

Sunday, March 20, 2016

Lazy Linkage!

It's been a while since I did this, hasn't it? I am, once again, going to try to be better about regularly updating this blog. Of course, we've heard that before, haven't we?

:: Apparently the person who runs the social media for San Francisco's mass transit system, BART (Bay Area Rapid Transit), finally decided to take a different approach in his/her responses to negative comment on social media. The result is some breathtakingly blunt honesty, and it really points up, in my mind, the odd American insistence on creating government services that are just good enough to be disappointing, and then complaining about them without actually committing, as a public, to do better. The money quote here is when this poor soul points out that the BART system was designed to move 100,000 people in a week, and it now moves over 400,000 people each day.

:: Moby Dick, read aloud, by the likes of Stephen Fry, Neil Tennant, Fiona Shaw, Will Self, Benedict Cumberbatch, China Miéville, Tony Kushner, John Waters, Simon Callow, Sir David Attenborough, and Tilda Swinton. Wow! I don't really like listening to audiobooks -- my mind wanders too much and I miss important stuff -- but this might bear investigation!

:: CGI recreation of the destruction of Pompeii. Wow, those people had a bad day.

:: The filmmakers of Airplane! reflect on that brilliant movie's making. Such a classic...although I got in trouble when we watched it as a family years ago, because The Daughter was six or so, and I figured, it's rated PG. I'd forgotten the gratuitous shot of waggling breasts during one of the air-turbulence scenes.

:: Finally, I didn't get around to properly observing Pi Day this year, but I did repurpose some older pie video footage of mine into a possible commercial for a new topical treatment for Resting Bitch Face, of which I am a sufferer....

I'm not promising more next week!

1 comment:

Jason said...

Heh - your anecdote about Airplane being PG...the '70s and early '80s were a very different time... :D

(Seriously, all joking aside, I've thought a lot about how much open and fun sexuality there was in pop culture while I was growing up, and how and why it all curdled. The prudes beat it back down during the Reagan era, and then it re-emerged as porn and sleaze. I keep meaning to write something about that, but I haven't managed to articulate it all.)