March 1, 2010 3:52 PM ET



It all goes horribly awry when Baron Vasectomy starts playing theme songs to old TV Shows, and the whole thing devolves into one big jumbled mess, sort of like this run-on sentence I have been milking right here.

Needful to say, please click through and have a listen to our slapstick shennanigans and what have you.

MAKE IT GO!

" And  yeah  thanks  and  evening  and  Hello  Pack.  Yes,  the  real  and  for  Ohh  and  I  have  the  wrong  cos  you  saying  hello,  Jack  June.  It's  me  York  Cox  alright.  I  was  ha  ha  ha  ha  ha  ha.  You're  man.  If  you  know  English.  And  this  is  yard  wrong  or  with  Bro.  So  Eric,  Andrews,  though  I  don't  know  how  long  war."

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Black Friday, the kickoff to the holiday shopping season, has come and gone. For our third year in a row, dealnews takes a look back at some of last week's biggest doorbusters and biggest failures. We present to you, the Best and Worst of Black Friday 2009.

Cheers: To Blu-ray movie prices. For $10 or less, we saw The Dark Knight, Harry Potter 1-5, Monsters vs. Aliens, Star Trek 2, 4, and 8, and many many more. At these prices, we'd prefer Blu-ray over streaming HD video. It's a pity we've only seen these prices once ever. DVD movie prices were at all time lows too.

Jeers: To newegg, whose Black Friday Sale began on Wednesday afternoon, only to see newegg's web servers immediately bog down under the traffic. By the time you could get through, the item was often sold out. Cheers to Amazon, for matching prices with newegg on almost every item that Amazon also sells. Amazon's web site had no outages or slowdowns.

Cheers: To early releases of Black Friday doorbusters. Many shoppers were able to buy doorbuster deals online as early as the Sunday before Black Friday. Shopping online is safer, more convenient, and much more relaxed than shopping in stores on Black Friday, the most hassle-filled shopping day of the year. We hope this trend continues.

Jeers: To Apple, for yet another Apple Store Black Friday sale with modest discounts that, at best, offset the cost of sales tax. But perhaps the biggest jeer should go to blog "Boy Genius Report" (a.k.a Weekly World News: Tech Edition) for reporting that Apple's sale would be stellar. Apple wasn't the only one whose Black Friday sale underwhelmed. We're looking at you, Buy.com and mwave. Cheers to MacMall and Amazon, for undercutting Apple's Black Friday prices.

Jeers — with emphasis: To Sears, which had Black Friday sale prices that were substantially worse than other times of the year, or at least worse than its competitors. Ironically, this is the first year that Sears' web servers didn't go down, at least since we started tracking such things.

Cheers: To Office Depot, for free shipping all week with no minimum requirement. It's an annual tradition for Office Depot, and it's one we've come to love. Jeers to Staples and OfficeMax for not matching it.

Jeers: To Costco, for recycling the same old GPS deal — its lead product in its Black Friday sale — that it's had since November 7. If we didn't want it three weeks ago ...

Jeers: To Roku, maker of a popular Netflix streaming box for your TV. Its servers crashed on Black Friday during its 50% off deal. Once you got through — you guessed it — the 50% off deal was over.

Cheers: To Walmart, who put 100% of its Black Friday doorbusters online at 4 am on Friday. We must regrettably offer a mild jeer to Walmart at the same time, since its best Black Friday deals sold out in mere minutes. (We've heard of "Limit one per store," but this felt like "Limit one per web site.")

Cheers: To TigerDirect.com and its "Pink Friday" promotion, which this year donated at least $100,000 to the Susan G. Komen Breast Cancer Foundation.

Jeers: To Target for waiting until Thanksgiving Day to post its official Black Friday ad. It was the last major store to do so once again. Last is bad.

Cheers: To 20% off coupons. Well, that's assuming you think that 20% off is a lot, because we saw more 20% off coupon codes on Thanksgiving and Black Friday than any other discount. The list includes Reebok, Disney Store, Petco, Ann Taylor Loft, and many more. Jeers to stores that offered their same old discounts, or worse, on Black Friday. Two of these "Lame Friday" stores include Bluefly and AllPosters.

Jeers: To the Overstock.com Black Friday Preview. It listed the products, but it didn't list the prices!

Jeers: To "Deal of the Day" sites like Woot. We love these daily deals sites most of the year, but on Black Friday, when every store had dozens of stellar bargains, stores having only one deal seemed hollow and irrelevant. Excluded from this jeer is Yugster, which had several products throughout the day.

Cheers: To AT&T, for cutting prices on the refurbished iPhone 3GS to $49 (sorry, since expired). Less than fifty dollars for an iPhone 3GS! Now if only AT&T had enabled them to work on Verizon's network, we'd really have something to cheer about.

The BIG WINNER: Amazon's customers, who saw the online giant match the best Black Friday prices at Walmart. And Best Buy. And newegg. And Staples. And Office Depot. And Apple. And Target. The list goes on. We imagined all of Amazon's product managers skittering about in a Black Friday war room, in a mad frenzy, unshowered, reeking of coffee and cigarettes, smashing their fists into their keyboards screaming, "You think you got a Black Friday deal, Staples? BWAHAHA! [Click.] SO DO WE!" We watched Amazon cut prices live, and it was a phenomenon to behold. But before we keep gushing, we should point out that there are another 364 days in the year.

Cheers: To the dealnews Staff, who worked 24/7, even on Thanksgiving, to hunt down deals or to keep dealnews.com up and running smoothly despite record traffic.


Compiled by the editors and writers of dealnews. See also our Cheers & Jeers pieces from 2008 and 2007.

Get it while its hot.

