Monday, June 30, 2008

Explosions (In The Sky?)

One hundred years ago, something leveled Siberia.

The Tunguska event was a massive explosion that occurred near the Podkamennaya (Lower Stony) Tunguska River in what is now Krasnoyarsk Krai of Russia, at around 7:14 a.m. on June 30, 1908.

USA Today, New Scientist, the astronomy blog Bad Astronomy, the BBC, Nature, and just about every sciency news outlet all have items devoted to the centennial. The explosion was most likely caused by the air burst of a large meteoroid or comet fragment at an altitude of 5–10 km above Earth's surface. Different studies have yielded varying estimates for the object's size, with general agreement that it was a few tens of meters across.

Although the meteor or comet burst in the air rather than directly hitting the surface, this event is still referred to as an impact. Estimates of the energy of the blast range from 5 megatons to as high as 30 megatons of TNT, with 10–15 megatons the most likely - about 1000 times as powerful as the bomb dropped on Hiroshima, Japan and about one third the power of the Tsar Bomba, the largest nuclear weapon ever detonated. The explosion knocked over an estimated 80 million trees over 2,150 square km (830 square miles). It is estimated that the earthquake from the blast would have measured 5.0 on the Richter scale, which was not yet developed at the time. An explosion of this magnitude is capable of destroying a large metropolitan area, and had the Earth's rotation been four hours different, St. Petersburg. This possibility has helped to spark discussion of asteroid deflection strategies.

Further nerdening about Tunguska event on their
wiki.



Who's On My Team?

Over the weekend, the Edmonton Oilers acquired Lubomir Visnovsky from my LA Kings for center Jarret Stoll and defenseman Matt Greene. I don't know if I'm going to recognize the team come November.

An All Star last year and one of the top scoring defensemen in the league, Visnovsky had signed a five year extension last July - so much for that. Clearly they're going for a youth movement, like Pittsburgh, who took their green squad to the Cup finals. Lubo became only defenseman in club history to lead the team in scoring with a career high 67 points in '05-'06, which is great, but his dealing with the trade of Cammalleri clears $11 million in salary cap space for a hopefully big splash in the free agent market tomorrow.

In for '08
RW Brad Richardson
C Jarret Stoll
D Matt Greene
?

Out for '08
G Dan Clouiter
D Brad Stuart
RW Mike Cammalleri
LW Ladislav Nagy
D Lubomir Visnovsky
Coach Marc Crawford

DMC

Detroit Metal City is about a kindly kindergarten teacher who joins a utterly obscene metal band. And as the trailer shows, there's metal six year old girls, a cameo by Gene Simmons and a song whose lyrics are exclusively made up of the word "Fuck." Try and tell me you don't want to see it.

Gay Athelete Becomes Homo

The uptight people who run the American Family Association’s OneNewsNow site are so frightened of gays that they've set up a filter to change every instance of the word "gay" to "homosexual." Which is terrific if you're running a story on Olympic athlete Tyson Gay.
And while they may have fixed this particular instance, it looks like they haven't gone back through their archives and corrected other articles where this happened, such as this article where professional basketball player Rudy Gay is referred to as "Rudy Homosexual."

Chapter Five

The fifth part of His Words - Not Mine is now available for your reading pleasure. Or disappointment.

Sunday, June 29, 2008

Birth-Thru

H.R.M. Idle Eyes The See-Thru turns one year older today, but last night we celebrated at Rybot's with some Leah D / Scarlett skewered kabobs, many drinks, some ice cream cake, and the 1-2-3 combo of Scartoe, J-Montana, and Senor (sans) Stache. Yes, there was birthday mirth for my upcoming date as well, but we can save that later...today is for thine Idle Eyes!

Friday, June 27, 2008

The Longest Weekend

Bill Gates' last day at Microsoft is today. In contrast, I'll be at work tomorrow. Retirement rules. Work can suck it. Suck it, dolphin!

Oh, Really?

Yahoo! News shockingly reports that Aerosmith frontman Steven Tyler sought the "safe environment" of rehab last month to recover from more than just surgery...he was fighting a dependency on pain and sleep medication.

"To have your feet done, to have your leg done, you have to be on narcotics," Tyler said. "You have to be on sleep aids at night. I don't know about (bandmate) Joe (Perry) but I was off and running and I didn't like the me that was me." Did we miss that big news about Joe Perry having surgery too? Or is it just the incoherent rambling of a pain med junkie?

Tyler released a statement in late May saying he checked into a rehab facility in search of said safe environment to recover from several foot surgeries and physical therapy, which is not even code for "he's on drugs". Tyler said the procedures were to correct longtime foot injuries resulting from his physical performances as the singer for the band. Sounds a little strange to me - how do you develop a pain and sleeping pill problem that requires rehab for treatment from a surgery you haven't had yet? Guess he was practicing his medication before the surgery just to know what he was in for. That, or Betty Ford's orthopedic rehab wing is finally ready to compete with it's chemical dependency programs.

And goddamn if the last ounce of rock cred Tyler had is now gone...Crocs? It's so hideous, I can't even do a
vs. with him and Cojo.

Melvins With Boots

Nude With Boots is the newest Melvins album, and it kicks some major ass. Building on A Senile Animal, it is their second with the members of Big Business as part of the band, creating a dual drum goliath with the bass and guitar assault. Their video will melt your brain it's so cool, and the live clips are hardcore.




The Talking Horse



Blood Witch



Suicide In Progress



The Talking Horse (live!)

Consume Anytime

The comics at Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal are a bit demented but not too odd or hip that your parents couldn't get the gag. With over 1200 to date, there's plenty to sift through for a laugh or two a day.





Sigur Ros

With Sigur Ros tickets on sale tomorrow, now's as good a time as any to show off one of their wild, dreamy videos.


(Glósóli)

Shame

More on that ghastly Vern Troyer sex tape via WWTDD:

Ranae Shrider is the woman who had sex with Vern Troyer in the now famous sex tape, and today she has broken her silence to say she’s furious that it got leaked. Gee, no kidding. Really, you didn’t want the whole world to see you get f’d by a goblin. How surprising. I’d be honored if my gf did that. In fact I’d project the film onto the side of a mountain so the whole world could see a wooden toy come to life and rape my girl.

