A gigantic space storm (the biggest in three years) slammed Earth yesterday. Good lord, no wonder everything was so wonked.
The most powerful geomagnetic storm since December 2006 struck the Earth on Monday, a day earlier than expected.
On 3 April, the SOHO spacecraft spotted a cloud of charged particles called a coronal mass ejection (CME) shooting from the sun at 500 kilometres per second. This velocity suggested the front would reach Earth in roughly three days.
“It hit earlier and harder than forecast,” says Doug Biesecker of the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Space Weather Prediction Center in Boulder, Colorado.
Fortunately, the storm was not intense enough to interfere strongly with power grids or satellite navigation, but it did trigger dazzling auroras in places like Iceland.
SHORT POST: Hey, down there at the bottom, The Phantom Tollbooth movie. Animated by Chuck Jones, it’s long out of print, it’s got pretty colors, give it a look!
LONG POST: What with last week’s Kraken re-releasing, I’m reminded once again of the perils of adaptation, and how meddling with the stories we cherish as children is, in most cases, a doomed proposition.
Not so much because movies, regardless of their “faithfulness,” never fully capture the scope and detail of the books they’re sometimes based on (Dune, Harry Potter), or that the sheer act of turning words into images, states of mind into dialogue, necessitates a sacrifice of some kind when jumping from interior-minded Literature to exterior-bodied Film (The Hours, Atonement).
All those notions are valid, sure, but they presuppose something that rarely gets mentioned in the great Book vs. Movie debate: that despite the slippery slope we call Language, there’s such a thing as a universally experienced book to hold against a universally experienced movie in the first place.
In other words, when male friend X tells me, “Well, I liked Atonement, but it wasn’t nearly as good as McEwan’s book,” I’m always left thinking, “That’s great, but who am I to gauge your private experience of McEwan’s book?”
In fact, maybe my private experience of McEwan’s Atonement not only kicks ass over X’s private experience of it in terms of analytical sophistication, but the “good” things he found in it are the same things I found both “trite” and “manipulative?”
Okay, now I have never read Atonement (hey, I saw the movie!) but I have read, on numerous occasions, Norton Juster’s The Phantom Tollbooth.
It’s also, along with Disney’s Song of The South, the first film I remember seeing in theaters. Directed by Chuck Jones, with a screenplay by Jones and Sam Rosen, The Phantom Tollbooth totally blew my then-puny kid gaskets. I remember stumbling out of the theater declaring it the best film (out of the total four, maybe) I’d ever seen. It was certainly the best film I’d ever seen starring The Munsters’ Butch Patrick.
I haven’t seen Tollbooth since, and it remains out of print, but, thanks to Vimeo (see above, below), I recently took some time to revisit it. And now…well, let’s just say Jones’s imagining of Milo’s adventures in the Doldrums and beyond no longer constitutes what I consider the best film I’ve ever seen. In fact, it’s now maybe the opposite of that.
But why, though? Why, exactly, does Jones’s version compare so woefully to the beloved Juster book? Well, it’s not just the crude animation and unsophisticated storytelling. It’s something that leads back to the above-mentioned perils of adaptation and my own private experience of the book—a few pages of it, anyway. Jones mangles a particular sequence I found—and still find—incredibly resonant: Milo’s conducting of the sunrise.
The shorthand goes like this (for those of you with the book handy, it’s Chapter 11, Dischord and Dyne): during his quest to save Rhyme and Reason, Milo meets Chroma the Great, the conductor responsible for all the colors in the world. The beauty of trees and sunsets, of sunshine and fireworks, all stem from the movement of Chroma’s hands and the thousands of musicians playing silently around him.
Wanting to let Chroma sleep in a bit, Milo takes the next morning’s sunrise shift. One by one the musicians come to life: piccolo players summon the day’s first rays, cellists make the hills glow red. Milo’s overjoyed, “because they were all playing for him, and just the way they should.”
Joy turns to terror, though, when Milo’s musicians start playing louder and faster, the colors of the world becoming “more brilliant than he thought possible.” Milo tries to keep up, but soon the sky’s changing from blue to tan and then to red. Flowers turn black. “Nothing was the color it should have been, and yet, the more he tried to straighten things out, the worse they became.”
