IMAO_ (Frank J. Fleming): You can’t watch “It’s a Wonderful Life” these days without thinking how much sense Mr. Potter is making about irresponsible lending.
June 2, 2010
Tweet of the day
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May 20, 2010
Torpedo damage and the sinking of the Cheonan
Geoffrey Forden posted information on likely causes of the sinking of the South Korean frigate Cheonan before the formal report was released:
One of the “mysteries” surrounding the sinking of the ROK’s warship, Cheonan, is that the explosion split the ship in half, a result our popular culture has trained us to forget. After all, World War II movies always show a torpedo strike in the same way: one or two white streaks quickly approaching the ship followed by a localized jet of water where the torpedo struck the hull. Sailors stream out of their bunks to jump over the side as the ship keels over, taking in water. Below the water line, jagged holes, punched by the explosive force of the warhead, let in sea water. Compartments quickly (or if dramatic effect is needed, slowly) fill with water, drowning all the bit players, uh, sailors trapped below.
These movies have influenced our expectations for the damage caused by modern torpedoes even though there are much more efficient ways for a torpedo to destroy a surface ship. [. . .]
The second major effect damaging the hull, and probably the one that caused the vessel to break in half, was a jet of water blasting its way through the ship. This jet was formed as the gas bubble created by the initial explosion collapsed upon reaching the ship’s hull.
This is the way modern torpedoes sink ships. Everything about the Cheonan’s sinking is consistent with either a torpedo or submerged mine blowing up beneath the ship’s keel.
Fascinating though this is, the official report (as filtered through what was made available to international media) discounted this mechanism:
South Korean scientists at the Sound Engineering Research Lab of Soongsil University have performed an analysis of the acoustic signals (the media report mistakenly calls them seismic waves) associated with the sinking of the Cheonan. It would be very nice to see their actual analysis — and the data would be even cooler — but it appears on the face of it to be a very interesting result. Their main conclusion, again based solely on the media report of their findings, seems to be that the Cheonan was actually struck by a heavy torpedo. (The say the most likely candidate is the Chinese Yu-3 heavy torpedo with a 205 kg high explosive warhead.) According the article, the South Korean scientists believe the torpedo struck the hull of the Cheonan but since the explosive is significantly aft of the torpedo’s bow, the center of the explosion was a little over 2 meters away. They rule out the “kill mechanism” being a bubble jet.
Interestingly, a summary in New Scientist (which is where I found the link above), seems to have been written before the updated information was added to the original post, as it attributes the sinking to the “deadly bubble jet”.
May 19, 2010
QotD: Action movie lines
“I know what you’re thinking, punk: Did I fire six bullets or only five. Being this is a Glock with seventeen rounds, it’s a moot point, but I’m doing a cognitive psychology study on people’s ability to count in stressful situation. You’ll get twenty dollars to participate. So, do you feel like helping science? Well, do ya, punk?”
Frank J. Fleming, “Action Movie Lines”, IMAO, 2010-05-18
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May 5, 2010
Three reasons not to remove the Downfall parodies
3 Reasons YouTube Shouldn’t Censor Downfall Parodies
[. . .]
It’s understandable why Downfall’s production company, Constantin Film, might be upset that such a serious movie is being burlesqued, but pushing YouTube to ban the parodies is a terrible idea for at least three reasons:
1. It’s fair use! The parodies, which transform a few minutes of a three-hour movie, are clearly legit under existing copyright laws. Because they clearly transform the original and have no possibility of confusing viewers, the parodies are clearly protected speech.
2. This is free promotion! As George Lucas could tell the filmmakers, fan-generated videos help keep the original source material vital and relevant. Lucas used to try to police all Star Wars knock-offs, until he realized that his audience was promoting his films more effectively than he ever could. More people have surely seen Downfall due to the popularity of the parodies.
3. Let’s keep the Internet creative! The greatest cultural development over the past 20 or so years has been technologies that allow producers and consumers to create and enjoy an ever-increasing array of creative expression in an ever-increasing array of circumstances. This development is nowhere more powerful than on the Internet, which has unleashed a whole new universe of writing, music, video, and more. Indeed, YouTube is itself one of the great conduits of cyberspace. Pulling down the Downfall parodies may be within YouTube’s rights, but it nonetheless strikes a blow to the heart of what is totally awesome about the Internet.
April 29, 2010
Did Bruno Ganz do too good a job playing Adolf Hitler?