"Ranae Shrider has admitted she is furious that a sex tape featuring her and Austin Powers star Verne Troyer has appeared online. The 22-year-old aspiring model said about the sex tape: "Do I look like I should be smiling about this" after being spotted by the paparazzi having coffee in a Starbucks in LA. Shrider also admitted that she still lives with the 2ft 8inch star in the same apartment where the sex tape was shot. When asked when she had moved out, Shrider replied: "We still live together." Asked if she was going to profit from the release of the sex tape, Shrider said: "I don't know." Shrider claims that the home movie was stolen, and illegally distributed without her knowledge."

My gag reflex won't allow me to think about this for long, but just imagine you’re a girl, lying in bed naked and you look down and there’s a monster from a fairy tale looking up at you from between your legs, it's little tongue flicking against your clit. I bet if you get her stoned enough, he could just crawl inside her and flail around. I can’t be the only one who thinks this sounds more like something out of "Hostel" than it does a night of passion and intrigue.

Model? Really? For what? She must be the "before" picture in ads. If she's an aspiring model, I'm an aspiring cowboy. Giddy-up! Wheeee!

Thursday, June 26, 2008

Strip Trooper

This is the least sexy thing I have seen in a long time.

A Writer Writes What He Knows

H.R.M. Idle Eyes The See-Thru sent me this one:

When Vlado Taneski wrote about the serial killer stalking his hometown in Macedonia, his eye for detail was such that the story was soon riveting readers. The journalist's inside knowledge of the brutal murders of three elderly women in the tiny town of Kicevo ensured that newspaper editors gave his columns prominence.

Yesterday the 56-year-old father-of-two killed himself by dunking his head in a bucket of water in the toilet at a prison in the town of Tetovo, after it was revealed he had been charged with the murders he had written about.

"All these women were raped, molested and murdered in the most terrible way and we have very strong evidence that Taneski was responsible for all three," said police spokesman Ivo Kotevski speaking from the capital Skopje. "In the end there were many things that pointed to him as a suspect and led us to file charges against him for two of the murders," he added. "We were close to charging him with a third murder, and hoped he would give us details of a fourth woman who disappeared in 2003 - because we believe he was involved in that case, too."

Of all the things which gave Taneski away, police point to his in-depth coverage of a story which is being reported as one of the most bizarre events to have befallen the two-million strong mini-state.

The people of Kicevo live in fear after another butchered body has been found in the town. The corpse strongly resembles one discovered 20 kilometres outside Kicevo last year and there is a possibility that these monstrous murders are the work of a serial killer.

Both women were tortured and murdered in the same fashion, which rules out the possibility that this could have been done by two different people. The Ochrid serial killer murdered three people [in 2007] but his victims were all street-based money exchangers and his motive was to rob them.

The motive of the Kicevo monster remains unclear. Both women were friends and living in the same part of town. Police have a few suspects who they are interrogating.

The latest body was found in rubbish dump. It had been tied up with a piece of phone cable with which the woman had clearly been previously strangled.

The three women were aged between 65 and 56. Zivana Temelkoska, Ljubica Licoska, and Mitra Simjanoska were each beaten repeatedly and strangled with a phone cable. Temelkoska was murdered in May, Licoska in February last year and Simjanoska in 2005.

They shared a common background in being cleaners, a job which Taneski's deceased mother had held for years.

Each of the three bodies was discovered wrapped in plastic bags and dumped and discarded around Kicevo, a drab town southwest of Skopje with a population of fewer than 20,000. The fourth woman, aged 78, went missing in 2003, and her body has never been found.

It was the ostensibly mild-mannered journalist's intricate account of the murders which led to suspicion.

But what made it unmistakable was his inclusion of details police had chosen not to release. Unlike any of his journalist rivals, Taneski knew the type of phone chord the killer used as his "signature weapon" - reporting, without attribution, that the cord had been used to strangle as well as tie up the bodies of the women; and, even more brazenly, he speculated about the chronology of the murders.

"On May 18, just after the gruesome murder of Zivana Temelkoska, he called and pitched the story to us," said Goce Trpkovski, a reporter at the daily Nova Makedonija.

"He was very quietly spoken but also very persuasive. As a contributor we published his story as the main article on the crime pages the next day - under the headline 'A serial killer stalks Kicevo, too' - because the murders followed a series of killings in Ochrid, although they were nothing like this.

"To tell the truth, I didn't believe the story - almost nothing happens in Macedonia, and suddenly we have two serial killers stalking our tiny country in a matter of months."

What neither the staff at Utrinski Vesnik, another newspaper that he contributed to, or any of his many friends, could also believe, was how a man described as "unbelievably low-key and soft-natured" was capable of such crimes.

Yesterday, his estranged wife told Canal 5, a local TV station, that she had enjoyed "an ideal marriage" with Taneski for 31 years. "He was always quiet and gentle. The only time I ever saw him get aggressive was when we were living with his parents," she told the channel.

As police released more details yesterday, it did emerge there was also a darker side to Taneski's life. A large collection of pornographic videos and magazines was found in his summer house.

And, adding to the fact the victims were cleaners, as was Taneski's dead mother, police noted all three bore a striking resemblance to her. He is believed to have had a troubled relationship with his mother, one which worsened considerably after his father killed himself in 1990.

"There is obvious symbolism in the fact that his mother, like the victims, was a cleaner," said Antoni Novotni, a professor who heads the psychiatric clinic in Skopje. "This is pure speculation - as he was never my patient - but one explanation could be that he wanted to be caught by letting slip what he did in his articles," Novotni told the Guardian.

"Perhaps he saw it as a way of resolving his inner problems, and getting rid of the burden which came with killing these women."

Kevin

From P.S. Zollo:

Riding my bicycle along
Hollywood Boulevard today
I saw him in the crowd - noticed
him instantly. When we reached
each other, I said hi and asked
if he would mind if I took his
photo.
"You want my photo?"
Yeah, I said. There's nobody
like you.
"I know." And he smiled for me
-although his face was
evidently destroyed by something-
and his mouth reconstructed.

I asked him what happened.
"Shot," he said. "Shot in the
face." He motioned a gun
at close range being shot
directly into his face.

Andyou survived that? I asked.
"No," he said with a smile.
"I'm dead."
I apologized for what was
a stupid question, but it
was hard to fathom - gun shot-
close range - into his face. And
he lived.

