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Friday, March 29th, 2013
| Time | Event | ||
| 1:35a | Cory speaking in Bradford tomorrow Here's details of the public event I'm doing in Bradford while I'm in town for Eastercon: I'll be at the 1in12 Club, as part of an event called "Can Technology Save the City?" that runs from 12-6. I'll be there around 1430h. Hope you'll come out! 
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| 5:07a | Last week to subscribe to Mark's 3rd Quarterly.co mailing  Quarterly.co is a subscription service for wonderful things. People can subscribe to a curator (such as Joel Johnson, Veronica Belmont, Tim Ferriss, Joshua Foer, Gretchen Rubin and others) and pay $25 per quarter to receive a box of surprise items selected by the curator. My first mailing included a number of "fantastic plastic" gadgets (shown above). My second mailing contained a length of EL wire, a tiny microscope, and a black light flashlight. My third mailing is still a secret, but I'm really excited about it. Here's a hint -- it requires a flame to enjoy. Mark's Quarterly.co subscription
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| 5:23a | How the amazing UK cover for Rapture of the Nerds came to be
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| 5:46a | Zombie houses: 300K+ in America
Zombie foreclosures: 300,000 'undead' properties stalk ex-owners (Image: Foreclosure, a Creative Commons Attribution (2.0) image from juggernautco's photostream)
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| 6:25a | Sri Lanka: crowd led by Buddhist monks attacks Muslim warehouse in Colombo In Sri Lanka's capital, Colombo, a group of Buddhist monks led a crowd of hundreds in an attack on "Fashion Bug," a Muslim-owned clothing warehouse. "The attack comes as hard-line Buddhist groups step up a campaign against the lifestyles of Muslims," according to the BBC. "Five or six" journalists covering the incident were injured, including one cameraman who needed stitches. [BBC News, thanks Antinous] 
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| 6:32a | Bill Gold, the master of the movie poster It’s rare that any of us gets to start at the top: Brandon Crawford’s first hit for the San Francisco Giants was a grand slam, Tatum O’Neal’s first movie, Paper Moon, netted her an Oscar for best supporting actress at the tender age of 10. It happens, but not that often. Rarer still are those who start on top and stay there (for the record, I have great hopes for Crawford). But a charmed life on the high plateau describes the career of Bill Gold, who designed a couple of thousand movie posters for Warner Bros. over the course of 70 years. Now 92 and retired for most of the 21st century except when it came to creating posters for Clint Eastwood films, Gold began his encampment at Warners with a movie that’s synonymous with the word “classic.” “Casablanca was the first thing I worked on,” Gold says when I spoke with him over the phone recently. “Yankee Doodle Dandy followed right after that. They were almost simultaneous.” Not bad, to be 21 and have a film starring Humphrey Bogart and another starring James Cagney drop into your lap. But that sort of thing would happen a lot to Gold. Which is not to say that everything he touched turned instantly to his namesake metal. Like the rest of us, he had to work at it. “We had finished the poster,” he recalls of the first iteration of Casablanca, which featured a full-color bust of Bogart in the foreground, wearing his trademark fedora and overcoat, with Ingrid Bergman, Paul Henreid and the rest of the cast rendered in a smoky pink behind him. “Warner Bros. looked at it for a while, and after few days they said, ‘Is there anything we can do to make this more exciting? More dramatic? It just kind of sits there.’ And I said, ‘Well, maybe. Let me take it back to the office.’ I brought it back the next day; I had put a gun in his hand.” Gold had left the gun out, he says, because Bogart didn’t use a gun in the movie, “until the end,” he reminds me, “in the airport scene when he shoots the Nazi. I didn’t want to reveal that, or the relationship between the two stars. I didn’t want people to know there was a secret love affair until they came to see the film.” In the years that followed, Gold would put a lot of guns in the hands of a lot of leading men, especially Clint Eastwood, for whom he designed some 40 posters. Drafted in 1942, Gold spent part of World War II in the Air Force Photography Unit before returning to Warners in 1946, pretty much picking up where he left off. By 1948, he was the art director of the studio’s in-house advertising department, and during the 1950s, he created posters for a string of who’s-who of directors, from Alfred Hitchcock (Strangers on a Train, Dial M For Murder, The Wrong Man) and Elia Kazan ( A Streetcar Named Desire, Baby Doll, East of Eden) to George Stevens (Giant) and John Ford (Mister Roberts). Some of these posters were traditionally Hollywood in their style, such as the cheery, red-white-and-blue composition for Mister Roberts, while others, such as his poster for The Prince and the Showgirl starring Marilyn Monroe and Laurence Olivier, exude Mid-century Modern cool.
