Yikes x3

• The live feed from Britney Spears' mic during live performances illustrates not only why she lip-syncs at shows, but also the sheer talent (and computing power) of modern music mixers.





• Another blog featuring embarassing photo trends from decades gone by - now including the '90's! My personal favorite is here, and I had this picture taken of myself.





• Naomi Klein on the Beijing Olympics:

  When Beijing was awarded the games seven years ago, the theory was that international scrutiny would force China's government to grant more rights and freedom to its people. Instead, the Olympics have opened up a backdoor for the regime to massively upgrade its systems of population control and repression. And remember when Western companies used to claim that by doing business in China, they were actually spreading freedom and democracy? We are now seeing the reverse: investment in surveillance and censorship gear is helping Beijing to actively repress a new generation of activists before it has the chance to network into a mass movement.

Yikes.

August 12

Today, I am 27. I'm feeling more than a bit old. I'm at the point where a birthday isn't that big of a deal; and, during the course of the year, I often forget just how old I am. 26, 27, something like that?

Did you know that on the exact day of my birth, IBM released the very first PC? Or that 882 years before that day in 1981, the First Crusade ended? That on August 12, 1883, the last quagga died, that on August 12, 1908 the prototype Model T was built, that on August 12, 1977 the Space Shuttle Enterprise took its first free flight, or that on August 12, 1990, Sue the Tyrannosaurus rex was discovered?

See all that, and even more, here.

It's been a good birthday so far, and even though I'm about to jump on a red eye, it's a red eye to Maine, which makes it all worth it. It's unfortunate that the day before my birthday, our president had to go and be an asshole, again, but them's the breaks. Nobody got me this (at least not yet), but I am consoled to think that nobody has been gifted with that.

Here's a house, Clingstone, that I would love to live in; reminds me of the Barnacle, done with elegance. The New York times wrote about it the other day.

But this, right here, is my real dream home. Tracy probably won't let me make us live in this, but I fully intend on building a hobbit office once we settle down. I don't know how best to do it, my building skills are may not be that great, but it will be mine, oh yes, it will be mine.

Time to go – I have a flight to make. I'll leave you with something that shouldn't, by any means, work at all, but ends up being almost sublime.

Enjoy.

Happy birthday.

"Tell It To Me In Star Wars"

Brilliant explanation of the Uncanny Valley.

Here's Wikipedia with a little more.

Speaking of Law School

This sounds like good advice to me, and passionately given at that – even the policeman agrees, and good-naturedly. Care to weigh in, future lawyers?

As an aside, this guy is the kind of professor a student dreams of – he cares so much he can't even slow down. Love it.

Best Review Quote Ever

Amanda Seyfried's publicist should start ordering t-shirts:

[Seyfried] is shot in such warm close-ups that you almost want to spread her face on your toast.

Ladies and gentlemen, David Poland and his review of Mamma Mia: The Movie.

You Got Windows In My Macintosh!

And people wonder why I hate using Microsoft problems products?

Pierre Igot details what can only be described as his quest to change a single keyboard shortcut in Mac Word 2008.

This kind of garbage is exactly why, for several months now, I've been trying to phase out all MS Office applications from my computer; with the help of TextEdit and the iWork suite, I only deal with Excel sheets (and the occasional Word document) at work. I'm pretty much there. Huzzah.

[c/o Daring Fireball]

Shipwreck Photos

Nice collection of beautiful photographs featuring wrecked ships; reminded me of the D.T. Sheridan, the iron tug that sits to this day on the southern coast of Monhegan Island, Maine. I lived on Monhegan for about five months after graduating from Wesleyan, and visited the wreck several times. I have some Flickr pictures here, for those interested.

Sunday Clip Show: On Shyamalan and Television

A few clips from the past week.

On the film front, a film clip (with introduction!) from M. Night Shyamalan's The Happening has been making the rounds. This features, hands down, some of the worst "sizzle" editing I have ever seen. This is the kind of piece we do at work a lot, hyping the movie using film clips and trailer bits, combined with interviews and behind-the-scenes footage. The studios want these to be slick and cool, like trailers, and editing pieces like that is a lot of fun, and can be good.

