Monthly Archives: April 2008

Apr162008

Announcing the Launch of Reel Classroom

My good friend and occasional writing partner Mike Chenoweth (more familiarly known in these parts as “Chenopup”) has just launched a nifty entrepreneurial venture, a company called Reel Classroom, which will produce and sell educational DVDs targeted at those who want to become film and video professionals, as well as those who are already in the business and want to deepen their skill sets. The first two DVDs — Introduction to Lighting for Film and Video and Green Screen Lighting — are available now.

Both were written, directed, and edited by Mike, and they feature veteran gaffer Carl Gundestrup as your host and narrator. I’ve seen both DVDs myself, and think they’re pretty interesting, even for people who have no intention of ever becoming gaffers or lighting techs. (Full disclosure: I actually appear on-screen in Green Screen Lighting, in all of my difficult-to-light glory!)

The Reel Classroom web site is live as of yesterday, so I’d like to ask my three loyal readers to do me a favor: click on over there and have a look around, see if there’s anything there you might like for yourself, and generally do what you can to spread the word. If you know anyone who might be interested in learning about the film industry, let them know.

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Apr152008

So What Really Sank the Titanic?

Among my various esoteric interests is a curious — some would say morbid — fascination for the infamous tragedies of history: Pompeii, the Hindenberg crash, and of course, the grandmother of disaster stories, the sinking of the RMS Titanic.

Today is the 96th anniversary of what author Walter Lord called “a night to remember,” i.e., the night the supposedly unsinkable ship struck an iceberg while on her maiden — and only — voyage. (Technically, the ship hit the iceberg late on the night of April 14, but it took two and a half hours to go down, so it actually sank on the 15th.)

Public interest in this particular shipwreck never seems to wane, for some reason, and to this day people are still debating over what exactly happened out there in the North Atlantic. Oh, sure, everyone knows the ship hit a ‘berg, but was it ripped open like a giant can of anchovies by a sharp spur of ice, as so many movies have depicted? Or was the damage actually something more… subtle? Caused by something innocuous that nobody thought would be a problem, like the stupidly mundane combination of rubber o-rings and freezing temperatures that brought down the space shuttle Challenger?

Here’s a theory: it was the rivets that held the ship together. More precisely, according to two authors of an upcoming book, it was rivets made of inferior, brittle materials that shattered when the iceberg gently brushed — not ripped into — Titanic‘s side. According to this theory — which is backed up by observations of the wreck itself on the ocean floor — the ship wasn’t torn open, as everyone has believed; rather, the broken rivets allowed the hull plates to simply open up along their seams. The end result was the same, of course.

Continue Reading…

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Apr152008

Something I’ll Bet You Didn’t Know About Coffee

Did you know that what they used to call “marital relations” is entirely dependent on the quality of what’s in your cup? No, really. Check out this “educational film” from the Folgers company:

So, let’s review: hubby is so disgusted by his morning ration of battery acid that he’s apparently decided he never wants to have sex again, at least not with his wife. (There is that veiled threat about the girls at the office and their “hot plates,” the implication obviously being that he’s ready to throw the missus over for somebody who really knows how to brew some good joe.) Fortunately, she’s not the sort to throw crockery at the jerk and move back in with her mother; instead, she wisely identifies the source of her husband’s discontent and takes steps to remediate the problem. And sure enough, by nighttime he’s all hepped up on go-juice and ready to rock her world.

Which of these two is the more foolish, the shallow man who is obviously on a caffeine-fueled emotional rollercoaster, or his doormat of a wife who’ll do anything — even turn to convenient, cheap, processed, better-living-through-modern-chemistry food substitutes — just to avoid revealing that she flunked her Home Ec class three times in a row?

Did these quaintly ridiculous ad campaigns really work back in the day? Do they even still make Folgers Crystals, and is anyone dumb enough to use them? And what would happen to this guy if he someone served him some freshly ground French-press coffee, i.e., real coffee? Based on the evidence presented here, I imagine the sexual release would probably kill everyone within five feet of the sap…

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Apr142008

I’m Ex-cellent!

One more for tonight: our esteemed colleague Jaquandor has declared me an excellent blogger:

Another terrific source of high-quality geekitude, Jason at Simple Tricks and Nonsense always brings the goods. Sometimes we agree on stuff, sometimes we don’t.

