The holiness of the multiplication table

...didn't know this film existed! I definitely have to get a copy :)



Inherit the Wind

The joy of torturing telemarketers

Call: 13.28

Me: (pick up the phone) .......
Telemarketer: Hell-ooooowwww goood morniiiing ♫ (really)
Me:.........
Telemarketer: good mooorniiing?
Me:.........
Telemarketer: Hell-ooooowwww goood morniiiing ♫
Me:.........
Telemarketer: good mooorniiing?
Me:.........

Me:.........
Telemarketer: (hangs up)

Call: 13:32

Me: (pick up the phone) .......
Telemarketer: Hell-ooooowwww goood morniiiing ♫ (really)
Me:.........
Telemarketer: good mooorniiing?
Me:.........
Telemarketer: Hell-ooooowwww goood morniiiing ♫
Me:.........
Telemarketer: good mooorniiing?
Me:.........
Me:.........
Telemarketer: (hangs up)

Aaah... I've got a new hobby.

I must be a bad person. About a year ago, I made a huge discovery. I had been getting recurrent phonecalls from a health insurance company, which I kept politely rejecting because, well, I'm a very polite person. However, one of these calls had to be made at 9.00 AM, in July. Let me tell you something about myself. I'm Insomniac. Ca-pi-ta-lized. I have serious problems sleeping, and heck, when it is the summer time and I finally can catch up with my sleep and sleeping late, waking me up for a stupid promotion is like feeding a Gremlin after 12. A Very Bad Idea.

So when I picked up the phone and I got the usual telemarketer yapping about their usual healthcare insurance thing, I just hanged up on her. No more "sorry, not interested", no more "sorry, I have to go", no more "sorry, could you please delete me from your list", no more "sorry, I asked you FIVE TIMES to delete me from your list". I just hanged up on her. And, hey, it felt GREAT.


Enter Telefónica, the Company We Love to Hate. This company has a very peculiar notion of public relations which includes systematically pestering cellphone owners of all sorts using a very scientific method, i.e. calling, randomly, all six-digit numbers starting by 6 and checking if there is a person on the other side of the line. Then they ask you for your name, and then they spam you with whichever stupendous new offer they have concocted on their evil dome.

The weekly meeting of the marketing section.

Enter 1485. I've been getting some calls (which, given my experience, I never answer) from these guys and I decided to do a little research to find out what they've been up to lately. Turns out, there might not even be a person behind the calls, but a sort of calling machine to more effectively pester cellphone users. The fun really begins when you pick up the phone and... no one is there. They're just checking if you might be so that next time a real person all-suffering telemarketer can call.

Well. Turns out I haven't enjoyed a dumb telephone call so much since those long lost summer days of making collect calls to foreign country switchboards.

Looking forward to the next one XD.

The Hitler Channel

The Boy in Striped Pijamas (2008)

(...) Loss of urgency, loss of documentary conviction, and loss of recognition, offset by a net gain in jokes about the Hitler Channel: these are the outcomes we may expect as the pace of Holocaust film production continues. These will be the consequences of an end-of-the-year schedule that brings Defiance, Valkyrie, The Boy in the Striped Pajamas, The Reader, Adam Resurrected, and Good—because only the most determined optimist would expect all these movies to aspire to the condition of Yad Vashem.
(...)

Nextbook: Lest We Remember , by Stuart Klawans

Reading the article above, I couldn't help but wish someone in Spain wrote something about our very own Franco channel. It seems to me that all nations have their own traumas/phobias, and if the American one is the Holocaust/Hitler, the Spanish one is the Civil War/Franco. As the author goes about a moratory on Holocaust pictures, I also wish there was a moratory in Spain about the historical period of 1936-1975. Of course that would do away with half of my country's filmography. IMDB lists 119 titles, and even though some of them are not Spanish, and even though a few Spanish films have not been listed, it gives you an idea of how exasperatingly exhausting the whole thing is.

Los Girasoles Ciegos (2008)

It has nothing to do with serious historical documentation and research (I have absolutely nothing again our Law of Historical Memory,explained here), not even with doing serious documentaries (although there isn't exactly a lack of those, either). I'm not even saying that all these movies aren't worth watching. Some of them are even good. But as Richard Corliss argues in Defiance: Beyond Holo-kitsch (through which I got the link to Lest We Remember), very often these movies don't make us remember these events and think about the consequences of the Holocaust/Spanish Civil War [/insert historical trauma here], but they merely become a suitable background to guilt-trip the audience and the critics, thus distracting them from how much some of these movies...er... actually suck. And I quote(because I love sounding academic)

It has become not just a topic but a genre, one that, at its most reductive, exploits the awful melodrama of that chapter in history to badger viewers, intimidate critics, elicit easy tears, and serve as a back-patting machine for serioso directors.