But this is plain embarrassing.

Shyamalan is a pretentious hack (at least these days), and laying abrupt cuts to random film clips, flash frames, and repetitive ominous sound effects don't class him up, even as he tries to invoke Friedkin, Coppola, and Hitchcock. Plus, I usually enjoy Mark Wahlberg, but he's trying too hard or getting bad direction, because he is terrible here.

Lame.

Moving on to more interesting things, all of the major networks have released their TV schedules for next season (How I Met Your Mother was renewed, so rejoice, and watch that show). Here're the schedules for Fox, CBS, ABC, and NBC. With these announcements come two previews for new shows, each made by a big name in TV entertainment.

Fringe comes from J.J. Abrams, creator/co-creator of Felicity, Alias, and Lost, as well as director of Mission: Impossible III and next summer's Star Trek reboot. His TV shows (for the most part) have been met with a lot of favor, but MI3 got banged around pretty hard. I for one enjoyed it and felt that, with the exception of the slide down the Shanghai rooftop, it was a well made spy flick. Sure, it was a carbon-copy of the Alias pilot, but that some damn fine storytelling the first time, and transitioned well. And, as you all know, I am looking forward to Star Trek…


Which makes the Fringe trailer all the more depressing. I loved The X-Files and enjoyed a lot of Alias, but this looks derivative and unoriginal. As far as this preview shows, I can see no "hook" or idea that grabs me and sets this apart from the myriad sci-fi shows that have been released in the 15 years since Fox debuted The X-Files. Government conspiracies and hot female FBI agents are old hat, and no, casting Pacey from Dawson's Creek doesn't count as interesting.
This show could still be good and surprise me, but as of now, I'm not holding my breath. Unless John Noble (Denthor from Return of the King) sets his son on fire for real this time…

It's interesting that the spin this show is gong for is that science and technology have advanced to the point where we can't control them; I guess all of the "fringe" events are a result of science, then. The X-Files was a lot more flexible in this regard… for every genetic hybrid, there was a body-skipping spirit, or something that science couldn't begin to explain. That was, essentially, the whole point of Scully – she stood in for scientific understanding, and couldn't comprehend so much of what happened, as Mulder was able to with his more visceral beliefs. Of course, Scully was the religious character, too, so…

There's a lot more to be said about the philosophy and character relationships of The X-Files, and this isn't the time or the place. Maybe later, but for now, I digress.

Next up, fan favorite Joss Whedon has a new show coming out, too, called Dollhouse. Oddly enough, it looks a bit like Alias, yet manages to seem pretty fresh and interesting. I dig the concept, and like that the central premise and conflict are laid out for us; we get good guys and bad guys from the start, most played by known (and charismatic) actors. This and Caprica are probably the two new shows I am most excited about; the fact that Dollhouse is a mid-season replacement debuting in January is a bummer, but c'est la vie.

And, of course, both of these shows are on Fox, so, if they're good, we can look forward to having them cancelled after about 12 episodes (see Firefly, Wonderfalls, Futurama, Arrested Development, Drive, and this page). I try to tell myself that at least Fox airs these shows in the first place, but the sting of Firefly is hard to ignore.

Californian Gay Marriage Ban Overturned

Not always, but sometimes, I am proud to live in California.

As I understand it, this ruling specifically overrules California legislation excluding same-sex couples from eligibility for marriage licenses, claiming marriage and the legal creation of a family is a [California] constitutional right. So, any same-sex couple can be married by the state, while religious groups are free to deny marriage for dogmatic reasons. Kevin and others, feel free to weigh in a correct me if I've got some of this wrong.

It's important to point out that of the seven judges who made this ruling (with a split of 4-3), six were appointed by Republican governors.

Sometimes, a good idea is just a good idea.

