April 27,1998


My Times


The movie Stuart Bliss was reviewed by Variety in last Fridays (April 24) print edition. If you are not a subscriber you can read the review here.

Most of the people I talked to after last weeks screening in Los Angeles found the film funny but also somewhat strange. It isn't a typical film, and it leaves you wondering whether the events in the story were in Stuart's mind or were really happening?
That to me is the point of the film. It doesn't matter whether it's really happening or not. When a person looses grip on reality and slips into madness, the madness becomes a reality
I think...

The word; madness
Armegeddon
End of the World News
Interactive Glossary of Mental Health Terms - TherapistFinder.net

Streaming audio on the web is starting to bother copyright owners and record companies alike. BBC Radio One has recently pulled music clips from their servers according to DotMusic News
The BPI in the UK has sent out a warning to companies offering music clips on their sites about web piracy. Because internet audio can be FM radio quality, people are recording it onto their hard disks and therefore depriving owners of copyright music their royalty income. However, it's very likely that the BPI and other licensing bodies would accept a small license fee from we web users...

I would think the easy way to control it is to create an audio file that sends out a "packet" across the web that can be captured by software that would track the playing of the file. The software would check that the server where the file resides has the legal right to play that file. If not it would sabotage the sound of the music clip by forcing another file to play at the same time, probably with a stream of "white noise". (Send cheques to johnjones.com...)

In the meantime, unless software becomes available that is truly non-recordable, we should start to see decent quality audio of entire songs disappear from web sites entirely...

A pretty good race on Sunday in San Marino was won easily by David Coulthard in his Mclaren Mercedes. Although the cameras missed most of it, Damon Hill's climb through the field after his start line incident with Alexander Wurz was the most overtaking anyone has done in Formula One in years!
The commentators were terrible as usual. It's bad enough that they were watching the same lousy pictures we were getting, but could they at least notice what was being filmed?
When oh when will Bernie do anything about this utterly dismal TV coverage?

Quotes from the drivers

"If we are to address this problem of world hunger--and who else is responsible for it except those of us living here?--we need to affect a massive shift in where we feed the foods of our fields. Instead of feeding grain to livestock, we could feed the world by feeding the grain direct to people"
Linda McCartney1
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