Tuesday, September 30, 2014
Inherent Vice
December 12, 2014
Written & Directed by Paul Thomas Anderson
Based on Inherent Vice by Thomas Pynchon
Starring Joaquin Phoenix, Josh Brolin, Owen Wilson, Katherine Waterston, Reese Witherspoon, Benicio Del Toro
David Fincher's View on Star Wars
The Dissolve - "David Fincher met with Lucasfilm about Star Wars: Episode Se7en"
“I always thought of Star Wars as the story of two slaves [C-3PO and R2-D2] who go from owner to owner, witnessing their masters’ folly, the ultimate folly of man… I thought it was an interesting idea in the first two, but it’s kind of gone by Return Of The Jedi.”
Can Graffiti Be Copyrighted?
The Atlantic - "Can Graffiti Be Copyrighted?"
"Street credibility is a fuzzy term, but these cases could provide some clarity on what it means. Anasagasti’s suit makes the case that his reputation rests on the idea that he won’t sell out to corporate interests, and Shienbaum says that American Eagle’s use of the eyeball badly distorts the meaning of the images, which represent the working-class grind."
Friday, September 26, 2014
The LeBron James Diet
""I'll tell you what I couldn't have -- no carbs, no sugar, no dairy, no refined sugar -- no nothing. Meat. Fish. Veggies. Fruit," James said.
And no pancakes, chocolate chip cookies or ice cream -- three of James' favorite vices."
ESPN - "LeBron James dishes on weight loss"
Business Insider - "LeBron James Didn't Eat Sugar, Carbs, Or Dairy For 67 Straight Days, Lost 'A Ton Of Weight'"
Deadspin - "LeBron Skinny"
USA Today - "LeBron James shares the details of his strict summer diet"
Thursday, September 25, 2014
Highest Paid NBA Players Of All-Time
Business Insider - "The 25 Highest-Paid NBA Players Of All Time"
1. Kevin Garnett - $315,372,398
2. Shaquille O'Neal - $292,198,327
3. Kobe Bryant - $279,738,062
4. Tim Duncan - $224,709,155
5. Dirk Nowitzki - $204,063,985
6. Jason Kidd - $187,675,468
7. Paul Pierce - $184,819,552
8. Ray Allen - $184,356,410
9. Chris Webber - $178,230,697
10. Jermaine O'Neal - $168,794,021
11. Elton Brand - $165,338,631
12. Gilbert Arenas - $163,061,257
13. Tracy McGrady - $162,978,278
14. Vince Carter - $161,663,315
15. Rasheed Wallace - $158,110,581
16. Pau Gasol - $156,574,396
17. Rashard Lewis - $155,332,815
18. Allen Iverson - $154,494,445
19. Juwan Howard - $151,465,633
20. Stephon Marbury - $151,115,945
21. Joe Johnson - $150,571,837
22. Baron Davis - $147,692,983
23. Alonzo Mourning - $143,906,333
24. Dikembe Mutombo - $143,666,581
25. Grant Hill - $142,854,650
"The Lion of the Senate"
GQ - "A Sober Look at Ted Kennedy" (published in 1990)
""To be truly human," Ted Kennedy once said, "is to shape your own world." And he has, far more than most men dream of, done just that. He has made laws. He has been at the front of sweeping change, improving the lives of many people. He has helped perpetuate a dynasty. The truth is, however, the world shapes us far more than we shape it. The truth is, the forces of the world—the rules of primogeniture, the warp of genetics and the woof of environment, the killing power of bullets and the grip of alcohol—shaped Ted Kennedy and shape him still. It is the sad irony of his life that while he has wrought his will on the world at large he remains unable still to control his own life. He started out in this world dangling from strings held by his father and his brothers. They're gone now, but Teddy dangles still, dancing to the echoes of an old and tired tune."
McSpoon
Priceonomics - "The McDonald's Cocaine Spoon Fiasco"
"In the 1970s, every McDonald’s coffee came with a special stirring spoon. It was a glorious, elegant utensil -- long, thin handle, tiny scooper on the end, each pridefully topped with the golden arches. It was a spoon specially designed to stir steaming brews, a spoon with no bad intentions."
