I began this book while on a business trip and had to stop reading for a while because it left me so worried about my wife and family.
The thing about this book is that it is not "The Silence of the Lambs." This is not some speculative book about Jack the Ripper.
"My Life Among the Serial Killers" is not some pop novel that ties the killer up with a surprise ending that places the ranting kliller in a neat little padded cell. This is a book that shows you to what may well be out there by exposing you into the minds of those awful human sharks that did not make it back to sea.
Read this book and you will look into the minds of John Wayne Gacy, Richard Macek, Robert Bedella. But don't expect the dark comedy/hollywood brutality of a Stephen King character. As I said before, this book is dark. There were times I wished that I could close my thoughts to what I read by simply closing the cover of the book. It left me drained and scared because these creatures are real and there is nothing sympathetic in them when you strip away their masks as few have done and fewer can do.
Helen Morrison is one incredible person. Good Lord how could somebody even think of living a normal existence after doing the work that she has done--meeting these killers, and boring into their minds!

Al Franken's abbraisive attitudes got him in trouble when he worked at Saturday Night Live. He saw himself as St. George ambushing the dragon when he verbally attacked former V.P. Spiro Agnew in the dressing room of another show. It didn't matter that Franken had his facts wrong. In a later interview, he admitted he had the wrong information, but did not seem to care in the slightest.

Now, more than 20 years later, Franken still sees himself as sainted when he jumps people he disagrees with from behind.

You Right-wingers may not like this guy, but he is quite funny 50 percent of the time. You Left-wingers may think Franken is a comic genius, but half of his jokes are nothing but mean-spirited, stupid, quips.

If Franken deserves credit for anything, it is for believing his own message. (And for believing in himself.) Franken may not be especially funny all of the time, he may be wiling to overlook the weakness of many Democrats, he may insist on hard-data analysis of Republican claims while taking Democrat claims on face value, he may seem purposely naive at times, and he many pat himself on the back for his own nasty behavior, but he is sincere; and for that, he deserves credit.

As for whether or not you should buy this book... If you are a conservative Republican (especially if you are a Hannady, Limbaugh, or O'Reilly listener), or a Bush supporter, don't bother. You will not appreciate the humor. You will often feel offended. You will want to debate points like a conservative talk show host, but many of these points do not stand up to close study.

If you are of a liberal bent, buy this book. You will find Franken both brilliant and insightful. He will affirm what you already believe, citing studies from groups with prestigious-sounding names and hardcore agendas.

Either way, if you are looking for new information, this book is vapid.

Tom Shales and James Andrew Miller did not author "Live From New York," they compiled it--just an observation.

I really enjoyed "Live From New York." What a brilliant topic for a thorough book. I have sometimes loved Saturday Night Live and other times loathed it. SNL has given the world some great stars and some of forgettable ones.

In compiling this book, Shales and Miller did endless leg work and then stepped out of the picture. They wrote introductions for the various sections of the book but left the text to meander as the body of the book is really little more than a list of quotes from the people who were there.

Shales and Miller reached almost everybody of any stature in the history Saturday Night Live--writers, comedians, producers. (Eddie Murphy was notably abscent.)

My gripe is that Miller and Shales are fine writers with expert views, I wanted to hear more of what they thought. I wanted to hear a little of their voice, and I wanted them to help me pick up on some of the nuances.

I wanted to know whom they trusted and whom they dismissed. When Bill Murray and Chevy Chase got into a shoving match--was Murray reacting to Chase's arrogance or had John Belushi put Murray up to attack? What do Shales and Miller think after interviewing both men? You won't get it from this book?

That said, reading quote after quote by everybody who is still alive (Gilda Radner, Chris Farley, John Belushi, and many other key people have passed away) becomes somewhat hypnotic, and you really do hear their voices in their quotes.

David Kushner has done an excellent job of bringing the personalities at id to life. This book is not just about a game or "the two Johns." "Masters of Doom" is about a group of driven men who helped create a culture--and the book does a great job of explaining the technological and sociological sides of the Doom phemonenon.

As good as his topic was, Kushner also proved himself more than equal to the task as a writer. The prose in this book hook you from page one and keep you on track for the entire roller coaster ride.

Hawaii has a rich history involving chiefs, and kings, and wars, and international diplomacy.

