Thoughtful Preparations: Media Spin Blog

Found an interesting step-by-step instruction for drawing and painting an elephant in Photoshop. It’s a relatively new blog, Olduvai George, by Carl Buell a professional illustrator who specializes in paleontology subjects.  First rate stuff.

You can sign up to look for interstellar particles using an online Virtual Microscope at Stardust@Home.

As well as being the first mission to return samples from a comet, Stardust is the first sample return mission from the Galaxy. But finding the incredibly tiny interstellar dust impacts in the Stardust Interstellar Dust Collector (SIDC) will be extremely difficult.

Volunteers will appear as a co-author on any scientific paper by the Stardust@home collaboration announcing the discovery of the particle.

Something in White house Press Secretary Scott McClellan’s briefing today bothered me:

The President is fully committed to doing everything within his power to prevent attacks and defeat the terrorists.

Sounds terrific, but in the next breath, McClellan declares, “We do not negotiate with terrorists.” So, negotiating with the enemy is not within his power. What does doing everything mean? Doing everything means everything, not just things you feel like doing. A heroic leader does not have such limited bandwidth, he has inventive imagination and comes up with great solutions.

In reading the full text of Osama Bin Laden’s recent statement, I have mixed feelings of hope and guilt. The hope is in that he is offering insights and peaceful solutions, perhaps an end to a great divide filled with corpses of war. The guilt is with the tone in the USA, that good Americans aren’t supposed to agree with Bin Laden. There are many average Joe Americans whose knee-jerk reaction will be to curse and dismiss Bin Laden’s statements.

Authors of post Sept. 11 books listed here earlier, Education In Terrorism, foresaw the statesman role Bin Laden seeks to play. They made many of the same observations as Bin Laden, such as warning the US against depleting itself in Iraq and Aghanistan in the same way that the former USSR did in Aghanistan in the 1980’s.

Bin Laden recommends reading the book, Rogue State and accurately quotes many current events. The book’s publisher is Common Courage Press. The author, William Blum’s web site is killinghope.org.
I would be pleased to provide a link to recommended reading by President Bush, but as far as I know he hasn’t come up with anything lately. Perhaps he defers to Oprah’s Book Club List?

Recently watched the classic 1960 À bout de souffle (Breathless), which I hadn’t viewed since a History of Cinema college screening 30 years ago. Filmed in Paris, Breathless is Jean Luc Godard’s first feature, based on a story by Francois Truffaut. Heralded as a cornerstone of the French New Wave Cinema, it is shot in an edgy, spontaneous style of the beatnick jazz poetry of the times. The main character is a shiftless chain smoking car thief played by Jean Paul Belmondo. The film is often heralded as a turning point in filmmaking.

Naked, 1993 directed by Mike Leigh and filmed in locations around gritty parts of London. The protagonist Johnny, calls himself a cheeky monkey and is a similar chain-smoking, woman chasing, bad guy hero on the run cast from the same mold as Belmondo’s character.

My previous review of Kurosowa’s Drunken Angel covers the similar harrowing decline of a self destructive modern tough guy. Better him than me, eh Chuck-o?
So now that DV cameras are cheap, where are the new new wave of guerrilla cinematographers and little guys up against the odds of big established society? Perhaps they are with GNN: The Guerrilla News Network or Channel 101. We will know it when we see it: raw, jagged, real and maybe a little bit romantic.

I love this classic animation from the early formative years. Here is an archived 1937 cartoon by Paul Terry and his Terrytoons studio. It appears that a crucial shot early in the cartoon, where the little goat drinks alcohol is absent.

Fortunately, The International Animated Film Society: ASIFA-Hollywood has embarked on an ambitious project to create an animation archive, museum, and library for the benefit of the animation community, students and general public. The first phase of this project involves the creation of a virtual archive which will house images, movie clips and sound files pertaining to the art of animation. Their blog is loaded with art and information of interest to animation fans.

So these dudes at the party were talking about their neighbor Andy Samberg and laughing about The Lonely Island. It turns out when you’re young, videotape your fresh comedy ideas and launch them on the Internet, then The Lonely Island is a pretty cool place to be, and it just might lead to being writers for Saturday Night Live!

They made a spoof series about young sexy people living at The ‘Bu (Malibu) for Channel 101. That’s a topic worth another few blog articles. Later.

I heard this cool dude at a party last night marveling about Andy Samberg making it to SaturdayNightLive and how he is his next door neighbor. Sounds like fun. He mentioned how Andy and Chris Parnell SNL’s The Chronic of Narnia Rap has been tearing it up on the Internet, so I had to check it out for myself. Yeah, I remember seeing that. Funny stuff. Lazy Sunday in New York strolling aroundlooking tough and buying cupcakes. New York’s Village Voice reviews Lazy Sunday and wonders if it’s better than real rap.