Continual Vigilance

Moviegoers deciding to see “Capote” with the notion that they
will walk away with more of an understanding of the
megalomaniacal, self-destructive author will be disappointed;
Truman Capote is more of an enigma at the end of the movie than
he was at the beginning.

The film depicts a four-year segment of Capote’s life which
begins days after four members of a Kansas farm family are
brutally murdered, and ends after the execution of one of the
killers. In between, Capote finds himself drawn into a complex,
approach-avoid relationship with convicted murderer Perry Smith
as he researches and writes In Cold Blood, his
best-selling book on the murders. Actor Philip Seymour Hoffman
literally vanishes into the role of Capote, who veers between
complete self-absorption and an overwhelming empathy for Smith
and back again, and one has to wonder: Is the compassion real,
or coldly manipulative, or both? Clifton Collins Jr. is quietly
intense as the young Smith, who comes to rely on Capote’s
friendship and is periodically abandoned; the young convict
reaches a kind of peaceful resolution of his feelings for Capote
at the end. Not so with Capote; hardly a model of stability at
the outset, his personality disintegrates until by the end of
the film he is firmly locked onto the path which will eventually
destroy him.

Director Bennett Miller and screenwriter Dan Futterman make a
gutsy decision in refusing to explain or psychoanalyze either
Capote or Smith; while it’s normal to want explanations - Why
did the killers do what they did? What was Capote’s motivation
in helping, and then not helping, and then meeting a final
obligation to Smith? Did Capote, who saw himself in Smith, see a
sympathetic human being, or did he see a monster? - The reality
is that real life rarely has the kind of answers or emotional
resolution we all crave. Hoffman’s unflinching portrayal of
Capote makes no apologies or explanations for any of the
writer’s actions but simply shows him in all his contradictions.

A possible irony of the movie is that In Cold Blood, the
pivot around which the movie revolves, was recognized at the
time of its writing as an entirely new literary genre, and
“Capote” is so utterly unique that it cannot be defined as
belonging in any conventional category. Neither standard bio-pic
nor psychological drama, it is nothing so much as Truman
Capote’s shattered psyche splayed open for everyone to see. Both
Hoffman and Collins deserve kudos in what is essentially a
two-man show, in spite of spot-on performances by an excellent
supporting cast.

Sales of HDTVs are more than doubling each year, technology
advances are announced daily, and it’s hard to keep up with this
heady pace. But it all sounds strangely familiar. Take a moment
to consider the personal computer market of 15 years ago. Back
in 1991…

* The computer you really wanted cost $3,000 or more;

* System specifications were a confusing mess of acronyms and
jargon, such as EGA and VGA, MHz and KB, IDE and DRAM, cache and
interleave;

* The technology was changing rapidly, making it hard to keep up
with the differences between the 80386 and 80386SX and the new
80486;

* If you walked into a computer store, you’d likely be confused
by the answers to your questions;

* If you went to more than one computer store, you’d find that
you’d be told conflicting answers to your questions; * Some
familiar brands such as IBM had personal computers, but you also
were confronted by a host of unfamiliar brands such as Swan and
Gateway and Sager and Packard Bell;

* Your purchase was going to have to last you at least five
years, so you wanted to make sure you bought a system that
wasn’t going to be obsolete overnight; and

* You didn’t want to make a stupid mistake, but it was hard to
get enough information to make a confident decision.

Fast-forward to 2006: this same list describes the current HDTV
and digital TV market, only the jargon and acronyms and brands
have changed.

Early adopters and high-end HD television enthusiasts either
have the time and interest to educate themselves, or have the
money to let someone else figure it out for them. These people
rely on the specialist magazines and custom HDTV installation
services.

As we climb into the fat part of the HDTV adopter curve,
however, we encounter HDTV buyers who are more concerned with
maximum results for minimum costs than with becoming experts in
high definition television on their own. They need a source of
independent, expert HDTV advice that will help them learn enough
to make a confident, informed decision about their HDTV and home
entertainment purchases, without having to invest a significant
amount of time and money in the process.

