Here’s something you don’t see every day, Chauncey: A Finnish bluegrass band playing their version of AC/DC’s “Thunderstruck” definitely not on the original instruments.
Link: http://youtu.be/e4Ao-iNPPUc
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by by A Vimeo user named Seccovan uploaded this well-done 3D CGI animation of the world envisioned in the Futurama television series. It runs only 30 seconds, but it’s nicely done using
Autodesk’s 3Ds Max, augmented by plugins and other software.
Futurama 3d (test shot) from seccovan on Vimeo.
by Some friends involved in minor crime (street-corner sales of dodgy goods, that kind of thing) in London suddenly find themselves owing a lot of money to a dangerous mobster, so they decide to go for a one-time big score by ripping off some bigger crooks. As you’d expect, this doesn’t work out so well, and then it gets worse, and then it gets even worse and worse and worse.
It’s a very dark but clever ultra-low-budget comedy with over-the-top violence, tons of interesting characters, and a constant stream of obscene Cockney-accented language. Definitely not for everybody, but I quite liked it. So would the students of St. Trinian’s, come to think of it.
Incidentally, the writer/director, Guy Ritchie, later went on to direct a number of much bigger-b budget films, including the two Sherlock Holmes films starring Robert Downey Jr (the first of which was quite good) and the upcoming Man from UNCLE. He was also married to Madonna for most of the last decade, which must have taken a fair amount of energy.
Link: http://youtu.be/Y8MXn5No1Jc
by John Green has a gift for presenting a subject succinctly, as in the video below that runs under four minutes. Ostensibly talking to his brother Hank, a very successful entrepreneur, he talks very informatively about arguments for and against raising the minimum wage. I highly recommend giving this a listen.
Link: http://youtu.be/ZI9aDHLptMk
by Ronald Searle (1920-2011) was a brilliant British artist in pen and ink. Even as a captive of the Japanese during World War II, when he was forced into slave labor and became seriously ill, he managed to obtain paper and ink and produced excellent drawings of his environment, captors, and fellow prisoners. In later years he served as courtroom artist during some major trials, including the war crimes tribunals at Nuremberg.
Besides his realistic drawings, he produced loads of humorous cartoons, and among the most popular were those depicting the very naughty students and faculty of St Trinian’s, a fictitious school for girls, the sort of thing you might have expected from Charles Addams had he taken up that subject.
The first film based on the St Trinian’s cartoons appeared in 1954 (The Belles of St Trinian’s) and starred Alastair Sim, better known as Ebenezer Scrooge, playing both the headmistress and her brother. At one point she says that most girls’ schools send their graduates out in the world unprepared. At St Trinian’s, it’s the world that’s unprepared. The older girls wore what were in 1954 scandalously short skirts and stockings. The younger girls were less interested in boys than in explosions and criminal enterprises. Three sequels followed in 1957, 1960, and 1966, then finally in 2007 this new entry appeared.
The protagonist is a transfer student of high school age played by Talulah Riley, who is of course initially persecuted and horrified by her fellow students but soon enough bonds with them. The headmistress is again played by a man in drag, this time 6-foot-4 Rupert Everett. Her nemesis is the minister for education, who also happens to be her former lover from their college days, played by Colin Firth (Mr Darcy in the BBC’s Pride and Prejudice, the king in The King’s Speech, Bridget Jones’s boyfriend, etc), who had costarred in other films with Everett, a fact referenced in some of the film’s numerous in-jokes.
The older students form various factions, including geeks (led by Lily Cole, who played the daughter in The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnasus), the Posh Totties (obsessed with style and boys), the chavs (a British term for ill-tempered, anti-social youth), and the emos (a variant on Goths). Among the younger students are a pair of 10-year-old twins who are the school’s demolition experts and criminal masterminds.
The school’s foreign language instruction seems highly practical, for example teaching students how to deny to customs agents that the suitcases are theirs. A new English teacher is played by Lena Heady, best known as the dangerous and blond Cersei Lannister on Game of Thrones and almost unrecognizable here in her natural brunette hair color. The school’s Head Girl is Gemma Arterton, who was a very hot Bond girl in Quantum of Solace.
Russell Brand plays a shady character who aids the girls in their conspiracies and Stephen Fry hosts a quiz show for competing schools, which a team of St Trinian’s students enters as part of a plot to save the school by nicking a famous painting from the National Gallery.
In keeping with the original cartoons, the comedy is dark and sometimes extreme. Reviews were all over the place, but I quite enjoyed it once it got past the initial hazing of the new girl, which I found obnoxious. A lot of the music is fun as well.
Alas, I can’t recommend the 2009 sequel, St. Trinian’s: The Legend of Fritton’s Gold, which amounts to a badly organized sequence of set pieces, some of them tied together by a dumb National-Treasure-like scavenger hunt for a mysterious ring that will lead them to the lost wealth of a pirate ancestor of the school’s headmistress. There are some fun moments here and there, but nowhere near enough of them.
Here’s the trailer, followed by a (slightly sanitized) music video for the end title theme from Girl’s Aloud (the school band):
Link: http://youtu.be/QW1xuCXABVc
Link: http://youtu.be/0DebmhCx8EA
(The term “ASBO” in the song may be unfamiliar to readers outside the UK. It’s an acronym for “Anti-Social Behaviour Order,” an injunction against youth with a history of bad behavior that forbids them to do certain things, such as hang out in certain areas or associate with certain persons. It can also refer to someone who has received an ASBO, and (as in the song) it can be a verb meaning to issue an ASBO against someone.)
