Donnie Darko
I’m late to the game on this, but no matter. Donnie Darko is the best film I’ve seen all year. I can’t remember the last time a DVD finished and I immediately jumped to the menu to play it again. (My normal post-movie routine is to visit IMDB to read the trivia on the flick.) Re-viewing is almost built into the movie itself. The dramatic fulcrum of Donnie Darko is the title character’s reaction to knowing how things will turn out before he should know. Donnie Darko is richly rewarding, bitingly funny at times (Patrick Swayze is absolutely superb), and even frightening. Apparently the director, Richard Kelly, was 26 when the movie, his first, was released in 2001. Goodness gracious.
Time travel, a creepy man-bunny, Michael Dukakis. It’s all there. Rent this movie.
OneVoice
Daniel Lubetzky is going to win the Nobel Peace Prize one day. You read it here first. Daniel is the founder of PeaceWorks, a not-only-for-profit business based on the principle that economic interdependence eventually can overcome socio-political turmoil. Basically they get people on opposite sides of a conflict to work together to produce high-end foodstuffs. But that’s only half the story.
The PeaceWorks Foundation — a group I have been working with for a few weeks now — is the non-profit wing of the company. Their main project is OneVoice, a unique grass-roots effort to promote the views of the vast swath of moderate Israelis and Palestinians. The process is fairly simple. Once Israelis and Palestinians are registered to vote with OneVoice (both online and by volunteers on the ground) they are asked to state their opinions on a variety of issues. The referenda are rolled out in phases and contribute to a progressively more honed and unified position statement that will eventually be forwarded as a mandate to global leaders. One interesting point is that, in an effort to promote negotiation, absolute rejection of a proposal is not allowed. You are alloted a limited number of points with which to register your relative level of discord. Use too many on any one issue and you may not have the ability to reject a point later in the vote. The mechanism is a gravitational pull to the center.
There’s a real urgency now with the upcoming Palestinian elections. Daniel and his team are preparing for television coverage, new voting, and a high probability that a supporter of the OneVoice initiative will succeed Arafat. To capture some of this momentum, they’ve created a blog. It’s nascent, but look for it to mature rapidly in the coming week or so.
I’m proud to be a part of this.
Favorite things, first in a series
Seems like I have come across quite a few useful, fun, or otherwise notable things lately. Thought I’d share.
Dynamap – Currently only for Manhattan, the Dynamap is a map made of polarized lenses stacked on each other so that when you alter the angle of viewing you see different layers of information: street grid, subway system, neighborhoods. Innovative and totally useful.
Konfabulator – Clearly someone at Apple thinks this is the future of modularized, task-specific applets since they are building Konfabulator-like functionality into the next version of their OS. But Konfabulator one-upped Cupertino by becoming cross-platform. To get a quick sense of what Konfabulator does visit the widget gallery.
del.icio.us – Social bookmarks. Like Friendster, except with your links. See how many or how few people link like you do.
flickr – Superb online photo gallery. Impressive editing and organization tools. Great attitude.
Web Developer – Extension for Firefox that adds a slew of geeky web dev tools, but the best by far is a block level element outlining function. Indispensible for ferretting out nested <div> tags and such. (Example.)
Delicious Monster Library – An iLife-like app (Mac-only) that organizes your books, software, videos, and games. Cool part: it can use a webcam to simulate a UPC code scanner, directly grabbing the volume info from Amazon.
Moleskine notebook – Paper PDA. Proto-blog tool. (Even hackable.) Snapping the elastic band over the cover is strangely satisfying.
Smarty Pants – Movable Type blog plug-in that enables curly quotes, em-dashes, and real ellipses. “I’m … not — kidding.” Rejoice!
ISS-Soyuz bags – Satchels and backpacks made from used Soyuz re-entry parachutes. “Why, yes, this bag has been to space and back.”
Take a memo
The shoot continues and the levels of overlapping documentary going on are humorous. To start, the project is a documentary about the history of documentation and interpretation in Egypt (that is, Egyptology). Fittingly, today we videotaped the famous Seated Scribe statue being scanned in three dimensions by a laser shape-grabber. Of course people were snapping pictures of the videotaping. So let’s recap: photography of the videotaping of a scanner capturing a sculpture of a person writing. That’s about as far back as this meta-documentary hall of mirrors went. If I only I were blogging it in real-time.
“Quite a pile”
I’m back in Egypt with the crew shooting the Eternal Egypt documentary. Everything’s going as expected: the hurry-up-and-wait of the film business multiplied by the hurry-up-and-wait of Egyptian life.
We interviewed Mark Lehner today. Along with Zahi Hawass and in addition to referring to the Great Pyramid as “quite a pile,” he’s most (recently) known for his discovery of the “workers’ village” (photos), the urban complex of the pyramid-builders at Giza. He’s a fascinating guy and, like Kent Weeks, wonderfully articulate about the importance of what he’s doing. You’ll have to wait for the documentary for the full scoop, but something he said today really made me think. He was explaining how astonishing the pyramids of the Fourth Dynasty are, given their precision and size. Importantly, he noted that no undertaking on their scale in the time it took to build them was ever duplicated in ancient Egypt. He then made a quick aside — I’ll bet it’ll end up on the cutting-room floor — that this burst of activity and innovation can be likened to the US space program’s accomplishments in the 1960’s. The implication is that we’ve not achieved anything comparable in the 35 years since we landed on the moon. Which, of course, is true as far as manned spaceflight goes.