Alfred Poor’s HDTV Resource Center is designed to meet the needs
of the “fat part” of the HDTV adopter market, providing access
to information that is presented in clear and accessible terms
that will help buyers understand the important issues so that
they can make up their own minds about which factors are most
important for their needs and tastes.

Alfred Poor has spent the last 20 years helping millions of
readers cope with the confusion surrounding personal computers
and related products, and has earned an international following
in the process. He now turns his skills and two decades of
experience to the HDTV and home entertainment market, with the
goal of helping bewildered readers cut through the confusion,
and make confident HDTV buying decisions.

There’s an awful lot of poker on the television these days. If
you wanted to you could probably watch poker on the TV almost
round the clock and the big events like the World Poker Tour and
the World Series of Poker receive massive coverage.

Poker is great to watch on TV, it is about psychology and people
more than it’s about the cards and so it attracts a large
percentage of non-players. People love watching other people in
real situations and poker is the latest reality TV craze.

The apparent simplicity of Texas Holdem draws the TV audience
and holds them, like all great games and sports it is incredibly
simple to understand but extremely difficult to master. Everyone
from teenagers to grannies can work out the basics - three of
something beats two of them! It’s only a short step to fill in
the other hands on the ranking table.

TV Texas Holdem also has a very powerful addictiveness about it.
Very quickly you will start to like some players more than
others, in some cases people will become fans of certain players
and follow their progress. If you start watching early on in a
tournament, poker has the ability to hold the attention in such
a way that you need to stick with it until the end to see who
wins.

OK you’re asking, but how will that make me wealthy?

Well, remember all of these non-players who start watching poker
on the TV and get hooked by it’s sheer entertainment value? Very
soon some of them will be saying the four little magic words to
themselves, the four words that will make you money.

“I can do that!”

Yes of course they want to join in. After all it looks so easy
when the professionals raise all-in with a Jack high and steal
the pot on a complete bluff against two pairs. What they don’t
realise is that it takes years of practise to develop the
instinct to know when they can bluff like that. The other point
they miss is that TV will edit out the majority of hands and
will give a distorted view of the play, it will look like these
big bluffs can be pulled off every two or three hands!

Position is of course the other great unknown to the new player.
Again to create a more exciting spectacle for the viewer, there
is a disproportionate amount of heads up play shown on TV. The
non-player absorbs this and takes two false impressions from it,
one that you should see the flop almost every hand, and secondly
that a good heads up hand is a good hand in any circumstance.

So along come these rookies to the internet tables, full of hope
and expectation. They’ve watched Phil Hellmuth take a big heads
up pot with pocket Queen Seven and thinks it is OK to call with
it when he’s first in to play in a 10 player tournament.

This is very good news for you if you’ve played internet Texas
Holdem poker for any length of time at all. All these novices
entering the arena on a daily basis eager to try out the new
found skills that they’ve learned from the TV means rich
pickings for you.

And it’s not going to stop anytime soon. TV poker coverage is
getting bigger all the time, and every time Texas Holdem is
shown, another new “expert” is born!

Selecting art for your home can be an exciting adventure and a
source of enjoyment for years to come. Keys to success are
figuring out what kind of art you like, how it will fit in with
the rest of your interior design plans, and how to exhibit the
art to the best effect in your home.

What kind of art do you like?

If you regularly visit galleries and museums, you probably
already have a good sense of what kind of art appeals to you. If
not, there are many opportunities to browse art within your
community at local exhibitions and art fairs. Even small towns
usually have a not-for-profit gallery space, and your local café
or restaurant may exhibit the works of local artists. In larger
cities, galleries often get together for monthly or periodic
“gallery nights” where all the galleries hold open house
receptions on the same evening. It’s a great way to see a lot of
art in a short time.

Today the internet provides the largest variety and depth of
fine art available worldwide. You can visit museum websites and
see master works from ages past, check out online galleries for
group shows, and visit hundreds of individual artists’ websites.
One advantage of using the internet is that you can search for
the specific kind of art you are interested in, whether it’s
photography, impressionism, bronze sculpture, or abstract
painting. And when you find one art site, you’ll usually find
links to many, many more.