As a bonus, here’s a music video featuring members of the cast for a song heard only briefly in the film, and otherwise unconnected:
Link: http://youtu.be/L1K3zYmJ8Jc
by A computer animated film about a prehistoric family forced to look for a new home when their cave is destroyed doesn’t sound too promising, so had my friend Jerry Lapidus not recommended it, I would have missed this, and I’ve very glad I didn’t.
Nicolas Cage is the voice of Grug, a caveman who devotes himself to protecting his family with a combination of physical strength and a lot of rules — curiosity is bad, anything new is bad, leave the cave only when necessary, and above all never not be afraid. His caution is well-founded. All the neighboring families have been wiped out by accident, predators, or disease.
Naturally, Grug’s teenage daughter Eep (Emma Stone) doesn’t like the rules. A bit of rule-breaking leads her to an encounter with Guy (Ryan Reynolds), a boy about her age who knows how to make fire and warns her of the end of the world, or at least of their part of it. Guy and the whole family are soon fleeing an advancing tectonic disaster.
The science here is shaky, and for that matter the weird fauna have little to do with real prehistoric life, but this is, after all, a cartoon. Grug’s mother-in-law (Cloris Leachman) even has a short, vaguely reptilian tail.
As one could predict geological ages in advance, Grug comes to resent his family’s growing dependence on Guy and the budding relationship between Guy and Eep, but the writing and acting (voice and animation) rise well above the obviousness of the basic plot. Even the predictable bits proved enjoyable.
Link: http://youtu.be/4fVCKy69zUY
That trailer doesn’t get across the fact that the film is often pretty funny, so to illustrate that, here’s one of the lesser comic bits:
Link: http://youtu.be/dP94CPkCmVU
by From various places on line. (Note that you don’t need to type the quotation marks shown below, and depending on what browser you use and how it’s configured, you can often type searches right into the address bar.)
- For useless fun, type “do a barrel roll” into a Google search bar and the screen will rotate.
- Type a calculation (such as “2+2” or “2*pi*50”) and Google will tell you the answer and also bring up an on-screen calculator. You can also type things like “10 miles in centimeters” or “the speed of light in furlongs per fortnight” or a currency conversion such as “25 USD in GBP”.
- Type “define” followed by a word and Google will tell you the definition.
- Type something like “translate pomme from French into Spanish” and Google will do that for you, and of course it works for different words and different languages as well. You can also leave out the “from” part and Google will try to guess the language, and if you leave out the “to” language Google will assume you mean English. For example, type “translate hundo” and Google will correctly tell you that “hundo” is the Esperanto word for dog. It will also let you override Google’s default choices for the source language and target languages. For example, if you type “translate gift into French” Google will assume you mean the English word gift (“le don” in French), but you’ll have an opportunity to change the source language to German, in which “das Gift” means poison or change the target language into Esperanto, in which poison is “veneno”.
- You can limit a Google search to a specific website by including something like “site:cnn.com” in your search phrase, and you can look for a particular type of file by including “filetype:pdf” or “filetype:doc” or the like.
- You can get the status of a flight simply by searching for the airline code and the flight number, as in “AA 8” (an American Airlines flight from Honolulu to Dallas).
- Type a package tracking number (FedEx, UPS, or United States Postal Service) into the search box, and Google will link you to the appropriate delivery service’s website.
- Search for what movies are playing near you in the U.S. by typing “movies” or “films” and your 5-digit Zip code. (This also works for some postal codes outside the U.S.)
- Type a city name followed by “forecast” to get a weather forecast.
- Type a movie actor’s name followed by “bacon number” and Google will find a chain of actors/movies linking the actor with Kevin Bacon. For example, type “Cary Grant bacon number” and it will tell you “Cary Grant’s Bacon number is 2. Cary Grant and Steve Martin appeared in Dead Men Don’t Wear Plaid. Steve Martin and Kevin Bacon appeared in Planes, Trains and Automobiles.” That’s the same bacon number as Ben Jones and William Shatner. (No, they apparently don’t do Erdős numbers yet, though those numbers — linking mathematicians to Paul Erdős via a sequence of coauthored papers rather than actors to Kevin Bacon through a chain of movies — can be found on other sites, and you can even find Erdős-Bacon numbers, which are the sum of the two. Actress Danica McKellar, for example, has an Erdős-Bacon number of 6 based on her acting roles and a math paper she published as an undergraduate.)
- Search for “Bletchley Park” (site of Britain’s code and cipher school) and in a descriptive box on the right an encrypted version of the name will appear and be decrypted as you watch.
- On Google maps (http://maps.google.com) search for “The White House” and when the result appears, click the See Inside link to take a virtual tour.
- Search for “anagram” and Google will ask if you meant “nag a ram” (an anagram of anagram). Search for “recursion” and it will ask if you meant “recursion.”
by Last month Queen Elizabeth II toured the Game of Thrones production facility in Northern Ireland and among other things saw the notorious Iron Throne. She declined to sit, but she did give it a careful look, as you can see here:
Then a few days ago the band of the Queen’s Guard in London was recorded practicing the Game of Thrones theme song:
As some have pointed out, when they start playing “The Rains of Castamere,” worry.
by Using camera phone telekinesis to affect another person. Possibly set up, but it looks like a real coincidence:
Link: http://youtu.be/YmDXfqsG-Gw
by In passing in a previous post I erroneously said that investment income is free of Medicare tax in the U.S. As I should have remembered, that’s no longer true for high income people (such as single taxpayers making over $200,000 a year in what’s called modified adjusted gross income). The earlier post has now been updated to correct my mistake.
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