... “This is the best cocaine spoon in town and it’s free with every cup of coffee at McDonalds.”
With its long, thin handle and tiny stirring head, the McDonald’s spoon had, indeed, amassed a cult following among drug dealers and aficionados. Light, cheap, and inconspicuous, it could be concealed easily -- and best of all, as its scoop held exactly 100 milligrams of product, it doubled as a measuring device."
The Oregon Trail
The Atlantic - "Going West: The World of Live Action, Competitive Oregon Trail"
"Rawitsch was a student teacher in a middle school history class in Minnesota when his supervisor charged him with coming up with his own lesson plans about the great American Western migration. Few classrooms had computers at the time and the personal computer didn’t even exist. Rawitsch envisioned a board game where players would travel across a map of the United States, but after a conversation with his roommates—two mathematics majors—he created a barebones computer program for a teletype device with a dial-up connection. “There was no precedent for computer games, nothing to admire or to look to for inspiration,” Rawitsch told me.
A few years later, after reading several diaries of trail survivors, Rawitsch took the game code to the Minnesota Educational Computing Consortium and began incorporating the narratives and statistical realities of real settlers into the game’s interface. Things in the game happened not at random, but based on the actual historical probability of it happening. “When you lose oxen in the game, it is based on the historical record and the probability of that occurring at that point on the actual trail,” Rawitsch said."
Monday, September 22, 2014
NFL in the Media
Politico - "'South Park' ad blitzes Redskins"
Bill Simmons - "B.S. Report with Cousin Sal" (around the 10:00 - 13:00 mark)
ESPN - "ESPN investigative reporter Don Van Natta discusses the Ravens' handling of the Ray Rice incident and Ravens owner Steve Bisciotti's comments that some of the information in ESPN's report was "manufactured.""
The Atlantic - "Pro Football and Understanding the Sanctity of the Body"
New York Times - "Brain Trauma to Affect One in Three Players, N.F.L. Agrees"
Saturday, September 20, 2014
Big Eyes
December 25, 2014
Directed by Tim Burton
Starring Amy Adams, Christoph Waltz, Danny Huston, Krysten Ritter, Jason Schwartzman
Friday, September 19, 2014
Monday, September 15, 2014
Sunday, September 14, 2014
"It will be guerilla warfare on a global scale, with no front lines and no identifiable enemy"
ESPN - "Fear & Loathing in America"
by Hunter S. Thompson
September 12, 2001
"It was just after dawn in Woody Creek, Colo., when the first plane hit the World Trade Center in New York City on Tuesday morning, and as usual I was writing about sports. But not for long. Football suddenly seemed irrelevant, compared to the scenes of destruction and utter devastation coming out of New York on TV.
Even ESPN was broadcasting war news. It was the worst disaster in the history of the United States, including Pearl Harbor, the San Francisco earthquake and probably the Battle of Antietam in 1862, when 23,000 were slaughtered in one day.
The Battle of the World Trade Center lasted about 99 minutes and cost 20,000 lives in two hours (according to unofficial estimates as of midnight Tuesday). The final numbers, including those from the supposedly impregnable Pentagon, across the Potomac River from Washington, likely will be higher. Anything that kills 300 trained firefighters in two hours is a world-class disaster.
And it was not even Bombs that caused this massive damage. No nuclear missiles were launched from any foreign soil, no enemy bombers flew over New York and Washington to rain death on innocent Americans. No. It was four commercial jetliners.
They were the first flights of the day from American and United Airlines, piloted by skilled and loyal U.S. citizens, and there was nothing suspicious about them when they took off from Newark, N.J., and Dulles in D.C. and Logan in Boston on routine cross-country flights to the West Coast with fully-loaded fuel tanks -- which would soon explode on impact and utterly destroy the world-famous Twin Towers of downtown Manhattan's World Trade Center. Boom! Boom! Just like that.
