Tuesday, October 14, 2008
"Bag of Hurt" Watch: Part 2
A mere nine hours later, "Bag of Hurt" yields 2440 google results. I never imagined it'd happen this quickly.
"Bag of Hurt" Watch: Part 1
At Apple's somewhat anticlimatic Laptop Announcement Event today, Steve Jobs explained why Blu-ray drives won't be included:
"Blu-ray is just a bag of hurt. It's great to watch the movies, but the licensing of the tech is so complex, we're waiting till things settle down and Blu-ray takes off in the marketplace."An hour later, the phrase "Bag of hurt" googles 23 results, most of them referencing Jobs' comment.
I thought it might be interesting to chart expanding use of the term.
Monday, October 13, 2008
Buy Low, Sell High
The mantra is so simple, so clear, so patently reasonable: "Buy Low and Sell High". Yet the investor who most famously sticks to this most obvious of strategies is viewed as a Grand Buddha Of Investment Wisdom. Most investors act on emotion, or chase feverish speculative strategies. They lose their money, of course, as any compulsive gambler must. Meanwhile Buffett makes billions following a simple strategy everyone knows but few diligently ply.
We prize adages; we love their simplicity and savor their wisdom. That's why our holy books are stocked full of them, and our media treasures sound bites. Yet we find it devilishly hard to follow through on simple principles. We all grow up appreciating those great Ben Franklin aphorisms, but how many people actually live any of them? The problem is that while our minds value simplicity, our natures yearn for complexity. We muddy our vision via endless distinctions and footnotes and we slog through the mud of habit, emotion, and cultural pressure until our actions become hopelessly fuzzy and irrational - and radically out of step with our professed values and beliefs.
We prize adages; we love their simplicity and savor their wisdom. That's why our holy books are stocked full of them, and our media treasures sound bites. Yet we find it devilishly hard to follow through on simple principles. We all grow up appreciating those great Ben Franklin aphorisms, but how many people actually live any of them? The problem is that while our minds value simplicity, our natures yearn for complexity. We muddy our vision via endless distinctions and footnotes and we slog through the mud of habit, emotion, and cultural pressure until our actions become hopelessly fuzzy and irrational - and radically out of step with our professed values and beliefs.
Consider "Do Not Kill", the Biblical injunction which many of the most fundamentalist Christians not only violate but openly spurn. It's hard to find much evangelical objection to war, capital punishment, or hunting. In fact, all three are disproportionately popular with those who deem themselves Bible literalists. How is this contradiction maintained? First, distinctions - the mental footnotes which carve out wiggle room. We mustn't kill, except in self defense. Or except in the case of infidels and criminals. Etc, etc. Innate emotional propensities lead us to niggle, wiggle, and squirm until we've carved out subtleties in even the most blatant clarity. And, in the end,, one easily abandons self-critical faculties amid the righteous company of millions of like-minded fellow believers.
It's exactly the same with investment. A jillion people sold a jillion shares of stock on Friday. The early players, who got the jump on bad news and slipped their sell orders in before markets tanked, were wise to act. But crowd-followers vastly outnumber the crowd itself. They see sharp dips, they get scared, and they sell - after, rather than before the dip. In so doing, they've lost out on, and can never recover, the 6.4% jump the market made this morning. Per above, the Three F's: fear, flocking, and footnotes induced them to sell low. When will they put their money back in the market? After leaders have already driven up prices, of course. They'll buy high.
Let's face it: greed and fear, being innate human drives, are always in play. The trick to investing wisely, they say, is to subvert them by feeling greed when others are fearful (i.e. prices are low), and fear when others are greedy (i.e. prices are high). It seems to be extraordinarily hard for most people to do.
It should be noted, at the risk of adding the first of a potentially infinite number of muddying footnotes to the mantra's simple wisdom, that the mantra is not "buy at the bottom and sell at the top". The attempt to do so is the worst pitfall of all. That's the very lair where fear and greed live.
It's exactly the same with investment. A jillion people sold a jillion shares of stock on Friday. The early players, who got the jump on bad news and slipped their sell orders in before markets tanked, were wise to act. But crowd-followers vastly outnumber the crowd itself. They see sharp dips, they get scared, and they sell - after, rather than before the dip. In so doing, they've lost out on, and can never recover, the 6.4% jump the market made this morning. Per above, the Three F's: fear, flocking, and footnotes induced them to sell low. When will they put their money back in the market? After leaders have already driven up prices, of course. They'll buy high.
