The Loftier Side of the Legal Profession
Where can one go to hear the term predatory lending result in one hundred belly laughs?
Shylock's Revenge. I knew Merchant of Venice is currently running at the Orlando Shakespeare Theater and correctly assumed yesterday's mock trial was a spinoff event. From the Orlando Weekly's posted description:
Using the actors from their current production of Merchant, with the assistance of the Bard’s Board Barristers, Shylock (Joe Vincent) and Antonio (Steven Patterson) will square off with actual advocates in front of actual judges to determine liability on their bond, Sunshine State style.
An improv courtroom comedy by the local Shakespearians? I'm in! Even if it turned out to be an epic fail, which seemed likely, I put a $10 donation on its being hilarious nonetheless.
Ever hear the saying you've got your pound of flesh? It's from The Merchant of Venice, a play about Shylock, a Jewish moneylender, and Antonio, a merchant. After harassing the Jew in a number of ways, Antonio finds he needs a loan so his friend can afford to marry a rich girl. Shylock agrees to loan Antonio 3,000 ducats interest free, but in the event of default the price would be a pound of the merchant's flesh. Antonio signed the contract, and when he defaulted, didn't want to part with his precious flesh. Good Jew that he was, Shylock took Antonio to court, where his bloodlust worked against him and he lost all his goods and assets to Antonio.
So, naturally, going to the old courthouse in the History Center to see Shylock appeal his verdict seemed like a fun idea. I was unaware the actors were only in the room to lend a little color and fancy to a performance by some of Orlando's higher-minded legal professionals. The publicity was misleading, failing to mention the actors weren't the ones putting on the show. The entire audience — save a light peppering of young, jeans-clad theater fans — was made of paralegals, Barry Law students and professors, judges, and lawyers — some of whom you may have seen on billboards and local commercials.
In-jokes for an in-crowd I felt very much outside of included haggling over whether a pound of flesh can be safely removed from a 170-pound man and the precise definition of a jot. Broader references to the Economic Crisis were made throughout, with squabbling over toxic assets, and whether Shylock was a predatory lender.
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2009-04-01 15:06:04
INSECTOBOTS! (Or, The Day The Earth Fell Asleep Watching The Day The Earth Stood Still)
My favorite part of watching the advance screening of The Day the Earth Stood Still tonight was the Star Trek trailer.
That said, I liked the original 1951 version directed by Robert Wise and written by Edmund H. North.
Hot hot hot!!! Is that King Kong back there moving worlds over his jealousy of the GORT?
I was excited to see the remake even despite Keanu Reeves starring as alien ambassador Klaatu. I was delighted to go to my local not-quite-IMAX screen despite Neo. And I can dig an upgrade from the cold war themes including fear of atomic violence to climate change and the stewardship of the Earth.
Snooooooore.
The effects were decent, though I wouldn't agree with their award-nominated status. Specifically, the swarms of insectobots devouring everything in their path worked much better on screen then I'd anticipated. Unfortunately, all the effects seem wasted on a plot so thin.
Ok, ok, I know the plot is basically the same as the original, but a message so simple, respect life, only gets squashed by overdone visual effects, and the tepid acting and lack of character development don't help either. Yeah, yeah, Jaden Smith, a little Connelly, who cares?
And whatever happened to the line Klaatu barada nikto, a sci-fi line so famous it's been used, referenced, or parodied in scores of books, movies, songs, tv shows, and comics? Where the hell was it? Oh that's right, no need for a safe word, the GORT is... nanobugs. Of course. Nanotechnology: the catch-all device for lame people.
An earlier conception of the GORT would have had him four-legged-ish coming upright to zap things.
Speaking of the GORT, I realize almost all science fiction builds on other science fiction, with interrelated fantasy technologies, futures, beings, etc. The Cylon Raiders and Centurions of Battlestar Galactica are simple, elegant, and not at all original. Look at the original movie's poster up top if you don't believe me. Cybermen ring a bell? I feel like the new GORT is a cross between the Cylon copy of itself and an OSCAR. Which this film will obviously never be mentioned in relation to again. I can't imagine paying to see this.
The thing I fear most about this film? On its release tomorrow, 12.12.08, the Deep Space Communications Network in Cape Canaveral will transmit the film to Alpha Centauri. Please no. Can we send 2001: A Space Odyssey instead? Ok, don't want to let the aliens in on Kubrick? Fine. Please send them the ORIGINAL The Day the Earth Stood Still.
Anything but this flick. Anything for publicity, and you couldn't stop at climate change. Why do we always make ourselves look like total asses?
Independence Day anyone? Or any other movie with robots or flying things or aliens. Or a Smith.
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2008-12-11 23:16:33
LA Weekly: Long Live Print
As much as I love the internet, I'm not about to give up on print, or declare its death. It may be true that print news giants are shrinking, but print is nowhere near dead.
LA Weekly's Long Live Print campaign is pretty hot. And by the same agency who did all their 'Blank Blankly' stuff, Ignited LA.
I love this.
