Another Gray Day

Definitely another grey day as the snow continues, so went to see “10,000BC” en famille.
Another Roland Emmerich effects splurge, with lovely woolly mammoths, sabre-tooth tigers and the inevitable hide couture. It seems to me like RE is really more of a manager than a director, since all the SFX strands are pulled together efficiently, o time and on budget etc. But rather like Peter Jackson with “King Kong”, the film has no real emotional core. whereas you can look up Hollyoaks on Youtube any day of the week and find tragedy of epic proportions. In fact, Richard Thompson does a better job of tragedy in three minutes of “1952 Vincent Black Lightning” than Roland E does in 1:48 of 10000BC. Which isn’t really tragic since there’s a happy ending of sorts. And they all spoke perfect French, except for the Africans and Egyptians who were acting out their stereotypical roles, being slaves and pyramid-builders respectively.
Although the theme of the film is “the first hero”, it doesn’t really convey the feeling of there being something really huge in the balance, like the future of humankind or Becca’s love for Jake (Hollyoaks again). Sure, the main man’s beautiful girlfriend has been kidnapped, but that’s about it. The film assumes that the human emotional universe was up and running 12000 years ago, rather than evolving gradually into the state in which it is now. Which is not to say that emotions did not exist, but we can’t easily recreate how they would have felt. In some ways they are a luxury, to be indulged once hunger, thirst and cold have been overcome. And with mammoth on the menu, that probably took a while.

Just enthused by a “what-if” that has become a ‘wow!’. What if you could organise files, such as journal articles, using iTunes? Look it up on Google, there are quite a few independent discoveries of the way you can use iTunes to organise .pdf files, using a completely separate library. Why is this useful? Because you can plonk your files into playlists more than once without actually creating copies and filling up your hard disk. Therefore you can have a group of articles about one topic, and a different group about another topic, with as much cross-referencing as you like. Clicking on the files opens them using preview or adobe reader. (incidentally with preview you can copy and paste,unlike reader, great for references.)
There must be something in this since even Windows users of iTunes are using it.
Whatever next?

In educational circles people are always trying to avoid “top-down” approaches to things, preferring the obvious opposite, “bottom-up” (i.e. no funding, but everyone agrees with whatever it is). Same with sustainable development, right? No way. If ever there was a case for something top-down being required, it’s the recent USAF order for refuelling tankers. Won by Airbus (hooray) but about as sustainable as a relaunch of the Austin Allegro (well it might sell in Japan). Obviously there are military arguments, but the environmental cost of the whole inflight refuelling process is…it’s as if we all drove FI cars up the motorway with pit stops every 50 miles. The military side is the what if…? argument (enter the foreign government of your choice). Time for some risk assessment, boys. which is more likely - climate change or WW3?