Let's face it: greed and fear, being innate human drives, are always in play. The trick to investing wisely, they say, is to subvert them by feeling greed when others are fearful (i.e. prices are low), and fear when others are greedy (i.e. prices are high). It seems to be extraordinarily hard for most people to do.
It should be noted, at the risk of adding the first of a potentially infinite number of muddying footnotes to the mantra's simple wisdom, that the mantra is not "buy at the bottom and sell at the top". The attempt to do so is the worst pitfall of all. That's the very lair where fear and greed live.
This upturn will be followed by violent downturns, which will be followed by sharp upturns. That's how it works. Over time, money will be made by those who simply let their investments ride, and who sell only during buying frenzies.
Friday, October 10, 2008
Economic Fiasco 101
Three great vehicles for learning about - and staying apprised of - the economic crisis:
1. Another Frightening Show About the Economy, a special edition of NPR's popular This American Life, is a nice, patient, non-condescending explanation of the complexities that brought us to this point (at least as of last week, when it was produced). For one thing, it (indirectly) explains why Paulson wanted all that unchecked power to implement the bail-out: the deal hinges on smart pricing of the distressed assets the government will buy. Price them too low and you hurt the banks more than you help. Price too high, and taxpayers don't get their investment back. It's extremely difficult, Paulson's extremely qualified, and it wouldn't help to have several hundred indignantly posturing politicians breathing over his shoulder.
2. No explanation's perfect. And NPR's Adam Davidson, the main force behind the program, screws up one thing: he describes the distressed assets as junk. That's a popular assessment, but Warren Buffett disagrees. Buffett (who may be Obama's pick for treasury secretary) has declared that if he could get in on a piece of the government's side of the deal, he'd jump at the opportunity. And his wisdom in deal assessment is long-proven. He explains all this in a recent interview on Charlie Rose.
3. The mainstream media is doing a clunky job. The problem is that most financial reporters aren't all-around finance experts (if they were, they'd be in a far more lucrative field); their knowledge is constrained to the sort of thing they usually report on. And no one reports consistently on the commercial paper market! I've been depending on The Economist, which so far has been clear, thorough, and reasonable.
4. Whether your interest in this crisis is selfish (i.e. you're displeased by your 401K losing 1/4 of its value) or historical (one day you'll tell people you were alive for this), you may kick yourself later if you don't keep up with the daily goings on. The situation keeps changing, with each day bringing, or at least revealing, a whole new situation (this explains why Congress - and the constituents they've been trying to represent - did an utter about-face on the bail-out in the space of a mere week). One good way to stay up is via a podcast summing up each day's developements. The NPR: Planet Money Podcast is a half hour report, produced by the same people who did the This American Life explainer mentioned above (not a completely reliable source, but, hey that's why I suggest the weekly Economist).
1. Another Frightening Show About the Economy, a special edition of NPR's popular This American Life, is a nice, patient, non-condescending explanation of the complexities that brought us to this point (at least as of last week, when it was produced). For one thing, it (indirectly) explains why Paulson wanted all that unchecked power to implement the bail-out: the deal hinges on smart pricing of the distressed assets the government will buy. Price them too low and you hurt the banks more than you help. Price too high, and taxpayers don't get their investment back. It's extremely difficult, Paulson's extremely qualified, and it wouldn't help to have several hundred indignantly posturing politicians breathing over his shoulder.
2. No explanation's perfect. And NPR's Adam Davidson, the main force behind the program, screws up one thing: he describes the distressed assets as junk. That's a popular assessment, but Warren Buffett disagrees. Buffett (who may be Obama's pick for treasury secretary) has declared that if he could get in on a piece of the government's side of the deal, he'd jump at the opportunity. And his wisdom in deal assessment is long-proven. He explains all this in a recent interview on Charlie Rose.
3. The mainstream media is doing a clunky job. The problem is that most financial reporters aren't all-around finance experts (if they were, they'd be in a far more lucrative field); their knowledge is constrained to the sort of thing they usually report on. And no one reports consistently on the commercial paper market! I've been depending on The Economist, which so far has been clear, thorough, and reasonable.