After Warners pulled the plug on its in-house ad unit in 1959, Gold started his own shop, with Warners as a major client. Unlike contemporaries such as Saul Bass (“We worked together in the early ’60s, I don’t remember what year it was.”), who was known for his distinctive, graphic approach, Gold was something of a chameleon, pushing his posters into realms that had more to do with the nature of the film than his personal aesthetic. Thus, Splendor in the Grass, starring Natalie Wood and Warren Beatty, used typography and photography, respectively, to tell and sensationalize the film’s lurid story, while Gold’s decision to hire illustrator Bob Peak to create the central image for My Fair Lady perfectly suited the romantic sentimentality of that George Cukor chestnut, which was the second of six films Gold worked on that won the Academy Award for best picture. Gold most famous collaboration with Peak came in 1967 for the musical Camelot. While Peak is often credited as the poster’s designer, it was Gold who decided Peak was the right artist to execute the narrative collage the cinematic spectacle demanded. It was also Gold who directed Peak to take his inspiration from Gustav Klimt’s “The Kiss,” which resulted in the illustration’s metallic hues, as well as the secondary image of Guinevere with her head bent back in the arms of Lancelot. An even more fruitful partnership began in 1971. “The head of advertising at Warner Bros. came to me and said, ‘You know, Clint Eastwood is looking for somebody to do the campaign on Dirty Harry. I’d like to bring your work to his attention. The producer, Don Siegel, is going to be there. You’ll get to meet them.’ Well, I didn’t get to meet Clint that time, but they took the campaign we did for Dirty Harry to Clint’s office, and Don Siegel was there. Now Siegel was famous for hating everything, but he looked at the campaign and said, ‘Don’t change a thing. I love it.’” Apparently Gold had long since learned his lesson about leading men and guns. In fact, one poster for the campaign actually put Eastwood’s character, Harry Callahan, a bit to the side and behind his .44 Magnum. “Don was a very creative guy,” Gold says. “He knew what he was looking at, he knew where the possibilities were. After that, they wanted me on everything.” As it turned out, the first-time’s-the-charm serendipity of Dirty Harry was a bit of a fluke. “In the case of Clint’s movies, he’s the trademark. But each time you do a campaign, it requires a different kind of idea. One of the reasons, I think, why Clint wanted me on every movie he did was that I always gave him alternatives, sometimes 20 or 30 of them. He totally enjoyed that.”
While the impact of the Dirty Harry poster was driven by its emphatic graphic design, as was Gold’s black-and-white composition for The Exorcist, other movie campaigns lent themselves to illustrations similar in approach, if not style, to those Bob Peak had created for My Fair Lady and Camelot. For these, Gold turned to another illustrator, Richard Amsel, who worked with Gold on posters for McCabe and Mrs. Miller, The Life and Times of Judge Roy Bean and The Sting, to name a few. Gold also worked with airbrush artist Philip Castle, who did the sinister illustration of the Malcolm McDowell character, Alex, on the poster for Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange. For any given movie campaign, numerous posters were produced. For the domestic release of Deliverance, Gold delivered an image of two arms rising out of the water, holding a shotgun aimed at three men in a canoe. The tagline on the poster read, “What didhappen on the Cahulawassee River?” It worked for U.S. audiences, but what about Europeans? For those potential viewers, Gold stuck with the tagline and the canoers, but had them emerging from a wide-open eyeball, giving the plot suggested by the tagline a sense of surrealism the American version lacked. To hear Gold tell it, the rest of the century was an almost endless stream of tight deadlines, followed by the inevitable revisions, for films as diverse as Alien and Unforgiven. Little wonder that these days, the details have begun to blur. “They all blend into one montage in my mind,” he says now with a laugh, “one big, horrible montage.” Still, Gold knows he’s had it good, having the opportunity to form an enduring relationship with Eastwood, as well as the chance to meet true Hollywood royalty like Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall. “Sure, I met them both,” he remarks casually, adding that it wasn’t like they were best of friends, or anything. “I was just a poster guy,” he says. “They didn’t know how many posters I was going to do.”