Or, to use another metaphor, one plate in the air. Then two plates. Soon dozens of plates. All moving in harmony. And then they start crashing down around you. In all of literature, I can’t recall a more compact or accurate description of the creative process. Or its possible dangers.
And while I’m pretty sure my kid mind didn’t grasp its meaning then, I’ve been returning to that passage ever since. Because that’s what metaphors do. The better ones, anyway. They hit you in the gut before you know how or why they’re useful.
If we’re lucky, we recognize it, maybe in the moment, maybe years later. Is it any wonder then that the book-to-movie process can be so fraught? One adaptor’s trash might very well be another reader’s treasure.
Which brings us to the version of this scene as imagined by Chuck Jones. It’s in Part II, 19 or so minutes in. As per the book, Milo meets Chroma, sends him to bed, and prepares to conduct the sunrise. And this is where things veer off course. Way the fuck off course.
Before those piccolos have a chance to breathe, celestial activities start going to hell, denying Milo – and the viewers – a single moment of pleasure. Not only does this rob Juster’s sequence of its poetry, but Jones turns the creative process into all danger, no joy whatsoever.
It gets worse from there. As the world unravels, Juster restores order by having Milo drop his hands, signaling the musicians to stop. What does Jones have Milo do? He has him retreat. Flee the scene. Act cowardly in the face of the forces he’s unleashed. Now, I ask you: what kind of metaphor for the creative process is that?! Not one I’d ever expose a child to, that’s for sure.
Jones’s Tollbooth might fail me now as a metaphor for the creative process, but it does say something about growing up, growing older…
If that process can be boiled down to the saying goodbye to everything we hold dear, maybe it’s a relief that some of those things we hold most dear aren’t worth holding on to so tightly in the first place.
I just ordered 2 packs of these and can’t wait to see how God uses them to open doors! Think of the ways you can use it, for kids, as part of your tip at a restaurant, even cashiers at the check-out line. Thanks for making these and helping further the Kingdom!
Dr. Jack Cassell, Orlando urologist and Republican crackpot, is the asshat who put up the sign in his practice reading: “If you voted for Obama…seek urologic care elsewhere. Changes to your healthcare begin right now, not in four years.”
Predictably the “liberal media” went nuts on this guy’s dumbass—he deserved it—and Cassell’s been seen making a fool of himself all over the media lately trying to stick up for himself and managing to damage his reputation even further. From The Washington Monthly:
But perhaps the most important coverage was an interview between Cassell and Alan Colmes on the radio Friday night. The host tried to get a better sense of why, exactly, Cassell hates the Affordable Care Act so much. The urologist specifically argued that officials, in light of the new law, are “cutting all supportive care, like nursing homes, ambulance services.”
Colmes: What do you mean they’re cutting nursing homes?
Cassell: They’re cutting nursing home reimbursements.
Colmes: Isn’t what they’re cutting under the Medicare plan what was really double dipping; they were getting credits and they were getting to deduct them at the same time.
Cassell: Well you know, I can’t tell you exactly what the deal is. [emphasis added]
Colmes: If you can’t tell us exactly what the deal is, why are you opposing it and fighting against it?
What a good question. Cassell struggled to explain himself, saying he’d seen some things “online,” and adding that the information he needs to understand the law “should be available to me.”
Of course, the information is available to him, and has been for months. Cassell chose not to do his homework before driving patients away—patients who, it turns out, may know a lot more than he does about the law he claims to hate.
This is painfully common—some of the loudest, angriest critics of the Affordable Care Act are also some of the least informed, most confused, embarrassingly ignorant observers anywhere. In this case, Cassell has become a national joke because he’s repulsed by a health care reform plan that he fully admits he doesn’t understand.
Joseph Matheny of Alterati fame does an interview with little old me for his GSpot podcast. We talk (mostly) about the future of media in the age of digital piracy.
Wonders never cease. Ganymed were (according to wikipedia) an Austrian space disco (!) band active in the late 70’s. The four proto-Alfs plus Aryan disco maiden format surely is unique if not extremely silly. I’d dare say they could pass for a current band pretty easily ! In any case it’s some decent sub-Moroder action that I’m sure would get any dance floor moving despite (or because of ?) the horrific prosthetic snouts.
