Archive for August 2009
Highpoint: Crow Wing County.
Ascent: August 30, 2009.
Mark Ness, one of two people to successfully highpoint all the counties in the state of Minnesota, called Crow Wing County’s summit “one of the most remote in the state.” He is very right about that. There is virtually no chance of driving right up to it. The way to claim the high point is to trudge through the woods and sidestep the swamps.
It was daunting for my first county highpoint, but I had to do it, since Crow Wing is my home county.
Image: Lego Quick Stop from Clerks.
Could this be the future new Lego video game from Traveler’s Tales?
Image source: Flickr
Did Nixon aide Haldeman come up with the idea for World-Wide-Web?
Dug up from The Book of Lists 2:
In his book The Shadow Presidents, author Michael Medved relates the extreme disappointment of H. R. Haldeman over his failure to implement his plan to link up all the homes in America by coaxial cable. In Haldeman’s words, “There would be two-way communication. Through computer, you could use your television set to order up whatever you wanted. The morning paper, entertainment services, shopping services, coverage of sporting events and public events… just as Eisenhower linked up the nation’s cities by highways so that you could get there, the Nixon legacy would have linked them by cable communications, so you wouldn’t have to go there.” One can almost see the dreamy eyes of Nixon and Haldeman as they sat around discussing a plan that would eliminate the need for newspapers, seemingly oblivious to its Big Brother aspects. Fortunately the Watergate scandal inteverened, and Nixon was forced to resign before “The Wired Nation” could be hooked up.
***
A very prescient article, because it seems like Haldeman’s plan to wire up the nation has come to fruition.
It comes from author David Wallechinsky’s list 6 OUTRAGEOUS PLANS THAT DIDN’T HAPPEN. And while Wallechinsky laments the “Big Brother aspects” of such a technology, he couldn’t foresee the ability of users to be able to communicate freely with one another while the rest of the media becomes consolidated into a huge corporatocracy.
To think we could have had something like Fark 20 years earlier.
Each of us is a brain, an athlete, a basket case, a princess and a criminal.
For years and years, and many viewings, it took me until LAST YEAR to be able to parse the differences of Brian Johnson’s letter from the beginning of the movie The Breakfast Club, and his final draft.
Each of us… each of us.
EACH OF US!
I’ve seen John Hughes’s movie at least 25 times [it was one of my sister's VCR tapes on heavy rotation], and yet the subtly of this escaped me. The point of the entire movie. What happened? Did I see it when I was too young and then I only paid attention to the off-color jokes upon repeated viewings? Did I just zone out as soon as Simple Minds’s “Don’t You Forget About Me” started playing behind John Bender’s triumphant fist-pump under the football crossbar?
A great, great screenwriter… John Hughes… disarming us with laugh-out-loud humor, and then reeling us in like a guffawing big-mouth trout to absorb the drama underneath. Someone who was an example for me as I tried in the mid-90s to be as prolific as I could putting stage direction and dialogue to page on my Commodore 128.
He holds the record for fastest time writing a screenplay: 2 days for Weird Science.
Two days! 120 pages?! Most writers only crank out 2-3 pages a day if they work 8 hours at it. I can imagine John at his typewriter, right next to a percolating Mr. Coffee. Pounding away for hours and hours and coming up with the funniest lines in movie history, establishing the smart-ass teenager movie as a genre, letting the caffeine help transcribe the movie in his head.
I finished my first screenplay in 8 days back in 1994 – Night on the Edge. I thought to myself… wow, this is great. I can do one of these a month! So many ideas! I’ll have a stack of scripts by the end of the year!
Well, that proved to be an exception. As a matter of fact, the most recent script I completed took 12 years!
I don’t think I could have matched the frenzy of completing The Breakfast Club in 3 days, or the week spent on the first draft of Mr. Mom. His scripts, all comedies poked with sentiment, and done the right way – National Lampoon’s Vacation, Sixteen Candles, Pretty in Pink,
and my favorite Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, where the most lasting moment is when Cameron closely examines the famous pointilist painting by Georges Serrault, A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte: it is an illusion made up of millions of dots.
John Hughes gave spirit, humor and intelligence to his teenage characters, and it is sad that he should die at the young age of 59 – influencing some great screenwriter-directors like Judd Apatow and Kevin Smith, (me too, maybe, someday?) With the whirlwind of my life as a teenager, I probably figured out way too late [into my 30s!] that I was a brain, an athlete, a basket case, a princess and a criminal.