For the last word about Bill Gold, check out Christopher Frayling’s 450-page Bill Gold: Posterworks (Amazon), which was published in 2010 by Reel Art Press as a limited edition of 1,500 copies, each weighing more than 16 pounds. On DVD, The Best of Warner Bros. 100 Film Collection, 2013, includes a poster featuring a collage of 100 of Bill Gold’s most iconic Warner Bros. posters. And on April 2, the studio’s latest DVD set, The Best of Warner Bros. 20 Film Collection: Romance, will be released. The collection includes only three pre-Bill Gold titles (Gone With the Wind is one of them), plus gems like Casablanca, Rebel Without a Cause and The Bodyguard.
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| 6:51a | How children become "cannon fodder" for Mexican drug cartels Wired's Danger Room blog points to this new report [PDF] by the NGO International Crisis Group, which details how Mexican drug cartels recruit and coerce kids as young as 11 years old to kill. Narcos “have recruited thousands of street gang members, school drop-outs and unskilled workers” over the last decade, and the report claims “cartel bosses will treat the young killers as cannon fodder, throwing them into suicidal attacks on security forces.” [Wired.com] 
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| 6:59a | Kickstarter to save the brilliant zine store READING FRENZY Reading Frenzy, the astoundingly great zine store in Portland, OR, lost its lease. They need to raise $50K to reopen. The store's founder, Chloe Eudaly, writes,
This is one of the best bookstores I've ever visited. The world needs it! Chloe is a brilliant bookseller, too, and as she points out, if not for the rotten luck of losing a lease, the business would be humming along merrily, and also spinning off more projects like its zine-creator's makerspace, the Independent Publishing Resource Center.
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| 7:29a | In photographs, North Korea "leaks" plan to attack US  A map of the USA's West Coast, with caption, “Plan to hit US mainland.” Photos in North Korea's state-run newspaper, taken at an "emergency meeting" Friday morning with Kim Jong-Eun and military advisors, show the leader signing an order for North Korea's strategic rocket forces to be on standby to fire at US targets. Behind him, there are large-scale maps and diagrams of the spots he'd attack. [Telegraph] The KCNA feed includes an item describing the "photo session with the participants in the meeting of information workers of the whole army," who "enthusiastically welcomed [Kim Jong-Un] with rousing cheers of 'hurrah!,' looking up to him, who is leading the all-out action for defending the sovereignty of the country and the dignity of the nation to victory after making a final decision to demonstrate the resolute will of the KPA with practical military actions to cope with the grave situation where the U.S. anti-DPRK hostile acts have reached the brink of a nuclear war."
They're really into run-on sentences over there. The release continues:
Acknowledging their enthusiastic cheers, he extended a warm salute to all information workers who are registering great achievements in improving and strengthening the ideological work in the KPA, bearing deep in mind the noble mission and duty they assumed before the times and the revolution. 
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| 7:44a | Laotian all-women bomb clearance team, "most dangerous job in world," to speak in U.S.  In the photo above: "Manixia Thor (left) and a member of her all women’s bomb clearance team head into the field to clear unexploded ordnance in the Lao countryside." In April, Manixia is on a speakers' tour in the US, focused on the urgent need for funding of bomb clearance and survivor assistance efforts in Laos.
