Vin Crosbie's Personal Blog

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If There Is A Theme To The 21st Century

When historians in the future look back at the 21st Century, the historical theme they will see is Tribalism versus World Law.

During the previous century, not only were all the ‘terra incognitas’ on the world’s maps eliminated but the nations and peoples of the world became interdependent, thanks to modern technology and modern transportation. ‘Globalization’ is only one aspect of that change. Viruses and plagues can now be transmitted worldwide in a matter of days. Pollution in any one country affects other or all countries. Etcetera.

Whether or not the nations and peoples of the world have the wisdom to cooperate and solve or prevent problems is the big question. Will nations and peoples revert to tribalism (ethnic cleansing, unilateral actions, etc.) or will they work together?

Miss Aniela's Photos

Via Flickr.com, I’ve discovered the remarkable ‘clone’ self-portraiture of Natalie Aniela Dybisz of Brighton, England. Great photography and use of Photoshop. Go see her work.

Altered Kiera Knightly

A Land Where Grander Tetons Are Required

Altered Kiera Knightly[/caption]

American media is fascinated with large breasts? Has it always been that way? It seems to predate Hugh Hefner‘s founding of Playboy magazine in the 1950s or Howard Hughesmammary engineering of Jane Russell in the 1943 film The Outlaw. I think it might have started with the Gibson girls at the beginning of the Twentieth Century.
Though Americans of both genders probably appreciated large breasts before that, the feminine idea (i.e., figure) had been much less top-heavily. Though the French revolutionary symbol of Liberty, Marianne, shows the contents of her C-cups whiling the people over the barricades, most depictions of women prior to the Twentieth Century, notably females in classical Greek and Roman sculptures and medieval and Renaissance art, featured neither wasp waists nor C- or D-cups. In fact, the concept of bra cup sizes is a Twentieth Century American invention, as is the brassiere or ‘bra’ itself. And, after all, everything is big in America.
So forgive 21 year-old British actress Keira Knightley‘s surprise to discover her images in the pictures and posters promoting her films in the U.S. have digitally enhanced her breasts. (Click the picture above to, er, enlarge). According to the Daily Mail of London, Knightley claims that American magazines ban stars from appearing on their front covers unless they have at least a C-cup size, or are willing to be digitally enhanced to make it appear as if they have.
If true — and, from being around the U.S. magazine industry for years, I suspect it is true — then it’s too bad, because Ms. Knightley has beautiful breasts that don’t need enhancement. Any fan of the young Charlotte Rampling (or even young Michelle Pfieffer in the film Scarface) knows that.
A- and B-cup breasts don’t need enhancements but display, or more realistically the tantilization of near display. Like a present that’s partially but not yet identifiable unwrapped, a woman with A- or B-cup breasts who keeps an extra button or two open atop her blouse is far more tantilizing to men than a woman her displays C- or D-cup cleavage. We men like to know what we’re about to get more than what we’ve already got.

The Batu Caves

Back from Malaysia

The Batu Caves
The Batu Caves, Kuala Lumpur

I returned Sunday from two weeks in Singapore and Malaysia. My round-trip was on the world’s longest commercial airline route: Singapore Airlines’ Non-stop flights between Newark and Singapore. Each 15,349-kilometer (9,593-mile) flight takes between 18 and 20 hours, depending upon weather conditions. The airline uses a four-engine Airbus 340-500 with 181 (rather than the standard Airbus 340’s 300) seats.
My flights took 18 and 18 and a half hours each, and used different routes. The flight from Newark headed directly north over the pole and then directly south over Siberia, Mongolia, China, Thailand, and Malaysia. However, my return flight followed a more traditional airline route between Asia and North America: Over the South China Sea, over the Pacific off the coasts of Taiwan, Japan, and Siberia, then over Alaska and diagonally across Canada. I don’t know whether the return took that route to lessen the amount of overflight fees that Singapore Airlines has to pay various countries or else because it takes less time due to prevailing trade winds.
Either way, 18+ hours aboard an airliner didn’t feel much different than 8 hours aboard an airliner (but must for the pilots). It was much better than changing plans in Seattle, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Tokyo, Seoul, Shanghai, Hong Kong, Manila, or Bangkok. I generally go out of my way (in this case Newark airport) to fly Singapore Airlines. Its service, as usual, was superb.

