The site
Found on Memepool. The site's on Geocities, so visit now before demand wrecks it. This page collects the scripts of old movies and makes them available to read. The highlights: The Wizard of Oz, Dr. Strangelove, Annie Hall, and Citizen Kane, full of Orson Welles' unnecessary, yet revealing, extra descriptions of characters and settings. Really cool stuff.
Is chess possibly the most over-analyzed and obsessed-over game on the planet? Perhaps poker? Maybe Monopoly? Guess go?
It’s possible that this game is, in fact, Scrabble. In case you don’t believe me, check out this Wikipedia article, where a tournament-level game between two players, scoring 1,004 points between them, is exhaustively explicated and wrung for every last drop of strategic significance. Scrabble is, to me, one of the most interesting popular board games out there, but this is just nuts.
In related news, a documentary about tournament Scrabble players, the name of which escapes me, either has recently, is currently, or will soon be making the rounds in American cities that actually have a cinema scene (Statesboro, unfortunately, is not one of them). If it’s anything like this game synopsis, it’ll be interesting, if a bit of a headache inducer.
How long has it been since I've done one of these? It just may be longer still until I have enough spare cash to be able to spend time on the computer at Maui's Smoothies, browsing around newsmap looking for news stories to make silly comments about, so let's make this one count, dadgumit.
1. Xinhuanet : English : Separated Filipino twins in good condition
http://news.xinhuanet.com/english/2004-08/11/content_1759274.htm
My god.
But I mean that in a good way! Well, mostly...
We live in age in which conjoined twins, connected at the head as if they had some horrifying adventure in Funhouse Mirrorland, can be detached from each other. And, afterwards, be in a condition that can be described by someone, anyone at all, as "good." And that is the happy occurrence this simultaneously wonderful and disturbing article has to report.
Say what you want about the corrupting influences of civilization, about the tendency of individuality to be lost in a sea of groupthink and corporate coercion, about the escalating tendency of human beings to feel overwhelmed by their environment, but there are still some things, a small but important number of things, that rock. We may not yet have flying cars, robo-maids, or an English translation of Sega Virtua-Hooker, but I'd say this still indicates that, yes Virginia, we are living in Jetson-land.
2. IndiaTimes : Economic Times : International Business : Trump just got fired, but he also got a raise
http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/articleshow/811236.cms
(Original source: Reuters)
Donald Trump has two messages to himself as he looks to reorganize his debt-laden casino empire. First, “you’re fired” and second, “you’ve got a raise”, according to a federal filing on Tuesday.
The first is the catch phrase he uses as the star of the hit reality TV series The Apprentice.
Until recently I haven't had access to the wonders of satellite television, so I've never seen The Apprentice. So allow me a moment to push my brain back up through my left nostril, through which it squirted when I discovered there was a show in which A. Trump played a role, B. his catch phrase is "You're fired," and C. is a hit.
Prepare yourselves as I'm ramping this up into boldface: HOW DOES THIS HAPPEN?! Is it the damn 80s all over again? Are groups of frat guys sitting around the communal TV, going "Woo-hoo!" whenever Trump sacks somebody? Do we now exult as a species when a poor schmo gets the axe from one of the richest bastards - BASTARDS - in the world? Wait I forgot, we're living in the era of the "reality" show, where malevolent producers cook up a stinking simulacra of real life, weak in compassion and kindness but rich in the kind of veiled, pseudo-Darwinian, survival-of-the-fittest propaganda that makes it perfectly okay, in too many worldviews, for one to do a flamboyant fandango all over the hopes and dreams of others, for the simple reason that they can, and can eek some cents out of it. That's not entertainment, it's propaganda.
And could there be even one person remaining in this world who believes in that moldy fiction, the American Dream, and thinks that with hard work and shrewd business sense that they could someday catapult themselves onto Trump's pedestal without liberal application of at least one of those two ancient, all-purpose salves, Extreme Luck and Shady Business Practices? If your ticket to success is printed with the name of a reality show, then I hate to break it to you, but this is not a viable path to success that anyone except the one-in-six-million who get on those shows.
