"You are a sexual predator, a sexual deviant. They should lock you up."

With these words, ESPN reporter Erin Andrews tore into Michael David Barrett, the stalker who pleaded guilty in December to following her to at least three cities and shooting nude videos of her through hotel peepholes without her consent.

"You violated me and you violated all women," Erin said told the total creep and now convicted stalker, who was sentenced to 2 1/2 years in prison for videotaping her.

The Illinois insurance executive gave a tearful apology for the peephole video of Erin Andrews nude, but it fell upon deaf ears and was harshly rebuked by his victim.

In fact, Andrews urged the judge at the hearing to levy an even harsher sentence against Barrett and said that she now fears for her life every time she enters a hotel.

After the sentencing, she said, "Thirty months isn't enough."

NOT ENOUGH: Erin says the perv's 30-month sentence doled out yesterday may not be long enough for his creepy behavior. We find it hard to argue with her there.

Michael Barrett, who has until May 3 to surrender, was ordered to have supervised probation for three years after his release and is prohibited from contacting Erin.

He will not be allowed to stay in a hotel without approval of a probation officer and if he accepts employment somewhere, Andrews will be notified by the court.

You can watch Erin Andrews in less creepy fashion beginning next week, when she joins the cast of Dancing with the Stars. Last week, we sized up her chances.

The Engadget Show is teaming up with Joystiq's very own Chris Grant this Saturday in a brand new episode that features the newly unveiled PlayStation Move motion controller. Sony's Richard Marks will take the stage, bringing some brand new tech demos that highlight what the controller is capable of. This will be the first time the general public will be able to get their hands on the device, with random members of the audience being able to play with the Move live on stage. And there's going to be a special surprise ... If you're in the NYC area, go to Engadget to find out more details on how to score a ticket for the show. If you can't make it, don't worry! Both Joystiq and Engadget will have a live stream of the episode available for you to watch this Saturday, March 20th at 5PM EST. Hope to see you there!

Go behind the tech of PlayStation Move at the Engadget Show this Saturday originally appeared on Joystiq on Tue, 16 Mar 2010 08:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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We've never written about the Parrot AR.Drone on our humble news site because we've yet to see its applications in the gaming space. Don't get us wrong -- it's as inherently awesome as you'd expect a hovering, camera-equipped drone (that's controlled by your iPhone!) to be. However, "random things that are awesome" doesn't really align with our editorial purview. At GDC, Parrot went to great lengths to show off the gaming applications of the Drone. A representative presented two tech demos to us, both of which use the device's front-mounted camera to recognize "tags" in the environment, creating augmented reality overlays which allow the user to virtually interact with an object. In layman's terms: It recognizes predetermined patterns, and turns them into virtual targets, at which you can then shoot virtual bullets and missiles.

Gallery: Parrot AR.Drone

Continue reading Hands-on: Parrot AR.Drone

Hands-on: Parrot AR.Drone originally appeared on Joystiq on Tue, 16 Mar 2010 08:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Did You Hear?

:: Turns out, Justin Bieber’s “swagger coach” Ryan Good is really just a road manager with a fancy name. Way to ruin our dream of becoming a swagger coach to the stars one day, Answer B!tch. [E! Online]

:: Check out the list of six albums that should be sold as one complete entity instead of being broken down into individual singles. You know it’s going to be an interesting list when Spice World makes the cut. [Black Book]

:: Courtney Love was allegedly attacked by daughter Frances Bean. When are these two getting together for the 2010 remake of Mommie Dearest? [Wonderwall]

:: Lil Wayne is prohibited from signing autographs while in jail. Apparently tweets are also a no-no, as we haven’t received any sort of 140-character sonnet since March 8. [Hip-Hop Wired]

:: Both of John Mayer’s recent exes—Jessica Simpson and Jennifer Aniston—appeared on the same episode of Good Morning America. We wonder what on Earth they could of talked about in the green room. [The Superficial]

After the jump: we rock out with The Rolling Stones.