Parkour: a 21st Century or Post-Modern Sport

Parkour is the new, urban, extreme sport of elegantly and efficiently overcoming obstances.This sport combines gymnastics and a tenacious flow along a course. Think of how Hong Kong martial arts star Jackie Chan chases someone through industrial or urban environments. According to Wikipedia::

Parkour is an art form of human movement, focusing on uninterrupted, efficient forward motion over, under, around and through obstacles (both man-made and natural) in one’s environment. Such movement may come in the form of running, jumping, climbing and other more complex techniques. The goal of practicing parkour is to be able to adapt one’s movement to any given scenario so that any obstacle can be overcome with the human body’s abilities.

The sport was largely invented by Frenchmen David Belle and Sebastien Foucan. Participants attempt to pass obstacles in the fastest and most direct manner possible, using skills such as jumping and climbing, or the more specific parkour moves. The name parkour derives from the (identically pronounced) French word parcours, meaning course. Participants are called traceurs, a French word meaning bullets, for their speed and directness.
For some video examples of parkour, see or Parkour.net or Focaun’s Parkour.com. A parkour sequence opens the forthcoming James Bond movie Casino Royale. Foucan plays a villian chasing Bond.

Madonna as Marie Antoinette

Producing the Past in this Information Era

Madonna as Marie Antoinette
Madonna as Marie Antoinette

Europe continues to turn into a European historical theme park. Whenever I visit Britain, I’m surprised by how much that country devotes itself to being a historical park for tourists.
France is no different, and the latest evidence is a story in today’s The New York Times about how the government officials who operate the Palace of Versailles are timing new exhibits there to coincide with American film director Sofia Coppola‘s movie Marie Antoinette.
Meanwhile, the Louvre has been similarly milking American director Ron Howard film The Da Vinci Code, which was the first commercial film that the French government ever permitted to film within that museum. Though Versaille and the Louvre are devoted to accuracy, French critics point out numerous historical inaccuracies in the Coppola film plus the fact that the Howard film is complete fiction. But officials just give a Gallic shrug; the films have been good for those historic places’ box offices. (The photo above isn’t actually from the Coppola film, but is Madonna portraying Marie Antoinette. Hye, what better example can I give? Click to enlarge it)
Wouldn’t Britain and France be better devoting themselves to future glories, rather than those of the past? To producing the future, rather than the past?
I dunno? In this Information Age, maybe the past is the information that these countries are producing.

Fin

Giant Fin Arises Within Mount St. Helens Volcano

Fin
Giant Fin Arises In Mount St. Helens

It’s not Jaws, but a 300-foot (90 meters) high and 330-foot (100 meters) wide triangular wedge of volcanic rock that’s been emerging from the crater of Mt. St. Helens since last Novembe, National Geographic magazines reports. It’s growing a rate of 4.6 feet (1.4 meters) a day.
“It’s an unstable column of rock. It will likely fall apart,” a geologist said. In the past week, blocks of rock have been falling from the tip of the fin at about the same rate as it is growing at the base. Scientists say these features typically last for weeks to several months. Nobody knows for sure when the current fin will collapse or be shoved aside.
The fin, which is steadily pushing other parts of the growing dome toward the west, has a smooth surface on the leading edge and is rough and crumbly on its sides.
“The reason for that highly smooth surface is because [magma] comes out at an angle, and the rock is literally getting ground against the walls of the vent,” another geologist said. “It’s like a rock in a rock-tumbler being ground, smoothed, and polished.”

Great TV Commercials

Great commercials seldom appear on America TV. The country is too puritanical for risqu� ads, too ‘politically correct’ for cheeky ads, and the focus group-types of approaches through which Madison Avenue uses to test advertising concepts tend to blunt edgy ads. You instead need to watch European TV to see great TV commercials.
My overall favorite this year has been a British ad for Honda automobiles, which uses a chorus to replicate the sounds of a Honda Civic on the road. Click this link to can watch the ad and also see the chorus rehearse for the ad. You can also see the ad through Metacafe, which  features some clips from some other excellent English-language TV commercials.

cheetapainting

Retired Actor Cheeta Turns 74

cheetapainting
Cheeta Painging

The graying, diabetic co-star of a dozen Tarzan action/adventure movies during the 1930s and 1940s celebrated his 74th birthday at his Palm Springs, California, home this month by devouring a sugar-free cake. Representatives from a Spanish film festival also showed up for Sunday’s party to present Cheeta with the first award of his career – an International Comedy Film Festival prize.

