Ran across this interview with Joss Whedon. Contains spoilers for the next season of Angel. It also contains what I find an interesting exchange:
IGNFF: Did it surprise you the reaction that the lack of widescreen for Buffy season four on DVD got here in the U.S.?WHEDON: People were upset, right? I haven't seen the season four package ... it contains a disclaimer from me as to why it's not in widescreen, that I wrote. It's on it, it comes with it. It's not a widescreen show. We shot it in a TV ratio, and I am very, very specific with the way I frame things. To arbitrarily throw – and I love widescreen, but Buffy was never a widescreen show. It was an intimate, TV-shaped show. To arbitrarily throw wider borders on it, to make it more cinematic when I very specifically framed it. Think of "The Body" – the episode "The Body"...
IGNFF: Right, which I've seen in widescreen and full frame...
WHEDON: How could you have seen it in widescreen?
IGNFF: The U.K. sets are in widescreen.
WHEDON: Good. See, that is not the way I framed it. That's not the way it was meant to be seen, and therefore that's not the way I shot it. I'm preserving what I shot. The DVD is there to preserve what we made, for eternity. What we made, very specifically, was a certain shape. So I'm sure there'll be widescreen copies and there'll be arguments about what's better, but I'm not interested in – and I mean, I love widescreen. I'm a widescreen fanatic, when something's wide. When it's not, then I want to see it the way it was meant to be seen.
I just watched "The Body" last week, in widescreen, listening to Joss's commentary. He discusses the framing at great length, and I believed he was watching the widescreen print when he was talking about it. Despite his protestations, he was obviously using the whole wide frame, most notably during some tracking shots in the morgue scene. Still, I might have to get the square versions, too. The season four domestic set also has one more commentary on it than the international release did. Bastards.
He mentions later that Angel is widescreen, but doesn't comment on the fact that the domestic release of the DVDs is apparently not going to be.
Island Hot Tubs will help you turn a stock tank into a lovely hot tub!
Today's Genius of the day is Tim Minear. The nominating committee wanted to point out some of the reasons he won:
1. The Firefly episode "Out of Gas"
2. His very clear influence in the second season of Angel, for the better
3. The phrase "Sky-Bully"
Tim, Forced Perspective salutes you! We owe you a beer for your excellent writing.
Richard Dawkins is endorsing a new meme, best expressed as an analogy:
gay is to homosexual as bright is to atheist, though perhaps the broader term queer could be brought into the analogy, as bright seems to include everybody with a predominantly naturalistic view of the world.
Philip Pullman and C.S. Lewis in the literary cagematch of the century!!! Not really, just a fairly confrontational interview with Pullman that goes into issues literary and spiritual.
A highlight:
Throughout His Dark Materials there’s a strong sense of ‘ought’. All the most attractive characters – Lyra and Will, Lee Scoresby, Iorek Byrnison, Mary Malone – are driven in the end by a sense of duty, at least to their loved ones if not to the world. Where in a world without God does that sense of ‘ought’ come from?
I’m amazed by the gall of Christians. You think that nobody can possibly be decent unless they’ve got the idea from God or something. Absolute bloody rubbish! Isn’t it your experience that there are plenty of people in the world who don’t believe who are very good, decent people?
Yes. I’m just curious to know where it comes from.
For goodness’ sake! It comes from ordinary human decency. It comes from accumulated human wisdom – which includes the wisdom of such figures as Jesus Christ. Jesus, like many of the founders of great religions, was a moral genius, and he set out a number of things very clearly in the Gospels which if we all lived by them we’d all do much better. What a pity the Church doesn’t listen to him!
crank.net is a potentially useful index of cranks on the web, by topic!
According to this BBC report, a Boeing 727 went missing from an airport in Angola sometime last month, and has yet to be found. On the one hand, it underscores that Africa is really big, but I really wonder if there are as many places with infrastructure support for a 727 as the article implies. Since one of the reasons the (presumed-) kidnapped pilot was down there in the first place was to determine whether the plane was air-worthy, I wouldn't be surprised if the thing has crashed in the middle of nowhere, to be found several decades hence when that chunk of the middle of nowhere is getting razed to put in a strip mall.
Sorry, no prostate jokes, though I do find the fact that the head of the UW Medicine department wanted to watch my prostate ultrasound pretty funny (he didn't make it back in time, since the doc who was actually doing the ultrasound opted not to leave me lying on the table waiting for the boss to show up). There's another story that I think is moderately funny, but I tell it only to people who actually know me, and Sarah's already heard it.
