Category: Politics, Religion & Money

Z lives in my memory

I’m watching Z, from 1969, on TCM.

When I was in the 9th grade I saw Z on a school field trip. We took a yellow bus all the way into downtown Boston, which was a big deal in itself. I remember being completely wrapped up in the film, start to finish. Everything seemed to be so real, and not fake like a Hollywood movie. I wasn’t even aware that I was reading subtitles for over two hours, as I struggled to keep up with the story of political intrigue. The ending left me feeling upset and outraged. Z helped to develop my awareness of the adult world, and political corruption, which was further tested a couple of years later, with the news of the Watergate Hotel break-in by Nixon operatives.

P.S. The movie is over, and it occurs to me that it’s similar to Dragnet, in the way it goes through the investigative process.

The tooth, the whole tooth, and numbing but the tooth

I’ve had a bunch of spontaneous blog ideas, but instead of posting them they went out as e-mail to various recipients. Maybe it was because I was anxious about my anticipated root canal, which happened today. I’d been told by a couple of people that the procedure is better now than it was fifteen years ago when I had my first root canal, but I thought it was pretty much the same drill. 😉 I’m just glad it’s over!

Stephen Colbert has reclaimed the MILLION DOLLARS in his SuperPAC from Jon Stewart! This was how the transfer went down yesterday.

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.

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.