About four hours ago, a man walked into Trolley Square, a quaint, relatively tiny Salt Lake City mall, and opened fire with a shotgun. The details are still sketchy, but, as of this writing, six people are confirmed dead, including the gunman, and an unknown number of injured people are in nearby hospitals. The victims have not yet been identified, and authorities have not even specified their genders or ages.
So, Anna Nicole.
I must confess, I wasn’t a fan. I thought she was a bimbo, actually, a grotesque and idiotic caricature of feminity, and an example of everything that’s wrong with the American worship of fame for fame’s sake.
Nevertheless, I find that I actually feel bad about her sudden death. She always seemed like such a helpless creature, and she has had a heavy ration of crap handed to her recently: the death of her 20-year-old son, the paternity battle over her infant son daughter, the on-going inheritance battle, and a newly minted class-action suit that named her, specifically, as a co-defendant. I have a hunch we’re going to find out she died of an overdose, either accidental or deliberate. I find it very easy to imagine her washing down pills with a glass of vodka while blubbering that we wouldn’t have Anna Nicole to kick around anymore. That’s a terribly sad ending for any human being, even one whose only apparent goal in life was to “be famous.”
I guess she managed that, though, didn’t she? She’ll now be enshrined alongside all those other starlets who met untimely and pathetic ends. Maybe that’s what she’s really wanted all the way along…
Via SF Signal, a link to Dwight Silverman’s 15 Geek Movies to See Before You Die. Silverman is the Tech Blogger for the Houston Chronicle; see his original entry for explanations on why these particular films made the list. As usual, my own comments follow:
First thought: my geek cred is in pretty good shape, according to these criteria. I’ve seen all but two of these films (Repo Man and Dark City, although it’s been so long since I’ve seen Brazil that it probably qualifies as “never seen” as well) and I own quite a few of them on either VHS or DVD. That said, I have to say that I personally find The Matrix and 12 Monkeys both overrated and depressing as hell to watch. In the case of The Matrix, it’s that grungy, clammy look of the film that gets to me — I’ve mentioned before that I hate the look of a lot of movies that came out of the latter half of the ’90s — while 12 Monkeys depresses me because, well, it’s just a downer of a movie. I’m not a big fan of any of Terry Gilliam’s movies, to be honest. He’s a fine filmmaker, but the stories he’s drawn to rarely engage me very much, certainly not enough to warrant a second viewing. But that’s just me.
Just as interesting as what’s on this list is what’s not on the list. Any true geek is, of course, going to have Star Wars on their “must-see” list, but what about Tron? Blade Runner? Alien? 2001? THX 1138, surely the geekiest titled film of all time? Colossus: The Forbin Project, which anticipated something very like the Internet? How about The Terminator, who was controlled by an evil variant of the Internet? Or John Carpenter’s Dark Star, the climax of which is a philosophical conversation between a frazzled astronaut and an artificially intelligent nuclear bomb? The list could go on and on… and I’m just thinking of the movies of the ’70s and ’80s, when “geek culture” as we now understand it was forming. What about movies from before that halcyon period? Do any of them count? I’m just asking, here…
A friend of mine just sent me a link to an eBay auction that ought to have plenty of crossover appeal for both the geek and motorhead demographics: somebody is selling was selling one of the three Lexus concept cars built for the movie Minority Report.
[Update: The eBay listing has been removed since this morning. Interesting. Oh, well, the rest of the entry still stands. I’ve added a link below so you can see what the Lexus looks like.]
As much as I love science fiction flicks, I’ve got to be honest: most futuristic movie cars leave me cold. They’re inevitably just bubbles or boxes on wheels, without any attempt to make them look “real-world.” This Lexus, though, impressed me in the movie as something that (a) might actually evolve from current automotive design, and (b) would be a design that people might actually want to own. I know I would. The opening bid on this one is a perfectly reasonable $88,000. Mere pocket change. I ought to have enough left over to pick up a Blade Runner spinner, too.