Defiance: Beyond Holo-kitsch,by Richard Corliss

Defiance (2009)

Ok, so maybe not all these films are even bad, and probably not every director means all this harm consciously, but it sems that that overflow of Holocaust and Spanish Civil War films makes us miss the forest for the trees. They become the artistic equivalent of Godwin's Law, i.e.:

Godwin's Law (also known as Godwin's Rule of Nazi Analogies) is an adage formulated by Mike Godwin in 1990. The law states:

"As a Usenet discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches one."

Godwin's Law,by the Almighty Wikipedia.

Similarly, we can probably calculate artistic stagnation by merely looking at how many Trauma movies are opening this weekend. Tragedy should not be yawn-not-another-one-please. Maybe we could restrict ourselves as audiences (we've got the power!) to one Holocaust and one Civil War movie a year?

consequences of gay marriage

couldn't let it pass.





more music charts

...and here's an online comic that will knock your socks off

I believe I've said it before --it always pays off to read Nalo Hopkinson's blog. This time it was a wonderful recommendation, the wonderful Bayou by Jeremy Love and Patrick Morgan. I like to think of it as a cross between Toni Morrison and Hayao Miyazaki, and I'm really looking forward to the second instalment. I had no idea you could read comics this good online, so Zuda, the home website in itself is quite a discovery.

I leave you with a teaser ;)

Bayou by Jeremy Love and Patrick Morgan

So many mistresses, so little time...

I've just finished the second season of The Tudors, and it's been exactly the same guilty pleasure as watching its first season or any season of Rome. It's great fun to see the beautiful costumes and the hyperbolic acting (John Rhys-Meyers, please cool it, will you). At the same time, however, you just want to smack them on the head with the Encyclopaedia Britannica, for all the historical inaccuracies they throw in just because. Margaret Tudor, especially, must be rolling in her grave for being merged with her sister and being portrayed like such a superficial $"·$%. As for the Atia of Rome, if there ever was such a thing as vengeful Roman ghost, I'm sure she will be there, holding a devout matronly rolling pin. (Of course, anyway, nothing will ever, ever, beat Braveheart becoming the father of Edward II for the sake of having Sophie Marceau squeezed in and having something of a happy end).

I'm not going Taliban on these people. Heck you have to film a movie or do a TV show, and I suppose nobody expects total accuracy when you have a limited budget and a limited time to stuff all the stories in. But if there is something that people like Simon Schama has proven with stuff like A History of Britain is that there are enough good stories in the history books to make such distorsions not terribly necessary. The problem, I think, is that there might be less boobs around, which seems to be the whole point of The Tudors and Rome at times. But oh well, being fun to watch as they are, all you can say is, bless Wikipedia for at least a few people in the audience will bother to check the facts out of simple curiosity, and that's good. The show becomes quite interactive that way -- at least for me. I'm becoming a complete expert on royal mistresses, who are all quite a curious bunch, what with all their ambitions, beauty (or lack thereof) and, more importantly, not giving a flying %&$%% about society's conventions. My favorite, so far, is Charles II's Nell Gwyn, if nothing else for this beautiful, beautiful scene, taken straight from the wikipedia article on her:

Nell Gwynn was one day passing through the streets of Oxford in her coach, when the mob, mistaking her for her rival, the Duchess of Portsmouth, commenced hooting and loading her with every opprobrious epithet. Putting her head out of the coach window, "Good people", she said, smiling, "you are mistaken; I am the Protestant whore"

Oh how I wish The Tudors got spin-offed all the way to The Stuarts! In any case, I'll certainly watch the third season of The Tudors next year, even though I'll miss the great Natalie Dormer as Anne Boleyn --she didn't look a thing like the historical Anne but hey she definitely can act. A lot of the weight of the show fell on her shapely shoulders and I worry that the actress they've chosen for Jane Seymour -- and, well, the character of Jane Seymour itself-- will not be enough to fill the space of Anne's severed head. Unless they go on to create a completely different Jane out of nowhere (see above), or dispatch her in a couple of episodes. And on with more interesting stories, such as When Good Portraits Happen to Ugly People.


Ps. One day, I hope, someone in Spain will do The Austrias. Now that's fun stuff for at least seven seasons.

you'd think NASA is getting some kind of publicity money from the Galactica crew...

Kara Thrace, anyone?

A 400 year old supernova captured by infrared and X-ray telescopes. This is sooooo going straight to my computer's desktop :)

NASA - A Vivid View

Ps. Yeah, I don't know how I'm going to wait another month... sigh.