. . . let’s look ahead to what’s on the menu for this year: four adaptations of comic books. One prequel to an adaptation of a comic book. One sequel to a sequel to a movie based on a toy. One sequel to a sequel to a sequel to a movie based on an amusement-park ride. One prequel to a remake. Two sequels to cartoons. One sequel to a comedy. An adaptation of a children’s book. An adaptation of a Saturday-morning cartoon. One sequel with a 4 in the title. Two sequels with a 5 in the title. One sequel that, if it were inclined to use numbers, would have to have a 7 1/2 in the title.1
And no Inception. Now, to be fair, in modern Hollywood, it usually takes two years, not one, for an idea to make its way through the alimentary canal of the system and onto multiplex screens, so we should really be looking at summer 2012 to see the fruit of Nolan’s success. So here’s what’s on tap two summers from now: an adaptation of a comic book. A reboot of an adaptation of a comic book. A sequel to a sequel to an adaptation of a comic book. A sequel to a reboot of an adaptation of a TV show. A sequel to a sequel to a reboot of an adaptation of a comic book. A sequel to a cartoon. A sequel to a sequel to a cartoon. A sequel to a sequel to a sequel to a cartoon. A sequel to a sequel to a sequel to a sequel to a movie based on a young-adult novel.2 And soon after: Stretch Armstrong. You remember Stretch Armstrong, right? That rubberized doll you could stretch and then stretch again, at least until the sludge inside the doll would dry up and he would become Osteoporosis Armstrong? A toy that offered less narrative interest than bingo?
[. . .]
1. Captain America, Cowboys & Aliens, Green Lantern, and Thor; X-Men: First Class; Transformers 3; Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides; Rise of the Apes; Cars 2 and Kung Fu Panda 2; The Hangover Part II; Winnie the Pooh; The Smurfs in 3D; Spy Kids 4; Fast Five and Final Destination 5; Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 2.
2. The Avengers; Spider-Man (3D); Men in Black 3 (3D); Star Trek untitled; Batman 3; Monsters, Inc. 2; Madagascar 3; Ice Age: Continental Drift in 3D; The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn, Part 2.
Mark Harris, “The Day the Movies Died”, GQ, 2011-02
March 8, 2011
QotD: Don’t look forward to the summer crop of movies
Canadian banks forced to enter 21st century
In a long-overdue move, the Canadian government is putting pressure on the banks to improve their glacial cheque-clearing time:
Ottawa is cutting the amount of time banks can hold cheques up to $1,500 to four business days from seven for consumers and small- and medium-sized businesses.
The measures detailed today, part of last year’s budget, will also give consumers “immediate access” to the first $100 deposited by cheque. There will be a 30-day period for comment.
“Lower-income seniors, Canadians without significant balances in their accounts, younger Canadians who do not have a long banking history, and people who receive cheques from newer employers or clients are often subject to longer cheque hold periods,” the Department of Finance said. “These are often the Canadians who most need quick access to their funds.”
This is great news for me personally: I’m self-employed. I bill my clients directly for a month’s work, they take time to process my invoice and issue a cheque, then I deposit it into my business account. Seven business days later after that, I can actually get some of that money into my personal account. It’s amazing how long seven business days can seem when you’re juggling the mortgage, property tax bills, utilities, and all the other things that can’t be postponed to a time when the bank lets you get at your own money.
H/T to Elizabeth for the link.
Helicopter footage of 9/11 just released
The Guardian explains:
Previously unseen footage of the 9/11 attacks, filmed from a police helicopter hovering above the burning World Trade Centre, has emerged almost a decade after the terrorist atrocity.
The New York Police Department air and sea rescue helicopter was dispatched to the scene of the attack to see whether any survivors could be rescued from the rooftops.
[. . .]
The video is part of a cache of information about the attack handed over by city agencies to the National Institute of Standards and Technology, the federal agency that investigated the collapse.
It was released by NIST on 3 March under a Freedom of Information Act request, but it remains unclear who published the footage online.
Conan, channelled through a 4-year-old
From the amusing Reddit thread “I’m 4 years old AMAA”:
gaadzooks
what is best in life?[. . .]
lynn
My 6-month-old has an answer for that: “To crush your parents’ sleep schedules, to see them flee before your diapers, and to drink the lactations of their women.”
Edit for honesty: credit for that one goes to my husband.
H/T Radley Balko for the link.
Lastest boon to spammers? The move to IPv6, apparently
John Leyden reports that with all the good things about moving to the vastly larger address space of IPv6, we can expect at least one negative:
The migration towards IPv6, which has been made necessary by the expansion of the internet, will make it harder to filter spam messages, service providers warn.
The current internet protocol, IPv4, has a limited address space which is reaching exhaustion thanks to the fast uptake of internet technology in populous countries such as India and China and the more widespread use of smartphones. IPv6 promises 3.4 x 1038 addresses compared to the paltry 4.3 billion (4.3 x 109) addresses offered by IPv4.
While this expansion allows far more devices to have a unique internet address, it creates a host of problems for security service providers, who have long used databases of known bad IP addresses to maintain blacklists of junk mail cesspools. Spam-filtering technology typically uses these blacklists as one (key component) in a multi-stage junk mail filtering process that also involves examining message contents.
“The primary method for stopping the majority of spam used by email providers is to track bad IP addresses sending email and block them — a process known as IP blacklisting,” explained Stuart Paton, a senior solutions architect at spam-filtering outfit Cloudmark. “With IPv6 this technique will no longer be possible and could mean that email systems would quickly become overloaded if new approaches are not developed to address this.”
