November 28th, 2008, 4 Comments »
I was reading a review of Milk, the new Sean Penn vehicle in this week’s Georgia Straight. Its a biopic about Harvey Milk, the first openly gay man to be elected to public office in California. In the third paragraph, there’s a rather conspicuous error (currently replicated in the online edition–the boldface is mine):
At 128 minutes, the film suffers from the usual biopic compression, and there’s a little too much foreshadowing and thematic repetition, especially for a director as willfully experimental as Gus Van Sant. (As an expository device, our troubled hero narrates into a Dictaphone near the end of his life.) If anything, the maker of My Own Private Idaho, working from a fairy conventional script by Dustin Lance Black, could have splashed out a little more in his re-creation of the Castro district of the butterfly-collared ’70s.
I guess “dairy conventional script” might have also worked. In any case, the early returns for the film are quite good. I’ll probably go see it, despite my dislike for Penn’s rather broad performance style.
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April 24th, 2008, 9 Comments »
I’ve been to Moscone Center in San Francisco a few times. I only learned a couple of weeks ago that it was named after George Moscone, former mayor of San Francisco. Along with city supervisor Harvey Milk, he was killed by a former, disgruntled employee.
I was talking to somebody about Moscone at Web 2.0 Expo yesterday. During our conversation, I wondered out loud whether a Canadian government official had ever been assassinated on domestic soil. I did a little searching, and couldn’t find anything. Can you think of anybody?
UPDATE: D’oh. How could I forget the October Crisis? Thanks to Andre for reminding me. Thinking back, I don’t think I ever studied this bit of history in high school. And I took no Canadian history courses in university. Still, I hang my head in shame, eh?
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March 29th, 2007, 13 Comments »
This morning I read over on DeSmogBlog (one of our clients), that Shaky Town is banning plastic bags:
The city’s Department of the Environment said San Francisco uses 181 million plastic grocery bags annually. Plans dating back a decade to encourage recycling of the bags have largely failed, with shoppers returning just one percent of bags, said department spokesman Mark Westland.
Mirkarimi said the ban would save 450,000 gallons of oil a year and remove the need to send 1,400 tons of debris now sent annually to landfills. The new rules would, however, allow recyclable plastic bags, which are not widely used today.
This was of particular interest to me because Ireland implemented a plastic bag tax while I lived there, back in 2002. People grumbled about the 15 cents they had to pay for each bag, but it was a raging success. There’s been a 90% reduction in usage:
The tax of 15 cents per bag was introduced five months ago in an attempt to curb litter, and the improvement had been immediate and “plain to see”, said Environment Minister Martin Cullen. He said that the 3.5 million euros in extra revenue raised so far would be spent on environmental projects.
For Dubliners, it was as much a litter problem as an environmental issue. Frankly, it had the messiest downtown I’ve ever visited in the developed world, and plastic bags were a major culprit. When I go back, I certain notice far fewer witches’ knickers in the trees.
UPDATE: In related news, Metaefficient reports that IKEA is going to start charging for plastic bags. Strong work, you Swedes.
UPDATE #2: Via Neatorama, Ramadhani “The Arusha Cleaner” Juma lives in Tanzania and makes dolls out of the discarded plastic bags he collects.
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