The towers are gone now, reduced to bloody rubble, along with all hopes for Peace in Our Time, in the United States or any other country. Make no mistake about it: We are At War now -- with somebody -- and we will stay At War with that mysterious Enemy for the rest of our lives.
It will be a Religious War, a sort of Christian Jihad, fueled by religious hatred and led by merciless fanatics on both sides. It will be guerilla warfare on a global scale, with no front lines and no identifiable enemy. Osama bin Laden may be a primitive "figurehead" -- or even dead, for all we know -- but whoever put those All-American jet planes loaded with All-American fuel into the Twin Towers and the Pentagon did it with chilling precision and accuracy. The second one was a dead-on bullseye. Straight into the middle of the skyscraper. Nothing -- even George Bush's $350 billion "Star Wars" missile defense system -- could have prevented Tuesday's attack, and it cost next to nothing to pull off. Fewer than 20 unarmed Suicide soldiers from some apparently primitive country somewhere on the other side of the world took out the World Trade Center and half the Pentagon with three quick and costless strikes on one day. The efficiency of it was terrifying.
We are going to punish somebody for this attack, but just who or what will be blown to smithereens for it is hard to say. Maybe Afghanistan, maybe Pakistan or Iraq, or possibly all three at once. Who knows? Not even the Generals in what remains of the Pentagon or the New York papers calling for WAR seem to know who did it or where to look for them.
This is going to be a very expensive war, and Victory is not guaranteed -- for anyone, and certainly not for anyone as baffled as George W. Bush. All he knows is that his father started the war a long time ago, and that he, the goofy child-President, has been chosen by Fate and the global Oil industry to finish it Now. He will declare a National Security Emergency and clamp down Hard on Everybody, no matter where they live or why. If the guilty won't hold up their hands and confess, he and the Generals will ferret them out by force.
Good luck. He is in for a profoundly difficult job -- armed as he is with no credible Military Intelligence, no witnesses and only the ghost of Bin Laden to blame for the tragedy.
OK. It is 24 hours later now, and we are not getting much information about the Five Ws of this thing.
The numbers out of the Pentagon are baffling, as if Military Censorship has already been imposed on the media. It is ominous. The only news on TV comes from weeping victims and ignorant speculators.
The lid is on. Loose Lips Sink Ships. Don't say anything that might give aid to The Enemy."
The Most Popular Sports in the New York Times
1. Football
2. Soccer
3. Baseball
4. Basketball
5. Hockey
In 2013, according to Men in Blazers.
New Yorker - "Are You Ready for Some Football?"
by Jay Caspian Kang
"Popular American institutions are never really in trouble until they are really in trouble. The hard crash happens at the end, in part, because the people tasked with tracking their rise and fall can’t imagine a world without them. The N.F.L., which looks today like Detroit did in the nineteen-fifties, with revenues nearing ten billion dollars a year—and a stranglehold on the public’s sports appetite (according to a Harris poll from earlier this year, thirty-five per cent of Americans name professional football as their favorite sport, more than baseball, basketball, and hockey combined)—has withstood ongoing concern over concussions, various gun/night-club/boat scandals, and a small but growing sentiment among sportswriters and parents that it is a corrupt and craven institution. And though these problems take up quite a bit of space on the yelling-heads sports-talk programs and blogs, the N.F.L. continues to grow, to the extent that it sometimes feels hard to connect the constant scandals to the games broadcast to millions every Sunday (and Monday, and now Thursday)."
The Interview
December 25, 2014
Directed by Evan Goldberg & Seth Rogen (This Is The End)
Starring Seth Rogen, James Franco
Wednesday, September 10, 2014
Monday, September 8, 2014
Saturday, September 6, 2014
Monday, September 1, 2014
Space Travel
New York Times - "Richard Branson Searches for Virgin’s Next Big Thing"
Amy Chozick: Do you worry that you’ve turned a trip to space, which costs $250,000, into just another luxury product?
Richard Branson: Not at all. If you go back to the 1920s, when aviation started, it cost the equivalent of about $200,000 to cross the Atlantic. Over the years, the price has come down. You’ve got to start somewhere.
Previously,
2011 Space Race
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