Should the art fit the room or the room fit the art?

As an artist, I’d certainly prefer that everyone buy the art
they love and then find a place to put it. If you feel strongly
about a particular work of art, this is certainly the way to go.
But you may find that when you get the art home and place it on
a wall or pedestal, it doesn’t work with its surroundings. By
not “working,” I mean the art looks out of place in the room.
Placing art in the wrong surroundings takes away from its beauty
and impact.

What should you do if you bring a painting home and it clashes
with its environment? First, hang the painting in various places
in your home, trying it out on different walls. It may look
great in a place you hadn’t planned on hanging it. If you can’t
find a place where the art looks its best, you may need to make
some changes in the room, such as moving furniture or taking
down patterned wallpaper and repainting in a neutral color. The
changes will be worth making in order to enjoy the art you love.

Sometimes the right lighting is the key to showing art at its
best. You may find that placing a picture light above a painting
or directing track lighting on it is all the art needs to
exhibit its brilliance. If you place a work of art in direct
sunlight, however, be sure it won’t be affected by the
ultraviolet light. Pigments such as watercolor, pencil and
pastel may fade, whereas acrylics will not. (Be sure to frame
delicate art under UV protected glass or acrylic.)

How to pick art to fit the room.

If you prefer to do the room first and then find the art, size
and color are the two major criteria for selecting art to fit
its surroundings. For any particular space, art that is too
large will overwhelm and art that is too small will be lost and
look out of proportion. The bolder the art, the more room it
needs to breathe.

As a rule, paintings should be hung so that the center of the
painting is at eye level. Sculpture may sit on the floor, a
table, or pedestal, depending on the design. Rules should be
considered guidelines only, however, so feel free to experiment.
One collector, for example, hung an acrylic painting on their
bedroom ceiling so they could better view it while lying down.

When selecting a painting to match color, select one or two of
the boldest colors in your room and look for art that has those
colors in it. You’re not looking for an exact match here.
Picking up one or two of the same colors will send a message
that the painting belongs in this environment.

Another possibility for dealing with color is to choose art with
muted colors, black-and-white art, or art that is framed in a
way that mutes its color impact in the room. A wide
light-colored mat and neutral frame create a protected
environment for the art within.

Style is another consideration when selecting art to fit a room.
If your house is filled with antiques, for example, you’ll want
to use antique-style frames on the paintings you hang there. If
you have contemporary furniture in large rooms with high
ceilings, you’ll want to hang large contemporary paintings.

How to create an art-friendly room

Think about it. When you walk into a gallery or museum, what do
they all have in common? White walls and lots of light. If a
wall is wall-papered or painted a color other than white, it
limits the choices for hanging art that will look good on it. If
a room is dark, the art will not show to its best advantage.

If you want to make art the center of attraction, play down the
other elements of the room like window coverings, carpeting,
wall coverings, and even furniture. A room crowded with other
colors, textures and objects will take the spotlight away from
the art.

You may want to select one room in your house to focus on art.
Paint the walls white or off-white. Lay hardwood floors or a
neutral carpet. Install window coverings with clean simple lines
and neutral colors (or no window coverings at all). Put up
ceiling spot lights that can be adjusted to focus on the art, or
use individual lighting for each piece. For the furniture,
follow the principle that less is more. Keep it spare. This is
not the room to display your collectibles. Let the art star.
Then relax and enjoy it.

Selecting and displaying art is an art in itself. Experiment to
learn what pleases you and what doesn’t. You’ll be well-rewarded
for the time you invest by finding more satisfaction both in the
art and in your home.

Source: http://www.artbylt.com

Remember the Osborn? Or was it the Osborne? Actually, I knew it
existed, but didn’t care. This thing was a personal computer.
Like we’d ever need one of those? Those new electric typewriters
with memory were the rage. THAT was something!

Flash forward and we are upon the reverse engineered UFO
goodies. Oh, wait, no, that’s not exactly right.

