Thinking Chaos, Thinking Fences

06 September 2002

Ritual in Film Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome was on TV, and I turned it on just in time to catch the great monologue that one of the children has. They've manufactured this great mythology about a nuclear strike and a crashed plane, all in a quaint Aussie accent. It's full of great, incorrect terms like "pocaclypse" and "highscrapers". Created ritual in film would make for an excellent Masters thesis for somebody. I was reminded of this scene while watching the underwhelming Reign of Fire, another post-apocalyptic film. In this scene, a couple of the adults are entertaining the children with a sort of serialized play. What play do they choose? Empire Strikes Back, of course. If I got twenty strangers together from different parts of the world, what story would we collectively know better than Star Wars? 10:29:35 PM    comment []

LPs on the Scanner I haven't been around many teenagers lately, but I suspect my use of the term "album" to refer to CDs probably dates me. Maybe not, but I imagine them all sitting around saying "dude, have you heard the new Korn CD?" But to me, they're albums. We bought our first CD player when I was maybe ten or eleven. The first five CDs we bought were Dire Straits' Money for Nothing and a fantastic 4-CD Eric Clapton box set. My father was a big audophile and had (and possibly still has) an enormous record collection. If he still has his record collection, I could use an algorithm this smart guy has devised that reads music from the scanned image of a vinyl record and creates WAV files. How cool is that? The quality isn't very good so far, but in technological development, that's generally not a big problem (see also television). 10:06:39 PM    comment []