Thanks to Netflix and the New York Times, now you know some of the answers. Behold a breakdown of 2009 rentals by zip code:

A Peek Into Netflix Queues – NYTimes.com.

If you ever wondered how safe your personal data is on the internet, here’s a scary object lesson. Sure, it’s anonymized. And even scarier is the conformity among neighborhoods. Play around with the sliders to see which neighborhoods are renting what. The first, biggest, and most embarrassing surprise is the frequency with which everyone in America seems to be renting the terminally tedious Curious Case Of Benjamin Button.

Looking at the patterns of Los Angeles rentals, for amusement check out the rental patterns for two Tyler Perry films – The Family That Preys and Madea Goes To Jail. Guess how frequently the residents of Malibu and Beverly Hills requested them?

Even cooler, and more telling (though only in ways that the ACLU would shit kittens over any meaningful attempt to draw conclusions from), is to drag the slider across the top 10-15 movies in an ersatz time-lapse. Watch the rental patterns – not just the intensity, but the areas where people are renting.

First, just about everybody in the Southland is renting The Shiteous Case Of Benjamin Buttass as their top pick, except for about half of the city of Los Angeles, and the good people of Lynwood.

For the international readers who might not be familiar with the birthplace of Weird Al Yankovic, Lynwood is right next to the more frequently name-checked ‘hoods like Compton and South Gate. And rightly or wrongly, it also has the same reputation as a gang-choked, poverty stricken hellhole. (Though you wouldn’t know it from the optimistically stock-photographed dead-end link called: Lynwoodwatch.com)

Say what you will about poor people, but if being rich means watching The Tedious Case Of Benjamin Suckass one more time, you can sign me up for foodstamps. I hope that it’s Netflix popularity is due to an early 2009 DVD release date, and that it’s gaudy rental numbers are a function of time as well as popularity. But since it was such a god-awful movie, I’ll keep taking my shots at it where ever possible.

Next up is Changeling, Clint Eastwood’s saga about a distraught woman in 1930’s Los Angeles. Nearly the same distribution pattern as Three Hour Boring Suckfest That Shall No Longer Be Named, and again the people of Lynwood lead the Southland in their cineastic wisdom.

Slumdog Millionaire, your 2009 Oscar winner for Best Picture hits a heck of a dropoff. The art film ennui spreads from Lynwood into Compton, South Gate, Inglewood, and El Monte.

Seven Pounds flips the numbers around a lot. But nowhere near as much as Eagle Eye. It’s a popularity inversion almost as severe as the Tyler Perry movies. Flip back and forth between Eagle Eye and Darren Aaronofsky’s tiresome The Wrestler. Holy socio-economic profiling, Batman, but the stereotypical lower-class neighborhoods apparently don’t give a shit about self-indulgent meditations on aging, but they do buy into the idea that the government is watching their every move! In the same vein, the people who love Eagle Eye also love Alex Proyas’ fatalistic supernatural melodrama Knowing. Is it for Nicholas Cage? Or for the paranoid ruminations of the inescapability of fate? You decide!

You can probably guess the rental map for biopic of gay rights activist Harvey Milk looks like. But why all the diffuse, widespread love for The Proposal with Sandra Bullock and Hugh Grant?

I might be the only person in 90041 with Transporter 3 on the queue, and I’m beyond delighted that Indiana Jones Buys Steven Spielberg A Fifth Summer House was rented by nearly nobody.

The most peculiar anomaly is 90747 – a subset of Carson, which shares almost nothing in common with Netflix’s top 25. Keep an eye on this trapezoid of dissidents as you pull through the maps. Who the hell are these people, and why are there so many kiddy flicks on their top 10?

Television Begins Push Into the 3rd Dimension – NYTimes.com

To this, I say bullshit. Complete and utter bullshit. 3D is no closer to being a viable home technology than smell-o-round

Many people are skeptical that consumers will suddenly pull their LCD and plasma televisions off the wall. … But programmers and technology companies are betting that consumers are almost ready to fall in love with television in the third dimension.

