Posts Tagged ‘johnny’
Whenever I mention that I don’t have a job, yet, it seems that someone always comes up with the idea that I should be on the radio. I used to say something about how I’d take it under consideration while keeping my scoffs to myself. Time was, I could never see myself in that industry.
It isn’t for any socially unacceptable reasons. I don’t drink like a fish, smoke like a chimney or cuss like a Carlin, and my life’s idol isn’t that Freed guy. After all, those qualities would make me far more comfortable disc jockeying up those magical Interwaves. Instead, my trepidation came from being too gosh-darn weird.
Right now, I’m listening to a shuffled playlist of my top rated songs in iTunes. In a matter of minutes, it goes from Nobuo Uematsu to the stuff from Johnny Cash’s second comeback, from the Red Hot Chili Peppers to Dr. Demento, from Spoon to Aqua. That doesn’t even get into my other playlists.
The last time someone said that I could be on the radio, I could help but think that there really isn’t a place on a music station for that kind of weird stuff. If I tried to pull off that kind of stunt, I’d just make a fool of myself. Then, I remembered three facts that I had somehow forgotten.
First, I love making a fool of myself. Second, disc jockeys are paid to make fools of themselves. Third, the chance that a walk-in job applicant would immediately be offered a position on the air is probably very, very low, anyway. Among hypothetical jobs, it’s a perfect fit.
Even if I decide against looking for work at a music station, there’s always talk radio. With my boorish tone of voice and sometimes-haphazard flamebait opinions, I’d do even better there.
Tomorrow, I’ll be off to discover how the local radio stations treat walk-in job hunters, so wish me luck. With it, I might get to polluting the magical Interwaves within in a matter of years. Sometimes, radio gigs even pay more than not having a job to begin with.
That would be even better.
It’s been a long few years since the last time I saw an Akira Kurosawa film, and I had forgotten how much I love them. Today, Sanjûrô reminded me.
Leading man Toshiro Mifune and Kurosawa were a high-quality, prolific team, and definitely one of the better combinations of actor and director in the history of film, not to mention one of my personal favorites. In my book, this coupling is eclipsed only by the Johnny Depp and Tim Burton team, and that’s mostly because I have a twisted sense of style. Great movies like that are few and far between.
It would be too easy to say that they don’t make movies like Sanjûrô anymore, and I’m not convinced that it’s altogether all that accurate, either. In an age when critics love to chastize Hollywood for cashing in on the blockbuster by churning out sequels, we forget that cheap cash-ins are nothing new. Sanjûrô is itself a sort of sequel to an earlier movie, and is, in my humble opinion, superior to Yojimbo, its antecedent.
Deep in the glory days of Hollywood — i.e., the mid-1940s — it was no accident for whole casts to get reunited for the cheap cash-in. After the surprise success of Casablanca, the studio powers that were got Humphrey Bogart, Sydney Greenstreet, Peter Laurie and Claude Reins back together for an astoundingly poor flick titled Passage to Marseille within a year of Casablanca’s release. Naturally, the only reason Marseille has withstood the test of time rather than fade into obscurity, like so many other B-list-quality films with A-list-quality casts, is that it’s a carbon copy of the Casablanca cast.
The film industry has just about always worshipped at the throne of the almighty dollar — and yen, and rupee — and to say that it was any different back in the glory days is to fall victim to your grandparents’ nostalgia.
I hope nobody disagrees, partly because I really want to enjoy all 152 minutes of The Dark Knight and partly because I know that few of those minutes could compare to a Kurosawa film.
Want a SmartBoard? Yeah — so does everybody else. Rich schools will get it; poor schools won’t. Hell, poor schools won’t get technology until the item costs as much as a textbook.
Good thing an off-brand SmartBoard costs as much as a textbook. Check out this Web site, or watch this TED talk.
I’ve mentioned TED here before, but not ever like this. Not-inventor Johnny Lee explains his innovation better than I could, but in case you don’t have YouTube where you’re accessing your Internet — where could that be? — here’s the gist:
As of September 2007, Nintendo has sold over 13 million Wii game consoles. This significantly exceeds the number of Tablet PCs in use today according to even the most generous estimates of Tablet PC sales. This makes the Wii controller one of the most common computer input devices in the world. It also happens to be one of the most sophisticated. …
Since the Wiimote can track sources of infrared light, you can track pens that have an infrared LED in the tip. By pointing a Wiimote at a projection screen or LCD display, you can create very low-cost interactive whiteboards or tablet displays. Since the Wiimote can track up to 4 points, up to 4 pens can be used. It also works great with rear-projected displays.
You can make off-brand SmartBoards with 80 percent of the name-brand functionality with 1 percent of the name-brand cost, Lee said. He estimates his system costs between $40 and $50, depending on the project. Less than a decent textbook.
In the end, all that matters to us: Will this technology add anything to the classroom?
Let’s use an example. Does CNN’s infra-tracker-screenie-thingie add anything to their broadcasts? The New York Times article that describes it uses the headline: “CNN’s Election Night Interpreter Revels in a High-Tech Toy.” Operative word: toy.
Now the debate becomes: Why the hell would you want a SmartBoard in a classroom? What ways could you use a SmartBoard in ways that don’t make it an expensive distraction?
Answer me this and I’ll make myself Lee’s SmartBoard knockoff. But not before.
Thanks to a commenter here for the link.
