The great Michael Pollan interviewed by Bill Maher about the new documentary Food Inc.
Here he explains a plant's-eye view in a fantastic TED talk.
"I'm a dupe of the lawns, whose goal in life is to out compete the trees"
"Looking at the world from another species point of view is a cure for the disease of human self-importance"
Incidentally, WTF can't Oxbridge do something like TED online?
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"Can you endure twenty thousand spoonfuls of terror."
Absolutely fabulous
'Oscars: 26 men and one women = normal. 26 women and one man = what the f**k'
You go girlfriend. Love her.
We're going to have to wait to see it until January but Shaun Penn's next Oscar winner will be 'Milk'.
The long-awaited biopic of the San Francisco gay supervisor Harvey Milk, assassinated alongside Mayor George Moscone in 1977, has just opened in the US.
Here's the trailer:
Harvey was an icon for the gay rights movement. He came just before my time but I still remember when I saw the biopic 'The Times of Harvey Milk' in the early eighties and came to learn more about him. Harvey changed the world.
It's just wonderful that Gus van Sant is the one to finally make this movie and all the reviews are great. It's extra great because the history will come back and people will get to see what was sacrificed to make the world we live in today.
This is especially good for young LGBT.
Here's some videos about that history.
Milk and Moscone's assassin, fellow San Francisco Supervisor (councilor) Dan White, got a very light sentence. This was 1977! Following this there was a candlelight parade and then a riot (the gay movement started with a riot at Stonewall).
Now California State Senator Carole Migden speaking so movingly about Harvey.
I'm such an old fart. I can totally relate to this aging queen, Cleve Jones, who worked with Harvey (and then went on to start the NAMES Project AIDS Memorial Quilt).
He speaks wisdom:
If your generation of young people do not know our history you will not be prepared to fight. History is full of examples of people who thought they were free and woke up and discovered they were not.Just like Rosa Parks.
It's important for people to understand that Harvey Milk was an ordinary faggot. He was not a genius, he was not a saint. His personal life was in disarray. He was poverty stricken. He was an ordinary man and yet because he was honest. because he had courage and because he really did love his people and love his city he was able to change the world. And I want all young people to understand that they have the power to do that.
Harvey was a mensch. He could also be a diva. He would have loved knowing that Sean Penn would be playing him.At the moment there's a riotous anger in California because of the passage of Prop 8, blocking gay marriage.
A Gremlins fan film: Gremlins interspliced I know not how with lots of others.Excellent.
Wait a while and the clips pile up ...
The Berlin gay holocaust memorial is unveiled and among the participants was 95-year-old Rudolf Brazda, who survived incarceration in Buchenwald concentration camp from 1941 to 1945. "It was a terrible time," Brazda said. Asked how he felt now, he responded: "I must say that I feel as though I were in paradise in this democratic society."
What is happening in the Italian blogosphere? I check viral videos regularly and a lot are suddenly Italian. And this is in a list previously 100% dominated by America with occasional Sarkozy interruptions.
Viral, political video on the whole is becoming more international. I've seen (as well as French) some Malaysian and Canadian video pop up with serious numbers of blog postings.
Another, positive, view of the impact of the internet on China:
The Chinese public sphere has become a more freewheeling, interesting and chaotic arena for expressions of opinion than it was. This isn't all due to the Internet (crusading print journalists and activists have also done their part), but bloggers calling attention to official corruption or mocking government policies have definitely helped alter the political landscape.After racist hiring, another negative against Google Inc: their Daycare arrangements.
The politically significant things happening online involve forms of communication, such as efforts to call attention to corrupt acts by local officials, that dovetail with policies that are promoted or at least given lip service by the central authorities.
The images in our mind are extraordinarily rich. We can tell if something is liquid or solid, heavy or light, dead or alive. But the information we work from is poor—a distorted, two-dimensional transmission with entire spots missing. So the mind fills in most of the picture. You can get a sense of this from brain-anatomy studies. If visual sensations were primarily received rather than constructed by the brain, you’d expect that most of the fibres going to the brain’s primary visual cortex would come from the retina. Instead, scientists have found that only twenty per cent do; eighty per cent come downward from regions of the brain governing functions like memory. Richard Gregory, a prominent British neuropsychologist, estimates that visual perception is more than ninety per cent memory and less than ten per cent sensory nerve signals.
...
