Quartz City

Kottke checks critic Jim Emerson’s “102 Movies You Must See Before…” list and I’m compelled to do the same. I’ve marked ones I’ve seen with an asterisk

* 2001: A Space Odyssey
The 400 Blows
* 8 1/2
Aguirre, the Wrath of God
* Alien
* All About Eve
* Annie Hall
* Apocalypse Now
* Bambi
The Battleship Potemkin
* The Best Years of Our Lives
* The Big Red One
The Bicycle Thief
* The Big Sleep
* Blade Runner
* Blowup
* Blue Velvet
* Bonnie and Clyde
Breathless
* Bringing Up Baby
* Carrie
* Casablanca
* Un Chien Andalou
* Children of Paradise / Les Enfants du Paradis
* Chinatown
* Citizen Kane
* A Clockwork Orange
* The Crying Game
* The Day the Earth Stood Still
Days of Heaven
* Dirty Harry
The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie
* Do the Right Thing
La Dolce Vita
* Double Indemnity
* Dr. Strangelove
* Duck Soup
* E.T. — The Extra-Terrestrial
* Easy Rider
* The Empire Strikes Back
* The Exorcist
* Fargo
* Fight Club
* Frankenstein
* The General
* The Godfather, The Godfather, Part II
* Gone With the Wind
* GoodFellas
* The Graduate
* Halloween
* A Hard Day’s Night
Intolerance
It’s a Gift
* It’s a Wonderful Life
* Jaws
The Lady Eve
* Lawrence of Arabia
* M
* Mad Max 2 / The Road Warrior
* The Maltese Falcon
* The Manchurian Candidate
Metropolis
Modern Times
* Monty Python and the Holy Grail
Nashville
The Night of the Hunter
* Night of the Living Dead
* North by Northwest
* Nosferatu
On the Waterfront
* Once Upon a Time in the West
Out of the Past
Persona
* Pink Flamingos
* Psycho
* Pulp Fiction
* Rashomon
* Rear Window
Rebel Without a Cause
Red River
Repulsion
* The Rules of the Game
* Scarface
* The Scarlet Empress
* Schindler’s List
The Searchers
* The Seven Samurai
* Singin’ in the Rain
* Some Like It Hot
* A Star Is Born
* A Streetcar Named Desire
* Sunset Boulevard
* Taxi Driver
* The Third Man
Tokyo Story
* Touch of Evil
* The Treasure of the Sierra Madre
Trouble in Paradise
Vertigo
* West Side Story
* The Wild Bunch
* The Wizard of Oz

77 - and of those 77, I’ve seen 47 in an actual theater. Much better than I would have suspected for these types of definitive lists you run across. Sadly, I’ve tried to watch Metropolis three times (once with the Giorgio Moroder version and twice with the original) and have fallen asleep each time.

Everyone is talking about the 20th anniversary of the Chernobyl disaster, but I had no idea that it was also the 50th birthday of the lowly and omnipresent Shipping Container…

It may not be printed in red on your calendar, but April 26 is an important date in economic history. Fifty years ago, the Ideal-X, a war-surplus oil tanker with a steel frame welded above its deck, loaded 58 aluminium containers at a dock in Newark, New Jersey. Five days later, the ship steamed into Houston, Texas, where trucks took on the metal boxes and carried them to their destinations.

This was the beginning of the container revolution. By dramatically lowering freight costs, the container transformed economic geography. Some of the world’s great ports - London and Liverpool, New York and San Francisco - saw their bustling waterfronts decay as the maritime industry decamped to new locations with room to handle containers and transport links to move them in and out. Manufacturers, no longer tied to the waterfront to reduce shipping costs, moved away from city centres, decimating traditional industrial districts. Eventually, production moved much farther afield, to places such as South Korea and China, which took advantage of cheap, reliable transportation to make goods that could not have been exported profitably before containerisation.

Via Telstar Logistics, who also just created the “Big Metal Box” Flickr group for “photos of cargo containers, container terminals, container ships, and container-based architecture.”

One last thing, it’s also Captain Sensible’s birthday!

This week’s squid story is about the firefly squid, but I’m still trying to get my head around this picture:

I think I’ll need to visit the firefly squid museum in Namerikawa.

Oskar Fischinger’s film Radio Dynamics

Colliding black holes as visualized at NASA

This is the most cheerful news item I’ve read all week…

Cat army annihilates destructive rats
(China Daily)
Updated: 2006-04-12 09:36
A group of villagers recently prepared a sumptuous fish banquet for more than 200 cats to thank them for eradicating rats from their farmland.

