Your math teacher, Darth Vader. (Boy, is he strict!)
The ability to calculate the length of the hypotenuse is insignificant next to the power of the force.
I have to add — I would have noted that Vader’s board skills leave something to be desired, but he might have found my lack of faith to be disturbing.
The real message of Toy Story. Warning: this cannot be unwatched.
via Mine
Why “Daisy” in 2001: A Space Odyssey?
Possibly because a Bell Labs computer sang it years earlier, in a demo of voice synthesis and voice recognition.
Indiana Jones and the Temple of Absurdly Implausible Excess in the NY Times discusses “Nuking the Fridge,” the expression spawned from some inanity in the latest Indiana Jones flick.
Jason Nicholl, a 37-year-old high school teacher who runs one of the sites, said he went to a message board shortly after the new “Indiana Jones” film was released and saw that the phrase had already caught on. He thought it was likely to be more than a passing fad.
“‘Jump the shark’ is for people over the age of 60, who remember the show,” he said, adding that “nuke the fridge” was a “new, fresh take.”
Wait, what? I remember the show, and have a ways to go before I hit 60. Happy Days ran from 1974-1984 and it literally and figuratively jumped the shark in 1977. You don’t remember the show if you were born after 1948? Nobody who was under the age of 26 when it first aired remembers the show?
Roger Ebert reminisces about Gene Siskel, following the announcement that Ebert & Roeper were leaving the show.
The first time they appeared on the Johnny Carson show:
We were scared out of our minds. We’d been briefed on likely questions by one of the show’s writers, but moments before airtime he popped his head into the dressing room and said, “Johnny may ask you for some of your favorite movies this year.”
Gene and I stared at each other in horror. “What was one of your favorite movies this year?” he asked me. “Gone With the Wind,” I said. The Doc Severinsen orchestra had started playing the famous “Tonight Show” theme. Neither one of us could think of a single movie. Gene called our office in Chicago. “Tell me some movies we liked this year,” he said. This is a true story.
I liked their — unlike everybody else, who would just criticize, they’d bother to tell you if they liked the movie, even if it wasn’t great cinema.
Cuckoo’s Nest Hospital to be Torn Down
Oregon State Hospital, the mental institution where the 1975 movie One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest was filmed, is making way for a new complex. Most of the dilapidated, 125-year-old main building will be torn down and replaced starting this fall.
There’s nothing to the rumor that a giant pillow will be used to demolish the building.
[it] is a colloquialism used by U.S. Cinema critics and fans and has a meaning similar to jumping the shark. It is used to denote the point in a movie or movie series at which the characters or plot veer into a ridiculous, out-of-the-ordinary storyline. Films that have “nuked the fridge” are typically deemed to have passed their peak, since they have undergone too many changes to retain their initial appeal, and after this point critical fans often sense a noticeable decline in their quality. It is considered as the movie equivalent of what Jumping the shark means for television.
Somedays teh interwebz iz just too rich of a medium. Thank you, Al Gore. 😉
via Kottke
Professor Henry Jones is denied tenure
As chairman of the Committee on Promotion and Tenure, I regret to inform you that your recent application for tenure has been denied by a vote of 6 to 1. Following past policies and procedures, proceedings from the committee’s deliberations that were pertinent to our decision have been summarized below according to the assessment criteria.
McKee examines story-telling like a biologist dissecting a rat. But after taking it apart, he explains how to build a story yourself using rules that wouldn’t look out of place in a computer programming text book.
[. . .]
Using McKee’s rules they compare the script of the film Casablanca, a classic pre-McKee movie, with scripts of six episodes of CSI (Crime Scene Investigation), a classic post-Mckee production, and find numerous similarities.That’s hardly surprising since McKee learnt his trade analysing films such as Casablanca, so anything written using his rules should have these similarities.
I also note that one of the producers for CSI has a PhD in applied physics. Chicken? Egg? Common cause?
(Not to name drop, but I went to high school with this person, and actually helped, in some small way, with the first script he wrote)
Font pun and typeface art. I’ve got a bad feeling about this.