4. Whether your interest in this crisis is selfish (i.e. you're displeased by your 401K losing 1/4 of its value) or historical (one day you'll tell people you were alive for this), you may kick yourself later if you don't keep up with the daily goings on. The situation keeps changing, with each day bringing, or at least revealing, a whole new situation (this explains why Congress - and the constituents they've been trying to represent - did an utter about-face on the bail-out in the space of a mere week). One good way to stay up is via a podcast summing up each day's developements. The NPR: Planet Money Podcast is a half hour report, produced by the same people who did the This American Life explainer mentioned above (not a completely reliable source, but, hey that's why I suggest the weekly Economist).
Wednesday, October 8, 2008
"Oh, Shit!" Antidote
I loathe self-help aphorisms. The distraught impulse to dote on that sort of thing reveals a need for stronger measures than the gathering of nuggets of smiley sunshine. But this one's a good one. Really!
I come from an "oh, shit!" family. I was taught from a young age that even the most petty of life's travails warrants an eruption of embittered pique. The world compels us to freely voice our displeasure at the ongoing pattern of cosmic persecution of which these misplaced car keys or that stubbed toe was the latest in a long series of examples. Given that few turns in life fulfill our expectations, the "oh, shit!" reflex can grow to eventually poison one's entire existence.
Here's the antidote. In place of the exclamation, swap in this question: "If this is the worst thing that happens today, would that mean it's been a good day?"
In several years, I have yet to answer "no", though a few legitimately bad things have occurred. That's because while human beings irritate easily at minutiae, we are remarkably resilient in the larger picture. And the act of stepping back to a wider view forces us to react to the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune from our oceans of resilience rather than our thin puddles of irritability.
Eventually, the question morphs into an exclamatory, triumphant statement: "If that's the worst thing that happens today, this will have been a really good day!" A parking ticket or a lost wallet can feel like a relief - a small sacrifice to the Gods of entropy. It works for cracked cell phone screens and red lights, but even for blown job interviews and romantic breakups. In fact, it works for everything.
I come from an "oh, shit!" family. I was taught from a young age that even the most petty of life's travails warrants an eruption of embittered pique. The world compels us to freely voice our displeasure at the ongoing pattern of cosmic persecution of which these misplaced car keys or that stubbed toe was the latest in a long series of examples. Given that few turns in life fulfill our expectations, the "oh, shit!" reflex can grow to eventually poison one's entire existence.
Here's the antidote. In place of the exclamation, swap in this question: "If this is the worst thing that happens today, would that mean it's been a good day?"
In several years, I have yet to answer "no", though a few legitimately bad things have occurred. That's because while human beings irritate easily at minutiae, we are remarkably resilient in the larger picture. And the act of stepping back to a wider view forces us to react to the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune from our oceans of resilience rather than our thin puddles of irritability.
Eventually, the question morphs into an exclamatory, triumphant statement: "If that's the worst thing that happens today, this will have been a really good day!" A parking ticket or a lost wallet can feel like a relief - a small sacrifice to the Gods of entropy. It works for cracked cell phone screens and red lights, but even for blown job interviews and romantic breakups. In fact, it works for everything.
Tuesday, October 7, 2008
Saturday, October 4, 2008
Dancing "To" Music (plus A Brief History of Accompaniment)
I caught a performance this weekend of Morphoses, the joint British/American ballet company founded by choreographer Christopher Wheeldon.
I occasionally check out dance performances, always hoping for the sort of inspiration I get from great music, art, writing, theater, and cooking. But I usually come away grumbling about what I call "Figure Skating Syndrome". It's a musician thing (I was a full-time trombone player once), but let me try to explain.
Figure skaters perform to music that serves as mere backdrop. The music may be acknowledged via a couple of arm waves and coquettish movements, but the skaters are front and center, and the music is mere sonic wallpaper. It's "accompaniment".
Most serious dance performances strike me as similar: talented people doing intricate and beautiful things with a backdrop of music. Or course, that's not fair; serious dance does have a deeper musical relationship than figure skating. But still not enough for my taste. No matter how acclaimed the choreographer, the dancers always appear to be dancing to music, rather than from it.
70 years ago, at the height of its power, the musician's union boldly called a strike on recording. For a very long two years, from 1940 to 1942, musicians recorded no new material. And it changed everything. Before the strike, instrumentalists were kings. Audiences actually listened, they idolized horn players and drummers. Bands were followed like baseball teams. Singers were mere adjuncts to musical performance: second class musical citizens. Props.
