The bespectacled, red-shirt, water-sipping guy who jumped on-stage during yesterday’s Peter Jackson-James Cameron discussion can be seen in this HE video starting around the 3:19 mark.

Here‘s a clip of same from Entertainment Weekly, as provided by In Contention.

I spent about four hours today driving back and forth between an AT&T store and an Apple store and getting sick from the overstuffed scenery. The area was just above Route 8, an east-west freeway in northern San Diego, and it has to be one of the ugliest areas I’ve ever driven through in any area of the globe. Seriously — I was actually feeling nausea.

I saw the lamest minds of my generation driven mad by overdeveloped, freeway-clogged hills and valleys, filthy with condos and malls and fast-food joints and corporate chain stores and looking for an angry cappuccino. Everyone cruising around in their late-model cars and talking/texting on their smart phones and driving in a sort of mad-impulse way, accelerating and then hitting the brakes whenever and doing sudden U-turns between slurps and sips. It’s psychotic — tens of thousands of Louis the Sixteenths driving over/under/sideways/down through grandiose remnants of the over-leveraged Clinton-Bush economic boom. It’s all less than zero.

James Cameron‘s statement, delivered during yesterday’s Jackson-Cameron Comic-Con sitdown, comes around the 1:45 mark. I got this off Kris Tapley‘s In Contention because my own video file (which includes footage of that wackjob guy who came up behind Jackson/Cameron and started jabbering) won’t upload to YouTube for some reason. Probably because I’m trying to upload it via McDonald’s wifi in lovely Hawthorne, California. What a hell-hole.

I have a special provision written into my AT&T iPhone contract that stipulates I will lose my iPhone 3GS no more than than 2.5 times every twelve months. Seriously, I lost the damn thing last night — don’t ask — and spent two hours looking for it. Then I spent three hours this morning and part of the early afternoon trying to buy a new one without being Cossack-raped by AT&T.

They stuck it to me regardless, charging me $451 including tax for a 16 gig replacement phone despite my having paid $200 two and a half weeks ago for the original. Fuckers wanted to charge me $600 but I finagled them down. I nonetheless feel as if I’ve been anally ravaged by an AT&T telephone pole.

I can’t remember if there was an theft/loss insurance clause offered when I bought the original, but if there was I obviously should have taken it. I know I don’t want to hear any polite 28 year-old AT&T rep with a dweeby haircut tell me about contracts. It’s just a lot of AT&T mumbo-jumbo cooked up so they can fuck people out of a greater share of their hard-earned income. Who would be so bloodthirsty and mercenary? Oh, you lost your phone? So sorry, sir. So let’s see, uhhm…that’ll be triple what you paid two and a half weeks ago if you want another one.

I bought MobileMe when I got the original, and if I’d remembered to install the MobileMe software on the phone itself (instead of on the computer and trusting that MobileMe would be transferred during a synch) I could’ve found the lost phone through the search function. I’ve now installed MobileMe on the new one, of course. Life is pain.

Jottings from the recently concluded James Cameron-Peter Jackson discussion are on my Twitter (wellshwood) account, but no column postings for now. I’m at a Focus Features party, for one thing, and on my second brew. “I can let it all go,” as Robert Mitchum once said.

Turn on the laptop inside the Starbucks under the Bayfront Hilton and activate the AT&T Wifi air card connection. Three bars, good air, fine…except when you activate a browser this Hilton Hotel “pay us or you don’t get online” page comes up. So you try and activate your Starbucks/AT&T account (which I pay $20 bucks monthly for) and that won’t kick in either. So you have to shell out $13 and change to the Hilton goombahs or you can’t work.

If you want to get into Hall H and you don’t have a VIP pass, you’ll have to line up under the blazing San Diego sun and just bake. The infamous Comic-Con swelter pit is directly adjacent to the Hall H entrance, or just south of the San Diego Convention Center. Two analogies came to my head: (a) Hebrew slaves waiting for portions of grain and asses milk during a lunch break as they build pharoah’s tomb; and (b) the Chicago stockyards.

“As of today all of the feedback has been so positive that it is hard to trust it,” Judd Apatow has written about responses to Funny People. “I hope people are telling me the truth,” he says, “but don’t feel obligated to go that way. If you like my film tell me in great detail what you liked about it, and if you don’t, please lie and tell me in even more detail what you loved about it so I believe your lie.

“And please don’t ask me what I am up to next. That’s a dead giveaway. I don’t think I could handle it.”

Apatow is presumably talking about junket whores. He should know that these guys never do anything but flatter when they’re in a room with talent. They’re gladhanders. Genuine honesty just isn’t in their DNA. And if it is, they’re certainly not going to let it out. What matters to them is one thing and one thing only, which is keeping their seat on the gravy train.

To hear it from Variety‘s Justin Chang, Nora Ephron‘s Julie & Julia is a “self-satisfied foodie fairy tale” that “feels middling, overstuffed and predigested.” He joins the crowd in noting that Meryl Streep‘s “delightfully daffy turn as Julia Child, the woman who demystified French cuisine for American households, is the freshest ingredient.” And yet the film disappoints, he says, by failing to offer “glorious culinary eye candy on the level of Babette’s Feast or Eat Drink Man Woman. Whatever auds make of Julie & Julia, it’s hard to imagine that Child herself, an unapologetic Francophile with one hell of an appetite, would have been much of a fan.”