Johnny Chung Lee is a student at Carnegie Mellon, and he’s gone bonkers with brilliant new applications for the Nintendo Wii using the Wii and easily obtainable objects. For example, he’s written some software to do real-time head tracking (changing the scene on the screen based on the position of your head — e.g., the effect of walking toward or away from a window). Using a pair of safety glasses with LED headlamps (fitted with infrared bulbs), the software he wrote, and what comes with a basic Wii, he’s built a fascinating virtual room.

His website has other Wii-related projects; other non-Wii projects; a link to his blog, called Procrastineering (giving in to productive distractions); as well as links to his very good photography.

This guy is a perfect example of why the Wii is so exciting — not only does it inspire this kind of thing, but Nintendo has been fairly open about how it works so people like Johnny Chung Lee can do neat new things with it. It’s cool enough that you can bowl in your living room — imagine how it’s going to be when people start writing new software like this for public use.

My parents recently got a film through Netflix called God Grew Tired of Us. They dropped it off here and told me to watch it, and tonight I did.

It’s about the Lost Boys of Sudan, several of whom have been relocated to our neighborhood here. The movie is definitely a sales piece for the validity of the relocation program, but it’s incredible. Truly incredible. It follows three guys from a refugee camp in Kenya to Pittsburgh and Syracuse, and tracks them for about three years while they adjust to life here, try to find their families, and watch other Lost Boys adjust as well.

Honestly, there’s no downside to it. Typically these documentaries movies have some heart-wrenching, crossroads Setback Moment at about 2/3 of the way through, but it kind of never came with this one. They’re tired and overworked and lonely and scared, but the contrast between what a typical American sees as hard and what they see as hard is sobering and inspiring. It’s in English but largely subtitled (because of their accents which, honestly, aren’t that hard to understand), but if it wasn’t I’d go ahead and show it to Nora (she’s a good reader, but not quite to that point yet).

I used to idly admire the Lost Boys around here over at Dominicks in Rogers Park — I’d see them shopping for groceries and then waiting outside for a car in the bitter cold (and there’s really no one on earth who looks colder than a 6′7″ Sudanese man in a Big & Tall puffy parka in Chicago in February), and I knew the basics of what they’d been through to get to Howard and Clark with a bag full of pizza rolls and yogurt. But this is a nuts and bolts (if a little thin due to time) view of three years of adjustment here while they search for their families through the Red Cross back in Sudan, Kenya, Uganda, and other places where refugee camps sprung up during the war.

I’m sure not every story among the Lost Boys has as happy an ending as those of these three. But really, even if they’re the ONLY guys who landed on their feet here (and they’re not), they’re still worth learning from. Rent it or buy it — it’s going to be something you’ll want to watch a few times.

I’ve been bored with my last few blog themes, but haven’t really found a great one. This one is a little hard to read, but let me know how you like it. I can start diddling around with the styles if this one appeals to you all (and by you all, I mean the three of you who occasionally come by and read this blog). I like the clean, simple nature of it, but it seems a little hard to track what’s what.

CNN is running a story about how to take a self-led Christmas tour based on The Catcher in the Rye. Sounds like fun to me, but then I’ve always liked Holden’s griping about the crumby phonies.