Paul Thomas Anderson’s austerely, milkshake-drinkingly brilliant There Will Be Blood — winner of Oscars last night for lead acting (by Daniel Day-Lewis) and cinematography — is coming to DVD in about six weeks. Click here to pre-order it from Amazon.

That’s the good news. The bad news for those of us who chose the winning side in the hi-def format war is that since Paramount very recently (and stupidly) decided to back HD-DVD exclusively, it seems there won’t be a Blu-ray version of Blood — or any other Paramount release — available just yet.

Meanwhile last night’s Best Picture winner, the Coen Brothers’ masterful No Country for Old Men, is coming to DVD and Blu-ray in two weeks.

Jason Kottke interviewed Steven Berlin Johnson, who bought a HD-DVD player about a month before Toshiba announced they were killing the format:

Kottke: The pace of HD DVD’s collapse was dizzying, even by contemporary standards. How do you feel about owning a brand new piece of obsolete technology?

Johnson: I thought it was pretty funny. I mean, the Betamax adopters at least had a few years to nag their VHS friends about the better picture quality, before the format died a slow death. But HD-DVD — they just took it out back and shot it! I think that’s what’s so striking about this. I can’t remember a standards war where the winner was crowned so definitively. For a few weeks there, I felt like the technology world was taunting me for my decision: I got email from Netflix saying that they were NEVER going to buy another HD-DVD again.

Incidentally, on Tuesday — mere hours after HD-DVD’s official death — I lucked into a $200 Sony Blu-ray player on open-box special at Best Buy. Its HDMI port is busted and it’s missing the original remote, but otherwise it’s great. (First HD movie watched: Michael Clayton.) While I still think HD downloads (like the new iTunes rentals) are the wave of the future, there is still something really nice about having a shelf full of the movies you love best. Now if only Criterion will step up and join the Blu-ray party.

Truly the most important blog you will read today is this one, a guide to all the wonderful, amazing horrible, bourgeois things white people like me like. Such as:

• Difficult breakups
• Expensive sandwiches (you know, like these)
• Knowing what’s best for poor people
• Breakfast places
• Bicycles (you know, like this one)
• Apologies
• Whole Foods

Announced this morning: Apple is cutting the price on 1 GB iPod Shuffles to $49 (a $30 drop from yesterday) and, later this month, shipping a new 2 GB model at $69. Both models are available in silver, green, purple, teal and PRODUCT(RED), with a built-in clip and hella crazy ridiculous battery life. And one can probably assume the new 2 GB Shuffle is just as sensitive to sweat as last year’s 1 GB, which I just retired from my workout bag in favor of a 2006-edition black Nano.

The Beeb reports that Toshiba is ending production of all HD DVD players and recorders, thus conceding victory in the HD home video format war to Sony’s Blu-ray Disc. (Which for Sony has got to be some sweet revenge for the whole Betamax thing.)

“It was an agonising decision for me, but I thought if we kept running this business it would have grave ramifications for the management of our company,” Toshiba president Atsutoshi Nishida said.

“We made a quick decision, judging that there is no way of winning the competition,” he said.

Ain’t It Cool News’s TV correspondent, “Hercules The Strong,” was bitching just this morning about how Blu-ray is like soooo much more e’spensive than HD DVD (HD DVD players retail for under $200; the cheapest Blu-ray gear is over $300). And yeah, that’s a fair point, except that the reason why HD DVD players were so cheap was a desperation move by Toshiba last holiday season to try to gain market share by selling equipment at lower margins or at a loss.

The reason they needed to do this is simple: Sony’s Playstation3 plays Blu-ray movies, and is already acting as a trojan horse bringing the format into newly HD-ified homes around the globe. With the PS3 halo effect came market share, with market share came support from content producers (read: Hollywood), with that support came…um…uh…not HD DVD?