I decided to learn more about this show, and Google'd up NBC's web site for The Apprentice. For a hoot, boys and girls, have a look at the site's bio for show host and Executive Producer Donald Trump. It scrolls on and on, detailing in lavishing, worshiping prose every damn erection Trump's bought or built and stamped his ludicrous name upon. That, ultimately, is why Trump's involved with this show, why he'd condescend to be involved with it, when on the big roster of his profitable endeavors this has got to rank at least twenty places beneath his friggin' casinos.
Reading about the show's premise, this is what it looks like to me. Please, someone whose seen the show, correct me if I'm wrong. Donald Trump and "trusted colleagues" George Ross and Carolyn Kepcher round up a bunch of people who applied to be on the show, make them perform annoying, difficult tasks with each other, then decide among themselves which of the lot has demeaned himself the least by slavishly doing precisely what he's been told. At the end of the series, the remaining applicant gets hired by Trump Enterprises and gets a quick "in" to the notoriously insular world of corporate management.
Oh, sign me up for the upcoming DVD release of that.
3. Internetnews.com : Google Auction Immient
http://www.internetnews.com/bus-news/article.php/3393411
It's about bloody time!
Months and months we've heard about the IPO, how it's going to be a "Dutch Auction," and how Wall Street hates its guts, hates it it does.
I love Google as much as anybody, but c'mon, sell it already! Oh, notice how Yahoo! managed to finagle itself some real cheap shares, for the price of lawyers and a patent application really, by using one of those highly-questionable software patent thingies to threaten Goog into giving them a cut. Yippie.
4. E! Online News: Mike "Rowdy" Wallace Busted
http://www.eonline.com/News/Items/0,1,14694,00.html?tnews
Man oh man, is this ever going to sting around the doughnut table. "Hey 'Rowdy,' attack any cops lately?" Imagine losing all your arguments with Andy Rooney when he drags out the chestnut, for the nth time, "At least I've never been in jail." I figure it'll be around the twentieth time that happens that 86-year-old Mike'll snap, and show Mr. Rooney a bit of the fightin' style that got him put in the slammer in the first place, to the cheers of harried secretaries and interns throughout the office.
Seriously, c'mon now. Mike Wallace did not "lunge" at a city inspector. If he did, then the inspector should have just stepped out of the way of the elderly telejournalist's murderous grip and continued doing his job. Even if he was "overly assertive and disrespectful," is that really sufficient cause to throw someone in the pokey?
But still, whoever woulda thought that Mike Wallace would one day be brought in by the man? I hope we get a juicy expose on this all over CBS prime time, serve 'em right. Let's see that inspector on the business end of a 60 Minutes interview. It'd be a hell of a lot more interesting to me than whatever antics Donald Trump's cooked up this week.
Link to documentary's home page
I'm a big pinball nut, or at least I would be if I had the chance to play (there seem to be no machines remaining in Statesboro). Pinball suffered a great blow when Williams, the biggest pinball manufacturer in the world, suddenly left the business. Strangely, they got out less than a year after releasing the revolutionary Pinball 2000 system, which was quite profitable right out of the gate with only two released, Revenge from Mars and Star Wars: Episode 1 (both games I've played and enjoyed). Yet ten months later their entire pinball staff was disbanded, including Pat Lawlor, the most successful pinball designer of all time, creator or Funhouse, Addams Family Pinball and Twilight Zone. Many of their engineers went over to Stern Pinball, the only major manufacturer left, or Pat Lawlor's new company, which creates games for Stern.
The documentary is the story of the creation of Pinball 2000 and its success, and its rapid demise at the hands of WMS Industries management, and is due out sometime in the remainder of this year. And I, for one, can't wait to see it.
In other news....
- Still looking for a job. Oy.
- After almost twenty years of on-again, off-again play, I have finally won a game of Rogue! I'm still a bit light-headed from the accomplishment.
Gapingvoid article
Found on Boingboing, I think this is an excellent description of the needs and processes of becoming truly creative. Great stuff.