You’ll note that the article doesn’t quote any of the skeptics. Nor does it quote any actual consumers or people who might be willing to pay over $2,000 for the privilege of being a 3D television guinea pig.

In fact, the bulk of the article is little more than a pro-industry press release, cheerleading the greatness of 3D television. Well, I’ve got some advice for you, little buddy… nobody in the near future is going to trade up. Certainly not in the numbers these executives are salivating over.

This is my favorite quote in the whole article:

“I think 90 percent of the males in this country would be dying to watch the Super Bowl and be immersed in it,” said Riddhi Patel, an analyst at the research firm iSuppli.

Nimrod. This guy, like most analysts, doesn’t have a clue. On paper, perhaps, you could find a bunch of dudes who would say that watching football in 3D would be cool. On paper you’ll also find that 90 percent of guys want a Ferrarri and a supermodel. In practice, though, 90 percent of guys also know that Ferrarris and supermodels are way too high maintenance to be worth the cash they’ll have to lay out.

You find me a group of guys not playing XBOX who are going to sit around a television wearing stupid glasses all afternoon to watch a three hour football game, and I’ll show you Santa Claus, the Tooth Fairy, and the Easter Bunny. Even when the game is on, rabid fans are still getting up for beer, bathroom breaks, or getting nagged by the wife for checking their fantasy football scores. By the fourth time you pull off your 3D glasses because you feel like a tool standing in the kitchen, squinting at your iPhone and rummaging through the fridge, the blush of novelty will have long worn off.

So, before rambling on and on about how every straight male in America can’t wait for a 3D television, re-phrase the question. Don’t just ask about 3D. Ask how they’d feel about paying a $1000 premium to have to sit in a limited viewing range wearing dumb-ass glasses that darkens the image, just to watch something in a pretend 3D. If you can hit the 90% number with a true assessment of the product, I’ll eat my hat. Add in the $100 cost for an extra pair of glasses, and the wildly high overestimate will halve.

There’s two market segments that would have any legitmate interest in this at all – gamers and children. Nobody else watches TV – not even the Super Bowl – with the intent, focussed interest that makes the hassle of wearing glasses worth while.

Until there’s a true 3D option – which means no glasses, no limited viewing range – 3D is a gimmicky non-starter. That means, ironically, turning television back into the equivalent of theater.

Television Begins Push Into the 3rd Dimension – NYTimes.com.

The Hurt Locker.

One of the few movies of 2009 to deserve every ounce of the praise that’s piled on it, Kathyn Bigelow’s story of a EOD (explosive ordinance disposal) unit in Baghdad is relentless from the very first frames and barely rests until the final fade out. It scores the best picture of 2009 award because it does two things to perfection. First, it is wall-to-wall with old-school Hollywood suspense. There’s no digital armies of zombies, or ridiculous CGI acrobatics with military hardware and indestructible super-soldiers. The whole film is wired like a bomb that could explode at any second.

Second, all that suspense is wrapped around the first truly great cinematic rendering of the Iraq war. Every other Iraq war movie to date has been a ponderous melodrama. The Kingdom, Lions For Lambs, Redacted, Rendition, and Stop-Loss were all misfires. Errol Morris’ probing documentary of the Abu Ghraib scandal, Standard Operating Procedure, got lost in the fog of war. The worst of the bunch is Paul Haggis’ In The Valley Of Elah – a film so smugly awful that words barely can describe the levels of failure in operation.

The Hurt Locker succeeds where everything else to date has failed because it refuses to explain itself. It doesn’t scold, nag, or pontificate. The decorated grunts in the EOD don’t know who they’re fighting. They don’t know what they’re fighting for. All they know is that being alive at the end of the day is victory, and nothing else matters. It works because Bigelow and her production team have created a cinematic world where everything is mundane and hostile at the same time. Shot in Jordan under war-like conditions, the heat and the tension suffuse every frame of the film. You never find out if the bystanders are curious onlookers trying to upload videos to YouTube or insurgents ready to detonate a bomb.

