A recent visit to the English countryside took me to Norfolk, in particular the hamlets of Happisburgh, Beccles and Great Yarmouth. It’s a magical area, in places part Fellini movie and part David Lynch fantasy.
Stormy skies over the Happisburg Lighthouse predict an uncertain future for the village, which is slowly collapsing into the waiting maw of the sea below, as measures put in place in 1953 to protect the area from floods and erosion started failing in the 1980s.
Photographer and part-time rustic David Koppel is a frequent visitor to the area.
Car wrecks and rusting tractors and caravans patiently wait for the sea to claim them. Houses are simply abandoned, as home owners are expected to finance any demolition projects.
All attempts at stopping the sea from reclaiming Happisburgh
have failed, although the Cliff House tea shop is still open… for now. 2005 will probably be the last season this landmark serves afternoon tea. A plastic chef keeps a watchful eye over the Cliff House tea shop. Will he be at the bottom of the ocean this time next year?
In a stunning display of the type of arrogance that fans the flames of the anti-European British tabloid press, the European Commission has proposed that some services delivered over the Net in Europe would have to charge VAT at the rate of the consumer country. According to EUbusiness, the “aim is to clamp down on traders taking advantage of low VAT rates in some EU Member States”.
Come again? Isn’t the freedom to take advantage of lower costs (which include taxation) one of the central tenets of the free movement of goods and services between European Union member countries? And aren’t member countries free to set the rate of VAT they see fit, guided by free market forces?
The reality of the situation is that innovative technologies like voice-over-IP telephony are being offered by companies like Skype, based in Luxembourg. Lumbering giant telcos, the dinosaurs of the 80s, cannot compete with this, so the Commission are making it easier on them by stifling technological innovation.
The proposed change would also present web developers with a logistical nightmare. Where we are currently able to calculate the total cost of an online transaction by applying a single rate of VAT, we will now have to store a whole ream of different VAT rates, many of which may also vary between types of products and services for different countries.
A logistical nightmare for the small business, but a Eurocrat’s wet dream.
On June 23,1980 the New Yorker published an essay by the late, great film critic Pauline Kael, entitled Why Are Movies So Bad? or, The Numbers. A quarter of a century ago, Kael described the sorry state of cinema in Hollywood with brutal honesty, a sorry state that has only become worse. Kael pointed out that the people making movies, the studio bosses and top executives, had no specific love for or experience of making movies. They were (and are) astute businesspeople, who know how to turn a product into profit. Studios would rather opt for a mediocre “sure thing” than a possible hit, and the numbers game rules all creative decisions.
Will the situation ever improve? Perhaps. Hollywood studios have turned cinema lovers into consumers, and consumers in an ostensibly free market will simply take their business elsewhere. In this case, “elsewhere” means file swapping and DVD ripping. Movie buffs will find the experience they want in a back catalogue somewhere, or in someone else’s private collection. Studios will start making losses, the business model will change, and market forces will enforce a return to classic values. Or not. Time will tell.
Pauline Kael’s collection of essays entitled 5001 Nights at the Movies is an indispensible companion for the lover of good cinema. For an example of her writing style and approach to movies, try this review of A Clockwork Orange.
Wow. Saying anything more about this online video project would simply be an injustice. Go check it out.
AlterNet on George Bush, the London bombings and the general war on terror:
And yet there’s something so painfully childlike in the spectacle of him. Here, after all, is a 59 year-old who loves to appear in front of massed troops, saying gloriously encouraging and pugnacious things while being hoo-ah-ed—and almost invariably he makes such appearances dressed in some custom-made military jacket with “commander in chief” specially stitched across his heart, just as he landed on the deck of the USS Abraham Lincoln back in May 2003 in a Navy pilot’s outfit. Who could imagine Abe himself, that most civilian of wartime presidents, or Franklin D. Roosevelt, or Dwight D. Eisenhower, a real general, wearing such G.I. Joe-style play outfits?
Ahh, the slow, sweet descent into madness that is open discussion forums on the Internet. In this particular discussion, a lonely chappie named cyclotouriste starts out looking for a female cycling buddy, with an eye on dinner and dance before committing to anything. The discussions sort of go downhill from there, ending in cyclotouriste claiming to have cracked the mysteries surrounding the 9/11 attacks on America.
Most people able to drive a car know that driving schools don’t teach you what you really need to know. Now, like sex, you can learn everything you need to know about traffic safety on the Internet.
Future technology my ass. Special forces on an unknown planet without air cover or the wherewithall to communicate via satellites in geo-stationary orbit? Small tactical nuclear devices can blow the space bugs to shit, yet the troops rely on suspiciously twentieth century small arms fire for combat missions? Hell, why not blow the whole planet out of orbit, as this appears to have been the basic idea from the start? Ham-handed acting, flimsy plot, basically a teen movie set in space rather than during summer break. American Pie without the jokes, the nudity, or the comparatively intellectual cinematographic depth. Poor Robert Heinlein, if he could only see what Paul Verhoeven did to his book…
I would rate this a 5 / 10, if only for the reasonably decent special effects. Rethea says I missed the point, and Verhoeven deserves a 10 / 10 for a brilliant anti-war commentary. But come on… Denise Richards as gung-ho fighter pilot and starship captain? With those eyebrows?
Buy this at Amazon.
Why? Because everybody loves a Nazi sex toy story, that’s why.
The world’s first sex doll – or ”gynoid” – was built in 1941 by a team of craftsmen from Germany’s Hygiene Museum Dresden. [...] The ”field-hygienic project” was an initiative of Reichsführer SS Heinrich Himmler, who regarded the doll as a ”counterbalance” (or regulating effect) for the sexual drive of his stormtroopers. In one of his letters, dated 20.11.1940 he mentions the ”unnessessary losses” the Wehrmacht had suffered in France, inflicted by street prostitutes.
Is this true? Well, Borghild.de says so. And the German tabloid newspaper Bild corroborates this, albeit quoting an unnamed website, in all probability Borghild.de. Which appears to be largely deactivated at the moment, which doesn’t help with any fact-checking.
And the good people at Merriam-Webster don’t know what a ”gynoid” is, although they helpfully suggest that it might be a “ganoid” I’m after: something with “fish scales consisting of bone and an outer shiny layer resembling enamel”. Those Nazis were kinkier than you thought, it would appear.
Still, Nazi sex toy story, hey?
Because you can just never, ever have enough references to octopus porn on a blog.
