There seemed to be quite a bit of focus at the Oscars on the advantages of watching a movie on the big screen (that is, in a theater, not your big screen TV at home). There were several references to this point, including comments by the president of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, the host of the Oscars. We got to see a clip illustrating the importance of the big screen. The clip had scenes from various big action movies such as The Ten Commandments (Moses parts the sea) and Star Wars (some starship scene).

I certainly understand the upside of seeing movies on the big screen (and not just from the profit-oriented point-of-view, but also from the viewer’s perspective). However, I don’t understand how it helps to make this argument in a situation where most of the people watching your clips are viewing them through their TV sets at home. Was the point to show us scenes that would look particularly unimpressive on the small screen, but remind us how impressive they would be on a big one? They were well-known scenes that we know are impressive so how is this supposed to get us to run out and watch movies in theaters?

I’m linking to “Ian Sanson’s piece on Johnny Cash from the LRB”:http://lrb.co.uk/v28/n05/sans01_.html [via the “Virtual Stoa”:http://users.ox.ac.uk/%7Emagd1368/weblog/blogger.html ] both because it is entertaining and perceptive, but also — in the light of “John Q’s Blonde post”:https://crookedtimber.org/2006/03/05/blonde-joke/ below — to report that Chuck Klosterman’s “hilarious sociobiological explanation for Led Zeppelin”, as referenced by Sanson, is freely available to the moderately ingenious via Amazon.com’s “search inside” feature.

“Jamie Kenny”:http://bloodandtreasure.typepad.com/ and “Backword Dave”:http://backword.me.uk/ have been keeping up commentary on the Mills/Jowell affair (scroll down for their various posts). Meanwhile, their friends in the meeja have been doing their best with the exculpatory smokescreens. Notable today is “Peter Preston in the Guardian”:http://politics.guardian.co.uk/labour/comment/0,,1724395,00.html (the newspaper most compromised by gourmet dinners and rounds of golf):

bq. Let’s all get off our high horses. David Mills is the Inspector Clouseau of global capitalism. He doesn’t lurch from hedge fund to hedge fund and pillar to post in order to grow fabulously rich; just to stay one stumbling step away from the knacker’s yard. Silvio Berlusconi (joyous news!) chooses back-to-front men, more naff than Mafia. Old Labour should remember Lord Gannex and John Stonehouse among too many others before it starts casting New Labour stones.

Some of us (including Preston it must be said) are old enough to remember the “Kagan”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Kagan%2C_Baron_Kagan and “Stonehouse”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Stonehouse affairs. One of the things about “New Labour” was its rehabilitation of Harold Wilson & Co. as against their post-79 detractors, and among the things that the detractors detracted was precisely the association of Labour grandees with the likes of Kagan. So playing the Old Labour/New Labour card here just reeks of bad faith.

The Jowell/Mills business also reminds me — though the parallels are superficial — to recommend the recent Danish political thriller “King’s Game”:http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0378215/ , which centres on dodgy politicians with cosy insider relationships in a leading newspaper.

The latest evolutionary psychology[1] theory to do the rounds is that blondeness evolved as a selection strategem for women trying to attract scarce mates in the harsh and male-scarce conditions of Ice Age Europe. According to this report in the Times, the theory has been formulated by an anthropologist, Peter Frost. His supporting argument is that blondeness is a signal of high levels of oestrogen. I suppose I should wait for the article which is supposed to come out in Evolution and Human Behaviour, but I can’t resist pointing to an obvious hole and an alternative explanation.

The obvious hole is that blond(e)ness is not a sex-linked characteristic. If light hair colour signals high oestrogen, blond men should have a lot of trouble attracting mates. Tempted as I am by this hypothesis (see photo here), I can’t say I’ve seen any evidence to back it up.

The alternative explanation (not at all novel) is that fair hair arose in conjunction with pale skin, as a straightforward physical adaption to the move away from the tropics – less need for pigment, or maybe more need to absorb vitamin D.

[click to continue…]

Via “3 Quarks Daily”:http://3quarksdaily.blogs.com/3quarksdaily/ this very enjoyable “interview”:http://www.nyu.edu/gsas/dept/politics/faculty/przeworski/przeworski_munck.pdf with Adam Przeworski on his life, his research and his intellectual development. And on the causal explanations for dictators’ economic strategies …

bq. Then, for the particular question I addressed in Democracy and Development I thought I needed statistics. But in the work I’m currently doing on development, I am back to reading biographies of dictators and novels about dictators, which are very informative. I would like to get into Park’s shoes and Mobutu’s shoes and see why one of them was a developmental leader and the other was a thief. My current hunch is that developmentalist dictators are those who loved their mothers: obviously this is not something you will learn or be able to test with statistics, but when you read novels and biographies, the pattern becomes uncanny.

