Tense Situation

In case anyone is curious about what the people in the now famous Situation Room photo were REALLY thinking:

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First Impressions: 1,001 Online Dates

As someone who hasn’t been on a “first date” in over a quarter of a century, I’m well out of the loop in understanding how people currently engage in this age-old social ritual. So, my excessive display of surprise when recently told by an old high school friend that he met his wife through a web dating service was borne out of honest ignorance. In fact, Online Dating Magazine estimates that 20 million people a month visit Internet dating sites such as eHarmony, Match.com or Zoosk.

This actually shouldn’t be all that surprising as a simple glance at the news reveals a plethora of events where the Internet plays a pivotal role ranging in importance from Rebecca Black’s rise as a pop culture star (sorta) to regime change in Egypt and Libya (maybe).

With that in mind, the writing/producing/directing team Mark L. Feinsod and Evan Leed use the popularity for this form of hooking up as the premise for 1,001 Online Dates. The independently-produced series is, appropriately enough, accessible online at: http://www.1001onlinedates.com/

Read the Full Post at The House Next Door...
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Special Easter Movie Review: The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly

I've always had a genuine interest in ostensibly "non-religious" films that evoke Christian imagery and yet tell a conventional story. Often, these are more insightful and less melodramatic than movies specifically about Jesus.

One of the most obvious examples is The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951). Klautu, the alien visitor with an important message for humanity, takes on the name of "Carpenter" while on earth. After being killed by soldiers, he is literally brought back to life amidst a flash of light. Both Hombre (1967) and Cool Hand Luke (1967) feature Christ-like anti-establishment title characters. Likewise, the grandfather (Alan Arkin) in 2006's Little Miss Sunshine is a sort of savior. Sure, he's a heroin-dealing, cocaine-using, porn fan. But his life and death function to guide the main characters out of their nihilistic Hell. After the events surrounding the cathartically chaotic beauty contest, the family returns to their van and ponders an empty linen bed sheet (shroud) which had formerly covered Arkin's corpse.

Films like those listed above perform a tricky balancing act that incorporates, to varying degrees, symbolic elements from the New Testament, such as the Resurrection (a tricky thing in real life too), while retaining a story that stands on its own.

Sergio Leone's The Good, The Bad and the Ugly (1966) is an another example of such a film. Loaded with Christian imagery, it still holds up as a traditional Western.

...Full Post at Basket of Kisses.
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Cold Calling: A Single Man

2009's A Single Man depicts the pivotal events that take place in the life of the title character on November 30, 1962.  Colin Firth is excellent as an English professor, George Falconer, who is going through a severe depression after the death of his partner, Jim (Matthew Goode), eight months previously.

Through Falconer, the film explores the depths of emotions faced by individuals who are forced to deal with loss.  While other attempts to present same-sex subject matter in television and movies are often self-conscious and veer into melodrama, director Tom Ford takes a matter-of-fact approach to the relationship at center of the story. This allows the audience to empathize more with its universal themes.

...Full Post at Basket of Kisses.
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Brick, Click and Mortar

Casey Chan at Gizmodo describes a curious practice in New York that manages to infuse viral networking with the nervous anticipation of glory holes. ("glory hubs?")

Why Is There a USB Drive Sticking Out of This Wall?

Across New York, there are USB drives embedded in walls, buildings and curbs. The idea is to create an anonymous, offline file-sharing network in public space. The drives are completely public and anyone can plug in to drop and download files.

...It'd also be interesting to see what people would anonymously share on the public drive, well, until some jackass decides to upload a virus to screw up everybody's computer.

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Peace Rally?

Question: Which Washington, D.C. rally featured a religious extremist who once advocated the murder of an author and acts of violence against women?

a) Glenn Beck's "Rally to Restore America"
b) Jon Stewart/Stephen Colbert's "Rally to Restore Sanity and/ or Fear"

Answer: b. Yusuf Islam (Cat Stevens) supported the fatwa against Salmon Rusdie and defended the practice of stoning women for adultry.

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Shark Jumping

In a Sept. 3 Los Angeles Times article, Fred Fox Jr., the writer of the infamous Happy Days episode where Fonzie jumps over a netted section of ocean containing a shark and inspired the "jump the shark" meme, addresses his dubious claim to fame in pop culture history.