As a bomb clearance technician and the leader of an all-women’s bomb clearance team in Laos, Manixia Thor has one of the most dangerous jobs in the world. Unexploded ordnance removal is perilous and the days are long, but she knows that her work clearing bombs will make Laos safer for her two-year-old son and for future generations. For nearly ten years, millions of bombs rained down on the tiny country of Laos, making it the most heavily bombed country per capita in history. The bombings ended 40 years ago this year, but more than 20,000 Laotians have been killed or injured by decades-old ordnance that litter the otherwise beautiful landscape. With support from the U.S. Department of State, Manixia and Thoummy Silamphan, a Laotian bomb accident survivor and victim assistance advocate, will be touring the United States on a speakers tour with the U.S.-based group LEGACIES OF WAR to raise awareness about the unexploded ordnance issue in Laos and the urgent need for further funding of clearance and survivor assistance efforts.Dates and details here. (thanks, James Hathaway)
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| 7:49a | Groups across America call on Congress to fix DMCA Boing Boing is a co-signatory to an open letter (PDF) to the House and Senate Judiciary Committees, calling on them to fix the Digital Millennium Copyright Act's ban on jailbreaking and unlocking your devices. This laudable effort was spearheaded by Public Knowledge:
Public Knowledge Asks Congress for a Permanent Fix to Cell Phone Unlocking
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| 8:08a | Watch the latest video posts in our Boing Boing video archives  We've gathered fresh video for you to surf and enjoy on the Boing Boing video page. The latest finds for your viewing pleasure include:
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| 9:12a | When US money was nice to look at
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| 9:17a | Grouching about Google Andrew Leonard has a tick-tock in Salon explaining how and when Google lost its cool. "Google Reader is gone. Google is banning ad-blocking apps. Google Alert doesn't work. The Google backlash is on." [SALON] 
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| 9:40a | Listen to Neverwhere free online, then see it in person Neil Gaiman's Neverwhere is one of my favorite novels; now you can listen to it free online on BBC Radio 4 and enjoy it in person at Robert Kauzlarik's stage production, which opens next month in LA after runs in Chicago and elsewhere. The story of a good-hearted Scotsman who finds a dreamlike alternative London Underground, it was originally released as a BBC TV show and an accompanying bestseller. "It's hard to put into words how magical it is to have the chance to step into the skin of a character you've loved for years," says Paula Rhodes, who plays Door, Richard's connection to the underworld, in the new production. " ... Door is a wonderful mixture of strength and fragility and I'm absolutely in love with her and her world." The official site has tix and cinemagraphs. 
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| 9:47a | Airlines should charge passengers by weight, says economist Reuters: "Bhatta put together three models for what he called 'pay as you weigh airline pricing.' The first would charge passengers according to how much they and their baggage weighed. It would set a rate for pounds (kg) per passenger so that someone weighing 130 pounds (59 kg) would pay half the fare of 260-pound (118-kg) person." 
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| 9:54a | Florida polo tycoon has difficulty adopting his 42-year-old girlfriend in order to keep assets away A Florida polo tycoon named John Goodman has hit a hitch in his plan to adopt his 42-year-old girlfriend so that his kids and ex-wife won't be able to keep him from writing her into his will. The court says he failed to disclose important information, but there's no word on whether that will have have any bearing on his manslaughter appeal stemming from his conviction for a drunken hit-and-run killing in 2010, or on his apparent plan to keep his assets from the family of the dead man by transferring them to his girlfriend/daughter. What an enterprising gentleman Mr Goodman appears to be.
What's the Point of Being a Polo Tycoon If You Can't Adopt Your Girlfriend?
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| 9:54a | Eating out makes your children overweight The Center for Science in the Public Interest reports that most childrens' meals offered in U.S. restaurant chains contain too many calories, salt and fat: "Most chains seem stuck in a time warp, serving up the same old meals based on chicken nuggets, burgers, macaroni and cheese, fries, and soda," wrote CSPI nutrition policy director Margo G. Wootan.