The opening sequence of _The Simpsons_, only “with real people”:http://youtube.com/watch?v=49IDp76kjPw. (English people, apparently.) Clever. Is it an amateur effort, or some marketing thing? Pretty damn impressive, if the former. A third, highly likely option is that it’s something that’s been floating around for a year or five which I only now have discovered.

Kevin Drum mocks Hugh Hewitt for his ‘it was in a PDF file that we were only able to read after downloading a new version of Adobe’ defense. But the proper pop cult reference is not Perry Mason. Allow me. Look to the man’s own site: "Hugh Hewitt is the Jack Bauer of talk radio and the blogosphere." This is actually a good idea for a show. ‘In the next 24 hours, terrorists will make a major strike against an American city. The only thing between all of us, and just a few of them … is a complacent, partisan hack.’ In 90 minutes or less you could play it strictly for Man Who Knew Too Little laughs. Subtler and ultimately more satisfying would be a genuine, 24-karat gold-plated imitation 24. In the first episode, "Download PDF For Murder", terrorists have encrypted their plans in an email attachment that can only be read using the latest version of Adobe Reader. Sweaty ‘which wire do I cut?’ tension as the heroes race against time to crack the main Adobe site. ‘This mouse has TWO buttons!’ ‘Just PICK one!’ [Adobe Acrobat Reader starts dowloading, to the "Hackers"-inspired strains of The Prodigy’s "Firestarter".] But then it all goes crazy. In the end they confront a nail-biting moral dilemma. Should they torture the Adobe executive, kidnapped in a daring, extra-judicial raid. He’s screaming "Just DOUBLE-click!" The agents scream back: “You’re lying” [click to continue…]

An entertaining “howler”:http://www.economist.com/opinion/displayStory.cfm?story_id=5575262 at the _Economist_ this week; one of its leaders has the grand title:

bq.

From Karl Marx’s copybook: Efforts to block foreign takeovers rest on a deceit about ownership and interests

and continues:

bq. PATRIOTISM, said Samuel Johnson, is the last refuge of a scoundrel. That may be unfair to the proper sort of patriot, but it would be an entirely valid comment about politicians today who make a fuss about foreign takeovers in their countries, in the name of “national interests”. The truth is that they are not defending their nations’ interests at all. They are defending their own interests and (often) those of their cronies.

Rather unfortunately for the leader writer, who seems never to have read Marx, there’s no support in Marx’s writings for economic patriotism or for defending national interests. Indeed, if you care to consult the man’s works, Marx was enthusiastically in favour of the bourgeoisie’s penchant for ripping down barriers to international exchange. From the “Communist Manifesto”:http://www.anu.edu.au/polsci/marx/classics/manifesto.html:

bq. The bourgeoisie has, through its exploitation of the world market, given a cosmopolitan character to production and consumption in every country. To the great chagrin of reactionaries, it has drawn from under the feet of industry the national ground on which it stood. All old-established national industries have been destroyed or are daily being destroyed. They are dislodged by new industries, whose introduction becomes a life and death question for all civilized nations, by industries that no longer work up indigenous raw material, but raw material drawn from the remotest zones; industries whose products are consumed, not only at home, but in every quarter of the globe. In place of the old wants, satisfied by the production of the country, we find new wants, requiring for their satisfaction the products of distant lands and climes. In place of the old local and national seclusion and self-sufficiency, we have intercourse in every direction, universal inter-dependence of nations. And as in material, so also in intellectual production. The intellectual creations of individual nations become common property. National one-sidedness and narrow-mindedness become more and more impossible, and from the numerous national and local literatures, there arises a world literature.

Now, of course, “Karl Marx’s copybook” stands in the leader-writer’s vocabulary for “vaguely left-sounding ideas that I don’t like and want to discredit by association.” But Karl Marx’s actual copybook would suggest that if anyone’s ideas are to be discredited by association with the work of disreputable lefties here, it’s those of the _Economist_ (not that I personally consider Marx to be a disreputable leftie, of course, but I do enjoy seeing a lazy attempted smear boomerang right back into the face of the smearer).

In my role as a music reviewer for Bristol and Bath’s “Decode”:http://www.decodemedia.com/tiki-index.php magazine, I got to see “Buddy Miller”:http://www.buddyandjulie.com/ on Tuesday night. I’m not sure that music reviews are my forte, but you can read my effort “here”:http://www.decodemedia.com/tiki-index.php?page=Buddy+Miller . Miller really is a remarkable guitarist and a pretty good singer too. I guess he’s “officially” “country” (whatever that amounts to) , but he’s really someone who transcends genre. He’s made some important records with some famous people (he’s Emmylou Harris’s guitarist) , but his own material (and that with his wife “Julie”:http://www.buddyandjulie.com/biojulie.html ) is also fantastic. His religious affiliations (Christian) are pretty much to the fore in his most recent record — “Universal United House of Prayer”:http://www.buddyandjulie.com/house.html — though they weren’t on Tuesday. UUHP is sort of country/rock/gospel crossover (if it even has a genre) with the highpoint being his cover of Dylan’s With God on Our Side (Miller plainly doesn’t think that God is a Republican). Anyway, check him out.