<>It’s strange, but one of the best detective dramas on TV isn’t live action but anime, a cartoon from Japan. Even more amazing, for its genre, is that there are no barely-dressed cyborg women, narrow-eyed evil swordsmen with long hair, or annoying spiky-headed kids who can save the world with the power of their playing cards/battle tops/pokemon. <>
It’s called Case Closed, a.k.a. Detective Conan, and it airs at one in the morning on Cartoon Network. It does have a typical annoying anime premise; 18-year-old detective genius Jimmy Kudo is poisoned by bad guys, which fails to kill but turns its victim into a little kid as a side effect. I can think of a bunch of people who’d pay to take that poison, but once you get past that the show turns out to be excellently written, solidly reasoned, and beyond that initial conceit almost more realistic than a cartoon has any right being<>.
But not quite! Little Conan Edogawa (you get a point if you can decipher the pair of references in Jimmy’s pseudonym), his former girlfriend/current gal pal Rachel and her lecherous, hack detective father Richard Moore tend to encounter more murder cases in their personal lives than in Richard’s line of work, and the number of deaths presided over by Jimmy’s elementary school posse is almost greater than those overseen by the police inspector. It’s so much that it pushes the limits of credibility more than the premise, but it’s nothing Father Dowling hasn’t seen.
And despite being both a detective’s daughter and a detective's girlfriend, Rachel never seems to notice all the weird things that have been happening since Conan joined them, and Richard never seems to notice how he can never remember how he solved all the cases that Conan so easily and conveniently causes to be attributed to him. <>
And Jimmy/Conan, seriously, is a blinking genius. The explanation that this eight-year-old kid is solving mysteries because he’s really eighteen fails to address the fact that most fifty-year-olds don’t have this kind of grasp of police procedure and the mortician’s trade. But of course the gimmick is just there to give us an excuse to watch and try to figure out mysteries. They’re like sardines tightly packed into their can, with most stories, complete with murder, suspect introductions, presentation of clues and dramatic ending fitting comfortably within a 30 minute episode, with the occasional two-parter. But it’s so different from the typical mystery genre that they make it new all over again, easily winning second place in the Strange Detective footrace (first place, of course, must go to Monk) that it’s surprisingly watchable.
Underneath the anime story tricks and implausibilities is a tightly-written puzzle mystery show in the classic style. The show isn’t afraid to make the viewer watch for clues, and Conan is very likely to refer to things that were never remarked upon by any of the characters, but just happened to be on the screen for less than a couple of seconds. There’s a good mixture of story types as well, with the occasional Columbo-style episode (murder shown at the beginning and the fun is in watching The Detective figure it out). And the murderers hardly ever raving psychos, but always have reasons, and usually elicit some sympathy from the viewer before they are brought to justice by the steel-eyed second grader.
Note that despite the heavy kid factor this isn’t for Saturday Morning, and no other show in Adult Swim’s lineup is as deserving of its late-night timeslot (1 a.m.) as this one. One recent episode featured a corpse that had been hacked to pieces, and Conan’s grade-school classmates have gotten up close and personal with bloody dead bodies on more than one occasion. Sometimes murder is shown graphically, and blood has often been shown splattered full and red on crime scene walls and floors. Word is that Fox Kids was all set to add this to their lineup, to the extent of licensing the show’s Japanese name Detective Conan, but apparently somewhere along the line they actually saw the show, and quickly realized there was no way they could pull a Dragonball-Z with this one, with blood edited out and the deceased magically “sent to another dimension.” Also, the show doesn’t quite fit their hideous toy-hawking mindset, what with the focus on crime scenes, murder weapons and alibis. It’d be like selling an Angela Lansbury action figure.
In Adult Swim’s sea of ultra-random Flash cartoons, prime-time cartoon rejects, and anime shows running the gamut from obfuscated giant robot to girl-sighing feudal dog boy, Case Closed stands out. It’s not quite Cowboy Bebop, or even Big O, but it’s interesting enough to stay up until the wee hours for. And with over 300 episodes in Japan, it’s unlikely they’ll run out of shows for some time.
