Padres Elevator Snapshot
A ride in a press elevator is too brief for a long conversation, but it does allow enough time for a few quick observations about a baseball team. An advance scout for a National League team who recently followed the Padres for four games offered the following snapshot:
On Trevor Hoffman:
“Hoffman was scuffling a little bit while I was there, but I’m sure he’ll get out of it. He has to have his changeup working, and at the time he wasn’t locating the way he needs to. It was probably more a question of age as much as anything, but he should be fine. He’s what now, 40 years old? He’s had a marvelous career.”
On whom he was pleasantly surprised with:
“That Scott Hairston kid looked pretty good. He’s more of a fourth outfielder to me, which he still might well be, but he played well when I saw him. He hit for some power, and he played some center field while Edmonds was out. He’s got some tools; he’s got some power; he can run. And he showed me that he can play center field, which makes him of some value to a team. He can also play multiple positions, including the infield.”
On the Padres’ offensive capabilities:
“Kouzmanoff and Gonzalez are pretty good hitters in the middle of their lineup. Kouzmanoff has to get hot. I think that Gonzalez is the real deal. Edmonds was hurt then. Giles is there. They have an older team, more of a veteran club. It will be interesting to see what happens with them.”
Jersey based pizza fanatic Scott Wiener (pictured) may have found a way to turn his appetite into a career with his just-launched Pizza Tours of New York City. Every Sunday, Wiener will escort up to 32 ravenous adults 
A while back, I was lucky enough to get an e-mail out of the blue from Heather Armstrong, inviting me to contribute to an anthology of stories about fatherhood that she was editing. She’d been pointed at me by Jason Kottke, who has been around long enough to remember when I actually used to write things, and that at some point I had managed to become a father.
In the 
There's no love lost between Steve Jobs and Dell founder Michael Dell. Back in 1997, when Michael was CEO of Dell, he famously told a group of IT big wigs, ""What would I do [if I were in charge of Apple]? I'd shut it down and give the money back to the shareholders."
Our gadget-obsessed brothers at Gizmodo report that many AT&T hotspots—including Starbucks and Barnes and Noble—have started offering free Wi-Fi access to iPhone users. With a little ingenuity, the same free Wi-Fi access can be granted to your laptop. Using it from your iPhone, you just connect to the hotspot and give the site your iPhone number. To get the same access on your laptop, the key is to fool the hotspot into thinking your browser is still an iPhone. Here's how:
Now that you're all set up with your spoofed iPhone user agent, head to the hotspot page and enter your iPhone number (or, if you've got permission, maybe the number of an iPhone owner you know).* Once you're done, you should hopefully have free hotspot access from your full screen rather than your tiny iPhone screen.
In a recent fan survey, 
There's something infinitely cool about Iron Man, the new Paramount action adventure based on a Marvel comic. Robustly directed by Jon Favreau with a wonderful performance by Robert Downey Jr. in the lead, it's a superhero movie with a "swinger's" soul. Downey Jr. plays the brilliant billionaire Tony Stark, who designs sophisticated weapons for the U.S. Army. He is abducted in Afghanistan and kept in a cave and forced to design rockets for a crazed warlord.
Instead, he fashions an invincible suit of armor to escape in which he modifies back at home into a super-charged flying body suit. Jeff Bridges (in full bald Daddy Warbucks mode) plays the weapons manufacturing executive who flips out when Tony Stark comes back from his capture (a changed man) and decides to stop making weapons of mass destruction only to have them fall into the hands of terrorists. Gwyneth Paltrow gives a lovely turn as Stark's devoted assistant Pepper, and the always great Terrence Howard plays Stark's military buddy. When the Iron Man cartoon was first conceived in the early 1960s the villains were the Viet Cong. This Afghan update is a surprisingly prescient and almost cartoonishly heroic in the end results. It's a bit of a relief after sitting through Standard Operating Procedure. Robert Downey Jr. has the nice ability of seemingly throwing away his lines in such an offhand manner but making them count somehow. And the whole film is a whole lot of fun -- the action scenes bring up fond memories of Robocop and The Iron Giant. And the witty hipster sheen makes it all go down nicely.
