Galvanize the Empire

The non-John Williams music is The Chemical Brothers.

Take your passion, and make it happen.

Via Gizmodo, Boba Fett flashdancing.

Mandalorian Dance
by PatrickBoivin

Excellent Web Cartoons

Everyone has got to check out The Rut. Sister sites: Pencils at Dawn, See Mike Draw.

Not Dead Yet!

Geez Louise - Two months since posting. Not the blogospheric death knell, I don't think, just that work has been absorbing 95% of my brainpower for the last long while. About a year ago we got a ton of new responsibilities at work, and (not to belittle 9/11) it kind of reminds me of the phrase that came into some usage after 9/11: "The New Normal."

Here's the thing: I don't feel guilty about not getting around to blogposting. I would have felt guilty had I not devoted my attention to personal and work matters that needed attention, and so my little observations and links and jokes and opinions and things just had to hold on for a little while. I'll be posting a bunch of stuff that has come my way over the last few months that I thought were interesting but didn't get around to posting.

Meantime, here's a Star Wars/Simpsons mashup to enjoy:

Various Items

Here's the story: Work is busy, life is busy (we finally cleaned out the garage loft today) and despite my best wishes to blog effusively, I get to what I get to. That's my new motto.

• Documentary being worked on about Wikipedia and wikis in general. You can contribute ideas to the film's own wiki site.
• Chris Anderson says the music biz is UP UP UP, except for CD sales.
• Map of the Star Wars Universe. Also, comparison of Star Trek and Star Wars spacecraft.
• The other night, The ♥G♥ and I watched F**k: The Documentary. Highly fucking recommended! Comments on profanity, free speech vs. censorship, the fluid nature of language, and just how silly we Americans can be about certain syllables, from Drew Carey, Alanis Morissette, Ben Bradlee, Ron Jeremy, Ice-T, Tera Patrick, Sam Donaldson, Janeane Garofolo, Kevin Smith, Hunter S. Thompson, et al. Not just them, but the no-fucking-fun crowd: Alan Fucking Keyes, Pat Fucking Boone, Dennis Fucking Prager, Michael Fucking Medved, and Miss Fucking Manners!
• Also watched 28 Weeks Later. Spoliers! I think this was even better than Days. Interesting things to note: The central family essentially doomed half the world or so by their own inability to realize that almost all of their countrymen had perished from the Infection. The whole U.S. Army involvement was very Iraq-ish, but here's the thing: They (Army) had the wrong idea about putting everyone into a confined space, but they had the right idea about trying to get rid of everyone afterwards. Very Planet-of-the-Apesesque ending.
• Django Reinhardt/Paul Simon mashup. Awesome!
• The math of vampires, ghosts, and zombies. Excerpt: Let us assume that a vampire need feed only once a month. This is certainly a highly conservative assumption, given any Hollywood vampire film. Now, two things happen when a vampire feeds. The human population decreases by one and the vampire population increases by one. Let us suppose that the first vampire appeared in 1600 c.e. It doesn’t really matter what date we choose for the first vampire to appear; it has little bearing on our argument. We list a government Web site in the references (U.S. Census) that provides an estimate of the world population for any given date. For January 1, 1600, we will accept that the global population was 536,870,911.2 In our argument, we had at the same time one vampire.

Funny Star Wars Videos

Mahna Mahna:

Mistakes:

Cubicle Stormtroopers:

Gangstsa Rap:

Robot Chicken:

Robot Chicken Star Wars from Hip Swizzle on Vimeo.

Several Excellent Kottke Links

Several excellent links from blogger Jason Kottke (whose wife Meg happens to be one of the developers of Blogger):

• Star Wars / Boogie Nights mashup. Awesome!
• Pie charts showing the color-use ratios of the flags of the world. (Guesses?)

• Women from Western art morphing into each other.

Good Research Sites; Web redesign; NYT on Cannes; NYT on Coulton et al.; Slave Leia

Items:

