There will be blood
Paul Thomas Anderson should be more than happy since, his movie "There Will be Blood" got an extremely positive review from an unlikely source: The Economist. Such an exceptional coincidence has not pushed me on running for the movie. PT Anderson has not jet convinced me so much: Punch Durnk Love was ok, but not that great (except for the Mattress Man). And I have just recently viewed Magnolia: the start is great, and so the end is. But in between there are about two hours and a half of quite of an irregular movie.
The Trap
I am quite disappointed on how usually works conventional wisdom. Many people settles down many concepts as being true or good without even thinking deeply about them. (My own sentence is very paradoxical, since "true" or "good" are just common wisdom concepts: how to prove something is "true" or "good" if it is mostly and objective perception?). So I usually consider any effort to make people rethink every little thing as laudable.
On the last months the BBC has been airing some very interesting documentaries by Adam Curtis. The films have a very descriptive name: The Trap. (ĦJep!, just guess he is criticise something). Fortunately, we have Google Video and there are a lot of BBC programs on Google Video.
So if you feel like, watch this documentary about Freedom and how politicians trying to provide Freedom just get things fucked up. (And how John Forbes Nash was not such a nice guy as they tried to make us believe in A Beautiful Mind).
The Trap - Episode one - F**k you buddy
The Trap - Episode two - The Lonely Robot
The Trap - Episode three - We Will Force You To be Free
But, let's not trust this BBC guys too much either, maybe they are also trying to trick us....
The winner looses all...
The other day I read a transalation of the Rolling Stone report on "The Decline of the Music Industry". That translation incluided some graphs comparing the sales of records between 2000 and 2006. (Don't try to get them from the online article, because that graphs are not there).
Most of the graphs were quite obvious (sales where down...) but there was some interesting info. In one of the graphs they were comparing the average number of records sold between a top 1 record and a top 10 record. The top 1 record sales went down 45%, but the top 10 record sales only decreased about 10%. In both cases, the sales for the top 1 were much higher than the sales of the top 10 (more than twice the sales on the 2000 and still more on 2006). Interesting statistics: so it seems that piracy is hurting more the top sellers (those 'hyper-commercial','over-advertised' records that I do not care about) than other records (still a top 10 is probably as 'hyper-commercial' and uninteresting...). And that is making the sales becoming closer between top 1 and top 10. Illegal justice..?
I do not want to mean anything, but I just love how statistics bring out small surprises. I just think... we should never just simplify things, and try to see all the different details. And in any case, if the 'crappy' music founds more trouble... I won't care so much...
AC/no DC
Woah, according to New York Times, Last Section of direct current will be switched off on New York. I did not knew that there were still using Direct Current anywere in the world, and even less in USA. I thought everybody was using Alternating Current nowadays. But the more interesting thing about it: Even if they are switching off direct current distribution, the buildings will continue to use internally direct current. And even more: Ħthe New York Metro still uses direct current!
Frat House
This goes for all those Animal House fans. What would have been of all those American University movies without fraternities? Since I am not American, and I have never attended to University there, I always wondered what would be going on on those fraternities with funny greek letters as name.
So it could be of interest watching this Frat House documentary. The documentary tries to display what goes on inside a fraternity (including the humilliating fraternity rites). It was financed by HBO, but the documentary was never aired (despite of winning several prizes). But it is now availabe on the web: Frat House on Google Video. (And fortunately Google Video exists and it can be see as whole, otherwise this will have been sliced into several YouTube videos). Video is not of the best quality, but it is quite interesting.Now I feel glad of not having fraternities here in Spain.
DDR Type
Minima, a beautiful type designed during the DDR years
This is a little bit like Goodbye Lenin. During the DDR years several font types were designed in Eastern Germany, and later on as DDR disappeared, many of those have stopped being used, except for some guys that provide again simils of those fonts. Let's forget about the politics, manyh of those fonts are very beautiful: East German Type Design
