A friend sent me a demo site URL for the Phillips 21 x 9 Ambilight. A little over $5 thousand bucks so you can watch a 56-inch wide Lawrence of Arabia without black bars on the top and bottom. 21 x 9 = a 2.3 to 1 aspect ratio, which means you’d still have black bars on the tops and bottoms when you watch Ben-Hur or the 1962 Mutiny on the Bounty, which have been mastered at the old Ultra Panavision 2.76 to 1 aspect ratio.

The Philips Cinema 21:9 is a full HDTV system with 2560 x 1080p screen, offering 8.3 million pixels. You can watch regular 4 x 3 TV, of course, but with heavy black bars on the side. Content on recent Blu-ray discs will support the 21:9 aspect ratio.

A statement from Des Power, Philips consumer lifestyle senior VP: “With our unique Cinema 21:9 we have developed a television which takes you as close to the experience that you enjoy at the cinema as you can get without buying a ticket. We believe that to really become absorbed in watching a film at home consumers are looking for a real cinematic viewing experience, so we have launched the world’s first cinema-proportioned TV screen perfectly complemented by our immersive Ambilight technology.”

My $60-something-per-month AT&T air card service is golden. It can be twitchy now and then but 97% of the time it hooks me up almost anywhere I happen to be, and usually with four or five bars when I’m in Manhattan. But you can’t use it in Europe unless money is no object.

AT&T is offering international air-card service but — get this — only if you sign up for a year’s contract at $260-something dollars a month. So starting Tuesday morning it’ll be the same old routine in Cannes. Excellent free wifi in the bunker and in the American Pavillion tent, that is, and free wifi in some of the hotels. But no just sitting down anywhere and filing.

And no iPhone service. Last year I bought a meager 100 megs of pre-paid data charges — next to nothing in the grand scheme but AT&T wouldn’t sell any more than that. I didn’t know about resetting the data usage tracker and turning off data roaming and e-mail auto-check. I just figured, “Well, I’ll be careful about going online with the phone and it won’t be too bad.” When I got home I was told I owed AT&T over $2400 in data charges plus regular phone-call charges. This year I’m turning everything off and using the iPhone only as an iTouch, going online with it only in wifi-access areas.

I may buy a European SIM card for a Motorola I have, but mostly I intend to use Gizmo 5 for phone calls. Plus I’ve bought a call-in number. If you miss a call you get an email with an mp3 attached with their voice message. Love it.

I’m in the pad until around 1 pm tomorrow. My flight leaves JFK at 5:30 pm. I’m in Zurich the next morning at 7:25 am and in Nice by 10:10 am.

“In the Star Trek prequel, Spock’s father tells him, ‘You will always be a child of two worlds,’ urging him not to keep such a tight vise on his emotions. Mr. Obama is also a control freak who learned to temper, if not purge, all emotion. But as a young man of mixed blood, he was more adept than Young Spock at learning to adjust his two sides to charm both worlds, and to balance his cerebral air with his talent for evoking intense emotion.

“Just as President Spock pledged to make hope and government cool again, JJ Abrams said he wanted his movie to make optimism cool again. Commanding his own unwieldy starship of blended species, with Cheney, Limbaugh and other pitiless Borg aliens firing phasers from all sides, Mr. Obama has certainly invoked Mr. Spock’s Vulcan philosophy of ‘Infinite diversity in infinite combinations.'” — from Maureen Dowd‘s 5.10 Sunday column, titled “Put Aside Logic.”

“Currently, more than 60 percent of U.S. Twitter users fail to return the following month,” wrote David Martin, vp primary research for Nielsen Online, on 4.28. “In other words, Twitter’s audience retention rate, or the percentage of a given month’s users who come back the following month, is currently about 40 percent. For most of the past 12 months, Twitter has languished below 30 percent retention.”

In short, a majority of users are finding that the lustre of Twitter fades after a period. That it’s a bit of an OCD pain in the ass. That it’s one more digital-electronic circle-jerk distraction that gets in the way and in a longterm way blocks out the sunlight.

“A high retention rate doesn’t guarantee a massive audience, but it is a prerequisite,” Marting goes on. “There simply aren’t enough new users to make up for defecting ones after a certain point. [The above chart] indicates that a retention rate of 40 percent will limit a site’s growth to about a 10 percent reach figure.

“When Facebook and MySpace were emerging networks like Twitter is now, their retention rates were twice as high. When they went through their explosive growth phases, that retention only went up, and both sit at nearly 70 percent today.

“Twitter has enjoyed a nice ride over the last few months, but it will not be able to sustain its meteoric rise without establishing a higher level of user loyalty.”

“A government without newspapers is not an option for America, ” President Obama said last night at the White House Correspondents’ dinner. “We count on you to help us make sense of a complex world [and] we look to you for truth, even if it’s always an approximation. This is the season of renewal and reinvention, which is what journalism is in the process of doing. It’s not short on talent or creativity or passion or creativity or commitment…qualities that certainly prove that journalism’s problems are worth solving.”

