Author Archive for Mike Olson
A Day in the Life of a Drums Corps Major
Mark De La Vega doesn’t go on vacation for the summer. He goes on tour.
‘Main mode of travel is a tour bus,’ he tells me. ‘That’s fun. We really get used to sleeping on that bus. We normally have a show, change, drive all night, sleep on the bus, rehearse in the morning
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Outgoing Editors Say Goodbye to UCI and the New U. (Head Copy)
I’m terrible at goodbyes. I linger in doorways at parties, have hour-long parking-lot conversations with friends and can’t seem to get off the phone with a simple ‘Talk to you later
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Now That We’ve ‘Lost’ Our ‘Heroes’ … ‘Traveler’?
Say goodbye to ‘Lost’ until February. After three seasons of unsolved mysteries, about the only thing we know for sure is that Jack and Kate get off the island (eventually and somehow). Jacob
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Taliban-Tested, al-Qaeda-Approved
Seven hundred billion dollars.
That’s how much Secretary of Defense Bob Gates, appearing before the Senate Appropriations Subcommittee last week, said the Pentagon needs to continue the war in Iraq. Seven hundred billion for a war that’s supposed to be ‘in its last throes.’
To put that into perspective, when all this began in 2003, Congress approved [...]
Mark Your Calendars: ‘Lost’ Ending in 2010
After years of pressure and speculation, the American Broadcasting Corporation has announced that ‘Lost,’ the wildly popular dramatic series about a collection of mysterious castaways on a mysterious island, will have only three more seasons. The series will come to an end in 2010.
I find this to be a disturbing bit of news, and am [...]
A Horrifically Good ’28 Weeks’
Is this a zombie movie?
It’s the same geeky question that dogged 2002′s ’28 Days Later,’ and the debate, such as it is, is likely to claw its way from the grave with the release of ’28 Weeks Later,’ now in theaters.
If these are zombies, they certainly aren’t your grandpa’s zombies. Unlike the brain-eating hordes of [...]
‘Spider-Man 3′: Fun But Cluttered
The guiding principle of ‘Spider-Man 3′ seems to have been ‘More!’ More villains! More love interests! More moral quandaries! More high stakes! More cameos! More plot contrivances! More money! More effects! More, more, more!
Admittedly, some of these are welcome; Spider-Man wouldn’t be Spider-Man without a little grey morality, and it’s hard to [...]
Media Shows Cowardice at WH Corr. Dinner
It’s getting hard to keep track of all of the Bush administration’s problems these days. There’s the war in Iraq, of course, and the president’s barrel-scraping approval rating. Attorney General Alberto Gonzales and his Reaganesque memory aren’t helping things much, and though Scooter Libby may have taken one for the team over the Valerie Plame [...]
The Invisible
At its best, ‘The Invisible,’ now playing in theaters, could have been a supernatural take on the 1950 classic ‘D.O.A.’ (or its 1988 remake), in which a man tries to solve his own murder in the time he has left before the slow-acting poison coursing through his veins finishes him off. Instead, it’s an angst-fest [...]
