Apple's Steve Jobs Action Figure

Have you seen the "SJ Action Figure"? Its a doll look alike of Apple's front man, Steve Jobs. Its received so much attention and Apple fans loved it. But Apple's (AAPL) legal department was not so happy about it. M.I.C. Gadget, the doll's Chinese manufacturer announced that Apple had stop them from producing the doll after selling out its first batch of 300.

A law firm representing Apple Inc. said in an email that this "SJ action figure", has not consented to the use of Apple's copyrights and trademarks, therefore was

ordered M.I.C. Gadgets to stop selling and manufacturing the said doll. "Unauthorized use of a person's name and/or likeness constitutes a violation of California Civil Code Section 3344, which prohibits the use of any person's name, photograph or likeness in a product without that person's prior consent…"

Source: tech.fortune.cnn.com

Sony HVR-HD1000U MiniDV 1080i High Definition Camcorder

Twenty years ago, back before digital video, they were selling full sized S-VHS camcorders. They cost about the same as a Hi8 camcorder and Hi8 was supposed to be slightly superior in some way, but people still wanted the full-sized camcorders.

I don't know, but, at the time, I figured that a full-sized S-VHS camcorder was an affordable, professional-looking alternative to spending three or four thousand dollars for an actual "prosumer" Hi8 camera.

Now, Sony has a camcorder, an HVR-HD1000U MiniDV 1080i High Definition Camcorder with 10x Optical Zoom. It sells for about $1,500.

Here's what Sony says about it:

The HVR-HD1000U was created to meet the growing demand from users who are looking for mobility and professional appearance. This camcorder features a shoulder-mount design and black matte body similar to that of professional camcorders; making it perfect for weddings, corporate communications, colleges, universities, and sporting events where appearance makes a difference....

It's a consumer camcorder made to look like a prosumer camcorder. It's for videographers who want to impress their clients.

Well. Seems like a good idea.

Years ago, someone posted on a message board. They were going to make a no-budget slasher movie. But should they use a Hi8 camcorder or a S-VHS camcorder? Other people discussed the relative merits of the two formats. I wisely told him to get S-VHS. A big, giant camcorder would impress the actors.

Video: HVR-HD1000u First Look

Leading Oscar Contenders

The Academy awards night is fast approaching and here are some of the leading oscar contenders.

Leading Oscar Contenders:

ANOTHER YEAR (SONY PICTURES CLASSICS, OPENS DEC. 29)

Director: Mike Leigh

Writer: Mike Leigh

Stars: Jim Broadbent, Ruth Sheen and Lesley Manville

About: A married couple who have managed to remain blissfully happy into their autumn years, are surrounded over the course of the four seasons of one average year by friends, colleagues, and family who all seem to suffer some degree of unhappiness.

IMDB Link

BLACK SWAN (FOX SEARCHLIGHT, OPENS DEC. 1)

Director: Darren Aronofsky
Writers: Mark Heyman (screenplay), Andres Heinz (screenplay), and 2 more credits »
Stars: Natalie Portman, Mila Kunis and Vincent Cassel

About: Darren Aronofsky's follow-up to "The Wrestler." A thriller that zeros in on the relationship between a veteran ballet dancer and a rival.

IMDB Link

THE FIGHTER (PARAMOUNT, OPENS DEC. 10)

Director: David O. Russell
Writers: Scott Silver (screenplay), Paul Tamasy (screenplay), and 4 more credits »
Stars: Mark Wahlberg, Christian Bale and Melissa Leo

About: David O. Russell's boxing movie is a worthy successor to "Raging Bull," "Rocky" and "Million Dollar Baby." A look at the early years of boxer "Irish" Micky Ward and his brother who helped train him before going pro in the mid 1980s.

IMDB Link

HEREAFTER (WARNER BROS., IN THEATERS)

Director: Clint Eastwood
Writer: Peter Morgan
Stars: Matt Damon, Cécile De France and Bryce Dallas Howard 

About: A drama centered on three people -- a blue-collar American, a French journalist and a London school boy -- who are touched by death in different ways.

IMDB Link

HOW DO YOU KNOW (SONY, OPENS DEC. 17)

Director: James L. Brooks
Writer: James L. Brooks
Stars: Reese Witherspoon, Paul Rudd and Owen Wilson

About: Feeling a bit past her prime at 27, former athlete Lisa Jorgenson finds herself in the middle of a love triangle, as a corporate guy in crisis competes with Lisa's current, baseball-playing beau.

IMDB Link

HOW TO TRAIN YOUR DRAGON (DREAMWORKS ANIMATION, ON DVD)

Directors: Dean DeBlois, Chris Sanders
Writers: Cressida Cowell (novel), William Davies (screenplay), and 2 more credits »
Stars: Jay Baruchel, Gerard Butler and Christopher Mintz-Plasse

About: A hapless young Viking who aspires to hunt dragons becomes the unlikely friend of a young dragon himself, and learns there may be more to the creatures than he assumed. 