At the clinic today, I had to hang around for an hour to make sure the four injections into my belly fat didn't go horribly, horribly wrong; and since the usual magazines there aren't really suitable for killing time (and I didn't know I was going to be in the group with the side-effect injections, so I didn't bring a book), I looked through the January Esquire, where I found Ten Things You Don't Know about Women, which seems to be a regular feature, written by a different celebrity woman each month. In January, it was Cheryl Hines, of Curb Your Enthusiasm fame. I've stolen the text and put it in the extended entry information, in case Esquire makes the original go away (or if you don't want to look at their ads). From this, and from the current installment, I feel like I learned more about the guys these particular women date than about women as a class.
Cheryl Hines's 10 Things You Don't Know about Women, from Esquire's January 2003 issue:
1. All women love to be referred to as "m'lady." As in, "Would you like another beer, m'lady?"
2. We imagine all guys are a little bit angry when they masturbate.
3. When we start dating you and we're "holding out," the amount of time we wait has nothing to do with virtue; we're hoping to lose ten pounds before you see us naked for the first time.
4. When we're out to dinner with you and you leave the table, we basically pick up our plate and shovel in as much as possible. When you return, we resume the old "I'm so overwhelmed by all this food, I can't even touch it right now" routine.
5. Every time we get a bikini wax, a little bit of our soul is ripped out. But you know how it feels: You go through the same thing when you get your back waxed. . . . Oh, wait a second, wrong magazine. You don't know how it feels.
6. We know that we can instantly intrigue you by memorizing one stupid fact. For example, we're at a party and you and I are talking. The conversation goes something like this:
ME: That's so interesting that you make your own soap. Did you know that camels have three eyelids?
YOU: Wow! What are you doing Saturday night?
7. If you have a vanity license plate, you will get laid only by women with long, fake fingernails who describe themselves as "classy."
8. More often than not, we use an adjective before your name when we talk to our friends about you, as in Squishy Steve, Flaccid Frank, Freakshow Charlie, or Perfect Paul. Makes you wonder, huh?
9. All women like getting paid for sex.
10. Everything sounds better when your mouth is next to our ear and you whisper it. Everything from "Sorry about the smell" to "I'm going to love you forever, m'lady."
Another publisher's description, this time of The Prostate: Everything You Need to Know:
"Taguchi, a urologist (Royal Victoria Hospital, Montreal), explains the most common prostate problems in plain language, with a bit of humor, for general readers."
Because there's nothing people like more than a bit of prostate humor. Craig? Any prostate jokes?
From a publisher's description of Betty Crocker's Cookie Book, 2nd edition:
"Betty Crocker’s celebration of the cookie includes more than 240 recipes for everything from Deluxe Chocolate Chip Cookies to Walnut Biscotti. Rpclu Rpad Bars, No-Roll Sugar Cookies, and more."
Rpclu Rpad Bars?
Three nuns in their sixties are awaiting heavy sentencing for breaking into a nuclear missile site and painting crosses on the silo cover in their own blood, plus some fairly symbolic (given that the nun in the picture is fairly petite-- your fun size nun, if you will) hammer damage. Their lawyer says the serious crackdown by the Man is due to intolerance of dissent since you-know-what, but I'm betting that it may have something to do with how far several fairly small non-muscular older ladies got in their quest, and how very much further anyone with any active malice or appropriate tools would get.
I'm confident that everybody who reads this also reads memepool, but I will nevertheless point to the Rotten Library. Their summary of everybody's favorite money-draining cult pretending to be a religion (I won't name the beast, lest it look in my direction, but you can find it under Religion. Kathy Griffin calls it Somethingology) is brief, to the point, and right on the money.
If you need to preserve food for a long time, you have a few main options. If you're going on a long space journey, I recommend canned food. If you're backpacking, I recommend dried food to reconstitute on the road (make sure you find potable water!). If you're at home, try freezing your food.
A few freezing tips are available from your local (or not so local) agricultural extension office (North Dakota), (Ohio), food conglomerate, or bridge club (huh?).
You can also try preserving in fat or pickling if you have dodgy electricity.
The ultimate in retro car customization: an in-car record player! Bonus points if you can engineer one that doesn't require specially-engineered records.
A weblog of cool tools, edited by a guy who used to edit Whole Earth Review.
The wonderful Sara Ryan mentions in her blog a piece by Sara Paretsky called Truth, Lies and Duct Tape, about bad shit that has happened in publishing and libraries and the culture in general. It's not real cheering.
According to this article (and why would the Sci-Fi channel lie?), there will be a Firefly DVD release, with at least some commentary, including the three unaired episodes. Also, hold on to anything that might come loose, it looks like a movie is in the works!
