things i think i think

Thirteen out of twenty-four. Could be worse.

Short categories and sound editing/mixing killed me on this one as I imagine it did for most. I thought Avatar would take more of the technical awards but The Hurt Locker (perhaps rightfully) claimed those as well. Congratulations to Bigelow of course, and to The Hurt Locker for a well-deserved Best Picture Oscar in a relatively weak year. It’s still a powerful film nevertheless.

Broadcast itself was a shit-show disaster. But would we expect any less from Hollywood?

Here they are — these aren’t my choices for who should win, but rather what will (hopefully) win my Oscar pool:

• Leading Actor: Jeff Bridges, ‘Crazy Heart’
• Supporting Actor: Christoph Waltz, ‘Inglourious Basterds’
• Leading Actress: Sandra Bullock, ‘The Blind Side’
• Supporting Actress: Mo’Nique, ‘Precious’
• Animated Feature: ‘Up’
• Art Direction: ‘Sherlock Holmes’
• Cinematography: ‘The White Ribbon’
• Costume Design: ‘The Young Victoria’
• Directing: ‘The Hurt Locker’
• Documentary Feature: ‘The Cove’
• Documentary Short: ‘China’s Unnatural Disaster: The Tears of the Sichuan Province’
• Film Editing: ‘The Hurt Locker’
• Foreign Language Film: ‘The White Ribbon’
• Makeup: ‘Star Trek’
• Original Score: ‘Up’
• Original Song: ‘The Weary Kind’ from ‘Crazy Heart’
• Short Film Animated: ‘A Matter of Loaf and Death’
• Short Film Live Action: ‘Instead of Abracadabra’
• Sound Editing: ‘Avatar’
• Sound Mixing: ‘Avatar’
• Visual Effects: ‘Avatar’
• Screenplay Adapted: ‘Up In The Air’
• Screenplay Original: ‘Inglourious Basterds’
• Best Picture: ‘Avatar’

So there you have it.

Matthieu Ricard from TED 2004. Fantastic:

An excerpt from the latest Adbusters (#88) by Banksy:

People are taking the piss out of you every day. They butt into your life, take a cheap shot at you and then disappear. They leer at you from tall buildings and make you feel small. They make flippant comments from buses that imply you’re not sexy enough and that all the fun is happening somewhere else. They are on TV making your girlfriend feel inadequate. They have access to the most sophisticated technology the world has ever seen and they bully you with it. They are “The Advertisers” and they are laughing at you.

You, however, are forbidden to touch them. Trademarks, intellectual property rights and copyright law mean advertisers can say what they like wherever they like with total impunity.

Fuck that. Any advert in a public space that gives you no choice whether you see it or not is yours. It’s yours to take, rearrange and reuse. You can do whatever you like with it. Asking for permission is like asking to keep a rock someone just threw at your head.

Your ow the companies nothing. Less than nothing. You especially don’t owe them any courtesy. They owe you. They have rearranged the world to put themselves in front of you. They never asked for your permission. Don’t even start asking for theirs.

Keep your eye on these guys — they are going to explode in about 3 – 4 months.

So I recently migrated my blog reading to Google Reader which made me realize a few things about blogs and online content. First, content is king. Always and forever. If you don’t have captivating content, fahgettaboutit. What makes Google Reader interesting though is that it aggregates your subscriptions from RSS feeds (in most cases) and thus strips these blog posts of their aesthetic context — meaning that WYSIWIG: content.

Second, I read far too many blogs. By the time I woke up on Monday morning (around 10 AM) I already had 280 some odd new posts from all of my subscriptions to read. By 11:30 I had that number down to about 80 — and that’s filtering through quite a bit of just trite shit. But to have all of my blogs in one place makes it seem far less time-consuming to read them… at least on the surface. So what makes you stand out from the crowd? What makes certain blogs successful and worthwhile? Content, again, is king.

Third, I read many blogs that apparently draw material from each other: Boing Boing runs articles that appear on Lifehacker which becoming trending viral topics on BuzzFeed, which – if it’s a gadget – get mentioned on Engadget or Gizmodo. (And if it’s an Apple product, it’s already all over the place anyway.) So why are these blogs re-reporting everything? Lack of original content. Bingo.

I just finished reading Michael Pollan’s brief (think one-hour read) ‘Food Rules.’ It’s a pretty good collection of general ways to think about what we eat — and then how and where to go about eating better.

Some of my favorite tips:

“#12 Shop the peripheries of the supermarket and stay out of the middle.” Because supermarkets are designed to get you lost in the middle, stick to the outside where the (mostly) fresh produce and meat are located.

“#24 Eating what stands on one leg is better than eating what stands on two legs, which is better than eating what stands on four legs.” So, mushrooms and plant foods > fowl > cows, pigs and other mammals. Interestingly enough, this Chinese proverb ignores one of the healthiest foods on the market — the legless fish.

“#39 Eat all the junk food you want as long as you cook it yourself.” You’d be much less likely to eat french fries or chips if you had to peel and cut and bake or fry the potatoes yourself, right? Same goes for churning your own ice cream.

“#51 Spend as much time enjoying the meal as it took to prepare it.” Fairly self-explanatory.

Above all else:

“Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.”

Treat others with respect and, I’d say almost ninety-five percent of the time, they will return the favor.

If they don’t, punch them in the mouth.

Metaphorically speaking, of course.