Enjoy their delicious, salty report on how eating out encourages childhood obesity. [cspinet.org, PDF]
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| 10:02a | Apple's security problems At The Verge, Tim Carmody reports on Apple's seeming inability to get to grips with account security.
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| 10:10a | Ouya, $100 Android game console, ships to early backers  Ouya, the $100 game console, is already shipping to Kickstarter backers who helped the Android-based project get going last year. For the rest of us, there's an official retail release date: June 4. Bloomberg: About 55 games will be available with today’s release, according to [Ouya founder Julie] Uhrman. The cube-shaped player uses a version of Android that requires developers to create applications and games just for the device. Games must be free, offer a free trial or have free add-ons, the company said. ... Ouya plans to keep 30 percent of game sales, with developers getting the rest. You can preorder an Ouya at Amazon and at the official store.
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| 11:03a | Gas masks for babies, 1940 GAS DRILL AT A LONDON HOSPITAL: GAS MASKS FOR BABIES ARE TESTED, ENGLAND, 1940 (via Kadrey)
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| 12:03p | More evidence linking fracking wastewater disposal to earthquakes Here at BoingBoing, we've talked before about the fact that earthquakes can be triggered by things humans do — everything from building particularly large reservoir to, most likely, injecting wastewater from fracking operations into underground wells. After a 5.7 earthquake hit Oklahoma in 2011, researchers there began gathering evidence that is making the link between rumbling earth and oil-and-gas discovery a lot stronger. At Mother Jones, Michael Behar has a story about this research and and how it is (and isn't) affecting the industry. 
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| 12:09p | Minneapolis SkepTech conference, coming April 5/6 Next week, I'll be speaking at the SkepTech Conference, a new gathering put together by University of Minnesota students. The lineup features some great folks from the science and skeptic communities, including bloggers PZ Myers and Hemant Mehta, and Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal cartoonist Zach Weinersmith. Registration is free. Come check it out! 
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| 12:10p | Zealous preacher bingo card Zealous Preacher Bingo (via Wil Wheaton)
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| 12:21p | Do GMOs yield more food? The answer is in the semantics
Today, on Twitter, I learned something new and interesting from environmental reporter Paul Voosen. Over the years, I've run into reports (like this one from the Union of Concerned Scientists) showing that genetically modified crops — i.e. Roundup Ready corn and soybeans, which is really the stuff we're talking about most of the time in these situations — don't increase intrinsic yields of those crops. But I've also seen decent-looking data that seemed to suggest exactly the opposite. So what gives? Turns out, this is largely an issue of terminology. "Intrinsic yield" means something very specific, and something different from what most of us think when we hear the word "yield". Because of this, both those sets of data that I've seen can be right, at the same time. The UCS is correct that GMOs plants don't seem to produce higher intrinsic yields — that is, there aren't more kernels per cob. But the data that shows GMO plants can produce more than conventionally bred plants is also correct, because that's looking at a bigger picture of "yield" — one that takes into account the fact that it's easier to protect those plants against pests. Fewer pests = fewer lost plants = a higher bushel-per-acre yield. Even if the plants, themselves, aren't yielding more. Jon Foley, a scientist who is also the director of The University of Minnesota's Institute on the Environment agreed with this distinction between "yield" and "intrinsic yield". He also told me that the overall yield data on GM crops isn't as simple as "yes, it produces higher yields" or "no, it doesn't". For instance, he pointed to a paper published this February in Nature Biotechnology which shows that GM corn sometimes out-produces conventionally bred corn and sometimes under-produces in comparison. The key is in the environmental context. The years where GM corn was producing similar or lower yields than conventionally bred corn were average years, when it came to factors like the weather, disease, and pests. It was in bad years that you can see a significant, positive, difference for GM corn. When the situation was bad, GM corn had greater yields. I'm not really posting this information because of the GM thing — although I suspect that will get more people to pay attention. What I think is most interesting about this is that it handily illustrates something I've seen in a lot of different conflicts based around science. When you're getting conflicting information, one of the best ways to start figuring out who is right is to look at the language and the semantics. Often, everybody's right. They're just right in different ways. Unless you look closely, you won't see the difference. Image: Corn-JollyRoger-8343, a Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike (2.0) image from graibeard's photostream 
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| 12:30p | Read the previously unpublished letters of Charles Darwin More than 1000 letters written between Charles Darwin and botanist Joseph Dalton Hooker, including 300 never before published, are now available free online for your reading and research pleasure. 
