In an unprecedented post-festival meeting with the press, the Cannes jury discussed their choices. Re: Palme d’Or recipient “Fahrenheit 9/11″, jury members said “it was a unanimous choice based purely on its strength as a film, not a political statement.”
From a story in the Independent:
Global warming is now advancing so swiftly that only a massive expansion of nuclear power as the world’s main energy source can prevent it overwhelming civilisation, the scientist and celebrated Green guru, James Lovelock, says.
One response from an environmentalist:
Climate change and radioactive waste both pose deadly long-term threats, and we have a moral duty to minimise the effects of both, not to choose between them.
Idealism, meet Pragmatism.
I’m still more than content with the 4.5 Mbit/sec downloads I’m getting with my ISP Free Dégroupage [french], which costs 29.95€/month including over 50 channels of TV [french] and a separate VoIP telephone line with exceptional rates (note that the site advertises 2 MBit, but I’m consistently clocking [french] 4.5). They throw in nice things too, like free, live coverage of all seven courts for the duration of Roland Garros (aka the French Open), channels 81-87. No Ginsu knife, though.
But, news for me, I see there is an Internet2 coming with 2.0 Gbit/sec bandwidth. 500X my little data trickle.
Like the Internet at its inception, it is the province of universities and technology centers. All you need to join the system is academic accreditation and nearly $12,000 a year to pay for an affilate membership.
I don’t have to write formal letters in French very often, but when I do, I stress. In a recent exchange with my landlord, I found this handy calculator for formal salutations.
Je vous prie d’accepter, Monsieur, Madame, l’expression de mes sentiments respectueux.
A.O. Scott summarizes Asia’s influence at Cannes:
What Europe was 30 years ago, Asia is today: a continent with at least a half-dozen artistically and commercially thriving national cinemas producing work in a dizzying variety of styles and genres, from challenging festival fare to populist blockbusters. Their influence is felt around the world, in the high-flying martial-arts wire work that has lately become a Hollywood cliché and, more interestingly, in the delicate urban anomie (a specialty of Mr. Wong’s) that permeates Sofia Coppola’s “Lost in Translation.”
In the same article, he reminds us of the impressive Asian representation at Cannes in 2000: “In the Mood for Love,” “Yi Yi,” “Chunhyang,” “Eureka” and “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon;” I was immediately craving both “Eureka” and “Mood” on the big screen.
On a much more serious/infuriating/depressing topic, Frank Rich discusses the Palme d’Or winner, Michael Moore’s “Fahrenheit 9/11″:
Whatever you think of Mr. Moore, there’s no question he’s detonating dynamite here. […] Just when Abu Ghraib and the savage beheading of Nicholas Berg make us think we’ve seen it all, here is yet another major escalation in the nation-jolting images that have become the battleground for the war about the war.
No surprise that a French film festival selected a film so critical of Bush and his war in Iraq? But as we see here, only one of nine judges is French, with a majority being American or English. And Scott asserts that Cannes doesn’t even like documentaries, that this is one of only three nonfiction films allowed in competition in nearly 50 years.
Despite that, as Scott reported a few days earlier:
The audience at the afternoon gala screening responded with a 20-minute standing ovation that the festival’s artistic director, Thierry Frémaux, said was the longest he had ever witnessed in Cannes.
Rich kindly reminds us, if we needed reminding, that Moore is “a polemicist, not a journalist,” as does Moore himself:
We’ve had this footage [shown in “Fahrenheit 9/11″] in our possession for two months,” he says. “I saw it before any of the Abu Ghraib news broke. I think it’s pretty embarrassing that a guy like me with a high school education and with no training in journalism can do this. What the hell is going on here? It’s pathetic.
And it is.
I did poorly on this one:
Your score: 23
A typical score is in the range 22-30. If you scored over 30,
you are very accurate at decoding a person’s facial expressions
around their eyes. A score under 22 indicates you find this quite difficult.
Or so I thought. Results at the time of writing show a male average of 23.33 (n=2107), and a female average of 24.51 (n=2763). So gosh, I’m practically average on that one.
Here’s an older post from Dylan Greene’s blog explaining why RSS is not ready for primetime.
John Markoff at NYT reports on google’s early counter to Longhorn searching, a PC file and text search utility.
The project, code-named Puffin, has been running internally for a year, and is overseen by a previous MS product manager. It will start as a free download, though no sign of it as of this writing. As google goes after some of this Longhorn stuff, MS is preparing an advanced web search service to counter google.
Not having looked at Longhorn, I see that it intends to make the standalone browser unnecessary. I’ve grown attached to modern browsers’ level of personalization and continuing stream of innovation in the form of plugins; but maybe Longhorn will blunt the inroads being made in browser space. At the moment, browsers are a very “sticky” product for me.
And natural language queries: I’m anxious to see what “where are my vacation photos” returns–I can imagine how ‘vacation’ and ‘photo’ are handled, but what about ‘where’ and ‘my’? I’m sure NL has come a long way since the ’90s when I was spending so much time on NL frontends to SQL databases.
Amy Gahran just announced at her weblog the winner of her RSS renaming contest.
Dan Gillmor thinks it’s pretty lame, as do his commentators.
I’ll admit that webfeed is not especially catchy or fun, but it is easy and doesn’t need any decoding. It stretches to include various implementations–people who care about RSS 0.91 vs Atom vs anything else can speak more specifically, and meanwhile, the masses can speak generally and usefully about webfeeds.