So does this mean you should all run out right now and buy a Blu-ray player? Maybe. But if you do, make sure you get one with firmware that can be updated: the current Blu-ray 1.1 standard is about to be superceded by an updated version which supports the same kinds of interactive content as HD DVD. (PS3 owners, you’re all set.)

Backpack has always been the funny little cousin among 37signals’s productivity web apps. Unlike its bigger brothers Basecamp and Highrise — not to mention crazy uncle Campfire — BP’s always had a single-user paradigm and a bit more of an open-ended focus that made it perfect for personal organization, unlike the other apps which are hardcore collaboration tools.

Well, Backpack’s still great for all of that, but starting today it is now also a killer collaboration tool. You can add multiple users to your Backpack account, just as you can in Basecamp, and on all but the cheapest plans ($24/mo and higher) you get a message board for simple discussions among your family/team/club/group/drug crew.

One other, more subtle change is new pricing tiers, which start at $7/month. The good news: that $7/mo single-user plan is identical to the old $9/mo one, with 1 GB of storage and SSL. The bad news: the cheapest multi-user plan is $12/mo, and doesn’t include SSL or the message board feature. Existing customers on a phased-out plan (like my old $5/mo one) get to keep their current rates and quotas, but will need to upgrade to get any of the new features. (Consequently, I haven’t tried any of the new features yet.)

As always, there is a free account available, which allows up to 2 users and 5 pages.

Updated: Here’s the Signal vs. Noise post announcing the new hotness. I’d update the post link above, but that points to my Backpack referral URL so I can actually maybe make some money from this damned site. Which reminds me: click any of those links and sign up for a paid plan and I get a credit on my Backpack bill. And you get an awesome new tool. See? Win-win.

In case you were curious what the Cloverfield monster really looks like — even having seen the movie, I had no idea — Hasbro’s posted pictures on their website of a toy version of the creature due to ship in September. (Anyone wanna bet that’s also when Cloverfield hits DVD?) The thing features “70 points of articulation” and “lifelike sound,” as well as interchangeable heads(?!) and no less than 10(!) of those little parasite things (as in, “WE GOT A BITE!!!”). The toy is an online exclusive and will be a limited run, so if you’ve got room on your mantle for a creeptastic 14” thing that you won’t get in the mail for another seven months, you should place your order now.

As part of their “gee, I guess we aren’t actually McDonalds or a record label after all” comeback strategy, Starbucks is dropping the ultimate coffee-nerd bomb: they’re testing $2.50 cups of drip coffee made in a Clover siphon brewer, usually found only in well-heeled boutique coffee shops like Intelligentsia here in Chicago.

A single Clover machine costs over $11,000, takes 2-5 minutes to brew a single cup of coffee, and can be configured to within an inch of its life to provide a brewing process perfectly tailored to specific coffee varietals. In other words, by even knowing what this thing is Starbucks is hoping to demonstrate that they’re still a real coffee company.

From the finest news source in America, The Onion:

Have we learned nothing from the tragic events of 1998, when, under the watch of President Morgan Freeman, this nation was plunged into chaos, and hundreds of millions of people died at the hands of the deadly Wolf-Beiderman space rock? The mere fact that this country is even considering putting another black man, Barack Obama, in the Oval Office proves that we have not.

We can’t deny the facts, people. All we will get by electing an African-American is Texas-size space particles crashing into the Earth’s surface, mega-tsunamis that barrel into the Appalachian Mountains, and 6.6 billion dead people.

