by Chris Barrus
Straight from the pages of Buckaroo Banzai’s airdroppable watermelon, comes this story…
The US Military has perfected the indestructible sandwich. Capable of surviving airdrops, rough handling and extreme climates, and just about anything except a GI’s jaws, the new “pocket” sandwich is designed to stay “fresh” for up to three years at 26 ÁC (about the temperature of a warm summer’s day), or for six months at 38 ÁC (just over body temperature)
[via bOing bOing]
Remember the threadbare attempts to link Star Wars to Joseph Campbell’s studies in meta-mythology? I’ve always suspected that it was Lucas’ attempt to de-emphasize the pulp sci-fi underpinnings to the movies, because pulp SF wasn’t Serious Literature. This Salon article dog piles more criticism onto Lucas, most of it valid, but still takes a couple of unfair potshots at the SF genre. Some worthwhile background on Leigh Brackett (the real screenwriter of Empire Strikes Back) too. Speaking of which, everyone has seen The Hidden Fortress, right? [via Slashdot]
Mostly complete list of TV commercial soundtrack songs.
A photographer hooked up a camera to the odometer of his car and drove from New York City to San Francisco taking a picture every mile. The whole sequence is up on the web as a QuickTime movie. [via Slashdot]
The future begins today, for only $4000 in parts. Part of the much larger Monorail Society web site which is worth investigating. [via Slashdot]
detailing Walt’s original plans for EPCOT, which was going to be a real futuristic city with a central translucent dome, monorails everywhere, and real residents . Lots of old-school retrofuture material here.
[via bOing bOing]
Possibly one of the best poison-pen reviews ever…
I may be mistaken, but it does seem to me that “Deerslayer” is not a work of art in any sense; it does seem to me that it is destitute of every detail that goes to the making of a work of art; in truth, it seems to me that “Deerslayer” is just simply a literary delirium tremens.
A work of art? It has no invention; it has no order, system, sequence, or result; it has no lifelikeness, no thrill, no stir, no seeming of reality; its characters are confusedly drawn, and by their acts and words they prove that they are not the sort of people the author claims that they are; its humor is pathetic; its pathos is funny; its conversations are — oh! indescribable; its love-scenes odious; its English a crime against the language.
Counting these out, what is left is Art. I think we must all admit that.
Gilliam’s the man!
“The guys who are shooting films now are technically brilliant. But there’s no content in their films.”
2012 posts several updates on the underwater site off the coast of Cuba.
“Manuel Iturralde, research director of Cuba’s Natural History Museum, has joined Canadian exploration company Advanced Digital Communications (ADC) in efforts to solve the mystery of the smooth, geometrically shaped, granite-like rocks. They are laid out in structures resembling pyramids, roads and other structures at more than 600 meters deep (2,000 feet) in a 20 km-square (7-3/4 mile-square) area.”
[via 2012]
JWZ nicely summarizes the maze of bureaucracy involved to webcast legally.
If you want to do something different than what I described above; for example, if you want to let users choose the songs to download, or you want to archive dj sets, or you want to allow the world at large to collaboratively dj by voting on what song to play next, or anything at all interactive that actually takes advantage of the power of the internet: well… you’re fucked. When you go into that world, you are out of the “compulsory license” territory, and must negotiate with all of the copyright holders individually, which is prohibitively complicated, since there are so many of them.
What’s going on here is that the music industry establishment are absolutely terrified of the internet, and are trying to prevent any kind of progress that might require them to evolve and change their business models to keep up with the times. They are pretty much trying to legislate the internet out of the way, and force things to continue to be done as if early-20th-century technology was still all we have to work with.
And after all is said and done, what happens to your fees? The media conglomerates take your money, keep most of it for themselves, and then divide the rest statistically based on the Billboard charts. That means that no matter what kind of obscure, underground music you played, 3/4ths of the extortion money you paid goes to whichever management company owns N’Sync; and the rest goes to Michael Jackson (since he owns The Beatles’ catalog.) All other artists (including the ones whose music you actually played) get nothing.
[via RRE]