• Via Rebecca Blood, here's a whole bunch (119) of links to non-Google research resources on the Web.
• Help Me Redesign the Web -- Article from Technology Review. Excerpt: Like singing a song or writing a story, designing a printed page is a craft that is fundamentally uni­directional, or one-to-many. The flexibility of Web structures confounded and then humbled many traditional designers as they started trying to make Web pages. The whole thing had been developed to let the readers--the users, software developers confusingly called them, as if they were addicts--have control. How could that be good? For these reasons, and others, most magazines' websites until very recently were dull, repurposed versions of their print editions. Thus, a new crowd took on the design of websites. These enthusiasts assumed that the print crowd didn't get it, that what they saw as the "new paradigm" would last forever. The two-way flow of information, the Web's flexibility, immediacy, and cheapness, deeply appealed to them.
• Good NYT article on the Cannes Film Festival. Excerpt: Its international scope is part of what makes Cannes so unmistakably French. No matter how wide-ranging their selections, American festivals — New York, Chicago, San Francisco, even Sundance — remain parochial events, but Cannes is bigger than the city that bears its name. It is a French affair, a source of national pride and a reminder of this country’s cherished, and perhaps vestigial, status as a capital of world culture. The covers of the glossy magazines cluttering newsstands are divided between Nicolas Sarkozy, the newly elected president, and Cannes, and it is not always clear which — affairs of state or affairs of cinema — are more important.
• Another good NYT article, this one on the web-based efforts of musician Jonathan Coulton (Wiki, 43 Folders Pt. 1, 43 Folders Pt. 2, NPR) and others (OK Go, Jane Siberry Issa, The Hold Steady). Excerpts: The universe of musicians making their way online includes many bands that function in a traditional way — signing up with a label — while using the Internet primarily as a means of promotion, the way OK Go has done. Two-thirds of OK Go’s album sales are still in the physical world: actual CDs sold through traditional CD stores. But the B-list increasingly includes a newer and more curious life-form: performers like Coulton, who construct their entire business model online. Without the Internet, their musical careers might not exist at all. Coulton has forgone a record-label contract; instead, he uses a growing array of online tools to sell music directly to fans. He contracts with a virtual fulfillment house called CD Baby, which warehouses his CDs, processes the credit-card payment for each sale and ships it out, while pocketing only $4 of the album’s price, a much smaller cut than a traditional label would take. CD Baby also places his music on the major digital-music stores like iTunes, Rhapsody and Napster. Most lucratively, Coulton sells MP3s from his own personal Web sites, where there’s no middleman at all... ...Will the Internet change the type of person who becomes a musician or writer? It’s possible to see these online trends as Darwinian pressures that will inevitably produce a new breed — call it an Artist 2.0 — and mark the end of the artist as a sensitive, bohemian soul who shuns the spotlight. In “The Catcher in the Rye,” J. D. Salinger wrote about how reading a good book makes you want to call up the author and chat with him, which neatly predicted the modern online urge; but Salinger, a committed recluse, wouldn’t last a minute in this confessional new world. Neither would, say, Margo Timmins of the Cowboy Junkies, a singer who was initially so intimidated by a crowd that she would sit facing the back of the stage. What happens to art when people like that are chased away?
• LBNL, here is a site of fangirls who like to dress up like the Jabba-enslaved Princess Leia.

Good Items for Friday

Like I said, I just got back from another business trip the other day. I feel like going inside of a cave, pulling a rock in front of me, and not coming out for three days.

Items:

• I'm trying to figure out how to do tag clouds. Anyone know any simple code to paste into Blogger? Here's the Wiki page, here's a blog devoted to the subject, here's a tagging tool, and here's a tagline generator.
• Non-Wikipedia wiki encyclopediae: Conservapedia, Encyclopedia Dramatica, Wookiepedia.
• Only 46 days left to vote for your favorite Star Wars stamp!



• New Orson Welles movie! Excerpt: Welles spent at least five years during the 1970s working on "The Other Side of the Wind," which stars John Huston as an aging filmmaker directing what turns out to be his final movie. Huston's character dies in a car crash before he finishes his film, and Welles's story unfolds in flashback after the death of the central character, a device Welles previously employed in "Citizen Kane," considered by many to be the greatest film ever made. Before he died, Welles claimed that the shooting of "The Other Side of the Wind" was almost complete, and the filmmaker is known to have edited between 40 minutes and 50 minutes of the work, excerpts of which have occasionally been screened at Welles retrospectives. But the negatives were entombed in France against Welles's wishes after he accepted funding for the movie from an Iranian financier, Mehdi Bousheri, the brother-in-law of the former Shah. Bousheri invested a reported $1 million in the film during its drawn-out production, but the negatives became trapped in the vault of his Paris-based film company in the legal fallout of the Iranian revolution of 1979. Rumors of embezzlement of funding by a Spanish producer also surround the movie. Welles managed to smuggle a working copy of his film out of Paris, but was denied access to the original negatives for the last 10 years of his life… …"The Other Side of the Wind" was expected to be Welles's most ambitious movie, utilizing innovative shooting and editing techniques new to filmmaking in the early 1970s. Although he denied any autobiographical resonance, it also appears to be Welles's most personal film, with commentators who have read the screenplay suggesting that it contains a series of thinly-veiled caricatures of people who angered the director during his career.

Stormtrooper Clerks; Every Eminem Song

Back from out of town. Found these quite clever! (I think Daily Motion is what YouTube ought to be.)