A fellow in Edinburgh, Ind., went on a perplexing rampage recently when he stabbed several packages of raw meat in a supermarket, apparently all in the name of vegetarianism. But Anthony Coffman didn’t stop there. He also took the additional step of smearing dog food into some of the packages, hoping to contaminate the meat so it could not be sold. His motivation? Well, according to what he told startled store employees, Coffman was on a mission from God to prevent little girls from eating meat so they wouldn’t get fat.
As admirable as Coffman’s goals might have been, his methods didn’t win him any fans among store employees, who wrestled him to the ground and held him until the police arrived.
“He thought if he could save one chubby girl, he’s done his job,” Edinburgh police Deputy Chief David Lutz told WRTV news. “He’d got into it with his grandmother. She was preparing a pot roast … and he was upset over that. Him and her had a few words, and then a couple hours later, he’s down there at the Jay C Food Store doing this.” About $200 worth of meat was lost in the incident. Coffman faces charges of criminal mischief, disorderly conduct and criminal recklessness with a deadly weapon.
Death Bear is a guy in a black bear mask who carts away bad memories as part of an elaborate performance art project. He apparently “lives in a cave in Central Park” and comes out to ease the pain of New Yorkers. From the LA Times:
Reporting from New York - A biting wind whipped down a dark street, where a man crouched in the shadow of a building. He pulled on black gloves and glanced up and down the avenue. Satisfied that no one was watching, he pulled a mask the size of a beach ball out of a bag, pulled it onto his head and wriggled it into place: snout in front, eye holes over his own, rounded ears pointed skyward.
Death Bear was ready for his mission.
A man in the second-floor unit of a nearby apartment building in the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn was desperate to get rid of something that was too torturous to keep but impossible to discard.
The anguished individual had turned to Death Bear, a macabre performance artist who silently walks the city streets in a one-man quest to relieve people of painful remnants of the past: love letters, photos, gifts, dog tags, underwear—a lot of underwear, it seems—anything that might reduce an otherwise well-functioning person to a sniffling wreck.
His service has spread through word of mouth and the Internet.
“Help me, Death Bear!” read a typical plea that flickered via text message onto his cellphone.
Here’s a blast from Counterculture Past… it’s Dr. Fiorella Terenzi, the super hot Italian astrophysicist musician who used to appear in Mondo 2000. Dr. Terenzi played cosmic symphonies using the sounds of the universe channeled through a synth while lecturing on astrophysics.
(Her Wikipedia entry lists her as being “known as an Apple Computer AppleMaster.” Holy shit, that sounds intimidating.)
Dr. Fiorella Terenzi is an Italian astrophysicist, author and musician who is best known for taking recordings of radio waves from galaxies and turning them into music. She received her doctorate from the University of Milan but is currently based in the United States.
Terenzi is known for her CD-ROM Invisible Universe, which combined music and poetry with astronomy lessons, and for a sexually charged 1998 book about science titled Heavenly Knowledge. She also released albums of her music. She is known as an Apple Computer AppleMaster, and has collaborated with the likes of Thomas Dolby, Timothy Leary, Herbie Hancock, and Ornette Coleman. She is currently teaching astronomy at Brevard Community College in Cocoa, FL.
Although today she is primarily regarded as a gay icon, Cher was undoubtedly one of the most lusted after women in America during the 1970s. I know, I was there. She wore the most revealing outfits of any woman on television, had an amazing body and the longest, most beautiful hair I’d ever seen. I thought she was amazingly, outrageously stupendously hot.
I was nine years old when the above TIME cover came out and I can recall staring at it—I mean staring at it—in a Rite Aid, totally and utterly sexually transfixed. I’d never seen porn at that point in my young life, but this cover was pretty darned wonderful, I reckoned. Before I could probably fully form the thought that certain of these puzzlingly female creatures must be amazing in bed, I think I intuited this fact rather easily when it came to Cher. In the clip below, Cher sings her classic hit song Half Breed, demonstrating the effect she had back then.
