Three years ago I took a film class at a community college. One of the assignments was to make a three minute short in super 8 (talk about retro). I didn’t have too much free time so I had to think of something that could be carried out in a single afternoon. I came up with the idea of showing the creative process of a talentless poet as he tries to compose a poem at the beach . As the protagonist writes and discards pages, a voiceover describes his thoughts:
THE BEACH
I come to the beach in search of inspiration
and all I find is sand and wind.
At least it’s cheaper than alcohol and drugs
and beautiful, like the stomach of a cow.
If I could swim to Japan
I don’t think I’d do it, no.
Choosing not to swim is power
just like biting your own thumb.
If I ignore my ignorance,
will I become a wise man?
All I know is I know nothing
but two things: Jack and Shit.
The ocean is like a woman, only it’s completely different:
the sea is cold, women are warm. And also they have breasts.
If I could touch the sky, I’d be sure to wear gloves.
Dirt is not good, neither are fingerprints.
The sea is like the beach and the wind is like life.
Life is not like the wind but very much like the sea,
although the wind is more like the beach than the sea is like life.
Damn right.
Confucius used to say:
“never wash your face with the blood of your enemies”
Boy, was he right. Even if time does not heal all
wounds.
Archibald, Benjamin and Cody are spies. Archibald’s mission is to intercept and decipher the secret messages that Benjamin sends Xorg, his boss. Benjamin must do the same with the ones Cody mails to Yuri, his commander. Cody, in turn, has to capture and decode the transmissions from Archibald to his leader, Zargon.
Xorg, Yuri and Zargon are actually the same person: a bureaucrat at the Department of Labor whose task is to create a job program with the purpose of reducing unemployment. At this very moment he is working on the details of a new mission to give the three men once they discover the truth:
Archibald will be in charge of setting up a cardboard recycling plant whose output will be used by Benjamin to make boxes with the purpose of transporting binders with documentation for other spies. Cody will command an army of recyclers who will gather the used boxes and sell them back to Archibald.
Meanwhile, the Ministry of Health is working on a new smart and lethal virus that will only infect the unemployed.
Today I was reminiscing about those old cameras that required to manually wind the film after taking a picture. If one forgot to do it, two pictures would appear superimposed upon developing the film.
I wondered what it would look like if I superimposed an arbitrary number of pictures and wrote a small program based on libjpeg to do it. I used to superimpose 11 pictures taken on a day when I went sailing with some coworkers. Here’s the result (click on the picture to see the original 1600×1200 version).
According to the weapons of mass media, Saddam is like an evil Elvis. Saddam has lookalikes. Saddam has left the building. Saddam was seen in a Baghdad market.
Coming next year, the first convention of Saddam impersonators in Las Vegas.
Last night God spoke to me in my sleep.
“You must know one thing about me, ” He said.
“I’m listening, oh powerful maker” I said anxiously.
“It turns out that I do not exist.”
“That does not make any sense. If you don’t exist, how can you be talking to me right now?”
He looked at me with an expression of contempt. “Isn’t that obvious?” he asked.
So I thought. If he was telling the truth, he did not exist. Therefore, he was a figment of my imagination. On the other hand, he could be lying. That opens up several possibilities:
1) He was not God but he did exist. Poser.
2) He was God and He did exist but He was just fucking with me.
3) He didn’t exist and wasn’t God, in which case it was just me lying to myself. Someone must have put something in the burrito I had last night.
In any case, the answer to the question is “No, it’s not obvious”.
The Lord works in mysterious ways.
I just saw on MSNBC that the US government is trying to find a link between Saddam Hussein and Osama Bin Laden. I decided it was my duty to help. What could I do?
I remembered the Oracle of Bacon, a tool that shows you the degrees of separation between any actor and Kevin Bacon. I thought, if I can link both Osama and Saddam with Kevin Bacon, there is some food for thought.
As it turns out, both Osama and Saddam have a “Bacon number” of 3!
Osama bin Laden was in Naqoyqatsi (2002) with Paul McCartney
Paul McCartney was in Mayor of the Sunset Strip (2003) with Courtney Love
Courtney Love was in Trapped (2002) with Kevin Bacon
and
Saddam Hussein was in Saddam Hussein: Defying the World – A Visual Biography (1990) with George Bush
George Bush was in Last Party, The (1993) with Laura Dern
Laura Dern was in Novocaine (2001) with Kevin Bacon
So there are only five degrees of separation between Saddam and Osama. Could they possibly be closer? I noticed that the same site provides this tool that links any two stars. Sure enough:
Osama bin Laden was in Naqoyqatsi (2002) with Julia Louis-Dreyfus
Julia Louis-Dreyfus was in Soul Man (1986) with Wallace Langham
Wallace Langham was in Uncle Saddam (2000) with Saddam Hussein
Time to nuke Iraq!
“T on Tea, moronic artwork”.
Created in a Japanese restaurant in Chicago, August 2002.
