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Friday, June 01, 2001
Damn! I hate it when Harry's right.
posted by LT2 12:26 PM ET | discuss | link
Thursday, May 31, 2001
For reasons that are likely to be neither relevant nor interesting to any of you, my assistants and I were on-line trying to find old box office reports and we found a site that had results all the way back to 1900!!! We started laughing and joking about what sorts of summer blockbusters might've been listed under the 1900 section. Two joke guesses were "Train Arrives at the Station" and "Man Runs 50 Yard Dash."
posted by LT2 8:26 PM ET | discuss | link
I found this exchange from Roger Ebert's Movie Answer Man column to be quite funny:Q. You wrote about the character outrunning the sunrise in ''The Mummy Returns.'' There is another problem. The filmmakers had the shadow ''disappear'' from the wrong way, by having the sun rise from behind Rick and Alex. You can prove this to yourself in a home science project by using a flashlight, an object (a pillow or binder), your arm and the wall. (1) Place the light source in one hand and hold it about a foot to your side. (2) Have your other arm about 2 feet away from the light source, and have the light source point directly at your other arm to the point where you can see the light cast upon it. Now, place your object in the direct path of the light source, so as to block the light. Here's where third-grade science class kicks in. Watch your ''wall'' arm as you raise the light source above the object. You will notice that the shadow ''fades away'' in the opposite direction from what is depicted in ''The Mummy Returns.''
Joel Mahler, Livermore, Calif.
A. How many arms did you need to perform this experiment? I needed three.
posted by LT2 8:03 PM ET | discuss | link
Here's a link to the pictures of the memorial. Looks a bit like a set from a movie version of the first Olympic games. It's big dick syndrome. Every time an interest group gets the go ahead for a monument, they have to outdo everyone else's. My favorite is the FDR memorial. The guy specifically asked that no monument ever be built in his memory, but in direct violation of his wishes, so numbnut built the biggest goddamn memorial I have ever seen and spread it out over about 2 acres of land on one side of the Jefferson Memorial reflecting pool. Ironically, perhaps the size of the monument is symbolic of the size to which Government has grown in modern times, a direction that, if it didn't begin during the FDR era, certainly it began to pick up speed around that time.
posted by LT2 7:21 PM ET | discuss | link
Roger Ebert joins the criticism of the ugly WWII memorial, comparing it to the movie Pearl Harbor.
posted by MES 7:01 PM ET | discuss | link
Wednesday, May 30, 2001
I wonder if, on the actual Planet of the Apes, the last remaining humans capable of higher order thought looked upon early third milenium incidents like these as hindsight warning signs.
posted by LT2 8:33 PM ET | discuss | link
Tuesday, May 29, 2001
Doug's final thoughts on having summitted Everest:"Like breathing through a wet collapsing paper straw. I know something is going on around me, but all I can focus on is drawing in each breath -filling my lungs as full as possible before sliding down that tunnel and trying to breath again." It may sound like I'm talking about breathing at 29,000 ft, but it is actually something I wrote when I was 13 trying to describe what it was like for me having an asthma attack. Most of you know my medical history some of you don't. When I was two and a half years old I had open heart surgery and for most of my childhood I suffered from severe asthma keeping me in and out of hospitals. Though today, my asthma is usually induced by a select few allergens, back then it included physical activity and the cold. I spent a lot of my youth looking out windows watching other kids play. I remember one Christmas when I was seven I got a brand new bicycle. I was so happy I rode it the five blocks in the cold winter air down to a family friends house to show it to him. I had a severe asthma attack and ended up spending the rest of the Christmas holiday and part of the next school year in Hospital. It was there, in the hospital, that sometimes in those damp oxygen tents that would fog up closing out the world and allowing me to create my own, where I discovered some of the explorers who would sail their Kon Tiki rafts across the Pacific, who would race to the Poles like Perry or Scott, or like Sir Edmund Hillary would seek another kind of Pole. Maybe it's just human nature, that the one thing denied me as a child, to just run, ski, play in the cold, became my passions as an adult. My greatest weakness, my cardiovascular system, became the thing I pushed the most with rowing, running marathons, pursuing high altitude climbing. It is my belief (though not a medical opinion) that testing and taxing that system is what strengthened it. Pushing it, nearly killed me on a couple of occasions, but I feel I came out stronger for it. So, with a lot of determination, persistence and sometimes stupidity and with the help of the Canadian and American Heart and Lung Associations and Doctors like Andrew Murray (who saved my life on more than one occasion) and family, friends and coaches, I started to get better. There were a lot of people there (mostly out of love) who told me all the things I "shouldn't do", I "couldn't do". "It was stupid given my condition." There were others who told me I could do anything I set my mind to. So to both groups, I thank you. To the one for inspiring me to prove you wrong and to the other for helping me pursue that proof because on May 23rd at 8:30am I wasn't the sick little boy looking out the window watching someone else, but was standing on top of the world at 29,028 ft. and it felt great.
posted by LT2 12:24 PM ET | discuss | link
