‘Light Up’ is a short animation by Aveline Stoquart and David Duvieusart. Students at the Haute École Albert Jacquard in Namur, Belgium also worked on the film. A girl who is into astronomy lives in a totally starless world. One evening she sees something new and gets into her little flying machine to investigate. I love the scene in the little plane. It’s a very simple charming little story, gently told and well-animated.
NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter has captured images of astronaut tracks, lunar landers, and left behind equipment from the Apollo 12, 14 and 17 moon missions. These are the sharpest images ever taken of the moon and should give fake moon landing conspiracy nuts a whole new bag of clues to play with. We can’t rebuild what we once understood and get ourselves back to the moon, but we can take pictures of our past glory.
Oh dear! What have we here? This is a Bollywood science fiction (and I use that term very lightly!) film that was apparently made in 1967, though it looks more 1950s to me. It was directed by one T.P. Sundaram. It is ostensibly about an astronaut who gets kidnapped to the moon and then has to fight for the moon princess and her kingdom when martians try to invade. The movie is a roaring low-fi spectacle with songs, fights and cheesy cardboard special effects. Spaceship controls are actually steering wheels. If you want some good advice, skip through to the 2 hour 15 minute mark and just watch the glorious action sequence that closes the film. You will see grown men fighting with giant sparklers aboard a crash-landing spaceship. You’ll see robots, a Cyclops, and two men engaged in a lunar surface wrestling match that makes Captain Kirk look like Bruce Lee’s star pupil. You will then see a rhinoceros. If you are not laughing hard enough to burst a vessel of some sort, then I don’t think anything can be done for you!
In what I consider the most important recent news event, the Federal First Circuit Court of Appeals in Boston ruled that citizens have the legal right to film police while they are performing their public duties.
The case involved attorney Simon Glik in Boston who observed an arrest in the Boston Common that he thought was abusive. So he flipped out his cellphone camera and filmed the cops. They arrested him.
The Court has responded to this – one of the increasing number of cases nationwide in which cops try to take cameras from or arrest citizens who try to record them during arrests – by affirming a lower court ruling in Glik’s favor. In this case, as in most similar cases, the police attempted to charge someone with ‘wiretapping’ because the video cameras are ‘secretly’ recording audio. Of course any court recognizes that only a simpleton would associate using a video camera with wiretapping.
The Court stated:
The filming of government officials engaged in their duties in a public place, including police officers performing their responsibilities, fits comfortably within these principles [of protected First Amendment activity]. Gathering information about government officials in a form that can readily be disseminated to others serves a cardinal First Amendment interest in protecting and promoting the free discussion of governmental affairs.
Episodes of police misconduct, brutality and murder are increasing nationwide. Police powers are growing, government agencies are eavesdropping on Americans without warrants, personal data is being pulled into government databases, and security paranoia is reaching nearly hysterical levels. The fact is that the police are committing crimes – including murder – at an alarming rate. Cops are using violence against innocent demonstrators. They are killing helpless people in the subways of Oakland. They are beating homeless people to death in Fullerton, California. They are raiding political activist groups before and during public events on the chance that these groups might be planning something illegal. Filming these cops is absolutely the least that citizens should be doing.
The Court has made it abundantly clear that citizens have always had the legal right to use video cameras on the police and that arrests of citizens in these circumstances is illegal. That is why all cases nationwide that police forces have brought against people with video cameras have been thrown out of court.
It should now be clear that police departments arresting people for filming are liable in civil courts.
The Court went further than its decision on filming police activities. It also stated that citizens recording police or government officials have the same legal protections afforded to the press. In other words: citizens are journalists.
The Court said:
Moreover, changes in technology and society have made the lines between private citizen and journalist exceedingly difficult to draw. The proliferation of electronic devices with video-recording capability means that many of our images of current events come from bystanders with a ready cell phone or digital camera rather than a traditional film crew, and news stories are now just as likely to be broken by a blogger at her computer as a reporter at a major newspaper. Such developments make clear why the news-gathering protections of the First Amendment cannot turn on professional credentials or status.
There is no legal definition of or requirement for being a journalist. In fact, much of CNN’s video coverage comes from ‘iReporters’ who are citizen journalists filming events around the world and sending in their footage via the CNN web site. Those people are fully protected by all the same laws that protect journalists and their sources.
I think this is a long-overdue and definitive ruling that clarifies legally what has been obvious all along. People always have the right to film their police officers doing the public duties that public monies pay for.
Finally, and most important: People Are the Press.
When Sri Lanka banned goods from the north during a war with the Tamil Tigers, newspapers had to find the paper they needed for publishing. Kannan Arunasalam made this short documentary film about people who take their work in journalism very seriously.
Via Brain Pickings
This is a charming look at the world’s greatest bike race from 1962. I see that Louis Malle is credited as one of the directors. You can see the incredible efforts put in by racers in the mountains and how back in the early sixties they would eat fruit on their bikes and sometimes dart into village restaurants along way to snatch bottles of water, wine and ice cream! The film also mentions the issue of doping as it was practiced in 1962 which seems to have mainly been an effort to mask the pain. The one depressing thing about this film is that it shows the sport of bike racing in 1962 was as uniformly white as it is today. The complete lack of diversity in the Tour de France is a shame and an unforgivable embarrassment to the race itself and to the sport as a whole. The damn race is so white that it makes my teeth hurt to watch it. And I watch every stage of it every single year. So trust me, it’s an all-white event and the organizers and teams should be investigated for that issue which is actually far more important than the doping issue. Every single racer dopes. But quite obviously the dope is only given to white racers. The Tour de France is becoming a European NASCAR. Just go ask Lance.