Is it real? Or is is the news?
I’m not usually a fan of shlock tabloids. I have friends who were very excited about Batboy: The Musical, based upon the popular reoccurring character in the Weekly World News, and young-adult librarians have considered putting tabloids in periodical sections as an “lite” option for reluctant readers. However, in my opinion, The National Enquirer, The Globe, and the like are filled with disturbing levels of invasion into the lives of celebrities and as well as content that is borderline repellant in its overt titilation.
So it is with some degree of surprise that I found the cover this the current edition of the Weekly World News to be incredibly inventive. The “Or the kitten DIES!” idea is a classic National Lampoon joke, but the graphic is well-done in the traditional part-drawing, part-manipulated-photo manner. The (partially obscured) headline about SPAM is hilarious, and I’d never really noticed the banner motto before. It’s all quite self-aware. Perhaps it really could be used by librarians in media literacy curriculum.
Cackles of Compassion Lite
For those of you who miss the ability to listen to Ben, Ken, and Dimitri’s revolutionarily self-indulgent college radio show as recreated through the magic of Live365.com, I have a partial solution: Last.fm and Audioscrobbler.com.
Audioscrobbler is plug-in that allows you to send any music that you play on your computer to a user account. This user account is hosted by Last.fm, which synchs your data with a fairly vast collection of licensed music, which allows you to listen to a streaming audio radio station that is based upon similar music to what you’ve played on your personal computer. One can also listen to the music favoured by one’s “musical neighbors”, people who have listening profiles similar to your own.
One only gets a month of free personal radio, which begins immediately after creating a user account. Listening to one’s neighbors is always free, but less likely to simply be music one likes. If one wants to be able to listen to one’s own musical tastes wherever one has a computer and a sufficiently speedy ‘net connection, one has to pay a “minimum suggested donation” of twelve dollars for a year’s subscription. Cheaper than National Public Radio.
So what’s the point? Signing up with Last.fm and listing me as a friend means that you can listen to my personal station, which is essentially like listening to Big Cackles of Compassion. The bands that Last.fm has in their library is quite compatible with my tastes: they have the eels, Suzanne Vega, Stacey Kent, The Smiths, Belle & Sebastian, Propellerheads, tAtU (in Russian!), The Cure, Frou Frou, Ani DiFranco, The Shins, The Who… If only they had a little Tom Lehrer and some more Stephen Sondheim, it could be just like the snippets of music that Dimitri and I would play between our interminable on-air conversation.
Also, how can you go wrong with an online service that promises you a pony when you subscribe?
Virtual Doubt
So… I may well be paranoid or seeing connections where there are none, but I’m reasonably certain that an innocent but unexpected visit to a friend may have caused her to switch her IM username and close her ‘blog. It is at least certain that she did these things within a few hours of seeing me, and I couldn’t help but connect the dots. Otherwise I’d have said that the conversation between us was short and innocuous.
Anyway, with no non-confrontational way to communicate with her, it’s a little difficult to confirm or deny any suspicions on my part. Which leaves my suspicions as, well, suspicious… questionable. Not exactly sure how I should feel about that. Ah, well, just one more thing to bury.
Hyrbid Cars, part 3
Now that I have archives happily built into the design of the site, I now feel like I can begin having running series of related comments. In that spirit, I had a couple of earlier posts about Hybrid cars that an article in the Keene Sentinel reminded me of this morning.
But now, hybrid technology seems to be heading the way of earlier technologies such as four valves per cylinder and variable valve timing. Those technologies can also be used to improve fuel efficiency, but in many instances they instead became another way of building cars with greater power and faster acceleration.
Manufacturers have been downsizing the gasoline engines in some of their hybrids only a little or not at all. And some are adding the electric motor essentially as a “green turbocharger,” as Consumer Reports magazine puts it.
Consider Honda. The company has two older-style hybrids — the two-passenger Insight, which the EPA says can get 66 miles per gallon on the highway, and the five-passenger Civic, which can get 51. The EPA estimates that the 2005 Honda Accord Hybrid gets just 37 miles per gallon, compared to 30 for the non-hybrid version on which it is based. According to Consumer Reports, which performs what it says are more accurate mileage tests, the actual difference is even smaller: The hybrid averages only about two miles per gallon better than the standard Accord.
More in link.
Charade for Free
While reading through a Wikipedia entry on Frank Sinatra, trying to clearly establish which came first, his film career or his wide renown as a singer (it seems he began as a singer but didn’t catapult into chanteur status until after he began appearing in movies), I happened upon an anecdote about the film Suddenly, which was reputedly watched by Lee Harvey Oswald just prior to his shooting of President John F. Kennedy. According to a biography of Sinatra, when he learned this, he had all prints of the film pulled from available distribution, and did not renew the copyright, thus allowing the film to fall into the public domain. A wikipedia link to a website that allows free downloads of lapsed public domain films led me to a link to a free download of Charade.
However, despite assertions to the contrary, I maintain my belief that Charade cannot actually be in the public domain. Now, I’m not a copyright lawyer, and I may well be wrong about this, but it seems quite clear to me that the various public domain DVD releases of Charade — and there are many — are not standing on firm legal ground, but taking advantage of a loophole that wouldn’t stand up under close scrutiny. Y’see, some prints of Charade were distributed without a notice of copyright. These prints are the ones that have been reproduced freely, as people are saying, “Hey! It didn’t say it was copyrighted on this print! How was I supposed to know?” The fact that it was copyrighted on other prints, and that intellectual property adheres to the content and not just the physical iterations of said content seems to be escaping most of these people. Plus, the fact that Universal Pictures made a remake of the film and re-released Charade on the DVD of said remake seems to indicate that they’re pretty sure they’re the copyright holders.
However, because of this loophole there are those that have thought the reproduction or adaptation of the contents of the intellectual property of Charade were fair game. So not only is there the official Universal remake, but there is also an indie-film adapation of the film. Robert Foreman has written and directed a film called Duplicity, written by Jack Cornish from “a 16th draft of a screenplay based on Charade”. Viewed at Cannes in 2004, it’s gone nowhere since. I’m hoping someone forgets to renew its copyright, so that I can legally download it and watch it for free, as I think that a film based on a screenplay based on a draft of a rewrite of a film based upon a novel based upon a screenplay based upon a short story in Redbook seems like something for which one might not want to pay good money.
Two last things. Firstly, while searching for some definitive answers to the public domain status of Charade, I stumbled upon some newsreel footage from 26 September, 1963 of “Mr. and Mrs. Robert Kennedy, Vice President Lyndon B. Johnson and his wife, and the President’s sister Mrs. Sergeant Shriver” attending the sneak preview of Charade at a benefit for the Stay-In-School Fund, an organization of which Mrs. JFK was honorary chair. Charade was released on December 6, 1963, and there was a rush to alter the prints so that the word “assassinated” would be dubbed over in the wake of the murder of President Kennedy. Why aren’t there more conspiracy theories surrounding this? VP Johnson clearly saw the original, pre-dubbed cut!
Secondly, I feel I should point out that Matt Fraction blogged about the free, downloadable public domain feature films aaaaages ago, but I never noticed that Charade was on the list. So, once again it becomes quite clear that I was born one day too early to actually be cool. Curses. However, the new video that Fraction’s animation and design studio produced for Guided By Voices is similar to their past works but a quantum step forward in terms of 3D incorporation and effect. Go watch it. I actually prefer the images with the sound off, but the camera strobe movement of the characters in the film make more sense when you realize that they’re in time with the song. Beautiful little thing, though, and the x-ray glasses effect is wonderful.
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