Was the "Hollywood 3" episode of Happy Days deserving of its fate?

No, it wasn't. All successful shows eventually start to decline, but this was not Happy Days time. Consider: It was the 91st episode and the fifth season. If this was really the beginning of a downward spiral, why did the show stay on the air for six more seasons and shoot an additional 164 episodes? Why did we rank among the Top 25 in five of those six seasons?

I suppose that if you've heard of Wikipedia (or meme), you don't need anyone to explain what "jumping the shark" means, but according to Wikipedia:

[JTS] has become a colloquialism used by U.S. TV critics and fans to denote the point at which the characters or plot of a TV series veer into a ridiculous, out-of-the-ordinary storyline. Such a show is typically deemed to have passed its peak. Once a show has "jumped the shark" fans sense a noticeable decline in quality or feel the show has undergone too many changes to retain its original charm...

Interestingly, Wikipedia also describes a 1963 episode of Bonanza, "Hoss and the Leprechauns," in which Hoss meets a leprechaun. That episode coined the term "seeing the leprechaun" as a precursor to the "jumping the shark" phenomenon.

This led me to wonder if, perhaps out of sympathy for Mr. Fox, a new term to explain the dynamic could be adopted.

Full Post at Edward Copeland On Film...

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Vox Pop

Interesting polling analysis from James Pethokouk at Reuters.

It's certainly fair game to argue about which economic and tax policy approaches work best. But those who would characterize the people currently disenchanted with the president and Congress as simply angry and self-deluded seem, to me, mostly angry and self-deluded.

A "few observations" from Pethokouk:

1. Americans don’t blame Obama for the economy, but blame him for not fixing it — which is what he was hired to do. Mission Not Accomplished.
   
   
2. The Obama agenda is unpopular, and Americans see it as a distraction from dealing with unemployment.
   
   
3. Americans are worried about spending and deficits, but have not made the mental leap to restricting entitlements.
   
   
4. Americans may not think government is necessarily the problem, but they are pretty sure it’s not the solution.

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Natural Selection (Mad Men 413)

A scene about half-way through "Tommorrowland," Mad Men's Season 4 finale, pointedly shows Bobby and Sally, on their California trip, having a heated "debate" in a restaurant about evolution. As with most spats between young siblings, things get heated and Sally knocks over her milkshake. At that moment, observing her calm response to the strawberry mess, Don seems to cement his choice of Megan over Faye. This illustrates a naturalistic (almost Darwinistic) motif that is developed throughout the episode.

...Full Post at Basket of Kisses
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A New Way For Apps to Crash

Oh yeah, this is a great idea. In fact, they should just project the driver's Facebook page RIGHT on their windsheild.

From The Detroit News:

GM moves on with in-car Facebook app

Feds slam driving distraction, but firms say technology is legal, safe

General Motors Co. still plans to roll out its new OnStar feature that allows drivers to listen to Facebook messages and update their status, despite pointed criticism from Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood.

OnStar President Chris Preuss said the company is confident in the safety of the feature after conducting driving tests and has no plans to drop it. The application can also be extended to other social networking sites like Twitter.

"Not only is it safe — all things relative in the vehicle — it's actually a benign activity," Preuss said.

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New Brand FAIL

The "Screenshot of the Week" is of Kieth Olbermann leaning backward in one of MSNBC's "Lean Forward" ads. The perennial cable news ratings loser calls their new re-branding effort the "biggest campaign in network history". (h/t Jon Stewart @The Daily Show)
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Potpourri (Mad Men 412)

I had planned to post about the plethora of numbers which were thrown into "Blowing Smoke." But as that's already been discussed in the comments for Deb's post from yesterday, I decided to change directions a bit. The result is this collection of eclectic observations.

Full Post at Basket of Kisses...
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Binary Day: Part 000010

Today's date is 101110 (binary for 46). Yesterday's date was 101010 (binary for 42). Coincidentally, 42 years ago saw the release of 2001: A Space Odyssey.

So, to honor an event that won't happen for another 100 years, here's the scene from that film where Dave turns the HAL 9000 computer OFF (another great "binary" moment).


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A Taxing Prospect

The "Screenshot of the Week" comes from an October 7th Wall St. Journal article titled: "Delays to Tax Tables May Dent Paychecks."

