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Wednesday, 5 October 2005
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Xeni Jardin:
In 1970, film director Randal Kleiser (website / IMDB) was a film student at USC -- his roommate there, btw, was George Lucas. One of Randal's projects during that time was a one-minute "ad" protesting the Vietnam War, created with Harry Winer. They asked Jon Voight
to do the voiceover, Voight said yes, and with a very simple set and
help from a very young actor, they shot a beautiful short which Randal
has kindly offered to share with Boing Boing readers again today.
It's as if it was produced just a day ago.
Baby Peace, directed by Randal Kleiser: Link to quicktime, Link to WMV.
(Thanks, Jeff Kleiser, and thanks, Randal Kleiser -- and special thanks to Jeff Koga for video conversion!)
My hippy heart responds!
[Boing Boing]
11:58:38 PM 
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Yahoooo!
Against everything I expected, the best TV show ever (I've written about it before), is back on Australian television.
The Wire.
Channel 9 utterly neglected this
show for the first series and have done the same this time. It's not
advertised or promoted in any way, and it's slotted in late night
Thursdays, starting tomorrow at midnight. This means that whatever 9 chooses to show earlier in the night will toss its start time around up to two hours either way!
I believe this is the real thing, because there is no indication that
this is a repeat, and the one sentence synopsis in the paper refers to
the finding of a body by a particular character, which I'm pretty sure
didn't happen in the first series, but, from the synopsis of the second series, I gather did happen in the first episode of that series.
The theme song is the same, but this time, rather than being sung by The Blind Boys of Alabama, it is the original, by Tom Waits.
From all reports, this series moves everything up a notch from the
first, and introduces another aspect of the rotting underbelly of crime
as capitalism by other means, or is that capitalism as legitimised
crime?
We meet the flesh trade as another side of the drug trade. Politics has
split up the successful team of the first series, but pragmatism slowly
assembles it again.
I'm getting excited!
The best.
Not kidding.
11:03:49 PM
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Rather than repost the Shining remix, I dug up an Australian video clip of Don Lafontaine, aka Thunder Throat, aka Voice of God. Yep, he's in Wikipedia too. And if you missed it, check out Seinfeld's parody of Don.
Quote from the interview: "I've worked on, by my estimation, in the
neighborhood of 4,000 pictures. But it hasn't changed that much. There
are only seven basic stories. If you want to parody a trailer you go, In a world where ..." And of course he nails it perfectly.
I've often wondered who was responsible for that voice in the trailers. The Seinfeld trailer is hilarious.
[Paul Boutin]
10:32:49 AM
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Satch Boogie
The Sounds of Joe Satriani
The only Satriani tribute band in the country is back
This Friday, Oct 7
Eureka Tavern, 10 Park Tce, Salisbury
9.30 P.M.
7:36:58 AM
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I've got a couple of weeks leave, and I'm implementing plans.
Firstly, each day, I'm trying to catch up with someone I haven't seen
for a while. This hasn't worked out all that well so far, but I have
organised to see someone on each of several days, which is more than I
usually
do. One or two people I haven't seen for a few months, a couple I
haven't seen for more than three decades.
My other big plan is to use the extra time I have on each day to do
some longer bike rides than I normally can. So far so good. I've done a
couple of days of more than thirty kms, which is not much in cycling
terms, but for me, on my old steel bicycle, it's an achievement. It's
about a quarter the distance I used to motor pace my son when he was
training for national and international races.
I feel good, but tired. Even that's good, because it means I'm sleeping
better than I usually do. The big downside is, because I don't wear
knicks, I'm getting a really sore bum.
No more anal sex for a while then.
Kidding.
7:21:10 AM
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Melbourne University academic Professor David Boger has been awarded the Prime Minister's Prize for Science.
It's been a good week for Australian science, although this scientist was born in the USA, but educated in Melbourne.
He's invented a new and important use for goo.
[ABC News: Science and Technology]
7:07:25 AM
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Xeni Jardin:
Here's a lovely time-lapse
photograph of the recent solar eclipse, shot by Nils van der Burg in
Madrid. He explains, "What you see is the form of the sun when the moon
was passing in front of it, then the shadow of the moon is reflected
through the leaves of the trees." Link
(thanks, John Parres)
Reader comment: Tom Radcliffe says,
The solar eclipse photos are very cool. The projection
of images by leaves in this way is an example of a natural pin-hole
camera. The small gaps between the leaves act as "pinholes" in the
sense that they are very much smaller than the distance to the ground
(and very very much smaller than the distance to the sun!)
Reader comment: M. Merrick says:
Just a little correction: The photograph is not a
time-lapse photography. In fact, it probably had a fairly quick shutter
speed in order to catch the light cast through the trees without the
blur of them moving in the breeze. It's still a neat-o eclipse photo
though!
[Boing Boing]
7:02:44 AM
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© Copyright 2005 Peter Nixon.
Last update: 1/11/05; 10:04:10 PM.
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