So what happened? I asked.
Was it an accident, or did
someone mean to shoot you?

"I did it myself. Tried to kill
myself."

You did?
"Yeah."

Where?
"Arizona."

Phoenix?
"Tucson."

So tell me, how did it feel,
after you shot yourself in the
face - and you came to -
and realized you were not
dead?

"Agony. The worst agony
ever."

Man.
"Yeah."

What kind of gun?
"30-aught-six."

I was thunderstruck. I have
met and photographed many
people - who are featured in this
stream - humans who have
overcome amazing
adversity. Lydia, who was
burnt almost to death.
Ray, whose eye was gone.
Margaret, who weighed over
500 pounds.

But this. Man. And yet he
was smiling. I told him what
I thought:

God gives everyone a different
life - and some people get really
really hard lives.

"That's me. Doesn't get
much worse."

Told me he's on the street.
Homeless.

I asked him how bad it was
that he wanted to die.
"Bad. Really bad. The worse
kind."

Are you gonna try again?
"No. I tried once. That's enough."

Man.
Sometimes our lives
seem hard - unbearable even -
but then we meet Kevin.
And realize
again how lucky we are.
How hard some humans
have it.
Man.

And yet
he smiled. He smiled
for me. This man with his
face blown off - by his own
hand. And here he is -
in the sunshine, listening
to music, smiling.

Don't even know what else
to say about this. Guess
I've already said it.

Reminds me of Arseface, from Preacher, who was based on James Vance, of Judas Priest subliminal message suicide trial fame.

Kill Switch Engaged

With the upcoming advent of remote kill switches, there rises a number of questions regarding the loss of control over one's own devices. Bruce Schneier lays it down on Wired:

It used to be that just the entertainment industries wanted to control your computers -- and televisions and iPods and everything else -- to ensure that you didn't violate any copyright rules. But now everyone else wants to get their hooks into your gear.

OnStar will soon include the
ability for the police to shut off your engine remotely. Buses are getting the same capability, in case terrorists want to re-enact the movie Speed. The Pentagon wants a kill switch installed on airplanes,and is worried about potential enemies installing kill switches on their own equipment.

Microsoft is doing some of the most creative thinking along these lines, with something it's calling "Digital Manners Policies." According to its patent application, DMP-enabled devices would accept broadcast "orders" limiting capabilities. Cellphones could be remotely set to vibrate mode in restaurants and concert halls, and be turned off on airplanes and in hospitals. Cameras could be prohibited from taking pictures in locker rooms and museums, and recording equipment could be disabled in theaters. Professors finally could prevent students from texting one another during class.

The possibilities are endless, and very dangerous. Making this work involves building a nearly flawless hierarchical system of authority. That's a difficult security problem even in its simplest form. Distributing that system among a variety of different devices -- computers, phones, PDAs, cameras, recorders -- with different firmware and manufacturers, is even more difficult. Not to mention delegating different levels of authority to various agencies, enterprises, industries and individuals, and then enforcing the necessary safeguards.

Once we go down this path -- giving one device authority over other devices -- the security problems start piling up. Who has the authority to limit functionality of my devices, and how do they get that authority? What prevents them from abusing that power? Do I get the ability to override their limitations? In what circumstances, and how? Can they override my override?

How do we prevent this from being abused? Can a burglar, for example, enforce a "no photography" rule and prevent security cameras from working? Can the police enforce the same rule to avoid another Rodney King incident? Do the police get "superuser" devices that cannot be limited, and do they get "supercontroller" devices that can limit anything? How do we ensure that only they get them, and what do we do when the devices inevitably fall into the wrong hands?

It's comparatively easy to make this work in closed specialized systems -- OnStar, airplane avionics, military hardware -- but much more difficult in open-ended systems. If you think Microsoft's vision could possibly be securely designed, all you have to do is look at the dismal effectiveness of the various copy-protection and digital-rights-management systems we've seen over the years. That's a similar capabilities-enforcement mechanism, albeit simpler than these more general systems.

And that's the key to understanding this system. Don't be fooled by the scare stories of wireless devices on airplanes and in hospitals, or visions of a world where no one is yammering loudly on their cellphones in posh restaurants. This is really about media companies wanting to exert their control further over your electronics. They not only want to prevent you from surreptitiously recording movies and concerts, they want your new television to enforce good "manners" on your computer, and not allow it to record any programs. They want your iPod to politely refuse to copy music a computer other than your own. They want to enforce their legislated definition of manners: to control what you do and when you do it, and to charge you repeatedly for the privilege whenever possible.

"Digital Manners Policies" is a marketing term. Let's call this what it really is: Selective Device Jamming. It's not polite, it's dangerous. It won't make anyone more secure -- or more polite.

Famous Armed Sister

My sister can have a gun (legally)! Look out D.C. - don't mess with my sister!

The Supreme Court ruled that Americans have a right to own guns for self-defense and hunting, the justices' first major pronouncement on gun rights in U.S. history.

The 5-4 ruling struck down the District of Columbia's 32-year-old ban on handguns as incompatible with gun rights under the Second Amendment. The court had not conclusively interpreted the Second Amendment since its ratification in 1791. The amendment reads: "A well regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed."

The basic issue for the justices was whether the amendment protects an individual's right to own guns no matter what, or whether that right is somehow tied to service in a state militia.

Justice Antonin Scalia said that an individual right to bear arms is supported by "the historical narrative" both before and after the Second Amendment was adopted.

The Constitution does not permit "the absolute prohibition of handguns held and used for self-defense in the home," Scalia said. The court also struck down Washington's requirement that firearms be equipped with trigger locks or kept disassembled, but left intact the licensing of guns. In a dissent, Justice John Paul Stevens wrote that the majority "would have us believe that over 200 years ago, the Framers made a choice to limit the tools available to elected officials wishing to regulate civilian uses of weapons." He said such evidence "is nowhere to be found."

The capital's gun law was among the nation's strictest.

Dick Anthony Heller, an armed security guard, sued the District after it rejected his application to keep a handgun at his home for protection in the same Capitol Hill neighborhood as the court. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia ruled in Heller's favor and struck down Washington's handgun ban, saying the Constitution guarantees Americans the right to own guns and that a total prohibition on handguns is not compatible with that right.