Especially coming from a weekly paper. It may be the case that no one is interested in daily print news anymore, (at least I'm not), but the weekly is a different beast. Of course I can hop on the internet at any time and get the news and opinion articles on any news item from any point of view. But I still read my local weekly wherever I happen to be living. Why? Because, it's the best way to get local voices and opinion on stuff and things. The items they choose to run are as relevant as what they choose to say about them. Not only that, they can distill the news of the week with, well, a week's perspective.
Long Live Print couldn't come at a better time. The heat of a market in near free fall might burn a little too hot for poor paper, but if there was ever a time to reassert the power of the medium, now is it.
This is kind of funny, I guess. Unfortunately the analogy seems... off. If horses are now for the select riding population, what does that say about the reader of the weekly paper? Are we some kind of landowning elite?
And this is just strange. Command P? If the battle of print news is raging against the internet, is appealing to mass knowledge of how to print a page helpful?
In any case, it's a good campaign, and the Ink Bleeds piece is just touching. Really touching.
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2008-11-23 18:03:55
The City Beautiful
It's high time I say something about the city I live in: Orlando, Fl.
Last Tuesday Thomas Friedman went on the Daily Show to discuss the importance of switching to a green economy, and mentioned in passing "half finished condos in Florida." Hah! You don't know the half of it Mr. Friedman.
The following Sunday, I was walking downtown and looked at the banners for the downtown Eola Farmers Market. The logo always reminds me of the Comedy Central logo, which is funny because our Farmers Market is a joke. It consists of twenty tables, two of which house unappealing overpriced produce, the rest of which contain bad arts, crafts, and incense.
Later that day, a friend sent me a link to the latest entry at DefameOrlando, which is nothing but self-righteous trash talk about the downtown scumsters and clubs and pseudo-nostalgiac meandering about Orlando's supposed good old days before our raves disappeared and our goth population died out, (read: got jobs and had babies).
These things happening in succession compel me to speak out.
Believe me when I say we realize the rest of the country makes fun of Florida on a near constant basis. Hell, we feel so held down we make fun of ourselves. Why would anyone come here? Infrastructure's bad, there's nothing to do, and our schools are horrific because our kids are just supposed to feed into the service industry.
Florida history in a nutshell: Semi-tropical savages, sweaty white money, agriculture, mansions, service industry, railroad, resorts, more servants, their children, public works, sprawl, skitter back into the swamp, have children, send them to in-state university or community college on Bright Futures, and like baby turtles to the moon over the water watch them crawl back to our 'cities'.
Help us.
SoDo, light rail, a team of Segway Ambassadors. Bad, good, no need.
Don't send us more development money for the peach and teal plastic and warped Spanish mission flair we left back in the suburbs and redneck coastal and swamp towns. And STOP with the plazas. You gave us a gross plaza (called SoDo, of all things), with a Super Target to supposedly expand the urban limits of downtown, for what? To put it in the condo brochures. We brought a little action, and you took us and built a bazillion condos. That nobody wants. There isn't enough action to merit the price or endure the monstrosity. You try to attract professionals from other cities where they are paid more to do the same work, but they want some action in the brochure. Pff.
Orlando was built on entertainment and hospitality via Disney and later, Universal. So where is it all?
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2008-11-19 17:39:49
The Spit of a People
This commercial for the Czech National Museum made this week's Top 5 at AdForum.com, and for good reason. The commercials that make these lists are usually less than thrilling, but this pleasant surprise deserves mention.
The Munich Agreement is now officially on display at the Czech National Museum. It was settled upon at a conference in Munich attended by the leaders of Germany, France, Britain, and Italy in 1938. The Agreement addressed Hitler's territorial dispute over Czech border lands and Hitler, Mussolini, Chamberlain, and Daladier signed off allowing Nazi Germany to annex Czechoslovakia's Sudetenland.
Czechoslovakia was not invited to the conference, and thus had no say in the decision. They lost their borderlands, strategic defense posts, and their military alliance with France was dishonored. In light of this, most Czechs refer to the Munich Agreement as the Munich Dictate or Munich Betrayal.
This commercial was created for the museum by the agency Euro RSCG Prague, produced by Armada Films, written by Eda Kauba and Filip Kukla, and directed by Jakub Hussar. Kudos to everyone involved.
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2008-11-19 14:07:20
GetYouHomeToChristianSlater.gov
A commercial during the Giants-Redskins NFL opener on NBC showed me peaceful, relaxed, silent people with hardly slightly exposed Sentri cards on which their joys could properly be sung by cheesy, animated ID photos. GetYouHome.gov
This was followed by thirty seconds of Christian Slater's face and high school newsdesk graphics for splitting Slater's face, My Own Worst Enemy, Oct 13.
GetYouHome.gov takes you to the Western Hemisphere Travel Initiative. I clicked the US as my country of origin to see what was there.
On June 1, 2009, citizens returning home from Canada, Mexico, the Caribbean or Bermuda, by land or by sea, will soon be required to present one of the travel documents listed below.
