The 'Fight Club' interpretation of Ferris Bueller's Day Off:

My favorite thought-piece about Ferris Bueller is the "Fight Club" theory, in which Ferris Bueller, the person, is just a figment of Cameron's imagination, like Tyler Durden, and Sloane is the girl Cameron secretly loves.

One day while he's lying sick in bed, Cameron lets "Ferris" steal his father's car and take the day off, and as Cameron wanders around the city, all of his interactions with Ferris and Sloane, and all the impossible hijinks, are all just played out in his head. This is part of the reason why the "three" characters can see so much of Chicago in less than one day — Cameron is alone, just imagining it all.

It isn't until he destroys the front of the car in a fugue state does he finally get a grip and decide to confront his father, after which he imagines a final, impossible escape for Ferris and a storybook happy ending for Sloane ("He's gonna marry me!"), the girl that Cameron knows he can never have.

posted by Cool Papa Bell at 1:06 AM on April 29

[Via kottke.org]

If we do end up in the middle of a swine fever pandemic, three Illinois residents have a plan:¹

U.S. patent #7255627 was granted to Elena N. Bodnar of Hinsdale, Illinois, and Raphael C. Lee and Sandra Marijan of Chicago on August 14, 2007 [for ...]

"a garment device which converts into one or more facemasks. In one embodiment, the garment device is a bra or a brassiere garment. The bra has two cups…. The inner portions of the cups are disconnectable, and the outer portions of the cups are disconnectable. As such, the bra is separable into two halves. Each halve is securable to a user's face to form a facemask."

[Via The Sideshow]

1. Or, at any rate, a patent. ↩

Militant vegetarians aren't what they used to be:

From the "Official Account of the Military Operations in China, 1900-1901" (PRO WO 33/284) compiled by Major E.W.M. Norie, Middlesex Regiment, page 113:

Between the 21st and 23rd July eleven English and American members of the China Inland Mission were murdered at Ch'u-chou by the local train-bands, which had been organized to defend the town against a rising of the secret society of Vegetarians.

Disappointingly, it turns out that the term 'vegetarian' was probably just a shorthand term for various Buddhist groups associated with the Boxer Rebellions.

Jason Scott on salvaging the remnants of Geocities for posterity:

The number of total sites currently on Geocities is elusive. There were numbers bandied about between 1996-1999 of millions, with 3.5 million the largest number I could find. Bear in mind, however, that 1. Yahoo are fucking liars, 2. People who are about to be bought for billions of dollars might be inclined to be fucking liars, and 3. The press will often aid and abide fucking liars, sometimes intentionally, and sometimes not. But what is definitely clear is that Yahoo purged a lot. How much, again, unsure, but we have found one neighborhood (WallStreet, ha ha get your jokes in, comedians) that is utterly empty, as well as the holiday special NorthPole. Gone, utterly.

I'm shocked – shocked! – to discover that Jason Statham's portrayal of a homicidal energizer bunny in Crank 2: High Voltage may not be entirely plausible.¹

Cardiologist Dr Simon Grant is the killjoy:

Frankly, I wouldn't rate Chev's chances in the real world very highly. Artificial hearts are pretty poor, primitive devices. They supply enough cardiac output to keep you slowly plodding around, but they certainly don't allow for martial arts and sprinting. Overcharging them won't give you super-speed, either.

Next thing you know, they'll be bringing in someone from the Parachute Regiment to explain how unlikely it is that Chev would have survived his fall from a helicopter at the climax of the first film, or getting a driving instructor in to highlight all the flaws in Frank Martin's driving technique.

1. For the record, I haven't seen Crank 2 yet. I wasn't sure whether I was going to bother, but having listened to Mark Kermode's review earlier today I think I have to go and see it. How can I not see a film featuring a cameo appearance by Geri Halliwell – playing Chev Chelios' mum in a TV game show dream sequence – and another scene where Chev imagines himself turning into what the Good Doctor described as "a Godzilla-style monster with a big monster Jason Statham head on"? ↩

Evelien Lohbeck's short animated film Noteboek is well worth a look.

[Via Vimeo, via Memex 1.1]

Fire-eating, a jelly cube and cheerleaders at 1,000 frames per second. Spectacular.

[Via MetaFilter]

Geoff Manaugh, inspired by the concept of neural interface technology that allows paralysed soldiers to control the technology around them, takes the idea and runs with it:

The idea of brain-controlled wireless digging machines, in particular, just astonishes me; at night you dream of tunnels – because you are actually in control of tunneling equipment operating somewhere beneath the surface of the earth. [...]

