Posts by Andre Alessi
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Gizmondo Facebook's Privacy Changes Get Scary
I liked the first comment:
they forgot 2021: Farmville becomes self aware and enslaves the human race
Shades of that Italo Calvino short story about the telephone network comming alive and connecting people based on what they say in private conversations.
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Torrential rain in Auckland today. I'm not making any inferences, but...
I prefer to interpret it as holy encouragement for the ladies. The divine equivalent of a pearl necklace, if you will.
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My yardstick is to ensure nothing appears there that I wouldn't want my mother reading.
My mother has oft remarked that she wishes I were a tad more interesting for this very reason.
I personally don't have a particularly iron fisted grip on my personal information online (other than my credit card details, game account info, etc-non "personal" but financially valuable information, in other words) and I'm comfortable with the fact that for the most part, if I put it on the internet, I may have to justify it in a job interview some day in the future. I'm not about to deny myself the functionality of certain online tools I enjoy using just because I'm worried some curious sod may see something silly I've done, though.
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And merkins aren't just a 'merkin thing: due to the difference between contemporary pubic grooming and that prevalent in ancient Rome, the cast of Spartacus: Blood & Sand had to be outfitted with individual merkins. You can imagine that they were clearly labelled to prevent confusion in the costume department: it's on thing to be accidentally given someone else's hat, but you really don't want to be playing swappa-merkin by mistake.
I know someone who's hopefully going to be in the costume department once Spartacus gets back up and running (currently it's delayed until at least August because Andy Whitfield has announced he has non-Hodgkin lymphoma) so I intend to ask her about this, then report back in detail.
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In all honesty, the kind of personality types The Apprentice is obviously looking for would fit in well with many real world senior management groups. It isn't about talent, it's about attitude (and I don't mean that as a compliment.)
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Does anyone remember 'Going Straight' where people had to do a number of tasks that involved going in a straight line. That was pure genius whoever came up with that
You mean the show where one of the contestants was horribly burned during a "challenge"?
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The emergence from it was also from a rediscovery of this heritage, mostly by the same Church. Western Europeans were also not the only Christians by a long shot, nor was Rome their only center.
And that rediscovery occurred in the main when Christian scholars read the works of Arab authors, and then followed them to their Greek sources. Constantinople, Moorish Spain and Jerusalem were, once the insanity of the Crusades died down, the vectors for the transmission of this rebirth.
I would hardly suggest "Western culture" had much to do with it except in so far as it was devoted to the science of war. I was speaking entirely about Christianity, and its main representatives at the time of the Renaissance, the Catholic Church. But yes, there was plenty going on outside of Christendom, thank goodness.
How many specifically Catholic scientists can you think of during that period, though? Gallileo, Copernicus and so on were scientists precisely because they challenged the existing Christian understanding of the world, and were treated as outsiders and threats as a result. The majority of what we would now call science during the Renaissance was being worked on by people who were not clergymen, and who were only associated with the Church in the same way everyone of that period was-because of their early education, and because of the Church's renewed (although variable) interest in Classical writers. Most people who "did science" during the Renaissance and into the Enlightenment were sponsored by secular authorities or out of their own pocket, and the Church was never terribly relevant to the sanction or validation of their discoveries.
I'm not arguing that the educational framework that the Church set up doesn't have its place in the history of Western science, but it would be a stretch to go from that to a suggestion that Western science is thus somehow inextricably culturally located within the Church's history, because that early education wasn't by any means the whole story of how individuals developed the theories and methods we now call "scientific".
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That sounds disturbing similar to that "Bachelor Pad" show that Charlotte Dawson got herself mixed up with, but that was around 2003, I believe.
There's a list of a whole bunch of forgettable shows on the Eyeworks Touchdown Wiki page (formerly Touchdown Productions.) Also this blog post about being a contestant on Home on Their Own is jaw dropping.
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A good resource for a list like this would be the KYM article on single serving sites:
Personal favourites:
http://hasthelargehadroncolliderdestroyedtheworldyet.com/
http://instantcrickets.com/ -
Another thing about Project Rungay is that I'm the kind of freak who actually watches the show for the clothes.
I do the same. Then again, I have an excuse: my girlfriend's mother is a professional dressmaker, so just sitting in the room with them is an education on the fine art of clothes stitching. Even so, recent seasons have been dull as dishwater (and don't get me started on the Australian version...)
As for Flatmates, wasn't it at least partially scripted? I seem to remember that there was a "lead" flatmate (who's name I forget-sandy haired late twentysomething fellow) who spent a lot of time fretting about things.
Anyway, I have a theory about why we had reality television shows start popping up locally during that period and later, before it was really clear that they were ratings winners. About that time South Seas Film School was cranking up its admissions numbers, and there were an awful lot of well trained television people with no industry experience being released into the wilds. To capitalise on that (low paid) talent, some of the production companies started to put together cheap TV with these freshies on board, and the rest, as they say, is history.
A friend of mine was directing one of the Matthew and Marc travesties a couple of years out of film school.