Yes, Ben Hur won for Best Picture in 1959. The only award it didn't win that it was nominated for was Best Writing, Screenplay Based on Material from Another Medium
I saw Silence of the Lambs for the first time a week or two after seeing Titus for the first time and thought his performance in Titus completely wiped the floor with his performance in Lambs.
Even as a teenager I thought that "teen" movies were a waste of time and money. Sure, I risked the social suicide but if I had to do it all over again...I'd risk the social suicide all over again. Because the kinds of people who made a point of seeing teen movies when they were teens turned into pretty dull and uninteresting people.
The only "teen" movie ever made worth its salt is "American Graffiti", ostensibly because it was a look back ten years later and as a result found a lot more substantial territory to communicate than just "Gee, 13 year old boys with disposable income will flock to our movie so they can laugh at masturbation and blowjob jokes. Hehehehehehehe."
I've come to try this, something I found on another site. As long as the bots are going to invade my site I thought I'd give them a page of 10,000 fake email addresses to take back home with them. A series of randomly generated names linking to randomly generated e-mail addresses.
No Business As Usual -- The Sufi version of a General Strike
How many times in the past 36 hours have you heard the mantra "business-as-usual" extolled as the way Americans should respond to the events of 9/11? Let us pause, take a breath, and consider the meaning of this phrase, and a possible alternative response.
A tremendous shock to our collective system has occurred. Many of our beloveds, if not killed outright, have been personally affected by great loss. Yet our apparent priority, beyond knowledge of some tally of casualties or on whom to focus our retaliatory fury, is the return to our day-to-day activities - business-as-usual. Indeed, we're told hourly or more that a profound sign of this tragedy's effect is the closure (temporary of course) of various trading institutions. These closures are significant because our business is also our busy-ness. We buy and sell to replace the immediacy of paying attention to the here and now, trading toward some future accumulation of ever-increasing material wealth and away from the gnawing of our soul's need for something else. This activity seemed unstoppable until yesterday morning, when the center of world trade melted before our very eyes, taking innumerable souls from this earthly life.
Some say that to return to business-as-usual immediately, to hold our heads high and strive further is to honor our dead, to reinforce our spirits, to display strength in adversity. Is this actually true? Is it really dishonorable to stop and take stock of our new position in the world? People keep saying, "Nothing will ever be the same." Could it be worthwhile to take a collective break and show respect for both the living and the dead? Why do we rush past the important questions we all need to ask ourselves, both alone and in groups?
We long for a return to business-as-usual, because we don't want to face the overwhelming evidence of our reality. What if it's true that any building could be blown up at any time, that we are not safe, that we inhabit a world full of risks and angry people armed to the teeth? It's true. We've seen it with our own eyes. So, what is important to us now?
Why does the government want us to return to "business as usual"? To show the world that America never stops, that we are big and invincible and ready to take revenge. I don't think we really need to prove that to the world. Many nations have felt the impact of our force, and all others have observed our effect. Perhaps what we need to show the world is our humanity, our ability to rise to the occasion by spending time on our knees. By holding each other tenderly and taking the time to care for something other than our supreme power to dominate.
People in authority doesn't want you to stay home this week or any other because you might realize that what fills the hole in your soul is not another relic of business-as-usual, but the intangible bitter-sweetness of being human in the diverse beauty of life on earth. Several years ago, some wise and wonderful people organized an event called "No Business As Usual." It was to be a day when people stayed home from work and let the country take a break from our usual busy-ness. A day for play, for love, for righteous action. Let's do it again. Stop, in the name of love. Stop and honor every nation's losses to the ravages of terror, war, and exploitation.
If everyone stays home, we can mourn our dead, hug our children, catch up on a little sleep, think about the meaning of life, remember our dreams, and cultivate something precious in our world. We've just joined the majority of the people on this planet who have no illusions of being safe from harm inflicted by others and motivated by incredible passions. We will survive a few days without pay, even if it means getting hungry, or going without some conveniences. Maybe we should ask the world's downtrodden how they cope with these moments, instead of pursuing our knee-jerk fury and our insatiable denial.
If we stop in our tracks, and think, and pray and call forth the deepest compassion in our souls to find understanding, maybe some of us will see new ways of being. What might happen if we all pray for peace? We don't even have to pray to the same gods, or in the same voices, or even call it prayer. What if we ask for resolution, for balance, for love?
