Christopher Walken: What I’ve Learned

Christopher Walken: What I’ve Learned:

Christopher Walken on some of life’s lessons that he’s learned. Among them:

I remember once, years ago, I was walking out a door — I’d been having a conversation and I was walking out the door, and this guy said to me, “Chris,” and I stopped and I turned, and he said, “Be careful.” And I never forgot that. And it comes back to me often: Be careful. That was good advice.

and

I don’t like zoos. Awful.

(via my tumblr)

Daring Fireball:

Lion is the eighth landmark new-big-cat-name release of Mac OS X in a little over ten years. There’s a pattern to these releases. Rumors, anticipation, release. Many things have changed in the interim. Apple’s industry stature, the size of the Mac user base, the relative position and importance of the Mac in Apple’s overall product lineup, the App Store. But one thing has stayed the same: John Siracusa’s splendidly deep, obsessively detailed, spot-on accurate reviews of each release. Lion, happily, is no different. (But from the things-that-have-changed department: this time you can buy Siracusa’s Lion review as a $4.99 Kindle book. (And make no mistake — it’s book-length.) Use that link and Siracusa himself will get an extra kickback from Amazon.)

John Siracusa’s Review of Lion

Since Roger Ebert lost the ability to eat, drink and speak three years ago, he’s focused his inner voice and energy into writing. Not just about movies, but whatever strikes his fancy – just skimming through the archive page of his blog reveals posts on every imaginable topic. Chris Jones has written a really touching piece on Ebert that tells not only of his current life, the joy he finds in ‘eating’ with others and his inability to stop smiling, as well as on the life he has led. On his online writing:

The original entries are short updates about his life and health and a few of his heart’s wishes. Postcards and pebbles. They’re followed by a smattering of Welcomes to Cyberspace. But slowly the journal picks up steam, as Ebert’s strength and confidence and audience grow. You are the readers I have dreamed of, he writes. He is emboldened. He begins to write about more than movies; in fact, it sometimes seems as though he’d rather write about anything other than movies. The existence of an afterlife, the beauty of a full bookshelf, his liberalism and atheism and alcoholism, the health-care debate, Darwin, memories of departed friends and fights won and lost — more than five hundred thousand words of inner monologue have poured out of him, five hundred thousand words that probably wouldn’t exist had he kept his other voice. Now some of his entries have thousands of comments, each of which he vets personally and to which he will often respond. It has become his life’s work, building and maintaining this massive monument to written debate — argument is encouraged, so long as it’s civil — and he spends several hours each night reclined in his chair, tending to his online oasis by lamplight. Out there, his voice is still his voice — not a reasonable facsimile of it, but his.

On finding that his tribute to his old partner, Gene Siskel, had been removed from YouTube:

Ebert keeps scrolling down. Below his journal he had embedded video of his first show alone, the balcony seat empty across the aisle. It was a tribute, in three parts. He wants to watch them now, because he wants to remember, but at the bottom of the page there are only three big black squares. In the middle of the squares, white type reads: “Content deleted. This video is no longer available because it has been deleted.” Ebert leans into the screen, trying to figure out what’s happened. He looks across at Chaz. The top half of his face turns red, and his eyes well up again, but this time, it’s not sadness surfacing. He’s shaking. It’s anger. Chaz looks over his shoulder at the screen. “Those fu — ” she says, catching herself. They think it’s Disney again — that they’ve taken down the videos. Terms-of-use violation. This time, the anger lasts long enough for Ebert to write it down. He opens a new page in his text-to-speech program, a blank white sheet. He types in capital letters, stabbing at the keys with his delicate, trembling hands: MY TRIBUTE, appears behind the cursor in the top left corner. ON THE FIRST SHOW AFTER HIS DEATH. But Ebert doesn’t press the button that fires up the speakers. He presses a different button, a button that makes the words bigger. He presses the button again and again and again, the words growing bigger and bigger and bigger until they become too big to fit the screen, now they’re just letters, but he keeps hitting the button, bigger and bigger still, now just shapes and angles, just geometry filling the white screen with black like the three squares. Roger Ebert is shaking, his entire body is shaking, and he’s still hitting the button, bang, bang, bang, and he’s shouting now. He’s standing outside on the street corner and he’s arching his back and he’s shouting at the top of his lungs.

I’ve noticed that Ebert has been giving more and more movies 3-4 stars, which the profile pegs on the simple joy that he finds in watching movies now. Moreso than ever before in life. Nothing wrong with that.

