Single Serving Ice Cream

Haagen-Dazs, Ben & Jerry's, and a couple other premium brands, including premium store brands, have jumped onto the bandwagon of single serving premium ice cream. In a tiny little carton with its own attached spoon, this ice cream is just as high calorie and bad for you as the large-sized versions, but without the added risk of polishing off an entire pint at one sitting.

Only a few flavors are available in this packaging right now, and the tiny spoon, while cute, is largely useless. Those are really my only complaints. While this isn't exactly a dieting option, it's an aid to portion control on those days when you really need a nice dose of high-quality ice cream.

The Dark Tower: Treachery

This comic series is a spin-off of Stephen King's Dark Tower series, featuring characters from the books during a time period not covered by the epic novel sequence. The story fills in gaps in the life of Roland Deschain, bringing readers more of his backstory and history.

Treachery follows The Long Road Home, which spun out from Gunslinger Born. Gunslinger Born was basically a retelling of pieces of the novel Wizard and Glass, and so brought no new material to the Dark Tower world. The following sequences, though, carry that story forward into new territory.

The end of Treachery does cover pieces of Roland's story from the books, but also adds to the narrative. Although readers of the Dark Tower books will know how the ending plays out, there's enough original material here to provide a good addition to the books.

A must-have for devoted Stephen King fans.

Gold's Gym Cardio Workout

Gold's Gym Cardio Workout for the Wii is a reasonably good workout game, but has several drawbacks. Intended to interface with the Wii Balance Board, Gold's Gym offers exercises for the balance board, but they don't work well and end up being more frustrating than useful.

The most entertaining and usable features of Gold's Gym are, unsurprisingly, the cardio boxing sections. With premade or customized workouts, you can produce a satisfying workout that fits your schedule, giving you a quick aerobic interval before work or whenever you have fifteen or twenty minutes to exercise.

The game takes a while longer to unlock than I'd prefer--I had to spend a few days going through the tutorials before I could actually get a good workout--but once this hurdle has been passed, the workouts proceed at a nice pace.

Recommended for increasing aerobic and cardio activity, but avoid the balance board options.

Life After People

My daughter introduced me to this show today--she's on summer vacation and spending a lot of time watching the History Channel and Animal Planet. Hey, at least it's educational.

Anyway, we saved a couple of episodes on the DVR and took a look together. While an interesting show in its way, it also doesn't make a great deal of sense. The show focuses not on how people were eliminated, but on what supposedly would happen to the planet after we're all gone. This premise seems flawed to me, because the fate of everything else on the planet is going to be dependent on how the people get wiped out. For example, if there's a nuclear holocaust, the aftermath will be distinctly different than if, for example, a meteor smacks into the planet.

Perhaps I'm missing the point of the show, though. Maybe it's really just about how much we've affected our planet, for bad and for worse. In many ways, the projected results make you think that maybe Earth would be better off without us.

100-Calorie Packets

You can find just about any kind of snack food in 100-calorie single-serving packets these days. This packaging is very handy for those of us trying to control and/or reduce our daily calorie intake.

Some of my favorite entries in the 100-calorie package wars:

• Pringles
• Milano cookies
• Keebler Fudge Stripe cookies
• Chocolate covered pretzels
• Cheez-It Snack Mix

Yes, there's a lot of chocolate on that list. Want to make something of it?

EA Sports Active Personal Trainer

After getting the Wii Fit for Christmas, it took me about three months to unlock everything in the game and get to a point where it wasn't offering me an intense enough workout. The arrival of the EA Sports Active offers new alternatives.

EA Sports Active integrates with the Wii Fit Balance Board, but also uses the nunchuck controller and a leg strap to track movement, as well as an elastic resistance band to provide surprisingly intense strength training. You can use pre-made workouts, including a 30-day challenge sequence, or make your own workout sequences. With workouts lasting from 20 minutes to as long as an hour, at three different intensity levels, EA Sports Active provides a variety of workouts that you can easily fit into even a busy day.

With its wider range of exercises and more intense workouts, EA Sports Active offers a great next step after your needs surpass the exercise provided by the Wii Fit.

G1 Apps: Hangman

After having great luck finding a good Tic Tac Toe game, I was hoping to have equal success finding a Hangman app. No such luck. I tried two different apps and wasn't particularly pleased with either.

Hangman from Vavni is a remarkably pretty application, but it's difficult to use. The touch keyboard on the screen has letters that are so small it's practically impossible to press only one letter at a time. The game also works with the keyboard, but this takes something away from the enjoyment.

HangDroid's touch screen alphabet works slightly better, but is still difficult. The graphics aren't as pretty as Vavni's entry, and the Android figure who gets "hanged" doesn't seem to have enough body parts for an enjoyable game.

I continue my quest for the ultimate Hangman app.

Movie Review--Up

A much deeper and more mature movie than it appears from the previews, Up, Pixar's latest release, transcends the conception of "family movie." Much like Wall-E before, it, Up tackles complex and intense adult issues, packaging them in an emotionally authentic story that will have most viewers going for the tissues in the first ten minutes.

The movie has plenty of laughs, as well--enough to send you looking for the tissues for an entirely different reason. There's also adventure, and some scary sequences, so be sure to take the PG rating into consideration.

The 3D presentation adds much to this movie, but subtly. Overall, even though the visual presentation is immaculate, it's driven by a story that's more touching and genuine than any number of supposedly serious, "adult" films.