These are the saddest of all possible flicks,
Fire up 'Bambi' and 'Champ'.
Duo of movies as sad as the Styx,
Fire up 'Bambi' and 'Champ'.
Ruthlessly jerking the tears from our eyes,
Turning a giddy mood into a cry,
Watch them only to see happiness die.
Fire up 'Bambi' and 'Champ'.
Showing posts with label movies. Show all posts
Showing posts with label movies. Show all posts
Wednesday, July 27, 2011
Sunday, April 17, 2011
Re, A Very High-Impact Drop Of Golden Sun
The movie Tangled (now on DVD in all your favorite stores!) tells the story- or at least Disney's interpretation of the story- of Rapunzel. You know the one even without the film. Girl in a high tower with hair so long you can climb it and amazingly not make Rapunzel scream in agony because there's a full-grown adult climbing up her hair.
As the movie tells it (which, being Disney, is a whole lot different from the actual story), a drop of golden sun grew a magic flower which had healing powers. After various shenanigans involving a witch, it wound up in the tea of a local pregnant queen, who gave birth to Rapunzel, whose hair carries the same healing powers.
All this from a drop of golden sun.
What would happen, you may be wondering, if--- no, not if your hair was like that too. What would happen if a drop of golden sun actually landed on Earth?
A drop would be about the size of a pinhead. If it landed near you, suffice to say that you would be thoroughly screwed. In fact, if it landed within 90 miles of you, you'd be dead from the radiant heat.
Which is why the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena decided they'd only bring back some particles. They launched a capsule, Genesis, sent up in August 2001 to gather particles ejected from the sun due to solar wind, in order to find out what those particles were made of and otherwise poked and prodded for all manner of purposes. In September 2004, Genesis was set to return. They hoped to grab Genesis out of midair by helicopter on its way down, in hopes of preserving the particles.
It sounds very unlikely to be able to pull that off, but we'll never know for sure. All of Genesis' parachutes failed, and the capsule slammed into Utah's Dugway Proving Ground at 193 miles per hour on September 8, and it only came in that slow due to air resistance. Nobody had discussed that possibility much, or at least, not in public. The capsule broke open on impact, damaging most of the particles were contaminated. The good news is, some did come away undamaged, and in addition, some of the contamination was actually removable. Despite the crash, there were enough ultimately usable sun particles to do all the research they wanted to do.
A month later in the postmortem, it was found that the accelerometer was installed backwards, causing it to fail. This, interestingly enough, backwards accelerometers were the exact type of design flaw that led to the creation of Murphy's Law. A rocket-sled test was conducted in 1948, designed to impose 50-G forces on a test subject and then subject him to rapid deceleration. This caused significant physical trauma on the subject. Dr. John Stapp. The tester, Edward Murphy Jr., then had to announce the test was voided because all the accelerometers had been put in backward, causing them all to fail to produce any measurements.
Genesis did get a measurement. However, 'how big a crater can we make in the Utah desert' wasn't the measurement they intended.
As the movie tells it (which, being Disney, is a whole lot different from the actual story), a drop of golden sun grew a magic flower which had healing powers. After various shenanigans involving a witch, it wound up in the tea of a local pregnant queen, who gave birth to Rapunzel, whose hair carries the same healing powers.
All this from a drop of golden sun.
What would happen, you may be wondering, if--- no, not if your hair was like that too. What would happen if a drop of golden sun actually landed on Earth?
A drop would be about the size of a pinhead. If it landed near you, suffice to say that you would be thoroughly screwed. In fact, if it landed within 90 miles of you, you'd be dead from the radiant heat.
Which is why the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena decided they'd only bring back some particles. They launched a capsule, Genesis, sent up in August 2001 to gather particles ejected from the sun due to solar wind, in order to find out what those particles were made of and otherwise poked and prodded for all manner of purposes. In September 2004, Genesis was set to return. They hoped to grab Genesis out of midair by helicopter on its way down, in hopes of preserving the particles.
It sounds very unlikely to be able to pull that off, but we'll never know for sure. All of Genesis' parachutes failed, and the capsule slammed into Utah's Dugway Proving Ground at 193 miles per hour on September 8, and it only came in that slow due to air resistance. Nobody had discussed that possibility much, or at least, not in public. The capsule broke open on impact, damaging most of the particles were contaminated. The good news is, some did come away undamaged, and in addition, some of the contamination was actually removable. Despite the crash, there were enough ultimately usable sun particles to do all the research they wanted to do.