IMDB Link

INCEPTION (WARNER BROS., ON DVD DEC. 7)

Director: Christopher Nolan
Writer: Christopher Nolan
Stars: Leonardo DiCaprio, Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Ellen Page

About: In a world where technology exists to enter the human mind through dream invasion, a highly skilled thief is given a final chance at redemption which involves executing his toughest job till date, Inception.

IMDB Link

THE KIDS ARE ALL RIGHT (FOCUS FEATURES, ON DVD)

Director: Lisa Cholodenko
Writers: Lisa Cholodenko, Stuart Blumberg
Stars: Annette Bening, Julianne Moore and Mark Ruffalo

About: Two children conceived by artificial insemination bring their birth father into their family life.

IMDB Link

THE KING'S SPEECH (THE WEINSTEIN CO., OPENS NOV. 26)

Director: Tom Hooper
Writer: David Seidler (screenplay)
Stars: Colin Firth, Geoffrey Rush and Helena Bonham Carter

About: The story of King George VI of Britain, his impromptu ascension to the throne and the speech therapist who helped the unsure monarch become worthy of it.

IMDB Link

127 HOURS (FOX SEARCHLIGHT, IN THEATERS)

Director: Danny Boyle
Writers: Danny Boyle (screenplay), Simon Beaufoy (screenplay), and 1 more credit »
Stars: James Franco, Amber Tamblyn and Kate Mara

About: A mountain climber becomes trapped under a boulder while canyoneering alone near Moab, Utah and resorts to desperate measures in order to survive.

IMDB Link

SHUTTER ISLAND (PARAMOUNT, ON DVD)

Director: Martin Scorsese
Writers: Laeta Kalogridis (screenplay), Dennis Lehane (novel)
Stars: Leonardo DiCaprio, Emily Mortimer and Mark Ruffalo

About: Drama set in 1954, U.S. Marshal Teddy Daniels is investigating the disappearance of a murderess who escaped from a hospital for the criminally insane and is presumed to be hiding on the remote Shutter Island.

IMDB Link

THE SOCIAL NETWORK (SONY, IN THEATERS)
Director: David Fincher
Writers: Aaron Sorkin (screenplay), Ben Mezrich (book)
Stars: Jesse Eisenberg, Andrew Garfield and Justin Timberlake
About: A story about the founders of the social-networking website, Facebook.
IMDB Link

THE TOWN (WARNER BROS., IN THEATERS)
Director: Ben Affleck
Writers: Peter Craig (screenplay), Ben Affleck (screenplay), and 2 more credits »
Stars: Ben Affleck, Rebecca Hall and Jon Hamm
About: As he plans his next job, a longtime thief tries to balance his feelings for a bank manager connected to one of his earlier heists, as well as the FBI agent looking to bring him and his crew down.

IMDB Link

TOY STORY 3 (DISNEY/PIXAR, ON DVD)
Director: Lee Unkrich
Writers: John Lasseter (story), Andrew Stanton (story)
Stars: Tom Hanks, Tim Allen and Joan Cusack
About: The toys are mistakenly delivered to a day-care center instead of the attic right before Andy leaves for college, and it's up to Woody to convince the other toys that they weren't abandoned and to return home.

IMDB Link

TRUE GRIT (PARAMOUNT, OPENS DEC. 22)
Directors: Ethan Coen, Joel Coen
Writers: Charles Portis (novel), Joel Coen (screenplay)
Stars: Jeff Bridges, Matt Damon and Hailee Steinfeld 

About: A tough U.S. Marshal helps a stubborn young woman track down her father's murderer.

IMDB Link

YOU WILL MEET A TALL DARK STRANGER (SONY PICTURES CLASSICS, IN THEATERS)
Director: Woody Allen
Writer: Woody Allen
Stars: Anthony Hopkins, Naomi Watts and Josh Brolin 

About: Follows a pair of married couples, Alfie (Hopkins) and Helena (Jones), and their daughter Sally (Watts) and husband Roy (Brolin), as their passions, ambitions, and anxieties lead them into trouble and out of their minds. After Alfie leaves Helena to pursue his lost youth and a free-spirited call girl named Charmaine (Punch), Helena abandons rationality and surrenders her life to the loopy advice of a charlatan fortune teller. Unhappy in her marriage, Sally develops a crush on her handsome art gallery owner boss, Greg (Banderas), while Roy, a novelist nervously awaiting the response to his latest manuscript, becomes moonstruck over Dia (Pinto), a mystery woman who catches his gaze through a nearby window. Written by Sony Pictures Classics
IMDB Link

Source: www.imdb.com ; www.reuters.com

Student films

There've been a number of attacks on student films. There was one website devoted entirely to making fun of them.

I did a search for "student film" on You Tube and found a few. Student films now seem to mostly be parodies of student films in general.