Music on TV Today: :: Tonight Show with Jay Leno (NBC) – Collective Soul :: Last Call with Carson Daly (ABC) – Paolo Nutini :: Late Show with Jimmy Fallon (NBC) – The Script :: Jimmy Kimmel Live (ABC) – Sade (repeat) :: The Ellen DeGeneres Show (ABC) – La Roux

VIDEO REWIND OF THE DAY: Tonight the Top 12 on American Idol sing (or butcher, depending on who’s behind the mic) the songs of The Rolling Stones. The contestants may make Mick Jagger proud, but nobody comes close to pulling off The Stones quite like The Neptunes did in 2003. Here’s the video for Pharrell Williams and Chad Hugo’s remix of The Stones’ “Sympathy For the Devil,” which more than likely will be performed tonight on the Idol stage. (Fun AI tie-in: the song’s music video was directed by Alex De Rakoff, who also directed the vid for Kelly Clarkson’s “Since U Been Gone.”)

Have a great day!

The planned April 22 release date for "Avatar" on Blu-ray and DVD has been known for awhile, so it's not exactly breaking news that the Los Angeles Times is reporting. It had also been pretty widely reported that this home video release -- the first of several -- would be light on bonus content. Well it turns out that "light" actually means "completely devoid" in this case.

The aim in abandoning all extras -- which includes stripping down menus as well as removing trailers and studio promotions -- is to fill every bit of space on the disc with a top-notch audio/video presentation. Before you get cynical and starting shouting "marketing ploy!" to the heavens, know too that the April 22 release is planned for a Thursday (instead of the usual Tuesday), so that it can coincide with Earth Day. This will include a tie-in environmental campaign to be announced by director James Cameron and producer Jon Landau at a March 23 press conference.

The director and producer will also discuss the particulars of the next "Avatar" home video release, a features-packed "ultimate" edition currently planned for a November release. Neither the April nor the November releases will be 3-D however, as had been previously reported. Cameron and Landau will also presumably talk a little bit about the possible fall re-release of the film, which Cameron previously indicated would contain additional content not seen in the original theatrical release.

Will you be buying "Avatar" in April? Is it too soon? Do you want more with your home video purchases than the promised pristine audio/video?

While Metroid director Yoshio Sakamoto may not have played Shadow Complex, the XBLA darling's creators definitely played Metroid. During a panel titled "Designing Shadow Complex," Chair Entertainment Creative Director Donald Mustard encouraged the audience of prospective downloadable game makers to embrace genre limitations. "So, genre is one of your limitations because you aren't just competing against other games that are released in the downloadable space," Mustard said, pacing across the stage. "You really are competing against Gears of War, Mass Effect 2, Uncharted 2. That is the real competition and you need to find a way to differentiate yourself from those kinds of games. And that is an awesome opportunity." For Mustard, that meant moving "orthogonally" from what the "big $60 retail games" are doing. Mustard said, "For us, what that ultimately meant is target an old and abandoned genre. Which to us was kind of this Metroidvania side scroller adventure genre that had been abandoned. No one was making games in this genre. And we said, 'What if we took that genre and fused that with some of the modern sensibilities that had come out; some of the modern ideas of AI and physics and graphics? That would be a really cool combination.'

Continue reading GDC: 'Designing Shadow Complex' (or: zig when they zag)

GDC: 'Designing Shadow Complex' (or: zig when they zag) originally appeared on Joystiq on Tue, 16 Mar 2010 07:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Well we bought the set of six Jane Austen novel and earlier I had already read Emma and Pride and Prejudice so I decided to start with Mansfield Park.

Fanny Price is an eight year old girl when she is invited to live with her well to do Aunt and Uncle the Bertram’s at Mansfield Park. Learning to find her place in the family and how to avoid Aunt Norris become the daily routines for Fanny but when the Crawford’s move into the area things begin to change. Fanny is a shy young women who enjoys nothing more than taking the mare out for rides in the country or wandering aimlessly through the gardens. Her thoughts and ideas clash greatly with the Crawford’s who have seems to enliven and corrupt all the Bertram’s including the solid dependable Edmund.

I don’t mean to be harsh for all the people who love Mansfield Park but this book irritated me greatly. it is well written and an interesting story but the characters made me want to run my fingernails down a chalkboard rather than spend time with them. Fanny is insipid and spineless, she cries at the drop of the hat. Edmund is to self righteous and when he justifies his part in the play I could barely keep down my lunch, such arrogance.  Mrs Norris, within every Jane Austen novel there has to be at least one overbearing incredibly annoying character, the kind you want to close a door on mid sentence, the one that makes you embarrassed to read their dialogue, in this book that is Mrs Norris. She downright rude and mean and makes you cringe reading her passages. Without these character though and Austen novel would not be the same.

