As part of the publicity campaign for a Criterion Collection release of Broadcast News, writer/director James L Brooks talked to The Atlantic about Journalism, the Oscars, and 'Broadcast News':

Holly Hunter's character is a portrait of confidence when it comes to her work. The network news president tells her, "It must be nice to always believe you know better, to always think you're the smartest person in the room," to which Jane replies, "No. It's awful." That's one of the great moments in this film. Was Holly's reply scripted?

Oh, God, yes. We did 24 takes because getting it just right was so important to me.

Is it just me, or does that line sound awfully Sorkin-ish?

I haven't seen Broadcast News in years, but I was a sucker for James L Brooks' films in the mid-1980s¹ and I suspect that I'd still enjoy the hell out of it today.

[Via The Awl]

1. Terms of Endearment is another firm favourite I haven't seen in far too long. ↩

The History of the Watchers' Council: good, geeky fanfic fun.

A purpose-built Academy was built in the Cotswolds in 1846 to educate new Watchers, while close by was situated a radical and controversial boarding school for young ladies modelled on the boys' public schools of the era. This school, of course, was operated by the Council through a series of cover identities. It was named St Athanasia's after the ancient Slayer (who of course was in reality neither a saint nor even a Christian, living as she did in the 4th century BC – a rather cynical private joke by the Council). The Council also acquired property in the Scottish Highlands as a summer retreat; this old but renovated castle offered a safe location where more extreme training could be conducted out of the reach of prying eyes.

The curriculum of St Athanasia's School for Young Ladies included Greek wrestling, archery, fencing, athletics and woodcraft as well as more conventional academic subjects like History, Biology, Greek, Latin and Ancient Sumerian. Polite society outside the Council deemed this far too adventurous and shocking for respectable women, which was doubtless why the schools's trustees were forced to fill up their class numbers with so many girls of foreign extraction. The St Athanasia's hockey team was notorious as being the only one that the St Trinian's team felt outmatched by, and not just on the playing field. [...]

[Via MetaFilter]

An excerpt from Street Life in London by J.Thomson and Adolphe Smith gives a fascinating glimpse of life as a Recruiting Sergeant in 1877 London. Apparently a recruiting job wasn't the sinecure it seemed:

The amount of work done by the sergeants who loiter about at this corner may best be estimated by the fact that 3605 approved recruits were enlisted from the London district in 1875, and I need scarcely remark that the greater number of these men accepted the fatal shilling at the hospitable bar of the "Mitre and Dove." Henry Cooper, one of the best known and most successful recruiting sergeants, enlisted at this corner during the course of thirteen years upwards of 3000 men; and is generally supposed to have retired with a large fortune. I hear, however, and on good testimony, that this latter detail is altogether erroneous, and that, notwithstanding his prolonged and devoted services, Sergeant Cooper was obliged to resort to the vulgar expedient of a loan on leaving his corps. This last version has at least the advantage of according with the general characteristics of the English army, and harmonizes with that spirit of ungrateful neglect which allows Waterloo heroes to die in the workhouse.

Recruiting sergeants have the credit of making large incomes, but insufficient account is taken of the expenses they are forced to incur. [...]

[...] There is no suitable barrack accommodation for the London recruiting sergeants, and 3s. 6d "lodger money" is therefore allowed per week. This is supposed to compensate for the room, fuel, and light which should be given in the barracks. It is, however, difficult to get a suitable room in London under seven shillings per week, and three shillings is but a low estimate for coals and light. Besides this outlay, recruiting sergeants have to be better dressed, and wear out their clothes more rapidly than if they were in ordinary service; yet they have only one pair of boots, and of gloves, and one tunic allowed them per annum, the authorities stretching a point, and giving three pairs of trousers for every two years. As a natural result, the sergeants have to buy the greater part of their clothes, and this at no trifling expense. A good cap, for instance, costs £1 1s., and when exposed day after day without respite to the smoke, dirt, and rain of London, this important appanage to the uniform does not last longer than a year. The recruiting sergeants have, therefore, like every other branch of the service, a formidable list of grievances, and consider themselves far removed from the enjoyment of that good fortune which is generally attributed to them.

[Via And Another Thing]

A would-be developer for RIM's new Playbook tablet computer ends up having to jump through a few too many hoops on the way to getting RIM's software development kit installed and up and running:

You win. I concede defeat. I no longer want to attempt developing an app for the Playbook. Are you happy now? Surely you must be. Considering how terribly designed the entire process is, from the registration right through to loading an app into the simulator, I can only assume that you are trying to drive developers away by inconveniencing them as much as humanly possible. Just in case you've forgotten, let me give you a little recap of the process you've put together. [...]

The full post is well worth a read. Make sure you follow the story to the very end, where our budding developer gets a … surprising … email from RIM.

[Via Daring Fireball]

Comment of the week, from a MetaFilter discussion on the joys of the long since out-of-print, but fondly remembered, Dune board game:

I'd like to see a God Emperor boardgame.