The issue caused a split within the Bush administration. Vice President Dick Cheney supported the appeals court ruling, but others in the administration feared it could lead to the undoing of other gun regulations, including a federal law restricting sales of machine guns. Other laws keep felons from buying guns and provide for an instant background check. Scalia said nothing in Thursday's ruling should "cast doubt on long-standing prohibitions on the possession of firearms by felons or the mentally ill, or laws forbidding the carrying of firearms in sensitive places such as schools and government buildings."

In a concluding paragraph to the his 64-page opinion, Scalia said the justices in the majority "are aware of the problem of handgun violence in this country" and believe the Constitution "leaves the District of Columbia a variety of tools for combating that problem, including some measures regulating handguns." The law adopted by Washington's city council in 1976 bars residents from owning handguns unless they had one before the law took effect. Shotguns and rifles may be kept in homes, if they are registered, kept unloaded and either disassembled or equipped with trigger locks.

Opponents of the law have said it prevents residents from defending themselves. The Washington government says no one would be prosecuted for a gun law violation in cases of self-defense. The last Supreme Court ruling on the topic came in 1939 in U.S. v. Miller, which involved a sawed-off shotgun. Constitutional scholars disagree over what that case means but agree it did not squarely answer the question of individual versus collective rights. Forty-four state constitutions contain some form of gun rights, which are not affected by the court's consideration of Washington's restrictions.

Wednesday, June 25, 2008

The Stuff Of Nightmares

You didn't ask for it, but you got it...the Verne Troyer (Mini-Me) sex tape! Stab thine eyes!

Batmatics

If Gizmodo is running it from Wired, then it's certainly worth putting here...a wonderful article about the "world's greatest detective", hitting theaters this summer in IMAX, and without the overused computer effects of the day.
The Bat-plan was simple: Base-jump off one Hong Kong skyscraper, smash through the window of another, grab the Chinese crime boss, then hitch a drag chute to a passing C-130 cargo plane for a daring aerial escape. And on to Gotham! An instant, no-fuss extradition in the best tradition of American vigilantism. Just another working day for Batman and, presumably, just another feat of digital wizardry for the visual effects team. Except for one thing: Christopher Nolan, director of The Dark Knight, wanted to do it for real.

Which is a funny thing to want when you're making a lavish superhero sequel here in the heyday of the greenscreen. And certainly not an easy thing to get, 88 stories above a juddering megacity on the other side of the world. "They spent weeks in preproduction working out a way to hang the stuntman from one helicopter and have a second helicopter following him with the camera," says Wally Pfister, the movie's director of photography. Two choppers and a stuntman on a string — all to make a comic- book hero seem as credible on film as Frank Serpico or The French Connection's Popeye Doyle. All to make a comic-book movie speak the cinematic language of crime thrillers.

And not a moment too soon. While today's action heroes routinely come dressed in shades of the giddy synthetic (à la Spider-Man and Iron Man), movie fans have gorged on digital eye candy — and, perhaps fearing retinal diabetes, now they're cutting back (Speed Racer, anyone?). Still, gritty naturalism is no small leap for the spandex genre. It's a mood more identified with art noir and the prestige pic, the kind of cinema built to attract Oscars, not mass audiences.

Nolan wants to clothe that grim aesthetic in a cape and cowl — and then project it onto an enormous wraparound screen. He's the first Hollywood director to shoot key sequences of a major feature in Imax, the giant-screen film format still known mainly for whopping nature documentaries. For Nolan, reality beats the hell out of gee-whiz special effects. But keeping it real doesn't come cheap: The $180 million flick is Warner Bros.' biggest summer tent pole, and after Speed Racer's flameout, its only box-office hope.

The studio should take heart. Nolan has a cogent Theory of Applied Batmatics: Insist on reality — no effects, no tricks — up to the point where insisting on reality becomes unrealistic. Then, in postproduction, make what is necessarily unreal as real as possible. "Anything you notice as technology reminds you that you're in a movie theater," Nolan explains. "Even if you're trying to portray something fantastical and otherworldly, it's always about trying to achieve invisible manipulation." Especially, he adds, with Batman, "the most real of all the superheroes, who has no superpowers."

How "real" are we talking here? When Nolan unveiled a six-minute Knight prologue on Imax screens last December (a twisty bank heist with a jarring Joker reveal), it was clear that his cinematic vision owes more to director Sidney Lumet than golden-age DC comics. You can feel the tension of Lumet's 1975 Dog Day Afternoon and Michael Mann's 1995 drama, Heat.

Nolan had an ally in Pfister, his collaborator on every film since the 2000 sleeper hit Memento. "When I was a kid, that bank heist scene in Dog Day Afternoon was real," Pfister recalls. "It was that whole time around The French Connection and Bullitt and The Seven-Ups. That's what Chris was going for. Only we were shooting in Imax, this format where you're used to seeing beautiful sunsets and helicopter shots of gazelles running across mountainsides. Instead, we've got machine-gun fire and Heath Ledger."

Nolan's use of Imax is the natural fulfillment of an experiment he launched with Batman Begins in 2005. That film depicted Batman's dogged, bruising rise from angry rich kid to driven crime fighter, and it hinted at the consequences of embracing one's inner demon, even in the service of good. Begins ended with a warning: Batman has escalated the war. His presence ensures the rise of equally quixotic, equally obsessed adversaries. One of these leaves a calling card at murder scenes: a joker. Batman promises the police he'll look into it. In The Dark Knight, he does, and it looks right back at him, with the leering, paint-smeared face of the late Heath Ledger. Eight stories tall. Cruel reality mashed up with the comic-book carnivalesque — unvarnished, without the comforting buffer of f/x. In an Imax theater, your eyes can't wander off Nolan's enveloping canvas and can't easily dismiss what they're seeing as trickery. Maybe that's the most special effect of all.

The man who revived the Bat-franchise and saved it from nipple-suited frippery receives visitors in the Garage, his filmmaking sanctum. It's where he shot the first Imax test footage for Knight and began what his wife and producer, Emma Thomas, calls "the biggest home movie ever made." Technically, she's right: The Garage sits across from the couple's large but unpretentious Hollywood manse, where Nolan and Thomas are raising four young children.

When I arrive, Nolan has just finished editing a Joker scene. Ledger is frozen in a blur on three monitors. The actor, who accidentally overdosed on prescription medications in January at age 28, haunts The Dark Knight. The full effect on the film of his shocking death has yet to be gauged, but ever since news of the tragedy hit the wires, there's been reverent yet inescapably ghoulish chatter about a posthumous Oscar.

