Category: Films and movies

Whether big-studio or independent, celluloid or digital, anything about movies

iTunes has lost its mind

Not only is Apple’s iTunes application constantly crashing, stealing focus, or crashing my entire computer – it just erased all my podcasts and iTunes U files for no clear reason. This is especially maddening for someone who is careful to catalog their media well.

Given that I was about to go on a long bus journey, this is unbelievably annoying. All of a sudden, university courses I was in the middle of listening to are just gone. Podcast collections that I had assembled with some care are deleted. All my audiobooks have vanished as though they never were. Much of the content I had in there cannot simply be re-downloaded.

It is all extremely frustrating.

Shaving methods

I have previously mentioned Put This On as an interesting fashion-themed blog. It seems worth pointing out that their fourth video ‘Grooming‘ is full of what I consider bad advice.

They suggest that the proper way to shave is to use shaving soap, a badger hair brush, and an old-fashioned razor. This is dangerous, takes forever, and involves terrorizing badgers.

You are much better off getting some shaving oil (like the kind sold by King of Shaves) and a modern razor like the Mach3. Shaving oil doesn’t hide your skin, so you are less likely to cut yourself, and a couple of drops per day is all that is required. It is quick, cheap, safe, and vegan-friendly.

Republican speculation, via psychic powers

The other night, talking with my friend Jessica, it occurred to me that it could be possible to set up a kind of internet sensation based around the upcoming American presidential election (how early they become ‘upcoming’!) and ‘psychic’ claims of the sort that made an octopus famous during the World Cup. All you would need is pictures of all the plausible Republican contenders and some mechanism for deciding who among them will win on the basis of supposed supernatural powers. An octopus could work. Another idea would be a very young baby, the cuter the better.

In order to draw things out and give advertisers time to start hocking their wares alongside your videos, you could follow a process of elimination, in which candidates are rejected rather than selected. Naturally, you would want to rig the selections so as to produce the most total viewership. A good idea would be to do something a bit controversial at the outset – like reject Sarah Palin. Then, start working through the no-hope candidates as you are building momentum. Rigging the outcomes would be incredibly easy: just keep making videos until you get one where your preferred selection is made.

By the end of the Republican primary competition, when there are only a few plausible candidates left in the race, there would be a reasonable chance that you could simply guess correctly, cementing the reputation of your chosen psychic vessel as the real deal, at least in the eyes of a credulous few. Naturally, you would then want to make a prediction on the actual election. Chances are, you will be able to guess correctly on the basis of sophisticated polling of the Nate Silver variety, along with an assessment of key economic indicators.

If you wanted to keep exploiting the gullibility that seems widespread within the general public, you could use your advertising earnings as seed money to start a cult.

The King’s Speech and unconventional teachers

The King’s Speech incorporates a trope that I think has been pretty well mined in Hollywood: the teacher who doesn’t follow ordinary rules of politeness. Think of Robin Williams’ character in Dead Poets Society. The language teacher in The King’s Speech differs from his peers in that he insists on treating the king as an equal, without the excessive deference other teachers showed. It is suggested that this attitude at least partly explains how he has more success than other teachers.

This also reminds me of the psychiatrist played by Robin Williams in Good Will Hunting. The brilliant protagonist has no respect for the ordinary psychiatrists. Indeed, he treats them with contempt. By contrast, the psychiatrist who isn’t afraid to be abrupt and rude with him proves to be the one who he ends up respecting, and who ends up having some success with him. Another example is the brilliant but caustic Dr. Gregory House.

There is certainly some truth to the trope. Excessive deference and politeness can produce impotence, in that people hesitate to raise even rather important issues with people who they see as their clear superiors.