But it got me thinking. There are many, many people who believe the only way to explain the Giza pyramids is to turn to supernatural forces, lost civilizations, or alien intervention. “Pyramidology” is an entire pseudo-science dedicated to these claims and there is no shortage of TV programming that laps it up. So I ask, if we are unable to get out of low-Earth orbit in the coming decades will the popular imagination begin to search for extra-human explanations as to how we accomplished the moon landings in the first place? That is, if enough time passes after a watershed technical achievement is it inevitable that humans will seek to explain its occurence in non-human terms? Certainly, there is a fringe that always does, but I wonder if technical singularlites like the Apollo program are doomed to mystification if not repeated. Can’t we just go to Mars and not find out?
Linguistic sidenote. The location producers here in Egypt are known as “fixers” and they are a three-person family team. They are extraordinarily good at what they do. They are also near-anagrams of one another: Romany, Ramy, and Mary. Wish I had thought of that with my kids.
Safety dance
Did anyone catch this weird one-point safety in the Texas-Texas A&M game on Friday? I was at the game and it was hilarious to see the crowd erupt in cheers at the awarded point (after the botched extra point) while virtually no one knew or understood what the hell they were cheering for. I’m no football scholar, but huh?
I promise no more 80’s song title references. Got carried away. Sorry.
Jeff Berg
I’ve always been mesmerized by the work of designer Jeff Berg. His primary medium is Flash, but he’s savant-like in a variety of areas. Weather, subway signage, geometry — it’s all fodder for visualization and interaction. Plus, he’s pretty good at his day job.
99 Luft
OK, not only does Lufthansa have one of the only in-air Internet connections available (allowing fun stuff like this), but I just learned that they have a flight from Chicago to Dusseldorf on a flipping 737 that is 100% business class seats. Just 28 or so. I didn’t even know a 737 had that kind of range. Like a Southwest flight deciding to re-route to Europe. Except without the free-for-all for seats. Crazy. And Dusseldorf. Huh? Kraftwerk, I may make the trip after all.
The tech support generation calls the help desk
I call my parents’ house the Museum of Technological Dereliction so I naturally chuckled when I read this piece about the “tech support generation” — people who return to their parents at the holidays and whose time is mostly occupied with debugging technology issues. Until I showed up at my in-laws, that is. Not funny anymore. It isn’t that I’m asked to fix things, but that I am incapable of not doing so. For example I can’t not intervene when my father-in-law is cursing his all-in-one remote because its interface complexity rivals a CAD program. Similarly I can’t sit by idly while my in-laws watch a standard-def football game on their 61″ High-Def LCOS TV completely oblivious to the fact that a perfectly good high-def version of the same show is on another channel. This isn’t their fault.
I have a specific suggestion on this point. Why not build HD receivers/televisions such that they can alert the viewer when standard-def programming is being watched that also is currently being broadcast in high-def? All the data is there; cable and satellite high-def receivers obviously have all the programming information stored. And most people don’t know when a show has a high-def counterpart. In addition, it would be great if high-def televisions automatically sensed the type of input — DVD, high-def, or standard-def — and changed the aspect ratio accordingly. It pains me to see my in-laws watching standard-def programming warped all over the screen in order to fill it. This is an easy technical problem to solve, it seems to me. Perhaps it has been?
Happy Thanksgiving, America.
Big!
Confession. I love watching Big!, the series on Discovery HD Theater where a team of welders, metal fabricators, and gadgeteers come together to build oversized versions of appliances and other everyday items. There’s interpersonal drama, mostly staged or instigated — but even conflict is humorous because you quickly remember that the bickering is over a gigantic toaster or some such. Not to trivialize things, but, c’mon, you’re not repairing aircraft here, folks. Maybe I like it so much because I’m really not handy and so seeing things built supersize makes it easier to comprehend their inner workings. Or maybe it is because blowtorches look great in high definition.
Speaking of, I don’t watch much television but what I do watch these days seems mostly to be in HD. I wonder if I could pull off watching only high-definition programming in 2005. Could be my first resolution.
Mission Elapsed Time: 20:00:21:06:42:40
I went back through it this blog (and my Flickr account) on its 20th anniversary, retracing digital footprints made on what feels like a different planet. Here are some highlights.
The Terror Tourist
A roughly monthly exploration of places in horror fiction — real or imagined, geographical or psychological — culled from The Heavy Leather Horror Show.
Subscribe to the podcast or the email newsletter or just read through the archives posted here.
The Ampcamper
How I hauled myself, two teens, an 80 lb dog, and a whole load of crap 4000+ miles across six states in twenty days using an electric vehicle. And survived to tell the tale.
