Balloon boy The Rocky Mountain State, home of the world's most famous phony Indian, Ward Churchill, now has a competing hoaxter, the “balloon boy” family of Fort Collins, at least according to the sheriff of Larimer County, Colorado. Here's what the Denver Post says: Sheriff Jim Alderden says Richard and Mayumi Heene “put on a very good show for us, and we bought it.” The sheriff says no charges have been filed yet, and the parents aren't under arrest. He says he expects to recommend charges of conspiracy, contributing to the delinquency of a minor, making a false report to authorities and attempting to influence a public servant. Some of the most serious charges each carry a maximum sentence of six years in prison and a $500,000 fine. The sheriff says that the Heene children knew about the hoax, but won't be charged. – marathonpundit.blogspot.com Wild Things Don't get me wrong. I liked the Spike Jonze movie Where the Wild Things Are a lot. Critical reaction was highly favorable overall, but this is one of these misleading “averages” with no middle ground. It's a movie that left most critics deeply polarized between those who loved it and those who hated it. I'm much closer to the ones who loved it. There's a lot of magic in this movie. The creatures are amazing, a very canny melding of costumes and CGI, and they express real feeling, not the synthetic substitute we see in so many children's movies. I admired the director's imagination, his love of the material and his refusal to pander in what became a big-budget studio movie. But in the end I was vaguely disappoined, and I couldn't figure out why at first. Part of it was that, as usual, I expected too much of a highly hyped movie by someone I admired. But it was more than that. And then I realized what it was. There's something very important in dreams that this movie got wrong, and it's the setting, which carries so much of the emotional resonance. Sendak got that exactly right. His book wasn't just about Max and the wild things. Or rather, the wild things included more than just the creatures. Most scenes as I recall took place in the dark, or a kind of dreamy half-light. The trees and plants were expressive and in no way naturalistic. It's impossible to imagine the book without the dreamlike setting. – letterfromhere.blogspot.com iPhone app Apple wasted little time approving Wolfram Alpha's new iPhone app, which we hinted at last week. There are two key points about Wolfram Alpha's iPhone app: 1) It is pretty cool, and very nicely done. 2) They're insane for trying to sell it for $50. I'm going to mainly focus on second point here, because if you've used Wolfram Alpha, you don't really need much explanation about this app, which is a slick interface for the service. And while I get Wolfram Alpha's logic behind selling the app for $50, I think it's faulty logic. The App Store has created a different economic reality – most apps are under $3.