Before you dismiss this proposition as a copout, take heed. The first moments of repose and contemplation are hardly going to be easy. Inertia demands that bodies in motion want to stay in motion. If we don't stop to think, we won't have to feel. We might be able to avoid a little longer the true grief of this earth out of balance, skewed by our proud conspicuous consumption and will to power. When we stop doing business-as-usual, we come face to face with whatever is unresolved, so it's easier to just keep moving. If we make the time to do this work of healing, to pay attention, to listen to our inner voices and confront our past and present prejudices, the world will again be different than before.
Are United Sates citizens stalwart enough to carry on, doing business as usual? Undoubtedly.
Are we courageous enough to stop, ask real questions, and face the truth that arises in response ?
And in other news Microsoft is giving a $7.2 million donation to the University of Washington. The money will be used for a new computer science building.
How ironic the timing of this, ahem, announcement.
Line 'em all up, all the Star Wars films, and no matter how much I loved the first three (still can't bring myself to see Episode One), all combined I still think that "American Graffiti" is far and away a much better film.
Saying that no one has found a way to make money on the Internet is like saying no one has found a way to make money on the telephone. You can't see the forest for the trees.
Exactly. If I can startup towerofbabel.com and grow it to a size of 200 translators in 40 different languages all over the planet (not to mention the contributors) from a room in my parents house, why can't anyone else? People skills perhaps? Being able to know that "please" and "thank you" really are magic words? I guess I'll never understand why companies fly people all over the world just for face to face meetings. Gee, aren't those really expensive? Haven't these companies heard of the Internet or email? Don't they know how to read a resume and tell if someone is trustworthy or not? Was I the only person who hitchhiked and traveled the world after college rather than mindlessly following the suspicious paranoia of the television-watching middle class?
Well, what do you expect from a culture built by an idiot who doesn't understand human nature at all? "Oh gee, you'd love to narc out your friend for some Samsonite Tourister Luggage, ya sure, ya betcha!"
...otherwise they'd remember that every action has an equal and opposite reaction. If you can't stand the retaliation, stop your bullying. Duh.
You could see this happening five years ago
on
Bad News from Yahoo
·
· Score: 1
A web advertising primer for suits:
1. The web is an interactive medium.
2. People on the internet don't like to interact with advertising because they don't have to deal with it, unlike television or the radio.
3. Expecting people to click on advertising because they can, in a medium which lets you not have to deal with advertising, obviously indicates that a lot of people think that just because computers have screens that they're JUST LIKE television.
4. Television commericals are not clicked on so why should web advertisements be? Just because an ad is on the TV it doesn't mean that someone is watching it.
5. All that potential advertising revenue and all those advertisers too suspicious of if anyone is actually seeing their lameass shit. Tsk tsk tsk.
6. We KNOW about your product. We KNOW about your very expensive and delicate brand. We decide in two seconds whether we want or need it or not, regardless of how many times you shove it in our fucking face over and over and over and over again. And guess what? The more you shove it in our fucking face over and over and over and over again the LESS WE WANT IT. Your marketing does NOT WORK on the Internet. Hello? Have you read The Cluetrain Manifesto yet?
7. The sites that get more aggressive with advertising are the sites which will drive their audiences away.
8. We don't like you. We don't need you and we don't have to put up with you. Do you get it yet? The Internet is not TV. If you'd rather waste your money and turn the Internet back into a haven for academics and geeks, then be our guest.
If you must talk about your former place of work, fuckedcompany.com is the ideal place to do it. As anonymous as you want to be, and a great virtual water cooler for anyone else who has had the same situation you've had.
Unconfirmed Rumor - it is a Denial of Service attack caused by disgruntled Asheron's Call players who got caught cheating / crashing the servers through exploitation of a game bug - after M$FT banned all their accounts, this is the result of their revenge - personally this is both sad and funny - a bunch of gamers got caught, got banned and then cratered the internet presence of the world's largest software company.
It's a Tower of Babel a lot more than it is a New Jerusalem. But this time the Tower of Babel will succeed thanks to a decentralized God. After all, the story of the Tower of Babel is straight out of Hierarchy 101. Look out, above!
We live in obscenely materialistic times and as such I imagine Microsoft (the perfect corporation, really, because it has the motivation of a cancer cell) and its money has, and will attempt to corrupt each and every person it comes into contact with. That's why the only people you can trust anymore are those who can't be bought. Linus understands this. So does Babel.