Cheeta is now the world’s oldest chimpanzee, according to the Guiness Book or World Records. Most chimpanzees live to no more than 40 in the wild but can read 60 in captivity. A caretaker told the Associated Press than Cheeta is very active and “he still has every tooth in his head.”

Cheeta started his acting career in the 1932 film Tarzan the Ape Man with Johnny Weissmuller. Cheeta’s last acting role was in the 1967 musical film Doctor Doolittle with Rex Harrison.

Cheetah and Family
Cheetah, Boy, Tarzan, and Jane

According to National Geographic, which had profiled Cheeta on his 71st birthday, the retired actor used to spend his spare time riding in a ride in the car with his caretaker, who said that Cheeta “likes to go through the drive-thru and get a hamburger and a Coke.” In his earlier years Cheeta had a penchant for beer and cigars, reportedly drinking several cold ones a day, but gave that up ten years ago when he moved into a new home.

Cheeta supports himself by selling his paintings (see top photo). I’ll let you judge if his talent as a painter is better than that of fellow actor Sylvester Stallone.

Wishful Thinking versus Reality

Since George Washington was sworn in as president of the United States, 42 men have held that office. I lived through the criminal administration of Richard Nixon, but I had thought the odds were good that I wouldn’t live during a incompetent president (Nixon’s unelected successor, Gerald Ford, although prone to tripping over his own feet, was a competent administrator). When I think about incompetent U.S. presidents, I think about Andrew Johnson, Warren Harding, Herbert Hoover, or other names from past generations.
I’ve however realized that I am living through the administration of who may be the most incompetent president in U.S. history. Andrew Johnson’s administration (1865-69) may have been a nadir, but the U.S. wasn’t the world’s only superpower at that time. The incompetent George W. Bush‘s United States is.
Six years into it, I cannot name anything he has competently done. Quite the contrary.

