John Allen’s book on Opus Dei actually came out a while ago, but the publisher just sent me a review copy.
I was pleased to get it because I like John Allen’s journalistic work, and I’d trust him more than most writers to handle the subject in an informed manner that is fair–neither uncritical nor overcritical.
I look forward to reading it. (When I can find the time!)
In the meanwhile,
GET THE BOOK.
CD sales are down, but online sales haven’t picked up the slack.
But here’s a piece of good news:
Sales of rap, which had provided the industry with a lifeboat in recent years, fell far more than the overall market last year with a drop of almost 21 percent, according to Nielsen SoundScan.
Maybe the culture is starting to turn away from rap.
I also found this interesting (EXCERPTS):
Aram Sinnreich, a media industry consultant at Radar Research in Los Angeles, said the CD format, introduced in the United States 24 years ago, is in its death throes. “Everyone in the industry thinks of this Christmas as the last big holiday season for CD sales,” Mr. Sinnreich said, “and then everything goes kaput.”
Some music executives say that dropping copy-restriction software, also known as digital-rights management, would stoke business at iTunes’ competitors and generate a surge in sales. Others predict it would have little impact, though they add that the labels squandered years on failed attempts to restrict digital music instead of converting more fans into paying consumers.
“They were so slow to react, and let things get totally out of hand,” said Russ Crupnick, a senior entertainment industry analyst at NPD, the research company. “They just missed the boat.”
“The U.S. health care system ranks last compared with five other nations on measures of quality, access, efficiency, equity, and outcomes,” the non-profit group, which studies health care issues, said in a statement.
Canada rates second worst out of the six overall. Germany scored highest, followed by Britain, Australia and New Zealand.
“The United States is not getting value for the money that is spent on health care,” Commonwealth Fund president Karen Davis said in a telephone interview.
The group has consistently found that the United States, the only one of the six nations that does not provide universal health care, scores more poorly than the others on many measures of health care.
Link:
Report: U.S. health care expensive, inefficient: America ranks last among six countries on key measures, group finds
Michael Moore is, well, not my favorite person.
BUT I WAS STUNNED TO READ THIS ACCOUNT OF HOW HE GOES ABOUT HIS FILMMAKING.
Abortions, pornography and contraceptives will be banned in the new Florida town of Ave Maria, which has begun to take shape on former vegetable farms 90 miles northwest of Miami.
Tom Monaghan, the founder of the Domino’s Pizza chain, has stirred protests from civil rights activists by declaring that Ave Maria’s pharmacies will not be allowed to sell condoms or birth control pills. The town’s cable television network will carry no X-rated channels.
The town will be centred around a 100-foot tall oratory and the first Catholic university to be built in America for 40 years. The university’s president, Nicholas J Healy, has said future students should “help rebuild the city of God” in a country suffering from “catastrophic cultural collapse.”
That’s the question being asked by David Boaz over at TCS Daily.
He notes that there have, actually, been some anti-Communist movies, but not nearly as many as there have been anti-Nazi movies, and the Communists killed far more people than the Nazis, thus creating innumerable dramatic human situations that could be illuminated through film.
I’ve got two thoughts on why there haven’t been as many anti-Communist movies:
1) Hollywood tends to the left of the political spectrum. It’s cultural/political ethos is socialistic to begin with, and there is less of a desire on filmmakers’ parts to go after Communists than people (like Nazis) that they perceive to be on the opposite end of the political spectrum (though, in actuality, the Nazi party was the National Socialist party).
2) The Cold War never got hot. What made Naziism so riveting and enduring an evil in film is the fact that a whole generation of Americans went off to fight it. Communism was a looming menace, but since we and the Russians (or the Chinese) never squared off in an actual world war, that looming menace never turned into the generation-defining experience that World War II was. If Stalin massacred more civilians than Hitler did (let’s suppose; I haven’t checked the numbers), we never had to fight Stalin, and that kept him from becoming an archtypal villain equivalent to Hitler in cultural stature. (Though he has clearly been the first runner-up in that category.)
So those are my theories.
What’re yours?
Jimmy’s 3D Mars Man post reminded me of those 3D posters that were popular for a while back in the ’80s/’90s. They usually resembled a cross between the white noise on your TV screen and some kind of LSD trip (at least, from what I hear). It was said that if you looked at the posters in just the right way (kind of crossing your eyes) that a 3D image would emerge.
It took me a while to actually make one of these work, but after that it got easier, and eventually I could make out the 3D image within a few seconds. Not that the actual image was anything to write home about… they were really sort of like crude paper cut-outs, but they were there, if you looked hard. It was a moderately interesting effect.
WARNING! ANALOGY ALERT! Barely thought-out spiritual musings ahead…
It occurred to me that in some ways, these posters are like the way we might approach religious faith. I heard from numbers of people I trusted that these posters really worked, and that there was something – some kind of image not immediately visible – "inside" them. There was the apparent image (which could look pretty chaotic), and then there was the image within the image. Thing is, to make out the deeper image took a little work. It did not just leap off the paper. To even give the thing a decent effort required a certain amount of trust. It took me quite a while, looking at a number of different images, before I could see what others already saw. If I hadn’t kept at it, I would never have seen that deeper dimension.
