Author: Chris Barrus

My Top 10 DVD wish list

Damnit, I can’t be the only one out here that wants these… This doesn’t include the real obvious ones that everyone wants like Raiders Of The Lost Ark, Heavenly Creatures, or the Max Headroom series, but my own list of titles that I haven’t seen other folks yelling about.

  1. Slacker. Linklater’s Austin classic
  2. The Horsemen. Totally awesome action/adventure movie about buzkashi players in Afghanistan. I recall seeing this in the late-70s (it came out in 1971). Frankenheimer directs. Omar Sharif and Jack Palance star
  3. Vanishing Point. Uber-cult movie about existential nihilism and long distance high-speed driving. Again, one of my major favorites.
  4. Desk Set. Wonderfully charming Hepburn and Tracy movie about early computerization. Lots of Big Iron hardware (IBM is namechecked several times in the credits) and a freaky Mondrian-esque opening titles.
  5. Them! Giant ants. Los Angeles storm drains. What more could you want (except the fscking DVD!)
  6. The Monolith Monsters. Wonderfully absurd monster movie with no monsters – just growing rocks. Always a favorite of mine because the hero is a geologist, the fictional town of San Angelo looks like it’s in the Eastern Sierra desert, and the humans win with their wits and not with a gun.
  7. Lord Love A Duck. Incredibly insane movie about sweaters and, er, quacking, with a groovy soundtrack.
  8. Action In The North Atlantic. OK, so it’s a formulaic war picture from 1943 except for two things: 1. Bogart. 2. It’s a forumulaic war picture about the Merchant Marines in WWII
  9. Dragnet. The 1966 TV movie with Jack Webb and Harry Morgan. Pretty hard boiled and superior to much of what aired on the subsequent series.
  10. The Driver. It’s another dark, brooding car chase film, but off-kilter with a heavy noir feel to it.

The Smurfs as Marxist parable

Remember that scene in Slacker about the Smurfs being a subconscious method to ease children into accepting the arrival of Krisha? Here’s a competing theory which puts the Smurfs at dead-center of a Marxist utopia.

What does Gargomel want to do with the Smurfs? He has two ideas. The first is to eat them. This is unusual, because the Smurfs are small and rare, and would not make as good eating as, say, a deer. It is similar to Sylvester’s obsession with eating the golf ball sized meal that is Tweety Bird. There are two explanations.æThe first is that metaphorically, he wants to devour socialism, as the West wanted to do to the USSR and its satellites during the Cold War through its tactic of encirclement. The second is that as a pure capitalist, he wishes to turn everything into a commodity – including people. The second thing Gargomel plans to do to the Smurfs once he catches them is to turn them into gold. As the ultimate supercapitalist, he is more concerned with his own wealth than with equality and fairness. Like any Adam Smith style capitalist, it is his ‘natural’ state to want as much money as he can get.

Gargomel is a cold, bitter and ultimately empty man. This is because he has nothing else in his life but a soulless quest for wealth and possessions. A definite statement about the anti-social effects of economic rationalism.

[via bOing bOing]

Bruce Schneier on firewalls

The latest Crypto-Gram centers on electronic liability and (and versus) security, but one paragraph in particular eloquently crystallizes one-half of my objection to firewalls (the other being that they’re more to do with monitoring and/or blocking access from folks within the firewall)

Think about why firewalls succeeded in the marketplace. It’s not because they’re effective; most firewalls are installed so poorly as not to be effective, and there are many more effective security products that have never seen widespread deployment. Firewalls are ubiquitous because auditors started demanding firewalls. This changed the cost equation for businesses. The cost of adding a firewall was expense and user annoyance, but the cost of not having a firewall was failing an audit. And even worse, a company without a firewall could be accused of not following industry best practices in a lawsuit. The result: everyone has a firewall, whether it does any good or not.

Volkswagen’s hyperfuturistic concept car

vwliterIt gets 100km/l and looks like a dead-ringer for Buckminster Fuller’s Dymaxion car.

The automated gearbox is coupled to a start-stop system, which includes a freewheel function. In overrun mode, the vehicle switches the engine off. The vehicle then rolls without the engine running. Development engineers call this gliding – alluding to the silent flight of a glider. The engine starts up again immediately when the magnesium accelerator pedal is depressed. A specially developed starter-alternator makes sure the engine is immediately restarted. Positioned between the engine and gearbox and using a dual clutch system, this works as both current generator and flywheel. In gliding mode, both clutches are open. When the driver presses the accelerator pedal again, the clutch between the engine and the starter-alternator is closed, causing the still turning flywheel to restart the engine without consuming any electrical current. Apart from this, the crankshaft starter-alternator, which eliminates the need for a conventional alternator and starter motor, has a so-called boost function which is able to supply additional power to supplement the power of the engine. But that is not all the starter-alternator does. While braking, the negative acceleration energy is fed into the alternator and recovered (recuperation).