You're one of those crazy people who enjoys working out ... and reads tech blogs. It could happen. You've got the 
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Joining 
Mule Design is hiring!
Everyone seems to 
What's Casey Thompson from last season's Top Chef up to? 
lose their job this season.
By 1990, Donruss and the other baseball card companies were beginning to understand that their industry was in a very different place from as little as three years before. Following the initial across-the-board quality of Upper Deck, the others suddenly found their market shares smaller. In order to stay competitive, they had to find the intersection between maintaining a traditional set and adapting to the competition with bells and whistles. 
An enterprising 
This week we’re presenting through exclusive interviews and portraits, a small window into the world of a handful of the celebrated directors with films at the Tribeca Film Festival. We start with Tom Kalin, director of Savage Grace (starring Julianne Moore, Eddie Redmayne and Stephen Dillane). Later in the week, Nathan Rissman, Madonna’s former gardener who picked up a camera for the first time to shoot her self-produced documentary, I Am Because We Are.
Savage Grace, based on the same-titled book by Natalie Robins and Steven Aaronson, is the cinematic dramatization of the tumultuous unraveling of the Baekeland family, comprised of Barbara and Brooks Baekeland, and their son Tony. Brooks is heir to the Bakelite plastics fortune, which he both resents and manipulates in his favor. His wife Barbara is a stunning spitfire, whose unsuccessful go as a Hollywood diva transfers nicely to high society socialite. Son Tony is sweet, cunning, coddled and laconic. The family travels all over the world and have famous friends. Brooks leaves Barbara after years of putting up with her brazen, sexually explicit behavior and maddening lust for everything an anything -- more and more is never enough. Tony becomes the center of Barbara’s world. And from there, things get pretty rough.
Director Tony Kalin's is known for his critically acclaimed feature film debut, Swoon. He is currently an Associate Professor at Columbia University School of the Arts, Film Division.
Rebecca Carroll: Jesus Tom, what a fucking movie, wow.
Tom Kalin: Just a nice little light-hearted romantic comedy! [laughs]
RC: How did you know about the story -- had you read the book, or heard about the case?
TK: For years, Christine Vachon [of Killer Films, which produced Kalin’s first film Swoon] and I have had a sort of unhealthy fascination with true crime non-fiction books -- awful paperback books with pictures in the middle. We would always try to shock each other -- like, ‘Oh you’re not going to believe this one!’ and then she gave me one that was different from the others because it was beautifully written. The book Savage Grace is this amazing series of first-person interviews.
RC: I have it.
TK: Christine and I tried insanely to make the movie with Andrew Lloyd Weber’s company, The Really Useful Group, in the early ’90s. Not as a musical. [laughs] And it didn’t work. I developed and produced [other projects], and Savage Grace was still fascinating to me. So I came back to it.
RC: It’s really tough to think of any actress other than Julianne Moore pulling off the role of Barbara Baekland.
TK: The lucky thing is that she was my first and only choice, and the other lucky thing is that she read the script and a week later was meeting [about it], and she just believed in the story. Julie’s how the movie got made.
RC: I didn’t know anything about the case before I saw the film. I knew that there was going to be some sort of incestuous relationship, because I had read a blurb about it somewhere, so I was looking for clues in the beginning. But by the time that scene on the couch in London came around, I had kind of forgotten that the film was about, in large part, an incestuous relationship. How did you work around that scene?
TK: It was a difficult journey. I didn’t think of the characters as anti-heroes, and I didn’t want to romanticize them or treat them as counter-cultural characters to identify with. It’s not like certain movies where you are making the movie and you are imagining you are the character. And Julianne has been funny as hell about [playing Barbara]: ‘Do you think I identify with this woman, what are you nuts?’
RC: What are Barbara’s redeeming qualities?
TK: I think Barbara was a beautiful mother -- she was incredibly tender. She just didn’t know the boundaries of love. One of the things that the film benefited from is that I insisted the London scene [in which Barbara and Tony have sex after which, Tony kills Barbara] be shot at the end of the film, and I also insisted beyond that, that London actually be shot in sequence. What you see on screen is shot in the order that it appears on screen. I don’t think that Eddie and Julie would have gotten to the same place had we scheduled that in week one or week two.