  • Almost five years since the terrorist attack on New York City, the site of the destroyed World Trade Towers is still an empty lot and no one directly involved with those attacks has subsequently been captured, prosecuted, or convicted.
  • Bush quite rightly led the United States to invade Afghanistan after that country’s government refused to prosecute or extradite the people (notably Osama bin Lauden) who openly claimed to the masterminds of the New York and Washington terrorist attacks. The U.S. military conquered most of Afghanistan (the first time anyone had successfully done that since Alexander the Great), but refused (reputably at the White House’s insistence) to send its troops into the Tora Bora Mountains where those masterminds were hiding.
  • Osama bin Lauden and the other masterminds apparently escaped into neighboring Pakistan. No one publicly knows if Bush demanded his extradition. Moreover, widespread evidence arose that the chief of Pakistan’s nuclear bomb project had been providing bomb plans and materials to North Korea, Iran, and Libya (the latter country’s dictator admitted this and turned the plans and materials over to the U.S. government). Yet Bush didn’t flinch when Pakistan’s own dictator pardoned the bomber and continued to shelter the September 11th masterminds. Bush this past week visited Pakistan and called it an “unwavering ally.” With allies like that, we’re in big trouble.
  • Bush then proclaimed a doctrine of ‘pre-emptive war’ and invaded Iraq because, according to the White House, there was ‘slam-dunk’ proof that Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein was building weapons of mass destruction. The United Nations inspectors and the International Atomic Energy Agency said there was no such proof and asked the U.S. not to invade. But Bush did invade. There were no weapons of mass destruction, exactly as the inspectors from the U.N. and IAEA had said.
  • His vice president and other cabinet officers predicted that U.S. troops would be greeted as liberators and wouldn’t need to stay in Iraq more than six months.
  • The Pentagon’s Chief of Staff General Eric Shinseki told the White House that the safe occupation of Iraq would require 500,000 troops, but the Bush’s and his cabinet civilians overruled the professional soldiers and sent in only 150,000. Three years, not six months, later, U.S. troops are still bogged down in Iraq, where they were greeted not as liberators but as invaders.
  • Rather than protect Iraqi national infrastructure and cultural sites (as we did the German and Japanese immediately after World War II), the White House ordered U.S. troops to protect only Iraq’s oil facilities, and U.S. soldiers watched as Iraq’s electrical, water, sewerage, judiciary, treasury, and administrative, plus national museums and archeological sites were looted. As Bush’s war minister Donald Rumsfeld remarked — ignoring the fact that U.S. troops were now responsible for Iraqi security — “Freedom’s untidy and free people are free to commit crimes and make mistakes and do bad things.”
  • Keeping Saddam Hussein’s Iraqi bottled up and weak (including unable to build weapons of mass destruction) was costing the United States $2 billion per year when it had been enforcing the U.N.’s sanctions against him. But Bush’s invasion of Iraq has now cost the United States $250 billion, more than 2,400 American soldiers dead and more than 15,000 wounded, Iraqi civilian casualties that the U.N. estimated to number in the high tens of thousands, and a subsequent civil war in Iraq.
  • Last week, conservative columnist George Will wrote, “all three components of the ”axis of evil” — Iraq, Iran, North Korea — more dangerous than they were when that phrase was coined [by Bush] in 2002.”
  • Conservative icon William F. Buckley last week wrote that “In four years we marched from Pearl Harbor to the heart of what was left of Tokyo and Berlin. In three years we can’t yet take a cab from Baghdad to its airport without an armed guard.”
  • My young conservative friends use revisionism to justify his Iraqi invasion. Some tell me that the invasion really did stop Saddam Hussein from building weapons of mass destruction even though he wasn’t building them. That’s logically true, but as true as saying that the invasion also prevented Saddam Hussein from voluntarily abdicating power and joining the circus. Others tell me that, though there were no weapons of mass destruction, the invasion was justified by toppling Saddam Hussein. Perhaps I could accept that had not tens of thousands — far more than the dictator executed or imprisoned in the equivalent period of at time — died in the process. And if the justification is toppling a dictator, why didn’t we send the U.S. military after Castro 90 miles south of Key West. We could have toppled him in a week. Other conservatives tell me that we had to invade Iraq because Saddam Hussein might have had weapons of mass destruction. But that overlooks the question of why we didn’t instead invade North Korea, a dictatorship that boasts it does have those weapons. The fact is Bush invaded Iraq, a sovereign country that didn’t attack the U.S. and did so on a demonstrably false pretext.
  • Bush’s remarkable lack of response to Hurricane Katrina’s destruction of the city of New Orleans cannot not be called incompetent. He has since vowed to rebuild the city, but nothing has been done about that.
  • The self-styled ‘No Child Left Behind’ president has cut federal education funding.
  • The self-styled conservative president has swollen the size of the federal government to the largest in history.
  • After the budget surpluses of the Clinton administration, the tax cuts by this conservative president have created the largest budget deficits in history (only 30 percent of which is attributable to national security, according to the non-partisan Congressional Budget office).
  • Do you know of anyone, outside of those less than one percent of richest Americans, who received any tax refund or tangibly lower taxes due to Bush’s three tax cuts? I don’t.
  • It’s been revealed that Bush ordered wiretapping of American’s domestic phone calls and e-mail, in open violation of laws passed by his own party due to Nixon’s abuses of such wiretapping.

How much more incompetent can he be?
I feel sorry for my conservative friends. They wish the world was certain way and ignore the facts that it’s not. they continue defending Bush because his wishful thinking is their wish, too.
But wishful thinking is not how to administer a superpower. At least, the Bush administration has competently proven that.

27 Years in the News Business

Ah, I’m entering my 27th year in the news industry.
I started as a reporter covering cops, fires, and courts for a small daily newspaper in Connecticut. Later, I worked for the old UPI, Reuters, and News Corp. My thanks to Prof. Ben Compaine who at the start of the 1980s interested me in the potential of new media and to venture capitalist Jon Gilbert who in 1993 brought me into new media full-time. I’ve never regretted that move.
(By the way, I don’t think the Connecticut State Police really minded that I didn’t return my police pass after 1979 ended. Indeed, I felt it odd being nearly invulnerable to speeding and other motor vehicle infractions during those years. The police departments of many towns and state police barracks knew my auto and wouldn’t stop it in speed traps. Only once was I pulled over, when I was late for work and driving 85 m.p.h. on a 45 m.p.h. rural road. The officer, rather than asking me for my driver’s license and vehicle registration, said , “Has anyone told you the problem we in the police union are having with management?” and gave me a story. Oh, to be a police reporter again!)