French New Wave directory Eric Rohmer made this 1964 short film about a woman who is a student in Paris and likes to walk around exploring the city and herself. Incredible simplicity.
Part 2:
Author Archives: Editor
My Plug Idea for the BP Oil Spill
Plug the hole with a big… you know… plug. There are no ideas coming out of the U.S. government or its bosses at British Petroleum, so why not offer some of our own. I’m pretty good at offering lots of dumb ideas while trying to find a single good one. So here’s my latest dumb idea.
To modify my idea in the film slightly, I would guess that instead of dropping the plug from chains, you would set the thing down on short legs at the ocean floor and then, when it was aligned with the hole, blow the legs out from under it to drop it into the hole.
I wonder if there are lots of ideas like this for solving the disaster in the Gulf. I’d be very curious to see what other people are coming up with.
Update:
After posting my doomsday hole plug idea last night, Scot Monette wrote me a note to point me to this video for his oil spill cleanup product, Petronet. It’s a biodegradable cellulose fiber made from ground up garbage. It’s environmentally friendly and it absorbs huge amounts of oil. When a country gets into a situation where it can only elect intellectual midgets to the highest federal offices (yes, I’m referring to our dimwitted President), you need people like this who are thinking on their feet and use their ingenuity to actually make things that help. Look at this video and ask yourself why the Coast Guard is not on the phone with Mr. Monette at this very moment:
Audio Podcast Novel: Robinson Crusoe (Part 11)
DOWNLOAD ROBINSON CRUSOE – PART 11
Crusoe makes another shocking discovery and sets himself on a course of action that leads him to one of the book’s most interesting passages. It is here, in Crusoe’s struggle with his own outrage and his ideas about what makes for civilized behavior, that Defoe begins to turn the novel in a new direction. He is examining the underpinnings of Western civilization. What makes a person civilized? What does the right of self defense really mean? This kind of thinking and questioning is perhaps somewhat lacking in certain countries today. Notice also how religion, for Crusoe, seems to have a moderating, calming influence. He resists using it to justify himself or his actions.
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Read by Alessandro Cima
Illustration is by NC Wyeth (1920)
Crusoe watches the ocean for boats
All audio stories are Copyright © Candlelight Stories, Inc., All Rights Reserved. Do not distribute copies of our MP3 audio or video stories. They are for your personal use. If you choose to burn our MP3 stories onto a personal CD, do not make copies of the CD or distribute them to other people. Also, do not sell CDs containing our audio stories. All audio stories are copyrighted by Candlelight Stories, Inc.
Artificial Life Created for the First Time
Scientists announced today that they have created the first artificial life form in human history.
The J. Craig Venter Institute has informed the White House of the incredible achievement and the possible environmental and military repercussions are already being debated.
Researchers used computers to create an artificial sequence of DNA. Then they inserted that DNA into hollowed-out cells which began to grow and replicate.
That’s a new form of life created by human beings. This may be a far more important development than going to the moon.
Trailer for Metropolis with Restored Lost Footage
Hey! I thought I had the darned movie already! But now there’s yet another ‘restored’ version of Fritz Lang’s 1927 science fiction masterpiece, Metropolis. Boy is that a gorgeous trailer though! Wow! And the music is far better than what’s on my DVD. This is the movie that just keeps making itself over and over and over.
I want to make a feature film and I’ll release the 2-hour version, but there will be 17 hours of ‘lost footage’ hidden in various places around the globe so that the movie can recompile itself over the decades into an ‘official version’ which bears absolutely no resemblance to the original movie. Or better yet, I’m going to start shooting fake Metropolis footage and then discover it in the broom closet of an old bus depot in the middle of Kansas. So the movie will suddenly expand to 4 and a half hours.
President Obama Using Military to Threaten Journalists Covering Gulf Oil Spill
The President of the United States is actively using United States military forces to threaten journalists who are trying to document the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. U.S. Coast Guard officers working with BP officials threatened CBS reporters with arrest for photographing an oil-fouled shoreline. A Coast Guard officer says, ‘These are BP’s rules. These are not our rules.’
This is simply horrifying. The Obama presidency has ended. I’m a lifelong Democrat and I’m frightened of this guy. I want him out and out fast. Any president who uses the U.S. military to threaten and harass journalists needs to be removed from office instantly. It’s criminal behavior. Our military is now apparently answering to British Petroleum in the Gulf region.
There are increasing reports coming out of Louisiana that cell phones and cameras are being confiscated and that scientists and research equipment are being turned away from trying to investigate the spill in public lands.
It is beginning to look as if the Obama administration, along with BP, is engaged in a massive cover-up of Gulf oil spill information.
Audio Podcast Novel: Pinocchio (Chapter 9)
DOWNLOAD PINOCCHIO – CHAPTER 9
Per l’Italia! More of our story!
This is one of the great gifts from Italy to the children of the world. Carlo Collodi’s 1883 masterpiece, The Adventures of Pinocchio, is the story of the wooden marionette who desperately wants to be a real boy. His adventures are full of mischief, wonder, sadness, joy, treachery, danger and all the exuberant life of a real Italian boy. This is the English translation by Carol Della Chiesa.
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Reading and illustration by Alessandro Cima
All audio stories are Copyright © Candlelight Stories, Inc., All Rights Reserved. Do not distribute copies of our MP3 audio or video stories. They are for your personal use. If you choose to burn our MP3 stories onto a personal CD, do not make copies of the CD or distribute them to other people. Also, do not sell CDs containing our audio stories. All audio stories are copyrighted by Candlelight Stories, Inc.