I started playing ping pong again a few weeks ago so I may appreciate this more than most, but I don’t think you have to be a practitioner for it to be worth a look.

While we’re on the topic of ping pong, check out this massively multiplayer online pong game. It’s not so much that it’s hours of fun (it’s not), what’s intriguing is that people come up with and create these things.

If all this has gotten you in the mood for some pong then try king pong [requires Shockwave]. It’s a pretty good version of a game that probably has hundreds if not thousands of variants.

I guess at this point I should probably include this here: .

UPDATE: The world smallest pong game is also worthy of a link here (I forget how I first came upon it a few weeks ago).

Thanks to Geeked for the Ping pong link and Waxy for the MMOP link. I found King Pong all by myself (well, with a little help from a search engine).

Hot off the presses. No idea when I’ll have time to read it, on account of me being so ‘time poor’ that I may as well have a peptic ulcer.

Via “Bitch Ph.D”:http://bitchphd.blogspot.com/2006/03/better-late-than-never.html some advice on recovering from “going AWOL”:http://www.insidehighered.com/workplace/2006/03/01/mckinney, i.e., catching back up again after becoming overcommitted and falling way behind on promised deadlines, etc. A much better name — and solution — for this problem, which alas I can’t claim credit for, is “Declaring Intellectual Bankruptcy.”

Listening to the radio on an airport shuttle last night — some CBS news station, I think — I heard the presenter interview a correspondent about the new “videos and transcripts”:http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/02/national/nationalspecial/02katrina.html?ex=1298955600&en=0201f0653564ac8b&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss of the White House’s response to Hurricane Katrina. At one point she asked whether this would make any difference to President Bush, or whether it was all “just water under the bridge.” To be fair, she realized just before she said this that it might not sound quite right, but was trapped by the need to maintain the flow of talk. So she could only manage “I hate to use what may sound like an inappropriate metaphor, but …” by way of rescuing the situation. A little later she said it again, this time without comment. (It would have been better if she’d asked whether this controversy was now all blown over or a wash for the President, or something.)

This was a very mild version of the situations Erving Goffman analyzes in “Radio Talk”, an essay from his book “Forms of Talk”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/081221112X/kieranhealysw-20/. The CBS announcer was unusual in that she flagged the problem with what she was saying. More often, as Goffman documents, the announcer ploughs on (often in deadly serious manner, to prevent the flow of talk from breaking down into giggles), as if daring the listener to think anything inappropriate has been said. Thus, “She’ll be performing selections from Bach’s Well-Tempered Caviar”, or “”Good evening, this is the Canadian Broad Corping Castration” are passed over in silence. It’s better to push on, as efforts to save the interaction may end up doing even more damage, as in “Tonight I am going to consider the films of Alfred Hitchcack … cock! CACK!”

A propos gender, I wanted to say a few words about some recent photo interests. A few months ago I decided to start taking pictures of gender signs. The most obvious location for these is restroom doors. I haven’t encountered any awkward situations yet running around public bathrooms snapping photos, but I can imagine eventually I may get some curious glances.

The purpose of this exercise is to see what are the core essential elements that the designers of such signs decide will be enough to distinguish between men and women. We are all used to the stick figures, with and without the skirt (or would that be a dress?). But how about the more innovative approaches? In the Hungarian Parliament, the emphasis on the signs seems to be on differences in hairdo while the signs in the Hungarian Academy of Sciences emphasize some facial feature variation (lips vs moustache) in addition to hairdo distinctions and some differences in clothing. (It would be interesting to know the date of these two pairs of signs, I guess I didn’t do adequate research.) In other cases, the focus is on how men vs women tend to go about their business. At times, the distinctions are not completely obvious (these tend to be some of the most intriguing cases).

I have compiled my photos on the topic into a set on Flickr. More interestingly, I also started a public group on Flickr, a pool of pictures to which any other Flickr member can contribute. This has led to some great additions by others, for example: this Ken and Barbie pair at the Shirn museum in Frankfurt.

The rule for the photo pool is simple: post images that have both the male and female symbol (either in one or two pictures) and give some description of where the signs are located in case others want to find them. I welcome contributions! Join the trend, don’t be shy to whip out your camera next time you spot a pair of gender signs.

Eventually, I could see this project leading to.. well, perhaps not a coffee table book, but maybe a bathroom book?