Cormac McCarthy Chats With the Coen Brothers

July 14th, 2008, 1 Comment »

I haven’t seen No Country For Old Men. It never came to Gozo last year. We don’t have a TV at the moment, and I’m disinclined to watch such a renowned film on my laptop. I’ll wait until we build our theatre room along with the rest of the house, I guess.

Anyhow, while researching ebooks last week, I happened upon this short interview between Cormac McCarthy and the Coen Brothers. An interview with McCarthy is a rare thing (according to Wikipedia, he sat for his first ever TV interview in 2007!), and it’s an enjoyable read:

C.M. But Miller’s Crossing is in that category. I don’t want to embarrass you, but that’s just a very, very fine movie.

J.C. Eh, it’s just a damn rip-off.

C.M. No, I didn’t say it wasn’t a rip-off. I understand it’s a rip-off. I’m just saying it’s good.

It’s about eight months old, but if you missed it and liked the movie, it’s worth reading.

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Facebook, Quit Stealing My Time

June 18th, 2007, 6 Comments »

Schnitzel-loving Boris, Dave and Robert are all talking about the closed system that is Facebook. A few weeks back I called Facebook ‘an ad hoc engine for folding time’. It turns out that Facebook is also a massive time vacuum, sucking up my time by making me double the places I go to do basic stuff on the web.

As you might expect, I made a diagram (click for larger version):

FacebookVacuum

The solution is obvious, and not particularly new. Facebook needs to, upon request, push all the stuff in the right-hand column back over to the left-hand column. Unfortunately, all we’ve got at the moment are endless, useless messages saying “Bob’s written on your wall. Click this link to see what he wrote.”

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