In "Shoal of Time," Gavan Daws relates this history in interesting, non-biased detail. Daws gives a quick sketch of Hawaii before James Cook arrived. He talks about the way the Hawaiians greeted the ships and gives snips from journal entries.

When it comes to the reign of the Kamehamehas, Daws does a wonderful job of showing the practical brilliance of how Kamehameha the Great and Liholiho mastered the game of diplomacy--allying themselves with England, France, and the United States in ways that prolonged their independence.

Daws also does a masterful job of showing how the once innocuous missionary families brought about the ultimate fall of the monarchy. Few authors can relate this story without showing passionate bias, but Daws succeeds. (Both Hawaiian activists and members of old missionary families will be offended, I think.) Daws avoids the common prattfall of painting King Kaulakaua and Queen Liliuokalani as saints, and Stanford Dole and Loren Thurston as demons.

Some have complained that Daws's book ends with statehood. Books need to end somewhere. Statehood was the right place to end because Hawaiian statehood is an entirely different epic.

Daws's book is a nearly perfect introduction to Hawaiian history--a survey book that covers all of the bases. After finishing this book you may want to move on to more detailed books on the fall of the monarchy (see the works of R.S. Kuykendall), ancient Hawaii (see "Ruling Chiefs of Hawaii" by S. M. Kamakau), and the attack on Pearl Harbor (see "At Dawn We Slept" by Prange and Goldstein).

I absolutely recommend "Shoal of Time" for anybody curious about Hawaiian history. I especially recommend this book to tourists coming to the islands for the first time. Reading this book could improve a visit. Knowing the significance of Iolani Palace and other sites cannot help but improve your visit.

If you are visiting Oahu, I also recommend purchasing a copy of "A Walk Through Old Honolulu" by the late O.A. Bushnell. This long out of print pamphlet gives a concise history of the buildings that speckle a small walkable distance in downtown Honolulu.

...

War of the Monsters is fast, frenetic, and incredibly fun! Players take control of a 50's-style monster movie monster. There's a glowing plasma creature with one great eye, a Kong-style gorilla, a lava monster, a distinctly American-style gargantuan robot, a sleeker Japanese-style robot, a giant praying mantice, and more.

Unlike the slow, hulking, Toyo Studios-style monsters in Godzilla: Destroy All Monsters, the beasts in War of the Monsters are fast and manueverable. These guys can scale buildings and leap from tower-to-tower.

They also use weapons, and it is amazingly cool. You can pick up a girder and use it like a bat. You can pick up a radio tower and hurl--impaling your opponent. This is Super Smash Bros. with fangs!

The game has enough options to give it semi-respectable depth.

The biggest drawback to this game happens to be Godzilla's greatest strength--four-player competition. Godzilla has it, War of the Monsters does not. You either battle the computer or a friend--a single friend.

You can place bots on the battlefield, but four-player or online battles would have been a great plus.

That said, Incog (formerly Incognito--the Utah company that created Twisted Metal Black), the Sony studio that made War of the Monsters, has done a great job with War of the Monsters.

Incog is establishing itself as one of the few great studios. They proved they could do car wars way back in their Singletrac days--The folks at Incog met at Singletrac, where they did Twisted Metal and Twisted Metal 2.

Sony probably made a great choice, a quiet game like War of the Monsters might well get overlooked during the Christmas rush. They delayed the game for a early 2003 release, and hopefully people will try and appreciate this totally groovy game.

What a groovy game!

War of the Monsters is fast, frenetic, and incredibly fun! Players take control of a 50's-style monster movie monster. There's a glowing plasma creature with one great eye, a Kong-style gorilla, a lava monster, a distinctly American-style gargantuan robot, a sleeker Japanese-style robot, a giant praying mantice, and more.

Unlike the slow, hulking, Toyo Studios-style monsters in Godzilla: Destroy All Monsters, the beasts in War of the Monsters are fast and manueverable. These guys can scale buildings and leap from tower-to-tower.

They also use weapons, and it is amazingly cool. You can pick up a girder and use it like a bat. You can pick up a radio tower and hurl--impaling your opponent. This is Super Smash Bros. with fangs!

The game has enough options to give it semi-respectable depth.

The biggest drawback to this game happens to be Godzilla's greatest strength--four-player competition. Godzilla has it, War of the Monsters does not. You either battle the computer or a friend--a single friend.