While this is a big step, it isn't big enough; not only does this just apply to California, and not the nation, but even statewide there is a disparity between the rights of heterosexual and homosexual couples.

But every step forward is a good thing, and cause to be glad.

Just for fun, some responses:

Governor Schwarzenegger's response:

I respect the Court's decision and as Governor, I will uphold its ruling. Also, as I have said in the past, I will not support an amendment to the constitution that would overturn this state Supreme Court ruling.

President Bush's response (via Press Secretary Dana Perino):

President Bush has always believed marriage is a sacred institution between a man and a woman. Today's decision by the California Supreme Court illustrates that a federal constitutional amendment is the best way for the people to decide what marriage means.

The LA Times has a collection of extracts from numerous figures.

Salon.com takes a look at the judicial press release, plus a release from conservative activist group "Concerned Women for America."

Lastly, the presidential hopefuls for this coming election.

Data Visualization

A quick look at the Safari tabs I leave open for days on end, articles and sites I e-mail and like to post about, and the things I get a lot of pleasure out of reveals a few trends, one of which is my preference for really smart data visualization.

In that spirit, here are a few favorites from the past few weeks.

• Andy Baio takes the data of the Whitburn Project (an effort to "preserve and share high-quality recordings of every popular song since the 1890s") and makes some interesting graphs here.


• Stefanie Posavec breaks down Jack Kerouack's On The Road into its component pieces of language and turns that data into the most amazing analytical maps.


• A photograph is cheating slightly, but when used to analyze the density/brightness of man-made light as seen from space, it qualifies as data representation to me.


• Ben Fry took Census data of all streets in the conterminous United States, and plotted them on empty space, and watched a fascinating map of American development appear. This things is streets only. Incredible. Extra details on how here, and updated info here.

Makes me wonder… for all of those important statistics that we just can't seem to collectively care about, maybe all we need is an innovative way to present the data visually – something to impress us with.

Saturday Laugh

Because everyone else seems to be e-mailing or posting this, I guess it's time to join the fray and throw up a link to Manbabies.com.

Who knew swapping heads between father and son in Photoshop could be so funny?

The Popular page gives an easy way to peruse the crème de la crème, but I've got to give special notice to May 17, which looks like something out of a Terry Gilliam movie.

Dear God No

Someone needs to slap George Lucas and tell him he has bad ideas. Rick McCallum didn't do it, and apparently Steven Spielberg doesn't either. So whatever happens, it's up to us, to us.

Says FOXNews:

Lucas had a lot to say about the new "Indy" and its future… "But I have an idea to make Shia [LeBeouf] the lead character next time and have Harrison [Ford] come back like Sean Connery did in the last movie. I can see it working out."

No George, you see dollar signs. Something "working out" looks, much, much different.



[c/o AICN]

Tonight We Dine In Hell

Courtesy of David H, here's something good for a quick laugh... Andrew Jackson has never been fiercer!

Gore Verbinski Directing "Bioshock" Movie

So says Variety, here and here.

This sounds exactly like a Universal project; Doom, Chronicles of Riddick, Pitch Black, Serenity, even Children of Men and TV's Battlestar Galactica all fit in with this type of science fiction adventure story. That list of titles, however, leaves a dubious taste in one's mouth; I seem to have inadvertently typed it in ascending order of quality, starting at the very bottom of the barrel and going up towards a potential tie at the top. Clearly, this is no sure thing, especially with John "Star Trek: Nemesis" Logan scripting.

Gore¹ has worked exclusively with Dreamworks/Paramount and Disney, at least as a director, and his first picture with Universal could be exciting. I don't have an Xbox 360, so I never played Bioshock myself, but I was able to watch Jamie play a few times, and it looked like a rich and interesting world. One I'd be interested in seeing on screen, done right. If Gore can reign himself in (and have a good, finished script when he goes into production) à la Curse of the Black Pearl, this could be a lot of fun.

There's no release date yet; my money is on Summer 2010. That gives us two years to see if this will turn out to be more Doom (shudder), or more Serenity (yay).

