Things I do not like include the increasing certainty that I am not merely not on the leading edge of The Curve, not merely behind The Curve, but rapidly falling far enough back in the pack to not even know that there's an Ahead with a Curve somewhere in it. Apparently it's a wiki world, and me not even a wikiterial , sakes. I thin I'm somewhere still in the gawrsh it sure is cool not being dependent on The Man's mainframe, hyuk hyuk. Maybe it's because I dare to write on a Dell machine, which as Our Andrew never fails to point out is hardly the textbook def of y. Our Andrew is not a Mac bigot; he's been agitating for Alienware ever since the fabled Tector was a fabled pup, and we do take the opportunity to point out that Alienware has been oh how should we put it assimilated by Dell. But I think it's because I have resisted being assimilated entirely into the Googleplex.
I dunno: I like Word. I'm kinda fond of Excel. I like my files where I can find them. I'm not convinced of the wisdom of hanging my so-called intellectual property (which it's the equivalent of a Balmer rowhouse) out in a server farm in Oregon and trusting Larry Page and Sergey Brin to remain warm n fuzzy n Wozlike, and not morph overnight into dare I say it Bill Gates (insert scary Elmer Bernstein music here). Other than it seeming kinda incomprehensible that given power corrupts and absolute power corrupting absolutely how is it different that Gates' inherent evility stems from selling out to The Man with MS-DOS whereas Page n Blin are magically incorrupt even after The Biggest IPO Ever (insert Those Were The Days cue here, o so long ago in the fabled days of yore when disposable incomes strewed daffodils across the land and mortgage companies showered us with monopoly registered trademark money), I should very much like to know? Ah well, mebbe I should just retire to my detached garage and push globs of Turtle Wax into my T while I'm at it, or fahgeddabout this furshlugginger keyboard and just scribble all over the screen with my vaguely sharp crow quill and let the ink kinda ooze into the Aether.
Say, what is that giant rock heading our way out of the sky? Not to worry, it's just a commercial airliner. Although I'll grant that when TSA gains access control over everything, which will likely be in about a week or ten days given today's news, there might be advantages to having all of one's work stored in a server farm in Oregon, since the only place we'll be able to go in and out of without a biochip ID will be our living rooms. Well, I've always wanted to be a sim.
Friday, February 15, 2008
Monday, February 11, 2008
Now there's something you don't see every day, Chauncey ...
It's hard to be a pedestrian in the city. But how else would I get to see the Wonder of the Age, the solar-powered trashcan.
You laugh. Behold the Big Belly, the pride of Seahorse Industries and the new secret weapon of Our Nation's Cities in the war against ism or litter, one:
This was even better than the forlorn Hillary supporters vainly trying to elicit any signifier of interest from commuters escaping from the subway tonight. Poor fools! Don't you know better than to get in the way of Very Important Suburbanites heading for their townhouses, so as to fire up their computers immediately upon entering and check their feeds for any updates more recent than when they left downtown an hour earlier?
See, you throw your trash into the belly of the beast; and then the solar-powered compactor solarly compacts your trash, carbonless footie-prints and all! Scoff scoff, I scoff at the PJM grid! By tossing my trash into this technological triumph, I strike a blow against the empire woo hoo!
Only thing is, it doesn't seem to work worth a patoot after dark. Maybe if I stood over it with a lit candle ...
You laugh. Behold the Big Belly, the pride of Seahorse Industries and the new secret weapon of Our Nation's Cities in the war against ism or litter, one:
This was even better than the forlorn Hillary supporters vainly trying to elicit any signifier of interest from commuters escaping from the subway tonight. Poor fools! Don't you know better than to get in the way of Very Important Suburbanites heading for their townhouses, so as to fire up their computers immediately upon entering and check their feeds for any updates more recent than when they left downtown an hour earlier?
See, you throw your trash into the belly of the beast; and then the solar-powered compactor solarly compacts your trash, carbonless footie-prints and all! Scoff scoff, I scoff at the PJM grid! By tossing my trash into this technological triumph, I strike a blow against the empire woo hoo!
Only thing is, it doesn't seem to work worth a patoot after dark. Maybe if I stood over it with a lit candle ...
Saturday, February 9, 2008
Back to the future
Trying fecklessly to keep to a schedule with 2/3 of the boys down with the ague, laboring under the foolish assumption that a Nice Night of Family Television would be just the ticket, what should we discover but a TCM offering of 2001, uncut and remastered just like it was on the premiere roadshow engagement of spring 1968? Well, here's a teaching moment to show at least budding cineaste Andrew th' source of more movie cliches in the last forty years than I don't know what. We decided to play the "They ripped that off from (insert more contemporary pop reference here)", although I'm not entirely sure that the notion of backwards-compatible ery was chronologically sound ("I think the point is to establish that the earlier image shows who came first." "I saw my image first, so it came first." "No, it came second." "I'm not talking about who came second." "Who came first." "I dunno." "He came third, we're not talking about him.")
On the one hand, the opening images of the moon-earth-sunrise szygny, with the Zarathrusta theme, still carry the weight of seeing the Real Moon on the gajillion-foot Cinerama screen, as did the Blue Danube approach and docking effects setpieces. And the shots are gorgously composed and lit, especially with the color remastering. And the pacing for the Dawn of Man sequence seems about right. And maybe we'll concede that the teeth-grinding banality of the dialogue once it gets started makes the point that we waste our highly developed sophistication and technology by taking it for granted.