Information on previous presidential administrations goes to the National Archives, and snapshots of the previous whitehouse.gov are helpfully archived. Clinton's complete letters and speeches are available as well.
The full context of the Bush quote turned up in the New York Times, December 21, 2000, from a news conference naming the treasury secretary.
Q. Mr. President-elect, this morning your office spoke about the need for a new energy policy. Can you tell us something specific that you would do, for instance, in the first 100 days, to correct rising energy prices?
A. I strongly believe that we must work in concert to increase the amount of supply available for American consumers. Supply of natural gas, supply of coal, supply of plant and equipment.
I believe we need to review all federal land policy to make sure that we're not missing an opportunity to explore for natural gas in the country. Natural gas is hemispheric; I like to call it hemispheric in nature, because it is a product that we can find in our neighborhoods, and it is immune from price manipulation by OPEC. It is -- there are supplies of gas to be discovered in America.
The issue with natural gas is not only its discovery, but its transportation. So we must review all policies that would prevent that construction of pipeline to be able to move gas from field to market.
When we're undersupplied as a nation and demand increases, prices will go up. And that's what's happening in the energy field.
I look forward to working with Congress to pass clean coal technologies, money for clean coal technology, so that we can explore and develop the vast coal reserves in our country with the comfort of knowing that we're not going to ruin our environment.
I look forward to working with our friends and allies in our own hemisphere to put together a hemispheric energy policy, an energy policy that will allow for the free flow of natural gas, in particular, across our respective borders to make sure there is ample supply, ample supply to meet the demand of this nation.
And so, Carl, I look forward to when I'm swearing in as to put together a strategy that will make clear to the American people that we will address the needs. . . .
Brooklyn Public has an archive of The Brooklyn Eagle that should be fun to browse, once the megablog traffic dies down. A writer for the Observer gives a pretty good impression of the subtle flavors of powerlessness involved in being a government functionary and a fascinating insight into Refusal Shoes. Librarians teaching people new to the net how to evaluate information used to give lectures on the difference between .com, .org, and .gov, but that has now all gone by the wayside. A horrifying discovery typifying this trend: Moneyfactory.com, which is actually the US Bureau of Engraving and Printing. And such an undignified name, too.
Being unable to rid myself of yesterday's Bush quote from the calendar, I've been trying to find out what the context was. I haven't been able to find it (he made the remarks before he was in office, but (I think) after he had been appointed), but I did find these remarks, which seem likely to be along the same tack. For instance,
THE PRESIDENT: Well, we had a good discussion. I had a very good discussion with Vicente Fox. And Secretary Abraham had a very good discussion with his counterpart from Mexico. Mexico has to make the decision as to whether or not they will be willing to allow foreign capital to explore for oil and gas in their country. That's the Mexican decision to make.I encouraged the President to begin allowing foreign capital to explore for natural gas in Mexico. It would be to our benefit. Gas is hemispheric. An MCF of gas found in Mexico is beneficial for the United States and Canada, even though it's found in Mexico. And the Vice President and I have had discussions with Prime Minister Chretien about exploration for natural gas.
A good energy policy is one that understands we've got energy in our hemisphere and how best to explore for it and transport it to markets. So, you bet, we've continued discussions with Mexico, as well as Canada.
He's still clearly an idiot, but he's been coached better. I encourage anyone who is looking for a reason for suicide to browse through the white house news releases. I have glimpsed only the merest fraction of the horror that is there, and it's, well, horrific.
Also, apparently, The White House didn't exist before January 2001. What if I want to know what that other guy did in office? Do we lose all those handy records of Executive Orders and press releases and whatnot every time the administration changes? I rather hope not. It sucks enough if they're off somewhere else. It would suck quite a bit more if that stuff's completely inaccessible.
I have this calendar that purports to contain stupid things people have said, or written (it was an xmas gift). Most of them are clearly typos; granted, they're sometimes funny ones, but not necessarily indicative of stupidity. By far the majority of the truly stupid things are quotes from W. Today's, for instance: "Natural gas is hemispheric. I like to call it hemispheric in nature because it is a product that we can find in our neighborhoods." Usually it's possible to tell where exactly his brain disconnect happened, and thereby figure out what a person familiar with the language might have said, but this reveals a breathtakingly profound thinking disability.
According to this review, the Funeral Home scent is a mixture of "Carnations, cigarette smoke and old oriental rugs[.]" Hmm.
Demeter Fragrances has a stunning line of perfumes for people who don't just want to smell like flowers and musks. I had only seen a few of their scents at Sephora, and I'm thrilled to see so many more, but I may not really want to buy "Funeral Home" without knowing what it smells like...