This is the clearest narrative picture audiences have gotten of the Iraq war, and by the time the credits roll, The Hurt Locker should make you angry. Why are we involved in this mess? This isn’t a fight for ground or for principles. It’s a war without a finish line. If our soldiers survive the day, it’s a small victory and there’s no other metric to measure progress. The intense storytelling and the immersive detail transform the nihilistic core of the Iraq war into a palpable knot in your stomach. If the soldiers doing the dirty work don’t know why they’re there, does anybody?

Bigelow is the first filmmaker to not only grasp the futility of the Iraq war, she’s the first director to transform that unknowability into a truly gripping narrative. By embracing the chaos, she gives us the first authentic narrative voice to the Iraq war. The best Vietnam movies all revolved around that same grim knowledge, that fighting in an unknowable war is an absurd experience. Putting a shiny badge of “war is bad” on a simple melodrama is an insult to the nearly incomprehensible post-modern conflict our political leaders pointlessly rushed us into.

Unlike her ex-husband James Cameron’s current exercise in directorial dick-swinging (the bland Avatar), The Hurt Locker doesn’t waste a frame. The tech credits are superb – the documentary style camerwork, the immersive sound design, the flawless editing – every production department is firing on all cylinders. The whole film is one of cinema’s primal elements – suspense – stripped down to its purest form.

Perhaps the most telling thing about The Hurt Locker is that the most memorable image isn’t of the war, it’s the generic cereal aisle of a generic grocery store. After surviving the heat and the explosive madness of Baghdad, the leader of the EOD unit finds himself stumped by a wall of cartoon cereal boxes. It’s a simple image – one that Oliver Stone (among others) has tried and failed to convey several times – but here it resonates. For months after seeing it, every time I’m in a grocery store, deep in the heart of civilization, surrounded by climate controlled rows of plentiful food, I can’t help but think about all the soldiers and civilians fighting and dying for reasons that won’t be clear even a hundred years from now. We’re on the same planet, but it might as well be another world.

American politicians—as well as American voters—have a confused, and often contradictory, set of beliefs about how health insurance should work. The wayward, patchwork plan that we seem likely to end up with is probably a good reflection of the wayward, patchwork opinions that most legislators have on the subject

Surowiecki’s single-page essays are almost always an inspired read. After some trenchant analysis, he points out perhaps the biggest contradiction in the current health-care reform package:

If you’re a triathlete with no history of cancer in your family, you’re a reasonably good risk, and so you can get an affordable policy that will protect you against unforeseen disaster; if you’re overweight with high blood pressure and a history of heart problems, your risk of becoming seriously ill is substantial, and therefore private insurers will either charge you high premiums or not offer you coverage at all. This kind of risk evaluation—what’s called “medical underwriting”—is fundamental to the insurance business. But it is precisely what all the new reform plans will ban. Congress is effectively making private insurers unnecessary, yet continuing to insist that we can’t do without them.

The emphasis, of course, is mine. And it’s a point that absolutely has to be considered strongly. The current health care bill is essentially forcing private industry to solve the problem, even though they’ve repeatedly proven that they’re not up to the task.

Surowiecki conclusions point to the screamingly obvious – that health care should be treated as a utility, not a privilege for the rich. And that forcing private industry to operate by government constraints isn’t nearly as effective as allowing the government to compete on level ground with private industry.

As a wise friend of mine recently pointed out, the for-profit health insurers are dinosaurs. They are an industry whose time has past, and for those of us with eyes on the future, it’s time to gradually sunset those providers and replace them with a more sensible solution.