A month later in the postmortem, it was found that the accelerometer was installed backwards, causing it to fail. This, interestingly enough, backwards accelerometers were the exact type of design flaw that led to the creation of Murphy's Law. A rocket-sled test was conducted in 1948, designed to impose 50-G forces on a test subject and then subject him to rapid deceleration. This caused significant physical trauma on the subject. Dr. John Stapp. The tester, Edward Murphy Jr., then had to announce the test was voided because all the accelerometers had been put in backward, causing them all to fail to produce any measurements.
Genesis did get a measurement. However, 'how big a crater can we make in the Utah desert' wasn't the measurement they intended.
Friday, January 21, 2011
The Other Other Hollywood
If you're reasonably up on your trivia, you might know that there's a Hollywood in Florida. If you know that much, you have almost certainly, at some point, used it as part of some lame joke in which Hollywood, Florida is mistaken for Hollywood, California.
You've probably also mistaken it for some trailer-park backwater, probably somewhere in the panhandle. In fact, it is the twelfth-largest city in the state, housing over 140,000 people, and is quite firmly part of the same South Florida metropolitan area that includes Miami. A first-time visitor to Miami could get sufficiently lost to stumble into Hollywood without even realizing it.
Were you to get even more lost, and travel north out of the metro completely, fairly soon you might find yourself in Hobe Sound. At only 11,000 people, and with a much less-developed oceanside, Hobe Sound might come a lot closer to your initial vision of Hollywood, Florida, though it's still not a trailer-park town.
What you would never guess is that Hobe Sound put a lot more effort into becoming the next Hollywood, California than Hollywood, Florida ever did.
Thomas Edison, as you had better be well-aware, was a very proficient inventor. One of those inventions was the motion picture. He was the first to get it to work, patenting the 'kinetoscope' in 1888, even though the groundwork had been laid as early as Leland Stanford. However, he was not the only one with a patent relating to motion pictures, and since this was a new, major thing, not a small bit of chaos resulted. Imagine if Microsoft had a patent on video game consoles, Nintendo had a patent on video games themselves, and Sony had a patent on the CD's the games were printed on. It's not a perfect analogy, but it'll hold up long enough for us to proceed. The rivalries were largely sorted out in 1908, when many of the competing companies banded together to form the Thomas Edison Motion Picture Patents Company with an eye towards creating a monopoly, and made everyone in the budding film industry pay them licensing fees in order to remain in business.
Some paid, and play no further part in this story. Some didn't. Those that didn't, the "independents," chose to run far, far away from the prying eyes of Edison, or any other authority that might make them pay up.
But where to go? It had to be far from Menlo Park, obviously. Another factor that went into the decision was local climate. Since they are picking out a preferred location, it might as well be friendly to filmmaking. Someplace warm. Someplace with nice weather. Someplace with a variety of settings they could use.
Someplace like Hollywood, California. Here, the independents could work with plenty of lead time on the authorities and develop their craft-- producing, distributing and exhibiting. When Edison threatened the supply of film used by an exhibitor, the exhibitor would just start making their own films and proceed merrily along. Eventually, the courts struck down the Motion Picture Patents Company in 1915 as part of the trust-busting movement, but by then they were more or less rendered moot anyway.
What does any of this have to do with Hobe Sound? In the 1920's, Florida, then a very rural state, experienced a land boom. As part of this land boom, Hobe Sound, like the rest of the state, got some fairly grand ideas in their head. They wanted to become the next Hollywood. Led by the Olympia Improvement Corporation, streets were renamed after the Greek pantheon. The town was renamed "Picture City." Fancy lightposts were built. Building construction was started all over town.
Unfortunately, the filmmakers would never get a chance to arrive. While construction was still underway, the land boom collapsed in 1926. Two years later, the Okeechobee hurricane, currently the 9th-deadliest Atlantic hurricane of all time, slammed into Florida. There was no way they were going to be the next Hollywood now. Picture City was changed back to Hobe Sound.
Not that fate was done with them yet. A year after that, as if to rub salt in the wound, the Great Depression hit.
No studio ever got built. The street names remained, the lightposts remained, but that was about it. To this day, the town has remained virtually untouched by the filmmakers they were trying to attract, with the only released feature film ever shot there being the 1972 movie Charcoal Black. Hobe Sound went back to being the sleepy oceanside town it was before and remains today.
