Say, this is an interesting bit of animation…
Pharyngula
Evolution, development, and random biological ejaculations from a godless liberal
I watched the movie Red Lights last night on Netflix. The first part of the movie was strikingly familiar: it practically stole the life story of James Randi. There was the Peter Popoff exposé, the psychic surgery stunts, the usual whirl of frauds and fanatics, all under different names with different details, but the same general stories about exposing flim-flam. And then it had a marvelous cast: Sigourney Weaver, Robert De Niro, Cillian Murphy. The whole movie is following a good ol’ skeptical trajectory…and then, the ending. Oh, jebus, I have never seen a movie so thoroughly implode as this one did with that ending.
Stop here. Don’t read further, unless you want to know how it ends, because I’m going to give it all away. Completely. This isn’t just a spoiler, it is full disclosure.
I saw that d r i f t g l a s s was also celebrating David Bowie’s birthday with this video: Never Get Old. I like it so much I had to post it too.
Excellent! OK, I promise to try to never get old.
We need a lot more of these. Check out Little Changes by Tiffany Taylor.
He’s released a new single for his 66th birthday — a lush, melancholy song that made me happy.
He’s looking good at 66. Even though I can’t quite imagine the thin white duke as a senior citizen yet.
I have a question for you all. I was reading this article about our terribly violent cultural surroundings, which includes both the Bible and American movies.
Whether history or mythology or some fusion of the two, the Bible stories, when tallied, include an estimated 25 million violent deaths. And yet, like any people, the internal narrative of God’s Chosen Ones is one of yearning for peace and prosperity, the dream of an idyllic past in which the lion lay down with the lamb; an idyllic future in which men will beat their swords into plowshares and the lamb and lion will lie down together again.
The Bible is a collection of stories about nasty genocidal people, with a message of peace that they pay lip service to while slaughtering their foes. American movies are all about brave heroes killing people to protect the good and kind.
So, the question: have you ever in your entire life settled a personal problem with violence? Have you resolved any conflicts by taking out your opposition, just destroying them to remove the obstacle to your life or happiness?
If you did use violence to fix a personal problem, did it work?
Just curious. I can think of only one time that I tried it; I hauled off and punched a grade-school bully in the face. It didn’t change anything, but it did make it worse, because a teacher (one who was a bullying jerk himself) decided to discipline me with a little corporal punishment — an hour of deep knee bends that left me barely able to walk afterwards.
Ever since, though, I’ve experienced nothing where I was tempted to resort to violent action, and nothing where I could believe that violence would help. There’s no situation that can’t be made worse by adding a gun, no opponent who will respond to a normal civic conflict by being cowed by the guy with a baseball bat.
Second question: so why is our media so saturated with bloody-minded simple solutions to problems? Arnold Schwarzenegger blowing up buildings with two-fisted cannons, Liam Neeson smashing heads and knifing evil-doers, superheroes solving every difficulty by applying force…it’s ludicrous that anyone imagines that these are effective answers to anything.
Probably also faked: the sweater looks completely ‘shopped. Via Ed Lam.
I held forth on the fake eagle video thing at some length over here at KCET yesterday, but there was something I didn’t mention there that irked me about the hoax: in the recap part, where the “amazing footage” of the “eagle” “catching” the “child” gets “replayed” in slow “motion,” the filmmakers dubbed in a bit of sound effect right at the moment where CGI talon hit virtual toddler.
And of course it was a red-tailed hawk call. It always is, It doesn’t matter what bird of prey is in a film: the SFX guys will always dub in a red-tailed hawk call.
Not that the red-tail sound was a dead giveaway: during the 45 minutes or so in which I was somewhat taken by the hoax in I was prepared to grant that perhaps the videographers just did a clumsy, misguided dubbing job, for much the same reason that nature YouTubers always seem to want a horrible music track to cover up their occasionally interesting footage. But it was the same kind of mistake as inflating a CGI osprey to eagle size and calling it a golden and expecting birders to believe it for a second.
In case you’ve never seen a bird of prey represented in video and have no idea what I’m talking about, here is a red-tailed hawk’s call:
By way of comparison, here’s what golden eagle vocalizations sound like:
Bald eagles have calls you might well mistake for a gull’s:
[Update: in comments, otrame offers a more characteristic adult bald eagle call.]
Almost without exception, the red-tailed hawk call is what the sound engineers will use. I do know of one such exception. In the 2010 remake of Clash Of The Titans, which I suspect most people here watched solely for the Kraken and the releasing thereof, there was a scene where Zeus and Perseus were having a difficult father-son moment. Perseus is recalcitrant, whereupon Zeus transforms himself into an eagle and flies away. And that eagle doesn’t “keeeer” — he peeps. Like a golden. Honestly, that one moment of verisimilitude was worth the preceding hour. I was impressed that they got that one detail right. Though the Kraken did disappoint.
Exemplary efforts like Clash Of The Titans aside, it seems like there’s a secret world law governing natural sounds in TV and film that requires all raptors sound like red-tailed hawks. All rats squeak incessantly. Horses whinny while chewing placidly. Tropical rainforests in Africa and South America always have kookaburras in them. And as soon as you start to pay attention to how things actually sound in the real world, that kind of mistake unsuspends your disbelief pretty damned quickly. It’s a bit like having a scene where John Wayne is leading a wagon train westward to Oklahoma City, and they pass the Tetons on the way.
It’s the natural world version of illiteracy, and it makes those of us who know a few things wince.
You know what’s spiffier than cats?
Rocks.
You know what else is spiffier than cats?
People singing about rocks.
Hey, I’m late to the party, but not too late. There are going to be a series of grassroots concerts all across the country to benefit Americans United for Separation of Church and State. This weekend! Look at the map and find the one nearest to you and go!
If you can’t make it, here’s Roy Zimmerman with a song he composed for the event.
I spend a lot of time paying attention to threats to the organisms that live in the desert, and what with all the environmental bad news available online these days that can be pretty damned depressing. This past weekend, though, I was reminded that there is actually hope for the future. Centuries from now we may well find that desert plants, especially those that now live within a day’s drive of Los Angeles, have a vital role to play in making yet-undiscovered planets habitable.
I was reminded of this while re-watching a set of documentary films describing the terraforming of an entire complex system full of dozens of more or less habitable planets, in many cases using entire vegetative suites once native to the California desert. I’ve gone back and taken some screenshots of these films to illustrate some of the ways in which the terraformers used desert plants, and they — along with discussion of the terraformed vegetation –are below the fold.