Oh, and speaking of flying cars (which the spinner is, if you don’t know), it seems they might not be so far off after all: according to this article, an Israeli engineer is working on a flying utility vehicle that he hopes to have on the market by 2010. Rafi Yoeli’s X-Hawk is designed to perform like a helicopter but without a chopper’s big exposed rotor blades that get in the way of snuggling up alongside a cliff or a building. The X-Hawk would instead have two enclosed fans at the front and rear with a cockpit and modular cabin that could be swapped out for different missions. It’ll supposedly be quieter than a chopper, too, which has obvious advantages for the military and, I suppose, for anyone bothered by that “whop-whop” sound. (Personally, I’ve always rather liked the sound of choppers; I was bummed when the Army stopped using Hueys, because I grew up hearing them off in the distance every day in the summertime.)
Yoeli has gotten a prototype to lift off (a mere three feet, but still, it did take off), and it looks much more practical to my admittedly ignorant eyes than a lot of the flying car designs I’ve seen. I’ll be watching further developments on this project closely.
If you’re interested, too, here’s Yoeli’s company web site, which includes conceptual information and a decent technical overview.
I haven’t mentioned it for a while, but I’ve been continuing to add to my LibraryThing catalog over the past several months. In case you’re curious, I’m now up to 1,245 (holy crap!) books entered, which comprises the bulk of my personal library. All I have left to do is a couple boxes of collectible books (the ones which live inside archival plastic sleeves and Aren’t For Reading) and a stack of children’s and young-adult books I found inside my old toy box. Obviously, this little data entry project has been a god-awful amount of work, but I don’t regret it one bit. For one thing, it’s been gratifying to get a handle on what exactly I own (when you have over 1,000 books, it’s easy to forget that you’ve got any one particular title) and fun to share that information with my Three Loyal Readers (there goes my exhibitionistic streak again!). But it’s also useful, I’ve decided, to have an inventory list stored somewhere other than in the same place where I actually keep my stuff. What good does a local inventory stored on my home PC accomplish if the house burns down and I lose everything? With LibraryThing, I have a list that I can access from anywhere and show to my insurance company in the event of a disaster.
That logic started me thinking that I really ought to set up something similar for my other valuable collections, especially my movies. A lot of googling led me DVDSpot.com, which is essentially the same thing as LibraryThing only specialized for those shiny silver discs we all love so much. I don’t like its interface quite as well as LibraryThing’s, and some of the community features that I enjoy on LT are lacking. Also, I would’ve liked to have some capability for cataloging VHS movies as well, since I still have a lot of those. But it does the DVD job well enough, and I didn’t find any online service that considered VHS. I guess a media format is well and truly dead when you can’t even find a way to inventory your legacy titles.
Anyway, cataloging my DVDs didn’t take nearly as long as my books, so without further fanfare, I now present to you Bennion’s DVDSpot catalog. I’ll put a link in the sidebar as well. Happy browsing!
Further evidence that we’re now living in the future: a Canadian company called XYZ RGB (even the company’s name is futuristic!) has created what it calls the “next-generation movie poster”:
Using cutting-edge technologies, XYZ RGB can turn an eight-second video into a full-colour hologram and place it in a plastic film that can be posted in malls, pasted to billboards or even wrapped around a can of soup.
The energy needed to make it work? Only a source of light.
The effect is described as similar to those newspapers in the Harry Potter movies that show a looped film clip over and over.
To be honest, I find that I’m rather ambivalent about this development. I’m totally wowed by the concept and the technology, and given that I used to collect movie posters, I think this may be a great way to revive what has deteriorated into a sadly unimaginative art form. However, if this technology becomes commonplace and ends up on everything from giant billboards to soup cans, I fear that the novelty will fade very quickly and we’ll be left with just so much additional noise in an already-deafening environment. I’ve become very conscious in recent years of how many commercial messages we receive during the day and frankly I resent them. It would be nice to find a way to turn down the volume, and I’m not sure this is it. I imagine that “video posters” will be pretty damn distracting once we start seeing them out in the wild; I can’t wait for the first 30-car pile-up because someone was checking out that amazing new sign looming over the freeway.