BP and U.S. are Hiding Something in Gulf
That’s a 21-inch pipe blowing oil and gas into the Gulf of Mexico. It’s 5,000 feet underwater and it’s a doomsday hole. There’s something very strange about the information coming out of the Gulf oil spill. It’s minimal. Some scientists who have technology for precisely measuring the rate of flow from the pipe are being turned away from the spill area by BP and the United States government. BP didn’t even want the video to get released because they didn’t want anyone to know how much oil was leaking. They are still saying that knowing how much oil is coming out is irrelevant. Really? Some experts are trying to warn people that over 75 million gallons of oil have already poured into the Gulf waters. 75 million. That’s almost seven times the Exxon Valdez spill already.
Animation: Fred the Button Finds a Friend
Quirky Pictures conducted a workshop for children who animate at the Oxley Park Primary School in the United Kingdom. This one is the story of a button who sets out looking for a friend and finds himself on many adventures. The kids have done beautiful drawings and their voice work gives the whole thing the kind of gentle wit that only clever kids can invent.
The Dead Weather
Ladies and gentlemen, the greatest rock & roll band in the world.
Painter: Andrew Abbott
One of my favorite sites is The Rumpus, an online culture magazine that covers literature, art, film, politics, sex, comics, music and generally excellent and useful ideas. One of their writers, Julie Greicius, did a piece on a painter I’ve never seen before: Andrew Abbott. I really liked his paintings as soon as I saw them. They are harsh and beautiful at the same time. I have no idea how much they cost or anything like that. Probably a lot. They’re really good and I imagine they are hanging in a lot of fancy living rooms right at this moment.
But his web site is plenty of fun for me and this guy can paint like some serious business.
Podcast Novel: A Princess of Mars (Chapter 18)
This is the first John Carter of Mars novel by Edgar Rice Burroughs, the author of the Tarzan books. It was his first novel, published in 1917 and it’s a work of rip-roaring science fiction that has inspired many of the great writers in the genre.
Chapter 18: John Carter, is a prisoner of a new Martian horde and he witnesses savagery like none he has seen before.
You can find all the previous chapters of the book here.
You’ll find regular podcasts of all the chapters over the next couple of months. Subscribe to our feed.
Duration: 00:09:24
Read by Alessandro Cima
All audio stories are Copyright © Candlelight Stories, Inc., All Rights Reserved.
Aldus Huxley Narrates Brave New World
This is an LP of a 1957 recording of Aldus Huxley narrating his science fiction masterpiece, Brave New World. The music is by Bernard Herrmann. Of course, it’s not really the book. It’s a 1 hour radio dramatization. The book is a frightening look at a future of genetic breeding and an anesthetized population of perfectly content people without desires. They are kept uninformed and comfortable so that they will remain peaceful and easy to control by a ruling order. They are made to cherish their servitude and oppression.
Huxley believed that George Orwell’s vision of the future in 1984 was too extreme and that oppression of large populations would be watered down into something resembling pleasure and entertainment. They were both partly right.
So read Huxley’s book and think about the world around you and how little is really expected of you.
Delete Your Facebook Account
See the insipid goober just to the left. That’s Mark Zuckerberg. He runs Facebook, the site that gathers tons of your personal and public information to form what he hopes will be an all-pervasive social network. Being young is no excuse for this guy. A young a-hole grows into an old a-hole very quickly. This is what the Web’s leading a-hole said recently:
And then in the last 5 or 6 years, blogging has taken off in a huge way and all these different services that have people sharing all this information. People have really gotten comfortable not only sharing more information and different kinds, but more openly and with more people. That social norm is just something that has evolved over time.
We view it as our role in the system to constantly be innovating and be updating what our system is to reflect what the current social norms are.
A lot of companies would be trapped by the conventions and their legacies of what they’ve built, doing a privacy change – doing a privacy change for 350 million users is not the kind of thing that a lot of companies would do. But we viewed that as a really important thing, to always keep a beginner’s mind and what would we do if we were starting the company now and we decided that these would be the social norms now and we just went for it.
Do you learn to talk like a corporate dick by accident or is it something they teach in business school?
In other words: Facebook thinks making your information public is the new default norm. Private information is a thing of the past. They’ve basically just taken away users’ ability to keep their information private. Public is Facebook’s new ‘norm.’
So let’s show this pre-pubescent nincompoop that we like our privacy. Delete your Facebook account. I did. Start a blog. It’s much more fun than struggling through a crappy interface just to tell people about your latest haircut.
Some students at New York University have funding and are working on a new open-source social network with freely distributed code. You know, like the Firefox browser. Their service is called Diaspora. That’s the best idea I’ve heard about in years. Open source social networking… with privacy.
Here’s the WikiHow article on how to permanently delete your Facebook account.
Here’s an update: The students working on Diaspora have raised over $115,000 via online donations. This is a great start for their development project and means they don’t have to answer to a corporate investor.
Another open-source effort at social networking is OneSocialWeb which actually has working open-source code. Their software works sort of like the open-source blogging software, WordPress. You can install your own version of it on a web server if you want.
Here’s an excellent Wired article on the up and coming alternatives to Facebook.
Ultraman Art From Japan
Pink Tentacle has Japanese sci-fi and Ultraman art by Takayoshi Mizuki. These were done in the sixties and early seventies. They remind me of the art you’d see on toy boxes.