I finally saw "Walk the Line" last night. Joaquin Phoenix is amazing as Cash, catching all the facial tics and vocal depth. And Reese Witherspoon is equally great; she captures the professional cheeriness and inner depth the Carter family is known for. It's got the HJ stamp of approval! It reminded me of Sarah Vowell's story for 'This American Life.' She calls June and Johnny's relationship the "Love Story of the 20th Century." Go take a listen and decide for youself. (Link is on the side of the page, and Vowell's part begins around 47 minutes in)...
Movies used to have boring credits. Saul Bass changed that. In his intros to Vertigo and The Man With the Golden Arm, he married graphic design and motion pictures into a new art form. Check it out....
Wow. That headline sounds as if I were editorializing in the Akron Free Press. But anyways... on the the moralizing! On Saturday, I got Punk'd. Starbucks has a clever marketing gimmick here in New York. They have cars driving around Manhattan with a Starbucks cup fastened on top, as if the driver accidentally forgot to bring his coffee in with him. As the car slowly cruises by, throngs of people on the sidewalk will point and yell at the driver that he forgot his coffee on top of the car. I actually walked up to the car to hand the driver his coffee and was greeted by the driver: "MERRY CHRISTMAS, FROM STARBUCKS!" It's a clever idea. Too bad it's the season of giving, and not April Fool's Day. The total effect of the Starbucks campaign is to make people feel foolish for not getting it. It's like Starbucks took us. This would be appropriate for a Halloween trick-or-treat, but not for Hannukah and Christmas. The appropriate thing to do would be for the driver to give a gift certificate for a free coffee to anyone kind enough to try to take the coffee off the top of the car....
The day has finally come when math works for us: A mathematician has explained how to stabilise a wobbly table without needing to jam a beer coaster under one of the legs. Australian researcher Dr Burkhard Polster, of Monash University in Melbourne, and his international colleagues have calculated that turning a rectangular table around on most surfaces will cure the wobble. The table will not necessarily be horizontal, which means your beer may still slide off, but it will not wobble....
