location scout

Hollywood is in the pre-production phases of a period adventure, a new version of the Three Musketeers starring Orlando Bloom, Christoph Waltz and Milla Jovovich, which will be at least in part filmed in the nearby cities of Würzburg and Bamberg, both beautiful and rich in history. Later this week, there will be a casting-call for extras. I am pretty excited about the exposure and augmented appreciation this will bring for this part of Franconia, but at the same time, I have a protective instinct for these places. I have remarked that both Würzburg and Bamberg have some excellent and authentic shoots to offer, and these places are not exactly undiscovered but neither are they over-run with tourism and too-common parlance.

I had wanted these streets as back-drops for independent movies or at least to tell the stories that Würzburg or Bamberg have to tell, and not some transplanted, ersatz swashbuckling in three-dimensions: the Peasants' Revolt, political intrigues with the Electoral College of the Prince-Bishops, the castle and the keep, Celtic monastics, the discovery of the x-ray, the invention of radar, the fire-bombing post Dresden, the US occupation, the art and architecture. I ought to work up a treatment myself, though H and I can be the perfect wall-flowers in the meantime.

skullduggery

Failure to adapt to changing economic conditions, both on the part of predators and prey, give license for a lot of failed schemes to stick around like blots of quicksand: pawn shops, bail-brokers, pay-day loan offices and other lending sharks intent on unending swim.  This too has made those forces determined to glean whatever profits they can from one's privacy even more firmly entrenched and desparate to try the most distasteful and tactiest of tacits.  I imagine that tombstones (pepperoni and cheese) of the future will be equipped with USB ports where visitors can plug in and download the archives of departed loved ones' tweets and other exhaustively monitored cyber spasms.  Reminscing, of course, will be peppered with targeted advertizing.  The interwebs will be a very poor executor and not many secrets will be secreted away.

minority report or farce protection

As Wired Magazine reports, Google and the CIA are exploring a partnership with a cyber-security firm, which I am sure was already double-dipping and in the rolls of the Washington Post's revealing exposé on US intelligence's poorly-constructed parade float of an operation, that promises to deliver reconnaissance on future crimes. By trawling blogs, tweets and other social networking sites, the firm hopes to project and predict potential threats before they happen through examining the broader network of connection and links. I was under the impression that intelligence analysts fight crimes by looking at these same context clues and making projections. With all the other surplus and redundancy, it is a challenge to imagine that these techniques could produce anything original and would only reduplicate different drafts of the same information already in circulation. I am not sure what Google's interest in this enterprise is. Besides the role of technical advisor, as the company reinvented Project Keyhole as Googlemaps and makes it freely available though with possible, I can only think that such prognostication could maybe catch future file-sharers and copy-fighters. For the intelligensia, possibly the biggest benefit could be in plugging leaks and nabbing the snitches.

Oedipus Rex or was not was--everybody do the dinosaur!

The Sphinx challenged Oedipus on the road to Thebes with a riddle: what creature walks on four legs, then two, then three? Paleontologists have found themselves confronted puzzle, as New Scientist reports, and this is really mind-blowing and disabusing. Certain specimens that researchers have always held to be examples of different species may actually be the same animal at different stages of growth and development. If people did not have the experience of frogs and butterflies contemporarily, who would have thought to connect them to fossil evidence of tadpoles or caterpillars?