Either way, I guess this means Jerry² (and Disney) will be waiting on Pirates 4…




[1] - That's right, I said Gore. After over three years of working continuously on Pirates of the Caribbean, we've earned the right to call them by their first names. [⇪]
[2] - Jerry Bruckheimer. See above. [⇪]


[c/o CHUD]

Physics Rocks

Take a moment when you have about two free minutes, and watch five metronomes synchronize themselves.

Some observations and questions:

• It's amazing how just a little rocking motion allows the energy to transfer between them, normalizing the motion.


• I wonder if you had several moving metronomes and a single stationary one, would the stationary one ever start moving? Would you need a lot of moving ones, like 20, 30, or 40?


• Although, as you used more, the weight of the board connecting them would start to absorb a lot of that energy...


• Maybe having heavier pendulums would help compensate?

Truly mesmerizing...

Which Sport Are We Playing?

Will's been posting about the Wizards pretty much nonstop over the last week or two, and last night's comments struck home :

But the Wizards won, Caron made a SICK shot and they'll be playing Friday night! Can't wait... (not like I'm actually hoping they win or anything... hope... is the worst thing a Wizards fan can ever have.)

Funny, he sounds exactly like a Red Socks fan...

To The Rescue... Here He Comes...

It is accomplished; I have purchased my tickets to Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crustal Skull. Opening night, at the Hollywood Arclight.

Hell yes.

To date, I have still managed to avoid seeing any video advertisements, though print ones have managed to seep in... not the final one-sheet (which apparently has a lot of mild spoilers), but the myriad billboards (some just showing the teaser poster image, some with just words, and some featuring a few plot-ish points) here in L.A. are hard to miss. Plus, my subway stop looks like this:

I still consider my self amazingly unspoiled, and that's pretty exciting.

To keep the mood, here are the trailers for Raiders, Temple of Doom, and Last Crusade. If you want the newest trailer, I encourage you not to – look at how much the original trailers spoil! – but if you must, you're on your own.

Salvage on the High Seas

I read a couple of amazing stories this past week, but none was so preposterously cinematic as the true story of the team of specialists called in to save a capsized freighter in the north Pacific. High Tech Cowboys of the Deep Seas: The Race to Save the Cougar Ace, a Wired article by Joshua Davis, follows the group from Titan Salvage on their real-life adventure:

Right now, it doesn't really matter how it happened. What matters is that the Cougar Ace has become a multimillion-dollar ghost ship drifting toward the rocky shoals of the Aleutian Islands. What's worse, according to the crew, the ship is taking on water. The Coast Guard alone doesn't have the capability or expertise to handle this kind of emergency, and officials fear that the ship will sink or break up on shore. Either way, the cars would be lost, and the 176,366 gallons of fuel in the ship's tanks would threaten the area's wildlife and fishing grounds. Mazda, Mitsui, and their insurers would take a massive hit.

The article is long, but gripping, and will obviously be made into a movie. It reads like a pitch for a film – not in the cheesy, "wouldn't-this-be-a-cool-movie-Hollywood-wink-wink-nudge-nudge" Tom Clancy way, but in the "this-happens-in-real-life-OMFG" way. Corporations, the environment, and individual lives could all be destroyed if they fail. There's a finite amount of time to accomplish their goals. The conflict and setting are high concept and exciting. And the guys who make up the team are the stuff of Jerry Bruckheimer's wet dreams:

They're a motley mix: American, British, Swedish, Panamanian. Each has a specialty — deep-sea diving, computer modeling, underwater welding, big-engine repair. And then there's Habib, the guy who regularly helicopters onto the deck of a sinking ship, greets whatever crew is left, and takes command of the stricken vessel.

And did I mention that the team leader, Senior Salvage Master Rich Habib, not only has an unlimited master's license, but he looks like an adventure hero, an "Indiana Jones" of the water. He reminds me of Jammer from The Abyss.