It’s the dawning of the age of Aquarius, age of Aquarius, Ah
QUAR EEEE USSS. Um, no, that was some time ago.

It’s the age of $3 US Gas. Not a good milestone

The age of HDTV!!! Remember when “high definition” included the
terms “stems and seeds?” You do? You rascal.

No, this is about High Definition TELEVISION. Personally, I feel
the word TELEVISON is so…. Fifties. We need a new one there.
So did you jump for the Plasma? Or the LCD projector? The DLP?
Have you got the home theater with all the tricked out
electronics?

Don’t put your ear directly on the high tech train tracks, then,
because there’s another train coming, and you’ll hear it down
the line.

UHDV is in the pipeline. On the track. In the lab. In the
electron wind. Want to guess? Time’s up. ULTRA HIGH DEFINITION.

Remember the movie where they invent this skull cap that would
capture your emotions and immediately the bad guy looped someone
having how shall we say - some very intense happy times… and
turned himself into peak experience broccoli? Is that where all
this is headed? Not for a while, if ever. HOWEVER: UHDV is close
to the detail of 35mm film. With 7680 x 4320 pixels, this isn’t
far from the 4K (4,000 scan line) digital projection systems for
big-screen movie theaters.

Donald Trump will be able to see how bad his hair looks like
never before.

UHDV features 33 million pixels with a 60 frame-per-second (fps)
progressive scan format.

NHK, the Japanese broadcasting giant who had HDTV in the
1980s… is behind the UHDV format, but reassures us it may be a
long time before home theater UHDV becomes reality. That’s
corporate talk for, “Don’t let the competition know how close we
really are!”

With 32 times the bandwidth demands of HDTV, UHDV would be
prohibitive for today’s broadcast, cable and satellite
technology. NHK’s demo required a data rate of 24 Gbps. That was
a few years back in Amsterdam where some people were close to
hurling lunch because the moving car video hi-jinx was that real.

How real?

NHK cobbled together a custom camera of four CCD image sensors;
then to show the output built a LCoS projector combining four
eight-megapixel panels. Data storage, using 16 synchronized HDTV
recorders, provided roughly 18 minutes of recording time, using
3.5 terabytes of total capacity and a screen about 12 feet high
and 22 feet wide. NHK researchers called this “the sensation of
reality saturation point,” in the hopes of providing a
completely immersive experience: 100 degrees of visual field
angle, viewing from a distance of three-quarters of the height
of the screen (about nine feet) with at least 60 pixels required
for each one degree of visual field angle.

And speakers? UHDV offers 24-channel sound, or 22.2, containing
vertically arrayed surround sound speakers: nine above ear
level, 10 at ear level, three below ear level and two
low-frequency subwoofer channels.

The format, according to NHK, is not so much intended for home
use as for museums, public spaces and theaters. You tell The
Donald.

Once upon a time there was SHOWSCAN. Special effects pioneer
Douglas Trumbull had his demo unit in a suburb of Dallas, behind
a Chucky Cheese, if memory serves. I saw the demo.

The equipment and the Showscan Film Process of producing and
projecting Showscan films are justifiably proprietary and
patented. At the time, Showscan’s discovery was hailed as the
most significant advancement in film technology since the
introduction of sound in the 1929 film “The Jazz Singer”. (Not
the one with Neil Diamond.) However, it remained as little more
than a technological curiosity until the company developed new
camera, high speed projectors, and built special theaters to
showcase the revolutionary Showscan images. There was a catch-22
at work. Theaters weren’t equipped for this state of the art
projection so they couldn’t convince investors to make films in
that format. Solution: do it all in house.

I can’t remember the specs but it was scarily real, 3-D, multi
channel and way ahead of multi channel… or HDTV. I do remember
it ran film through the gate much faster than normal projection
speeds.

Today the company’s simulation and specialty theatres are open
or under construction in 24 countries around the world, located
in theme parks, motion picture multiplexes, expos, world’s
fairs, resorts, shopping centers, casinos, museums, and other
tourist destinations where somebody wants a rush.

If NHK can even come close, well…

Enjoy your puny HDTV now while you can, citizen.