But all that is far from Nolan's mind today. Right now, it's about the work in front of him. "Ask Emma to look at the scene and make sure I didn't fuck it up," he tells his editor, Lee Smith, in a gentle English accent that suggests, to Yank ears, that Everything Is Under Control. As we step out into the toy-strewn, sun-striped courtyard separating Nolan's house from his workshop, I nearly trip over a battered effigy of the Tumbler, the tanklike Batmobile unveiled in Batman Begins. "At one point, that was remote control," Nolan sniffs. "Then it got left out in the rain." I detect a trace of disdain: A real Tumbler wouldn't fritz out after a little LA sprinkle.

Because these aren't toys, after all — not in Nolan's world: For the new movie, his designers built a full-size, working motorbike called the Batpod, which zips around on two fat spheroid wheels. According to star Christian Bale, it's a cruel mistress; only one stuntman managed to stay in the saddle. "If you ride it like a bike, you won't be riding it very long," the actor says, speaking from painful experience. But spills aside, Bale definitely caught Nolan's naturalism bug: When he heard that his stunt double, Buster Reeves, was prepping for an aerial shot atop the Sears Tower, he pulled rank. "I said to Buster, 'No you're not. You get to do a lot of fantastic stunts. You're not taking that one away from me.'"

"So we got an Imax shot of Christian Bale as Batman standing on top of the Sears Tower," Pfister says. "Here we are with our principal actor standing on the edge of one of the tallest buildings in the world. I think a lot of people will assume that's CGI." Perhaps, but when you see the shot (featured in the first trailer), your eye instinctively detects something different, something thrilling and rare: photographic reality.

Settling for anything less, Nolan feared, would send the Batman franchise back into camp and mummery. That's why he transported his hero to the very real city of Hong Kong. Unfortunately, the real world has its drawbacks. "The Chinese government was a nightmare in terms of filming stuff," Pfister sighs. "They wanted to limit the amount of helicopter activity over the city."

And Nolan needed helicopters. He especially wanted to minimize digital meddling in those high-altitude Imax sequences. His reasons were both aesthetic and practical: Imax film stock is enormous, roughly 10 times the size of 35-mm celluloid, and it soaks up a vast amount of visual information. Those dimensions are what make the image so rich and sharp, even spread over a screen the size of a blimp hangar. While conventional films are digitized at 2K resolution (2,000 pixels across), or 4K at most, adding visual effects to Imax footage requires digitizing each frame at up to 8K. In other words, the difficulty and expense of doing f/x rise exponentially with the size of the negative.

But even superheroes and movie directors sometimes have to compromise: In the end, Chinese authorities refused to budge, and the skyscraper jump was digitized. (But the C-130 preparing to snatch Batman into the sky? That's real.) "Sometimes you do end up replacing a filmed shot with visual effects," Nolan says. "And there's kind of a see-I-told-you-so among the effects guys. But if we had started out with that, it wouldn't have looked the same. Because we photographed something, we have a benchmark standard to hold to, even if we change things. Even the film's CG shots are rooted in some kind of photographic reality." For instance, Nolan adds a layer of actual human-generated camera-operating motions to digital effects shots — kind of like deliberately scratching the negative. He says it restores "the human element of choice: the little corrections, little imperfections. Certain uncertainties."

Certain uncertainties have always pocked Nolan's relationship with the Bat-franchise. Even in 2005, after his revisionist reboot proved successful, the director wasn't sure he was up for a sequel. He was making The Prestige, an art-house thriller about rival magicians in 19th-century London (which, significantly, pits technology against old-fashioned sleight of hand). He was moving on. But there was one small problem with leaving Batman behind: He knew how he wanted it all to end. He had something Godfather-ish in mind, a saga of dark doubles and transfiguration — big, dense, and novelistic.

It would involve not only Batman's archnemesis, the Joker, but also Harvey Dent (Thank You For Smoking's Aaron Eckhart) as a crusading Gotham City DA destined to become scarred, schizoid villain Two-Face. Nominal allies, Wayne and Dent would vie for the affections of Wayne's longtime love, assistant DA Rachel Dawes (Maggie Gyllenhaal, who replaces Batman Begins' Katie Holmes). And Dent's tragic transmogrification into criminal half-man would mirror Wayne's disappearance into his Batman persona. The director wasn't interested in plumbing the murky origins of the Joker himself — the Clown Prince is more a Loki-like force of chaos. "He's like the shark in Jaws," Nolan explains. "The Joker cuts through the film, he's incredibly important, but he's not a guy with a backstory. He's a wild card."

It was an ambitious tale, and Nolan needed a canvas to match, a format that could sweep fans off their feet. Imax was his best bet. Since the late 1960s, the Canadian company has specialized in large-format filmmaking and projection. Its screens are the biggest on offer, and their vertiginous 1.43:1 aspect ratio is uniquely suited to tales set on dizzying rooftops. "It's like replicating that childhood experience of moviegoing," Thomas says. "It's harder to be taken out of your own world as a grown-up. You need an even bigger screen."

Of course, most people will ultimately see Knight on ordinary multiplex screens. The scenes shot in Imax — the bank heist and Hong Kong escape, all the aerial shots, a bang-up armored car chase, and the final confrontation with the Joker — will have to be adjusted to the usual 2.40:1 aspect ratio. But because they're compressed from the sumptuous Imax negative, those sequences will still retain a special visual richness.

Pfister admits that even in an Imax theater, many viewers, wowed by the sheer size, might miss the finer photographic distinctions. But they'll feel them. "It's more of a visceral thing," he explains, adding that Nolan's longer, calmer cuts are designed to let viewers scan the huge Imax screen for detail — a refreshing change after years of synapse-snapping action-movie flash-cuts. "You can see something way off on the horizon," Pfister says. "You can see a little glint of light, a reflection in Batman's eye. You can't see it in a conventional theater. And you definitely can't see it on a plasma screen at home."