Now, that reminded me of another sorta-related thing which I found very cool;
Akira Inaka creates 3D images of pictures from the Hubble Space Telescope. These images work in much the same way as the 3D posters I mentioned above. It might take some experimentation, but they really do work, and the effect on some of the images is pretty striking, giving the viewer a little sense of the spatial depth that is lacking in regular photos of galaxies and nebulae and other neat stuff. Inaka gives instructions on the site on how to make the things work. One note of advice; if you do this for too long, you might run into some serious eye fatigue, and maybe a headache. If you start to notice that happening, just quit and come back to the site later.
I found the site by following a link on the Hubble Heritage website (which I’ve plugged before). The site offers a convenient way to look at some very beautiful images of the cosmos. The captions can be as fascinating to read as the images are to see. The vast distances, mind-boggling dimensions and sheer energy represented by some of these photos can be truly staggering.
Pretty SCARY, eh keeds?! Ooooohh…
It’s true!
NOTE: Fortunately, it seems to be white kryptonite, which is only deadly to plants, so our planet’s Kryptonian defender seems to be safe. . . . for the moment!
Every few years one network or another has a period when they’re doing really entertaining cartoons. Back in the ’90s, Nickelodeon had such a run when they were first doing Rugrats (before they got stale) and Doug. Then it was kind of slim pickins until they came up with SpongeBob SquarePants and The Fairly Oddparents (though Hey, Arnold! and The Wild Thornberrys could be good).
Kids WB (back when they were around) also had such a run with Animaniacs, Pinky & the Brain, Freakazoid, and Earthworm Jim.
And Cartoon Network had one with Johnny Bravo, Dexter’s Lab, Powerpuff Girls, Courage the Cowardly Dog, and Ed, Edd, n Eddy.
I don’t know what it is, but these runs of good cartoons always seem to peter out after a couple three years and then you just have to wait until someone else starts doing good TV animation again.
Filling the gap between such little golden ages is, of course, why God created DVDs, but man hasn’t been doing his part up to now: The vast majority of these cartoons have never been released on DVD! (Yet another crime against the humanities!)
I was delighted to learn, therefore, that though it’s not yet out on DVD the first season of Johnny Bravo has been released on iTunes!
WOO-HOO!
I downloaded it immediately.
My guess is that they’re testing the waters to see how well it does before possibly putting it out on DVD–or at least expanding the number of whole-season releases of Cartoon Network’s classic toons.
For those who may not know, Johnny Bravo is the biggest, dumbest, most narcissistic, body-building blond Elvis-clone that the world has ever seen.
The first season of the show also includes the immortal episode "Bravo Doobie Doo," in which Johnny meets the Mystery Inc. gang from Scooby Doo, and we get a double-franchise satire.
There are some really funny bits in that one.
A favorite moment: Velma’s glasses are knocked off in a chase scene, and she’s groping around on the floor for them saying, "My glasses! My glasses! I CAN’T SEE without my glasses!" then the camera pans over and we see that Johnny’s ever-present shades have been knocked off, too, and he’s crying, "My glasses! My glasses! I CAN’T BE SEEN without my glasses!"
Classic!
Amazing what you can do with the passive voice.
I just hope they release the rest of the series.
I can’t wait to watch the episode where Johnny runs for mayor against a ham sandwich and the ham sandwich is ahead in the polls.
Hey, Tim Jones, here (not Jimmy).
I did a series of posts on the nature of art a long time ago, which I left unfinished, due to the fact that I had not thought through all the implications of my earlier assumptions and categories of thought, especially in regard to the place of non-objective art ("abstract" art that depicts no recognizable subject).
I have been doing more thinking on this recently, and though I am still not prepared to draw any huge, sweeping conclusions, I have clarified my thought considerably. I will be completing that series of art posts soon, but in the meanwhile, I stumbled on an interesting art blog, where the author and I have been engaging in a discussion about non-objective art that some readers might want to scan.
Basically, I’m not convinced, yet, that non-objective art is really capable of substantive communication, but I am open to argument.
The subject came up as a result of an upcoming opportunity I have to meet and view the work of artist Makoto Fujimura (above). I have heard a great deal about his work, and have been reading some of his articles and interviews, trying to get some insight into his understanding of the function of art, and why he prefers to work in such a highly abstract way. Fujimura is very open about his Christian faith, and his work has found increasing recognition in the secular art community. He speaks with great conviction both about the Christian faith and about the power of art, and so I look forward to meeting him and seeing his work. I will post about his exhibit afterward.
Visit The Aesthetic Elevator blog. In addition to our discussion, he addresses the chocolate Jesus sculpture of recent infamy. My take on it? Flippant, empty and of no consequence, artistic or sociological. Calculated to gin up publicity by means of controversy… *yawn*. Anyone could think up a project like this every twenty minutes.
A reader writes:
I wanted to share this
movie I made. Its a family film, 5 minutes in length and was my first
attempt for "On The lot" by Steven Spielberg. My oldest son loved filming
it, so if you have a chance take a look. Its a general audience film. Thanks
again and God Bless.
I did indeed take a look at the fim, and thought folks (especially parents!) would get a big kick out of it. I’d love to embed it here on the blog, but unfortunately Mr. Spielberg doesn’t seem to have gotten with the YouTube generation yet, so . . .