Twitter goes to the movies

One thing about the Twitters is it’s a great place to get silly. Every once in a while someone starts a hashtag dare, and it’s off to the races.

After the Texas Lege banned feminine hygiene products in its hallowed chambers, #ReplaceAWordInAMovieWithTampon trended for a day or two.

You know: Lethal Tampon. A Fistful of Tampons and so on.

Then there was #TitlesWithNachos.

So you had Die Hard with Nachos, Where the Wild Nachos Are, Harry Potter and the Deathly Nachos, No Nachos for Old Men and… Well, you get the idea.

One of my favorites, and therefore my excuse for the Funky Friday post today, is #1letterwrongmovie. Change one letter in a movie title; get a whole new film.

What happened with this one was that the Photoshoppers came out in droves. It wasn’t enough to play with the words; they had to augment the images.

You do not want to be drinking anything while looking at these. Or, if you are, at least aim your nose away from your keyboard.

Nightmare on Elmo Street:

 

Pilates of the Caribbean:

Fat & Furious:

Iron Nan:

And—I can’t decide which wins the prize—Lord of the Wings:

Or Paws:

What do you think?

A flight into history

A friend of mine alerted me to this video of B-17s in action during the Second World War. It’s set to Glenn Miller’s “In the Mood”.

B-17s were the workhorse of the US air war in Europe, and they were perhaps the earliest of my technology interests.

They didn’t have the payload capacity or the range of other bombers, but once their armor was beefed up, the Eighth Air Force followed a strategy of formation flying and they developed long-range escort fighters, the B-17 just kept pounding targets all over Europe.

It was called the “Flying Fortress” because you could shoot half of the fuselage, most of the tail and other sundry parts away, and it would still make it back to base. (You can see this in the video.)

I’ve actually been in one—a guy I was going out with was designing Mattel’s “B-17 Bomber” Intellivision game, and we went to an air show specifically to see it. (The game kind of tanked; wonder how it would do with today’s graphic action capabilities?) 

(And if you want to see the interior, here are some pix from the Smithsonian's Air & Space magazine.)

The interesting thing to me was the old guy they had showing us around. He’d flown in the craft and had lots of stories to tell.

The one thing I remember, 30 years on, is that he said that, even with its stolid homing capabilities, about half of the Forts were lost during the war. (And since each plane held a crew of ten, that means a loss of more than 50,000 men.) According to this guy, a high proportion of those losses occurred on a crew’s 25^th (and final) mission. The pilot would try some damn-fool stunt, like buzzing the control tower, and that was all she wrote.

Well, maybe, maybe not. I can’t find that documented anywhere, but it makes a good story.

Both Andy Rooney and Walter Cronkite were working journalists during WWII, and they’ve written about “ride-alongs” they took on B-17s. I recommend their accounts to you. Before their sortie, they’d absorbed the ground-pounders’ usual complaint about how war for the flyers was all glamour and no risk. They had a different perspective afterward.

Cuisine-in-a-can

Okay, I suppose someone was going to do this at some point. For any number of reasons.

Wired reports that a grad student at a London university has created a 12-course dinner-in-a-can. Twelve foods embalmed in gelatin & entombed in a can. Chris Godfrey says it’s part of his investigation into today’s “bombastic consumerism”, but I’m betting he really did it to see if he could.

From the top down they include:

Selection of local cheeses

Pickled Kobe beef

Ricotta ravioli

Shiitake mushrooms

Halibut poached in truffle butter

It goes on and on, through the main course, rib-eye steak with grilled mustard greens; and it ends with a canelé and hazelnut latte.

Leaving aside the issue that a latte is not an appropriate after-dinner coffee, I guess Chris Godfrey has covered all the major food groups, although covering them in gelatin just makes them icky.

(Hey—you ever eaten an aspic by mistake? You’d be scarred for life, too.)

I’m really seeing this as a guy thing—can’t think of any woman who’d spend hours and hours preparing expensive ingredients and layering them in a can, knowing no one’s ever going to eat the result.

Me—I can’t even get my head around the turducken. Plus, if you’ve ever tried to get the jellied cranberry sauce out of the can whole at Thanksgiving, you know this would be a bitch-and-a-half to extrude onto your plate without smooshing it.