Researchers at the University of Manchester, in England, have gone a step beyond mirrors and fashioned an immersive virtual-reality system for treating patients with phantom-limb pain. Detectors transpose movement of real limbs into a virtual world where patients feel they are actually moving, stretching, even playing a ballgame. So far, five patients have tried the system, and they have all experienced a reduction in pain. Whether those results will last has yet to be established. But the approach raises the possibility of designing similar systems to help patients with other sensor syndromes. How, one wonders, would someone with chronic back pain fare in a virtual world? The Manchester study suggests that there may be many ways to fight our phantoms.
How social networking saved New Orleans: Powered by community, New Orleans residents exposed city hall and the power of social softwareUsing blogs with names like Fix the Pumps and Squandered Heritage, citizens took up "beats," lending their professional expertise, ingenuity and gumshoe efforts to create a citizens' voice to counter city government rhetoric.Via David Wilcox: Community networking to tackle climate change
That’s not all, though - I have also been drafted in by Tracey Todhunter to help develop her ideas for a ‘communiversity’ for low carbon communities. She writes about it here. We’re going to start off in my session, so Tracey and her colleagues can develop a strategy using the game; and then take the results into her session to drum up support and refine things.All about the CivilSerf project:
Good new resource: The Social Web Analytics eBook 2008A global virtual community for teenagers has teamed up with the Matthew Shepard Foundation to educate young online users about dignity and respect.
From next Monday foundation staff will lead discussions twice a week in Habbo.com's InfoBus, which is a virtual room designed to look like the inside of a high-end bus.
I oblige. I'm shocked, confused, scared and embarrassed all at the same time. Most of the bystanders have vacated the platform by now, by police order. And I'm not talking about normal police either. This is the Specialist Firearms Unit, about 8 of them, machine guns, bulletproof vests, police dogs and all. And they're here to arrest ME!AP feature on Web 2.0 - censoring the right to rant
Where's Web 2.0 at in the US government?With online services becoming greater conduits than shopping malls for public communications, however, some advocacy groups believe the federal government needs to guarantee open access to speech. That, of course, could also invite meddling by the government, the way broadcasters now face indecency and other restrictions that are criticised as vague.
Others believe companies shouldn't police content at all, and if they do, they should at least make clearer the rules and the mechanisms for appeal.
Local government officials had mixed views about how they see Web 2.0 meshing with their needs, however. Mary Benner, CIO of the Pennsylvania Department of Labor and Industry, called it "something that we need to pursue, but it is not an immediate priority".Dave Briggs' review of Communities in Control, the new white paper by the Department for Communities and Local Government. It's pretty radical but I commented that if you want to address the 'digital divide', which it references, you could start by ramping up funding for UK Online Centres whose CEO has been screaming about underfunding. Not sexy and seemingly not on anyone's agenda.
While Web 2.0 can help residents communicate better with their governments, she says, offering those kinds of features is becoming a key way to lure younger IT workers to take jobs in government where they can build innovative Web 2.0 applications.
7) Because our senior executives haven't gotten the hang of email yet, and we know that our executives (who approve our ad design and spend) think and act exactly in the same way as our customers, even though they earn more, are degree-qualified, much older and live in Canberra.Comment from Belgium about the YouTube/Viacon decision:
Obviously, European Youtube users didn’t ask for their youtube usage to be handed over to Viacom Inc.. Who knows what Viacom will do with this highly private data (which contains highly detailed information about people’s interests such as the videos they watch, the various topics they are interested in, and so on)?In the US, the right-wing Xstian preacher Hagee has through take-down been attempting to get off the viral video circuit, but it's backfired.I only hope that enough Europeans will formally protest at their country’s privacy agencies and/or at the European institutions. Although, I fear it won’t matter anymore as privacy nowadays has become far less important than Britney Spears or Paris Hilton.
Anyway, please find the contact details for Belgium here.
After being held in custody in appalling conditions for over 26 hours by the department of homeland security, Mengal was refused entry to the US and deported. No reasons given. No right of appeal. This is Bush-style democracy in action.Patricia Hewitt is Nigerian?
Before my retirement, I personally made an over estimation, and stacked the sum of Six Million Three Hundred Thousand Great Britain Pounds which I totally intend for the purpose of charity and none other which will be supervised Attorney as he will also be the one in charge of securing these funds into your custody.The historic victory for UK bloggers of Alan Murray in Northern Ireland.