Now that you actually have to work at it to find some of the Downfall parodies on YouTube, John Naughton looks at the cultural power of remix culture, which has been most recently popularized by Bruno Ganz in his mesmerizing performance as Adolf Hitler:
Ganz’s performance is a real tour de force, so much so that the New Yorker critic wondered aloud if it would have the effect of humanising Hitler. But the scene had another, equally extraordinary, side-effect. It became the basis for a wildly successful and entertaining comic virus, in which people used everyday video-editing software to remix the scene in modern contexts (politics, sports, technology, popular culture). The German soundtrack was left unchanged, but new subtitles were added and then the results were posted on YouTube.
[. . .]
Some of these parodies are tiresome. But many are side-splittingly funny, a testimony to the power of remixing as a way of enlivening cultural life. Nevertheless, not everyone is delighted by this new art form. Jewish organisations have been understandably disturbed by the way the architect of the Holocaust has been turned into a comic turn. “Hitler,” said the director of the Anti-Defamation League, “is not a cartoon character”.
[. . .]
The YouTube remix culture is thus a new take on a venerable tradition. I wouldn’t argue that the Downfall spoofs are high art, but they are evidence of bottom-up creativity and intelligence in a new medium. And if we allow narrow considerations of intellectual property to stifle this creativity, then we may all, except for the lawyers, live to regret it.
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April 27, 2010
Almost right
Kathy Shaidle linked to this map at Spleenville, showing an approximation of how Europeans (and implicitly the rest of the world) view the United States:
(Click map to see original image)
[. . .] As a matter of fact, from what I’ve garnered from across the pond, the rest of the world thinks the USA consists of one large metropolis — Newyorkangeles — with a sunny beach where only blond, tanned, perfectly-toned twenty-something models are allowed to go, and the rest of it is a desert wasteland full of racist white cowboys who wear big hats and shoot their guns in the air.
You forgot the teeth: Europeans all seem to believe that Americans all have identical “Hollywood” smiles. Oh, except for the gun-toting racist yahoos, who only have a few teeth each.
March 31, 2010
Disciplining the customer
In what may yet turn out to be a groundbreaking method of increasing customer satisfaction and loyalty, the US Copyright Group is suing 50,000 of them:
The number of Americans targetted by entertainment industry lawsuits nearly doubled this month, as the the US Copyright Group (“an ad hoc coalition of independent film producers and with the encouragement of the Independent Film & Television Alliance”) brought suit against 20,000 BitTorrent users. 30,000 more lawsuits are pending, bringing the total number of US entertainment industry lawsuit defendants up to 80,000 (when you include the 30,000 victims of the RIAA).
This beatings-will-continue-until-morale-improves gambit is puzzling to me. It seems likely to me that most of these defendants will settle for several thousand dollars (regardless of their guilt) rather than risk everything by hiring a lawyer to defend themselves. But does the “US Copyright Group” really think that Americans will go back to the mall with their credit-cards in hand once their friends’ lives have been ruined by litigation?
You have to wonder how they think this is a useful and creative solution to a problem they’ll be facing for the rest of their corporate existance. Suing your own customers would seem — on the face of it — as an unlikely way of persuading them to remain customers . . .
Some of the folks being sued are, undoubtedly, guilty of deliberate and repeated copyright infringement for purposes of personal gain. In a sample size like this, some of ’em will fit just about any profile you choose. Most of them, however, will almost certainly turn out to be teens and twenty-something students with no particular assets worth taking. It’s like taking a sledgehammer to a cloud of gnats: you’ll mess up a few permanently, but most of ’em will not be touched.
March 23, 2010
March 15, 2010
Latest Iraq war drama bombs at box office
Hard though it may be to believe, American film-goers still don’t seem to want to watch anti-American movies:
In Team America: World Police, the first Hollywood-financed movie inspired by the U.S. invasion of Iraq and its attendant political controversy, South Park‘s Trey Parker and Matt Stone dispatched a squad of U.S. guerrillas — all in marionette form — to take down an Axis of Evil dictator and, in the process, slaughter the real villains of the piece: a bunch of self-important celebrities who had publicly opposed the U.S. policy. One of these stars is Matt Damon, who’s portrayed as such an idiot that all his dialogue consists of his grinning stupidly and saying, “Matt Damon!” The puppet Damon ends up dead, his head snapped by a Team America hero.
The real Matt Damon didn’t fare much better as the star of the new Green Zone: he went looking for the truth about Iraq’s WMDs, and got blown up by the IED of public indifference. The box-office curse of movies about the U.S. Mess-o-potamian escapade remained unbroken, as Damon became the latest star — after George Clooney, Jamie Foxx, Tom Cruise, Robert Redford, Meryl Streep, Tommy Lee Jones, Reese Witherspoon and Jake Gyllenhaal, not to mention the South Park guys — whose attempts to address the blood and blunders in our Mideast wars tanked with the mass audience.
