Author: DOuG pRATt

Blog cross-pollutionation

Two huge J.R.R. Tolkien fans are Brian Sibley and Stephen Colbert, and they happen to have provided me with a convenient segue so I can include them both in a single post. (I hope Colbert hasn’t already coined the word “pollutionation!”)

Brian (friend of the blog) Sibley is up for a BBC Audio Drama Award, for his superb radio adaptation, The History of Titus Groan, based on the Gormenghast books by Mervyn Peake. This is a wonderfully engrossing and challenging series of radio dramas, with outstanding performances that are both finely nuanced and, when required, hilarious and over the top. The cast includes one of my favourite ladies of British stage and screen, Miranda Richardson. Winners of the BBC Audio Drama Awards will be announced on Sunday. Good luck, Brian!

A couple of days ago, Brian told the story of the ill-fated attempt by Boston-based American publisher Houghton Mifflin to have artist Maurice Sendak provide illustrations for an edition of The Hobbit. By coincidence, this week The Colbert Report featured an uproarious interview with Sendak.

Apple, phone home

The recent assertions from within the ranks of the GOP that Obama wants to turn America into a Communist country make me laugh and shake my head. They’re implying that Capitalism and Communism are mutually exclusive, when China proves them wrong on that point every day. The New York Times has this article on how iPhones are manufactured. Apple does it with a little help from its friends in the Chinese government.

When an Apple team visited, the Chinese plant’s owners were already constructing a new wing. “This is in case you give us the contract,” the manager said, according to a former Apple executive. The Chinese government had agreed to underwrite costs for numerous industries, and those subsidies had trickled down to the glass-cutting factory. It had a warehouse filled with glass samples available to Apple, free of charge. The owners made engineers available at almost no cost. They had built on-site dormitories so employees would be available 24 hours a day.

One aspect of iPhone production that the article doesn’t get into is the rash of suicides at Foxconn facilities. The problem for Apple, and other electronics manufacturers who rely on Chinese labor, is that eventually the workers will stop tolerating the conditions they work under and suicides will be replaced with strikes. Note: I’m writing this on my durable Acer Aspire One netbook, purchased for $250 three years ago, that was made in China.

Follow-up: The New York Times has posted a second article about Apple that gets into injury-and-death issues involved with iPhone/iPad production.

It’s a mad, Mad World

I watched Donnie Darko once, probably more than five years ago, and it didn’t hit the spot for me. Maybe I’m too old for the material. If it becomes available on Netflix Watch Instantly I’ll give it another try. But something that stuck out from it was Mad World, a remake by Gary Jules and Michael Andrews of the Tears for Fears song. This version was #1 in England and I hear it played every so often on BBC Radio 2.

http://youtu.be/4N3N1MlvVc4

SO-PAthetic

It’s Los Angeles vs. San Francisco in the fight for our online future! The music and movie industries have always cried foul over every new perceived threat to their business model. Thirty years ago they insisted that cassettes and VHS would be the end of them.

Perhaps I’m easily amused, but I never tire of the Downfall parodies, with Hitler in the bunker, railing about the latest tech controversy.

TCM Alert – Petula Clark in ‘Runaway Bus’

Wednesday at 6:30 PM ET, Turner Classic Movies is showing The Runaway Bus, a nifty little caper comedy with Petula Clark, from her years in British film. No singing, just Pet being perfectly perky as Nikki, a resourceful stewardess.

And this coming Sunday night/Monday morning at 4 AM ET, TCM is showing Petula in one of her teen roles from the popular Huggetts series, The Huggetts Abroad. Thanks, TCM!