Thoughtful Preparations: Media Spin Blog

Just finished upgrading this blog to WordPress’ new 2.0 release. After a few tense moments, the good old Thoughtful Preparations blog came back to life, upgraded and all.

Kind of fitting and good timing since this is roughly the one year anniversary of my launching this blog. I had no idea I would get into it as much as I have, and the WordPress software community has much to do with the pleasure gained in blogging.

I look forward to seeing the new features, plug-ins and performance enhancements in WordPress 2.0 aka Duke. Thanks!

Beautifully composed photographs by Arno Rafael Minkkinen. See a recent gallery retrospective of his large collection of thought provoking images.

My recent blog entry Wacky Holiday Fun Movies attracted a lot of eyeballs, so we return with more pop internet video craziness. Everybody loves a good joke. Add audio and video special effects, shot quick and dirty, and you’ve got a crude laugh riot.

Google recently announced at the 2006 CES show in Las Vegas their intentions to sell video produced by major content producers such as CBS. Meanwhile, a look at Google Video reveals something like America’s Funniest Home Videos on a global gross out scale. Google clearly understands how to attract eyeballs, with their clean presentation and access to thousands of dirty little homemade videos and animations uploaded by the salt of the earth.

Poop Today? Clever stop motion video of floating young men singing a gay song.
Fire Fart, a man lights a candle by lighting ass gas on fire. A human torch!
Matrix Ping Pong, Creative example of what ping pong looks like in Matrix time-space.
Hung Up Remix, Maybe not the music video Madonna had in mind. Performers from a distant era can’t keep the dancing spirits down.
Farting Preacher, Strange attention getting methods of a televangelist. Sounds fake.
Girls Judo Wrestling Match, Rachel’s first jiu-jitsu tournament.
Dumbest Dog, a dog who seems to want to bite himself with a laugh track.
Poppin’ Balloons, a peak inside of what appears to be a college dorm room balloon popping party.

Google set out to organize all the information in the world, and now we can see that there is such a thing as too much information.

Came across this inspirational passage by D. H. Lawrence in a recent New Yorker book review:

Dying of tuberculosis in the winter of 1929-30, unable to walk, and rendered sexually impotent by his disease, he wrote these words on the last page of his last book:

“Man wants his physical fulfilment first and foremost, since now, once and once only, he is in the flesh and potent. For man, the vast marvel is to be alive. For man, as for flower and beast and bird, the supreme triumph is to be most vividly, most perfectly alive. . . . The dead may look after the afterwards. But the magnificent here and now of life in the flesh is ours, and ours alone, and ours only for a time. We ought to dance with rapture that we should be alive and in the flesh, and part of the living, incarnate cosmos.”

He died on March 2, 1930, aged forty-four and weighing all of eighty-five pounds, in Vence, where Frieda, Aldous and Maria Huxley, and some others buried him, Frieda wrote, “very simply, like a bird.”

Let’s dance!

Once again, congratulations to Reid on your accomplishment in getting Broken Arrows made. Cannot say enough for someone who manages to realize the long road from the idea to the screen.

Fortunately Reid is one of those people like myself who has been known to take a few risks, but they are carefully calculated risks. On the other hand, there is a man I know of who died by jumping backwards from his roof onto trampoline, only he missed. He broke his red neck; the thoughtless party stunt killed him. For him we have a Darwin Award.

The Darwin Awards:

“We salute the improvement of the human genome
by honoring those who remove themselves from it.
Of necessity, this honor is generally bestowed posthumously.”

Comical tales of the unwitting demise of fools who try to build their own rocket cars, drink from bottles found at the dump, or who drown in their kitchen sinks may have served as inspiriation for HBO’s Six Feet Under, and no doubt for their own movie, The Darwin Awards, to be screened later in January’s Sundance Film Festival. The film version written and directed by Finn Taylor, stars a quirky cast including Joseph Fiennes, Winona Ryder, David Arquette, Ty Burrell, Kevin Dunn, Nora Dunn, Judah Friedlander, Lukas Haas, Tom Hollander, Brad Hunt, Juliette Lewis, Julianna Margulies, Tim Blake Nelson, Alessandro Nivola, Chris Penn, Max Purlich, D.B. Sweeney, Robin Tunney and Wilmer Valderrama.

More details in a San Francisco Chronicle article.

Going into 2006 not all things will go well. There will be problems to solve and unforeseen obstacles to face. Your path is full of danger, risks and rewards. Therefore, practice going to your happy place, find your song, and keep smiling.

I’ve been out of touch with many of the multi-talented, creative folks I met and worked with on Shrek 2 at PDI/DreamWorks. So, it was with great surprise and delight that I read a front page San Francisco Chronical news story about the friendly, energetic software engineer Reid Gershbein writing and directing an independent film Broken Arrows. The Chronicle knows that eyeballs are attracted to Google, so the headline is more about how the Google co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin are involved in funding roughly 50% of the making of Broken Arrows. Turns out Reid knows them and successfully pitched his story.

The Broken Arrows trailer looks very promising and I’ll be looking forward to seeing Reid’s first film when it comes out later in 2006. Maybe I’ll even be fortunate to get a pre-screening…. hello, Reid?

Here is what Google’s home page artwork looks like as an animated GIF sequence.