Funny-Trooper clerks Star Wars Clerk
Uploaded by wdc4

8mile: Every eminem song ever...
Uploaded by Blerds

Back Again

Back again from another quick business trip. Items:

• Here are a whole bunch of mashups. Some of my faves are Benny Goodman/Beastie Boys, Sex Pistols/My Milkshake, and P!nk/Nirvana. For some reason, Without Vader is only on Odeo.
• Wikipedia entry on the Essjay controversy, in which a college dropout named Ryan Jordan is found out to have been presenting himself as a Ph.D.-holding theologian for purposes of adjudicating Wikipedia disputes.
• The U.S. State Department has come out as pro-Borat. Int'l Herald Tribune excerpts: Baron Cohen, whose bumbling Borat has vexed the Kazakh government and rocketed to fame with his film "Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan," became a victim when Kazakhstan took action against his satirical Web site. Specifically, it took control of the registration of .kz Internet domains in 2005 and revoked the Borat domain, since relocated, because it deemed his site offensive, the report said. The movie depicting Borat's pseudo-documentary wanderings across the U.S. became an unlikely hit and earned Baron Cohen a Golden Globe award. It also generated complaints that he duped his American subjects into making racist and sexist remarks and portrayed Kazakhs in an unflattering light. Borat, for example, asserted that Kazakhs are addicted to horse urine, enjoy shooting dogs, view rape and incest as respectable hobbies and are fond of "running of the Jew" festivals. Baron Cohen is an observant Jew. The State Department report made no mention of the contents of the film or Web site but said Baron Cohen's banishment was symptomatic of repression in Kazakhstan, a former Soviet republic in central Asia. Full State Dept. report here. Kazakhstan-specific comments here.
• A couple of new blogs for the blogroll... Techyum (from the NSFW Violet Blue) and, via Techyum, Bedazzled!.
• Peanuts: A Comic Book History. Charles Schulz has said that he developed Charlie Brown's character largely from his own joys and insecurities (I paraphrase); Interesting how these two covers feature Charlie Schulz/Brown trying to capture the image of Snoopy.

Schlesinger Obit, Samurai Vader, IQ Scarcity, Floyd/Bee Gees Mashup

Items:

• Farewell to historian Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr. NYT obit excerpt: Mr. Schlesinger wore a trademark dotted bowtie, showed an acid wit and had a magnificent bounce to his step. He was a lifelong aficionado of perfectly blended martinis. Between marathons of writing as much as 5,000 words a day, he was a fixture at Georgetown salons when Washington was clubbier and more elitist. In New York, he was a man about town, whether at Truman Capote’s famous parties or escorting Jacqueline Kennedy to the movies.
• Here's Darth Vader's uniform Samuraized. Excerpt: Transforming Vader into a Samurai, or a Samurai into Vader, required the integration of several design motifs that married the traditional with the fantastic. "First, we hit on the idea of adding the 'front crest', which was designed based on the Imperial Icon, to the front of the helmet," says Yoshitoku. "By adding this, the 'leader of the Imperial Army' image is emphasized, as ancient Japanese military commanders used their ancestral family emblems on their front crest. We also added a Vader-like design to the face guard (called a menpo) which features a handcrafted look as if artisans of the past had done it."
• I'm sure we all know people for whom the phrase "scarcity of IQ" applies. Here's a thumbnail economic analysis of that phenomenon. Excerpt: In practical terms, "Conservation of IQ" is used to argue for limits on immigration, against various meliorist attempts, and possibly even for eugenics. I've heard it used to argue for outlawing marijuana, which of course destroys brain cells... ...I don't assign special status to The Conservation of IQ for two reasons. The first is the Flynn effect, or the fact that measured IQs have been rising steadily over time. This implies some combination of a) IQ gains come naturally under conditions of progress, and b) IQ statistics are to some extent phony and don't measure real intelligence. We can debate the mix, but either deflates fears that IQ is somehow especially scarce or endangered. These data also suggest that IQ is an artifice to be unpacked rather than a primary category.
• Pink Floyd meets the Bee Gees!

Star Wars Gangsta Rap Video

Awesome!

Pulp Fiction Stuff

This has been floating around for a little while, but I just saw it...

Update, 5:35 PM, 2-25-07. We are now watching Pulp Fiction instead of the Oscars. This is because a) I shoveled the driveway (Note: Not that it did much good) and was tired and wanted to watch something while I ate my spaghetti, b) It's a great fucking movie, and c) Its loss at the 1994 Academy Awards to "Life is like a box of chocolates..." was the first time that I actively was disappointed that a Best-Picture nominee did not win, which was the genesis for my current policy of not caring about who wins Best Picture despite my love of the cinema. (The 1996 snubs of L.A. Confidential and Boogie Nights in favor of that retarded ship movie solidified this policy.)

So, here are some more fun PF-inspired web videos:

This one was on Boing Boing...

This one is kind of like that one:

Brick Fiction:

Royale With Cheese:

In Chinese:

Enterprise vs. Death Star

Ever wonder what would happen if Capt. Picard was flying along in the Enterprise and ran into Darth Vader? Wonder no more:

Terrific mashup! Except... They spelled most of the characters' names wrong in the end credits! (Riker, Vader, Sidious) Still, an excellent contribution to the Blogosphere from Kocevski.