On the other hand, I can't help but thinking as we watch: What a 60s poser. Here a bunch of the boys have rallied through the phlegm to whoop it up over the vision of swinging London haute design carried forward in a triumph of the Bauhaus will to rule the future. And Our Andrew and The Michael are catching on, "Oh, it's like flying to Grandma's." "Yeah, pretty much. Pan Am was the world's biggest and most ous airline back then. Of course it doesn't exist anymore." "But we've got videoconferencing through webcams." "Yeah, Bell Telephone was working on that in the 60s." "What's Bell Telephone?" "It was the phone company, it doesn't exist anymore." "Like Sprint." "Well, yeah since Sprint doesn't exist anymore either, but there was only one phone company." "Like Vonage." "No, we have one phone company for our landline, one phone company for our personal cell phones, another phone company for our long-distance calls, one phone company for our work landline, one phone company for our business cell phones. Back then there was one. phone. company. Period." "Well, why didn't he use his cell phone from the moon?" "They probably were out of the area." "No, nobody could imagine carrying your phone around with you and calling anybody whenever you felt like it. Phones were attached to wires that came out of the wall where the phone company ran them. You couldn't put a phone where you wanted it, the phone was put where it was easy for the installer to put it." "That's stupid. Why didn't you just tell him to put it where you wanted it?" "Because it was the phone company. You didn't tell the phone company what to do. They did what they wanted. That's why the government broke up the phone company." "Well, what kind of dumb movie about the future only has one phone company?" "Well, when you imagine the future you're really imagining your present and trying to make it better, kinda sorta. You can't imagine what you can't imagine." "George Lucas did." "But he did because he saw this movie when he was a kid, and realized that he could imagine the future just like this guy did." "Well, this guy got it wrong. I remember 2001. No space station, no colonies on the moon, and I didn't get what I wanted for my birthday. That's all that happened." "Well, some mopes drove some planes into buildings." "He missed that, too."
Well, yeah. We watch for a while in silence, interrupted by the occasional snort of "That's a computer? Computers don't look anything like that." "I don't even think the Apple guys were out of grade school by then, much less building their little boxes in their garages. Computers were still big racks in sealed rooms, and if you wanted to use the computer you had to get the computer guy to run it for you." "Well, what about games?" "They're playing chess, that's a game." "Chess is boring. This movie is boring. George Lucas made a better future." And I think again: What a 60s poser, rubbing our noses in his smug cold egotistical misanthropy. And we, including my own personal self, fell for it.
Outta th' mouth o' s. George Lucas did make a better future. And I want fries with that.
On the one hand, the opening images of the moon-earth-sunrise szygny, with the Zarathrusta theme, still carry the weight of seeing the Real Moon on the gajillion-foot Cinerama screen, as did the Blue Danube approach and docking effects setpieces. And the shots are gorgously composed and lit, especially with the color remastering. And the pacing for the Dawn of Man sequence seems about right. And maybe we'll concede that the teeth-grinding banality of the dialogue once it gets started makes the point that we waste our highly developed sophistication and technology by taking it for granted.
On the other hand, I can't help but thinking as we watch: What a 60s poser. Here a bunch of the boys have rallied through the phlegm to whoop it up over the vision of swinging London haute design carried forward in a triumph of the Bauhaus will to rule the future. And Our Andrew and The Michael are catching on, "Oh, it's like flying to Grandma's." "Yeah, pretty much. Pan Am was the world's biggest and most ous airline back then. Of course it doesn't exist anymore." "But we've got videoconferencing through webcams." "Yeah, Bell Telephone was working on that in the 60s." "What's Bell Telephone?" "It was the phone company, it doesn't exist anymore." "Like Sprint." "Well, yeah since Sprint doesn't exist anymore either, but there was only one phone company." "Like Vonage." "No, we have one phone company for our landline, one phone company for our personal cell phones, another phone company for our long-distance calls, one phone company for our work landline, one phone company for our business cell phones. Back then there was one. phone. company. Period." "Well, why didn't he use his cell phone from the moon?" "They probably were out of the area." "No, nobody could imagine carrying your phone around with you and calling anybody whenever you felt like it. Phones were attached to wires that came out of the wall where the phone company ran them. You couldn't put a phone where you wanted it, the phone was put where it was easy for the installer to put it." "That's stupid. Why didn't you just tell him to put it where you wanted it?" "Because it was the phone company. You didn't tell the phone company what to do. They did what they wanted. That's why the government broke up the phone company." "Well, what kind of dumb movie about the future only has one phone company?" "Well, when you imagine the future you're really imagining your present and trying to make it better, kinda sorta. You can't imagine what you can't imagine." "George Lucas did." "But he did because he saw this movie when he was a kid, and realized that he could imagine the future just like this guy did." "Well, this guy got it wrong. I remember 2001. No space station, no colonies on the moon, and I didn't get what I wanted for my birthday. That's all that happened." "Well, some mopes drove some planes into buildings." "He missed that, too."
Well, yeah. We watch for a while in silence, interrupted by the occasional snort of "That's a computer? Computers don't look anything like that." "I don't even think the Apple guys were out of grade school by then, much less building their little boxes in their garages. Computers were still big racks in sealed rooms, and if you wanted to use the computer you had to get the computer guy to run it for you." "Well, what about games?" "They're playing chess, that's a game." "Chess is boring. This movie is boring. George Lucas made a better future." And I think again: What a 60s poser, rubbing our noses in his smug cold egotistical misanthropy. And we, including my own personal self, fell for it.
Outta th' mouth o' s. George Lucas did make a better future. And I want fries with that.
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