Author: USM

For years now, Yosaku, that Japanese place on Danforth St. near Brian Boru, has been my favorite place in town to go for sushi. But I’m starting to reconsider. After two delicious meals last week at Shima, the new French / Japanese fusion restaurant that just opened on Fore St. across the street from Rosie’s, I think my loyalties are beginning to shift.

To begin with, Shima has a menu vast enough that I may never become familiar with it all as well as a constantly shifting set of specials. I opted for a special – the tempura-fried, fish-wrapped spinach – since it didn’t sound like anything I’d ever had before, and I figured it’d be wonderful to try. Indeed, it was. Served on a plate full of a sauce which tasted distinctly French, it was a flavorful dish far surpassing my simplistic prior experiences with sushi.

The MiFi 2200 Intelligent Mobile Hotspot is the size of 10 stacked credit cards, and it works wonders. Simply turn it on wherever you are and BANG! You have a wi-fi network that you can connect to on your laptop or other device to surf the Web.

During one afternoon drive between Lewiston and Brunswick, my fiance was able to stream video from her Web cam and browse the Web at the same time – all at a relatively fast speed. As I write this review, I am using the MiFi card to connect to the Internet where I normally wouldn’t be able to – in Rumford, Maine at my grandparents’ house.

Almost everyone has heard the story of Amelia Earhart. She attempts to fly around the world and goes missing somewhere over the Pacific Ocean. Don’t be alarmed by the overdone subject matter, however, this film is nothing like that paper you wrote on her in sixth grade.

It was another rainy afternoon on Congress Street in Portland. From behind a large first-floor window, an eight foot tall model of Bigfoot watched the traffic roll by from behind a plastic shrub, trying to make sense of his new home – the International Cryptozoology Museum in Portland’s Parkside neighborhood.

My sister sent me a text this morning that read “You hanging with the golden girls?” I could see why – we were in West Palm Beach, Florida, a retirement town. It’s the last place you’d expect to find a punk show. We all half expected to roll up on a town of all senior citizens, complete with wheelchair ramps on every storefront.

Of course, that wasn’t the case. Even on the beach, which was our first stop, there were plenty of young people out and about. As I reported in my last dispatch, the water was anything but refreshing. The floating trash and jellyfish warning signs didn’t help anything. But the beach was still a nice stop before the show. As far as the show was concerned, we didn’t know what to expect. Would it be full of oldtimers hobbling around the mosh pit?

Reality shows all claim to present ordinary people in unscripted situations. But how real are they really? Does it matter?

To begin with, unscripted television is not that novel an idea.

Game shows have been around since before the United States entered the Second World War. But the current “reality show” idiom in which contestants are eliminated by their peers instead of by a system appeared nine years ago when “Survivor” contestants began getting “voted off the island.”

Much of what makes these shows exciting is that nobody knows what’s going to happen. It’s riveting to watch people double-cross each other as they compete in the wide variety of competitions throughout the season. If it were orchestrated, it’d lack suspense and just be boring. That’s what’s so upsetting about the longstanding allegations that “Survivor” may actually stage some of its events and possibly even, gasp, not take place in the wilderness that they portray. If the drama of the show was created by an off-screen writer, then the appeal is written off as well.

Yamato – The Drummers of Japan provided the people of Portland with a unique opportunity to feel the beat of authentic Japanese culture at their show in Merrill Auditorium last Tuesday, Nov. 10.

The group performed an intense combination of masterful drumming and synchronized dance. They swung the drums – which were almost as big as they were – around the stage and gracefully performed marshal arts moves without ever missing a beat. Throughout the entire show, the performers had massive smiles strewn across their faces, encouraging each other and radiating positive energy out into the audience.

I never thought I could be disappointed in a movie featuring George Clooney. “The Men Who Stare At Goats” has proven otherwise. It presents the dullest, most random series of disjointed events imaginable. It’s as boring as watching two people cross an endless desert. Scratch that: the film is actually about two guys walking across a desert.

The film follows and is narrated by Bob Wilton( Ewan Mcgregor), a reporter looking for a story amid the disasters of the Iraq War. He thinks he hit a gold mine when he meets Lyn Cassady ( George Clooney), a former member of a paranormal battalion from the Vietnam War. What ensues is a great plotless heap that leads the viewer into their own boring, endless desert of annoyance.