Source: Washington Post (Original Article)
Timing is everything, you know? While I was working on last week’s newsletter, I got an e-mail asking about System Restore. I stuck something into that Lawyers in VIC beginning with P Page 1 newsletter and decided to expand on it this week.
Source: Seattle Times (Original Article)
Maybe you’ve often wondered, during life’s quiet moments when one ponders such things, what it would be like to be trapped inside a video game that goes on and on, pelting you with bright colors and zooming vehicles. Maybe you’ve thought, while endlessly watching “Speed Racer” reruns on DVD, that this half-hour cartoon really would translate nicely into a two-hours-plus big-screen feature. Maybe you’ve more than once sat transfixed by the wonder of an extra-gaudy floaty pen, thinking, “Why don’t movies look like this?” If so, dear reader, have I got a movie for you. Unfortunately, there isn’t much in it for the rest of us.
“Speed Racer,” the first post-”Matrix” writing/directing outing by Larry and Andy Wachowski, certainly has energy to burn; it’s the movie equivalent of a rambunctious preschool kid wildly scrawling, with an extra-large Crayola box, on a white wall. What it doesn’t have is much of a reason for being. (Watching it, I wondered whether a feature-length version of “Wacky Races” might be on the horizon.) True, the original “Speed Racer” TV series, created in Japan by Tatsuo Yoshida, has anime-fan cachet and a cult following, but the Wachowskis have done it no favors by stretching it out like a piece of Day-Glo taffy. I brought along a childhood fan of the series to the screening; he went home disappointed.
For the non-”Speed Racer” initiated: Speed Racer (Emile Hirsch, nicely cowlicked) is a person, and that is indeed his real name. His family, who runs a racecar-building business, includes older brother Rex Racer, who died in a car race long ago; Mom (Susan Sarandon) and Pops Racer (John Goodman); younger brother Spritle (Paulie Litt); and chimp Chim-Chim, whose status in the family seems to be somewhere between mascot and son. (No one ever explains why the Racers have a chimp, which I’m told is quite true to the original series. For the record, real-life chimps Willy and Kenzie do a bang-up job ghost whisperer dvd playing the ever-cheery Chim-Chim, but then …continue reading
Source: guardian.co.uk (Original Article)
What Sport Tells Us About Life, by Ed Smith (Penguin, £14.99)The captain of Middlesex County Cricket Club here offers a kind of Sportonomics. It’s a diverting jog around issues of psychology and statistics in football, boxing, baseball and so on, with more or less elaborated arguments for their wider resonance. The way to get out of a bad patch, Smith argues, is to play “with joy”, like an amateur in the best sense. Perhaps, he suggests, that lesson could be applied to education, business or politics. Quite how is left as an exercise to the reader. A discussion of the Pakistan ball-tampering controversy, on the other hand, widens out helpfully into a distinction between things we know are against the rules (speeding), and things we think are actually wrong (drunk driving).
Article continues
There is a very entertaining demonstration of how different schools of historians might have explained England’s Ashes victory in 2005, and interesting discussions of Zidane’s headbutt, the dourness of Italian football and the market economy in modern sport. Against the cliché that sportspeople are those who are good at everything, Smith argues persuasively: “Sport makes for different winners. It may well enfranchise children who are losing at the game of ‘real’ life.” Allergic to cricket, I none the less found it a humane and amiable read.People and the Sky: Our Ancestors and the Cosmos, by Anthony Aveni (Thames & Hudson, £18.95)Modern historians of astronomy can be patronising about the knowledge of the ancients, or the “imperfectly understood” folk astronomy of farmers or shepherds. Aveni, both an astronomer and an “archeoastronomer”, sets against such complacency a lavish exposition of the extraordinary sophistication of such skywatchers, from Mayan calendars and sidereally aligned Inca cities, to vivid instructions for making a calendar out of sudoku strategy sticks, or a Micronesian sea chart …continue reading
Source: Telegraph.co.uk (Original Article)
Post this story to:
del.icio.us
|
Digg
| Citibank Credit Cards
Newsvine
|
NowPublic
|
Reddit
|
Fark