But the musicians' strike changed all of that...forever. Two factors contributed. First: the slack was picked up by a slew of vocal recordings, and the public developed an enduring taste for singers. Second, record companies, desperate to maintain revenue, started reissuing old recordings, including one of the Harry James band featuring an unknown singer named Frank Sinatra. The original recording hadn't even listed Sinatra's name, but the reissue hyped him to the hilt, and a sensation was created, which led quickly to screaming, swooning bobbysoxers. After Sinatra, an unbroken string of singers became huge stars. A publicity model was born...and musicians would forevermore be deemed accompanists.
That pecking order has affected the very fabric of music. Vocalists generally sing over the music rather than deeply inside it. Many barely listen to the musicians with whom they perform - whose job is to merely lay down a solid foundation. And that seems perfectly natural to post-1942 audiences, who focus exclusively on the singer. The chasm greatly widened with the advent of music videos, which made the music itself nearly beside the point. Invisible in a visual medium, music grew even less important than wallpaper, become nothing more than subconsciously registered sound stuff, subliminally enriching the lead melodic line.
There are singers who have a musician's ears and understanding, and who sing as an intrinsic part of the music rather than accompanied by it. I was lucky enough to perform with the legendary Joe Williams, and it was exactly like playing with a great instrumentalist. But that's rare. Most singers lack real musical training, have poor "ears", and simply do their thing. Audiences - who, since 1942 have pinned their eyes tightly on the singer - expect nothing else. The result is much like karoake.
And "Karaoke" is the Japanese word for "figure skating syndrome". It's about music serving as the vague backdrop for performances which happen more or less "to" the music.
I'm not suggesting that choreography must be musically literal: that each piccolo trill be matched with a corresponding fluttery dance movement. But dance ought to emanate from the very guts of the score. A dancer should be a musician. A choreographer should be a musician. Both the dance and its music should seem to spring from the same muse. Yet even the most acclaimed choreographers merely set beauty to a musical accompaniment. All would surely profess great respect for and commitment to the musical form, but that's not enough. They ought to have a musician's soul.
The only modern choreographer who has struck me as truly possessing a great musician's soul was Jerome Robbins. He choreographed Stravinsky's Les Noce, a lush, hyper-complex work I'd previously come to know very well, and his work offered me fresh, startling insights on the piece, which he understood far more deeply than I had. All movement derived profoundly, brilliantly, ingeniously, from Stravinsky's score. The dance truly completed the music.
The Morphoses performance was virtuosic and beautiful. But it completed nothing.
I occasionally check out dance performances, always hoping for the sort of inspiration I get from great music, art, writing, theater, and cooking. But I usually come away grumbling about what I call "Figure Skating Syndrome". It's a musician thing (I was a full-time trombone player once), but let me try to explain.
Figure skaters perform to music that serves as mere backdrop. The music may be acknowledged via a couple of arm waves and coquettish movements, but the skaters are front and center, and the music is mere sonic wallpaper. It's "accompaniment".
Most serious dance performances strike me as similar: talented people doing intricate and beautiful things with a backdrop of music. Or course, that's not fair; serious dance does have a deeper musical relationship than figure skating. But still not enough for my taste. No matter how acclaimed the choreographer, the dancers always appear to be dancing to music, rather than from it.
70 years ago, at the height of its power, the musician's union boldly called a strike on recording. For a very long two years, from 1940 to 1942, musicians recorded no new material. And it changed everything. Before the strike, instrumentalists were kings. Audiences actually listened, they idolized horn players and drummers. Bands were followed like baseball teams. Singers were mere adjuncts to musical performance: second class musical citizens. Props.
But the musicians' strike changed all of that...forever. Two factors contributed. First: the slack was picked up by a slew of vocal recordings, and the public developed an enduring taste for singers. Second, record companies, desperate to maintain revenue, started reissuing old recordings, including one of the Harry James band featuring an unknown singer named Frank Sinatra. The original recording hadn't even listed Sinatra's name, but the reissue hyped him to the hilt, and a sensation was created, which led quickly to screaming, swooning bobbysoxers. After Sinatra, an unbroken string of singers became huge stars. A publicity model was born...and musicians would forevermore be deemed accompanists.
That pecking order has affected the very fabric of music. Vocalists generally sing over the music rather than deeply inside it. Many barely listen to the musicians with whom they perform - whose job is to merely lay down a solid foundation. And that seems perfectly natural to post-1942 audiences, who focus exclusively on the singer. The chasm greatly widened with the advent of music videos, which made the music itself nearly beside the point. Invisible in a visual medium, music grew even less important than wallpaper, become nothing more than subconsciously registered sound stuff, subliminally enriching the lead melodic line.