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| 12:38p | Why can't we prevent asteroid strikes? Asteroids: Yet more evidence that (as a society) we aren't very good at prioritizing preventative measures against long-term risks. 
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| 12:50p | It's tin foil hats, all the way down In 2010, scientists published a paper on conspiracist ideation as it applied to both climate change and the moon landing. This year, the published a second paper — about the conspiracy theories that sprung up in response to their previous research. 
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| 12:53p | IKEA-style vibrator LELO, a Swedish sex-toy company, has produced an IKEA-style, assemble-it-yourself vibrator called GӒSM (what else?) that comes with its own Allen key.
Meet GӒSM, LELO’s Cleanest, Greenest Vibe (via The Mary Sue)
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| 1:05p | Bollywood Easter: Images of Christ in '70s poster art from India
My brother Carl Hamm (Twitter), who is a club and radio DJ and a collector of obscure but excellent global stuff, shares the images in this post and says:
There's a long tradition of Indian poster art which was probably at its height in the 1970s but goes back many many years before then. Youve already seen vivid and colorful posters for Hindi films. Some of the studios/artists here include: JB KHANNA AND CO (Madras aka Chennai) "Jesus life," S.J BRIJBASI AND SONS "Holy Family", and STUDIO SVARAS, "Jesus with arms outstretched."
(Source: random piles of stuff on the internet. Artists unknown, alas.)
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| 1:17p | Chocolate Bunny family (photo)  "Lindt Bunny Family," a photo shared in the Boing Boing Flickr pool by Paul J. "Leave them alone, and they multiply."
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| 1:36p | Lessons learned from YouTube's $300M "Original Channel" fund Hank was one of the recipients of the YouTube $300M "Original Channel" fund, and recounts some of his lessons learned:
There's lots more there, but the tl;dr up there really nails it, and seems broadly applicable to other types of online creative endeavors. Lessons Learned from YouTube’s $300M Hole (via Wil Wheaton)
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| 1:37p | US Border Patrol uses horses to secure Mexican border  Erin Siegal "Immigration enforcement and drug smuggling continue to be top priorities for the Department of Homeland Security, and the Border Patrol's budget has swelled accordingly, increasing from just $262,647 in 1990 to over $3.5 million dollars in the 2012 fiscal year," reports photojournalist Erin Siegal of ABC/Univision, in Mexico. "They've added more agents, more technology, and higher fences. But they've also got horses. "Coyotes" (human-smugglers) and narcotraffickers have moved further into mountain and desert terrain, in response to law enforcement's more aggressive patrolling of urban areas. And in remote areas, horses help. Read the full essay (with photos) here. [ABC News]
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| 1:38p | Interview with Wrong director Quentin Dupieux ADVERTISEMENT The following is a sponsored post:
There’s nothing quite right about this hilariously delirious clip from Wrong, which hits theaters throughout the country this Friday and is already available on iTunes, featuring a suspicious gardner explaining the impossible overnight transformation of an everyday Californian palm tree to an evergreen. Its one of the many, many things wrong with Wrong from director Quentin Dupieux. After directing just a mere handful of features, Dupieux (aka international electro-musician Mr. Oizo) has already established himself as one of the modern cinema’s foremost fearless surrealists who refuses to play by the rules. The Cannes Film Festival selected Rubber about a serial homicidal tire (yes, a car tire), the viral short and soon-to-be feature Wrong Cops starring Marilyn Manson and now his latest comedic brainbomb Wrong all seem to be constructs of the same wholly original and strange deadpan daymare. With a laser-sharp eye, a pranksterish wit and the airy rhythm of a ballet dancer, this filmmaker has zapped a fully-formed artistic vision into our collective space. Wrong follows “Reno 911”’s Jack Plotnick after he loses his beloved dog and encounters a barrage of bizarro human roadblocks in his journey including a feces-hunting pet detective (Steve Little from "Eastbound And Down") and an ponytailed, face-scarred guru (a flat-out brilliant William Fichtner). This surreal comedy guides you through a fascinating and