Posts Tagged ‘Planet of the Apes’
Tuesday Links
* David Graeber teaches my superheroes module in one long go at the New Inquiry.
* Affirmative action and the fantasy of “merit” comes to the Supreme Court. Buckle up.
* The wisdom of markets: Mysterious Algorithm Was 4% of Trading Activity Last Week.
* The main victim of the ongoing crisis is thus not capitalism, which appears to be evolving into an even more pervasive and pernicious form, but democracy — not to mention the left, whose inability to offer a viable global alternative has again been rendered visible to all. It was the left that was effectively caught with its pants down. It is almost as if this crisis were staged to demonstrate that the only solution to a failure of capitalism is more capitalism.
* Annals of Canadian crime: Canada cheese-smuggling ring busted – policeman charged. Maple syrup seized in N.B. may have been stolen in Quebec.
* Obama makes a strong pitch for my particular demographic.
* Are drones illegal? Well, we’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality, so…
* Let six-year-olds vote: Afghan war enters twelfth year. And onward! And onward!
* The maintenance of civil order in society rests on the foundation of family discipline. Therefore, a child who disrespects his parents must be permanently removed from society in a way that gives an example to all other children of the importance of respect for parents. The death penalty for rebellioius children is not something to be taken lightly. The guidelines for administering the death penalty to rebellious children are given in Deut 21:18-21… You know what? Let me stop you right there.
* “Man who defaced Tate Modern’s Rothko canvas says he’s added value.” And he’s probably right!
* Community not coming back on schedule is/is not a catastrophe. I’ll just go ahead and assume that they need more time to bring Dan Harmon back.
* Why do Venezulans keep reelecting Hugo Chávez?
To understand why Chávez’s electoral victory would be apparent beforehand, consider that from 1980 to 1998, Venezuela’s per capita GDP declined by 14%, whereas since 2004, after the Chávez administration gained control over the nation’s oil revenues, the country’s GDP growth per person has averaged 2.5% each year.
At the same time, income inequality was reduced to the lowest in Latin America, and a combination of widely shared growth and government programs cut poverty in half and reduced absolute poverty by 70%—and that’s before accounting for vastly expanded access to health, education, and housing.
Oh.
* The Rise and Fall of the Cincinnati Boner King.
* Admitting that scientists demonstrate gender bias shouldn’t make us forget that other kinds of bias exist, or that people other than scientists exhibit them. In a couple of papers (one, two), Katherine Milkman, Modupe Akinola, and Dolly Chugh have investigated how faculty members responded to email requests from prospective students asking for a meeting. The names of the students were randomly shuffled, and chosen to give some implication that the students were male or female, and also whether they were Caucasian, Black, Hispanic, Indian, or Chinese.
* Campus officer kills naked freshman at University of South Alabama.
* The Ohio Statue University marching band pays tribute to video games.
* Johnny works in a factory. Billy works downtown. / Terry works in a rock and roll band looking for that million dollar sound. / Got a job down in Darlington. Some nights I don’t go. / Some nights I go to the drive in. Some night I stay home. On “The Promise.”
* digby imagines what would happen if we tried to ban lead today.
* Like Darth Vader at the end of Jedi, Ridley Scott ends his career a hero.
* Behind the Scenes of the Planet of the Apes.
* And get ready for competing Moby Dick projects! Who says Hollywood is out of ideas?
More Friday
* The headline reads, “Belgian firefighters soak police in protest.”
* Dana Gould IS Dr. Zaius AS Hal Holbrook AS Mark Twain. Thanks, John Hodgman.
* Breaking: Corporation exploits tax loophole to avoid paying taxes, receive bogus tax refund. MUST CREDIT GERRYCANAVAN.WORDPRESS.COM.
* Greg Sargent explains Obama’s contraception win today.
* More good news for Obama: the unemployment rate is dropping faster in swing states.
* And on the pop-culture beat: When Buffy had an abortion.
Monday Night: Scooby-Doo, Stalin’s Daughter, and More
* “You can’t regret your fate,” Ms. Peters once said, “although I do regret my mother didn’t marry a carpenter.” Josef Stalin’s daughter has died. More at MeFi.
* Occupy the Mystery Machine: The very first rule of Scooby-Doo, the single premise that sits at the heart of their adventures, is that the world is full of grown-ups who lie to kids, and that it’s up to those kids to figure out what those lies are and call them on it, even if there are other adults who believe those lies with every fiber of their being. (via)
* Behind the scenes of Planet of the Apes.
