The Phantom City

If you need to see these 102 movies to be movie-literate, I’ve still got a ways to go.

Blatantly stealing from kottke.org, I’ll list the movies and mark the ones that I’ve seen with an *.

* 2001: A Space Odyssey
The 400 Blows
8 1/2
* Aguirre, the Wrath of God
* Alien
All About Eve
* Annie Hall
* Apocalypse Now
* Bambi
* The Battleship Potemkin
* The Best Years of Our Lives
* The Big Red One
The Bicycle Thief
* The Big Sleep
* Blade Runner
Blowup
* Blue Velvet
* Bonnie and Clyde
Breathless
* Bringing Up Baby
Carrie
* Casablanca
Un Chien Andalou
Children of Paradise / Les Enfants du Paradis
* Chinatown
* Citizen Kane
A Clockwork Orange
* The Crying Game
* The Day the Earth Stood Still
Days of Heaven
* Dirty Harry
The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie
* Do the Right Thing
La Dolce Vita
* Double Indemnity
* Dr. Strangelove
* Duck Soup
* E.T. - The Extra-Terrestrial
Easy Rider
* The Empire Strikes Back
The Exorcist
* Fargo
Fight Club
* Frankenstein
* The General
The Godfather, The Godfather, Part II
* Gone With the Wind
GoodFellas
The Graduate
* Halloween
A Hard Day’s Night
Intolerance
It’s a Gift
* It’s a Wonderful Life
* Jaws
The Lady Eve
* Lawrence of Arabia
M
* Mad Max 2 / The Road Warrior
* The Maltese Falcon
* The Manchurian Candidate
* Metropolis
* Modern Times
* Monty Python and the Holy Grail
Nashville
* The Night of the Hunter
Night of the Living Dead
* North by Northwest
* Nosferatu
On the Waterfront
* Once Upon a Time in the West
Out of the Past
Persona
Pink Flamingos
* Psycho
* Pulp Fiction
* Rashomon
* Rear Window
* Rebel Without a Cause
* Red River
Repulsion
The Rules of the Game
* Scarface
The Scarlet Empress
Schindler’s List
* The Searchers
* The Seven Samurai
* Singin’ in the Rain
* Some Like It Hot
A Star Is Born
A Streetcar Named Desire
Sunset Boulevard
* Taxi Driver
* The Third Man
Tokyo Story
* Touch of Evil
* The Treasure of the Sierra Madre
Trouble in Paradise
* Vertigo
* West Side Story
* The Wild Bunch
* The Wizard of Oz

Actually, looking back on it, it seems kind of weird what I’ve seen and what I haven’t. I’m missing some foreign-language films, but otherwise it’s just a scattering of movies across the past 100 years that you’d think I would have seen by now.

Sigh…They just don’t get it. You always sacrifice your work life first.

Courtesy of Google Video

Archaeologists in Visoko, Bosnia-Herzegovina, believe they have uncovered the first pyramid ever found in Europe. They think it may be a step pyramid higher than the Great Pyramid of Giza.

Link courtesy of EdCone.com

I don’t understand this question…

AJAX is shorthand for tools and design practices that allow the user to interact with the server without reloading an entire web page. A good example is the kind of interface provided in Gmail, where message information is loaded into the interface without needing to reload every element on the page.

To say that AJAX increases server load would indicate that AJAX is creating some sort of server transaction that didn’t exist before. Let’s see, what is AJAX used for? A person clicks on a link…the browser requests information from the server…the server interprets the request, pulls the data, and sends it back…the browser interprets the code and displays it.

Sounds like every dynamic page you see on sites that don’t use AJAX at all. However, on those sites, you also get the server overhead of dealing with requests for any extra content that might have already been loaded, if the browser doesn’t just use the cached version.

I’m not knowledgeable enough to declare Tim Bray right — he doesn’t need my endorsement — but if you’re using AJAX to reproduce functionality that was already there, I just don’t see how it could significantly increase your server load. Seems like it should decrease it, more often than not.

Update: I understand the argument a bit more: Fetching smaller bits of data that add up to a whole costs more than grabbing the whole set of data at once. However, as Mr. Newport points out, this is a design issue in the application. I’m sure the possibility of inefficient design means people will use inefficient design, but that’s still possible with any dynamic language that pulls sets of data. The question has to be whether the user only needs a small amount of the data, and will leave the rest alone, or whether they will normally look at all of it.

Hugh Hefner, founder of Playboy, reaches out and touches high-school students in North Carolina. No, not that way…

Turns out a Rockingham County High School English class noticed the film The Tragedy of Macbeth was produced by Hefner back in 1971. They were watching the film on an old television set, so students joked that Hefner could buy them a new TV.

The teacher wrote a letter to Hefner asking for a new TV. The letter signed by the students and sent to the Playboy Mansion and the Chicago headquarters. Two weeks later, a new 32-inch TV was on the way.

My favorite part is that Hefner’s aides asked for copies of the school newspaper with an article about the donation for his scrapbook.

The American Civil Liberties Union sent a letter to officials in Raleigh, Clayton, Pittsboro, and Chatham County, NC, pointing out that official prayers at council meetings that refer to specific religions are a violation of the First Amendment.

I like the ACLU for a lot of their work, but in this case I have to wonder what they’re thinking. Official prayers before governmental meetings have been a long tradition, and many bodies handle it by bringing in clergy from different religions. Those clergy then sometimes do a very generic prayer, or they might take the opportunity to “sell” their faith. (Of course, in some religious beliefs, it is hard to imagine how one would say a “neutral” prayer.)

However, while saying a religiously neutral prayer might avoid a governmental endorsement of a particular religion, the act of prayer to a “god” endorses a particular sort of religious beliefs. I’m not sure why the ACLU — I’m thinking this must be the North Carolina branch — would send a letter asking for neutrality, instead of just going for the more controversial stance and asking for no endorsed prayer at all. In other words, if you’re going to be unpopular, might as well be logical.

Ah, Rasheed…

(Number 19 of the NBA 101.)

There is a site called My Heritage that tries to match your face to celebrity faces using face-recogntion technology on a photo you upload.

My number 1 face-match? Andre Agassi. Oh well, we were both born in 1970, so you figure the aging process might have worked similarly. (Except for the hair.)

Top nine (they gave me nine):

1. Agassi
2. George Clooney (That’s flattering. Maybe the gray hair?)
3. Bryan Adams (Yep, aging ’80s rocker.)
4. Josh Jackson (Dawson’s Creek.)
5. Carl Lewis (Huh?)
6. Charlie Chaplin (I thought it was supposed to be face recognition, not height recognition.)
7. Laurence Fishburne (I wish.)
8. Gary Cooper (Ditto.)
9. Justin Timberlake (One of these things is not like the other.)

Link courtesy of Best Week Ever Blog

Pretty self-explanatory.

Link courtesy of Dave Barry’s Blog.

Ninjas vs. Pirates The ATF!

What’s this country coming to, when a good Methodist ninja can’t run across campus without the feds hasslin’ him?