Roger Ebert: The Essential Man

Chuck Lorre Vanity Card #277: Belarus is a small, land-locked country next door to Russia, Ukraine,

Chuck Lorre Vanity Card #277:

Belarus is a small, land-locked country next door to Russia, Ukraine, Latvia, Lithuania and Poland. According to Wikipedia, one of its major exports is cattle by-products. Which begs the question, what horrible shape are the cattle in, if all they’re good for is felt hats and wallpaper paste? But Belarus does have a bustling TV production industry. One of their most recent hits is a sitcom about four nerdy scientists who live next door to a beautiful blonde waitress. The characters are named Sheldon, Leo, Hovard, Raj and Natasha, and the show is entitled, The Theorists. Each episode begins with a rapid-fire montage of images which takes us from the dawn of time to the present moment. Keeping with that theme, the montage is scored with what is probably the worst piece of recorded pop music since the dawn of time. And finally, each episode appears to be a Russian translation of a Big Bang Theory episode. When we brought this to the attention of the Warner Brothers legal department, we were told that it’s next to impossible to sue for copyright infringement in Belarus because the TV production company that is ripping us off is owned and operated by the government of Belarus. Having no other recourse, I’m hoping that this vanity card will be read by the fine folks making The Theorists, and, wracked with guilt, they break down and send us some felt hats. The Kyrgyzstan version of Dharma & Greg already sent me some wallpaper paste.

This is true! Larry Getlen found clips of The Theorists. I was hoping there would be subtitles – but I guess I could just watch the first episode of Big Bang for the translation…

The Onion:

CUPERTINO, CA—Claiming that he completely forgot about the much-hyped electronic device until the last minute, a frantic Steve Jobs reportedly stayed up all night Tuesday in a desperate effort to design Apple’s new tablet computer. “Come on, Steve, just think—think, dammit—you’re running out of time,” the exhausted CEO said as he glued nine separate iPhones to the back of a plastic cafeteria tray. “Okay, yeah, this will work. This will definitely work. Just need to write ‘tablet’ on this little strip of masking tape here and I’m golden. Oh, come on, you piece of shit! Just stick already!” Middle-of-the-night sources reported that Jobs then began work on double-spacing his Keynote presentation and increasing the font size to make it appear longer.

Frantic Steve Jobs Stays Up All Night Designing Apple Tablet

http://vimeo.com/moogaloop.swf?clip_id=8718627&server=vimeo.com&show_title=1&show_byline

http://vimeo.com/moogaloop.swf?clip_id=8718627&server=vimeo.com&show_title=1&show_byline=1&show_portrait=0&color=&fullscreen=1

BoingBoing:

Damian Kulash of the band OK Go has published a tremendously informative, frustrating, and important open letter about the reason that the band’s videos can’t be embedded on sites like this. OK Go rose to prominence on the strength of its viral Internet videos, but now EMI, its label, won’t allow embedding for its videos, because no embedding is possible. Kulash is clearly frustrated by this impasse, and his ruminations on how the industry got to this place and where it might go are required reading:

The catch: the software that pays out those tiny sums doesn’t pay if a video is embedded. This means our label doesn’t get their hard-won share of the pie if our video is played on your blog, so (surprise, surprise) they won’t let us be on your blog. And, voilá: four years after we posted our first homemade videos to YouTube and they spread across the globe faster than swine flu, making our bassist’s glasses recognizable to 70-year-olds in Wichita and 5-year-olds in Seoul and eventually turning a tidy little profit for EMI, we’re – unbelievably – stuck in the position of arguing with our own label about the merits of having our videos be easily shared. It’s like the world has gone backwards.

Let’s take a wider view for a second. What we’re really talking about here is the shift in the way we think about music. We’re stuck between two worlds: the world of ten years ago, where music was privately owned in discreet little chunks (CDs), and a new one that seems to be emerging, where music is universally publicly accessible. The thing is, only one of these worlds has a (somewhat) stable system in place for funding music and all of its associated nuts-and-bolts logistics, and, even if it were possible, none of us would willingly return to that world. Aside from the smug assholes who ran labels, who’d want a system where a handful of corporate overlords shove crap down our throats? All the same, if music is going to be more than a hobby, someone, literally, has to pay the piper. So we’ve got this ridiculous situation where the machinery of the old system is frantically trying to contort and reshape and rewire itself to run without actually selling music. It’s like a car trying to figure out how to run without gas, or a fish trying to learn to breath air.

> Open Letter From OK Go, regarding non-embeddable YouTube videos

Nerd out with me and see with other folks have on their home screens.

First & 20