But I bet Godfrey gets his degree off this. His committee’s probably all-male.

The flow of human history

I came across this timeline of sorts—“Histomap of Four Thousand Years of World History”—yesterday. It covers 2000 BCE to 1931. (Click here to go to a somewhat larger version at the Slate site.)

I’ll start out with a complaint—why couldn’t Slate have made it zoomable? At least zommable so that it doesn’t go into a blur?

But beyond that, this thing is fascinating.

For one thing, it’s beautiful to look at—the multicolored rivers of human groupings, flowing through history. They appear, they expand; they disappear…

If you view the whole thing as one long strip, it looks like something that came from one of those WPA murals that used to adorn all manner of public buildings. Which would put it in the right time-frame for something that ends history at 1931.

Look at where the US appears—that little blue rivulet way, way down towards the bottom at the left. Just a little blip in the course of human history. & Great Britain—it achieved its greatest point of expansion just as we broke away, presaging the collapse of empire.

China is the one constant in this whole thing—ain’t that a kick in the pants?

I really wish I could print this out on some gigantic printer, so it’s at a legible scale. Then I’d hang it on a tall wall next to a multi-floor staircase so people could walk up and down to follow the streams of history.

Second complaint—why couldn’t Slate have commissioned a graphic artist and historian(s) to pick up at 1931 and take it through to at least 2010? This just cries out to be updated.

Gratitude Monday: My excellent birthday adventure

Saturday was my birthday. I stopped making a big deal about that around the time I moved to Seattle and pretty much gave up the will to live. My family and friends always remember it, and I get the most wonderful cards and presents; I just don’t bother with it much myself, since the closest one of the family-and-friend crowd is more than 500 miles away.

But a couple of weeks ago, a friend who lives right here asked how I intended to celebrate my birthday. She takes this kind of stuff seriously, to the point of taking the day off from work to mark her own birthday. So I thought, well, why not?

Except for our foray in to Union Square for the SF Design Week events a couple of months ago, I’ve not been into San Francisco in a couple of years. And those trips were for job interviews. So that became our destination.

It was an incredible day.

We had to adjust out plans a bit when we realized that Outside Lands was going on in Golden Gate Park, but it still turned out great.

We started out with breakfast at Mel’s Diner, where the food was good and the service what you’d expect at a place that makes its money from tourists who won’t be returning.

The real star of the day was the park, where we spent about six hours, and barely cracked its possibilities. Dahlia Dell, the conservatory, the de Young Museum, the rose garden, the Japanese tea garden and the carousel were all we could manage.

Highlights:

The conservatory reminded me of its counterpart at Kew Gardens, though smaller and more intense. (Meaning it was basically a sweat lodge with a lot of greenery.) They have a temporary exhibit of a butterfly garden, which was fascinating (down to and including the signage):

They invited you to add the word for “butterfly” in other languages onto a chalkboard. Ann and I gave them the German (der Schmetterling); right after that, a Vietnamese woman wrote in bướm bướm, which is apparently pronounced somewhere between “bom-bom” and “boom-boom”. But I like the repeated “B” sound for the fluttery creature; seems appropriate.

I was stunned by the variety of dahlias, all concentrated into a small space, so they just cry out for your attention. Also, for the ministrations of bees, who were stocking up on all the good pollen:

The carousel was wonderful—totally mechanical (as opposed to electronic), with spectacularly beautiful animals. It dates from 1914. I rode the tiger (no limericks, please). Take a look at the stork:

To tell you the truth, by this time (nearly 1700) we were just the teensiest bit tired. So back to Japantown for some of the best sushi I’ve ever had, with boats floating past us to distribute the delicacies. Listen—I’ve eaten a lot of raw fish in my time; this was amazing. Also: first time I've ever seen éclairs at a sushi bar; much less floating past me on bamboo boats next to raw shrimp and salmon.

The sushi cutter’s name (according to his name tag) was Alberto.

America, gonif.

It was a great way to celebrate my birthday, and I’m grateful for the opportunity to do it and for a friend to share it with. Gratitude Monday hardly seems big enough to cover it. But it’s a start.