You can place bots on the battlefield, but four-player or online battles would have been a great plus.

That said, Incog (formerly Incognito--the Utah company that created Twisted Metal Black), the Sony studio that made War of the Monsters, has done a great job with War of the Monsters.

Incog is establishing itself as one of the few great studios. They proved they could do car wars way back in their Singletrac days--The folks at Incog met at Singletrac, where they did Twisted Metal and Twisted Metal 2.

Sony probably made a great choice, a quiet game like War of the Monsters might well get overlooked during the Christmas rush. They delayed the game for a early 2003 release, and hopefully people will try and appreciate this totally groovy game.

This collection does not represent the best that Hall & Oates had to offer.

In the campy, pre-Michael Jackson days of 1981 and 1982, known rock groups could get away with almost anything in videos. If you saw the musicians, and it looked like they were playing actual music, that was enough.

Taken in context, "You Make My Dreams" was a pretty good video. Hall jumped and bounced a lot, Oates panned for the camera. They were better looking than most of their peers, and they were popular.

"You Make My Dreams" is not in this collection. Too bad, it is a better video and a better song than most of what follows:

Say It Isn't So,
Family Man,
One On One,
Maneater, (You remember the video with the big black panther?)
Private Eyes,
Adult Education,
I Can't Go For That (Probably the best in this collection)

Hall & Oates did most of their best work before MTV went on the air. This DVD might be worth buying if it included "Rich Girl," but that song came out before the days of music video--sort of.

"Kiss on my List" and "Sara Smiles" are nowhere to be found on this disc. Instead, it has a lot of songs from H&O's stale period, a point in time in which so many of their songs sounded so alike.

If you are looking for classic Hall & Oates, buy a 'best of" CD. If you have fond memories of this great duo, "watch out, boy!" This CD "will chew them up," it's a nostalgia eater.

Raccoon City, Umbrella Corporation, and the S.T.A.R.S. never looked or played so good!

Resident Evil Zero begins with these wierd ameaba creatures attacking a commuter train. When the S.T.A.R.S. (kind of a para-military elite S.W.A.T. team) goes to investigate, agent Rebecca Chambers is sent to explore the train while her comrades look around the tracks.

Poor Rebecca--right place, wrong time. When the not-so-dead train mysteriously takes off, some of the very dead commuters re-animate, and her only chance of survival is to pair up with an escaped prisoner.

Yes, Zero still has that clunky Resident Evil control scheme that sometimes leaves you funbling to run or shoot in the right direction. Yes, Zero is still stingy with the typewriter ribbons and save spots, leaving players struggling to survive as long as possible before saving their progress.

Other things have changed. You can now jump from Rebecca to Billy (the escaped maniacal killer who's not really so maniacal after all) just by pressing the > button. The game includes special puzzles for both Billy and Rebecca.

Though I have not finished this game, I can say that it is considerably larger than RE-2. Zero does still has the pre-rendered backgrounds. But the graphics in Zero are amazing, even better than the GameCube remake of the original game.

Overall, I would say that Resident Evil Zero is Capcom's best nightmare so far. Incredible graphics, great story with lots of surprises, and some new devices that bring new live to survival horror.

I had been away from home and had no access to a television from 1979-1981. When I came home, my parents had cable, and I discovered MTV.

This was before Michael Jackson electrified the nation. The VJs played a lot of Madness and clips from Elephant Parts. My first favorite video was the Little River Band's The Night Owls, but I digress.

Perhaps Pure 80s should be called "Mid 80s New Age." Most of the videos in this collection of the post Madness/Pre George Michael variety.

As fairly early attempts at a new medium, the videos in Pure 80s are flawed. The music and production values in the two Tears for Fears selections are great, but videos are dull. "Everybody Wants To Rule The World" is a great song, but watching the guys sing and drive cars...

There are no breakthrough videos in this collection, no Billy Jean, no Jenny I've Got Your Numbers, no Jesse's Girl--all videos that helped shape the art form. (I claim not expertise--just deep nostalgia.)

Many of the songs in this collection bring back good memories, however, so it is hard to complain.

If you want a random sampling of good songs, this is the perfect collection. If you want something more, keep waiting. MTV has to release a "Year's Best" collection some time... I hope.