Which is good news for studios trying to lure viewers back to the box office. Without a crane or David Copperfield, it's impossible to pirate "the Imax experience" for private viewing. It also bodes well for the Imax Corporation, which two years ago saw its stock plummet after an SEC inquiry into its accounting practices. The company has since bounced back, signing deals with theater chains AMC and Regal to expand beyond its current network of 300 theaters in 40 countries. On July 18, Warner Bros. will roll out Knight on almost 100 of those screens and on some 4,000 traditional ones. (The studio has shown plenty of blockbusters on Imax screens before, but those films were shot conventionally and later digitally adapted for the format.)

Of course, shooting on the biggest negative in town isn't easy. The cameras, which Pfister's crew had to lug up to rooftops and onto helicopters, weighed over 60 pounds each, and their bulk made them awkward to maneuver. One crushed its mount. "On a fast tilt-down, the camera just takes you with it," Pfister says. Add to that the fact that Imax film is more than three times as expensive as 35-mm, that there's only one lab in the world able to process it, and that the cameras have to be reloaded after three minutes of shooting. "Chris said, 'It's just like when we were kids and shooting on Super 8!'" Pfister recalls. "You get a three-minute load, and then it takes five days to get your film back.'"

Imax cameras are also considerably louder than traditional 35-mm cameras, making it difficult to harvest the environmental, on-set sound Nolan prefers. Movies and television shows often dub dialog after principal photography is over, since the sound recorded by the boom and body mics can prove unusable. Nolan would rather fix it while everyone's still on the set. He hates to loop. "I just think separating the voice from the face and the body is very tricky," he explains. It is, after all, blatantly unreal.

The ker-pow! of Imax rests on the simple rule that bigger and brighter is better. And the negative used by Imax cameras is huge: 65 mm across, or about the width of an iPod. The additional surface area allows more data to be recorded, resulting in lush, detailed, hi-def images that loom large onscreen. (That hi-def effect is expensive and the cameras are gluttons with it, slurping up 6 feet of stock per second.) Better still, in 2-D Imax theaters, two xenon bulbs outshine the standard single projection light. The result is a brighter image, with angelic whites that make the other colors pop. And don't forget the giant 76 x 98 foot screen — two billboards long and eight stories high. Because it runs wall to wall and floor to ceiling, the image fills viewers' peripheral vision, immersing them in the onscreen action.

So did the director get everything he needed from Ledger before his death? He says yes: Ledger nailed it in principal photography. Thomas adds, "Everything you see onscreen is his performance." (In other words, there'll be no clunky digital resurrection, aural or visual, no morbid echoes of Oliver Reed's posthumous performance in Gladiator.) Besides, Nolan doesn't believe in bringing an actor back six months later and expecting him to re-create the nuances of a character, any more than he believes a computer can re-create the quality of human camera work on its own.

"Anything that's even vaguely funny you just can't reproduce. When there's a hint of irony or comedy ... Well, I don't make comedies, per se, but" — he chuckles — "at least I think my films are funny. Nobody else seems to think so, though."

It's a problem Nolan shares with Batman's greasepainted nemesis — and perhaps a harbinger of marketing challenges to come. Naturally, no one's expected to laugh at the Joker's pranks, but will audiences even be able to look at him? How will they react to these frightening final images of Ledger-the-actor? His death is, in a way, the ultimate case of reality intruding on fantasy. Even before tragedy struck, Nolan was spooked by the character Ledger created. "I remember Heath calling up while I was working on the script and talking about ventriloquist's dummies, about having a voice that was high and low, and I'm on the other end going, 'Uh ... yeah.' It sounded insane, and not necessarily in the right way. But when he performed it, I was like, 'OK, I see.'"

Nolan could be describing The Dark Knight itself, this rough comic-book beast he's conjured into our workaday world. "I don't know what this thing is, exactly," he says, "but I know it's what I wanted." He pauses. "Be careful what you wish for!" He laughs again — perhaps a little nervously. It's the first, tiny hint I've seen of a certain uncertainty.

As The Building Turns

Italian architect David Fisher is building his first skyscraper, the Dynamic Tower, and it happens to be one of the most ambitious construction plans since the Pyramid of Khufu.

Every floor of the 80-story self-powered building rotates, and nearly the entire structure of the $700 million building is pre-fabricated. Fisher was inspired to design the Dynamic Tower during a visit to a friend's top-floor Midtown Manhattan apartment. "I had a view of the Hudson River and East River at the same time, it was beautiful and I wanted to make that feeling accessible to more people." He loves the idea of seeing the sun rise and set in the same room, and considers the building to be four-dimensional. "Time is always changing the shape of the building."

The rotation takes up to 3 hours, and gets power from photovoltaic solar cells and 79 wind turbines, one located between each floor. The system is meant to create enough energy to power to the entire tower. According to Fisher, two of these $700 million futuristic scrapers are planned so far, one each in Dubai and Moscow. Construction on the Dynamic Tower will be unlike anything that preceded it. The only part of the tower built on site will be the skinny center core. It is strong enough to hold the floors in place, and will contain the building's elevators, which transport people and cars right to their door. Each floor will be made piece by piece in a factory in Italy—a throwback to Fisher's previous life in prefabricated bathroom design—and placed onto the core using a lift system. With this method, each story is completed in about six days. By comparison, traditional ground-up methods can take six weeks per floor.

Groundbreaking for Dynamic Towers in Dubai and Moscow is expected to happen in the fall, with construction reaching completion by the end of 2010. If you're game—and incredibly rich—you can sign up now for a villa or office space. The going rate is $3000/sq foot.

Ph070 H4x0r

The German translation may be a little wonky, but the idea is super cool. Julius Von Bismarck has given us the chance to hack your photos in realtime.

"The image fulgurator is a device for physical manipulation of photographs. The intervention will take place, while the photo is exposed, without the photographer can say something like this. The change will be for him only in retrospect visible in the photo. As long as a flash is used, the principle on each camera or environment applicable. Each photos, any photographer, from the object to which the Fulgurator is addressed, which is affected by the manipulation. This can be unnoticed visual information in the images of other einschleusen. The Fulgurator works with a kind of feedback lightning projection, with which it is possible, an image on an object to project exactly the same time, the object photographed by someone else. This procedure is very inconspicuous, since it takes place within a few milliseconds."

Technically, the Image Fulgurator classical works like a camera, though in reverse. In a normal camera, the light reflected from an object is projected via the lens onto the film. In the Image Fulgurator, this process is exactly the opposite: instead of an unexposed film, an exposed and developed roll of slide film is loaded into the camera and behind it, a flash. When the flash goes off, the image is projected from the film via the lens onto the object.