'During my testimony in court I said I was only trying to criticise those in power or those that would speak for us. That right has been upheld by the judge's decision. If the judge had ruled against me, then every blogger would have been vulnerable to charges of intimidation because those at the end of their criticism could claim they were being picked upon. A very bad precedent would have been set,' he said.Revealed: The ten members of Web’s ‘500 million club’ - Via NetImperative: Only 10 websites and applications - led by MSN Messenger, eBay and Facebook – have averaged at least 500 million UK minutes per month over the last year, according to new research. Facebook, YouTube and Second Life are the fastest growing sites in terms of total UK minutes.
Both media and online leaders are grappling with the Internet's increasing fragmentation. And they're all looking for more advertising revenue online, where media companies have recouped only a small fraction of what they lost in print and where Web companies want to maximize their investments.Bill Thompson on the reaction to copyright infringement by big corps:
EMI, Warner, V2, Sony BMG and the other four hundred or so members of the BPI want to cut people off from that network for copyright infringement.Wal-Mart: Ethical retailing? Hmmm.Imagine if you had a child who was excluded from school for cheating in an exam, and you were told that they weren't allowed to watch TV, listen to music, read books, talk to their friends or go into any shop during the exclusion.
Oh, and you and your entire family were subject to the same restrictions.
The company has been churning out dozens of white papers on sustainability, publicly available on its website, addressing everything from how to change eating and exercise habits to green charities; holding state-of-the art conferences on greening the supply chain; building environmentally efficient stores with open sky lighting and motion sensors to reduce energy consumption; rolling out green products in almost every department; and basing its promotion structure of its own employees, including senior staff, on how successful they are in convincing vendors to adopt measurable environmental standards.Monbiot: Trawlermen cling on as oceans empty of fish - and the ecosystem is gasping
Ministers have declared another major sweeping 'new' pan-government efficiency drive aiming to cut down IT spending and slash back-office costs.Talk about desperation ... in Slate: the movie I'm rushing out to see, Wall-E, is allegedly fattist:
The 'Operational' Efficiency Programme kicked off last week with the launch of a series of 'cross-cutting' reviews headed up by a veritable host of business leaders. Each review will report back in March with news of where £££ billions of savings can be made across the public sector.
The first review, led by Martin Jay, chairman of technology and engineering group and former stock market darling Invensys.
This stereotype of the "obese lifestyle" is simply false. How fat you are has a lot more to do with your genes than with your behavior. As much as 80 percent of the variation in human body weight can be explained by differences in our DNA.Genius take on all those stories about science's quest to find the cause of gayness by David Ehrensten, merging a “feminized brain” with Plan 9 From Outer Space:
FabulousThat’s because, Lord Saletan, we know full well who WILL be doing the controlling — Eros from Plan 9 !
Can’t you see him now explaining it all to us? Why is this happening, O Visitors From Another World?
“Because of death. Because all you of Earth are idiots! You see! You see! Your stupid female brains! Stupid! Stupid!”
If ever anything summed up that British "stiff upper lip", this Keep Calm And Carry On poster is it. During the early spring of 1939 and the war with Germany almost inevitable the British Government commissioned this poster to be displayed throughout the country upon the out-break of war. The plan for the poster was to relay a message from the King to his people that all capable measures to defend the country were being taken. This original World War II poster lay undiscovered and forgotten until a copy turned up over 50 years later within a pile of dusty old books bought from an auction, it's soothing message is still relevant today - it understands that you are a little bit stressed but knows you'll be ok. You can purchase heaps of great products that feature the Keep Calm and Carry On logo from this fab site. www.keepcalmandcarryon.com.auThe Onion has been celebrating Gay Pride march month (for want of a better word) by pulling together past posts, including this: New Dad Thinks Baby Might Be Gay.
"Vait, vait. Vat’s zee connection between a political movement and food. Vy hummus?”Quote of the week
It's about privileged beliefs. I'm a vegetarian. If I worked at Tesco and said I'm not going to put meat through the checkout they'd be quite justified in saying 'you're not right for the job'.
labels:
blogging,
Dave Briggs,
egov,
environment,
fabulous,
facebook,
gay,
google,
italy,
movies,
religion,
sarkozy,
science,
second life,
social networks,
youtube
Man gets fired .. man goes nuts ...
Actually, it's a (very) viral promo for a new Timur Bekmambetov movie. Genius.
Heard numerous times from the elders that 'silver surfers' is, well, patronising.