Just as many of us dumped T-Mobile's magenta-colored ass as soon as the iPhone came out, so is [Starbucks switching over to AT&T for their in-store Wi-Fi service](http://wifinetnews.com/archives/008175.html) beginning this Spring. This is awesome for the following reasons: * AT&T will be offering up to two hours per day of free access to Starbucks Card users. Starbucks Cards are free, so this basically means that two hours of Wi-Fi is now free with any purchase. (I'm assuming one has to have _used_ the card that day to qualify, which is entirely reasonable.) By comparison, two hours of T-Mobile service costs about $14. * Speaking of cheapness: for people without Starbucks Cards or people who need more than two hours, AT&T's rates start at $4 for two hours. Their unlimited plan is $20/month, which is the same rate as T-Mobile charges for people who are _also_ T-Mobile phone customers who bundle their HotSpot access with their mobile phone accounts. * AT&T has a roaming deal with Boingo Wireless, who provide for-pay Wi-Fi service in a number of airports, including (I think) Chicago O'Hare and Midway. I don't know exactly how Wi-Fi roaming works, but if nothing else it should make trying to get work done while waiting for a (delayed) flight a bit easier. * Prior to this deal, AT&T's only major Wi-Fi partner was McDonalds. So if you buy an AT&T Wi-Fi monthly plan to use at Starbucks, you also get Wi-Fi access at a bunch of McDonalds locations. Whether this is useful to you depends on whether you love Egg McMuffins as much as I do.

In the spirit of John Gruber, here’s a translation from PR-speak to English of selections from a just-posted message from Congressman and GOP Presidential candidate Ron Paul:

With Romney gone, the chances of a brokered convention are nearly zero.

My only hope of winning the nomination was for McCain and Romney to fight it out until the convention, then getting enough delegates drunk to maybe kinda sorta pull 1,100 votes out of my ass.

But that does not affect my determination to fight on, in every caucus and primary remaining, and at the convention for our ideas, with just as many delegates as I can get.

People only listen to my crazy ideas when I tell them I’m running for president, so I’m going on a suicide mission.

But with so many primaries and caucuses now over, we do not now need so big a national campaign staff, and so I am making it leaner and tighter.

Suicide missions are cheaper than real campaigns.

Of course, I am committed to fighting for our ideas within the Republican party, so there will be no third party run. I do not denigrate third parties — just the opposite, and I have long worked to remove the ballot-access restrictions on them. But I am a Republican, and I will remain a Republican.

As a third-party candidate I would be totally ignored, unlike at the GOP convention where I’ll only be mostly ignored.

I also have another priority. I have constituents in my home district that I must serve. I cannot and will not let them down. And I have another battle I must face here as well. If I were to lose the primary for my congressional seat, all our opponents would react with glee, and pretend it was a rejection of our ideas. I cannot and will not let that happen.

I just woke up and realized holy shit, I just spent a year trying to get Republican voters to reject the whole U.S. financial system instead of running for re-election! Be right back, I gotta put up some lawn signs!

The Writers Guild leadership has announced a tentative deal with the major movie/TV producers that would, if ratified by the membership, end the strike:

It is an agreement that protects a future in which the Internet becomes the primary means of both content creation and delivery. It creates formulas for revenue-based residuals in new media, provides access to deals and financial data to help us evaluate and enforce those formulas, and establishes the principle that, “When they get paid, we get paid.”

…Over these three difficult months, we shut down production of nearly all scripted content in TV and film and had a serious impact on the business of our employers in ways they did not expect and were hard pressed to deflect. Nevertheless, an ongoing struggle against seven, multinational media conglomerates, no matter how successful, is exhausting, taking an enormous personal toll on our members and countless others. As such, we believe that continuing to strike now will not bring sufficient gains to outweigh the potential risks and that the time has come to accept this contract and settle the strike.

WGA members on both coasts are meeting tonight to discuss the new contract.

The Chicago Trib’s food blog on the best movie catchphrase of 2007:

In the pantheon of food-related catchphrases, it has not yet scaled the heights of “Where’s the beef?” But give it time. And if you’ve not yet run across those words, you will — it is the devastating put-down Daniel Day Lewis’ megalomaniacal oilman delivers to his cowering rival during the lunatic finale of eight-time Oscar nominee “There Will Be Blood.” USA Today recently declared it “Hollywood’s hottest catchphrase”. New York magazine’s Vulture blog offered a handy guide to its proper usage (“Let’s face it. The Celtics drank the Knicks’ milkshake last night”). And one need only type ‘I drink your milkshake” into YouTube to find a dozen parodies of the line, including an extremely clever mash-up of the trailer and the Kelis’ “Milkshake” song.