Keith Richards used to say that when he quit heroin his new high was watching the faces of his dealers when he told them he didn't want any because he'd quit. Try it when Microsoft tries to interview you. Let them wine and dine you, lead them on, then simply spring it on them: "Sorry, your company just doesn't have any morals or ethics and I do." It's the best high there is.;-)
As someone who can't hold a candle to a real nerd or a real geek (IE: I got a liberal arts background first and THEN got into computers and the Internet) I can predict the future for you all. Social skills are not as difficult as computer languages. Those of us with social skills were amazed at how easy computer languages and the Internet came to us and we now have both arrows in our quivers. But if geeks and nerds refuse to learn social skills and would rather simply preach to the choir here on Slashdot for the rest of their lives, then the socially well-adjusted are going to whisk this whole Interweb thing away from those who invented it just because those who invented it decided that it was, in the end, just way too traumatic to deal with the real world. The choice is yours. Learn how the real world works, or be content to just write indignant posts for the rest of your lives.
"Guinness, who received a share of Star Wars grosses for agreeing to appear in the original movie and its sequels, made no secret of his disdain for the film, calling it "frightful rubbish" and refusing to answer fan mail concerning it."
"Frightful rubbish." LOL. Yeah, it's a shame that geeks don't discover the theatre until later in life. Then they'd see how their memorization of Star Wars is really quite embarrassing. I still think that "American Graffiti" is far and away George Lucas's best film and better than all of the Star Wars filmed combined.
Oh well, he lived an amazing life and just like the death of John Gielgud, now everyone else moves up a notch.
Well since our original investor fell through and it being a who-you-know world and we're unlucky enough to not know anyone else offhand, towerofbabel.com, the multilingual, multicultural online journal and community of arts and ideas, is about to become a non-profit organization. In fact just this morning we had our bubble burst again when we realized that in order to run slashcode on our site we pretty much need our own server which just isn't our reality right now. Kind of a bummer too, because we had high hopes of being a Slashdot for the arts. Take a look around the site and see what you think.
Slashdot Mirror
...and accurate, too.
Yes, Ben Hur won for Best Picture in 1959. The only award it didn't win that it was nominated for was Best Writing, Screenplay Based on Material from Another Medium
I saw Silence of the Lambs for the first time a week or two after seeing Titus for the first time and thought his performance in Titus completely wiped the floor with his performance in Lambs.
Julie Taymor rocks.
Even as a teenager I thought that "teen" movies were a waste of time and money. Sure, I risked the social suicide but if I had to do it all over again...I'd risk the social suicide all over again. Because the kinds of people who made a point of seeing teen movies when they were teens turned into pretty dull and uninteresting people.
The only "teen" movie ever made worth its salt is "American Graffiti", ostensibly because it was a look back ten years later and as a result found a lot more substantial territory to communicate than just "Gee, 13 year old boys with disposable income will flock to our movie so they can laugh at masturbation and blowjob jokes. Hehehehehehehe."
Towerofbabel.com is always looking for help.
I've come to try this, something I found on another site. As long as the bots are going to invade my site I thought I'd give them a page of 10,000 fake email addresses to take back home with them. A series of randomly generated names linking to randomly generated e-mail addresses.
http://www.towerofbabel.com/antispam/
Oh there's still some places that haven't sucked the blood out of the genius of generousity, like towerofbabel.com
No Business As Usual -- The Sufi version of a General Strike
How many times in the past 36 hours have you heard the mantra "business-as-usual" extolled as the way Americans should respond to the events of 9/11? Let us pause, take a breath, and consider the meaning of this phrase, and a possible alternative response.
A tremendous shock to our collective system has occurred. Many of our beloveds, if not killed outright, have been personally affected by great loss. Yet our apparent priority, beyond knowledge of some tally of casualties or on whom to focus our retaliatory fury, is the return to our day-to-day activities - business-as-usual. Indeed, we're told hourly or more that a profound sign of this tragedy's effect is the closure (temporary of course) of various trading institutions. These closures are significant because our business is also our busy-ness. We buy and sell to replace the immediacy of paying attention to the here and now, trading toward some future accumulation of ever-increasing material wealth and away from the gnawing of our soul's need for something else. This activity seemed unstoppable until yesterday morning, when the center of world trade melted before our very eyes, taking innumerable souls from this earthly life.