Radio Four's Front Row had an interview with two octogenerians posting film reviews on the web. I went to have a look at their YouTube page and, f+++ me, they got half a million views for their last show. To put that in context a million views is a lot for a US cable news show.
Turns out, 81 year old Marsha Nasatir and 84 year old Lorenzo Semple are both industry veterans — Semple wrote the fabulous 3 Days of the Condor and Nasatir worked with Laurence Kasdan — though they don't credit themselves. Apparently "people in the industry love the show but in true Hollywood fashion they don't watch it!"
They say, "the point of it - the reality, it's a reality show - is that we argue." They see films seperately and "don't exchange words until we're on the air."
Strangely, they reminded me of David Stratton and Margaret Pomeranz, who host a long-running movie review show on Australian TV.
After looking, I ended up viewing lots of their reviews. They are that good, and funny. Though they do geezery things, like get chilly.
Here's their latest - NSFW! Menstruation and f+++!
And here's their take on the Oscars, complete with embarrassing baby photos! And they know how to pick 'em! - well most of them. (+ a private moment about Julie Christie and discussion of Viggo Mortenson's 'endowment')
Here's the review of Sex and the City (warning spoilers) . "It's very upsetting that I spent $8.75 on a Saturday morning when I could have been shopping".
Oliver Stone's movie 'W' has a teaser poster featuring a list of Bushisms. Click the image for the large version.
As you may have read, noted comedy director Oliver Stone is making a film about George Bush - W - which is scheduled for release before November. Josh Brolin is playing Bush and amongst the rest of the cast are Ioan Gruffudd playing Tony Blair and Thandie Newton as Condi.
Stone is one of my least favorite directors having made one of the very few movies I've ever walked out of, Natural Born Killers. But this one sounds, on paper, like great fun.
The NY Daily News managed to get their hands on a highly embargoed script and found these highlights:
Here's Karl Rove making W. memorize answers, telling him, "Before you speak, come to me first. I'll tell you what to say." W. chiding late-arriving "Balloonfoot" Powell, saying military men should know about being on time. Rumsfeld, who's hard of hearing. W. happy when Cheney laughs at his cowboy-delivered twang. Cheney stepping in cow poop at Crawford. W. eating his favorite White House bologna sandwich lunch.
In all presidential erudition, telling Gen. Tommy Franks to be sure what he's doing: "I don't want to fire no $2 million missile at a $10 empty tent and hit a camel in the a - -." Then: "Americans don't like to see dead boys on their television sets." Telling education reformers: "Rarely is the question asked, 'Is our children learning?' "
Page 10 on Bill Clinton: "My mother waddles faster than that larda - -." Page 11: "We'll move these terr'ists to Guantanemera." Cheney: "Guantanamo." Bush: "Right." Then Bush to Cheney: "Vice, when we're in meetings I want you to keep a lid on it. Keep your ego in check. Remember, I'm the president."
Flashbacks have college-boy W. boozing, slacking off from work, in jail, calling his then-congressman father "Poppy." Sr. praising Jeb, castigating Jr., asking if he's "knocked up" a girl named Susie, complaining, "You never kept your word once . . . you're only good for partying, chasing tail, driving drunk . . . You deeply disappoint me." Repeat father and son arguments. Father: "I've had enough of your crap." Son: "I've had enough of you for a lifetime." Mama Barbara breaking up the near fisticuffs with announcing Jr. just made Harvard and Sr. responding, "But who do you think pulled the strings?"
Then, W.: "Saddam's been d - - - ing us around for 11 years. I told my father to get rid of the sucker" long back. War-thumping Cheney: "Saddam's smoking gun might become a mushroom cloud." W.: "We need the WMDs. We still need that 52nd card." Someone says: "You mean the 53rd card, sir."
Bushisms such as "A kick-ass war . . . Hittin' it off like grease to a skillet" . . . nu-cu-lar" . . . calling people "a-holes . . . son-of-a-b - - - - es . . . " saying it's "bulls - - -" . . . saying about one, "I'm going to kick his motherf - - - ing ass." About another, his "ba - - s have been put through the wringer." About himself, "One of the biggest talkers." It shows him wanting broader powers. It shows him saying about the press: "Like I owe them an explanation!?"
Page 42. Checking a map, being told it passed "Humint," whereupon the President of the United States asks, "What's 'Humint' again?" and being told "It's Human Intelligence." A scene in which, auditing an Iraqi intercept, W. asks, "Wolfowitz, got any Maalox on you? . . . and while you're at it, trim your ear hairs." And Cheney checking his heart pills.