There are singers who have a musician's ears and understanding, and who sing as an intrinsic part of the music rather than accompanied by it. I was lucky enough to perform with the legendary Joe Williams, and it was exactly like playing with a great instrumentalist. But that's rare. Most singers lack real musical training, have poor "ears", and simply do their thing. Audiences - who, since 1942 have pinned their eyes tightly on the singer - expect nothing else. The result is much like karoake.
And "Karaoke" is the Japanese word for "figure skating syndrome". It's about music serving as the vague backdrop for performances which happen more or less "to" the music.
I'm not suggesting that choreography must be musically literal: that each piccolo trill be matched with a corresponding fluttery dance movement. But dance ought to emanate from the very guts of the score. A dancer should be a musician. A choreographer should be a musician. Both the dance and its music should seem to spring from the same muse. Yet even the most acclaimed choreographers merely set beauty to a musical accompaniment. All would surely profess great respect for and commitment to the musical form, but that's not enough. They ought to have a musician's soul.
The only modern choreographer who has struck me as truly possessing a great musician's soul was Jerome Robbins. He choreographed Stravinsky's Les Noce, a lush, hyper-complex work I'd previously come to know very well, and his work offered me fresh, startling insights on the piece, which he understood far more deeply than I had. All movement derived profoundly, brilliantly, ingeniously, from Stravinsky's score. The dance truly completed the music.
The Morphoses performance was virtuosic and beautiful. But it completed nothing.
Friday, October 3, 2008
Ten Terrific Films You've Never Heard Of
A Walk Into The Sea
About the uncle of the filmmaker, a brilliant young man who got entangled in Andy Warhol's factory. Briefly was Andy's boyfriend. Mysteriously died. Nobody knows why or how. We've seen a zillion exhumations of The Factory, with all its eccentric, bitchy denizens trotted before the camera ad infinitum. This is different. Soulful and surprising.
All In This Tea
The latest from Les Blank (director of foodie classic "Garlic is as Good as Ten Mothers" and the acclaimed Burden of Dreams - the only making-of film that's as good as the film it's about...in this case, Herzog's Fitzcarraldo). This one is about tea trader/expert David Hoffman (who I wrote about here). Hoffman singlehandedly, and against horrendous odds, stimulated a market for artisanal, organic tea in China, which was well on its way to expunging that sort of thing in favor of mass-produced drek. He did it via sheer hubris and perspicacity. Incidentally, this is a fantastic behind-scenes look at how business is done in modern China. Which sounds awfully dry...but Les Blank's never dry.
Unflinching Triumph: The Philip Rockhammer Story
Seems like a standard indie doc about an offbeat crowd....this time, professional "Stare Off" competitors. But as you watch, you increasingly notice that something's kind of off, and also kind of great. I won't give away the secret. Revolutionary, in that it was produced entirely for the Web. And it's hilarious.
How To Draw A Bunny
Ray Johnson was the Andy Kaufman of art. Like Kaufman, he was a deep prankster way too slippery to ever be pinned down. And like Kaufman (whose spot-on Elvis impersonation dropped jaws), he invested vast continents of skill, care, and preparation in even his most flippant-seeming work. Whether Johnson was painting a canvas, chopping up a collage to send fragments to strangers as "mail art" (a genre he invented), or simply typing up a quick letter, everything his hands produced was profoundly, dizzyingly beautiful. And while he knew and was known by a vast number of people, nobody in the film shows the slightest idea who he really was or why he chose to die such a singularly mysterious death.
Refusing to Be Enemies
Palestinian women and Jewish women gather to chat. Not debate, just friendship and a sympathetic airing of feelings in an atmosphere of empathy. A humble little movie about a tectonic breakthrough.
Starting Out In the Evening
If you're a fan of great acting, don't miss Frank Lagnella's role of a lifetime as Leonard Schiller, an aging intellectual who walled off the world ages ago, but is reluctantly coaxed into opening up one final time. When it comes to capturing truth on celluloid, it doesn't get richer than this.
King of Masks
An old Sichuan master of quick-change masks needs an apprentice. It's got to be a boy, but there's this real persistent and sweet little girl who just won't give up....yeah, it's predictable and corny. But totally affecting, and offers a very transportive trip through rural China.
My Kid Could Paint That
Adorable little toddler is a fantastic art prodigy, selling her abstract canvases for thousands of dollars. But....wait....what's really going on here?
