–The music industry wouldn’t be spiteful bastards, would they?

–I found a video of SpaceShipOne’s flight. It’s about an hour long and requires RealPlayer (or Real Alternative).

–The author of this New Yorker review of “Eats, Shoots & Leaves” seems to have completely missed the point of the book. It’s not a punctuation guide. It’s just a little editorial along the lines of “gee, wouldn’t it be great if people tried to care again?” The author comes off as somebody who can’t stand the idea that someone else might know as much–if not more–about grammar and punctuation as he, therefore he must strike them down before they become a threat to his obvious superiority.

–Burt Rutan did it again! SpaceShipOne successfully became the first private air(?)craft to breach the boundaries of space. After achieving weightlessness, pilot Mike Melvill released a bag of M&Ms and let them float around in the cockpit for about three minutes before beginning the shuttlecock-like descent to Earth. Fortunately, the landing went more smoothly than December’s test flight. That’s a costly paint job. Speaking of re-entry, did you know that SpaceShipOne has no heatshielding? If you re-enter the atmosphere at low speed, you don’t need any.

SpaceShipOne is little more than a proof-of-concept vehicle. It can’t carry cargo or more than one passenger, and it’s not designed for prolonged or orbital flights. However, the Wright brothers’ Kittyhawk flights and Lindburgh’s transAtlantic flights were little more than proof-of-concept stunts themselves. All I know is that when, 10 years or so from now, private passenger trips into space come down to the $3k or so mark, I’m booking my seat.

–Courtesy of Robert Fripp’s diary comes this disturbing article about Clear Channel’s attempt to claim ownership of the concept of bootlegs. Such displays of arrogance, combined with their blatant rightist propoganda, have quickly moved Clear Channel to near the top of my corporate hate list, along with MicroSoft, Monsanto, and Wal-Mart.

–Lost in Translation (no, not the movie). Found on William Gibson’s dead blog. Jeez, I’ve been doing this manually for some time now. Obviously I need to waste more time surfing.

–If America’s version of Big brother were like the UK’s, I’d watch it.

–The Rutan brother’s White Knight has been doing test flights in the Mojave desert, and is scheduled to make the first private manned space flight this Monday. I’m a little disappointed, in that Rutan told a crowd at the Oshkosh air show last year that he would make the first flight from there. Oh, well. At least we’re finally taking space flight out of the exclusive hands of the government.

–Yet another example that we are turning into the country that does things we used to think only other countries did–countries that we were told are Evil. The US is now officially in the business of “disappearing” its enemies. Donald Rumsfeld even signed the memo ordering it.

Admittedly, this most recent example is nothing new; American citizens and civilian citizens of other countries have regularly been “disappeared” to Guantanamo Bay for a few years now. This, however, is different in that it blatantly violates the Geneva Convention. Of course, Bushco doesn’t believe that the Geneva code applies to them.

–BTW, here is the memorandum that the Justice Department wrote up giving the White House legal go-ahead to torture prisoners. This is the one Ashroft has refused to turn over to the Senate committee investigating the atrocities, thus putting himself in contempt of congress. But then, contempt of congress is nothing new for this administration.

–I had the opportunity to attend a special showing of the restored Lawrence of Arabia last night. This is the second time I’ve seen it on the big screen, and I am spoiled. I can never watch that movie on TV again. The sprawling Super Panavision 70 vistas are overwhelming. Tiny figures can be seen picking their way amongst the massive dunes and rocks that are completely lost on a television screen. The scale of this picture simply does not translate to any format other than a full-size theater screen. None of David Lean’s films were constructed to be seen any other way. Every shot of Lawrence is a piece of artwork. No setup is wasted. Although nearly four hours in length, the film does not drag, because the images themselves are so wonderful to look at.

While watching, I was struck my a number of elements in Lawrence that simply don’t exist today. The on-location filming and expansive shots, for starters. If Lawrence were made today, the shots of the camera emerging from behind rock outcroppings to reveal a beduin encampment spread among the buttes would have been entirely CG. The rocks would be fake; the giant dunes would be fake; the colony of tents would be fake; the legions of Arab riders would be faked from a few dozen extras. It would all look very good, but you would know. Lean drug equipment into the desert. Rumor has it that the cameras had to be refrigerated between uses to prevent the film from melting (though I find that doubtful; removing the camera from the refrigerator would have caused the lens to condense; now, the film itself, perhaps…).