Some say that to return to business-as-usual immediately, to hold our heads high and strive further is to honor our dead, to reinforce our spirits, to display strength in adversity. Is this actually true? Is it really dishonorable to stop and take stock of our new position in the world? People keep saying, "Nothing will ever be the same." Could it be worthwhile to take a collective break and show respect for both the living and the dead? Why do we rush past the important questions we all need to ask ourselves, both alone and in groups?
We long for a return to business-as-usual, because we don't want to face the overwhelming evidence of our reality. What if it's true that any building could be blown up at any time, that we are not safe, that we inhabit a world full of risks and angry people armed to the teeth? It's true. We've seen it with our own eyes. So, what is important to us now?
Why does the government want us to return to "business as usual"? To show the world that America never stops, that we are big and invincible and ready to take revenge. I don't think we really need to prove that to the world. Many nations have felt the impact of our force, and all others have observed our effect. Perhaps what we need to show the world is our humanity, our ability to rise to the occasion by spending time on our knees. By holding each other tenderly and taking the time to care for something other than our supreme power to dominate.
People in authority doesn't want you to stay home this week or any other because you might realize that what fills the hole in your soul is not another relic of business-as-usual, but the intangible bitter-sweetness of being human in the diverse beauty of life on earth. Several years ago, some wise and wonderful people organized an event called "No Business As Usual." It was to be a day when people stayed home from work and let the country take a break from our usual busy-ness. A day for play, for love, for righteous action. Let's do it again. Stop, in the name of love. Stop and honor every nation's losses to the ravages of terror, war, and exploitation.
If everyone stays home, we can mourn our dead, hug our children, catch up on a little sleep, think about the meaning of life, remember our dreams, and cultivate something precious in our world. We've just joined the majority of the people on this planet who have no illusions of being safe from harm inflicted by others and motivated by incredible passions. We will survive a few days without pay, even if it means getting hungry, or going without some conveniences. Maybe we should ask the world's downtrodden how they cope with these moments, instead of pursuing our knee-jerk fury and our insatiable denial.
If we stop in our tracks, and think, and pray and call forth the deepest compassion in our souls to find understanding, maybe some of us will see new ways of being. What might happen if we all pray for peace? We don't even have to pray to the same gods, or in the same voices, or even call it prayer. What if we ask for resolution, for balance, for love?
Before you dismiss this proposition as a copout, take heed. The first moments of repose and contemplation are hardly going to be easy. Inertia demands that bodies in motion want to stay in motion. If we don't stop to think, we won't have to feel. We might be able to avoid a little longer the true grief of this earth out of balance, skewed by our proud conspicuous consumption and will to power. When we stop doing business-as-usual, we come face to face with whatever is unresolved, so it's easier to just keep moving. If we make the time to do this work of healing, to pay attention, to listen to our inner voices and confront our past and present prejudices, the world will again be different than before.
Are United Sates citizens stalwart enough to carry on, doing business as usual? Undoubtedly.
Are we courageous enough to stop, ask real questions, and face the truth that arises in response ?
Ella Peregrine
So only people who are dead support Microsoft? I wonder what the survivors of the deceased think about that.
And in other news Microsoft is giving a $7.2 million donation to the University of Washington. The money will be used for a new computer science building. How ironic the timing of this, ahem, announcement.
Line 'em all up, all the Star Wars films, and no matter how much I loved the first three (still can't bring myself to see Episode One), all combined I still think that "American Graffiti" is far and away a much better film.
Saying that no one has found a way to make money on the Internet is like saying no one has found a way to make money on the telephone. You can't see the forest for the trees.
Exactly. If I can startup towerofbabel.com and grow it to a size of 200 translators in 40 different languages all over the planet (not to mention the contributors) from a room in my parents house, why can't anyone else? People skills perhaps? Being able to know that "please" and "thank you" really are magic words? I guess I'll never understand why companies fly people all over the world just for face to face meetings. Gee, aren't those really expensive? Haven't these companies heard of the Internet or email? Don't they know how to read a resume and tell if someone is trustworthy or not? Was I the only person who hitchhiked and traveled the world after college rather than mindlessly following the suspicious paranoia of the television-watching middle class?
And it's free, too.
http://www.adsubtract.com
Well, what do you expect from a culture built by an idiot who doesn't understand human nature at all? "Oh gee, you'd love to narc out your friend for some Samsonite Tourister Luggage, ya sure, ya betcha!"
...otherwise they'd remember that every action has an equal and opposite reaction. If you can't stand the retaliation, stop your bullying. Duh.