One player is Leto II. The other players represent the various factions – the BG, the BT, Ix etc. Leto's special power is to see what every other player is going to do before they do it. The other players have a range of powers that don't make sense or provide any apparent advantage, like producing Duncan Idaho gholas or building carts for Leto.

In the first turn the non-Leto players try to kill Leto. If they fail, the Leto player gets to deliver a one minute Nietszche-tinged rant about the evils of bureaucracy, the perfidiousness of historians or the way that a military force made up of males will inevitably destroy itself through homosexuality.

On further turns the non-Leto players get to try again, and each time they fail Leto's ranting time is extended by 30 seconds. The winner is the player who finally manages to kill Leto, although Leto wins if the game goes on for 3,500 turns or when all of the other players leave, whichever happens first.

Seriously, it would be awesome.

posted by A Thousand Baited Hooks at 9:31 AM on February 24

Advice for aspiring screenwriters on the language of the film set:

Once you get to the Promised Land of the set, you'll find that you don't exactly speak the language. The natives have a fascinating patois that they use to implement a very particular protocol. In an attempt to save you the confusion I've experienced in the past, here is my handy dandy guide to set lingo.

[...]

Abby Singer: The second-to-last shot of the day. Apparently from an A.D. named Abby Singer who routinely announced that a shot was the last of the day, only to learn that there was one more.

[...]

Linda Stills: Linda is a person, but her last name isn't Stills. She's the stills photographer. Crews can be large, and when you have three folks named "Linda," it gets annoying to ask for one on the walkie and get the wrong one. Beyond that, no one really cares what your name is. On a set, you are your job. If you're Linda and you're the still photographer, they call you Linda Stills. They'll call you Jim Hair and Ellen Crafty and Craig Writer. Seriously. The name on my trailer door says Craig Writer.

[...]

picture's up: There's a lovely kabuki aspect to the beginning of a shot. Once everyone's ready to shoot a take, the first A.D. says "on the bell!" That alerts the crew to prepare for a shot. "Picture's up" is followed by "roll sound" and "roll camera", which tells the sound and camera guys to get the tape and film speed going (given that one day all sound and images will go directly to a drive or chip, these phrases will eventually be as quaint as MOS). The camera operator will say "camera's set" to let you know he's speeding, the sound guy will say "sound speed" to let you know the sound is ready, and then it's time for the director to call "action!"

[Via the inside of my brain]

Commenters at the Word Magazine blog recently engaged in a game of bands expressed in percentage terms:

Lou Reed...
55% miserable
45% bastard

Oasis
0% original
100% enjoyable for what they are

The Pogues
The secret of their success:

Rum – 33.3%
Sodomy – 33.3%
The Lash – 33.3%
Front teeth – 0%

Churnalism.com is essentially a narrowly focused search engine: instead of searching the web in general, it lets you search UK news web sites and identify the extent to which related news stories simply regurgitated the text of the press release.

Someone needs to turn this into a browser plugin, so that as you read news online you can see how much of what you're reading originated in a press release.¹

[Via One Thing Well]

1. This would be a trickier problem, I'd imagine. The web site starts with the wording of the press release and searches a finite list of UK news sites to find related stories and measure how much overlap there is between the stories it locates and the original press release. In order to start with a news story and work your way back to do a comparison with the press release, a plugin would presumably need access to a complete index of press releases circulated in the UK. I'm not in the media: does such a searchable index of press releases even exist? If it does, is it available to the public, free of charge? ↩

The fake @MayorEmanuel Twitter feed looks set to become a classic of the genre:

[It's the day before the mayoral election in Chicago. Infamously short-tempered former Obama White House chief of staff Rahm Emanuel is preparing to make one last push in his bid to succeed Mayor Daley...]

Let's just keep the motherfucking coffee coming, non-fucking stop.

MayorEmanuel
February 21, 2011 at 14:31

When I run for reelection, I'm having a motherfucking hand-shaking robot built.

MayorEmanuel
February 21, 2011 at 15:01

Carl the Intern and Axelrod are directing the InterCorps from "the command center"–a laptop and a map in the backseat of the fucking Civic.

MayorEmanuel
February 21, 2011 at 16:02

Asked Carl how things were going, and he said "In brightest day, in blackest night, no evil shall escape my sight." The fuck does that mean?

MayorEmanuel
February 21, 2011 at 16:05

Then, come election day, things went in a very unexpected (and hugely entertaining) direction. Read on…

David Cameron:

"If the Queen asks you to a party, you say yes. If the Italian prime minister asks you to a party, it's probably safe to say no."

In response to a Salon article about how marketers come up with titles for films:

Most unintentionally funny/weird title ever

"Barry Lyndon"

Because people thought it was about the Presidential campaign of 1964 and stayed away in droves.

- redhatter

[Via Fritinancy]

Chris Wahl's Chewie and Han T-shirt: a classic.

[Via acedog007]

The problem with Hollywood isn't that it makes too many sequels: it's that it fails to make sequels in the spirit of this fake trailer.

I don't imagine for one second that Steven Spielberg would dream of doing that to ET, but surely he could hand the job to his old pal Joe Dante. It'd be like a cross between Mars Attacks! and Gremlins 2: The New Batch.