Today’s budget-obsessed studio execs would never allow so much of a film to be shot in the actual desert. They would insist on bluescreens and digital elements. It would be filmed on 35mm for easy home video transfer. They would insist that the movie be cut down to 2 1/2 hours. Lord of the Rings, with all its action-packed fight scenes and fanciful creatures may have gotten away with it, but a biopic? Who is going to sit through that? Besides, you can hold twice as many showings of a 2 1/2-hour film as a 4-hour film. Gotta get as many paying butts in the seats during a day as you can.

The lingering, dialogue-less shots would be nonexistent. Some of my favorite scenes in the movie would have been cut down to a few seconds: the red-orange screen that slowly reveals the rising sun; the trek back across the desert to rescue the man who fell off his camel; and of course the Mirage: Omar Sharif’s famous entrance from a mile off that takes minutes, with no dialogue and no music.

Peter O’Toole would never get the job today. His effeteness, which worked so well in the movie, would be mistaken for homosexuality, and the part instead would go to a young, handsome actor who would draw women to an admittedly male-centered film.

But enough gushing about Lawrence of Arabia. There is plenty of bandwidth for me to carry on some more another time.

–In other news: Eep!

–While sympathetic to the man’s family during his declining years, I am not joining the legions mourning the passing of Ronald Reagan. An article by Mark Morford sums up my reasons pretty well. We named enough after the man while he was still alive (naming an airport after the man who fired all the air traffic controllers? Nice irony, guys.). He did not end the Cold War. At most, he accellerated by a few years the Soviet Union’s inevitable economic collapse. I could go on and on, but I’ll let the article speak for me.

–Turns out the Inquisition wasn’t as nasty as we thought. Fewer witches were burned and heretics tortured than we’d been led to believe. I guess that makes it all right, then; noble cause and all that. Members of the Bush administration, take note!

–Oh, and one more thing:

Happy Bloomsday! Go down to the pub and raise a pint in rememberance of dear Mr Joyce.

Some of the wackiness going on today:

–You don’t get a good beheading story very often. Kevin Lee Graff is suspected of stabbing retired physician Hal Engelson to death. When police arrived at Engleson’s house, they found the severed head of his neighbor, screenwriter Robert Lees in a back room. Lees, 91, is probably best known for the movies The Black Cat (1941) and Abbot and Costello Meet Frankenstein (1948). Although not a fate I would wish on anybody, beheading does seem an appropriate way to go for a writer of camp horror.

–From the same goverment that tried to reclassify fast-food jobs as manufacturing, comes “frozen french fries are fresh vegetables!”

–Microsoft is going to enter the antivirus market. Why does this not reassure me?

–Lake goes walkies. These folks woke up one morning to find the 23-acre lake they live beside had vanished, leaving only a stinky, muddy pit. Closer to home, a similar mishap befell Shady Lake in nearby Oronoco a few years ago. Only in that case it was no natural disaster. Shady Lake is a man-made lake, created by a small dam on the Zumbro River. One night, some pranksters snuck in and raised the sluicegate, then broke off the wheel so the gate could not be lowered again. The lake has since recovered.

–A group called Move America Forward (not to be confused with MoveOn.org) is trying to rally people to call & e-mail theatres that will be showing Michael Moore’s film Fahrenheit 9/11. The effort is not one of support; they want to pressure theaters into dropping the movie. I remember living in a town with a single two-screen theater when The Last Temptation of Christ came out. A group of local pastors & ministers got together and paid the theater’s owner a visit. Suddenly, an ad appeared in the paper announcing that the theater would not be showing The Last Temptation of Christ. Lots of movies never made it to our town, but I’ve never seen an announcement before or since that a particular movie would not be showing there. A person may not agree with Moore or his film, but suppressing it smacks of concealing the truth, and right now truth is a very hard thing to come by.