Archive: April, 2005
Steven Soderbergh has signed a deal with the billionaire entrepreneurs Mark Cuban and Todd Wagner that heralds a potential revolution in the way films are released.
The former Broadcast.com web radio founders and the Oscar winning director of Traffic will create a series of six pictures shot by Soderbergh on high-definition video that will be released simultaneously in theatres, on DVD and television.
The plan is a radical departure from the accepted distribution model and offers filmgoers unprecedented choice in the way they watch a new release.
Traditionally films have opened in cinemas months ahead of their home entertainment release, with release on pay-per-view, cable and free television following after defined periods.
However Cuban and Wagner will be able to remove the lag time between release platforms through their vertically integrated Hollywood venture 2929 Entertainment.
The partners’ US distributor Magnolia Pictures will initially release the films in the 2929-owned national chain of digital arthouse cinemas, Landmark Theatres. On the same day, television viewers will be able to watch the film on Cuban and Wagner’s cable channel HDNet Films, while talks are underway to set up a home entertainment service.
Soderbergh has begun work on the first low-cost title, Bubble. The story takes place in a small town in Ohio and features a cast with no previous acting experience.
That man is dumber than two bags of hammers on a slow Thursday night. If a lifetime of constant exposure to positive depictions of heterosexuality doesn’t turn children straight, how is it that an occasional depiction of homosexuality is going to turn them gay?
You know what he’s really saying, don’t you? He’s saying that gay sex has straight sex beat all hollow, that’s what. It’s stronger, sharper, more pervasive and overwhelming. Sexier. Instantly attractive. Transcendently hot. All it takes is one hint that homosexuality is survivable, that it’s something engaged in by humans rather than demons, and right away kids are going to be abandoning the straight and missionary for a life as a queer.
It must make Gerald Allen feel kind of small and humble and inadequate to know that gay sex is so powerful, when he’s just a feeble little straight boy. No wonder he has to get out there and puff himself up by preaching the glory of homosexuality.
He’s no better than those people who pretend they’re hardcore Christians when they’re really preaching Satan Triumphant. I mean the ones who think that after years and years of weekly church services, with hymn-singing and Bible-reading, the least little exposure to some kind of encoded Satanic reference—seeing pictures of rainbows or Ganesha, or taking in the afternoon matinee of the latest Harry Potter movie, or hearing a rock song with muddled lyrics they can’t make out anyway—is tantamount to throwing open the door to Satan.
What they’re saying is that Satan is much more powerful than God, and that nobody who was even glancingly acquainted with Satanism would ever want to stick with Christianity. They might as well don the robes and start sacrificing goats, because they believe in the mighty power of Satan as much as any declared Satanist out there.
Gerald Allen’s like them, except what he believes in is the overwhelming superiority of homosexuality. Only he doesn’t even have the option of converting, the way Satan-worshipping Christians do, because he’s stuck being straight just as thoroughly as gays are stuck being gay.
Sucks to be him.
What should we do with US classics like Cat on a Hot Tin Roof or The Color Purple? “Dig a hole,” Gerald Allen recommends, “and dump them in it.” Don’t laugh. Gerald Allen’s book-burying opinions are not a joke.
Earlier this week, Allen got a call from Washington. He will be meeting with President Bush on Monday. I asked him if this was his first invitation to the White House. “Oh no,” he laughs. “It’s my fifth meeting with Mr Bush.”
Bush is interested in Allen’s opinions because Allen is an elected Republican representative in the Alabama state legislature. He is Bush’s base. Last week, Bush’s base introduced a bill that would ban the use of state funds to purchase any books or other materials that “promote homosexuality”. Allen does not want taxpayers’ money to support “positive depictions of homosexuality as an alternative lifestyle”. That’s why Tennessee Williams and Alice Walker have got to go.
I ask Allen what prompted this bill. Was one of his children exposed to something in school that he considered inappropriate? Did he see some flamingly gay book displayed prominently at the public library?
No, nothing like that. “It was election day,” he explains. Last month, “14 states passed referendums defining marriage as a relationship between a man and a woman”. Exit polls asked people what they considered the most important issue, and “moral values in this country” were “the top of the list”.