[Via MetaFilter]

In her series Photo Opportunities, artist Corinne Vionnet takes hundreds of photographs taken from the internet of famous landmarks and overlays them to depict an eerily consistent consensus version of the building/monument/scene in question. I'm making it sound terribly dull, but in fact the results are beautiful.

The images at the artist's site are fairly small: My Modern Metropolis has larger versions of some of the pictures.

[Via My Modern Metropolis, via MetaFilter]

This Star Size Comparison is, essentially, a YouTube version of the Total Perspective Vortex.

[Via Astronomy Picture of the Day]

Researchers Martin Hilbert and Priscila López took on a real doozy of a project: estimating The World's Technological Capacity to Store, Communicate, and Compute Information. Ars Technica summarises their findings:

[...] Estimating this sort of thing can be a nightmare, but the task can provide valuable information on trends that are changing our computing and broadcast infrastructure. So a pair of researchers have taken the job upon themselves and tracked the changes in 60 different analog and digital technologies, from newsprint to cellular data, for a period of over 20 years.

The trends they spot range from the expected – Internet access has pushed both analog and digital phones into a tiny niche – to the surprising, such as the fact that, in aggregate, gaming hardware has always had more computing power than the world's supercomputers. [...]

The entire article is well worth a read. Deeply fascinating.

[Via The Long Now Blog]

Andrew McAfee has found a hole in the iTunes Store privacy model: if you try to gift music (or an App, or a Tv programme or film) to an iTunes Store user, iTunes warns you if the user already has that item.

This snooping process is iterative and cumbersome, but I'm pretty sure it could be at least somewhat automated. It's also a little fluky; to learn what I have, [the snooper] has to gift media to me in the same form I bought it. For example, if he sent me only a single episode of "Breaking Bad" season 3 iTunes wouldn't send him a message like the one above. This is because I bought the whole season at once, so [the snooper] has to gift me the whole season to learn about my purchase. Similar rules appear to hold for music.

Even though [the snooper] has to work a bit, I'm not thrilled that he (or anyone else) can so easily learn about my media purchases and tastes. If I want to share my iTunes holdings with my friends or broadcast them to the world Apple gives me tools to do so, but if I want to keep them private I can't.

McAfee says that Amazon handles this sort of problem differently; it simply converts duplicate items to store credit, informing the recipient of the duplicate items but not the gift-giver, and suggests that Apple would do well to adopt this approach. My online gift-giving is usually selected from users' wishlists so I've never encountered this problem in the wild, but if I were giving a gift I think I'd prefer to be given the chance to choose a different item rather than have my gift silently converted to an impersonal store credit: if I'd wanted to give an iTunes Store credit I'd have chosen that option. However, I can see that both approaches have their merits.¹

My feeling about this is that whilst it's technically a privacy breach, it's not a terribly scary one. The would-be snooper needs to:

1. Guess the email address I use with my iTunes Store account.²
2. Guess what music/apps/ebooks etc I might own and whether I bought them as individual items or as part of an album/season purchase.³
3. Automate this process so that Apple won't notice that some rabid fan of mine has made X attempts to gift me Y different tracks/apps/ebooks without ever going through with a purchase and throttle or block their access.

Having successfully negotiated those hurdles, the snoop is now in possession of … a listing of a small portion of the contents of my iTunes Library. Given that I display ample evidence of my taste in music on the internet for the whole world to see as a matter of course, you'll understand if I'm not terribly worried by this potential attack vector.

That being said, I do take the point that users who wish to keep their music choices to themselves should have the ability to do just that: Apple should probably get right on it.⁴

[Via Risks Digest]

1. Perhaps iTunes Store users should be allowed to specify in their account settings whether gift-givers should be warned of duplicates. ↩
2. Admittedly not everyone sets up a distinct email address to use just for iTunes, so this could be straightforward in some cases where the snooper already has your email address. ↩
3. Which raises another question: what if I have a track that I ripped from a CD in MP3 format and the potential snooper tries to gift me the iTunes Store version of that track in AAC/m4a format. Does iTunes recognise that it's the same track despite the format difference? ↩
4. Interestingly, McAfee points out that in the US it an offence to give out details of an individual's video rental/purchase history and suggests that if the iTunes Store makes it possible to find out what films a user has purchased this might leave the firm open to legal action. That sounds more like the sort of motivation Apple will need to close this hole. ↩

T-Rex is absolutely right: reality SUCKS sometimes.

[Via The Run of Play]

Another week's selection:

1. Ghost: Rainbow Bridge, Tokyo
2. untitled #116
3. Dodge
4. Tree gang
5. Sea Ice Surrounds Shikotan

I like this Push and Store Cabinet a lot.

I can imagine it being especially useful as a bedside 'bookshelf.' Place it within an arm's length of your bedside, then when you're finished with your night's reading and are too drowsy to faff around placing your book neatly back on its shelf you need only close the book and thrust out your arm in more or less the general direction of the push and store cabinet: the cabinet 'grabs' the book no matter what orientation you're holding it, and you're done.

[Via Bookshelf Porn]