Earlier this year, 2009, I happened to re-connect with an old friend - You know him as Quality Jones (which is an anagram for  Squat Line Joy, in Quality's native land the favorite pastime is communal bowel movement). Lunch ensued and at this lunch Quality brought along another old friend, Baron VC (which is an anagram for Bacon VR, a Virtual Reality Bacon Simulator). During that first lunch we talked and reminisced about the good old day (there was only the one good day, the rest pretty much sucked) and before too long I blarted out something about wanting to do a podcast. Since Quality Jones had some previous experience with podcasting via his FryCookOnVenus Podblast and Baron VC is a part time DJ, it seemed like we three were a perfect fit.

So you may be asking yourself "what does bigbrain bring to the table?", and you'd be right! Basically I serve as the impetus, the motivator, if you will. we three (and friends) have a lot of stored up content in our feeble minds and scooping it out and serving it to you is what its all about. I also provide technical support via equipment and editing, hosting and such.

The show, in our opinion, has certainly started to sound better as we get on - but, audio quality is not the goal here. Great sounding drivel is no substitution for quality content. We recognize that some of our offerings may not be palatable to certain audiences, and while we all agree - in principle - that Pop Zombie should be a quality entertainment show there will be moments when life interferes and the show may suffer for it. With new jobs affecting some of us, pending nuptials others its amazing we get together as often as we do.

So. Moving forward, what are our goals? Most likely the same as they have always been. We'd like to get a little bit more serious - not in tone, but in focus. We'd like to have some interesting guest stars, interviews and subjects that can be recurring segments. Really, we need a show runner and some help planning for the show. Most of the time we are winging it, and it shows. We do want to address that and take steps to correct it.

Our next scheduled recording is for 11/28/09 (a.k.a. Black Friday) and most likely the goings on of Black Friday will be a topic of discussion. So tune in, Tune Out and Turn On - to the next Pop Zombie Podcast.

That's right. We talk about MODERN WARFARE 2 again... Just listen to it, its FUN!
Go to the Podcast Page Here...

We also peel back the covers on the latest iteration of the Cal of Duty series, Modern Warfare 2. We cover the hard speculation on the new perks menu and field some questions about the inherent danger of war games with our producer Jaybone.

While there have been some success stories (Battlestar Galactica, Star Trek, See More Here) there has been many more failures (Top Ten Here). And despite the general consensus that "We don't like remakes!" Hollywood still insists on churning them out. Granted, every time I hear an old favorite is going to be remade I get hopeful, still, but more often than not, I am disappointed.

I recorded about 6.5hrs of the original V mini-series that aired recently on the Syfy channel and have only managed to get through about 2hrs of this epic cheese-filled sci-fi allegory for Nazi Germany, but I can say already, without a doubt - effects and bad '80's fashion aside - The original is better.

I watched the remake last night with fellow podcaster, Quality Jones - I won't speak for him, but I don't think our opinions are too dissimilar on this matter. Before the show even began I remarked that a series premiere for a story as epic in scope as V is intended to be should certainly be at least 2hrs if not more. The fact that it was a 1hr show that basically tells you the entire outline of the series from Visitor arrival to family dissent to false devotion to aliens to sleeper cell visitors and the 'truth' about them and their actual form simply blows my mind.

I understand not everyone wants to wait 1/2 a season for the reveal of the Visitor's secret agenda, and that the audience for this version of V may be assumed to be the same as the original (as-in we know already what's going to happen...) but that's no excuse to get lazy with storytelling. Sure, LOST and Flashforward have the long-tailed tale covered, but please don't regurgitate an entire seasons worth of story at me in 44 minutes.

Here's what I took away from the debut; I don't really know the value or direction of the characters, I don't really know how or why the Visitors are here and I don't have any clue how/why/when this 'resistance' came to exist - Yet I was presented with all those items as is to say "You need to be aware of all these things right now, in this first episode."

I couldn't disagree more with the way the story has been revealed, the methodology and the presentation. The story is in effect exactly the same as the original - alien race needs a chemical to survive (cover) and we have the raw materials to help them produce it. In the original it was our refuse they used to manufacture the chemical, seemingly unavailable on their planet due to environmental damage. We haven't been told what the need or fodder for this chemical will be in the new version, but with the environment being such a hot topic I assume it will be the same.

So I've made it clear that the first episode feels extremely rushed - too much going on, too fast, but does that mean I don't like the show, or that I won't watch it again? No, it doesn't. There simply isn't enough good sci-fi on TV, and whether this series will eventually qualify as 'good sci-fi' remains to be seen, and I intend to give it a chance to do so. If my wish comes true, now that the information overload is out of the way, the writers will slow down and let the mystery and conspiracy and conflict build. Let us focus on the key players and understand their behavior and motives - Why did Anna brow beat Chad into running the interview the way he did? Awfully suspicious considering at this point she has 'nothing to hide'. Going from day one to 3 weeks later in 1hr just made me feel gypped out of all the interesting development I really want to see - and not as background noise/newscasts on a tv in a throwaway scene.

The acting was ok, but its hard to get attached to anyone's character in 44mins when they are trying to cram so much into it. I for one am a big Alan Tudyk fan and after one scene of him at a desk we don't see him again until the big reveal - WTF? Are we supposed to be shocked, pissed or confused at his secret? We get snips of Morena Baccarin actually looking like an alien (a super hot alien) and 2 speeches, leaving us to think what about her? As far as character development goes, I think I got more from Morris Chestnut's refusal to answer the phone than from anyone else's dialog.

  The VFX were ok, especially the first sighting of the motherships as they appear reflected/refracted in the tall buildings windows. I did think, however, the landing shuttle looked like a basketball sneaker.

Here's to hoping it not only gets better, but gets better fast - Without an audience it won't have time to get better.