There's Rove saying, "The polls have shot up to 80 percent behind the president. The American people want blood. They demand it." And Colin Powell: "This about politics or policy? I'm really confused. What're you doing in this room?"
In line with what Stone personally says about W.: "Limited ability except to promote himself," in one cocky flashback he guarantees he can fly a plane and then has trouble landing it. Page 50, asked if he loves his parents, he answers: "Most of the time. My father and I have a tough go . . . My mother says I'm as good as her at holding a grudge." After his father becomes president: "I'll never get out of Poppy's shadow. I wish he'd lost." After W. becomes president, his father saying, "I'm worried about him. Really worried. But you can't talk to him." And Barbara replying, "Well, he's not going to listen to me. He takes criticism worse than I do." And after Jr. knocks his father and shouts, "This is my war, not his," Condoleezza says: "We'll let him know that from here on out, he's persona non grata. No briefings, no nothings."
I somehow managed to not find the opening scene of La Dolce Vita clipped on YouTube (slap!) and instead used the Perroni Advert, which is a glossy tribute, as I was matching available clips to my fave films.
The Observer gave copies away on Sunday and as a teaser they found a lot more clips than me, including the stunning opening.
I've never seen a Fellini film I didn't like and could happily watch Marcello Mastroianni open an envelope but La Dolce Vita is a definitive classic:
Continuing my rummaging through Google Video Search, I actually found clips from all my list, bar one (a few were unpostable).
However, some of them aren't exactly inflictable or foul up a potential viewing of the movie . 
Like the ones for Distant Voices, Still Lives - a Terrence Davies movie which never fails to make me cry but seeing a clip would just ruin your day. 
Or the one I couldn't find a clip for, Derek Jarman's Blue, described thus by IMDB: 'Against a plain, unchanging blue screen, a densely interwoven soundtrack of voices, sound effects and music attempt to convey a portrait of Derek Jarman's experiences with AIDS, both literally and allegorically, together with an exploration of the meanings associated with the colour blue.' Well I like it.
Or the Ciao Manhattan clips, all Edie tributes except for the uninflictable original trailer.
Or the terrible selection of bad copies of Muriel's Wedding highlights (not my pick), despite the Abba theme.
Or finding the - great - Anita Ekberg's Trevi Fountain flounce clip from La Dolce Vita but only advertising's tribute to the spectacular opening scene. Also good but not the actual film. As un-referable as most trailers, all I could find for Altman's The Player although its opening scene, which features an 8 minute tracking shot, sells the movie.
But the really popular movies do have a variety of clips, mash-ups and parodies and are ready made for clip picking/Youtube. Like one of my NSFW favourite numbers from South Park: Bigger, Longer & Uncut:
'It's not my fault that I'm so eeevill.. it's society ... society ...'
Or another - very safe for work but insane - number ripe for a guitar band rethrashing from Wizard of Oz:
'Witch that rhymes with bitch'?
Masses of Oz and South Park clips. And there are other findable, memorable, inflictable clips like this one of the stunning Pam Grier acting cool for a reason in Jackie Brown.
Or the happy conclusion of Beautiful Thing:
As well as insane ephemera like a surreal 1930s Wizard of Oz cartoon or the bizarre, full-length Turkish version or, from last September, the even more bizarre 'Surviving Munchkins Honored At Wizard Of Oz Screening' (some still in costume):
From my rummaging I learnt that you just can't find 'everything' yet, including with the added touch that I can't then, easily, reshow it to you. Surprising lapse in movie marketing? I think so.
Tidying my profile link and then the profile, I noticed I could click on movies I'd favourited. This gave me the top ten of popularity, amongst Blogger users of these movies.
Clicking through was an exercise in revelation as some were far more well-known than I thought and others had interesting, not always predictable, fans.
Not in order of addition, some movies I could watch over and over
Danny Finkelstein at The Times looks at copycat suicides, supposedly spawned by the web, and finds them part of a long tradition.
Too right. One word: Valentino, the silent screen heartthrob.
At the news of Valentino's death, two women attempted suicide in front of Polyclinic Hospital; in London a girl took poison before Rudy's inscribed photograph; an elevator boy of the Ritz in Paris was found dead on a bed covered with Valentino's photos.
While Valentino was lying in state at Campbell's Funeral Home, New York streets became the scene of a ghoulish carnival as a mob of over 100,000 fought for a last glimpse of the Great Lover
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