A web advertising primer for suits:
:D
1. The web is an interactive medium.
2. People on the internet don't like to interact with advertising because they don't have to deal with it, unlike television or the radio.
3. Expecting people to click on advertising because they can, in a medium which lets you not have to deal with advertising, obviously indicates that a lot of people think that just because computers have screens that they're JUST LIKE television.
4. Television commericals are not clicked on so why should web advertisements be? Just because an ad is on the TV it doesn't mean that someone is watching it.
5. All that potential advertising revenue and all those advertisers too suspicious of if anyone is actually seeing their lameass shit. Tsk tsk tsk.
6. We KNOW about your product. We KNOW about your very expensive and delicate brand. We decide in two seconds whether we want or need it or not, regardless of how many times you shove it in our fucking face over and over and over and over again. And guess what? The more you shove it in our fucking face over and over and over and over again the LESS WE WANT IT. Your marketing does NOT WORK on the Internet. Hello? Have you read The Cluetrain Manifesto yet?
7. The sites that get more aggressive with advertising are the sites which will drive their audiences away.
8. We don't like you. We don't need you and we don't have to put up with you. Do you get it yet? The Internet is not TV. If you'd rather waste your money and turn the Internet back into a haven for academics and geeks, then be our guest.
Idiots.
We already have cloning. It's called 'marketing.'
If you must talk about your former place of work, fuckedcompany.com is the ideal place to do it. As anonymous as you want to be, and a great virtual water cooler for anyone else who has had the same situation you've had.
Unconfirmed Rumor - it is a Denial of Service attack caused by disgruntled Asheron's Call players who got caught cheating / crashing the servers through exploitation of a game bug - after M$FT banned all their accounts, this is the result of their revenge - personally this is both sad and funny - a bunch of gamers got caught, got banned and then cratered the internet presence of the world's largest software company.
It's a Tower of Babel a lot more than it is a New Jerusalem. But this time the Tower of Babel will succeed thanks to a decentralized God. After all, the story of the Tower of Babel is straight out of Hierarchy 101. Look out, above!
We live in obscenely materialistic times and as such I imagine Microsoft (the perfect corporation, really, because it has the motivation of a cancer cell) and its money has, and will attempt to corrupt each and every person it comes into contact with. That's why the only people you can trust anymore are those who can't be bought. Linus understands this. So does Babel. Keith Richards used to say that when he quit heroin his new high was watching the faces of his dealers when he told them he didn't want any because he'd quit. Try it when Microsoft tries to interview you. Let them wine and dine you, lead them on, then simply spring it on them: "Sorry, your company just doesn't have any morals or ethics and I do." It's the best high there is. ;-)
As someone who can't hold a candle to a real nerd or a real geek (IE: I got a liberal arts background first and THEN got into computers and the Internet) I can predict the future for you all. Social skills are not as difficult as computer languages. Those of us with social skills were amazed at how easy computer languages and the Internet came to us and we now have both arrows in our quivers. But if geeks and nerds refuse to learn social skills and would rather simply preach to the choir here on Slashdot for the rest of their lives, then the socially well-adjusted are going to whisk this whole Interweb thing away from those who invented it just because those who invented it decided that it was, in the end, just way too traumatic to deal with the real world. The choice is yours. Learn how the real world works, or be content to just write indignant posts for the rest of your lives.
"Guinness, who received a share of Star Wars grosses for agreeing to appear in the original movie and its sequels, made no secret of his disdain for the film, calling it "frightful rubbish" and refusing to answer fan mail concerning it."
"Frightful rubbish." LOL. Yeah, it's a shame that geeks don't discover the theatre until later in life. Then they'd see how their memorization of Star Wars is really quite embarrassing. I still think that "American Graffiti" is far and away George Lucas's best film and better than all of the Star Wars filmed combined.
Oh well, he lived an amazing life and just like the death of John Gielgud, now everyone else moves up a notch.
Well since our original investor fell through and it being a who-you-know world and we're unlucky enough to not know anyone else offhand, towerofbabel.com, the multilingual, multicultural online journal and community of arts and ideas, is about to become a non-profit organization. In fact just this morning we had our bubble burst again when we realized that in order to run slashcode on our site we pretty much need our own server which just isn't our reality right now. Kind of a bummer too, because we had high hopes of being a Slashdot for the arts. Take a look around the site and see what you think.