Chris Crow's Xombytes

If you are someone between the ages of 17 and 41 who likes to laugh, and you have not seen "The 40 Year Old Virgin", buy it, rent it, or borrow it from a friend--today. This movie gets better each time you watch it, so plan on keeping it for a few weeks or a month. A very good movie that could have easily gone the way of the standard crude sex comedy, writer/director Judd Apatow’s "The 40 Year Old Virgin", which stars Steve Carrell, is actually a dignified (albeit sometimes crude) romp with a happy and uplifting ending.

What is the deal with eating contests? Japan's Takeru Kobayashi was once again crowned "hot dog eating champion" this year in Nathan's Famous Fourth of July International Hot Dog Contest. He ate just under 54 hotdogs (including the buns) in about 12 minutes.

SanDisk today (August 21, 2006) revealed that it will be releasing a new model of its Sansa digital music player with 8 gigabytes (about 2000 songs) of storage. It will directly compete with Apple’s popular Nano model, and is poised to do well because it has twice the storage space for roughly the same price.

SanDisk is well known as a primary maker of flash-memory cards, the type of memory that digital music players use, so with the release of the new player, the company is essentially cutting out the middleman. It seems that the savings will be passed along to the customer. Apple is the top dog in digital music and digital music players, so it will be interesting to see how Sansa’s new player fares. Itunes has become so popular that it is the industry standard, and the ipod has reached icon status, being featured in movies, TV shows, and every other medium available. Apple owns 80 percent of the market while Sansa has a mere 10.

The reason I took the time to write a few paragraphs about this topic is because it is going to be interesting to see how the market and public reacts to the first viable threat to the ipod’s dominance. SanDisk basically figured out that they cannot compete with Apple and the ipod in terms of “style” and “coolness”, so they decided to pack more memory and capability into their machine. Sansa spent the summer at the gym working out getting ready for the holiday season. Let’s see if ipod did the same, or just partied and hung out in grocery store parking lots. If the Sansa is user friendly, maybe it will do well. And you know what, it kind of looks like an ipod. (It’s primarily white with a wheel-like control pad.) Coincidence? I'm not so sure.

Snakes on a Plane. What a fantastic title for a movie. Surprisingly, this movie did not live up to studio expectations its first weekend in the box office. It pulled in about $15 million and it was produced for approximately $30 million. That is not bad, but what did the marketing for the film cost. Advertising and creating buzz usually will cost millions, and I'm sure that New Line Cinema spent millions promoting the movie.

Pirates seem to be riding the high seas of the cultural conscience these days, what with the hugely (and surprisingly for Disney) successful Pirates of the Caribbean movie franchise and the recent pirate v. U.S. Navy skirmishes in the Indian Sea. More on the latter later. We love pirates--especially in America. Well, what’s not to love about these seafaring swashbucklers. We romanticize them like we do wild west cowboys, roaring 20’s gangsters, and countless dubiously talented American Idols whose names dot the lower end of the Billboard charts.

In the quaint, bohemian town of Brattleboro, Vermont, it is not unusual to see someone ride by on a bicycle--butt naked. Others, who are in less of a hurry simply walk down the street naked.

These incidents have yet to result in a ticket or an arrest. In this small town of 12,000 people, public nudity is not illegal (unless, of course there is some type of obscenity involved).

When one resident took offense to a group of nude teenagers quite literally hanging out in a parking lot, one stunned member of the underclothed group replied: "We're bored."

Next hot vacation destination?

I noticed something interesting the other day. I was at a Red Hot Chili Peppers concert in Southern California with a few friends. It was a great show and they rocked the house. Everyone in the large stadium was either dancing, singing, or drinking eight dollar cups of Coors Light. The Chili Pep's played a lot of their hits and put on a phenomenal show.

President Bush is visiting his parents for the weekend in Kennebunkport, Maine, as part of his summer vacation. He was greeted near his family's century-old summer estate by 700 Anti-War protesters.

Invincible, starring Marky Mar...I mean Mark Wahlberg, was an opening weekend box office success. The Disney movie raked in $17 million in reciepts, proving once again that inspirational sports-themed movies based on true events are almost guaranteed money makers if they are made right. The story is based on the life of Vince Papale, who played for the Philadelphia Eagles in the late 1970's. Without the benefit of any college experience, Papale became an NFL rookie at the age of 30. It is a classic underdog story of someone achieving what seems like an impossible dream. These types of movies do very well when they are well done. Disney had success with "Miracle," the movie about the United States Olympic Hockey team's victory over Russia's dominant team.

According to a recent pole in Esquire magazine, the top five "movie dicks" of all time, or total a-hole antagonists, are as follows:

1. BILLY ZABKA as JOHNNY LAWRENCE in THE KARATE KID

2. BRADLEY COOPER as ZACHARY LODGE in WEDDING CRASHERS