Ghost Rider teaser trailer [ via jwz ]
It was the time of the Sun Dance and the Big Tractor Pull.
– Mary Margaret Road-Grader, by Howard Waldrop is online at Strange Horizons (and has been for years?). Go read it. I had a collection of Waldrop’s stories once, which I must have loaned to someone — you know, one of those You must read this!
loans, except the other guy forgets all about it, and you forget who that other guy was — and I regret it to this day. Post-Apocalyptic survivalism with Communist Disney animatronic robots, telekinetic Sumo wrestlers, reincarnated Pharohs, Israelis traveling in time to enact Elders of Zion conspiracies, be-bop, dinosaurs, movie monsters and nostalgia – fittingly that I remembered Waldrop because he’s just reviewed King Kong for the Locus site).
In this story (like in his cool but unfocused novel Them Bones), Waldrop writes Indians. Like in Little Big Man, Waldrop’s Indians combine movie Western noble savageness with an endearing down-to-earthness. I love them.
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Unicode Resources
Alan Wood’s Unicode Resources is a web site about Unicode and multilingual support in HTML, fonts, Web browsers and other applications
. Good stuff for figuring out why you get question marks or empty boxes on web pages.
King Kong is a Big Movie for a Big Ape. Has this movie been compared yet to one of those painstakingly constructed reproductions of cathedrals built by obsessives from matchsticks and macaroni? It’s like that, except that Peter Jackson has built his devotional reconstruction out of the finest pixels and the glow of their reflection in Naomi Watts’ dewy eyes. And he’s lavished visual riches and attention on every fragment of the original film’s story, from the 1930s scene-setting to the giant bugs.
Now, despite the cramped seating (the Seven Stars Mall at Herzelia; Cinema City sucks at internet orders), the film swept me up like a dream. But three hours was too much for the rabble of kids and venomous plebes (Ars’im). So at the most heartbreaking moment of the story, some ass yells, Die already!
at the screen.
Now, maybe my phobia of crowds wore my fragile anger management faculities, or perhaps I got too excited by watching Kong wrestle tyranosaurs, but at that moment, I would gladly have cleared out the cinema with a tommy gun, moved to a more comfortable seat on row 9, and ordered the projectionist to start the film from the top, so I could see it without interruptions.
Hmm. Except for the audience, I think my only complaint with the film is Adrien Brody. He’s a nice guy and all, but, two-fisted playwright and love interest? uh, no.
Oh, and in Jackson’s version, the reason Kong falls for Ann Darrow is the same reason Jessica Rabbit falls for Roger: She makes him laugh.
Seed: Girls Gone Wild … for Monkeys
The researchers found that while straight men are only aroused by females of the human variety, straight women are equally aroused by all human sexual activity, including lesbian, heterosexual and homosexual male sex, and at least somewhat aroused by nonhuman sex.
[via kottke]
This build on research done earlier (by some of the same people) which showed that a man’s sexual arousal correlates very well with his sexual orientation, but women (both gay and straight) get aroused by pretty much any old thing (One presumes that it isn’t an artifact of their testing equipment…)
I found the commentary by the female psychologist at the end of the article entertaining: she’s clearly trying to explain why women’s reactions are normal, and wondering why men react differently:
Barbara Bartlik, a psychiatry professor at Cornell, said she was not alarmed by the women’s response to the nonhuman stimuli.
“I don’t know why this has surprised everybody that women get aroused watching humans and animals,” she says. “Animals, because of the way they function in an uninhibited manner…can be very arousing to look at when they copulate.”
However, Bartlik was surprised that the men did not have the same response as the women.
“I would wonder if the men weren’t concerned about being labeled as homosexual or perverse by being interested in these things, and therefore their erections were inhibited,” she said.
Uh, right. Men restrain their erections because of their stronger inhibitions. Clearly, a statement made by someone who was never on the other end of the penis.
I wonder if male arousal is focused on the actual act of sex, while females arousal is tied to the concept of sex. Men think about having sex, women think about sex in the abstract.
Women. Abstract Thinking.
Now that’s bizzare.