Due to the similarity of the two processes, the Fulgurator looks like a conventional reflex camera. As soon as the built-in sensor registers a flash somewhere nearby, the flash projection is triggered. Hence the projection can be synchronized to the exact moment of exposure of all other cameras in its immediate vicinity. Via a screen (ground glass), it is possible to focus the projection and to position it on the targeted object.

The first test of an image fulguration in public: an intervention at the Checkpoint Charlie in Berlin (former border of east and west Germany) The target of the manipulation was the famous "YOU ARE ENTERING THE AMERICAN SECTOR" - sign. The manipulation created a link from the former East / West border to the US / Mexican border in order to reimagine the dramatic situation at worldwide borders today. The message was addressed to the tourists on location, that can travel easily over every border without risking there life.

the flash projection of the Fulgurators visualized a temporal link in the year 1933, the year of the Reichstag fire

Reverse Cowgirl

I echo her sentiments...and her unabashed candor looking at sex. Lose yourself there as well as your inhibitions. And if you don't believe me, how about some esteemed praise:

"... Susannah Breslin's blog supplies a rare commodity online: smart writing about sex and sexuality," The 2008 Top 25 Blogs--Time.com

A Best Blog of 2007 That (Maybe) You Aren't Reading--Rex Sorgatz

"I highly recommend regular visits to the Reverse Cowgirl."--About.com

"Frank, insightful, fun..."--Village Voice

"It's not a porn site."--MSNBC.com

Tuesday, June 24, 2008

Shaq Fu!

Shaquille O’Neal will lose his special deputy’s badge in Maricopa County because of language he used in a video on an internet gossip site that mocks former teammate Kobe Bryant. Boo-hoo.

Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio said the use of a racially derogatory word and other foul language left him no choice. Arpaio made Shaq a special deputy in 2006 and promoted him to colonel of his largely ceremonial posse later that year.

“I want his two badges back, because if any one of my deputies did something like this, they’re fired. I don’t condone this type of racial conduct.”

“I was freestyling. That’s all. It was all done in fun. Nothing serious whatsoever,” O’Neal said.

Arpaio, who describes himself as “America’s Toughest Sheriff” and is best known for feeding jail inmates green bologna, clothing them in pink underwear, and making them work on chain gangs, said he didn’t expect his actions would teach Shaq a lesson. But he hoped he learns that as a role model who wants to someday be a full-time sheriff, he needs to know his words matter. Thanks, Sheriff Manners!

Drug Rugs

Drug traffickers in China's far west are smuggling heroin into the country woven into carpets imported from Afghanistan and Pakistan, giving an entirely new meaning to the term "roll one up and smoke it".

Customs officials in Xinjiang, which borders both countries, have seized more than 30 carpets containing some 110 lbs of heroin in the last several months. Traffickers first inject heroin into plastic tubes of 1-2 mm diameter and wrap them with colorful natural or synthetic fibers to make them look like yarn. They then weave them into the carpet along with normal yarn. The new smuggling method was making detection harder as equipment normally used by customs' officers was not up to the task, the newspaper added.

While drug smuggling into China from the Golden Triangle in Southeast Asia -- including Laos, Myanmar and Thailand -- had fallen, drug trafficking was on the rise from the Golden Crescent, which includes Afghanistan and Pakistan. Drugs smuggled into China are in turn sent to other destinations. Heroin and cocaine usually go to Australia and Europe, while new drugs such as Ecstasy are more likely to be smuggled into South Korea and Japan. Rugs, coincidentally, are sold in all these countries.



what the kids call a drug rug: that natty poncho from TJ

Great Ball Of China

The recent Sichuan Earthquake in China was so intense, tremors were felt all the way over in the Taipei 101 building in Taiwan...a whole eight minutes after the quake originated. What's interesting about the 101 is that it has a gigantic suspended tuned mass damper, or hanging ball, which takes up four stories and works like this to prevent the building from falling over and tragically crushing office workers.

This 730 ton sphere looks intimidating when still, but wait until you see it in motion during the earthquake.

This ginormous ball (of which the soon to be completed world's tallest building Burj Dubai has nine) was installed in-place from 41 discrete steel plates because the combined weight of 730 tons would have been too heavy to lift by crane. The people even came up with a nickname for it: the Damper Baby. The architects were forced to install it because of high winds and the fact that the Taipei 101 is only 600 feet from a fault line.


In order to get up to the observation floor where you can see the top of the ball, you have to ride in the world's fastest elevator.

Land Of Opportunity

Money laundering? Rappers? Drug money? Bling? How could these worlds possibly collide? Or collapse?

The businessman known in the hip-hop world as "Jacob the Jeweler" was sentenced Tuesday to 2 1/2 years in federal prison for lying to investigators looking into a multi-state drug ring. Shocker. AKA Jacob Arabov, the jeweler pleaded guilty in October to falsifying records and giving false statements as part of a deal with federal prosecutors. The judge also ordered the Russian immigrant to pay a $50,000 fine and to make a $2 million forfeiture payment to the government.

"I feel ashamed that I broke the laws of this country, a country that has been so good for me," Arabov said. "I will carry this shame for the rest of my life."

Arabov was arrested in 2006 at his Manhattan jewelry shop. Authorities accused him and others of conspiring to launder about $270 million in drug profits. Prosecutors eventually dropped the money laundering charges in the plea deal.

Authorities accused Arabov and others of conspiring to launder drug profits for the "Black Mafia Family," a ring that operated out of the Detroit area beginning in the early 1990s. The seven-year investigation resulted in the indictments of Arabov and at least 41 other people, federal authorities say. They say about 1,100 pounds of cocaine and $19 million in cash and other assets were seized beginning in 2000 - typical for a rap party.

Arabov, also known as the "King of Bling," became popular among hip-hop and R&B artists in the mid-1990s. He launched a line of religious-themed jewelry with Kanye West, and manufactured Lil' Kim's line of Royalty watches.

Arabov will report to prison January 15, likely making new clients.



this is so ugly, it's maker deserves jail time

Suicide In C Sharp

One performance only, by musicians magicians Barry and Stuart.

