How to Tell a Bad Movie From a Truly Bad Movie: “Bad films wear their ingredients the way soup labels do. To be really bad, a film should be pretentious and sententious. It should seek to change your life. (Anti- genius is 1 percent perspiration and 99 percent aspiration.) It should be, above all, humorless.” A Warner Bros. executive who wishes to remain nameless adds:

Locate the exit nearest you, she says, before screening any film directed by big-name male actors or Brian De Palma, any film that features Robin Williams in a beard, any film scored by John Williams, any film starring Juliette Binoche or Kevin Costner, any film that features Robin Williams clean-shaven, any film directed by a woman and proud of it, any film that features Robin Williams in a yarmulke and any film positively reviewed by anyone associated with National Public Radio.

New York Times

President is taking the month off Some worry about impact on his image. Only on the job six months and he already gets a month off? A month?? Of course, some would say, he’s not really ‘off’; he’ll be briefed daily on what those really in charge are doing in his absence. A Presidential spokesperson says he’ll be making some brief outings “to celebrate some of the values that strengthen America,” making him sound more like a ceremonial chief of state than he is. USA Today and Washington Post While we’re on the issue of executive branch compensations, the White House staff is not a bad palce to work. However, it doesn’t match what an ex-President can make by just signing his name to a piece of paper and hiring a ghostwriter. More Washington Post

It’s OK to get angry. “Prank callers call someone up to bother them. But these people are calling me because they don’t know to dial a ‘1’ before they call outside of their own area code. These people are harassing me with their stupidity.” Profile of New York comedian Matt Besser, who “has built his show aound the idea of irrational anger in our society.” Several years ago, he began getting middle-of-the-night phone calls from people seeking customer support for software they’d been given for free Internet connections. He figured out they were all Manhattanites who had failed to dial a ‘1’ before the area code for the tech support line in Houston and refused to believe him when he told them they had gotten a wrong number. The Internet company refused to insert the ‘1’ in their printed material. “So Besser did what any self-respecting comedian would do: He began fucking with people” … and recording the results. Salon

It’s OK to get angry. “Prank callers call someone up to bother them. But these people are calling me because they don’t know to dial a ‘1’ before they call outside of their own area code. These people are harassing me with their stupidity.” Profile of New York comedian Matt Besser, who “has built his show aound the idea of irrational anger in our society.” Several years ago, he began getting middle-of-the-night phone calls from people seeking customer support for software they’d been given for free Internet connections. He figured out they were all Manhattanites who had failed to dial a ‘1’ before the area code for the tech support line in Houston and refused to believe him when he told them they had gotten a wrong number. The Internet company refused to insert the ‘1’ in their printed material. “So Besser did what any self-respecting comedian would do: He began fucking with people” … and recording the results. Salon

It’s OK to get angry. “Prank callers call someone up to bother them. But these people are calling me because they don’t know to dial a ‘1’ before they call outside of their own area code. These people are harassing me with their stupidity.” Profile of New York comedian Matt Besser, who “has built his show aound the idea of irrational anger in our society.” Several years ago, he began getting middle-of-the-night phone calls from people seeking customer support for software they’d been given for free Internet connections. He figured out they were all Manhattanites who had failed to dial a ‘1’ before the area code for the tech support line in Houston and refused to believe him when he told them they had gotten a wrong number. The Internet company refused to insert the ‘1’ in their printed material. “So Besser did what any self-respecting comedian would do: He began fucking with people” … and recording the results. Salon

“This might be the strongest explosive ever discovered… An accidental explosion in a German physics lab has led to the identification of a superpowerful explosive. The substance – an exotic form of silicon – releases seven times as much energy as TNT, and explodes a million times faster.” New Scientist

“Teachers are more likely to die from an autoimune disease than other professionals, according to US research.” High exposure to large numbers of school children’s viral infections could be the explanation. New Scientist

Taking pictures with your PDA. PDAs and digital cameras were ‘made to be merged.’ The Nando Times

Storm experts make cloud vanish: “Storm experts in the US have made a cloud vanish from the sky for the first time.

They achieved the feat by sprinkling a water-absorbing powder over the cloud, making it disappear from sight and weather station radar screens. They hope the powder will one day dry up deadly hurricanes and tropical storms.” New Scientist

Survivors mark anniversary of Hiroshima bombing: ‘Sunday was just another day for most of the world. But for Fumiko Amano, the 56th anniversary of the day an atomic bomb destroyed her home in Hiroshima rekindled memories of “a kind of hell.” ‘

“The Hibakusha (atomic bomb survivors) are very concerned that the world is going to forget Hiroshima and Nagasaki.” Nando Times

Low Cholesterol Linked To High Death Rate In Elderly ?Our data accord with previous findings of increased mortality in elderly people with low serum cholesterol, and show, for the first time,that long-term persistence of low cholesterol concentration actually increases risk of death.

“These data cast doubt on the scientific justification for lowering cholesterol to very low concentrations (less than 4.65 mmol/L) in elderly people.? UniSci

Film is a veiled look at Scientology

It’s a movie about cults based on fictional characters, says the director. But it’s hard to miss the inspiration behind The Profit.

The main character is a science-fiction writer who founds a religion. Get it?

The leader starts the Church of Scientific Spiritualism. His name: L. Conrad Powers.

The full-length feature film was written and directed by Peter Alexander, a 20-year Scientologist who broke from the church in 1997 and now calls it an elaborate fraud. It was funded in part by Bob Minton, the Church of Scientology’s most vocal critic.