Apparently, there are a lot of suicides in student films. I wonder what the actual suicide rate is among film students. My guess is that it's lower than among those with other majors. There hasn't been a single documented case of an emo kid ever committing suicide, and, like emo kids, film students apparently embrace depression and make it work for them.For years I heard that writing a short story was more difficult than writing a novel. I never understood why. It didn't make sense. I finally got an explanation: Novels aren't very well-written. In the same way, a short film needs to be better-made than a feature film.

It's rather cruel forcing film students to make short films. It's kind of like school music programs. They force kids to play classical music and jazz, the two most difficult and least popular genres, while other kids form punk rock bands, practice for a week or two then start playing gigs. Film students plumb the depths of their souls and attempt to make meaningful short films which get them nothing but mockery while far less ambitious young people make feature-length slasher films with their parents' camcorders and go on to successful careers.

Come to think of it, didn't Rick Schmidt say that he started making feature films when he and Wayne Wang realized it wasn't much harder than making a short film?

Cambodian Water Festival Stampede Kills Hundreds

At least 339 people been killed in a stampede during the water festival celebrations in the Phnom Penh, Cambodian. Most of the deaths were as a result of suffocation and internal injuries. Some were even said to be electrocuted.

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Sean Ngu, an Australian who was visiting family and friends in Cambodia, told the BBC too many people had been on the bridge. "There were too many people on the bridge and then
both ends were pushing, panic started and at least 50 people jumped in the river. People tried to climb on to the bridge, grabbing and pulling [electric] cables which came loose and electrical shock caused more deaths."

Source: www.bbc.co.uk

Harry Potter's Real Life Quidditch

Some Harry Potter fans made "Quidditch" into a real life sport. Although, not as exciting as in the movie, it is still competitive and tiring. Quidditch is a fictional sport in the Harry Potter book series. It is played by wizards and witches around the world. Matches are played with 2 teams, each has seven players riding flying broomsticks.

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"The sport has been adapted under the name of Muggle Quidditch or simply
"Quidditch" to the real world. Since at least 2003, Harry Potter fans have played ball games resembling the Harry Potter sport. In the United States, teams from more than 200 colleges are affiliated with the International Quidditch Association and play tournaments. Furthermore, high-level Quidditch tournaments are a mainstay of Harry Potter Conventions, such as Nimbus 2003, The Witching Hour, and, most recently, Infinitus 2010."

The Room

Several years ago, I was looking at a message board for a website that made fun of student films. It had a post from an angry, bitter recent film school graduate. He said he spent between twenty and thirty thousand dollars making his film. He charged it all on credit cards. I hope he had the good sense to declare bankruptcy.

His movie was about a girl leaving home. I assume it was a girl going away to college. He thought that the weakness in most student films was the acting--they never delivered their lines convincingly--so he avoided the issue and made a silent film.

I don't think he put any sound track at all on it, because when he submitted it to film festivals they'd send it back with a note alerting him to the fact that there was no sound.

As I said, the purpose of the website was to make fun of student films, but the people running it were sympathetic. They told him the movie sounded interesting and that they could understanding his feelings running up a large debt he had little hope of repaying.

I had mixed feelings. I understood what he meant and why he made a silent movie. I think this was the old days, before digital video. He had to choose between 16mm film and Hi8 video and he apparently went with film. Still, I think I would have recognized the lack of commercial potential.

The Room

That's what I thought about when I saw The Room.

I came across The Room on one of the "worst movie" lists. I'd never heard of it, but it has a cult following.

The movie cost $6,000,000 included marketing. It was self-distributed by it's mysterious first-time writer/producer/director/star, Tommy Wiseau. From what I read, he was never clear about how he raised the money, although he did mention importing leather jackets from Korea.

The movie is about a love triangle. Wiseau plays a sinewy, long-haired banker in his 50s whose fiance begins sleeping with his best friend. It was apparently intended as a melodrama, but audiences found it extremely funny. Wiseau ran with it and began to promote it as a "black comedy".
Now it has midnight showings, every two weeks in L.A. and every month in London.

It's unlikely the movie has made any money. I suppose it's possible it could after the release on DVD.

If I had six million bucks, I wouldn't blow it all making a movie. If I did squander it all on a film, it wouldn't be about a nice guy whose fiance sleeps with his best friend.

It reminded me of something in the memoirs of the journalist Claud Cockburn. He mentioned at one point getting himself assigned as a theater critic. He never attended the theater before, so he found the most hackneyed plot to be clever and original---for example, plays about guys whose fiances were sleeping with their best friends. Theater owners loved him. He gave everything a rave review. At first.

Reportedly, Wiseau rented a studio and bought a "beginning director package" which included a new 35mm camera and a high definition digital video camera. Wiseau said he was confused about the difference between the two formats, so the film was shot with both. The two cameras were mounted side by side during the filming.

