From a prematurely released Greenpeace fact sheet:

“In the twenty years since the Chernobyl tragedy, the world’s worst nuclear accident, there have been nearly [FILL IN ALARMIST AND ARMAGEDDONIST FACTOID HERE].”

The final version of the document cited plane crashes and meltdowns. Like an episode of Lost, presumably.

Rental car technology:

I think the point of having the buttons on the steering wheel is that it’s supposed to be safer, but it’s actually more dangerous for the first 15 minutes, because that’s when I’m experimenting. I’m pressing all the buttons to see what they do. I’d make a terrible James Bond. Two minutes after I pulled into traffic the streets would be covered in oil slicks and smoke screens, and I’d be trailing a grappling hook.

Is it just as silly to link to boingboing now as it was to link to Instapundit three years ago?

From Putting the Public Interest back in Public Transport (pdf)

The new public transport agency would have a small staff, no more than 30 or so, selected from the best people in the world. [emph. added]

Why not the very best people in the world? Or perhaps the bestest? In many people’s minds, policy is just a matter of finding really smart people. “Like, super-smart.” Dynamism, accountability and efficency inevitably follow.

One of the books I have read recently has been Cinema and Soviet Society, 1917-1953, which, most interestingly for me, contains a comprehensive look at the cinema industry policy and how it affected the content of film.

But one of the most striking things that can be drawn from the book is the infighting within critical and artistic circles about the merits of each film’s ideological purity - did, for instance, the montage technique pioneered by Eisenstein and Vertov reflect the revolutionary cause? And how could the need to break with the capitalist way of film production be reconciled with the need for ‘art for the masses’?

I had the luck of getting a hold relatively easily a copy of Earth (or Zemlya), directed by Aleksandr Dovzhenko, a film which had been rather viciously accused by Soviet critics and other directors for ideological impurity.

This discussion rings true for watching silect movies: there is much to adjust to, and the fact that they are silent is the least challenging. In the past, I’ve tried a number of solutions to make adjestments - watching one copy of Nosferatu with a particularly atrocious musical soundtrack, I often turn it to mute and listen to a different music. You’d think this would be jarring - the mood of the music wouldn’t match up to the images - but sometimes this matching is so woefully done that playing your own music has at worst a neutral effect on the film.

Earth is no exception - it is extremely slow and overacted by modern standards. The plot seems simple, and the characters poorly drawn (but, unlike the famous Eisenstein or Vertov films which more people may be vaguely familiar with, at least there are characters.) In the copy I watched the dialogue sometimes seemed ludicriously irrelevant to the plot - although the coherance of the film may have been damaged by the passage of time; it was not uncommon for films to be cut and recut by local distributers.

But there is a lot that is fascinating in Earth. It seems shocking, at least to a modern viewer, that this film could ever be considered ideologically impure by the standards of the time. Its plot is simple; a tractor arrives in a village, giving the poor villagers the will and the energy to overthrow the exploitative capitalist farmer. To emphasis how evil the capitalist is, he murders the handsome male hero.

It was condemned, perhaps understandably, for showing the hero’s girlfriend mourning his death by trashing about naked in her room. But it was also condemned for insufficient adherance to the party line and for excessive use of artistic techniques.

I have to admit - many of these films I watch not for their aesthetic pleasures, which do exist but do not necessarily fully reward the amount of effort it takes a modern viewer to find them. Instead, they are most entertaining in their historical context - knowing when they were made, how they were made and how they were received. (Whatever the film’s merits, can anybody say their appreciation for Citizen Kane is not greater than after learning the story behind its production and consequences?) Reading a fascinating book like Cinema and Soviet Society makes you want to watch as many of these as you can - to see the stereotypes and cookie-cutter plots on screen rather than in theory.

First: McSweeney’s “Old Jokes, Updated to Make Them Even Older”

I’m going to be in Brisbane for a few days, so blogging will be light - and by light I mean probably non-existant.

Spain destroys lost Roman city for a car park:

The archeologists could barely hide their excitement. Beneath the main square of Ecija, a small town in southern Spain, they had unearthed an astounding treasure trove of Roman history. They discovered a well-preserved Roman forum, bath house, gymnasium and temple as well as dozens of private homes and hundreds of mosaics and statues — one of them considered to be among the finest found.

But now the bulldozers have moved in. The last vestiges of the lost city known as Colonia Augusta Firma Astigi — one of the great cities of the Roman world — have been destroyed to build an underground municipal car park…

The socialist council says that had it not dug up the main square, Plaza de Espana, to build the car park in 1998, the remains would never have been found. But it insists the town must press ahead with the new car park…

Juan Wic, the mayor, who is responsible for the car park project, said he was happy to have kept one of his main election pledges. He said it was “essential for the commercial future of the square and city”.

The economics of American Idol: a fantastic snapshot of how money flows through reality tv.

Link via Hit & Run.

Cybersyn - the Allende government’s attempted solution. More here, here, and here. Links originally via Boingboing.