Happy Panic Productions

Nope

But... but I want to be a millionaire! Drat, the computer didn't select me; no phone call. Oh well, I suck at Fastest Fingers anyway.

The Wait

On Friday night I correctly answered the five qualifying questions for Super Millionaire. Three of them I knew dead to rights (including the fifth question), one I was pretty sure on (I had a moment of doubt as to whether Lichtenstein was smaller than Belgium), and one was a complete guess -- I had never heard of 2 of the 4 authors I had to rank from the date of their first publication, starting with the earliest. Sometimes, it's better to be lucky than good!

And one of those times would be now. Now I'm waiting to see if I receive a phone call, sometime between now and 11 AM, to tell me that I've been selected to appear on Thursday's episode. For that to happen, some computer has to randomly select me from a pool of qualifiers. Come on, computer!

Recent movies

In the theatre:

• Big Fish: it's a movie about how to read the Bible! Or more specifically, it's about the kind of reading a modern audience should take from the Old Testament.


• Fog of War: I'm not a great Errol Morris fan, but this is my favorite of his films (although it's been so long since I saw The Thin Blue Line that I hardly remember it). I think he made his point the first time he showed the dominos falling across a map of southeast Asia, so why did he need to show it five more times? Like all the fisheye-lens circus footage in Cheap, Fast, & Out of Control, too much of his B-roll seems too cute, too forced, and far too repetitious. But there wasn't so much of that in Fog. (Too bad he couldn't find an excuse to play my favorite bluegrass tune, "Foggy Mountain Breakdown" -- perhaps perfomed by the Foggy Bottom Boys? (Old English spelling.))

On video:

• Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade: still overrated. It says something that the movie gets boring whenever the action isn't taking place on a moving vehicle. (Yes, horses count.)


• Roger & Me: good, but the structural motif of Michael Moore's quest to get an interview with Roger Smith was forced and the least interesting part of the film. What disturbed me most about the rabbit scene was the fact that it bothered me at all. It shouldn't be so unsettling to see an animal get cleaned and butchered, if I'm willing to eat it. Even the cute ones.


• Miracle Mile: This was my favorite movie in high school and beyond (eventually unseated by Sling Blade). But I hadn't seen it in about ten years. I think holds up very well, despite its very dated look; it maintains a very high level of suspense for a very long time. The first time I watched it, I stood for the entire second half of the movie, unable to remain in my seat for the tension. I suppose it was a good thing that was on home video and not in the theater.


• American Splendor: pretty good (and a hell of a lot better than Crumb), but the formal cleverness (combining dramatic recreation, documentary and cartoon) felt like nothing more than an exercise. It wasn't clear to me that it was thematically relevant. An interesting way to tell a story, but why was it the best way to tell this story? Nevertheless, Paul Giamatti was great in the lead.

A head-scratcher

We watched the first six episodes of "The Office" over the weekend, and now I keep catching myself reproducing Tim's mannerisms while I'm at work.

Salvaged!

Anyone who read this blog in the last two hours must think I'm a liar. In my previous post, I claimed that this website proclaimed itself to be under a Creative Commons license. After I posted that, I just thought I'd double-check that it was the kind of license I thought it would be... and the license notice wasn't there! Neither were the first few months' woth of posts! And the auto-archive mechanism wasn't working! The whole bottom of my blogsheet had vanished!

Well now I have the archiving thing configured properly (I think) and I put the CC license right in the template, so I think that should be a'right. Unfortunately, three months of posts were lost. However, Google once again saves the day; all I had to do was think of a search term that would be in an past version of my blog page, and then use Google's cached copy of the page (pre-vanishment) to retrieve the lost posts! So the archives are working and (I believe) fully populated. And to serve as a lesson throughout history, the search terms I used will remain highlighted, Google style, in the archives for those three months.

A viable middle ground between copyright and public domain

To quote from Oyez and Creative Commons:

[Stanford University Law] Professor [Lawrence] Lessig has granted the Oyez project permission to redistribute an MPEG4 video of his presentation on copyright to the Clio Society on April 24, 2003. Professor Lessig has released this content under the Creative Commons NonCommercial license.

Clio Society Presentation (Warning: 225 MB)

Okay, some explanation: Oyez is a project here at Northwestern to make availble audio recordings of the oral arguments of the Supreme Court. It's pretty cool, and my friend Tony worked on it.

Creative Commons: well, a great way to find out about that is to watch the video. I was there for this presentation, and I thought it was great. You may notice the Creative Commons license posted at the bottom of this very page. This presentation is what motivated me to put it there. Recommended viewing. (Take care to note the license under which I am able to distribute this video.)

Comedy College

I was reading Seriously Funny: The Rebel Comedians of the 1950s and 1960s when it occurred to me: I had no idea what Mort Sahl's voice sounded like. Much of the chapter devoted to him discusses how revolutionary his delivery (more even than his material) was at the time. This piqued my curiosity, since I never thought Mort was very funny in print. So I Googled for some audio clips of him and I found... something wonderful!

From the skull of Garrison Keillor has sprung Comedy College, a series of half-hour episodes each spotlighting a different comedian. What a great way for us to better ourselves by listening to these old pros, some unequivocal masters of their craft, and others, memorable and talented peddlers of schtick. And best of all, there are none of those annoying interviews which are standard fare these days whenever older artists are concerend, whereby the value of past geniuses must be validated for a modern audience by lesser current comedians who will not be mentioned when the next generation produces their own retrospectives. There's none of that in Comedy College, just generous portions of the artists' recorded output, buffered by thankfully brief biographies by the host. This is really a great thing, and lucky for us there are several episodes available online.

And as for Mort Sahl... more clever than funny. None of his ideas seem particularly great, but he speaks them at such an alarming rate that I can imagine the mind getting overloaded at the end of a 45-minute set, and the audience leaving with the euphoric impression that they just saw some kind of genius at work. Maybe he's an artist whose work resists being taken out of context... perhaps especially the temporal context, since each night's performance was anchored by reading that day's newspaper on stage and riffing on it. How relevant can those individual jokes seem a week, a year, or a decade later? The sharpness of his witticisms (if not his wit) necessarily fades over time. I guess he's still around and performing to some extent; I wonder if I'll ever have the chance to see him live.

Try Firefox!

Mozilla's new web browser, recently renamed from Firebird, has gone to version 0.8. So yes, it's still in beta, but I've yet to run into any problems. It's a nice piece of software! Have you been itching to throw the MS Internet Exploder yoke off ever since Netscape turned into a huge steaming pile of software poo? Then try Firefox today -- before Clint Eastwood steals it!

Here's some interesting commentary on Bush's interview on Meet the Press from Slate. Best excerpt:

Now, however, the president is asserting a right to strike first not merely if a hostile power has deadly weapons or even if it is building such weapons, but also if it might build such weapons sometime in the future... If no commentators have noted, or perhaps even noticed, this new spin on American military policy, it may be because they don't take Bush's unscripted remarks seriously. (It's just Bush, talking off the top of his head. No sense parsing the implications.) That in itself is quite a commentary on this president.

I caught about the second half of Bush on Meet the Press yesterday morning, and he looked like hell. It looked like he had aged ten years since the State of the Union address. Was he up all night studying for his faceoff with Tim Russert? Have the Kay report and the drop in his approval been getting to him? Or is there a conscientious attempt to make him look more like his father, more like an elder statesmen?

Wide open!

It will be remembered as the most infamous play-call in Super Bowl history: Gold 32 C Right, snap on 2.