With all of the iPad hype going on this week, I was surprised that so few pundits were saying what I felt was glaringly obvious:No way in hell is the iPad going to save the ailing magazine and newspaper industry. Did anyone really believe that for a single second anyway? Gimme a break! I already get more than enough distractions for free—no, really guys, my infotainment cup has been runneth overing for a very, very long time now—that there is no way, not a chance—none—that I’m going to subscribe to your magazine or newspaper now that a device I never asked for in the first place has been caused to exist by Steve Jobs. I don’t care what your new iThingee is or how great your marketing people are telling me it’s going to be. If you think what you’ve got is so unique and must-read that I should pay for it, I’ve got news for you, it’s not. It’s a very big Internet out there and as long as 99.99999 percent of it is free, your subscription fee is a self-imposed death sentence, and will not even constitute a revenue trickle let alone a stream.
Witness the recent paywall experiment at New York Newsday. It did not go very well. During the first three months of the paywall, exactly 35 people opted to pay for what they had been previously getting for free. Raise your hands, readers in Long Island, NY, how many of you who plan to buy an iPad also have plans to tap the digital ass of New York Newsday for a monthly fee?
About what I thought: None of you.
Every morning I scan dozens of newspapers around the world for my job at the Los Angeles Times and believe me when I tell you that much of it looks like all the rest of it. Take a gander at the blog rolls at Huffington Post and the Drudge Report. They differ but only slightly. Together they list almost all of the top-flight, “world class” English entrants in the “must read” daily category of news producers and aggregators. (And no, I don’t seriously include World Net Daily or News Max amongst them just because Matt Drudge does, I’m speaking generally here).
My point is that there are only really a few dozen news organizations worldwide—a hundred tops—that have any real import. Only the ones at the top of the Christmas tree of each day’s information cascade really matter. Everything else follows these sources. Of course there are rogue newsmakers like Perez Hilton who can break a story, but the likes of him are few and far between. There are but a handful of credible, well-run daily news organizations worldwide and beyond them are professional speciality magazines and more or less second-rate information sources. By this I mean the copycat news organizations of the Middle East, Asia and India that largely just regurgitate the Western news organizations output a day later and also the blogs that parse the very same information, dice it and slice it, opine about it and then point back to the original source. It can really start to look quite same-y the more of them you read. In the vast stew pot of information out there, should one chunk drop out behind a paywall, the flavor will remain exactly the same overall, whether or not that chunk is the New York Newsday, US Weekly or Wired magazine.
The $150,000 full page print ad has no equivalent in the online world and THIS is, very simply, the problem defined. Randy Michaels of Tribune hit the nail squarely on the head when he said that the magazine and newspaper industries had traded dollars for dimes in the transition from print to digital. Historically we know how it happened (the infant online ad industry sold very cheaply—they had to starting out—and got stuck with the fee structure), but why in 2010 when everyone has got their face in front of their computer all day long, is online advertising still only worth a fraction of the print equivalent? The static advertisement when displayed in the medium of yesterday that only over 50s read anymore is worth more than the dynamic electronic version? Why is this still the case?
If you ask me, this is what the industry needs top be concentrating on: getting their advertisers to foot the bill, not the public. The public has already spoken on this matter and they are not going to budge on the issue of paying for content on the Internet. That inconvenient yet incontrovertible fact is by now well-established, so what methods remain to monetize news content? If a media cartel formed of News Corp, Time-Warner, the New York Times, Tribune, Gannett and other of the major newspaper players (and indeed many of the online resources linked off the Huffington Post and Drudge Report blog rolls) with the goal of standing together to raise the prices of their online advertising to actually reflect the fact that, as I say, but a few dozen corporations are in the main responsible for the creation of 90% of all news, this might have an astounding effect.
We can say conclusively that the public will not foot the bill, so what is the alternative? I just told you. The worldclass news gathering organizations out there are performing tasks which are of great value to mankind and between them. they have the world’s attention. Should they all stand together and institute a form of collective bargaining with the very same vendors who pay them $150k for print ads and demand the same for access to their online audience—which constitutes a far more valuable aggregation of attention than their geriatric print readership—the industry could survive and even thrive. The subscription/paywall route is one of sure—and swift—extinction.
You can’t run a daily newspaper on 35 paid subscribers. No matter what shiny happy iPad apps the digital strategists are coming up with, no one subscribes to shit anymore under the age of 50. The newspaper media needs to get hip to this fast and not let the supposed iPad revenue model become a distraction.
