You are now entering another dimension

So it's school holidays this week and on my turn, I took Peter for some daddy bonding with "Ice Age 3 in 3-D". I hadn't seen a 3-D movie in the theaters, oh, since, "Megaforce" back in the early 1980s (which now that I think of it, may not have actually been in 3-D). Anyway, "Ice Age" was all spiffy digital 3-D so it was a novelty to check out -- and while the story on these movies never quite grabs me the way the best Pixar or Disney can, it is, undoubtedly, an amazing technological achievement -- the razor-sharp clarity of the computer animation combined with pretty astounding 3-D is worth seeing at least once. A couple of scenes involving floating soap bubbles or falling snow were so remarkable that the illusion truly felt three-dimensional to me. That said, though, I still have trouble seeing 3-D as much more than a gimmick rather than a storytelling tool – yeah, it's an "Ice Age" movie so not Shakespeare, but I've yet to see 3-D be integral to a story. And the glasses, darn it, fancy as they are now they still get a bit uncomfortable after an hour or so I think. (Reportedly James Cameron's upcoming "Avatar" will take the medium in a whole new direction, though, which could be interesting indeed to see.)

Elsewhere on the internets:
• Marvel at the wooden iPod! I'd love one of these made of NZ kauri.

• If you haven't seen the newly famous "naked Air New Zealand safety ad," here it is. (Google Ads service seems to be frequently running it right here on this blog, which makes me feel kinda funny.) I just find it all rather odd, myself (the body paint is rather hard to see as body paint, really, so it's like they're just wearing tight clothes), but hey, 1,000,000 hits on YouTube can't be wrong, it's doing the job as publicity. (And what is it about New Zealand and naked advertisements, anyway? Mind you this one is a lot more, er, titillating.)

• We got an actual chain letter in the mail yesterday. In the year 2009! Don't they know that email spam is the way to go in our modern age? On the other hand, they are promising us $70,000 ***GUARANTEED*** income in six months.... Hm....