Ed Wood, Jr, died just before people became interested in his movies. His friends weren't sure what he would have thought about it if he had lived, if he would have liked the attention or been hurt that they were laughing at him. There was the sad interview with his widow in which she insisted that young people didn't laugh at Plan 9, they watched if for its message of peace.

It's good that Tommy Wiseau can enjoy whatever following his movie has.

Wills and Kate are Engaged | Video

After making the official announcement of their engagement on Monday, Prince William and Kate Middleton made their first public appearance in the state rooms of St. Jame's Palace on Tuesday, November 16, 2010. And, the couple gave their first joint interview.

Congratulations goes out to Wills & Kate on their engagement! They look so happy together...

Ray Dennis Steckler, Charles Grodin

There was a show from England. The Incredibly Strange Film Show. It was probably twenty years ago.

On one episode, they interviewed Ray Dennis Steckler, director of The Incredibly Strange Creatures Who Stopped Living and Became Mixed-Up Zombies, Rat Fink a Boo Boo, The Thrill Killers, Blood Shack, and a number of other movies. His work was extemporaneous. He generally worked without a completed script. He explained that, "every time we have a completed script, the movie never seems to get made because we can never afford what's on the script. You know, you need all these things, then you spend all this time locating these things that you need for the movie, and by the time you get all that done, it's too late to make the movie."

Ed Wood, Jr, wanted to be like Orson Welles. Ray Dennis Steckler was more like Eisenstein or Pudovkin--more of an Alfred Hitchcock. The poor man's Brian de Palma, perhaps. His movies were much more visual. He made pretty good use of montage. If things had been a little different, he might have been another Robert Rodriguez.

The Incredibly Strange Film Show was hosted by Jonathan Ross. It's available on You Tube.

At a couple of points in the interviews, Steckler seems to catch himself taking his work too seriously. He quickly snaps out of it. You can't make any kind of a movie without taking it seriously, but you don't want to get caught taking yourself seriously.

I've seen it happen.

I saw Paul Michael Glaser on Charles Grodin's cable talk show after he made the movie Kazaam.

Glaser had directed other movies, but this was the first one that he worked on from start to finish, writing the script and directing all aspects of the movie. He was the auteur. He seemed quite proud and grimly serious. It was a little embarrassing.

I was at my brother's place when I saw the interview and he commented on it.

"Everybody's proud of their work," I said. There are people who are proud of having worked their whole lives in the lumber mills. I've met people who were proud of having never held any job for more than two months. I took perverse pride in being a car wash attendant. And the man did make a movie, after all.

As it happened, Kazaam grossed $19 million, a bit less than its cost, and got terrible reviews.


The child star in it was cute enough. He's still an actor. He's now shaved his head and he's covered with tattoos. You'd think that would be an impediment to an acting career.

Charles Grodin, Bill Cosby, other family films

I found Kazaam on a list of worst films, but it seemed to have done pretty well compared to most of the others on the list. Much better than Bill Cosby's family films, Ghost Dad and Leonard Part 6.

Cosby wrote and produced Leonard Part 6, but tried to blame the director for it being so terrible. It was one of the worst movies ever made. No director could have saved it. And how does Cosby explain the equally bad Ghost Dad, directed by Sidney Poitier?

Bill Cosby was hired to do ads for TCM, Ted Turner's classic movie cable station. This in spite of his role in two of the worst movies ever made, and in spite of the fact that nearly every movie shown on the channel either had an all-white cast or was explicitly racist.

The commercials were in black and white, meant to look like an old film noir. Bill Cosby tells us that he likes classic gangster movies because they don't use obscene language like in movies today.

Well. If the only good thing you can think of to say about a movie is that there were no dirty words in it, I'd say you probably didn't like it very well. In fact, that's pretty much all they said in the ads for Cosby's two movies. They couldn't quote reviews or show clips without revealing how terrible they were, so they interviewed people coming out of the theaters. The only thing they could say was that the movies weren't overtly offensive.

"Well, there wasn't any nudity."

Apparently Charles Grodin took offense at Cosby's TCM ads. He gave an angry commentary on his show. He pointed out that Cosby has made a career of presenting himself as a devoted family man when he secretly had an illegitimate daughter who he sent to prison when she threatened to sell her story to the Inquirer. This was before several women made rape accusations which Cosby denied. Who was he to complain about bad words?

Truffaut, Godard, Day For Night, and a link

There was the letter Jean-Luc Godard wrote to Francois Truffaut after the release of Truffaut's Day for Night, his movie about the making of a movie.

Truffaut was a liar, Godard wrote, "because the shot of you and Jacqueline Bisset the other night at Chez Francis is not in your film, and one wonders why the director is the only one who doesn't fuck in Day for Night."

Truffaut played the director in the movie.

Godard may have had a point there, I suppose. Truffaut was carrying on a highly publicized affair with Bisset while they were making Day for Night. But Truffaut was the only major character who doesn't have a sex scene in the movie. In fact, we keep seeing Truffaut's character alone in bed dreaming of himself as a child stealing movie posters from the local theater.

