The San Francisco Examiner is probably the best designed newspaper I’ve seen online: with only one little advertisement tucked away in the corner, it’s a refreshing change from The Slime of India.

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Photos from the Return of the King premiere in Wellington, NZ:

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News of the LoTR: Return of the King India release date from theonering.net:

The ROTK release date in India is Feb 2004, as reported by the Times of India. This is earlier than both FoTR and TTT, which is a sign of how popular the trilogy has become… word from one distributor was that ROTK would be released in India even earlier, on January 9th.

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More on India’s premier trashy tabloid. For some time now, The Times Of India has now stopped giving single-page views of articles. Even for small articles, you now have to click through to a second page. Someone at Indiatimes must’ve been on a page-view doubling jihad. Compare ToI’s approach to the NYT’s, which for all its faults doesn’t split small articles, and has a clearly visible “Single Page View” link.

Add to this the atrocious writing, and the infernal blinking ads (also guilty: The Hindu, which is a far better newspaper than its crappy website would lead you to believe), and who really wants to visit ToI on the web any more? Certainly not me.

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The Indian Express is the first Indian Newspaper out there with RSS feeds. Updates regularly too. Great! I can now cut down my visits to that trashily written tabloid called The Times of India.

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Went and saw The Matrix: Revolutions yesterday night (first day, second screening). Reaction: predictable movie, if you’ve been following all the hints the Brothers W have been dropping in the Animatrix and Enter the Matrix, but fascinating to watch and a visual (and acoustic) treat nevertheless.

Of course, some critics miss the point of the movie entirely, but the creators of the movie have remained very consistent with their intention of creating a SF messiah movie, even down to disappointing a large percentage of their fanbase with an allegedly weak ending.

Animatrix-watchers, on the other hand, would agree that the trilogy ended very well. In The Second Renaissance (which you can see online: parts one, two), leaders from the machine city, 01, go to humanity’s doors — actually, the UN — and ask for peace and coexistence. Their pleas are denied, the war soon begins.

At the end of Revolutions, humanity’s representative — Neo — travels to the machines to ask for peace. If, to a machine, that would not be a satisfyingly symmetrical and fitting note to end the war, I do not know what would be.

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HBO India is showing the Final Flight of the Osiris on Monday June 9, at 8:50pm IST. And the movie is premiering in Indian theatres (so I hear) on June 13.

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When will Reloaded hit India? Die Another Day came within a month of its world premiere. Harry Potter and The Two Towers took about 6 months. (The MPAA sucks.) On the bright side, MTV India is showing promos for a Reloaded special in mid-June, so perhaps an end-June India premiere is not too much to expect?

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…And here’s hoping the proto-journos at the MediaSci Dept at Anna U will do better than their seniors at Outlook Magazine are doing. Or Indiatimes, for that matter. Which kind of nutcase newspaper (or online portal) sets up a portal specifically for anti-war tripe, with not a pixel devoted to readers who might have rational arguments for the war? (Pro-war comments to this board are edited out.) Balance, obviously, has been thrown to the winds, and Indiatimes has never heard of providing an equal opportunity to all opinions. This one is worth remembering the next time the anyone from the Times Group talks crap about freedom of speech and freedom of the press, for it is obvious that the Times is not above censoring opinion when it suits their own editorial point of view.

PS. Yes, I know Indiatimes is a private entity and can do what it likes on its own webspace, but it is a portal for the public, but seeing that even CNN (the much maligned lap-dog of the American establishment) allows viewers to phone in with anti-war comments, Indiatimes’ editorial policy ré this war has been reminiscent of a Communist Party rag.

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On Rediff, Varsha Bhosle wrote on April 7:

No matter what America’s politicians and generals are saying now, it is evident that Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld’s shock-and-awe theory envisioned one combat division coolly strolling into Baghdad and taking over Iraq after a dramatic and precise aerial bombardment had shattered the enemy’s will to resist. Alas, the enemy didn’t cooperate: The war-planners had underestimated Iraqi resistance and miscalculated local support, leading to inadequacy of US troops on the battlefield…

Three days later, statues were falling in Baghdad. Of course, it isn’t over yet, but Pizza Hut was seen beefing up its stocks of crow-flavored pizza for immediate delivery to the Bhonsle residence.

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