Basically, even though Congress could take time to hear Steven Colbert's "testimony" on illegal workers, the whistle blew before a vote on extending tax cuts could happpen. As the article points outs, this affects MORE than just the "rich."

Treasury officials' most obvious option is the least attractive. If they publish tables based on expiration of the Bush tax cuts, which occurs Jan. 1, millions of low- and middle-income taxpayers who have paid little or no income taxes for a decade would likely see increases in January. Prof. Graetz estimates that higher withholding could take up to $10 billion a month out workers' pockets due to higher tax rates alone.

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Latex Free (Mad Men 411)

Peggy's relationship with Abe Drexler marks a point of personal growth on her part which is conveyed through her work on the Playtex account. Whether it be Pete Campbell, Duck Phillips, or Mark Kerney, Peggy's past involvement with men has been characterized by a noticeable level of detachment on her part. For a variety of reasons, something has always kept her from being, as Megan might say, totally in the moment. Abe Drexler seems to have awakened for Peggy an awareness of new feelings.

The Playtex campaign in "Chinese Wall" revolves around "touch" while Peggy and Abe's encounters are pointedly characterized by touching. Abe brushes sand off Peggy's arm in the car. Peggy runs her hands down Abe's back the next morning. And just as the women depicted in the Playtex ads take off their gloves to experience sensuous things, Abe seems to have allowed Peggy to take down emotional barriers which have hampered her previous relationships.

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Original G: (Spartacus)

Today marks the 50th anniversary of Stanley Kubrick’s Spartacus. The 1960 epic set in ancient Rome boasts an all-star cast led by Kirk Douglas and includes: Tony Curtis, Laurence Olivier, Charles Laughton, Peter Ustinov, Jean Simmons and John Gavin. Kubrick was called in to direct replacing Anthony Mann when creative differences with Douglas (who also was producing) caused him to be removed from the project. This may certainly explain why Spartacus doesn’t seem like a traditional Kubrick film. Unlike Kubrick’s other efforts (especially his later films) which tend to observe characters from a dispassionate distance, in Spartacus there's a stronger feeling of being ensconced in the narrative.

Full Post at Edward Copeland On Film...
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Closing Time (Mad Men 411)

Because I teach business courses part-time, I often watch Mad Men and imagine how I'd apply marketing concepts discussed in class to a particular episode. It's been difficult to do this in Season 4. At the risk of splitting hairs, Mad Men takes place in an ad agency, but it's not necessarily about an ad agency. Certainly, the writers do their homework and Men Men gets the advertising stuff more right than, say, Star Trek's regular disregard for the laws of the physics. But, episodes like "The Wheel" — a textbook example of how to sell a product's benefits (sizzle) rather than its features (steak) — have taken a backseat to the development of character-driven storylines. I'm just humbly pointing this out, not complaining.

That said, "Chinese Wall" could be screened in a "Techniques of Selling" class. The different sales calls it depicts are worthy of an academic discussion. One question I'd assign the class to consider while watching it would be:

How would you rank the salespeople depicted in this episode?

...Full Post at Basket of Kisses

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Licence to Pan (Mad Men 410)

When he surprises his daughter Sally with Beatles tickets in "Hands and Knees," Don Draper quips that he'll be wearing earplugs to the concert. Coincidentally, James Bond, another fictional 60's character had the same reaction to the "Fab Four."

In Goldfinger, 007 (Sean Connery) is assigned to observe international smuggler Auric Goldfinger. Bond (being Bond) has a tryst in Miami Beach with one of Goldfinger's sexy employees, Jill Masterson (Shirley Eaton). At one point, he abruptly leaves the bed they're sharing to fetch another bottle of champagne after the first one loses "its chill." When the soon to be gilded Masterson playfully protests the interruption, the secret agent/gourmand explains:

My dear girl there are some things that just aren't done, such as drinking Dom Pérignon '53 above a temperature of 38 degrees Fahrenheit. That's as bad as listening to the Beatles without earmuffs!

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Step One: Don't Buy It

Did Christopher L. Hoyt, the author of How To Raise Your Daughter Without Reading A Book: One Dad's Rules to Live By, realize the irony of its title?

The editor?

Anyone involved in its publication?

I guess not.
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Worlds Collide

Tony Curtis passes away on the same day that the Flintstones turn 50. The "Stoney Curtis" episode is one I still remember from childhood.

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