Opera Jawa
About the uncle of the filmmaker, a brilliant young man who got entangled in Andy Warhol's factory. Briefly was Andy's boyfriend. Mysteriously died. Nobody knows why or how. We've seen a zillion exhumations of The Factory, with all its eccentric, bitchy denizens trotted before the camera ad infinitum. This is different. Soulful and surprising.
All In This Tea
The latest from Les Blank (director of foodie classic "Garlic is as Good as Ten Mothers" and the acclaimed Burden of Dreams - the only making-of film that's as good as the film it's about...in this case, Herzog's Fitzcarraldo). This one is about tea trader/expert David Hoffman (who I wrote about here). Hoffman singlehandedly, and against horrendous odds, stimulated a market for artisanal, organic tea in China, which was well on its way to expunging that sort of thing in favor of mass-produced drek. He did it via sheer hubris and perspicacity. Incidentally, this is a fantastic behind-scenes look at how business is done in modern China. Which sounds awfully dry...but Les Blank's never dry.
Unflinching Triumph: The Philip Rockhammer Story
Seems like a standard indie doc about an offbeat crowd....this time, professional "Stare Off" competitors. But as you watch, you increasingly notice that something's kind of off, and also kind of great. I won't give away the secret. Revolutionary, in that it was produced entirely for the Web. And it's hilarious.
How To Draw A Bunny
Ray Johnson was the Andy Kaufman of art. Like Kaufman, he was a deep prankster way too slippery to ever be pinned down. And like Kaufman (whose spot-on Elvis impersonation dropped jaws), he invested vast continents of skill, care, and preparation in even his most flippant-seeming work. Whether Johnson was painting a canvas, chopping up a collage to send fragments to strangers as "mail art" (a genre he invented), or simply typing up a quick letter, everything his hands produced was profoundly, dizzyingly beautiful. And while he knew and was known by a vast number of people, nobody in the film shows the slightest idea who he really was or why he chose to die such a singularly mysterious death.
Refusing to Be Enemies
Palestinian women and Jewish women gather to chat. Not debate, just friendship and a sympathetic airing of feelings in an atmosphere of empathy. A humble little movie about a tectonic breakthrough.
Starting Out In the Evening
If you're a fan of great acting, don't miss Frank Lagnella's role of a lifetime as Leonard Schiller, an aging intellectual who walled off the world ages ago, but is reluctantly coaxed into opening up one final time. When it comes to capturing truth on celluloid, it doesn't get richer than this.
King of Masks
An old Sichuan master of quick-change masks needs an apprentice. It's got to be a boy, but there's this real persistent and sweet little girl who just won't give up....yeah, it's predictable and corny. But totally affecting, and offers a very transportive trip through rural China.
My Kid Could Paint That
Adorable little toddler is a fantastic art prodigy, selling her abstract canvases for thousands of dollars. But....wait....what's really going on here?
Opera Jawa
Ravishingly beautiful, highly stylized musical portrayal of part of the Ramayana (a Hindu epic), done Indonesian-style. Not for viewers with even the slightest tinge of ADD, but if you can lose yourself in the beauty and not fight the exoticism of sight and sound, you'll find this a ravishing aesthetic experience. (Warning: this DVD doesn't play on American region DVD players...but here's a workaround.)
Memorable and intricate German/Turkish tale from Turkish/German director Fatih Akin. Akin's previous films are worth a look, as well: Head On (an uber-twisted love story between two troubled Turks adrift in Germany), and Crossing the Bridge: The Sound of Istanbul (a hyper-transportive look at the multifarious music scene in Istanbul).
I'm always shocked by how few people know about this classic film. A magnum opus wherein filmmaker Ross McElwee retraces General Sherman's march, but it's more about tracing the ruination of McElwee's love life, as he looks up old flames enroute. Amazon page lists "Burt Reynolds" as a cast member, but that's just a shaggy dog joke within a shaggy dog joke.
Thursday, October 2, 2008
$29 Swiss Army Knife DVD Player
Many DVD players have secret codes that allow them to play all regions. Google the model number plus "multiregion" for tips. Or buy this ultra-compact DVD player at Target for $29, and apply the remote control trick mentioned in the Amazon user reviews to make it play all regions. It also plays PAL (European video format). And SVCDs. And homegrown DVD-Rs and DVD-RWs. And just about anything else you throw at it.
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