Other than the majority of the character annoying me I did enjoy the story and reading about the evolution of the character interactions but like Many Jane Austen novel she spend most of the book setting up the story and developing the characters that the final resolution of the story is completed in less than 20 pages. I found that a little disappointing in Mansfield Park everything in nicely wrapped up so quickly and then the book is over.

This isn’t my favourite Austen novel but each book is different with a variety of characters and I think  this is why Austen appeals to everyone. There is a character for all of us out there, which is your favourite?

Filed under: Classics, Fiction, Romance

Reuters - The discounted claims of an 18th century author to have re-shaped the words of Shakespeare into a play are finally being taken seriously by a respected publisher of the Bard's works nearly 300 years on.

AP - The Americans who populate the ABC series "FlashForward" are, on balance, a morose lot. And justifiably so: They are paralyzed by their 137-second visions of the future, part of a weird global bout of unconsciousness in which all humans see glimpses of their lives at the same moment six months onward.

NEW YORK -- Betty White's dance card continues to fill.

Kate Voegele and Mike Grubbs recorded a video for fans from the set of ‘One Tree Hill’ about their upcoming show at SXSW in Austin, Texas. Voegele will be performing at the music festival...

A Fine Frenzy is out with the stop-motion film to her single ‘Lost Things’, a never released song from the Los Angeles singer songwriter. Watch the clip, written and directed by Angela...

Meiko updated fans on her blog at MySpace on Monday (March 15), discussing her upcoming shows at the SXSW Music Festival in Austin, Texas. The singer songwriter tells readers: Hey there long lost...

X Factor twins Jedward have been given the boot by their record label after their debut single failed to top the charts.

Moby checked in with fans on his blog at MySpace on Monday (March 15), contemplating the direction his next album should go. The eletronic artist tells readers: Just working on music, trying to...

AP - At first touch, the PlayStation Move feels awfully familiar.

AP - Even though the Court Yard Hounds are a new group, they are hardly your typical baby act. The duo is derived from one of music's best-selling bands — the Dixie Chicks — and their self-titled debut album is already among the spring's more anticipated releases.

Actress Amanda Seyfried is 24 years old, gorgeous, talented and actually does not seem like a desperate, Kim Kardashian or Heidi Montag-style attention monger.

Basically, that makes the girl a prime catch.

The departing Big Love cast member recently posed for Esquire magazine, and let's just say that if you aren't familiar with her by now, you will be soon enough:

Mamma Mia! Amanda Seyfried as you've never seen her before ...

In addition to the HBO series, you may recognize Seyfried from her roles in various daytime dramas, and more recently Mamma Mia, Jennifer's Body and Dear John.

She's also known for being in seriously sexy lingerie as of now.

Click to enlarge more pictures of Amanda in Esquire ...

[Photos: Esquire]

(S06E15) I couldn't find a really good quote to transcribe or even characterize this week's episode, because the whole turn of events are a jumbled lump of clay in my head. Normally, a show that goes by so fast that I need a drag chute just to figure out what's going on would turn me away from it, but the dramatic tension that 'House' creates kept me velcroed in front of it all the way to the end. Sure my head still hurts from trying to understand the science of it all, but the dramatic and even comedic angles makes for some fine-tasting Advil.

Continue reading 'House' - 'Black Hole' Recap

 

Filed under: House, Episode Reviews, Reality-Free

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In the same way that it would be hard to meet Scarlett Johansson and not be distracted by her beauty, it is difficult to read War and Peace and not be preoccupied with its reputation as the greatest novel ever written.  As lay readers, the specific qualities that make War and Peace so great can be hard to assess.  But just as it takes specialized knowledge to understand exactly why a magnet attracts metal, yet any five-year-old can identify a magnet when he sees one, it is one thing to apprehend the formal properties of a great work of art, but another, much more accessible question, to assess its effects.  And so, having recently finished reading War and Peace, what I want to think about is just what it is that great art does.

One way to think about what a work of art does is to imagine the counterfactual—how would my life have been different had I not spent the last three months reading War and Peace?  The answers, I think, tend to group into three categories: The social experiences I had because of the book; the ideas the book incorporated into my life; and the aesthetic moments that were opened to me because of what I was reading.