Of course, these posters may never rise beyond the level of novelty. The production process currently takes too long for any kind of large-scale implementation — a couple of hours are required to produce a single poster — and the company may never manage to improve on that. But I suspect they will. And the year 2015 may look a lot more like Back to the Future II than we ever expected…
You can see a video of the Terminator 2 demo poster here (the 3-D effect is great, but the video doesn’t demonstrate the embedded film clip very well); I originally found this story here.
As long as we’re thinking about astronauts today, Wired.com reminds us that the first extra-terrestrial round of golf was played on this date back in 1971 by Alan Shepard of Apollo 14. So-so quality YouTube video of the event below the fold:
When you live in Utah, you get used to hearing weird news stories that have some kind of local connection. From Howard Hughes’ “Mormon Mafia” and the tale of Melvin Dummar in the ’70s to the White Salamander bombings and cold fusion kerfuffle in the ’80s to anything related to the polygamist colonies of the Four Corners area in the last ten years, the more bizarre the story, the more likely it either happened here or has some kind of link to my home state.
Today’s weirdest news story is no exception to the rule, but it is really a wild tale: astronaut Lisa Marie Nowak is being charged with attempted murder after she drove 900 miles from Houston to Orlando while wearing a diaper (so she wouldn’t have to stop for potty breaks), intending to kidnap or otherwise harm a rival for a fellow astronaut’s affections. Nowak, who is a married mother of three and who flew on shuttle Discovery last summer, accosted Colleen Shipman in an airport parking lot while disguised in a wig and trench coat and carrying pepper spray, a mallet, a BB gun, gloves, a folding knife, rubber tubing, and trash bags. She later told police she only wanted to “scare Ms. Shipman into talking with her.” Um, yeah… you always go loaded for bear when you just want to talk.
According to the Orlando Sentinal, these are likely “the first-ever felony charges filed on an active-duty astronaut.”
Weird indeed. But what’s the Utah connection, you’re wondering? Well, as it happens, Nowak is a cousin of Tony Caputo, the owner of one of Salt Lake’s most popular eateries and a bit of a local celebrity in his own right. I imagine he’s screening his phone calls today…
You know, this whole blogging thing really amazes me sometimes. I’ve got no illusions about the size of my audience here; I’m an absolute small-timer writing only for friends and family, and I’m not entirely kidding when I talk about having only three Loyal Readers. Still, I’ve got a presence out there in the world because of this silly blog, and connections are being made because of it, tiny audience or no.
For example, a few weeks ago I was contacted by a total stranger named Anna Biller . She’s an LA filmmaker who had a movie that was going to be running here in The SLC as part of TromaDance, one of several renegade film festivals that run concurrently with Robert Redford’s big Sundance event. Anna was looking for information about Brewvies, the venue where her film would be playing, and Simple Tricks popped up in her googling because I’ve mentioned the place in a couple of entries. We ended up having quite a nice conversation via e-mail; regretfully, I wasn’t able to take her up on her invitation to meet her in person. But still, a connection was made that never would’ve happened only a few years ago, before this technology and this blogging phenemenon came along.
And then there’s the strange story of Chenopup and Brian Greenberg. You may recall that these two guys, regular commenters here on Simple Tricks, got into a debate over whether a local Salt Lake pizzeria could produce a pie that would be equal to what you find in New York. The Great Simple Tricks Pizza Challenge never did materialize, but Cheno was in New York on business recently, and, well… I’ll let Brian tell tell the rest.
Simple Tricks and Nonsense… it’s both a blog, and a social networking tool! Next up, I’ll be introducing floor-wax functionality, too…