Forget that they threw a soon in there where it doesn't belong. I think. US Passport, US Passport Card for land and sea only, Enhanced Driver's Licenses distributed in the US and Canada for travel by land and sea, and Trusted Traveler Program Cards. I can see frequent travelers getting excited about Sentri, Nexus and FAST cards to avoid the worry and burden of carrying a passport or equivalent documentation. It's like getting the E-Pass. Private lanes, swipe swipe, off you go. No Booths.
But wait, what does it say for Canada? It says the exact same thing. Canadian Passports, Funky Driver's Licenses, Trusty Traveler Cards.
Ok, ok, so what does Mexico say?
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2008-09-05 08:33:19
Who's Afraid of the Internet?
The United States of NBC.
I'm twenty-five and self-employed, living on bran flakes and dreaming of luxuries like health insurance and television. Zeus forbid I want to watch the Olympics on the internet I pay more for because I'm not also purchasing a cable tv package. All the whining about online coverage of the Olympics is getting annoying, but it brings me to a point I've been making for a long time: Internet, internet, internet.
NBC is so dependent on primetime advertising that they couldn't even televise the four-hour opening ceremonies live, (much less show it online), much to the boo-hoo of laptop-toting and DVRing 18-35 year-olds everywhere. Despite the claim of over two thousand hours of streaming online coverage, the majority of it is not live, and NBC won't be offering the more popular events to online viewers until well after they've happened. I know women's gymnastics just ain't what it used to be now that steroid-testing and underage Chinese girls are the norm, but the only thing badminton calls to mind is an animated match between Maid Marion and Lady Cluck. It's tough to get excited about that.
Granted, ninety-eight percent of households in the US contain at least one television, if not the 2.5 average, and sixty percent of households with television subscribe to cable, but even they're getting shafted on coverage if this guy's f***-per-paragraph rate is any indication. I can understand the importance of commercial sales, especially considering the $800 million payout required to win the bid as exclusive US broadcaster of the Olympics, but if NBC can't make that money back that's their own fault. And what's with all the exclusivity, anyway? It's the Olympics. If there are two things people the world over can unite on, I'd say they're the Olympics and the internet. Just not at the same time, apparently.
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2008-08-12 00:00:00
IKEA - 2009 Catalog Drop
Don't be fooled by its pretty looks.
Home and Lifestyle, Design, and general Women's bloggers are wetting themselves in delight. Nothing provocatively silent there. I-King-A, the international furnishing titan, just dropped its 2009 catalog. If they were perusing the US catalog, this is the message they saw on the first page:
The way you live every day. That's how we define our homes. A functional welcoming kitchen for weeknight dinners and late-night talks. A comfortable living room that invites everyone to stretch out and tune in. And when all the activity is done, a peaceful bedroom to shut the door and recharge.
This year's catalog is filled with new products, inspirational solutions and incredibly low prices that make it possible to create a beautiful home even during the tough times. Start here, and then go to www.IKEA-USA.com. Because on the website you'll find more selection, inspiration and solutions for your life at home. And with hundreds of products being launched throughout the year, there's always something new to discover on our website and in our stores.
But for now, grab a place on the sofa, turn the page, and start browsing, planning, imagining. After all, Home is the most important place in the world.
The bolding is theirs, but I'd just bold the tough times. Says it all, right? Everyone knows they have a lot of really cheap stuff, but they've been trying so long to push the great green design. Now they can just run with cheap as hell! (Unless you want their weirdly overpriced large furniture.) So what's their most prominent tagline, appearing as a full right page dozens of times? Our biggest idea is the smallest price.
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2008-08-02 13:12:52
Cry Dctrw [is a] Twt
(This post originally appeared in November 2007 at my StumbleUpon blog.)
Anti-censorship internet hero disemvowels balanced and calm criticisms.
A few days ago on BoingBoing Cory Doctorow posted an announcement that, gasp!, his short story, 0wnz0red was translated into Swedish.
If you scroll down to the comments, you'll find some interesting bits. The first comment was by Flying Squid. He says in a very polite way that it seems unreasonable for Cory Doctorow to use BoingBoing for personal PR. Cory responds with several paragraphs of "I can do what I want," which is basically true, and the reason I don't bother reading BoingBoing. There's nothing on that site I won't see elsewhere on the internet, minus all the tush-patting of the aging BoingBoing brigade. Flying Squid responds by hanging his head in impotent apology.
My friend and roommate, Yeago, decided at that point to post a comment. Some time ago a member of our personal mailing list suggested 0wnz0red as good reading and a long thread ensued wherein I gave my criticism of the story. Yeago quoted me within a polite frame, and even deleted the last few sentences which were perhaps too scathing for the BoingBoing readership. Shortly after that post Nutkin joined in, telling Flying Squid not to roll over, and that Mr. Doctorow's personal blog is where those posts belong. Seems reasonable. Shortly after that, both Yeago and Nutkin were disemvowelled.
For those of you who don't know what that is, all the vowels were removed from their comments, rendering them illegible without undue scrutiny. Teresa Nielson Hayden is the moderator responsible for this. She also runs the blog and moderates discussion at Making Light, where a response blog was posted by her husband Patrick, titled Blow, blow, thou wanker wind, and yet more disemvowelling occurred.
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2008-07-31 13:16:55