Yangmei villagers in Sanjiang Township of Xinhui District in the city of Jiangmen, Guangdong Province, are expecting a good harvest this year thanks to the hard-working cats.

The village committee spent more than 12,000 yuan (US$1,500) to buy more than 200 cats, which they released onto farmland to help wipe out the rat problem.

Sanjiang Village has 86.67 hectares of rice fields and 13.33 hectares of other crops and suffered from a rat infestation after most of the snakes were caught and slaughtered by local villagers in previous years.

Yeah, it’s been linked to by everyone, but Jason Scott’s “The Great Failure of Wikipedia” is a great piece of internet sociology that supersedes the usual knee-jerk “gee, online people suck” that you see on message boards, mailing lists, newsgroups, etc.

I’m sad that Hal the coyote didn’t make it, but apparently his demise wasn’t altogether unexpected. I really want to watch Chico, The Misunderstood Coyote if I knew where the hell I could find a copy.

Meanwhile, Reggie the alligator should be waking up soon. He’s already got his blog going.

James writes…

Today is a great day! Today I received for my father his Master’s degree in music from the University of California at Irvine. I have to blog & run, but I’ll be back to post more details tonight.

The Register article is online now…

IRVINE - It was Gregory Coleman’s dying wish.

On the day he died, Coleman, his body tumor-ridden, could barely scratch out his initials on a letter asking UC Irvine to award him a master of fine arts degree in music.

He died from cancer in September just a few classes short of completing the curriculum.

“The last thing I told him that day was, ‘You will get this degree,’” said his son, James Coleman. “I promised him that. All I did was help him speak beyond the grave.”

Tuesday, UC Irvine awarded Coleman the diploma his father earned. University officials granted the master of fine arts degree in guitar after a several-month process of determining that Gregory Coleman’s professional and teaching career in classical music had satisfied any missing degree requirements.

His CD “Isla California” met the degree’s final requirement of composition and was called an “exceptional accomplishment.” Coleman’s degree is only one of five that the university has awarded after a student’s death.

“Getting this degree emphasizes the importance of formal education that was so vital to my father,” Coleman said. “When he taught guitar, he wasn’t just teaching music – it was about teaching life.”

James Coleman, 33, began his quest for his father’s degree shortly after he died. Almost like a lawyer, he put together evidence of his father’s work and accomplishments.

Ron Purcell, director of the International Guitar Research Archive at Cal State Northridge, entered Coleman as one of the pioneers of American guitar. He cited “Isla California” in which Coleman plays traditional music from the rancho era, as an example of the preservation of California’s historical music.

Associate Dean Colleen Reardon, also a musician, played a key role in Coleman’s quest. She demonstrated that Coleman’s numerous performances, his CDs and the extra classes he took were part of his “intellectual curiosity.” The music department’s unanimous support sealed the case.

“This was a long process,” said Fernandez. “In the end, this degree has more value - it was earned. It’s so nice to give that satisfaction and closure to the family. He was one of the best. He was agile, expressive and totally committed.”

Coleman’s battle with melanoma began 18 years ago when a student spotted a mole on his neck. Doctors removed it, and for 15 years he was symptom-free. In January 2003, doctors found eight tumors in his body. Coleman suspended his studies at UCI to go through intensive chemotherapy and radiation therapy.

Mark Westling, Coleman’s friend and student of 30 years, played “Romanza” for him the day he died.

“He was an extremely elegant and passionate player,” said Westling. “This is a wonderful closure for Greg. A fitting award to an accomplished musician and someone who loved education.”

Ladies and gentlemen I give you the greatest pork quesadilla in the greater Los Angeles area. Yes it’s that good.

Get it at:
Casita Taco
405 N. Victory Blvd.
Burbank, CA 91401
(818) 848-3242

That is all…

So what to make of this? Apple watchers are in a tizzy, but I can’t help but think this is a good thing. A couple of points:

1. For the people who use Macs 95% of the time but have to use Windows for one specific task. Last year I worked at a place where the data interchange standards were terrible… One of the processors wrote their own non-standard encrypted file transfer app that was Windows-only. Another web site used IE-only ASP. Another used Windows-only VPN software, etc. etc. Admittedly, Darwine could be a simpler answer for them.

2. Microsoft owns Virtual PC. Bundling BootCamp into the next OS is a moderate-level way for Apple to go “nyah nyah.”

3. Hard to believe, (but I believe that this is the most important) in my consulting travels I still encounter people (end users AND corporate IT guys) who ask me if Macs can run Windows. They don’t read tech blogs, argue about file systems, or have an opinion on open source software - they only know Windows.