hallucinatory universe to which you’ll want to book repeat accommodations. In this interview, Dupieux chats about Wrong, his unique brand of nightmarish comedy, the construction an unconscious dimension and working with Plotnick. Wrong is the story of a man who loses his dog: Paul. Is this an excuse for talking about something else? QD: I love dogs and I am fascinated by the relationship between people and dogs. I get along with dogs better than I do with people! Wrong is an homage to this special love between people and dogs! The story about the character and his dog is the real subject of the film. In writing, you could think that it was some sort of pretext, but I soon realized that there was something poignant about the story of this guy Dolph who loses his dog. I talked about it with the lead actor, Jack Plotnick, and it didn’t take long for us to agree that it’s something you have to experience. The kind of telepathic exercises with his dog, the scenes where he cries in his car because his dog might be dead, all of that could have just been funny but I felt that the potential tragic side of those moments had to be fully explored. I had a very basic desire to see Dolph find his dog and to feel a sincere joy. At the same time, we had to avoid the slightly depressing aspect of a single man with his dog. That’s why he lives in a rather chic house: he has taste, there are lots of pictures on his mantle. You feel that he has a real life. What was the idea that led you to start writing Wrong? I wrote Wrong using the same method as I did for my other movies: in a rather random way. Once I have laid down all the random elements, I link them together to create an overall logic. I try not to have too much control. I reject steering the audience as part of the director’s role. On the contrary, I like the uncertainty that a film can generate. I refuse to take on the role of the director who controls the spectator. Instead, I like this idea of anxiety and uneasiness that the film generates. What a person should be thinking about this or that scene, is a problem for each viewer, not mine. The science of directing the viewers is not my cup of tea. There are already a lot of directors who do that very well. I prefer to create my own domain, which is to create the sense of unease. The film is sometimes very nerve-wracking. As you’re watching, you say to yourself that it could veer off into a complete nightmare or pure comedy. You’re never sure what to expect. The film is built on a bed of anxiety, through these scenes when characters don’t really understand each other. It’s the disappearance of the dog that guided my writing and I hope that plotline stays in people’s minds. I’m pleased to have forged an alliance between comedy and the anxiety linked to the missing dog. From the hero’s point of view, the situation is atrocious, especially when he picks up horrible snippets of information, like the burned-out van. The trap for a movie built on misunderstanding is that if everything is possible, nothing is important. The dog plotline anchors us to something tangible. How do you achieve an overall coherence while preserving this unconscious dimension? Once I have a certain number of ideas, I process them almost mathematically in order to find the overall logic. At the beginning, though, I love not understanding where an idea comes from. The process is the fruit of a lot of hard work. The short films I made when I was 18 were guided only by chance. They lack any logic. Reaching greater maturity, finding the cement that holds ideas together, took time. I sort through parameters; I check everything, like a pilot before take-off. The mere fact that I believe it gives the movie solidity. I’m my first audience. You don’t want to make it your style? No, I find artists who have a style boring. It’s too easy. When you know how to do something, I find it rather lazy to do it again. The filming of Rubber was very exciting because I was discovering my own method, finding my own grammar by inventing it. Thanks also to Jack Plotnick, who seems inhabited by his character’s quest. It was important not to play it cynically. In fact, it worked out quite the opposite. In some takes, Jack was crying too much because his character’s tragedy was so raw for him. Jack Plotnick is unforgettable in the role.
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| 1:38p | A baby can be a funeral for a friendship  Photo: AlexSutula, Shutterstock Jeff Simmermon, who writes funny essays and does funny standup, has a great new piece up on his blog. Read the rest: Doin’ It All For A Baby That Can’t Love Me Back [andiamnotlying.com]. 