Well, it's okay with me. Truffaut was playing a character. He didn't need to do a love scene if he didn't want to.

What bothered me about it was that we know what Truffaut looked like as a kid. He looked like the kid in The 400 Blows. Jean-Pierre Leaud. He had a crew cut and a big nose. But in the dream sequences, he had a cute dutch boy haircut and an adorable little button nose.

And remember Truffaut's comment in his book on Alfred Hitchcock. He talks about the kid in Hitchcock's Sabotage. The boy keeps getting into trouble. Truffaut commented that, in movies, kids doing things they're not supposed to endears them to the audience.

Were the shots of himself as a child stealing a poster a shameless attempt to endear himself to the audience? And why on earth would a child want a poster for Citizen Kane?

Day for Night was still a pretty good movie. Truffaut not having sexual intercourse in it wasn't a major flaw. I should probably say, though, that that wasn't Godard's central objection to it.

Truffaut had been a critic himself. Like many critics, he could dish it out but he couldn't take it. Roger Ebert wrote an angry letter to the local newspaper here after one of his books got a bad review. And Truffaut wrote a twenty page letter to Godard attacking him back.

"I've always felt that true militants are like cleaning women," Truffaut wrote, "performing a thankless, daily, necessary task. But you, you're like Ursula Andress. You make a four-minute appearance, just enough time for the cameras to flash, for you to make two or three startling pronouncements, then you disappear, shrouded in appealing mystery."

But, anyway, here's a link to an edited English translation of an interesting interview with Godard. He discusses his split Truffaut, the Oscar they're awarding him, the accusations made against him by Zionist groups, among other topics:

http://landscapesuicide.blogspot.com/2010/11/everything-or-nothing-2.html

Who should play Prince William in the made-for-TV movie

Prince William is getting married. Good for him. But the poor girl should take a good long look at the family she's marrying into. If they divorce, who gets custody of the children? Christopher Hitchens has said a number of times that the royal children are legally the property of the royal family. I don't know if he meant that literally.

But who should play Prince William when they make a made-for-TV movie about the royal wedding? Should actors who play members of the Royal Family be better-looking or not-as-good-looking as the actual Royal Family? Or should some of them be played by better-looking actors and some played by worse-looking actors? Should William and Harry be played by a couple of handsome young stars while Prince Charles is played by some elderly Arnold Stang-like actor?

There were at least three made-for-TV movies about the Amy Fisher case. The actors who played Amy Fisher and Joey Buttafuoco were better-looking than the actual people, but poor Mary Jo Buttafuoco, the victim in the case, was always played by actresses who were less attractive than she was.

What about the baldness issue? How bald should the actor playing Prince William be?

And what about Harry? Prince Harry looks nothing like anyone in the Royal Family, but he looks just like one his mother's boyfriends. It wouldn't effect casting, though. It is a little like the Farkel Family skits on the old Rowan & Martin's Laugh In. A family with red-haired children who all looked exactly like their next-door neighbor.

Through some freak genetic mutation, the inbred royal family seems to be very long-lived. The Queen Mum was 101 when she died. Elizabeth II is only 84. Prince Charles may have to sweat it out for another 17 years before he gets to be king. If his mother manages to live that long, Charles will be almost 80.

Prince William should wait until he's 60, then marry a stewardess and have a couple of kids. That way they'll still be reasonably young when he dies and they get to take the throne. Although having to be king or queen for most of your life wouldn't be much better than spending your life waiting for your father to die.

For the sake of the children, abolish the monarchy!

Royal Wedding of Prince William and Kate Middleton

Finally after the tragic end of Prince Charles and Princess Diana, another big royal wedding is on the works. The helicopter pilot Prince William will marry Kate Middleton, a commoner like Diana. Prince William is second in line to the throne, next to his father.

William and Kate Middleton had been dating for more than 8 years now and its just right that they get married. They are both 28 years old. The palace announced that their wedding will be next year's (2011) spring or summer.

The sapphire and diamond engagement ring  belonged to his late mother, Diana. "I thought it was quite nice because obviously she's not going to be around to share any of the fun and excitement of it all. This was my way of keeping her close to it all," William said.

They have publicly announced their engagement in a televised interview. The interview reminded many of a similar TV appearance by William's parents, Prince Charles and Diana, shortly after they became engaged.

Paul Burrell, the former British Royal Household servant believes Westminster Abbey might be the wedding venue of choice.[www.glamour.com]

"Royal watcher and author of William and Harry: Behind the Palace Walls Katie Nicholl told the magazine that the prince and Middleton had a secret pact to marry three years ago while in the Seychelles. William told Kate she was The One, but he was not ready to get married. She...agreed to wait for him."[www.mb.com.ph]

UPDATE Link: Royal Officials announced route they will travel on April 29 and the churchmen taking the service

More about Kate Middleton Click Here
 
Prince William's engagement pictures Click Here

Lucky Prince William to marry Kate Middleton, who's also sexy and hot. Best Wishes.

