This isn’t particularly graphic, I’m glad to say, but it does illustrate the dangers of cell phone use, especially for texting, while behind the wheel.
The drivers shown here are all teenagers, but we older goats aren’t immune. I’ve wised up to the extent that now I almost never use my cell phone while driving. There are things called “voice mail” and “parking,” and texts don’t mysteriously fade away if you don’t look at them immediately.
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Back in 2014, the University of Maryland’s Memorial Chapel played the following from its bell tower on the first day of April, sometimes known as April Fool’s Day:
by This is one of the longest videos I’ve ever posted or linked to here (it runs a bit over 33 minutes), but I think it’s worth watching. John Oliver talks and jokes about the Patriot Act (sometimes beating the jokes into the ground, I admit), then goes to Moscow to interview Edward Snowden, the guy who leaked a bunch of secret documents he had access to while working as a contractor for the U.S. National Security Agency. After a few minutes of joking around, Oliver starts asking serious questions to which Snowden gives serious answers. It gets funny again at the end, but still makes serious points, as Oliver’s Last Week Tonight on HBO often does (as do The Daily Show and The Nightly Show on Comedy Central).
by My friend Bruce Arthurs has written a brief but interesting piece on his blog about the Affordable Care Act (aka Obamacare) that I recommend. Here’s the link.
Among other things, Bruce mentions a couple of instructive examples: someone who had got very little medical care until the ACA came along, and someone else who initially thought an ACA policy would be unaffordable until an ACA counselor pointed out a mistake the person had made on the application, so that previously uninsured person is now covered as well.
I have, on the other hand, encountered cases of people who buy their own health insurance and whose premiums have gone up quite a bit. The question is why.
Where is the extra money going? To the government. No, taxes on insurance companies haven’t increased. To insurance company profits and overhead? No, in fact the law requires that companies refund to the customers premium costs that end up exceeding a certain percentage of what the companies spend on medical care? To higher charges from doctors and hospitals? Actually, health care price inflation has been very low recently.
The only explanation seems to be that the new law puts minimum requirements on health insurance, and some of the older, cheaper policies sold to individual purchasers just weren’t very good insurance. They might have offered some good-sounding benefits up front (low co-pays and the like), but what they’d pay for serious, expensive conditions was another matter. Real insurance just turns out to cost more than relatively crappy insurance.
by A television report from Atlanta presents in a straightforward way the benefits of music therapy for elderly persons in a rehabilitation program. It’s worth a few minutes of your time.
by Texas filmmaker Ryan Connolly has released another entertaining short, this one called “U.F.Oh Yeah.” It runs a bit over five minutes and is well worth your time:
The star is Ryan’s younger brother Josh, who is in real life rather thin, unlike the character he plays in the film above. You can see a more normal version of Josh Connolly in a clip I included in an earlier post (link) in praise of Film Riot, a YouTube series about filmmaking produced by Connolly et al.
by If you haven’t already seen this, below a math teacher named Matthew Weathers pranks his students on April 1 with a clever bit of mixed live action and video.
by The following caution from the packaging for a flying Batman toy is among the most poetically cryptic I’ve ever read. It’s not often that instructions include the word “prythee” or the expression “till the cowcomes home.” Someone named Sandy Moritz contributed a photo of the warning to the Engrish.com website here.
I’m not making fun of whoever was tasked with writing this. The late and much-missed Buck Coulson was once assigned the job of translating the instruction manual for an overhead door into Spanish. When he pointed out that he didn’t know any Spanish, his boss told him this was not a problem; they would buy him a dictionary. His further objections were for naught, and he did the job as best he could.
by This film tells (if I’m counting right) six different stories set at six different points in time, one in the present, three in the past, and two in the future. (Come to think of it, the last story is set at two different times in the future, so maybe there are seven stories.) The main actors appear in multiple roles, even crossing racial and gender lines and becoming downright unrecognizable. Hugh Grant at one point looks like an aging James Caan, and his lovely wife is a secondary role played by one of the film’s male actors. Grant is even less identifiable as a Korean villain. He has four other roles as well. I initially didn’t realize a Cockney gangster was one of the six roles played by Tom Hanks until I saw the end credits.
Other actors playing six parts include Haile Berry, Hugo Weaving, Jim Sturgess, and Doona Bae. Jim Broadbent has a slightly easier time of it with a mere five roles, and Susan Sarandon has just four.
The film switches back and forth across time rather than telling the stories in sequence, which helps emphasize the interconnections but also makes the multiple plot threads harder to keep straight. This is especially true early on.
As it happened, I watched roughly the first half hour of the film, got interrupted by something, and then started it over a few days later. I’m glad I did. The part I’d seen made a lot more sense the second time through and helped me follow the rest, so you might want to do this deliberately, sort of like taking a practice run at the film before you watch it in earnest.
At nearly three hours it’s a long movie but worth the effort to absorb. I liked it, though I suspect not everyone will. It covers so much territory, though, that almost anyone will find some part they like. The film’s genres include historical drama, adventure, mystery, suspense, comedy, and science fiction.
Following are two trailers, the first running 2 1/2 minutes and the second a bit over 5 1/2. The latter may give you a clearer notion of the film.
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