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| 2:57p | Toronto Mayor Rob Ford about to lose his job coaching high-school football? Critics of Rob Ford, Toronto's laughable bumblefuck of a mayor, will tell you that at least he's good at teaching high-school football (maybe the only thing he truly enjoys). So it's newsworthy that the schools for which he coaches are considering firing him, and he won't show up to meetings to discuss his misconduct.
Rob Ford: Mayor cancels meeting with Toronto Catholic board to discuss his coaching future (Thanks, Gord!)
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| 3:43p | ATM skimming comes to non-ATM payment terminals in train stations, etc
This reminds me a little of the evolution of payphones -- the armadillos of the device world! -- and the look-alike COCOTS (customer-owned coin-operated telephones) that presented very soft targets if you could scry through their camouflage. Cash Claws, Fake Fascias & Tampered Tickets
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| 5:13p | Group whose Wikipedia entry was deleted for non-notability threatens lawsuit against Wikipedian who Benjamin Mako Hill writes, "Last year, I participated in a discussion on Wikipedia that led to the deletion of an article about the "Institute for Cultural Diplomacy." Because I edit Wikipedia using my real name, the ICD was able to track me down. Over the last month or so, they threated me with legal action and have now gotten their lawyers involved. I've documented the whole sad saga on my blog. I think the issue raises some important concerns about Wikipedia in general."
The Institute for Cultural Diplomacy and Wikipedia
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| 5:53p | Little Mermaid tights (via The Mary Sue)
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| 7:01p | Maine Zumba instructor pleads guilty to prostitution charges  A Zumba aerobics dance instructor who ran a prostitution business on the side (while collecting welfare assistance) pleaded guilty in a Portland, ME court today. Alexis Wright's male business partner has been convicted of co-running the sex business with her. The plea deal means there will be no trial in which jurors would have had to sit through video the small-town sex worker secretly shot of her sex acts with johns. Prosecutors will recommend 10 months in prison for her, 20 days in jail for her partner. CBS News: "There was plenty of electronic evidence, because the two kept in touch via text and email and because Wright videotaped the clients and Strong watched live via Skype. Videos showed them speaking openly of ledgers, payments and scheduling." (Reuters, CBS; thumbnail: Portland Press Herald, John Ewing)
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| 8:05p | KISS/Hello Kitty TV show in development
So, on the one hand, this is a delightfully weird popculture trainwreck. On the other hand, Gene Simmons is a misogynist asshole, and I can't get all that enthusiastic about his executive producer role in an entertainment project aimed at little girls. Exclusive: Hello Kitty and Kiss team up for a TV series [USA Today/Whitney Matheson] (Thanks, Prezombie!)
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I'm really impressed with the 
Designing book covers is the best job in the goddamn world. If you're lucky, like we are at Amazing15, you get to work with incredibly talented and lovely people, on some of the most fiendishly interesting projects you can't even begin to imagine without the aid of viralised nootropics. 
Books which can manipulate reality aren't easy to design covers for. When you start a new project there's generally two initial ways in: 1) you step into it and find a moment, a scene, an element and pin your cover design on that or 2) you step back and look at the overall picture - try and find the theme. But what do you do when that picture seems to keep changing? The answer is, you keep chasing it. And what happens when there's other people involved in the process, each of whom has their *own* take on the book, a take which fluctuates as wildly as your own? The answer is you chase even harder and you don't look back. 
The first ideas we turned in were turned down. They looked non-fiction (
We chased harder. We imagined a bright spectrum filtered through a fractured pattern, clean fonts with nothing to hide. We got close. We kept the chaos subtle, a radiation of binary noise printed in spot varnish so you can only see it in angled light but you can feel it all the time under your fingertips. We got close and we caught it (
From the Imperial War Museum in London, a couple of incredible photos of nurses testing out infant gas-masks: "Three nurses carry babies cocooned in baby gas respirators down the corridor of a London hospital during a gas drill. Note the carrying handle on the respirator used to carry the baby by the nurse in the foreground." 
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