Shanghai Skycraper Fire Kills at least 42

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A fire in a 28-storey Shanghai apartment building has killed at least 42 people. It is believed to have started in construction scaffolding surrounding the building.

Source: www.bbc.co.uk

Number Coding Causes Bus Strike

Local bus operators made good on their threat to keep their buses from plying their regular routes to protest the implementation of the number coding scheme for all passenger buses, including provincial buses.

Under the number coding scheme, buses are banned on EDSA that have license plates ending in 1 and 2 on Mondays; 3 and 4  on Tuesdays; 5 and 6 on Wednesdays; 7 and 8  on Thursdays, and, 9 and 0 on Fridays.The Metro Manila Development Authority (MMDA) said around 13,000 provincial and city buses will be affected by the scheme, 1,000 of them on a daily basis.

President Homer Mercado of the South Luzon Bus Operators Association said the MMDA should just issue special cards that would cut by 20% the number of buses plying EDSA. As if that would work? Special cards are prone to corruptions. Unlike Number coding which can be monitored not only by the police and MMDA but also by the public. 

I hope that the government would not give in to this strike and continue to put the public's safety first. Most bus drivers in EDSA are reckless and careless about the safety of us commuters. Yes less bus means less space, but less bus also means faster transportation and less traffic. Less time for buses to return to terminals. If you think about it, number coding on buses makes sense right?

Why Bus Number Coding is being re-implemented?

Soruce: www.abs-cbnnews.com

Image: article.wn.com

Manny "Pacman" Pacquiao Dominated Antonio Margarito

The people's champ Manny "Pacman" Pacquiao has done it again. Dominating his 12-round fight against Mexican “Tijuana Tornado” Antonio Margarito. Pacquiao, dubbed the “Fighter of the Decade” wins his 8th world crown, the vacant World Boxing Council (WBC) super welterweight title at the Cowboys Stadium in Arlington, Texas with a unanimous decision  scoring 120-108, 118-110 and 119-109.

“He’s strong. I never expected him to be as strong as he was. He’s a very tough fighter. I can’t believe he took all those punches,” Pacquiao said in a Reuters report.

Margarito suffered severe cuts on his eyes early in the match, giving more advantage to the already leading Manny Pacquiao. The people's champ felt for the mexican and was trying to motion to call for a doctor to take a look at Margarito’s cuts. “There were really bad cuts in the eyes,” Pacquiao said. “Boxing is not for killing each other, you know.” Freddy Roach, Pacquiao’s trainer,  wished that the fight was halted. “We didn’t lose a round,” said Freddie Roach. “I wish they had stopped the fight. They probably ruined his (Margarito’s) career by not stopping the fight.”

Where are you Floyd Mayweather, Jr.? Why don't you fight Manny Pacquiao? The world needs this fight!

Manny Paquiao's 8 world titles in 8 weight classes:
WBC super welterweight crown

WBC flyweight title

International Boxing Federation (IBF) junior bantamweight title

Linear featherweight title

WBC junior lightweight title

WBC lightweight title

International Boxing Organization (IBO) junior welterweight title

World Boxing Organization (WBO) welterweight title

Pacquiao now has 52 wins (with 38 KOs), 3 losses and 2 draws.

Have you seen  Young Manny "Pacman" Pacquiao as a Teenager?
CLICK ME: Young Manny "Pacman" Pacquiao as a Teenager

Source: Reuters

You Tube celebrities

I guess Justin Beiber is the only You Tube celebrity to hit it really big thus far.

There were others. Tay Zonday sang "Chocolate Rain" on You Tube and went on to do a Dr Pepper commercial. Chris Crocker, after the success of his "Leave Brittney Alone" video, has done some things, or they've talked about him doing some things. I don't know what. I haven't seen him in anything.

Low budget filmmakers used to get John Carradine or some other aging star to appear in their movies. Rory Calhoun started doing the same thing late in his life. Ernest Borgnine appeared in movies you wouldn't expect to see an Oscar-winner in.

Maybe it's time to turn to You Tube celebrities. Use their star power to sell DVDs.

It may be a bad idea. Few are actual actors. I don't know about the singers like Zonday and Beiber, but most of the others seem to be egomaniacs. Are narcissists easy to manipulate or just hard to work with?

Maybe you can go the other way. Pick your star then put them on You Tube to turn them into phony celebrities. Like the way John Waters used to make his own stars.

This one You Tube guy

There was one You Tube celebrity. Someone I know had "friended" him on My Space.

"Who's that guy?" I said.

"I don't know. He wanted to be my friend so I clicked 'okay'."

I won't say who the You Tube celebrity was. I don't think I want him googling himself and finding his way here. He argued at length on his My Space page that he wasn't a narcissist.

