Month: January 2003

Take your design artists out back and shoot them

Awhile back I blogged about the decline of magazine cover design. Today it’s the miserable state of DVD covers – specifically the awful cover for the American DVD of 24 Hour Party People. What the HELL is up with this?

24hour-usdvd

Yuck yuck yuck! Who the hell at MGM decided that a movie about a conceded nut-job record label impresario needed a murky and poorly designed generic “rave” cover? American ravers aren’t really going to be into it because half the movie is centered on Joy Division and the whole post-punk scene. OK, the other half is about the Happy Mondays (who I’d call more Benny Hill than rave), but this has to be the worst case of a cover having nothing to do with the movie.

The UK DVD is a little bit better. At least there’s a picture of the cast…

24hr-ukdvd

What’s funny is that the soundtrack album has the best cover of all. Very striking design that evokes Factory Records’ whole look.

24hr-usalbum

In general DVD covers seem to be afterthoughts these days. For example, the remake of Oceans 11 had a great design to the marketing and advertising posters:

oceans11-replacedvd

But the DVD? Boring and uninspired:

oceans11-dvd

Perhaps not surprisingly, the net comes to the rescue. Spleenworld has full resolution replacement DVD cover art to hide the ugly ones from the studio (including the boring Oceans 11 one). I’m sure there are more sites out there.

While we’re waiting around for the bombing to start…

…you might want to read what Dwight Meredith wrote about Bush II’s proposal to cap lifetime pain-and-suffering awards at $250,000.

It is beyond dispute that pain and suffering is a real, actual, legitimate loss. The hard question is how much money is required to compensate for a given amount of pain and suffering. There is no scale that actually balances pain on one side of the scale and money on the other side. The Bush administration suggests that a lifetime of pain and suffering result in compensation of a maximum of $250,000.

Perhaps we can put that amount into perspective by comparing it with other values our within society.

In 1999 Ken Lay dispatched an empty Enron Jet to France to fetch his daughter Robin home from Nice. The cost of that flight was was $125,000 or one half of what the Bush administration considers to be the value of a lifetime of pain and suffering.

The Bush administration’s latest tax cut proposal would have reduced Dick Cheney’s taxes by $220,000 in the last year he worked at Halliburton. That tax relief is approximately 90% of what the Bush administration believes to be the damages for a lifetime of pain and suffering.

Former Tyco executive Dennis Kozlowski spent $2.1 million on a birthday party for his wife (more than Mr. Bush feels is fair for 8 people having to live while hooked up to tubes unable to feed themselves).

A lifetime with brain damage caused by medical negligence, according to the administration, should result in compensation for pain and suffering that is less than the cost of a 2002 Rolls-Royce.

Travel author Robert Young Pelton kidnapped in Columbia

CNN reports:

The author of the travel book “The World’s Most Dangerous Places” was kidnapped with two other Americans near the Colombia-Panama border, police said Tuesday.

Author Robert Young Pelton, 47, of Redondo Beach, Megan A. Smaker, 22, of Oakland and Mark Wedeven, whose hometown wasn’t released, were traveling Saturday through a lawless area used by Colombian guerrillas and paramilitary groups for drug and arms trafficking, authorities said. Pelton was researching a story for National Geographic’s Adventure Magazine.

Pelton’s website has some more details.

Compulsive squalor: animal “collectors”, trash houses, and clutterers

Teresa Nielsen Hayden has put together an amazing, comprehensive post about squalor and animal collecting: the so-called “cat ladies” and garbage people. The stories are incredible, the syndrome pervasive. People across the country accumulate hundreds of animals, or fill their bathtubs with feces, or stack newspapers to the ceiling in room after room until their homes are uninhabitable.

Careful with some of those links, the stories they lead to are not for the squeamish. This article from the Minneapolis City Pages is particularly amazing.

Giant squid attacks French boat

Because I can’t pass up a good squid story…

French sailors taking part in the round-the-world Jules Verne Trophy say they have come across one of the most elusive monsters of the sea: the giant squid.

Veteran yachtsman Olivier De Kersauson, who sailed from Brittany on Saturday, said that several hours into his voyage he found that a giant squid had clamped on to the hull of his boat.

Black And White Overnight

Matt over at Scrubbles has a nice write up of the Game Show Network’s ‘Black And White Overnight”:

The New York Times did a nice article on the wonders of ‘Black & White Overnight’, the Game Show Network’s graveyard shift programme of vintage ’50s-’60s quiz shows. This has quickly became a favorite of mine since getting the TiVo, giving me the warm fuzzies for a time which I never experienced firsthand. The shows (‘What’s My Line’, ‘I’ve Got a Secret’, and ‘To Tell the Truth’) conjure up a swanky, Manhattanish world of cigarettes and martinis, intermissions and urbane small talk. Concepts were simple, sets were utalitarian, and personality was everything. Being smart and well-rounded was a given among all participants, something nearly unheard-of nowadays. For example, the effortlessly witty Bennett Cerf of ‘What’s My Line?’ was the head of Random House — can you imagine a publisher being on today’s game shows? I could go on and on, but instead I’ll point to Evan Izer’s wonderful weblog entry on the same subject from last year. Arlene Francis must be smiling down on him.