Green Zone, reteaming Damon with Paul Greengrass, his director in the last two, very popular Jason Bourne films, earned just $14.5 million in its first three days at North American theaters, according to early studio estimates. That’s way below industry predictions (in the low to middle $20 millions) and less than a quarter of the $62 million amassed this weekend by the defending champ, Alice in Wonderland, which has leapt like a White Rabbit past the $200 million mark in just 10 days.
Full disclosure: haven’t seen it, almost certainly won’t see it. I’m not much of a movie fan, especially the type of movie with heavy-handed “message” overtones. Even though I’m well-read in military history, I rarely watch war movies (I suspect I have a touch of “extreme empathy“, honestly).
Update: Frank J. thinks it’s not all bad:
I’m sure Green Zone will make up the money in the merchandising like the McDonald’s Happy Meals tie ins.
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March 12, 2010
Does this movie trailer remind you of every other movie?
It does for movie trailers what the Generic News Report did for TV news. H/T to Virginia Postrel for the link.
March 9, 2010
This is why Fark.com has a special “Florida” tag
The headline really does say it all:
Shows with gay characters could lose Florida tax credits
Florida lawmakers are considering a “family friendly” bill that would deny tax credits to films and television shows with gay characters in favor of those promoting traditional values.
The proposal, which has fueled a heated controversy for its discriminatory nature, would increase current tax credits from 2 to 5% of production costs for shows considered “family friendly.”
I’m not in favour of tax credits for TV and movie production in any case, but if your government is going to be providing them, they should at least be available to all legal forms of entertainment. Discrimination in this way is ridiculous — and I’d be astounded if it was actually constitutional.
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February 11, 2010
QotD: Slandering and insulting Uzbekistan
Yesterday Uzbek photographer Umida Akhnedova was convicted of slandering and insulting her people. Her crime consisted of taking pictures, such as the one on the right, that government officials thought made Uzbekistan look bad. Among other things, The New York Times reports, Akhnedova was accused of “showing people with sour expressions or bowed heads, children in ragged clothing, old people begging for change or other images so dreary that, according to a panel of experts convened by the prosecutors, ‘a foreigner unfamiliar with Uzbekistan will conclude that this is a country where people live in the Middle Ages'” (a misleading impression, since the Spanish Inquisition never persecuted people for taking photographs). The government also charged that Akhnedova’s 2008 documentary about the Uzbek custom of verifying a bride’s virginity is “not in line with the requirements of ideology” and “promotes serious perversion in the young generation’s acceptance of cultural values.” Although her crime is punishable by up to three years in prison, the judge let her go, officially to celebrate the 18th anniversary of Uzbek independence but possibly also because the publicity surrounding the case was tarnishing Uzbekistan’s reputation (no mean feat).
Jacob Sullum, “One Frown Over the Line”, Hit and Run, 2010-02-11
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January 29, 2010
Australia’s film censors got bored, so decided to call attention to themselves
At least, that’s a sensible an interpretation as I can come up with for this lovely little policy change:
A reader writes, “Australian Classification Board (ACB) is now banning depictions of small-breasted women in adult publications and films. They banned mainstream pornography from showing women with A-cup breasts, apparently on the grounds that they encourage paedophilia, and in spite of the fact this is a normal breast size for many adult women. Presumably small breasted women taking photographs of themselves will now be guilty of creating simulated child pornography, to say nothing of the message this sends to women with modestly sized chests or those who favour them. Australia has also banned pornographic depictions of female ejaculation, a normal orgasmic sexual response in many women, with censors branding it as ‘abhorrent.'”
Hard to come up with a sensible explanation for this, you have to admit.
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January 18, 2010
Why just be shallow? Show off your shallowness for the next generation
It used to be that you could show off your lack of imagination by naming your kid after sports stars. These days, it’s names from popular films that are all the rage:
According to a rather sketchy report in the Sun, some parents have inexplicably decided it’s a bright idea to name a kid Neytiri or Toruk or indeed Pandora. The latter is top choice in the US, “with UK parents set to follow”.
The Sun appears to have got the shock news from blinkbox.com, which suggested that the $1bn box office barrier acts as a trigger for movie-based sprogbranding. A spokesman offered: “Past the $100m barrier, the chances of a film’s star lending their name to a child increase.”
This remarkable and almost unbelievable fact explains, of course, why priests have in recent years been obliged to utter: “I christen thee Bilbo Dark Knight Barbossa Gollum Jack Sparrow III…”
It almost makes you sympathetic to those countries which legally restrict the names parents are allowed to select for their children . . .
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January 8, 2010
Snow, 1963
What would happen if you took a typical Canadian snowfall and dumped it on Britain? In 1963, this is what happened. As you can see, it must have been the “right kind of snow”.
H/T to Roger Henry for the link.