The best part is, there is absolutely nothing anyone else can do to reference that line that could ever be funnier or more terrifying than the milkshake scene itself, which is the most un-self-consciously Kubrickian thing I’ve ever seen outside of Kubrick.

If you haven’t bought an iPhone yet because you just can’t imagine walking around with only 8 GB of music/videos/etc., you’re in luck: Apple is now selling a 16 GB iPhone for $499, $100 more than the current 8 GB model. There’s also a new 32 GB iPod Touch model available at the same price. Apart from storage, the new iPhones/Touches are identical to current models, and the pricing for those current models is unchanged.

Current iPhone owners, you may commence your whining now.

So, I finally got to see the new MacBook Air in the flesh at Best Buy (I’m too lazy to go downtown on a snow day), and my god it is sex-ay. As much as I’ve been thinking it would be a much better product with an even smaller screen and form factor — making it a true ultra-portable — as with many Apple products, the MBA makes perfect sense once you actually hold it in your hands. The keyboard is very, very similar to that on the regular MacBooks and the newer standalone Apple Keyboards, i.e. full-sized and very comfortable to type with.

One thing that surprised me is the sheer hugeness of the trackpad. It’s not just that the trackpad is big (which it needs to be for all those fancy multi-touch gestures, disabled on the model I played with), but also that the trackpad button a lot narrower than on the other MacBooks. I think I’d prefer it this way because I’m a tap-to-click kinda guy, but people used to thumb-clicking may be turned off.

Regarding performance, I didn’t do anything in the five minutes I spent with it to give it a true workout, but I also didn’t have any problem with day-to-day stuff (which for me includes a lot of Spotlight searching).

So am I buying one? The MacBook Air is an awfully tempting toy, and if I traveled more and needed something that lightweight and airplane-friendly, it would be a must-own. But considering I already have a 2007-vintage MacBook Pro and find it portable enough for my needs, it’s hard to justify spending $1800 just to cut 2.5 pounds from a carry-on bag.

But if I had either the extra cash or the need, I would already have ordered one.

Best analysis of the Presidential campaign field to date, from The Morning News’s John Warner:

Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama are like HD-DVD and Blu-Ray, respectively, Mitt Romney is DVD, John McCain is VHS, and Ron Paul is a View-Master dug out of a box in the basement with a “Great Wonders of Engineering Vol. 12: The Hoover Dam” permanently jammed in it.

(Mike Huckabee is a filmstrip, Fred Thompson was Betamax, and Rudy Giuliani was that never-ending slideshow of that vacation your neighbors took seven years ago with 57 different shots of them “holding up” the Leaning Tower of Pisa.)

My favoritest pundit ever, Paul Boutin, on Ron Paul’s traction among internet “voters”:

If a guy with a smaller market share than Apple’s can rack up 73 percent of TechCrunch’s primary vote, what’s your candidate’s excuse? Al Gore and John Kerry didn’t lose to President Bush because evil Republicans stole the vote, or because Ralph Nader stole the voters. They lost because millions and millions of I’m-too-busy Democrats didn’t bother to show up on Election Day. This time around register as a permanent absentee, dummy, and mail it in. Spend some time online pestering swing state voters to do the same before next November. Otherwise, you’ll once again get the government you deserve.

The next president of the United States will be the most powerful person on Earth. A leader that important should inspire passion and action. Yet the same people who obsessively count their pageviews, links, comments and rankings as irrefutable proof of importance write off Ron Paul’s overwhelming volume of support as irrelevant. Instead of smugly dismissing the Paultards, sit up straight and take a lesson: This is how you win.