The social consequences first.  It’s a fair bet that without War and Peace I would not know that my father-in-law read the book himself in two feverish weeks 35 years ago while on sabbatical in West Berlin.  People, as I discovered, tend to remember where they were when they read War and Peace, and when they saw me with the book they told me those stories.  I learned that my friend Paul read War and Peace as a 25-year-old Peace Corps volunteer in Colombia in the late-sixties.  He told me that the experience was revelatory in that it showed him that “a classic that came with the gravity of adult recommendations could be more engaging than life and easy to read, too.”

War and Peace lends itself to sharing with others more than most books.  I wouldn’t say that shareability is an essential element of great literature, but where present, it helps.  As I read, I frequently retold episodes from the book.  I remember taking a long walk with my wife in early February and telling her the story of how Pierre, who was kind-hearted but lacked will, became engaged unwittingly to Helene who was beautiful.  With my father-in-law, as part of a conversation about how to plan for the future, I brought up the tragic tale of young Petya Rostov, who joined the Russian army in a fit of patriotic fervor, but whose romantic visions of war blinded him to its dangers right up until the moment he was shot through the head.  And on a happier note, I shared with my friend Eric a retelling of the scene of Natasha at the opera, a scene charged through with the erotic energy of a young woman suddenly becoming aware of her beauty and the power it holds over men.

This is not something I usually do, tell stories from books I read, but the spectrum of experience depicted in War and Peace, combined with the precision with which it’s captured, creates an infinite number of roads into the book and an infinite number back out.  The fact that the scenes in War and Peace are easy to retell is also in keeping with a claim my friend Paul likes to make that Tolstoy’s writing is so irreducible that the translation doesn’t matter. (For my part, I began reading the Maude translation and switched halfway through to the new Pevear and Volokhonsky; I found that while my mind was stimulated all the same, my heart raced twice as fast with the newer version.)

After the social experience of the book there is the intellectual one.  I have read other novels where the controlling idea of the story came to serve as a lens through which I viewed my days, but never has this happened quite as thoroughly as it did with War and Peace.  Tolstoy’s intellectual agenda in the book was to expose the meagerness of historical accounts of the War of 1812 that tried to reduce the world-remaking conflict to a finite and knowable set of causes.  Instead, Tolstoy wanted to depict the war in all its complexity and contingency, to show that the outcome rested at least as much on the decision of an individual soldier to charge or not as it did on Napoleon’s machinations, and that both the soldiers and the Emperor were controlled equally by forces larger than themselves.

It’s an expansive idea and one that finds ready application in almost any facet of one’s life.  I thought of Tolstoy when reading about climate change (he probably would have been a skeptic) and when assessing President Obama’s leadership on health care (I think, based on his favorable depiction of General Kutuzov, who abandoned Moscow to the French in order to preserve the Russian army, that Tolstoy would have endorsed Obama’s decision to forego the public option).

I applied War and Peace to my life in smaller ways, too.  A passage about the forced idleness of regimental life clarified vague thoughts I’d had about how having a baby makes it easier to nap guilt-free.  And at one point—I may have been walking through a park when this happened—I stopped short after reading a passage on Prince Andrei’s decision to withdraw from life into the work of his estates that seemed, minus the part about the estates, like a mimeograph of my own mind.  (One somewhat disquieting effect of reading War and Peace is that the more your own thoughts show up in its pages, the less original your life begins to feel.)

In the end, though, the reason I read novels is not because I can talk about them with other people, or because I’m looking for ideas to explain the world.  I read them for the pure aesthetic moment that comes from seeing life perfectly distilled into words.  In this respect, I don’t think there is a more able book than War and Peace.  Tolstoy’s singular genius is to be able to take the torrent of conscious experience and master it.  There are countless moments in the book where this happens, but the one that left me reeling was Tolstoy’s long, exquisite depiction of the Battle of Borodino, which was the deciding battle in the war and one of the bloodiest in history.

The night I finished reading about Borodino, it was plainly obvious that I had just read something great.  Yet here I was sitting in a corner of my couch, just the same as I had been an hour before.  I thought about the question with which I opened—what is it that greatness does?  An encounter with greatness, I would say, is like a bright light fixed in time, a marker that defines memory and makes it clearer than it otherwise might have been, that we were here.

Previously: Scenes of Retreat in War and Peace and Atonement, Selections from a Winter Reading War and Peace

Bonus Link: The Millions Interview: Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky