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?
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.
A Conspiracy of Cartographers
Rosencrantz: I don't believe in it anyway.
Guildenstern: What?
Rosencrantz: England.
Guildenstern: Just a conspiracy of cartographers, you mean?
I apologize for the excessive map worship, but do consider this following snippet of page grab from Google Maps. To the left is a moderately wide-angle photograph of the border between Massachusetts and New Hampshire, along a route that I drive four times weekly. From this distance, they look moderately the same, except that New Hampshire looks significantly more verdant, as if its foliage is greener than its tax-laden commonwealthy neighbor.
However, since the border between the two states is imaginary and not marked by a physical or weather barrier, it seems unlikely that Massachusetts’ trees should be in such dire need of water, especially when immediately next to their lush New Hampshire brethren. The image on the right brings understanding in to sharper focus by showing just how low-fidelity the zoomed-in sattelite images for New Hampshire are. Whoever is responsible for the NH aerial imagery, namely Digital Globe, clearly isn’t providing the level of resolution acheived by the neighboring MassGIS (Geographic Information System) in collaboration with the Commonwealth of Massachusetts Exectutive Office of Environmental Affairs. How sad to live in a state that looks down its nose at its southern sibling, and thinks so highly of its environmental efforts, only to discover that that Mass’ enviromental agencies are going to be able better track erosion, weather damage, deforestation, suburban sprawl, blight, and the like with sattelite technology.
Click on the above image for a larger demonstration of blurry, trippy, low-rez New Hampster.
You Will Go To The Moon
Google has installed a special site in “honor of the first manned Moon landing, which took place on July 20, 1969”, making this the amusingly non-standard 36th anniversary event.
It’s part of the standard Google Maps feature, which combines directions and roadways and available satellite photos into a pretty smooth interface, with the expected Google speed to its interactivity. Once again, Google’s functionality is stealing my heart away from the plodding, methodical, reliable Yahoo.
And in part, it’s because Google’s cleverness and sense of humor inspires allegiance. Question three in the Help FAQ reads, “What happens if I try to zoom too close?”, with the following dare as an answer: “Well, you’ll have to go and find out, won’t you?”
And just to spoil it for you, if one delves too close to the surface of the moon, one discovers that it’s features are composed of the following: Read the rest of this entry »
Calvin and Hobbes
Along the lines of the Gillen film, this is another digital project I’ve been planning on getting ’round to for quite some time. However, while the Gillen footage was taken in November of 2002, I clipped the original version of this from the newspaper almost ten years ago. Long before I knew of a computer program that would allow me to animate pictures, I knew not only that there had to be one but that one would eventually come into my possession. Thank goodness for free scanner software and Adobe Elements, for I can now animate GIFs to my heart’s content.
Bill Watterson has been very outspoken about controlling licensed and unlicensed reproduction of his creations, and with the recent announcement of the publication of The Complete Calvin and Hobbes, a number of C&H archives have disappeared from the web. I don’t begrudge either Watterson or Andrews McMeel the right to control their product, and I repoduce the following strip only as reference and context for the following animated image. After all, while I assume and hope that Watterson assumed and hoped that people would cut out these images and paste them onto three by five cards and staple them together into a flipbook, scanning them into Photoshop Elements, making the slightly uneven squares match, and making a digital flipbook is much the same impulse.
And rest assured that I will be plonking down a hundred and fifty dollars in October when that gorgeous behemoth hits shelves.
Motivational Punishment
From AllPosters.com:
It doesn’t surprise me that someone has discontinued the above Punisher Motivational Poster. It also fails to surprise me that someone in Marvel’s increasingly omnipresent marketing department — I’m not willing to track down the webpage of the new venture partnership they’ve embarked upon where one can pay for Marvel Superhero Clip Art — thought it was a good idea to to have a gun-toting, skull-wearing vigilante on a cubicle-sized motivational poster.
No, that sort of appalling ignorance is in perfect keeping with the sort of marketing folks that create children’s action figures based upon characters in Rated-R movies. And I’m not even talking about the MacFarlane Toys line, as those action figures are primarily designed for adult collectors, no I’m talking about the vintage TERMINATOR 2 action figures and the like, before the “Grown-Up” Toy Market really ballooned. Marketing execs are soulless freaks, embodying a particular combination of fierce imagination and total lack of social awareness. And besides, the Punisher was in a recent film (although the poster has been around for about two years) and is therefore a recognizable commodity.
No, what really gets me is that someone felt that a Captain America Motivational Poster about patriotism would be a suitable substitution for the sort of person who would be buying a Punisher Motivational Poster in the first place. That’s just mind-boggling.
By the way, the “motivational” text on the Punisher poster is as follows: “To fight when others fold, pursue while others retreat, conquer while others quit, and make right when all else is wrong.”
Woo! Makes me want to buckle down and improve my corporate efficiency rating, I tellya!
We have taken your blog hostage
Above image stolen from PythOnline. It feels very Gilliamesque, so well done, corporate interns.
Sorry about the long delay. Normal weekly updates commence immediately. And I’m still updating more frequently than the Memecenter‘s patron saint Jen Frickell. So that’s something, then.
For Candidate For President For America
Download a print-resolution version here. Suitable for placing on your bumper. Also available at my long-time-coming CaféPress store. I’ve been a member since 2001, and have never quite managed to finalize the designs that I’d had kicking about in my head. However, I now have two stickers available online, with more MelbaMadness to follow! Watch this space!
Tim Calhoun’s platform speeches can be found on FallonFey.com. Download from 2003-2004: Andy Roddick, and from 2002-2003: Ray Liotta and John McCain. RealOne player required.
3-D Lomography
Apparently, the new fad is lomography. Everyone else who writes random crap on the medium of the world wide web has already weighed in on the perils and pleasures of the LOMO Kompakt Automat camera, so now it’s my turn.
I have been a careful and precious photographer for many years. When I travel and vacation, I prefer to travel alone. This gives me a sufficient amount of time to take photographs of minutiae and landscapes from dramatic, calculated angles and to sit in hunched, spiderlike positions until the sunlight suits my fancy. I am patient and particular, which is why it’s good that most of my photographs are not of people. If you look at many photo albums from people’s travels, you will find that most of the photographs are almost exactly the same. Here are Joe and Amy in front of the Acropolis. Here are Joe and Amy in from of the Leaning Tower of Pisa. Here are Joe and Amy in front of the airport. The smiles are the same, the clothing has few variations, and while the order may change (Here are Amy and Joe in front of…), the only real difference is the background.
What is the purpose of these photographs? Proof? This photograph categorically proves that the vacationers have in fact stood in front of something homogeneously famous. Woo. In the days of Adobe Photoshop, this is not particularly categorical. Also, I’m not precisely sure what the merit is of a) having dozens of virtually identical photographs of you and your traveling companion are, or b) taking photographs of partially obscured great works or scenery and architecture. You already know what you and your traveling companion look like, but the details of the ruins of the Glastonbury Cathedral are not so easily brought to mind without photographic assistance.
My father, on the other hand, prefers photographs with his traveling companion standing near the edifice. “For scale,” he says. Not a bad use of people in photographs, but I still prefer my pictures human-free. I will wait for a considerable time, my eye squinting through the view-finder and my finger tense over the shutter release, waiting for the split second when tourists are no longer marring the composition of my picture of, say, the Lion’s Gate of Mycenae. Bloody tourists.
So I am perversely interested in the LOMO camera. With such precision and pain-staking attention to exactness, I occasionally yearn for a camera sans buttons and knobs and dials and settings. A camera that you wave at the intended target, take a picture, and damn the consequences. A camera that doesn’t make people squirm and shift and demand that you take the damn picture, already. The versatility of its light meter and automatic shutter functions apparently allow for excellent and sometimes unintentionally artsy photographs in almost any condition or setting. When I first heard about these babies six months ago or whenever, I knew I wanted one as my second camera. I figured I probably go LOMO before I went digital.
With the recent deterioration of my primary camera, you’d think that I’d ratchet my LOMO-purchasing plans a notch closer to actually happening, but this is not the case. Han Duong recently brought my attention to another camera available under the LOMO umbrella, the Loreo 3D. The Loreo creates stereographs, photographs that are the 1930s predecessor the the View-Master.
While it may seem silly to buy a secondary camera that doesn’t take normal photographs, especially when my primary camera is essentially non-functional, I will have this camera. It dovetails nicely with a recent resurfacing of my love for View-Masters, and the ability to create my own 3-D images is just too cool for words.
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