March 2011 Archives

A Brief History of Title Design from Ian Albinson on Vimeo.

Although we make much of our tradition of freedom in this country, we are not so clever at understanding what freedom really means. Even our president, for example, cannot understand that among the rights symbolized by the American flag is the right to burn it - or honor it, if that is our choice. I have always wondered why the people who call themselves "American" most loudly are often the ones with the least understanding of the freedoms that word should represent.

When the country is threatened, our civil liberties are among the first casualties - as if we can fight the enemy by taking away our own freedoms before the enemy has a chance to. That is what happened in the early days of World War II, when a wave of racism swept the Japanese-Americans out of their homes and businesses, confiscated their savings and investments, and shipped them away in prison trains to concentration camps that were sometimes no more than barns and stables. Later on some of these same Japanese-Americans fought with valor in the same war, perhaps because they understood better than their captors what they were fighting for.

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Well, that was a fast mission... STS-133 is already winding down, just as I was getting used to the idea. Discovery undocked from the International Space Station early this morning and is now pulling away a little more with each orbit, heading for a planned Wednesday landing at Kennedy Space Center in Florida. It leaves behind a completed ISS, the largest object mankind has ever put up there in the black. It's not exactly the elegant wheel-shaped space station of Stanley Kubrick's 2001, but it is nonetheless an incredible achievement. I suspect -- I hope -- that 75 years from now, the building of orbiting structures will have advanced enough and become common enough that people will marvel at the story of the ISS, amazed that we could have accomplished something so monumental using such primitive technology, just as we now look back and admire the men of the 1930s who constructed Hoover Dam and the Golden Gate Bridge with little more than sweat and sheer determination. Of course, that's assuming that the ISS isn't the last big thing we do up there before we run out of everything and descend into a new feudalism. But I'm trying to be positive.

Getting back to Discovery, I don't know if it's because this is her final mission, or if I'm just paying more attention because it's her final mission, but there is really an amazing plethora of videos -- or should that be a plethora of amazing videos? -- from STS-133 floating around the InterWebs. I think I mentioned the other day how really, shockingly different it is today than it was even just a few years ago, when amateur movie-makers had no efficient way to share their work and NASA only released a few minutes of their footage, which the news media promptly cut down to about 15 seconds because we had to get back to the day's sports scores or some damn thing. As much as I gripe about the 21st century, I have to admit that YouTube is a boon for geeks like me. And tonight I'm taking advantage of that boon to gather here on Simple Tricks a few of my favorite video clips from the past two weeks... enjoy!

Here's another entry that probably won't be of much interest to anyone except me and possibly those readers who grew up in Utah or are otherwise familiar with the place, but I've been utterly enchanted by this find and want to share it with somebody. It's a 30-minute film called Desert Empire, which I stumbled across over on the Internet Archive -- a fascinating repository of all kinds of material that doesn't quite fit the YouTube paradigm, and isn't ever going to see a DVD release, but is still worth preserving in some fashion. The film is a 1948 travelogue in which two lovely ladies journey by train through my very own home state of Utah, stopping in such places as Arches National Park (then known as Arches National Monument), Provo City, Bingham Canyon, the original Saltair pavilion at the Great Salt Lake, and of course, Temple Square in Salt Lake City. The voiceover narration is pretty outrageous even by the charmingly effusive standards of the 1940s, but the visuals are incredible. It's fascinating to see very familiar places as they used to be, back when this state's entire population was probably less than the modern-day citizenry of metro Salt Lake, and it's even more fascinating to see how little some of these places have changed in 60 years.

Anyhow, if your curiosity is even remotely piqued, the film appears in three parts below the fold. I'll be providing a few little observations on the things that struck me about each segment...

Yeah, I know, I'm a little late with this one. Usher, would you please show that heckler to the door? Thanks. I'll wait until he's... oh, okay, good now we can talk.

Last night, I was trying to look something up when I realized that I never got around to doing my customary overview of the books, movies, and home video I enjoyed in 2009. I've managed to hit every other year since 2005, but somehow '09 got away from me. Well, anyone who knows me knows I can't tolerate that sort of inconsistency! Luckily, I was able to find my handwritten notes for that year -- yes, I keep notes about these things -- so I've now been able to put together the official Simple Tricks and Nonsense 2009 Media Wrap-Up.

