Extremely harrowing clip from an educational film that’s doing the rounds in UK schools. This should be required viewing for anyone that drives, not just young people.
Via kottke.org.
August 2009 Archives
A woman draws in sand to create a mesmerising animation. From Україна має талант - aka "Ukraine's Got Talent".
Via mUmBRELLA.
Ah Tom the Dancing Bug, your blending of disparate situations never ceases to amuse.
In 1987 Apple imagined what things will be like in 1997:
The computers of the “future” sure did look a lot like a Mac Plus.
Here’s a Vanity Fair article about the fascinating TV show Mad Men that focuses on its creator, Matthew Weiner, and his obsessive attention to detail:
John Slattery, who plays the droll and sybaritic Roger Sterling, one of the agency’s two named partners, told me about a scene he shot opposite Christina Hendricks. She plays Joan, the office manager with a Marilyn Monroe–esque figure and, beneath her steely command of the secretarial pool, a similarly Monroe-esque vulnerability. In the scene, the two characters are enjoying an adulterous afternoon in a plush hotel room. “We’ve ordered food,” Slattery recalled. “She doesn’t want to eat and I’m eating whatever it is—I’ve grabbed something and stuffed it in my mouth, which I think, to me, is part of the hedonism of the scene. It’s very decadent. And Matt comes in and he says, ‘You can’t eat! You can’t eat!’ And I’m like, ‘What do you mean I can’t eat? In the script I’m talking about food and I’m encouraging her to eat, and the stage direction says I walk over to the food.’ He says, ‘It’s disgusting. You can’t eat.’ And I say, ‘All right.’ And he says, ‘All right, fine. If you have to eat, O.K., but just don’t take such a big bite.’ So I break off the tiniest piece of whatever the hell I was eating, but he goes, ‘It’s still … you can’t … no, you can’t.’ So, you know, he wants what he wants. And he has some freaky ideas of what’s palatable.”
I found this quote interesting:
He talks about “training the audience” to learn how to read the show, and says things like “It’s been a process for the audience to trust the show on some level, to think that we’re thinking about it as much as they hope we are.”
My experience is that newcomers to the show have to be “trained” (myself included), as it’s so different from anything else on TV.
Season three begins in the USA this coming Sunday.
When it comes to television, if it’s happening in the USA there’s a good chance it will happen everywhere else. So based on this article from Advertising Age, I suspect my TV viewing is set to decline even more:
Walt Disney recently disclosed that its ABC and ESPN TV networks are testing the efficiency of “upper-third messaging,” or graphics that appear in the top third of the TV screen. This comes after IAC Corp.’s Ask.com search site ran “crawl” ads along the bottom of the TV screen on selected networks earlier this year, marking one of the first times full-fledged advertising has run during a program, not just in the ad breaks that disrupt it.
Now that the gaping masses have adopted timeshifting technology – and its concomitant ability to skip over ads – the networks can no longer bunch all the ads together in between programmes. Fortunately for advertisers, however, consumers have become so used to being bombarded with messages simultaneously that we won’t mind allocating some neurons to absorbing sponsors’ messages while being spoonfed the latest celebrity swill.
Advertising is set to become a whole lot more difficult to ignore. If you keep watching TV, that is.
It’s a compelling story: guy walks across China, and becomes progressively more hirsute .
Via kottke.org.
It’s been 30 years since the world was introduced to the Pan Galactic Gargle Blaster (in book form, at least). Here are some new book covers to commemorate the re-issue of the Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy series - you get a bunch of stickers, and can create your own design. Hoopy!
Small car + canal + many drinks = Smart Smijten.
Those poor little cars.