All of my talk regarding this story-as-film is to show what an incredible read it is. We forget, sometimes, just how extreme real-life adventures can be. The stakes are high, lives are lost, technology can be mixed with elbow grease and physical feats of wonder. And occasionally, reality has down-beat and mildly ironic triumphs.

Check it out.

[c/o kottke]

That's The Head Of My Department

Jeanine Basinger, the head of the Wesleyan University film program, just got profiled in Variety (again):

According to filmmaker-thesp Domenica Cameron-Scorsese, "Jeanine teaches with positive reinforcement while putting the fear of God into you." Her policies are legendary, draconian -- and inarguably effective: No missed classes. No extensions. No exceptions. (She even holds her senior seminar on Sunday!) "Jeanine would say your only excuse for tardiness was death," remembers "Cold Case" producer Liz Garcia.

But once students get past those warnings, their reward is a class more fulfilling, engaging and stimulating than any they're likely to encounter in any discipline. Basinger's quick wit and deadpan sense of humor are as legendary as her intellect. On the recent crop of magic-themed films, ("The Prestige," "The Illusionist"), Basinger quipped to former student Marc Longenecker, "Magic in cinema is a bit like ventriloquism on the radio."

That humor is an integral part of Basinger's teaching style, which is peppered with personal anecdotes and highly original notions. Her three rules for mastering film: Watch two movies every day (to absorb history), take drum lessons (to learn rhythm) and study physics (to understand space and time).

While I never took drum lessons, I bag my hands around constantly, and like to think I've got a well developed sense of rhythm. The other two I do pretty well on, so much as working life allows.

I could pull quotes from just about every part of this article, as it all resonates – which should be no surprise, since this is the exact program I went through. I will call attention to one last bit, though:

...Basinger's teaching is founded on the premise that film's form and content are inextricable. Unlike most other film schools, where production and critical studies are separate, Wesleyan's undergraduate program, "was conceived as a wedding between history, theory and production," Basinger explains. She is intimately involved, as are all the faculty, in the editing and writing process of students' senior film projects. "Jeanine's classes bridge the gap between film appreciation, film criticism and filmmaking," concurs [Paul] Weitz ("About a Boy")... She assigns no books – though she's written 10 herself – because she insists that students study films by watching them. Writer Jeremy Arnold recalls the moment when a Basinger neophyte asked what he should focus on while viewing that day's movie: "Everything," she replied.

Amen.

Great piece, and worth a read. Especially if you want a glimpse on how I think about movies, as her department was truly formative in that regard.

[c/o Leanne]

More on "The Ruins"

A while back I posted about Bowdoinham-boy Carter Smith and his new film The Ruins; the movie opens today and is getting solid reviews.

Massawyrm from Ain't It Cool News says:

Newcomer director Carter Smith really does his job here. He manages to choose all the right angles to keep the same characters in the confines of the same 30 or so feet interesting at all times. He tempers just the right amount of blood and sound work with off screen injuries and death to keep it both brutal but never over the top. And he never gets gratuitous with anything. Everything is in just the right amount to feel natural.

Capone, from the same website, has this to say:

First-time feature director Carter Smith does not spare us the blood and guts, but he doesn't go overboard with it either, especially when the young med student is forced to perform emergency surgery a couple of times in the group's time atop the temple... The Ruins is great, freak-out-worthy material that will have you questioning every little bump under your skin and itch you can't quite reach. Oh, I need to see this again very soon.

Even Ain't It Cool News' founder, Harry Knowles, seems to love it, in his rambling, horribly-written way.

In addition to the billboards I see everywhere, I checked my e-mail to find the marketing for this film is going full force: Amazon.com had sent me the following notice:

I can't say this is my kind of movie – intense gore-fest horror films aren't at the top of my list. But I'll be out there showing my support, and if any of you want to join me, let me know.

Dreamworks is going full-steam on this one; if the reviews were bad, I'd say they were trying to bum-rush the opening weekend, but with the solid reviews everyone seems to be giving, it looks to me like the studio believes in this one.

Not bad for a kid from Bowdoinham!