[Perhaps...] this could even be used as a new and extremely avant-garde form of psychotherapy.

[...]

Instead of performing more traditional forms of Freudian analysis by interviewing the boy in person, a team of highly-specialized dream researchers is instead sent down into those artificial caverns, wearing North Face jackets and thick gloves, where they deduce human psychology from those moments of curvature and angle of descent.

Once again, the internet brings me an answer to a question I'd never thought to ask: how do they test the arresting cables and barricades used on aircraft carriers to bring landing aircraft to a sharp stop?

The photo above shows an F/A-18 airframe sitting on a sled. On the back of that sled are 4 jet engines which, when fired up, will produce 42,000lbs of thrust and ultimately send the jet down the 2.8km track at a speed of 460km/h, into an arresting cable or barricade. If the plane stops: great. If not, the plane usually ends up in the clearing behind the track or amongst the trees. Either way, an enormous, expensive amount of fun.

I'd dearly love to see film footage from those testing sessions.

Muppetstar Galactica.

Having seen this, I can't help but picture Miss Piggy as a Six. That's just wrong on so many levels.

The author of Xee just had to vent – at length, right there in the middle of his source code – about the joys of decoding Photoshop files:

[...] Trying to get data out of a PSD file is like trying to find something in the attic of your eccentric old uncle who died in a freak freshwater shark attack on his 58th birthday. That last detail may not be important for the purposes of the simile, but at this point I am spending a lot of time imagining amusing fates for the people responsible for this Rube Goldberg of a file format. [...]

[Via Daring Fireball]

Is it just me, or did Sir Paul Stephenson, commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, leave an enormous loophole when he spoke about taking action against Met officers who had removed or hidden their number badges before going into action on the day of the G20 summit:

The commissioner, who has spoken personally to TSG officers in a bid to raise their morale, said all knew they were individually accountable for their actions.

He said officers who were found to have deliberately hidden their numbers would be severely disciplined. "If someone is trying to deliberately avoid being identified and their reason is so they can behave inappropriately, criminally, then of course they could face the sack," Stephenson said. [Emphasis added]

So if an officer is identified as having removed his or her numbers how, exactly, does one assess whether they did so in order to facilitate criminal or inappropriate behaviour?¹ The whole point of officers wearing their numbers is that it facilitates holding them accountable for the way their wield their powers: why is it necessary to establish both that an officer removed their numbers and the officer's intent in doing so?

Perhaps Sir Paul misspoke, and what he meant to say was "If someone is trying to deliberately avoid being identified our default assumption must be that their reason was so they could abuse their position by behaving inappropriately, criminally, and therefore of course they should face the sack."

1. There will no doubt be some cases where officers were caught misbehaving on camera and were identifiable by means other than their numbers. But there will be others who, because they weren't wearing numbers, can't be linked to a specific incident. If you can't identify an officer, you can't link them to their behaviour. ↩

Snakes on a Plane: The TV Edit.

[Via Why, That's Delightful!]

Judging by Gaby Wood's account, In Treatment sounds like a show worth seeing if only a UK channel would give it a chance:

A beautiful woman is crying in a room. "I shouldn't have come," she says, "I should have just called it off." She gets up to leave, her dress from the night before shimmery and out of place in the daytime, her mascara smudged with tears.

What we are witnessing is not – or not yet – a love affair; it's a psychotherapy session, the very first scene of In Treatment, an innovative and prolific HBO TV drama now in its second season in the US. Last year, five half-hour episodes were aired every week for nine weeks – a marathon in TV terms, yet barely a dent in the amount of listening a real psychotherapist has to do. Each episode was a single patient's session – Laura on Mondays, Alex on Tuesdays, Sophie on Wednesdays, Jake and Amy on Thursdays. On the fifth day, the therapist himself would see his old supervisor, so that the last patient was always the doctor, offering a post-mortem on the week from a shifted point of view. [...]

I've commented before about my reluctance to watch a drama that is stripped across a week at the whim of a channel for no better reason than to blast through the maximum number of episodes in the minimum time.¹ I think I'd be prepared to stick with In Treatment, since there's a clear structural reason for running the show five days a week. Here's hoping someone gives it a try so I can put that theory to the test.