He was the second most popular "director" on You Tube at the time. He had millions of hits. I watched some of his videos. They were terrible. The only one that stands out in my mind showed him drinking a bottle of Snapple. He drinks some of it. He stops and smiles. He drinks the rest of it. The end.

Snapple was donating money to some environmental cause, so he claimed he was saving a tree.

His followers were all teenage girls. Girls get crushes on teen idols they know they would never meet as a safe way to explore romantic feelings. With this guy, they had an extra buffer. They'd never meet him and he was openly gay.

He was banned from Wikipedia---it turns out you're not allowed to make a page about yourself.

At one point, he called on his fans----he has tens of thousands of them----to send donations. He needed help with his rent. He raised eighteen dollars.

Poor kid. People don't realize that narcissism is a serious, debilitating psychiatric condition.

There are others who are more interesting. There's a young fellow called Dylan. He has a scripted series where he tells plausible-sounding anecdotes about life as a teenager.

At least it's voluntary. Not like that poor Canadian kid. He was taking a video class in school. Everyone was gone. He went into the studio and made a tape of himself with a broomstick re-enacting a fight scene from a Star Wars movie. Some classmates found the tape, posted it on line and ruined his life.

PXL 2000

"Come on!" I said.

This was over twenty years ago.

I went with my friends to Toys R Us.

"There it is!" I said.

It was a Fisher Price PXL2000---the toy camcorder that really worked! Produced a slightly fuzzy black and white picture recorded on an ordinary audio cassette tape.

It cost about $100 at a time when real camcorders could cost a thousand bucks.

My friends scoffed. I didn't buy it. I shouldn't have listened to them. Now the PXL 2000 is coveted by artists and bohemians.

I don't know why it matters. There's a free program for Mac computers to modify video to make it look like a PXL 2000 picture. Even if you don't have that, there's a way to monkey with the image to do the same thing.

I'm not sure what all of this means, but here's how to do it:

1. Scale your footage to fit a 540 x 405 composition at 15 frames per second. (This is exactly 75% of a full 720 x 540 NTSC frame.)

2. Reduce the saturation to 0.

3. Apply a Gaussian blur with a radius of 1.5 pixels.

4. Sharpen the image 30%.

5. Clamp the black point to about 5% and the white point to about 95%.

6. Compress the dynamic range of the entire image by about 1.2 to 1.

7. Posterize to 90 steps.

8. Add a lag effect; this should add a small proportion of the three previous frames to each frame, giving slight trails and motion artifacting.

9. If desired, add a scanline or “TV” effect.

10. Clamp the white and black points again.

11. Apply a second 1.5-pixel Gaussian blur.

12. Expand your composition to 720 x 540, leaving a large black border around the frame.

13. If necessary, scale your finished composition to meet your output requirements (720 x 480 for an NTSC DVD, for example).

http://fox-gieg.com/tutorials/2008/fake-pxl2000-effect/

But why do artists go for the PXL 2000 picture but dismiss other lovely analog video? Look at VHS or S-VHS video, or Hi8!

I was filming some stuff one day with a huge S-VHS camcorder. A fellow began talking to me. I told him a couple of times that I wasn't from "the media", but he kept talking, giving me a message to pass on to governor.

Young Manny Pacman Pacquiao as a Teenager

Saw these young and skinny Manny Pacman Pacquiao pictures by Gerhard Joren. He was said to be just 17 years old in these pictures. Like most unfortunate people in Philippine provinces, Manny went to Manila at the age of 14 to escape poverty and help his mother with 6 siblings in General Santos City, Mindanao.

There have been rumors that he started out as a "Panadero" or Baker or Pandesal Maker or Pandesal seller. Then became a boxer just like that. That's not true. Filipinos know so little about the history of Pacquiao. He started working different jobs, one of them is
construction. But even as a child Pacquiao loved boxing. So he later found himself training and boxing at LM Gym in Manila. He was said to turned pro when he was 16 around 1995, a light flyweight at just 106 lbs. Yes, at that age! Now you won't wonder why he's so strong in the ring.


Manny Pacquiao deserves every bit of what he has now. He has put so much hard-work and time to make his dreams into reality. Not like most people in poverty, who do not push themselves as hard as he did. Mabuhay ka Manny!

You can view more of young Manny Pacquiao's photos over at  Gerhard Joren's website.

CLICK ME: Manny "Pacman" Pacquiao Dominated Antonio Margarito

Google Offers Help To People Searching "Suicide"

Google added a new feature to its search engine. The feature is a "link-up with Samaritans, displaying the charity's helpline number in response to UK search queries relating to suicide." When users in UK search the word "suicide", they will now be shown a red telephone icon on top of the lists. This feature was already introduced in the US last April.

Google says it aims to reach out to people who are depressed, suicidal or in distress. "People turn to the internet for information and advice all the time," said Google's UK chief, Matt Brittin. Although some other specific words relating to

suicides are not yet filtered, more terms are likely to be added as the service evolves over time.