(I realize, of course, that this information is likely of very little interest to anyone but myself. I'm only going to the trouble of making a blog entry at this late date for my own records, and to satisfy my OCD. Thanks for your understanding. If you're vacillating about whether to read on, it might help you to know that I'm not going to bother with any commentary on this one, it'll just be lists of titles.)

During my glorious teenage years back in the Awesome '80s, the annual AutoRama car show was a must-attend event for every red-blooded young male in the valley. No, not because of the cars, although they were neat enough -- seeing ZZ Top's Eliminator hot rod in the flesh, er, steel was a real treat, for example -- but because the show afforded the opportunity to bask in the presence of honest-to-glory Playboy Playmates. Yes, for only the price of admission plus a small additional autograph fee, any pimple-faced, scrubby-mustached, mullet-wearing doofus could have the honor of standing in a line that sometimes stretched back for a couple of hours, all to experience less than 30 seconds of facetime with a paragon of feminine pulchritude you couldn't actually go out with in a million years. Oh, and you got a signed picture, too. And occasionally a Playmate who would pose for a photo with you, although the shot never seemed to turn out because your friend with the camera had shaky hands. But hey, you could at least point at the blurry, vaguely humanoid shape and tell people who it was, and remember the prickle of flopsweat blossoming under your arms as she slipped her arm across the top of your shoulders.

Yes, those were the days.

I haven't been to an AutoRama in decades, but there's one coming up this weekend, and just for kicks I thought I'd have a look at the schedule to see if anything -- or anyone -- interesting is going to be there. The results were... disappointing. No Playmates. Instead, we've got Jeanette McCurdy, a teenaged actress from a cable-TV kid's show called iCarly, and a fisherman from that reality series The Deadliest Catch.

Sigh. Is there any doubt America is a society in decline?

I struggled all last week to compose one of my occasional political cris de couer, this one motivated by the nonsense currently going on in Wisconsin. If you've been in a cave for the last month -- and I know at least one of my Loyal Readers whose circumstances could be described as such -- Wisconsin's Republican governor is using a budgetary crisis, which he seems to have engineered himself, as a pretense to try and force his state's public-sector labor unions into giving up their collective bargaining rights. In shorter words, he's union-busting. But he's not busting all the public-sector unions. No, he's only after the ones whose members tend to vote Democratic. The Republican-leaning police and firefighter unions are safe. Which means this whole exercise is transparently partisan and blatantly ideological. I'm not interested in debating the pros and cons of unions -- Kevin Drum pretty much sums up my opinion here, and says it better than I could anyhow -- but the more unsavory political truth of the Wisconsin deal makes me mad. It is only the most obvious example of how Republicans nationwide are trying to take advantage of a shaky economy to ram through a radical right-wing social agenda that they haven't managed to accomplish in decades of trying. In other words, they're trying to kill things Republicans hate on principle anyway, while saying they have to do it to get the economy going.

Bullshit.

Here's the thing: if you really care about cutting the deficit, then you've got to be willing to at least consider letting the Bush tax cuts expire. The tax rates during the Clinton years were hardly onerous -- they were lower than the taxes in the prosperous 1950s -- and they'd go a long ways toward balancing the books. And you also ought to be trying to find a way to convince the wealthy -- who seem to think they're above paying taxes -- that they are still part of this country, even if they live behind locked gates, and it's immoral of them not to contribute to the common good. Oh, and you'd get serious about making corporations pay their fair share too. And while I'm pipe-dreaming anyhow, how about re-regulating the financial industry that caused this mess anyhow? And sending a few CEOs to jail? Or at least taking their solid-gold parachutes away from them and giving the money to the employees who got laid off to bolster the stockholders' dividends last quarter... but noooo, that's class warfare and we can't have that. Not unless it's being waged on the middle-class people who actually do the work in this country and are fast on their way to becoming vassals of a new feudalism. The sad thing is, a lot of them seem to actually want that...

Yeah, anyhow that's the gist of what I've been trying to write, but the damn thing just hasn't wanted to come together in a satisfying way, so tonight I decided "Screw it, let's do a nice harmless meme." And as fate would have it, SamuraiFrog recently provided one...