* No second acts in America: The life and times of Chris Hardwick. (also via)
* Terry Gilliam, the heir of Fellini and the enemy of God. (you know what I’m gonna say)
On his flight to Los Angeles, Gilliam tried to watch the $1-billion hit “Transformers: Dark of the Moon,” and he felt battered and sullen by the time the landing gear came down. The old wizard says it’s the stage magicians who rule Hollywood now.
“You just sit there and watch the explosions,” Gilliam said. “I couldn’t tell you what the movie was about. The movie hammers the audience into submission. They are influenced by video games, but in video games at least you are immersed; in these movies you’re left out. In films, there’s so much overt fantasy now that I don’t watch a lot because everything is possible now. There’s no tension there. People can slide down the side of a building that’s falling and they don’t get ripped to shreds? The shots are amazing, but if there is no consequence, no gravity, what’s the point? I can’t watch Hollywood movies anymore. There’s no room for me.”
* Safe, reliable, and too cheap to meter: Japan’s science ministry says 8 per cent of the country’s surface area has been contaminated by radiation from the crippled Fukushima nuclear plant.
* “For our brewery, growth depends on abundant clean water and quality barley and hops—and climate change puts those ingredients at risk. Our supply chain—including barley, hops and water—is especially vulnerable to weather in the short-term and to climate change in the long-term,” Orgolini told Forbes.
* Medicine and “never events.”
There are sharp generational differences on this question. Millennials are the least likely to say that the U.S. is the greatest country in the world, with just 32% holding this view. This number rises with each successive generation, culminating in nearly two-thirds of Silents (64%) expressing the view that the U.S. stands above all other nations. Within the Silent generation, it is the oldest members who feel most strongly about America’s greatness – fully 72% of those ages 76 to 83 say the U.S. is the greatest country in the world. About half of members of Generation X (ages 31 to 46) and the Baby Boomer generation (47 to 65) believe that the U.S. is the greatest country in the world.
* “Berkeley Police Defend Actions by Sensationistically Claiming Protestors Could’ve Used Lethal Violence.” That’s good enough for me!
* The engineers behind Russia’s failed Mars attempt could face criminal charges.
“Recent failures are a strong blow to our competitiveness,” explained Medvedev. “It does not mean that something fatal has happened, it means that we need to carry out a detailed review and punish those guilty.”
* Speaking of punishing the guilty: The Walker recall is already almost halfway there. @wi_defender: One signature every 3.456 seconds for 12 days. #WIRecall #RecallWalker #damn
* Corporate synergy watch: Staples is launching Dunder Mifflin brand paper.
The North Carolina Senate voted (27-17) Monday to repeal the Racial Justice Act, sending SB 9 off to Governor Bev Perdue. The Senate’s approval came just hours after the Judiciary Committee heard emotional testimony on both sides of the legislation.
Johnston County District Attorney Susan Doyle told legislators that DAs were “fearful” that the two-year-old law had the potential to parole death row inmates.
One shudders to think!
Procrastination Is Important
* Finally, a job for which I am qualified: Chinese companies are temporarily hiring white men to pose as fake businessmen.
* You had me at “International Planet of the Apes comic covers.”
* You had me at anti-BP art.
* Given that GDP is an abstract metric with little relationship to the happiness of unhappiness of actual people, it’s no surprise to find that the BP oil spill will likely boost U.S. GDP.
* Science! Scientists are to map Ozzy Osbourne’s genetic code in a bid to find out how he is still alive after decades of drug and alcohol abuse. Via Facebook.
* And a book I will inevitably buy: The Best of Kim Stanley Robinson.
Sunday Night Links 1
Sunday night links.
* Is Twitter the Drudge Killer? We can only dare to hope.
* The Art of the Movie Poster. (Thanks, Ron!)
* Accusations from the left that Obama was behind Honduras’s coup seem completely unfounded.
* Sanford says he won’t resign. Okay, then, impeachment.
* Steve Benen against bipartisanship. Also at Washington Monthly: early movement towards fixing the Democratic primaries for 2012 and beyond.
* Krugman has had a very good series of posts this weekend trying to bash denialist talking points on climate change. Here’s the chart that dismantles the “we’ve been cooling since 1998″ canard:
Random Linkfest
Random linkfest.
* Coup in Canada! Somehow the Liberals and New Democrats finally managed to pull their heads out of their asses and kick Harper out.
