Matt Ruff's Blog, page 51

The Cove

Well, that was harrowing.

Gotta say, the most disturbing thing about this documentary for me was not the images of the dolphin slaughter (although it is clear that the Japanese did not consult with Temple Grandin about humane killing methods). It's the revelation of how pointless the whole business is. Turns out dolphin meat is so high in mercury that no one in their right mind would want to eat the stuff. So the fishermen have got to come up with creative ways of dumping it -- like labeling i...

Your camera may be telling the world where you are

An article in today's Times points out a surprising (to me) security vulnerability in smartphone and other GPS-equipped cameras: They mark images with invisible but easily readable* "geotags" pinpointing where (and when) the photo was taken. Take a picture with an iPhone or a Droid inside your house, post it on the Web, and you've just shared your home address with the Internet. Combine that picture with a blog post about your vacation plans, and, well... you didn't really need that TV or ste...

A Pavlovian response

From today's New York Times review of Paul Greenberg's Four Fish: "And cod? As Greenberg writes, it fueled the American economy in its early days, and good parts of the European one, too... But industrial fishing of these tremendous and once common animals, by fishermen the world over, has led to terribly depleted stocks and closed fishing grounds — and, Greenberg reports, to a turn toward wild Alaskan pollock to fill our desire for firm, white-fleshed fish to make fish sticks..."

Me, to Lisa,...

Wookieleaks

Heh.

The Authors Speak interview

FYI, an interview with yours truly just went up on The Authors Speak blog.

A question occasioned by last night's viewing of Creation

Do pet orangutans share chimpanzees' history of turning on and attacking their keepers, or is that more strictly a chimp thing? (I'm not planning on getting one, but I did wonder whether Paul Bettany might be putting his fingers at risk for his art.)

A good if sad movie by the way. Watching Darwin take the water cure made me very glad for modern medicine.

Chloe

Atom Egoyan remakes Fatal Attraction, minus the boiling bunny and with Julianne Moore and Amanda Seyfried in the Michael Douglas and Glenn Close roles.

What's weird is if you cut the last ten minutes and maybe one or two scenes in the middle it becomes a different kind of movie, one more in line with the opening narration. Which makes me wonder whether Egoyan or the people paying the bills decided to change genres in the middle of production.

William Gibson tweets about certain technical aspects of Inception

"The extent to which Inception didn't need to be made in 3D is total."

Roger Ebert on Inception's detractors

Worth a read. (My own thoughts on the film here.)

[ Via jaylake ]

Inception

A pleasantly trippy Borges love-child of a movie. Lisa and I both really enjoyed it and both want to see it again.

Comparisons to The Matrix, while understandable, aren't really apt. There's tons of action but at heart this isn't really an action movie (or a caper film). Best way I can think to describe is that it's like a type of anxiety dream I sometimes have where I'm in a strange city trying to get to a meeting I'm already late for, only to be continually sidetracked. Such dreams involve a...