Quartz City

Matt M. pokes a stick at the movie Chinatown and uncovers the horror movie that lies within.

Not only is Cross a crook who manipulates civic policy, potentially endangering hundreds with flood; not only does he order murders as casually as you might step on an ant. He steals life from others to prolong his own. When he says that he wants The Future, he’s not just talking about the future of water in the city or his personal fortunes. He is talking capital T, capital F The Future. “How many years have I got? She’s mine, too,” he tells his daughter, Evelyn of his granddaughter Katherine.

But Katherine Mulwray isn’t just his granddaughter. She’s his daughter, too. Evelyn Cross Mulwray isn’t only Katherine’s mother, but she’s her sister. Is this adding up? Cross slept with his daughter to give birth to another daughter that is more than half of himself (assuming that you can call your child half your own). And his plan is to sire another child who is more than three quarters himself. Cross commits monstrous, perverse acts in order to extend his power and his grasp of the future. Not only will he live through his daughter, but his granddaughter and even his great granddaughter, who are more and more him with every generation.

Cross is a vampire in the literal sense of the word, but worse than that, he’s a vampire that preys upon his own children, sundering taboos and any consideration but his own survival as he does so.

And in order for evil to survive, good has to be quietly vanquished. Cross extinguishes hope with every footstep. He is impervious to the law, even when Gittes finds out the truth. What’s more, Cross acts with impunity, all but kidnapping the only innocent being in the story right under the noses of the police and a powerless Gittes. What’s more, Gittes has to take it. He has to swim in that water, and in order to do so, it’s easier to let evil triumph. The Bad Guys win, and not in a “zombies swarm all over the wreckage” kind of way. It’s a very personal, intimate kind of devastation that Cross wreaks. He is able to take the fight out of Gittes (whose been shown to be more than capable of manipulating any situation) with seemingly no effort.

Happy Halloween Los Angeles!

• Some intimate details on the Google YouTube Deal - Blog Maverick
  (tags: blog google video music media copyright news youtube)

(Credit to Masonic Boom for finding this one first before I got to Astronomy Picture Of The Day in my feed reader.)

The album cover for Spiritualized’s Lazer Guided Melodies

The dark nebula SH2-136

Dear Apple Customer,

*Loads FedEx tracking page. Obsessively hits “reload.” Repeats*

• Neighboroo
  Swoonworthy Google Map mash-up demographic data visualization
  (tags: data visualization reference housing demographics politics maps geography google)
• The elephant and the event horizon
  What happens when you throw an elephant in a black hole
  (tags: physics astronomy)

Ladies and gentlemen, the aftermath of the highest scoring game of Scrabble ever:

New records for most points in a game by one player (830), the most total points in a game (1,320), and the most points on a single turn (365 for “QUIXOTRY”).

Make up your own “Author X meets Cultural Critic Y” combinations here, because things are just too strange…

• Classified nuclear weapons info from Los Alamos turns up in a trailer park drug bust.
• The NSA building that contains the U.S. Army’s counterintelligence unit burns down in a fire.
• Bush II buys up 100,000 acres of land in Paraguay.
• The Pope may abolish Limbo.
• Metal salvagers break into an abandoned missile silo in Russia and find the shaft filled with money.
• Two men in Pennsylvania are busted for attempting to enter a nuclear power plant with a half-million in cash.
• Lockheed Martin wins a contract to build a remote control Nano Air Vehicle the size of a maple tree seed.

These “Warning Signs for Tomorrow” might be a little more urgent and key now:

• Microsimulation of road traffic
  It’s SimTraffic with this traffic modeling java applet
  (tags: urban.planning animation transportation auto)

I was on Charles Phoenix’s whirlwind Los Angeles tour back in March. Apparently someone videoed the event and edited the whole works into a 15 minute overview. In keeping with the Disneyland theme, I suppose you can call it “The Disneyland Tour Of Los Angeles via SuperSpeed Tunnel.”

[youtube]kIaBThV1ekc[/youtube]

• macminicolo Mac Mini colocation
  Mac Mini server colocation facility
  (tags: mac.os.x colocation)