Yeah, because the TechCrunch “primary” is so, so, so important to anyone outside the Bay Area tech sector.

Know what? I am sick to death of the Paultards. They look at any encouraging change in their candidate’s prospects as a sign that the whole game is about to tip in his favor. They take it personally when anyone questions his sage wisdom, even though Rep. Paul’s economic proposals (mostly about reinstating the gold standard — WTF?) seem stupid to anyone who didn’t flunk out of high school economics. (Actually, that’s probably enough people to be a fairly solid base for any candidate.)

Rep. Paul does have an overwhelming volume of support, in the sense that his inconsequential number of supporters are simply whining more loudly than anyone else’s. Ironically, I think he’d have had a better shot if he were running as an independent, a la Ralph Nader, rather than compete with grownups like McCain and Romney for dollars and GOP support.

The Deaniacs made this same mistake back in 2004 — believing that excitement at the “netroots” would magically turn into a victory at the polls — and I think we all realized even then that the netroots are an echo chamber like so much else on these internets of ours. In retrospect, while I don’t think Dean would have stood a chance in hell against Bush in the 2004 general, I’d have much rather seen him win the nomination than an empty suit like Kerry. He’d have gone down, but he’d have taken some bodies with him.

Several different sources are reporting that representatives from the Writers Guild of America and the various Hollywood studios have worked out the thorniest disagreements in their four-month-old labor dispute, and that a deal could be finalized as soon as the sides dot I’s and cross T’s on the language for a new contract.

So what does this mean for the current TV season? Really, that all depends on how quickly a deal is finalized and what show you’re talking about. Expensive hour dramas like Pushing Daisies and Lost would take several weeks to get back into production, making it unlikely they could produce more than a handful of episodes. Sitcoms (even single-camera ones like The Office or 30 Rock) have an easier time of it and may return for a few shows before summertime.

Regarding Lost, here’s what I expect to happen. Before the strike, they completed the first eight shows of season four. I think they’ll probably air the final eight shows of “season four” this fall (same as they aired the first six shows of last season from October-November), then run a non-stop 16-episode season five from Feb-May 2009, followed by the 16-episode final season from Feb-May 2010.

I’ve been meaning to do a full announcement post for over a week, but time keeps getting away from me. So I’ll just tell you: this year’s edition of the Oscars Game started last week.

Rules are the same as last year: 24 categories, 25 points per category, highest score wins. Prizes are still being finalized, but will probably involve a “purse” of Amazon.com gift certificates to be divvied up among the top finishers.

The Pools feature from last year is back, and this year I’ve added something cool: public player profiles, with “TalkSmack” comments. If I have a free moment this week, I’ll also add TalkSmack to the Pools so you can squabble amongst yourselves.

Everyone’s favorite dysfunctional TV family, the Bluths, may be on their way back. Mitch Hurwitz and Ron Howard are pinging their former cast members — including Jason Bateman (Michael) and Jeffrey Tambor (George Sr.) — about reprising their roles in an Arrested Development movie.

The movie wouldn’t really go forward until after the WGA strike is resolved (oh, come on!), but there have been rumblings about a possible movie since the show ended in ‘06. In fact, Ron Howard alluded to a movie in an on-camera cameo in the series finale. Nearly every cast member is on record as saying they’d love to be in it, and the movie appears to be set up at Universal where Ron Howard’s production company has been based since the 80’s. So really, if Hurwitz is ready to write it and the cast is willing to be in it, it’s going to happen. Boo-yah.

A burger joint in East Texas has put up signs at every public entrance, informing customers that just by coming inside they waive their rights to sue and instead agree to binding arbitration. Coffee is scalding hot? Burger has e coli? Cashier takes you to the back and rapes your girlfriend at gunpoint? No dice — you’re on the premises, ergo you can’t sue.

Provided the sign/policy is enforceable, of course. Which it’s most likely not.