“Traditional family values are under attack,” Allen informs me. They’ve been under attack “for the last 40 years”. The enemy, this time, is not al-Qaida. The axis of evil is “Hollywood, the music industry”. We have an obligation to “save society from moral destruction”. We have to prevent liberal libarians and trendy teachers from “re-engineering society’s fabric in the minds of our children”. We have to “protect Alabamians”.
70% of Wal-Marts merchandise is from China. Sam Walton’s bestselling autobiography is titled “Made in America”. And as recently as 1994, company literature titled “Bring It Home To The USA” touted Wal-Mart’s commitment to American manufacturers saying “The Buy American program is both a commitment and a partnership.” That was then. This is now.
Read more here.
What’s a greenwasher? Someone who tries to spin themselves as “green” but really isn’t. It’s all PR.
- Ford Motor Company
- BP
- United States Forest Service
- ChevronTexaco
- General Motors
- Nuclear Energy Institute
- Alliance of Automobile Manufacturers
- TruGreen ChemLawn
- Xcel Energy
- National Ski Areas Association
Alcohol Without Liquid (AWOL) is a vaporized Vodka delivery system that enables users to “inhale” their liquor. (Previously on BB here.) Thirteen states are considering legislation to prohibit the sale of AWOL while the Distilled Spirits Council of the United States are also fighting for a nationwide ban. As my friend Scott Daniel said, “They always hate it when you inhale.”
(via Americablog.blogspot.com)
USA Today reports that privately financed travel by Congressmen and Senators has totaled about 5400 trips in the last five years — half of them paid by non-profits who don’t need to disclose who is paying the bills. The total cost of these private junkets? About $16 million.
For a government that spends billions of dollars, is it really necessary to ransom our politicians’ souls for a measley $16 million just so they can cozy up to big business and take nice golfing trips?
Here’s an easy fix: ban ALL travel financed by outside groups of any nature. If you are a Congressman or Senator you CANNOT accept any travel — not a private jet to Scotland to hit the links; not a taxi down the street.
Create an annual slush fund for travel for these politicans, divide it up evenly, with more for seniority and more for heads of committees, who’d presumably need to travel more. Let them spend the money as they will, be it vacation or fact-finding mission, but EVERY SINGLE TRIP will be detailed and every one will be reported annually by law to their constituents, including price, length and purpose of stay and so on. Once they’re spending OUR tax money, see how often they go on that “fact-finding” trip to London or Fiji, with money spent on golf and tennis and scuba diving. Since lobbyists and non-profits would be BANNED from giving them these gifts, it would be one less source of sleaze in our government.
GNR8 shows off the Liquid_Light series of lamps, presenting a drop of light in a “fluid” form. For between $360-$400, spirit, emotion and poetry come at something of a premium, to be sure.
Two initiatives in the coming weeks will seek to make computing grids, where far-flung computers act as a single machine, more widespread in the business world.
In May, a consortium of vendors called the Enterprise Grid Alliance plans to release its first recommendations for making grids more palatable to businesses, CNET News.com has learned.
The guidelines from the EGA, which was formed one year ago to promote grid computing in business, will address a range of technical issues, from security to a utilitylike pricing system for buying computing power in industry-standard increments. At the end of this week, a consortium of grid computing researchers and corporations called the Globus Alliance plans to release the Globus Toolkit 4.0 for writing applications that run on several, disparate machines.
The Globus tools and the EGA technical recommendations aim to address computing tasks suited to the business realm rather than academia, where computing grids have been used for years. Perhaps more significantly, these efforts seek to establish industrywide grid standards, something experts say is still lacking.
“The challenge is getting the ideas out of the lab and into commercial use,” said Steve Tuecke, CEO of Univa, which Tuecke founded with a group of grid computing luminaries in December last year to build commercial systems around the Globus Toolkit. “Being used just in science isn’t going to cut it.”
The grid computing industry today is roughly at the same stage the Internet was about 10 years ago, experts say. Before commercial customers can share their computing resources more effectively across widespread networks, they need a wide variety of standardized products.
Today, most examples of grid computing are done using vendor-specific tools within a single company, said Jonathan Eunice, an analyst at Illuminata.
“We’re in the stage of development where you build a grid, you don’t buy it, because these are all tools,” Eunice said. “It’s commercially viable, but you still have to put a lot of things together.”