Read more: http://www.newyorker.com/talk/financial/2010/01/04/100104ta_talk_surowiecki#ixzz0bFPkaVje

            Diversity is a key component in the creative process because it challenges the brain.  If there were no Haight-Ashbury, there would have been no CBGB’s.  Artists and writers and all kinds of creators need to remember that the creeds, opinions and cultures they are used to are not the only ones that exist.  Just so, these creators need to remember that their creeds, opinions and cultures are not necessarily superior to others.  Diversity allows the creator to meet those of different aesthetic and perhaps even to respect them.  This can only challenge them to create beliefs which are strong; for that creed which is untested is frail, easily blown over in the wind.

            Yet a super-abundance of diversity has its dangers.  If the people in a pod of creators are too diverse, then there is nothing to bind them together.  They will easily splinter.  They must be strongly bound together by central, core beliefs so that they might diverge in their own growth, yet not grow apart from their peers.

            Competition sparks the human desire for respect.  If there were no Dionysia, there would have been no Western theatre at all: no Thespis, no Euripides, no Aeschylus, no Mamet, no Brecht, no Sondheim.  To be given respect is no small gift; it is what many people seek their whole lives, frame their whole lives around.  It is a very potent motivator, and it should not be overlooked in the creative process.  The desire for respect through competition has, time after time, forced creators to work and practice to become better.  Without this impetus, the creator might stagnate, content to be what he or she already is, rather than aspire to greater things.

            Yet we are all too familiar with the dangers of super-competition, especially here in America, where competition is the battle cry of Capitalism.  Time and time again, we see those who compete to be the richest, the most talented, the most respected in their field, break the trust of their admirers.  They cheat, steal, lie, and defraud their way to greatness.  These trust-breakers grapple to the top because the top is so high, the stakes are so great that the allure is hard to resist.  This is not a healthy environment for any creative endeavor.  We should be allowed to trust one another so that we can talk, debate and exchange ideas without having to fear.  Only a fearless heart can create to the fullest extent of its ability.

            Community is a place of trust, where one can create without fear of closed-minds.  It is a place where the fearless heart can flourish.  Without a community, what would Chelsea have been at the turn of 1900?  What could have been created had it not been for the community of Bohemian London?  One can bring their creation to the community and receive honest praise, or honest criticism for it.  This allows the creator to learn more about their craft, and grow from it.  What is created in solitude often lacks the context of the world at large.  These creations can be abstruse, or even impossible to comprehend.  Only with input from trusted peers can a creator grow.

            Yet, here, too, community can be an oppressive force.  Dependency on community means a dependency on others opinions, and can strangle the creator’s singular identity.  Every creative person needs time to themselves to remind them of what they are compared to the others in the community.  Solitude is a friend to thought and personal independence.

            And in this era of creativity, due to the power of the internet, we are seeing a massive explosion of diversity.  Almost nothing is too distant to avoid the grasp of anyone with a PC and a phone or cable line.  A person can reach around the world in an instant, learn about cultures far and wide, and allow those cultures to affect their own work.  You can talk directly to the creator, and purchase directly from them and directly support their work.  You can find countless group, communes, and pods of creators across the world that meet in invisible rooms.  It’s never been easier to find one’s peers in anything from sexual practice to political opinion.

            Also rampant in this era is competition.  The stakes are enormous for those looking to make a living in the creative world.  Rock stars, actors, painters and directors stand the possibility of making millions of dollars.  This is especially true in music and film.  And these are the people who are looked up to most by their peers.  The respect that comes with going down in the history books of culture is more tempting than almost any other vice.  So there is rampant cheating, defrauding, and backstabbing.  It comes with the territory of high stakes.

            But what is missing is a sense of community.  There is little trust between professional creators in this day and age.  Everybody is all too ready to betray one another for a step up the ladder.  The stakes are so high that a sense of community is impossible.  Healthy competition is impossible in this climate.  And those fabled communities of trust and creation exist.  But what they need to flourish is a culture which focuses less on wealth and fame.  This culture ought to focus on the community instead, and glamorize the act of creation, not its after-effects.

            So, all one has to do is radically change American culture from valuing materialism to valuing metaphysics and poetry.  That should be easy, right?