It may seem a little cheap to do a parody of the “;I’m A Mac…”; tv spots, but when Live Free or Die Hard slaps Justin Long in their movie as the comic sidekick to Bruce Willis, that’s low-hanging fruit too delicious to ignore.

In the commercials, Long represents the slick, hip future of computing to the stodgy, bland PC. Willis’s John McClane character is the analog equivalent to action movies. It makes sense they would try to “;freshen”; him up a little.

From what I’m hearing, thought, LFoDH does a good job with it’s action set pieces in a low-tech way. Not a lot of CGI cartoon physics. They’re doing it old school – which I admire. No one works harder than a stuntman.

I don’t know if there will be room in our schedule this weekend for LFoDH. Cami recently finished reading The Wal-Mart Effect and it inspired her to go back and re-read Fast Food Nation. This has put her in a very specific frame of mind, so I think she’s got her sights set on seeing Sicko this weekend. I kind want to see Ratatouille, but that’s because I’m a socially irresponsible bastard stuck in a state of arrested development. Adorable rodents! Awww!

If you want to get the reaction of someone who saw LFoDH and loved it, check out the most recent Joe Loves Crappy Movies. As Joe puts it, the movie is “;the balls.”; It’s cool to me that he enjoyed it so much. I’m sure we’ll be talking about it on Monday’s Triple Feature.

Speaking of The Triple Feature, I didn’t give you guys the second half of the clue for our Evening contest. So here it is:

“;POWER”;

Be sure to download Monday’s show over at TalkShoe to get the first half of the clue. Take the compiled clue and mail it to me at theaterhopper@hotmail.com along with your name, age and mailing address. One lucky winner will be chosen at random to receive a make-up bag, a cook book and two posters from the movie Evening. Happy hunting!

Switching gears, I just wanted to give everyone a status update on my computer situation.

First, let me thank EVERYONE who left comments in Wednesday blog or e-mailed me personally offering solutions. I wish I had time to thank you all individually, but the outpouring was so strong, that’s not possible. So if you took time out of your busy day to help me diagnose the problem or made yourself available to me through e-mail or by phone – thank you. Each of you went above the call of duty and I appreciate it.

Long story short, I ended up finding the Windows XP installation discs I need to repair my machine. But it turns out my hard drive was physically degraded to the point where it wouldn’t accept it. I contacted Dell customer support to help walk me through things and we tried the repair console first. But it didn’t take, so their recommendation was to do a complete reinstall. That didn’t take, either. So I was forced to buy a new hard drive.

Even though I was keeping all my Theater Hopper stuff on another smaller internal drive (so I think it’s safe) this whole episode has put enough of a scare into me to make sure I have backups of that data in multiple formats. If I ever lost my original artwork, I would probably give up completely. It would be like someone pulled the string out of my back.

That said, we’re not completely out of the woods yet. I had to complete today’s comic using my laptop, but I was running into errors THERE as well. I have a… copy of the Adobe CS2 Suite and for some reason, the version of Photoshop I had on my machine was saying that certain registry information wasn’t matching up. I tried re-installing it, but had no luck. I eventually had to load a… copy of Photoshop 6 I had lying around to get my work done.

This makes me a little nervous about getting the programs I need back on my desktop after I install my new hard drive. So if anyone knows where I might find a… copy of Photoshop CS2 (or, even better, CS3) send me an e-mail and we can chat.

It’s been a long week. That’s about as much as I can say. Everyone enjoy their weekend and I’ll see you here on Monday!