“The real question,” N.Y. Times columnist Frank Rich wrote this morning, “is for the public, not journalists: Does it want to pony up for news, whatever the media that prevail?

“It’s all a matter of priorities. Not long ago, we laughed at the idea of pay TV. Free television was considered an inalienable American right (as long as it was paid for by advertisers). Then cable and satellite became the national standard.

“By all means let’s mock the old mainstream media as they preen and party on in a Washington ballroom. Let’s deplore the tabloid journalism that, like the cockroach, will always be with us. But if a comprehensive array of real news is to be part of the picture as well, the time will soon arrive for us to put up or shut up.

“Whatever shape journalism ultimately takes in America, make no mistake that in the end we will get what we pay for.”

The Three Days of the Condor Bluray arrives Monday morning, two or three hours before I leave for Kennedy airport. Just barely time to pop it in and watch most of it. It’s probably not going to be visually stunning, but it’ll certainly look “better” than anything that’s come before. I love David Rayfiel‘s dialogue, and I’m telling myself, however illogically, that the sharper visuals will somehow make it sound a tad better. The speakers are Robert Redford, Faye Dunaway, Max Von Sydow, Cliff Robertson and John Houseman.

Kathy: You…you have a lot of very fine qualities.

Joe Turner: What fine qualities?

Kathy: You have good eyes. Not kind, but they don’t lie, and they don’t look away much, and they don’t miss anything. I could use eyes like that.

Joe Turner: But you’re overdue in Vermont. Is he a tough guy?

Kathy: He’s pretty tough.

Joe Turner: What will he do?

Kathy: Understand, probably.

Joe Turner: Boy. That is tough.

And….

Higgins: Do you miss that kind of action, sir? [referring to joining and working for the CIA during World War II]

Mr. Wabash: No, I miss that kind of clarity.

“Kehr, Dave. Third- or possibly even fourth-string New York Times movie critic. Though often relegated to reviewing DVD releases, he is preferred by Snobs over A. O. Scott, Manohla Dargis and Stephen Holden.” — 2005 passage from The Film Snob’s Dictionary. Does Kehr still enjoy said status?

I’ve assembled my four favorite passages from Anthony Lane‘s 5.18 New Yorker review. He follows Variety‘s Todd McCarthy and myself by taking note of James Tiberius Kirk’s mood hair (i.e., veering from dirty blond to blondish red). It’s not a pan, and I wouldn’t agree if it were. But it’s great succulent stuff — the best Lane reviews always are.

Excerpt #1: “This new Star Trek is nonsense, no question (‘Prepare the red matter!’), but at least it’s not boggy nonsense, the way most of the other movies were, and it powers along, unheeding of its own absurdity, with a drive and a confidence that the producers of the original TV series might have smiled upon.”

Excerpt #2: Kirk “is played here by Chris Pine, who struggles with a screenplay, written by Roberto Orci and Alex Kurtzman, that could have been downloaded from a software program entitled ‘Make Your Own Annoying Rebel.’ I thoroughly approved of his bedding an extraterrestrial female with green skin, eco-sex being all the rage two centuries from now, but that is the only downtime afforded by the recklessly rolling plot, although Jim still manages to defy the continuity team and switch hair color from dirty blond to redhead and back again. Don’t worry, he’s still a natural dickhead underneath.”

Excerpt #3: JJ Abrams’s “fondness for the retro is crucial to his non-stop knowingness, with its hints of both hipster and nerd. He gorges on cinema as if it were one of those all-you-can-eat buffets, piling his plate with succulent effects, whether they go together or not. Hence the red ravening beast that pops up on a random planet, clearly left over from the props cupboard of Cloverfield; the man-to-Romulan fistfight borrowed from M:i:3; and, I regret to say, a dose of parallel universe.”

Excerpt #4: “This theme of alternative reality is clumsily worked, and not a patch on its tighter, more alluring, and thus much scarier treatment in Coraline. Its effect here is to saddle us with two Mr. Spocks, one from the vulnerable present and one from the comforting future, and its main purpose, I suspect, is to drag in Leonard Nimoy, who these days makes Bela Lugosi look like Zac Efron, and thus insure that all the Star Trek scholars in the audience will have to hurry home and change their underwear.”

I’m presuming, naturally, that several HE regulars were among last night’s Star Trek viewers, and that given the 96% positive Rotten Tomatoes rating some are focusing on aspects of the film they weren’t entirely satisfied with. Because it’s more fun to be contrarian. Not to dump on the film (which I liked), but that’s where the percolation is right now.

You might want to read Anthony Lane‘s New Yorker review as a starting-off thing. Ignore it, debate it or join the praisers but please add something specific. Comments that just say “I liked it” or “it sucked” will be immediately deleted.

It took in $26 million yesterday for a cume of $33 million if you count Thursday night, which of course you must. Steve Mason says it could hit $75 to $77 million by Sunday night and bank over $200 million by the end of the run.