And in three weeks, it will be shown to the public for the first time at an independent theater in none other than Clearwater, the mecca for Scientologists who come there from around the world for church counseling. St. Petersburg Times

It’s OK to get angry. “Prank callers call someone up to bother them. But these people are calling me because they don’t know to dial a ‘1’ before they call outside of their own area code. These people are harassing me with their stupidity.” Profile of New York comedian Matt Besser, who “has built his show aound the idea of irrational anger in our society.” Several years ago, he began getting middle-of-the-night phone calls from people seeking customer support for software they’d been given for free Internet connections. He figured out they were all Manhattanites who had failed to dial a ‘1’ before the area code for the tech support line in Houston and refused to believe him when he told them they had gotten a wrong number. The Internet company refused to insert the ‘1’ in their printed material. “So Besser did what any self-respecting comedian would do: He began fucking with people” … and recording the results. Salon

How to fool the customer service reps into really helping you. Social engineering tip from WOIFM?.

Google’s directory of weblog tools

Talking Heads: “The desire to create talking human heads stems back

at least several hundred years. This

quest presently combines approaches that are

computational, cognitive, and biological, and cuts

across a wide variety of domains and interests. This

Talking Heads website provides a brief overview of

some of these areas and attempts to convey some of

the excitement that has spurred a considerable

amount of international research collaboration.”

SlySearch says it can find your lost property. Looks like they lost some themselves.

The War On Drug Wars – Ashkan Sahihi Gets Normal People High “If the

American government was really concerned about stopping drug abuse,

things like legalization and free needle programs would at least enter

the discussion. In the absence of that, all we have is a silly political tool

to please the Christian right.”

“Look at what we ate!”

Meet the Neanderthals — “Reconstructions of Neanderthal skulls add to

growing evidence that the creatures were not

close relatives of modern humans.” BBC

Tracking Bloggers With Blogdex: “MIT’s Media Lab is experimenting with a tool for indexing the most popular hypertext links across thousands of weblogs

and has ambitious plans to turn it into a resource for the mass media.

Launched last week, Blogdex is like a search-engine spider that visits about 9,000 weblogs a day looking for hypertext

links.” Wired

It extracts the links and ranks them by popularity. The top 10 are published daily on the Blogdex site.

Gallery of ”Misused” Quotation Marks

Lincoln Center Gets New Jazz Director. Another nail in the coffin of Great American Music, in line with Ken Burns’ and Wynton Marsalis’ treatment of the genre as a museum piece. What in the world would an ex-dean of Juilliard and the Boston University School of the Arts (where no jazz programming exists), a classical composer, a former v.p. of G. Schirmer the music publisher, want with the position? Should we worry that he wants to “propel jazz into the center of the culture” and thinks putting up a new building for Lincoln Center in Columbus Circle will do it? New York Times

MTV: Rewinding 20 years of music revolution. Today is the twentieth anniversary of the advent of “the only television phenomenon that had a generation named after it.” CNN It’ll be no surprise to FmH readers that there’s no love lost between me and MTV. In addition to the usual criticism that its three-minute quantization of entertainment doses has driven a generation to attention deficit, critics worry that the indelible grafting of visual imagery onto music has done something profound to our aural senses. It’s true, music as a performance art has always had an element of spectacle, but the violent, debased, usually misogynistic imagery of a TV commercial director has a deeply different effect than watching the performers performing, to which aficionados of live music have for ages been devoted. Finally, in some irrational way, I blame MTV every time I see anyone who isn’t a catcher wearing a backwards baseball cap (only acceptable if it’s an FmH cap…) In related news, MTV was forced to create a new finale for its anniversary gala when keynote singer Mariah Carey cancelled after a psychiatric admission. (BBC) (The oft-cited “emotional exhaustion”, by the way, does not correspond with any psychiatric malady and should be considered an uninformative euphemism at best. Denials from her spokesperson that she attempted to cut her wrists smack of the lady who doth protest too much… )

The annual human rights and violence thematic issue of The Journal of the American Medical Association is out, with a Longitudinal Study of Psychiatric Symptoms, Disability, Mortality, and Emigration Among Bosnian Refugees by Boston physician and human rights activist Dr. Richard Mollica (who long steered the Indochinese Refugee Clinic at the Brighton Marine Hospital in my backyard) and associates. Interesting finding of this study is that repatriation of refugees back to their countries of origin, even after horrendous resettlement camp experiences, does not appear to help alleviate their psychiatric symptomatology. As Mollica comments, the economic rehabilitation of wartorn regions is pouring good money after bad in the face of such an unmet need for society-wide mental health intervention. Links to other JAMA theme issues, including previous annual violence/human rights volumes, are here.

Chuck Taggart at Looka! pointed to this unspeakably tragic instance of medical carelessness. A 6 year-old boy was killed at Westchester Medical Center while undergoing an MRI scan to assess his progress in recovering from a brain tumor, because someone left a metal oxygen tank in the room during the scan! Recall that an MRI scanner is based around a 10-ton electromagnet, and imagine the rest. For God’s sake, the referral form I have to fill out when I refer a patient for an MRI scan goes to prodigious lengths to rule out the presence of even the smallest fragment of metal in the body of the scan subject because of the dangers of such a powerful magnetic field! Nice to know the entire medical center is grieving, and that the state health department wonders “if there were any violations”. I can’t imagine the responsible party having to live with the knowledge that s/he had committed such an outrageous mistake any more than the family can metabolize the senselessness of their little boy’s loss. My heart goes out to all of them. This is not the first instance of gross malfeasance at Westchester Medical Center either. Time for the head honchos to step down, if not be prosecuted for criminally negligent homicide along with the directly guilty party? There are some societies where the head of the institution might offer to take his own life over this… Nando Times