Meanwhile, Hollywood, Florida, primarily by virtue of being a Miami suburb, has attracted a number of filmmakers, among them Martin Scorsese, who used the town as part of the backdrop for his 1991 remake of Cape Fear, starring Robert De Niro, Nick Nolte and Jessica Lange. So was The Hours, a 2002 Best Picture nominee. Among the other productions that have used Hollywood, Florida: Midnight Cowboy, 2 Fast 2 Furious, Striptease, and episodes of Burn Notice and Dexter.
Some cities have all the luck.
You've probably also mistaken it for some trailer-park backwater, probably somewhere in the panhandle. In fact, it is the twelfth-largest city in the state, housing over 140,000 people, and is quite firmly part of the same South Florida metropolitan area that includes Miami. A first-time visitor to Miami could get sufficiently lost to stumble into Hollywood without even realizing it.
Were you to get even more lost, and travel north out of the metro completely, fairly soon you might find yourself in Hobe Sound. At only 11,000 people, and with a much less-developed oceanside, Hobe Sound might come a lot closer to your initial vision of Hollywood, Florida, though it's still not a trailer-park town.
What you would never guess is that Hobe Sound put a lot more effort into becoming the next Hollywood, California than Hollywood, Florida ever did.
Thomas Edison, as you had better be well-aware, was a very proficient inventor. One of those inventions was the motion picture. He was the first to get it to work, patenting the 'kinetoscope' in 1888, even though the groundwork had been laid as early as Leland Stanford. However, he was not the only one with a patent relating to motion pictures, and since this was a new, major thing, not a small bit of chaos resulted. Imagine if Microsoft had a patent on video game consoles, Nintendo had a patent on video games themselves, and Sony had a patent on the CD's the games were printed on. It's not a perfect analogy, but it'll hold up long enough for us to proceed. The rivalries were largely sorted out in 1908, when many of the competing companies banded together to form the Thomas Edison Motion Picture Patents Company with an eye towards creating a monopoly, and made everyone in the budding film industry pay them licensing fees in order to remain in business.
Some paid, and play no further part in this story. Some didn't. Those that didn't, the "independents," chose to run far, far away from the prying eyes of Edison, or any other authority that might make them pay up.
But where to go? It had to be far from Menlo Park, obviously. Another factor that went into the decision was local climate. Since they are picking out a preferred location, it might as well be friendly to filmmaking. Someplace warm. Someplace with nice weather. Someplace with a variety of settings they could use.
Someplace like Hollywood, California. Here, the independents could work with plenty of lead time on the authorities and develop their craft-- producing, distributing and exhibiting. When Edison threatened the supply of film used by an exhibitor, the exhibitor would just start making their own films and proceed merrily along. Eventually, the courts struck down the Motion Picture Patents Company in 1915 as part of the trust-busting movement, but by then they were more or less rendered moot anyway.
What does any of this have to do with Hobe Sound? In the 1920's, Florida, then a very rural state, experienced a land boom. As part of this land boom, Hobe Sound, like the rest of the state, got some fairly grand ideas in their head. They wanted to become the next Hollywood. Led by the Olympia Improvement Corporation, streets were renamed after the Greek pantheon. The town was renamed "Picture City." Fancy lightposts were built. Building construction was started all over town.
Unfortunately, the filmmakers would never get a chance to arrive. While construction was still underway, the land boom collapsed in 1926. Two years later, the Okeechobee hurricane, currently the 9th-deadliest Atlantic hurricane of all time, slammed into Florida. There was no way they were going to be the next Hollywood now. Picture City was changed back to Hobe Sound.
Not that fate was done with them yet. A year after that, as if to rub salt in the wound, the Great Depression hit.
No studio ever got built. The street names remained, the lightposts remained, but that was about it. To this day, the town has remained virtually untouched by the filmmakers they were trying to attract, with the only released feature film ever shot there being the 1972 movie Charcoal Black. Hobe Sound went back to being the sleepy oceanside town it was before and remains today.
Meanwhile, Hollywood, Florida, primarily by virtue of being a Miami suburb, has attracted a number of filmmakers, among them Martin Scorsese, who used the town as part of the backdrop for his 1991 remake of Cape Fear, starring Robert De Niro, Nick Nolte and Jessica Lange. So was The Hours, a 2002 Best Picture nominee. Among the other productions that have used Hollywood, Florida: Midnight Cowboy, 2 Fast 2 Furious, Striptease, and episodes of Burn Notice and Dexter.
Some cities have all the luck.
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