1. It's not just the current BBC run of The Wire: BBC2 did something similar with the last season of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. ↩

Norman Abjorensen's article exploring the tension between the desire for a leader to seen to be be a 'good bloke' and the nature of the sort of person who makes it to the top in politics includes a marvelous anecdote about post-WWII Australian prime minister Ben Chifley:

Ben Chifley was perhaps the closest we have had to a good bloke as prime minister. A man capable of toughness and unafraid of making decisions that might hurt friends, Chifley had a decency and a humanity in a class of their known. The best known story is that of the woman who, believing she had dialled the Manuka butcher, proceeded to read out her weekend meat order. The recipient was the prime minister – his private direct line number only one digit different from the butcher's – and he calmly wrote down the order and then telephoned it through to the butcher. When a staffer chided him, telling him he was too busy for that, Chifley would have none of it. "Mrs Murphy is busy too," he shot back.

I wonder which British prime ministers would have reacted likewise. I can imagine Chifley's contemporary Clement Attlee doing so, and perhaps at a stretch the likes of Harold Macmillan or Jim Callaghan, but it's hard to imagine any of the last few residents of Number 10 reacting like that.¹

[Via The Browser]

1. Fairly or not, if a politician allowed a story like that out nowadays everyone would assume it was a put-up job or an out-and-out lie. ↩

Pulp Browsers.

[Via MetaFilter]

I've got to give Brendon Connelly credit: anyone posting a list of The Ten Most Influential Films of The Last Ten Years that includes Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow, Polar Express and My Big Fat Greek Wedding clearly has enormous reserves of self-confidence.

I'd say that the first two might look better in another decade's time, when the technologies used to create fully CGI sets and motion capture have improved tenfold and become commonplace. I'm not convinced that anyone has cited either film as influential thus far.¹

The inclusion of My Big Fat Greek Wedding is simply mystifying: is it really any more influential than half a dozen other offbeat comedies lacking big stars that did unexpectedly good box office business? I'm thinking of the likes of Little Miss Sunshine, Mean Girls or Juno.

I'd fill the gaps by including at least one of the modern wave of superhero films. Spider-Man will probably be looked back on as the film that confirmed that superhero films were box office gold, but I'd rather nominate X-Men, which was earlier, cheaper and better. Finally, I'd throw in Peter Jackson's The Lord of the Rings trilogy as the inspiration for a whole bunch of Big Fantasy films.

I wonder what a list of the Ten Most Influential TV Series of the Last Ten Years would look like…

[Via Feeling Listless]

1. Unless, of course, you know different. ↩

Mark Romanek is filming an adaptation of Kazuo Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go, starring Keira Knightley and a pretty decent supporting cast:

The drama is a co-production between DNA Films, Fox Searchlight and Film4, with a script by Alex Garland, author of The Beach. Knightley's co-stars include Sally Hawkins, Andrew Garfield, Carey Mulligan, Andrea Riseborough and Charlotte Rampling.

I enjoyed Ishiguro's novel quite a bit; I hope the film works out.

In the middle of a fascinating LRB article comparing the use of pardons in the US and British legal systems, former Lord Chief Justice Tom Bingham relates an intriguing anecdote:

[It was accepted...] that a commutation of sentence could be offered subject to a condition which the defendant was free to accept or not. [...] More unusually, a condemned man was pardoned in 1730 on condition that he allow one Cheselden, a celebrated surgeon, to perforate his eardrum in order to study the effect on his hearing.

A bit of googling this evening turned up what appears to be a reproduction of a contemporaneous newspaper report of the pardon:¹

24 December 1730 Last night a reprieve came down to Newgate for respiting the execution of Charles Ray, condemn'd for stealing 5 watches, and he is shortly to undergo the experiment of having the drum of his ear cut out, and is afterwards to have his Majesty's most gracious free pardon. [Grub-street Journal]

7 January 1731 The experiment to be try’d on Cha. Ray in Newgate, is in order to discover, whether deafness cannot be cur’d by purging. It is to be done by an instrument, which is to cut the Tympanum, or drum of the ear, which will demonstrate whether the hearing proceeds from the Tympanum, or from the nerves that lie between that and the conseptor of the ear, it being the opinion of several eminent surgeons, that deafness is principally occasioned by obstructions in the said nerves. The tryal of the experiement is put off to next week. We hear it is laid aside. [Grub-street Journal]

1. Although the excerpt I quoted makes no mention of Dr. Cheselden, later reports quoted on the same page do refer to him as the surgeon in question. ↩

NEW MATH by Craig Damrauer. Very good.

[Via Monoscope]