Colin Farrell seems like an average actor, although he has survived longer than most flavors of the month.

I thought he was good in the New World, which I felt was an excellent moview. I can't stomach Stephanie Zacharek's reviews. She seems to fancy herself as a modern Dorothy Parker and that viscious, cutting comments are substitutes for real contemplation.

The part which interested me the most in last night's episode was the comment Tony made to Melfi about his mother. Tony says that it was like his mom dropped him off from the bus, but Tony wants to get back on instead of letting her drive off.

This is a terrifically insightful comment. At times it seems that the Sopranos is about being caught in context, just like with the bus. Tony's context is the world of the Mafia. He goes to therapy and at times is able to use part of what he learns to help his own life. But the problem is that as long as he lives within the context of this life, the life he learned as a boy that he keeps returning to, he will never be able to fully heal. He can't escape the evil that he does, and when he sees this in himself, he can't fully accept the therapy either. It seems like a joke that all these years he's been going there but that no one has taken him to task for what he does.

Maybe the presence of the FBI is a way out. If Tony can escape his world, break his context, maybe he can save the best parts of himself. Of course, the problem with this is that one cannot escape one's nature. If Tony is a sociopath, he will never escape.

Sometimes it seems like the only thing this page talks about is Apple. You know that when you see an article on Apple's financial statements. Uh, this is a technology page. Apple's putative financial strength is important to technology only to those who are in an imagined fight with Microsoft. How many articles were there on Steve Jobs back dating his options?

Yahoo has had expandable mail boxes forever. It must be a slow news day.

Regardless of whether Colbert and Stewart think that You Tube makes them more popular, Viacom owns the copyrights to the material. You can hate Viacom for not wanting it put up on You Tube, but it's their right.

First of all, investing and betting are not the same. Risk is a component of both, but whereas speculating implies a simple end goal--that the purchased security will rise in value--investing implies that regardless of the outcome, the investor will own something tangible. Also, with an investment the invested money will be used for some purpose by the recipient whether it be an acquisition, another investment, or a loan origination. That's why betting on a football game is not the same as investing in a football team.

The writer has done a lot research but misses on many of the important nuances of structured finance. First, in the way he describes a derivative, a mortgage loan would itself be a derivative. It's not. It's debt. Debt is used to finance an asset. A house is an asset. A pool of loans is an asset. A pool of mortgage backed securities is an asset. You can finance these assets by using debt. Also, a mortgage backed security is not referred to as a CDO.

Everybody is so quick to blame Wall Street for all of the country's financial ills. I would have to agree that greed is the main factor in this bubble. It's greed by all parties. Structured Finance itself is nothing so magical. It does not create value. It's just a way to finance assets. It's when people stop worrying about the risk...that someone will default or can't make a payment, that it runs amok. This goes for all credit markets.

As has been mentioned before, Blockbuster has, and maybe still does, edit movie content for the movies they rent. I find that so distasteful, I will NEVER rent from those idiots again.

World War II is always an interesting subject, and the movie has been entertaining mostly. I think that Burn's take on the war is not terribly unique, but his effort to highlight the areas of the war which are not well known is admirable. Most memories seem to start at D-Day and go forward to the fall of Berlin. The war in the Pacific was bloody, hard fought, and mostly overlooked.

The part that bothers me, and the opportunity which is missed, is that I fear that the memories of the people in the documentary have been affected by time. Many of the memories seem very rosy, and there is little challenge or investigation as to what is said. One lady says that before the war, everyone knew that Hitler was bad and had to go. This is not true. There was strong pro-German sentiment in the U.S. That's why we declared war on Japan and not its allies. It was Germany who declared war on us, which helped Roosevelt out a great deal.