To which I say, with all sincerity, thanks, man. That truly means a lot to me. I’m glad people out there enjoy what I do.
And to everyone else reading this, if you haven’t checked out Jaquandor’s blog, Byzantium’s Shores, I highly recommend it. He’s a fine writer and seems to be a good egg. Have a look, in particular, at his on-going project to “fix” the The Phantom Menace; basically he’s writing a story treatment that retains the bulk of Uncle George’s screenplay as we saw it, but with a few tweaks that would’ve made for a drastically improved film. As he says of me, I don’t agree with everything he’s doing — I would’ve made far more substantial changes to Jar Jar Binks and the Gungan people than Jaq has chosen to do, and I probably would’ve jettisoned the midichlorians altogether rather than trying to find a way to make that idea work — but that’s the fun of these sort of geeky conversations. At least it used to be, back before everybody got so damn serious about them.
As you can imagine, this rewrite is a pretty lengthy process; he’s doing it by installments and is about halfway through the film at this point. Here’ s Part One to get you started…

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Apr142008

A Few Important Facts

This will probably surprise no one:

Do you talk too much in your blog?
Created by OnePlusYou

Yeah, nothing unexpected there. The next one, however, surprised me very much, because I’m willing to bet the incidence of profanity in my spoken usage is much, much higher:

The Blog-O-Cuss Meter - Do you cuss a lot in your blog or website?
Created by OnePlusYou

And finally something that’s good to know, just in case it ever comes up:

How many cannibals could your body feed?
Created by OnePlusYou

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Apr142008

The Best and Brightest

I’ve pretty much stopped paying attention to the seemingly endless back-and-forth between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama — at this point, I figure I’ve already decided who I prefer and I’ve frankly lost interest in following the campaign any further until a candidate is officially chosen at the Democratic National Convention in August — which means that I only learned of “Bittergate” this morning when I saw that the blogosphere had been chattering about it all weekend. Basically, I guess Obama made a remark about small-town folks relying on guns, God, and anti-immigrant feelings to deal with their frustrated ambitions, and Hillary and McCain are feigning offense on behalf of those people he was talking about, branding Obama an “elitist.” (In case you also missed this one, details are here.)

Now, I’ve read Obama’s remarks and I personally don’t think he said anything all that offensive (although I grant I may feel differently if I were one of those small-town people). While you never know what’s going to piss people off, this whole thing strikes me as a tempest in a teapot that’ll likely be forgotten by next week. However, the accusation of elitism has been reliably effective in bringing down politicians who display too much schooling in their speechifying, so, again, you never know what’ll happen here. It’s a phenomenon I’ve never fully understood, myself. I find our cultural distrust of intellect both mystifying and deplorable.

So does writer Peter David; he made some particularly cogent remarks on the subject today:

We have a situation wherein this country’s anti-intellectualism has become so pervasive, so suffocating, that we have multi-millionaire Ivy league graduates trying to pretend they’re just plain folks when clearly they’re not. And people know they’re not. This country was founded by men who knew they were the best and brightest, and the citizenry took pride and comfort in that. But television has put politicians into peoples’ homes, and now we just want someone we’re comfortable with. We don’t want men and women who come across like professors; we want the guy who sat in the back of the class and goofs off, as if life was a sitcom. To put it in “Fast Times at Ridgemont High” terms, we should want to elect Mr. Hand; instead we opt for Jeff Spicoli.

Couldn’t have said it better myself…

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Apr102008

Today’s Best Descriptions

As I fancy myself something of a clever wordsmith, at least on good days, I always admire a good turn of phrase, a line that perfectly describes the subject at hand or even — bonus! — makes me smile or laugh out loud.

I’ve encountered two such items in today’s web surfing, which I’d like to share with you now.

The first comes from Phil Plait, the Bad Astronomer, who, in talking about yesterday’s news that scientists have successfully tested an immensely powerful petawatt laser, explains that:

…one petawatt is 1000 terawatts; peta is a prefix people will get to know in a year or two once terabyte drives prove too small to store very many illegally downloaded BluRay movies.

That’s a pretty good one, but the comparison that really earned a chuckle came from Boing Boing Gadgets:

[Item X] should cost more per ounce than heroin filtered through the limbic system of Tom Cruise.

Heroin filtered through Tom Cruise’s limbic system? How absurd! How perfect! What kind of twisted, beautiful mind comes up with something like that? I can only doff my hat in wonder and respect…

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Apr092008

Waiting for the Bus

I love this photo:

zaius_loves_donuts.jpg

Why? Well, why not? It’s in groovy black-and-white and has the slightly flattened, zoomed-in perspective that I often shoot with myself. There’s some awesome mid-century googie architecture in the background, and it looks like that’s probably the famous Randy’s Donuts to the right. Oh, and there’s frickin’ Dr. Zaius sitting on a bus-bench in modern-day (well, 1968, anyway) Los Angeles. How could you not love this?

I found it here, via Boing Boing, of course. I recommend checking out all of the photos in that set. There’s a lot of beautiful, nostalgic, and somewhat weird stuff. Be warned, though — there is some hippie-style nudity. If that sort of thing bothers you.

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