yah FUCKING wooo

wd50 3* NYTimes today

RIGHT on
"Anyone who has heard the snap of a rubber band breaking knows it's time to reach for a replacement.
But a group of French scientists have made a self-healing rubber band material that can reclaim its stretchy usefulness by simply pressing the broken edges back together for a few minutes.

The material, described on Wednesday in the journal Nature, can be broken and repaired over and over again."

Full article:
http://uk.news.yahoo.com/rtrs/20080221/tsc-uk-rubber-band-011ccfa_1.html
My cable tv went out. The box is trying to reboot, but it's been doing that for 30 minutes. Cable internet is fine though, so that's sort of weird. I guess it saves me from having to figure out which is the least bad cable network to watch the results on.
'Ace' McCain
The Blue Brain project is now at a crucial juncture. The first phase of the project—"the feasibility phase"—is coming to a close. The skeptics, for the most part, have been proven wrong. It took less than two years for the Blue Brain supercomputer to accurately simulate a neocortical column, which is a tiny slice of brain containing approximately 10,000 neurons, with about 30 million synaptic connections between them. "The column has been built and it runs," Markram says. "Now we just have to scale it up." Blue Brain scientists are confident that, at some point in the next few years, they will be able to start simulating an entire brain. "If we build this brain right, it will do everything," Markram says. I ask him if that includes selfconsciousness: Is it really possible to put a ghost into a machine? "When I say everything, I mean everything," he says, and a mischievous smile spreads across his face.
hillary is on the daily show tonight.
dont read kos as assiduously as i did but this special election for hasterts open seat in illinois caught my eye because its apparently winnable and because the democrat is a physicist. we need more diversity than just lawyers representing us.
pre-code night on tcm tonight including a new documentary, Thou Shalt Not Sin . will tivo if not watch norma shearers oscar winning turn in The Divorcee.
eastwoods Unforgiven last night. that is all.
bob del grosso (hunger artist) at hendricks farms in bucks

via adman
things to do when you cant sleep.


afi updated its top 100 american films last year. interesting to see what rises and falls in their esteem. spielberg is a little overrepresented in my estimation. hard to see shindlers list cracking my top 100 much less the top 10. cant believe The Third Man, Giant and A Place in the Sun gets short shrift for the likes of The Shawshank Redemption Titanic The Sixth Sense and Toy Story. conversely nice to see Nashville, Sunrise The Last Picture Show and Swing Time crack the list.
just to maintain fealty to the log i will note that i watched Stage Door directed by gregory la cava starring kate hepburn and ginger rogers and Singin in the Rain with gene kelly, debbie reynolds and donald o'çonnor directed by stanley donen. also the previous day i absorbed the better part of two epics Fiddler on the Roof directed by norman (im not a jew) jewison and david leans Dr Zhivago with julie cristie omar sharif and alec guiness among others.
Her abrupt and public exit from “Gilmore Girls” in the spring of 2006 over a contract dispute could have left her stigmatized as unmanageable, but her abilities proved too much of a draw. Weeks after her departure was announced, she was working on “Jezebel James,” which Fox has scheduled for a March 14 debut.

For Ms. Sherman-Palladino, the show represents more than the opportunity to put the contentious history of “Gilmore Girls” behind her, to prove that she was right to butt heads, bruise egos and burn bridges to gain the creative latitude she required. Now that she has sold Fox on herself and her methodology, she can demonstrate that she still makes the kind of emotionally engaging television that is worth fighting over.

As Ms. Sherman-Palladino put it, “I don’t want to sit there and go, ‘Ucch, if I had just gone with my instinct, if I had just cast this person, or fought them on this.’ You don’t want to fail not having really put up a fight.”

These sides of Ms. Sherman-Palladino were already in evidence in 1999 when she began developing the series that became “Gilmore Girls.” At the time she was an Emmy Award-nominated former writer from “Roseanne” — one who had both struggled and thrived under that show’s notoriously temperamental star — with an idea for a series about the kinship between a young mother and her precocious teenage daughter.
“CRIME AND PUNISHMENT” on skateboards — that was one of the early tag lines floating around the production of “Paranoid Park,” the new film by Gus Van Sant. Based on a novel by Blake Nelson, the story follows a teenage skateboarder in Portland, Ore., who accidentally kills a security guard and is then left to ponder his guilt in a void of suburban amorality.
anbar angie?

this op-ed must make a dittoheads explode with contradiction. notorious hollywood liberal in league with the UN and is concerned with displaced brown people thinks we should be cautious about our withdrawl from iraq for humanitarian reasons. wouldnt it just be simpler if we bombed them back to the stone ages?
watched The Philadelphia Story which for me was the equivalent of a gateway drug in terms of my interest in classic film. and after numerous viewings it still retains its intoxicating allure. in rock the question is often posed "do you prefer the stone or the beatles?" similarly one might ask the same of jimmy stewart or cary grant. ive always leaned towards the image of cosmopolitan sheen of grant versus the stuttering boyish cornfed all-american stewart. but its hard not to be charmed by stewarts oscar winning performance even if his character loses out in the end (a little to readily to my taste) to the more inwardly cynical grant. meanwhile hepburn is at her best here in a part she brought with her from broadway to save her flagging film career. watching grace kelly attempt to fill hepburns shoes in the musical adaptation, High Society, fifteen years later makes clear the excellence she brought to the role, to say nothing of the pallid performances of bing crosby and frank sinatra as the stand-ins for grant and stewart.
Grape Expectations
Went to 15 East for lunch recently.

My main had butter it seemed, otherwise it was a well-cooked cod, fresh with tons of flavor. App was 10 seaweeds, tasty till one diner said ''dude I dont eat them anymore once I found out how processed they are as a food group'' I said ''why not tell before I ordered''. co-diners loved the sushi, not the soup.

The three of us would gladly go back but we all have more "traditional" spots we like more....
paint the earth

who thought this was a good image for sherwin williams - toxic red paint spilling over the planet? it reads cover the earth.
obamas typography is brand news.
Comcast's Blowback
didnt watch any movies yesterday except for the first half hour of lubitschs version of To Be or Not To Be starring carole lombard jack benny and a remarkably youthful robert stack. im much more familiar with the mel brooks remake which is pretty faithful to the original but is more campy as most brooks films tend to be. that this film is made during world war ii gives it more bite than the remake. also lombard dies in a plane crash while out collecting money for war bonds three weeks after filming ended the knowledge of which adds an elegiac air to the political satirical.

then this afternoon i watched parts of two versions of Mutiny on The Bounty, the 1935 academy award winner for best picture starring clark gable (lombards husband) as the dashing mutinous mr christian and charles laughton as the excerable capt bligh. that was followed by the 1962 three hour epic starring marlon brando as a foppish christian and trevor howard as a colder, martinet bligh. this version fared less well critically and at the box office. supposedly mgm almost went down with the ship because of it. and brandos reputation as more trouble than he was worth was cemented with this effort. but i think over time this film has risen slightly in esteem as its judged on its merits. some sharp dialogue and sparkling technicolor although at times seemed like a tahitian travelogue.
"Shipwrecks, ghost forests of tree stumps thousands of years old and brilliant red formations have all been uncovered this winter along the Oregon coast after severe storms led to massive erosion."
Hey Steve have you seen any?
rocks
Comcast ratfucks democracy