Monday, June 23, 2008

Black Cocaine God

Police say a man named God was arrested near a Tampa church for selling cocaine. Authorities began investigating God Lucky Howard in April, and he was arrested on Saturday. Police say he sold the cocaine to undercover detectives in his neighborhood. When officers searched his home, they reported finding another 22 grams of cocaine and a scale.

Jail records show Howard was charged with several counts drug possession and distribution, which include increased charges for being within 1,000 feet of a church, a school and public housing. He was also charged with having an awesome name.

He was being held on a bond of $86,500 - about right for a God of that stature. Florida, FTW.

(I was planning on my 1300th post to be titled Black Cocaine God, and I'm thrilled beyond description that, through some strange coincidence, there happened to be a story in the news that could remotely fit. Some things are just meant to be.)

Nude

Sick? But How?

I refuse to believe that Amy Winehouse could have early stage emphysema. She's so vibrant...

Take That, Megan Fox!

Friend of MAGNA and IOVUF, Miss Leah D'Emilio got some serious cred for herself and Mahalo Daily. And she didn't even need to get undressed like some of the other Women Of The Web...

Super Cable

More incredible reviews from Amazon, this time for the butch (and sickly overpriced at $500) Denon AKDL1 Dedicated Link Cable.

By G. P. (Phoenix, AZ)
If I could use a rusty boxcutter to carve a new orifice in my body that's compatible with this link cable, I would already be doing it. I can just imagine the pure musical goodness that would flow through this cable into the wound and fill me completely -- like white, holy light. Holding this cable in my hands actually makes me feel that much closer to the Lord Jesus Christ. I only make $6.25/hr at Jack In The Box, but I saved up for three months so I could have this cable. It sits in a shrine I constructed next to my futon in Mother's basement.

I only gave it four stars in my review because I can't find music that is worthy enough to flow through this utterly perfect interconnect.

By owlberg (Seattle, WA USA)
Previously, the Denon AKDL1 Dedicated Link Cable could only be obtained either by prescription or via the black market. But now, suddenly everything remains exactly the same. That fact, by itself, should add some much-needed gravitas to the scholarly debate on this controversial and highly irrelevant topic.

Nevertheless and notwithstanding, as with any first automobile purchase, all potential buyers should first consult a spiritual advisor BEFORE taking the Denon AKDL1 intravenously for recreational purposes. I cannot stress this highly. At ALL.

While well-tolerated in most domesticated animals, the Denon AKDL1 is not for everybody. Side effects may include headache, nausea, trouble swallowing, disorientation, incontinence, explosive diarrhoea, spontaneous combustion, menopause, chronic erogenous dissonance (CED), lethargy, gluttony, avarice, death, spontaneous mutation, gas, spontaneous gas, spontaneous lethargic gas (SLG), gout, the vapors, explosive spontaneous stupidity (ESS), death, Larry Fine Syndrome (LFS), blurred vision, post-nasal death (PND), spontaneous explosive hubris (SEH), goiter, weeping buboes, and dry mouth.

I feel confident in stating that most users will find the Denon AKDL1...

By Cap'n Stoob "Stoob" (USA)
I bought this cable because Morgort the Mighty says he uses a $350 audio cable to strangle HIS enemies and he isn't better than I am just because he wears a belt of Fire Giant strength! I ordered this cable and it arrived on the back of a pegasus (FedExian the Winged Messenger) within 3 moons. Excellent! As an 8th level Psionic Warrior, I was eager to hop into the Astral Plane and see what kind of damage this baby could inflict against astral filchers!

Well...it was OK, but this thing really needs a + THREE enchantment instead of only +2. See, it was forged on the material plane, so it becomes only +1 in the Astral Plane and that's just not enough to overcome the damage reduction of the Githyanki I'm running into all the time. It's a nice garrote, but tell me if you can find a neck on an astral ghost and I'll give you 50 gold pieces for the info! It works just fine on the Material Plane, but who cares about that? If I want to whip someone with a cable on my OWN plane, I'll just use a mighty whip +4!

The bard Amazon sings constantly of this cable, supposedly forged on Mt. Gulfwarden by the dwarves of Denon...but I think it's just a Calimshan knockoff made from melted-down Lubaskan coppper pennies and old Athabascan smallclothing...In any case, it's at least stylish and good for astral encounters up to CR 6. But for the discriminating warrior, you're better off with a flaming greatsword or a ghost touch halberd.

The worst part is when I went over to Morgort's yurt the other day and he showed me all his Astral trophies he keeps in a pocket dimension...color me GREEN with envy! All he kept saying was, "Oh, how's that cable of YOURS doing? "

ARRRRRRRRRRRRGH

By R. Blais (Fernley, NV USA)
I accidentally dropped one end of my Denon cable into a glass of Tuscan whole milk I was drinking. Later when I finished my milk (yeah, I still drank it; should I not have done that?), my right arm (lost in an accident in 1987) spontaneously grew back.

Is that normal?


(awesome meme callback!)

By Patrick Carroll (Atlanta, GA USA)
I installed one of these cables between my gigabit ethernet switch and my Canon Pixma 6700 color printer. I know it's not a sanctioned use, but I was looking for the ultimate in speed and color fidelity. I'm freaky that way.

The first time I downloaded a picture to the printer over this cable, the bits moved so fast the printer collapsed into a naked singularity, right there in my office.

Since then, I can't find the cat, and my entire set of VAX/VMS 4.7 documentation (DEC Will Rise Again!) (Mmmmm, orangey!) has gone missing.

Please, for the love of God, please, do not use these cables! The very existence of Earth may depend on your decision!

Monster vs. Monster 2

Courtney Hole Love must be pushing for a part in Fright Night 3. Someone should let her know it's not being made...


And for those compelled to revisit the cult movie, here's a little drinking game to liven it up.

Drink every time:

1. Anyone turns into a vampire, bat, wolf, etc . . .

2. Anyone gets bitten

3. Anyone says "Fright Night"

4. A method of hurting a vampire is shown or mentioned

5. "Evil" Ed giggles or cackles

6. Jerry is shown enjoying some fresh fruit

7. Anyone is referred to as being a "young" person

AND IF YOU REALLY WANT TO GET WASTED...Anytime anyone says "Peter Vincent"

Chapter Four

It is a Monday morning, and so there is another chapter ready in the saga of His Words - Not Mine.

This week puts another twist in our tale and also takes a huge step forward in opening up the plot. Read it. Read it now. Go on...I'll wait.