* You had me at Planet of the Apes. Just don’t screw it up this time. More at CHUD.
* Matt Yglesias: If you’re not following Shaq’s Twitter feed you’re not really living in the contemporary world. He’s moved us all the way to Web 4.0.
* Flight of the Conchords Season 2 is coming.
Apes, legal personhood and the plight of Nim Chimpsky
Apes, legal personhood and the plight of Nim Chimpsky.
Eberhart Theuer: A legal person would be something like a company or a certain society that in itself, or a fund that has certain rights without being a natural person.Anita Barraud: This is similar to the US in common law notion of a juristic person that can apply to corporations and organisations that they’re artificial persons created by the law.
Eberhart Theuer: Exactly.
Paula Stibbe: It’s not talking about the rights for non-human animals to go and vote or be able to go to university, that would clearly be inappropriate and ridiculous. This is about recognising that non-human animals share with us sentience, which means that they have the ability to suffer, and that they have interests which can be damaged.
In sci-fi-philosophic terms, this is the distinction between sapience and sentience; while apes likely cannot “think” in the human sense, they and other animals can certainly feel pain, and that capacity is something we are morally obliged to respect.
I say likely because I am by nature extremely wary of the anthropomorphistic tendency to project human emotions and consciousness into animal behavior that is actually instinctual or learned—in general I’m impressed with Daniel Dennett’s theory in Kinds of Minds that our dogs appear to “love” us precisely because we’ve selected for just that impression over millenia of canine domestication. But as an anecdotal matter I must admit this is really evocative:
Paula Stibbe: I’ve learned what he likes to do most, what food he likes to eat most, though that would include some games. He likes to use charcoal with paper sometimes to draw, or chalk.
Anita Barraud: What does he draw?
Paula Stibbe: They are kind of abstract angular kind of works and he takes the paper and the chalk and he leans against the wall, he bites his bottom lip and concentrates really hard on what he’s doing. He won’t let himself be distracted while he’s drawing.
(cross-posted at culturemonkey)
Sci-Fi Top Tens
SETI.com has your ten must-read first-contact novels. Cynical-C and SF Signal have already decried the absence of Contact, so I will decry the absence of Dawn from Butler’s Xenogenesis trilogy.
See also: Classic sci-fi film of the 1960s.
Monday Night Catchup
Links from the weekend I’m only now having the chance to blog:
* It’s finally come to this: they’re remaking Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure. Via SF Signal, which has the only response one can have: Why?
* Stop the Planet of the Apes: Charlton Heston has gotten off.
* The Office’s John Krasinki has spent the last five years trying to make a movie out of DFW’s Brief Interviews with Hideous Men. Now he’s gone and done it. Here’s an interview.
* Seven superheroes who will never get their own movie (but should). The moral of this story is that the Legion of Superheroes has had a large number of silly superpowers in its pages.
* McSweeney’s hunts the most dangerous game, while Sisyphus enters analysis.
* The best UFO pictures of 2007.
Children of Men Coming to TV
David Eick (Bionic Woman, Battlestar Galactica) is working on a small-screen adaptation of Children of Men. The Alfonso Cuarón film joins Buffy, Ferris Bueller, Logan’s Run, Clueless, Highlander and Planet of the Apes in the coveted film-to-TV remake arena…
Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair
UPDATE: Keep ‘em coming! I’ve added a whole lot more below.
It was my week to post at culturemonkey this week, and I delivered with a post about the motivations for apocalyptic fantasy, what it is and what it’s for. Check it out. Comments, criticism, and elaborations of all sorts are very welcome.
While writing the post, in connection with Ryan’s theory that the most salient feature of apocalypse in science fiction is the way in which the same images are simply repackaged for us over and over again, I was struck by the recurrence of a ruined Statue of Liberty as perhaps the quintessential icon of disaster since the 1940s. So struck, in fact, that I began to obsessively collect these images from the ‘net wherever I could find them. Submitted for your approval, the fruits of my labor:
Fantastic Universe, August-September 1953
Aftershock: Earthquake in New York, 1999
D.C. Countdown teaser poster, 2007
And this is by no means an exhaustive list. Let me know in the comments what I’ve missed…
UPDATE: Stealing a few more ideas from my commenters:
Part of a campaign promise during the elections in 1978 to bring the “Statue of Liberty to Madison.” As a result of this effort the Pail and Shovel Party (Stu was one of the major masterminds) was given the Politician of the Year award for keeping the most campaign promises of any Wisconsin elected officials. The Daily Cardinal was outraged by this expenditure and actually burned it down. The following year after re-election the Statue was rebuilt. A security guard was placed inside of the head after getting an ice fishing hut permit.