RC: How on earth do you direct that?
TK: I didn’t wake up in the mornings and think, ‘Oooh, I’m directing a sex scene’ -- all the scenes in the movie that involve sex are about behavior. If the audience becomes titillated or turned on or disturbed or turned off, those are all valid important feelings to have, but from the perspective of working with actors it’s about distancing the behavior without psychologizing it. That scene on the sofa kind of breaks it down for you. That it happens in broad daylight and is so normal between them is what is so shattering.
RC: Well, I was bowled over.
TK: It’s hard for people to come fresh to a movie and know nothing, because the media culture we live in talks about everything in advance. So if you know this a “movie about incest” it may change the way you see it. I adore that you knew that, and that along the way you got lost inside the story and caught up in the relationships, because I think the power of the story is that it does creep up on you.
RC: It really did, and I am the mother of a young son -- so, I was ready to pay very close, careful attention. Talk to me about Eddie Redmayne.
TK: I work with a great casting director, Laura Rosenthal, and she is excellent about finding actors. Eddie did The Goat in London and won a prize for it. We met, he read, he had amazing instincts, he went away for nine months, he shot The Good Shepard in the meantime, came back, read again and this time he had grown and there was a lot more depth, and he was by far the most amazing actor who read. He was shooting The Golden Age then and had these adorable little extensions in, and was like, ‘Oh, extensions look weird,’ I was like, ‘Eddie, you’re adorable, don’t worry about it.’ And there’s also the added and very important benefit that you believe that Eddie is Julie’s son. For Barbara and Tony to work on camera, you must believe that one actor is the parent of the other actor, and if you don’t, if you just think it’s make believe, that it’s Julianne Moore and Eddie Redmayne, it falls apart. But people believe it.
RC: What kind of reactions to the film have you seen?
TK: I definitely have had people who feel an intense hostility, people saying, ‘I’m really angry and I’m deeply offended. Why does the masturbation scene have to be on camera?’ And I say, because it’s actually about behavior and that behavior isn’t gratuitous, but it specifically launches the snap inside Tony. It’s a monstrous expression that Barbara thought of [jerking her son off] as taking care of her child, as mothering. I don’t mean that I see Barbara as monstrous. And clearly in the scene, I hope you see, she isn’t scheming -- ‘Oh I’m going to destroy this kid.’ For her, it’s about tenderness and about love.
RC: Any regrets?
TK: Would’ve loved to have a little bit more time, like every filmmaker wants. But getting to travel a lot with the movie has been so interesting. I just came back from Japan, where the reaction was sort of amazing.
RC: Do tell.
TK: They really embraced the film -- they saw both the beauty and the extremity of it. I did all this nutty press about the growing phenomenon in Japan of children who kill their parents, which is something that’s happened in the past 50 years. They really saw the film as an expression of something historic, as a cautionary tale. And I met Rinko Kikuchi, who was nominated for an Oscar for Babel. She brought me flowers and said, ‘I’m dying to work with you,’ and so who could fucking complain? I adore actors so to have actors embrace what I do and say that they want to work with me, makes me walk a foot off the ground, it makes me excited about what’s next. I might work with Rinko!
Photo by Aubrey Mayer
In a poll on 
As many serious eaters know, the director-screenwriter 
I explained to the two very large security guards that I was a friend of Nora's. Another film crew member escorted me to the cheese section of the store, where Nora was going over some details of the shoot. She gave me a big hug and a kiss and introduced me to her director of photography, Stephen Goldblatt, and assistant director, Nancy Herrmann.
She invited me to wander around the store for a few moments while she attended to a few things and asked if I would come to dinner with her at 
We went back to the set, and Nora explained what we were going to be do in our scene. My on-screen family and I were going to walk down an aisle of the store just in back of the butcher counter where Julie Powell (Amy Adams) would be buying some meat. In other words, Nora had wisely decided to have me doing something I know how to do: shop for food. I was to talk to my wife about what we were going to make for dinner that night. 