Hopefully they can apply this worldwide soon. 

Samaritans in the UK offer confidential support by phone 24 hours a day, seven days a week on 08457 90 90 90.

Source: www.bbc.co.uk

British Amateur Space Enthusiasts Launch Paper Plane Into Space

A team of amateur British space enthusiasts just sent the first paper plane into space. The place was made of paper straws and covered in paper and has a 3ft wing span. They launched the plain using a helium balloon and then dropped 17 miles in the atmosphere, capturing images using its miniature camera.

The paper plane was launched in Spain using a helium balloon and eventually landed 25 miles away from its launch site with minimal damages to its wing.

View full article for the video of the flight.

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Source: www.dailymail.co.uk

Dino De Laurentis, Menahem Golan, Chuck Norris

Dino De Laurentis has died at age 91.

He produced some great movies---Bitter Rice, La Strada, Nights of Cabria---but it was always a little surprising to see his name on those films because he produced a lot of somewhat lower brow movies in the '70s. I'm looking at a list of what he produced then, and he still produced some pretty good movies. Serpico, Three Days of the Condor, Ingmar Bergman's The Serpent's Egg.

There was a spaghetti western Vic Morrow directed in the 1970s called A Man Called Sledge. De Laurentis was producer. Filmed in Spain. They brought in horses from Italy. When they were done filming, the guy from De Laurentis's production company told them to shoot the horses. It would be cheaper than shipping them back to Italy.

Vic Morrow and the Americans on the set were appalled. They shipped the horses back.

Menahem Golan and Yoram Globus

In the '80s, there was a grim shift in internationally produced exploitation films. The Israelis took over.

A lot of the Italian filmmakers were in the Italian Communist Party, directors like Sergio Leone. Spaghetti Westerns were full of Communist symbolism. I mentioned in another entry the end of For a Few Dollars More--bounty hunter Clint Eastwood counts the dead bodies in the back of a wagon by adding up their monetary value. There was the gold buried in the war cemetery in The Good, The Bad and The Ugly. In another Spaghetti Western--was is Django?-- we see a rich American rancher murdering Mexican peasants and feeding their bodies to his pet eagle.

But that all vanished. Communist symbolism replaced with Zionist racism.

There was one Israeli Golan-Globus production, Lone Wolf McQuade starring Chuck Norris as a Texas Ranger. Mexicans stand in for Palestinians.

"A Texas Ranger kicked my father's teeth out! Are you going to kick my teeth out, Texas Ranger?"

Chuck Norris mows them down in the desert with an Israeli submachine gun. Then he kicks the man in the mouth.
People compared Lone Wolf McQuade to the spaghetti westerns. It had the same sort of look to it and it had loud music. But the plot revolved around Chuck Norris fighting Communists who were delivering aid to Nicaragua.

In one scene, Chuck Norris gets involved in a fight at a square dance.


"The boys are just having a little fun," says Communist David Carradine.

"Want to join the fun?" says Chuck Norris assuming a karate fighting stance.

"Stop! This is not my idea of fun!" says Barbara Carrera.

Walker, Texas Ranger

I never sat through an episode of Walker, Texas Ranger. According to The Daily Beast's list of the "Fifty Most Loathsome People" of 2007, "Walker, Texas Ranger once let a little girl battle armed gangsters, because she had the power of belief in God."

A guy who watches Walker, Texas Ranger told me that, toward the end, they resorted to a "ceramic leg". We would see elderly Chuck Norris raise his leg as if he was going to kick someone, then they would cut to a close-up of the person he was going to kick and they'd hit him with a fake leg.

It makes me wonder how one should properly use an elderly martial artist in a movie. Even if they could do a spectacular karate fight, is that what the audience wants to see? They should probably show a little dignity. Not kick as high.

Here's a karate fight with an older actor not generally associated with martial arts films:

Google Not Building a Social Networking Site Like Facebook?

Before the social networking sites, search engines like Google has dominated the web industry. Now we can see that people are spending more and more time using social networking sites. Mark Zuckerberg's Facebook was just launched in 2004 but has more than 500 million members. So why is the Internet Search Leader Google Inc not building a social network to compete with Facebook?

"We're not working on a social network platform that's just going to be another social network platform," Google's head of mobile product development, Hugo Barra, said in answer to a question at the Monaco Media Forum. "We do think that social is an ingredient for

success for any app going forward, search and advertising being probably the best two examples that I would mention. So that's how we're thinking about the problem."

Google Chief Executive Eric Schmidt said that the company intends to add social network features to its sites rather than building its own social network to compete with Facebook. But people are still speculating a Google Social Network in the works. Google already owns a social networking site, Orkut, which is said to be popular in Brazil and India. But it did expand beyond those countries.

They better hurry making a Google Social Network soon. Maybe Facebook is going to have a more reliable search engine within its site in the future? Or Google is "in" Facebook?

Source: news.yahoo.com