Independence Day (amazed that I missed this one)
Thundarr the Barbarian (My favorite so far. Here’s Skot’s description from the comments:
In the ’70′s Saturday Morning cartoon “Thundarr the Barbarian” the Statue is shown in a decayed state at the start of each show, and there’s an episode where the evil wizard Gemini imbues the statue with life (but better than in Ghostbusters 2) and an awesome flame-throwing torch! The basic concepts and story ideas for that show came from the fertile but sometimes repetitive mind of Jack “King” Kirby, who also created the Kamandi comic book for DC, as seen above…
The latest Smashing Pumpkins album, Zeitgeist (2007)
Eerie-in-retrospect book cover from Bluejay Books, 1985. The artist’s name was Thomas Kidd. (Thanks to revdoug for the email)
UPDATE 2:
Brett emailed in with a great screenshot of the Statue of Liberty in The Fifth Element, which has not been destroyed but rather swallowed by an expanding New York megapolis.
UPDATE 3: Jeff from Gravity Lens sends along this wild image from the recent D.C. Comics “Sinestro Corps” storyline:
Tim in the comments leaves behind links to the Statue of Liberty under threat in X-Men and Children of Men:
And another album cover, this one from New Jersey’s own God Forbid’s fourth album, IV: Constitution of Treason:
UPDATE 4: Jeff sends along two more, one the usual sort of doomsday image and another desecration of a very different sort:
UPDATE 5: Commenter Ty may have found the earliest example, “The Next Morning” from the Feb. 24, 1887 edition of Life:
UPDATE 6: Later, Ty came back with two more, first from an alternate-universe Statue’s destruction by helicopter in Batman Forever
and the other a much-longed-for clip from the statue’s appearance in Ghostbusters 2. I can do him one better, though: Google Video has the clip.
Google Video has also got Spaceballs, too, naturally, as well as Superman being thrown through the torch in Superman II.
http://video.google.com/googleplayer.swf?docId=-7856985522976157958&hl=en
UPDATE 7: Over night a few more links were added in the comments, including this beauty from 1889, J.A. Mitchell’s The Last American:
as well as two video-game scenarios, World in Conflict and Command and Conquer: Red Alert:
Elsewhere in the world of video games, Eman Resu also points us to the Resident Evil 3 trailer, where the replica Statue of Liberty outside the New York, New York casino in Vegas is used to signify for apocalypse:
UPDATE 8: Another cool one from the comments, a comic-booky illustration (don’t know what year it’s from, unfortunately) given the title “Cloverfield Monster Revealed!” on Flickr:
(Identified! It’s from the “Dinosaurs Attack!” Topps trading card series.)
UPDATE 9: Here’s a nice still from Ghostbusters 2 I just found in the Fark thread on this. Incidentally, the Fark link coupled with the Boing Boing link plus a few other big ones (National Review Online?) makes this the most popular thing I’ve ever posted by a mile, eclipsing even the “Our Brains Don’t Work” link on Backwards City from back in 2004. It’s kind of amazing.
UPDATE 10: rootbeer277 founds some pictures of the Statue in Superman IV here:
Elsewhere in the comments people have provided video links for related scenes from Twisted Metal 2 and National Lampoon’s European Vacation.
And Traveler sends in a still from Deep Impact:
UPDATE 11: Wow, they’re still coming in. Lady, That’s My Skull writes in with two more from the comics, Atomic War #1 (1952) and Incredible Hulk #206 (1976).
And Anonymous points us to this Audi ad from the early 1990s:
UPDATE 12: It’s been a few days and this post still keeps getting hits. It’s getting close to 25,000 people now, which is astounding.
First, from the comments, MagicManky has the Jay & Silent Bob Strike Back parody:
Also in the comments, Slade leaves links to a number of sought-after images of the broken Statue of Liberty overshadowed by the Statue of Justice in Judge Dredd, both film and comic:
Finally, in what’s likely to be the last image I add here for a good while, Viktor emails an Italian propaganda poster from World War II which reads “Here are the liberators”:
Yes, You Finally Made a Monkey
Two new culturemonkey posts, each one sillier and more perverting of the site’s original mission statement than the last. Real culturemonkey posts to resume once we get these end-of-the-semester papers off our backs.
