Tickets Available For The Above Shows at
LasVegasBookmarks.com

Tickets Available For The Above Shows at
LasVegasBookmarks.com

With those points of reference in mind, Jake and I have started our third plastic model kit.  We're building a 1/600th scale model of the HMS Titanic.   You know, the unsinkable ship that.........................well, it sank!

Keep in mind that the Titanic was 882 feet long.  Our model is about 17 inches.  It's quite possible that I'm going to go blind before we finish this sucker.  Thus far we have not been able to glue a single piece of this boat together without the use of tweezers.  Someone once told me that modeling was a relaxing hobby.  THEY LIED!  After countless hours of tweezer and X-acto knife work, we have the forward deck nearly done. 

So, the moral of the story is this:  Don't take up modeling. 

Seriously though, we are learning things as we work.  Lots of things like:

Patience

The effects of caffeine on the body 

The effects of not bathing the dog regularly (our "modeling room" is also the dog's room and she stinks)

Red paint stains....everyting 

Plastic pieces crack easily

Words like "sprue" and "Cyanoacrylate" 

Well, you get the idea, we're having.....fun.  By the way, the phrase "Parental Supervision" is a load of garbage.  Loosely translated it means: "Dad will build it and Son will repeatedly ask when it will be done."  Next time I think I will spring for the 1/300th scale. 

Now where did I put my reading glasses?

“I know what you’re thinking. Did he fire six shots or only five? Well, to tell you the truth, in all this excitement I kind of last track myself. Being how this is a 44 Magnum, the most powerful handgun in the world and would blow you head clean off, you have to ask yourself one question, ‘Do I feel lucky?’”
                                                                                                 Dirty Harry

I don’t know if Monday’s immigration raid in Postville, Iowa made it on your radar but it was the largest single site raid in the history of this nation. Federal immigration agents arrested 390 people from Mexico, Guatemala, Israel and the Ukraine.

Let’s put the politics aside and look at this from a Screenwriting from Iowa  perspective.

Recently I wrote about David Lynch being in a small town in Iowa known as a haven for transcendental meditators and I find Postville just as intriguing. The community was founded by those of German and Norwegian decent and they make up half of the town’s 2,500 people. The other half are mostly Mexicans who work for the Hasidic Jews who moved there from New York, so the place is a little surreal.

Yesterday I drove to Postville to shoot some footage and interviews for Univision, the Hispanic Network in Miami,  and the first two people I met to were two young Hasidic Jews. We talked a little about the town and had a common connection talking about B&H Camera in New York.

The Hasidic Jews are in Postville because they own and run Agriprocessors the world’s largest kosher meatpacking plant (and where Monday's raid occurred). The Mexicans and other immigrants are there to work in the meat packing plant. The Germans and the Norwegians are still in the area running the farms they and their families have been tending for over 100 years.

Stephen Bloom, author of Postville: A Clash of Cultures in Heartland America writes, “I look at Postville as a social laboratory to test the limits of diversity, tolerance, and acceptance.”

When I first pulled into Postville it looked like many small Midwest towns you drive through. But then you notice the Guatemalan restaurant and the Mexican clothing and convenience stores and know that there is something unique about this area. Then you wonder how the Hasidic Jews have adjusted to moving there from New York.

Bloom writes, “When the Hasidic community moved to Postville, they moved their entire ethos with them from Brooklyn to northeastern Iowa. They created immediately a shul or synagogue. They made two mikvehs, or ceremonial bath houses, as well as a yeshiva, or school for their children. They replicated in northeastern Iowa the community they had established in Crown Heights, Brooklyn. So in my mind, they were not suffering any degree of cultural deprivation. They moved their world, lock, stock, and barrel, one thousand miles westward.”

Am I the only one who thinks that setting would be more a fascinating and original setting for a movie than say…”What Happens in Vegas”? In fact, What Happens in Postville sounds like a fine title. Witness meets La Bamba meets The Life and Times of Hank Greenberg with a dash of Ibsen and Wim Wenders. 

But what I really want to talk about is the concept in your screenplay of “What’s at Stake?” That is a key question of the stories you tell. Investors and studios long ago learned the secret of that question. Because at the core of the question "What’s at stake?" is the concept of what holds an audiences attention.

Writers are sometimes slow learners and can get caught up in the story, characters and dialogue they are writing. But "What’s at Stake?" is vital to ask when what’s at stake financially is a lot of money. "What's at stake?" is related to the level of conflict I wrote about in tip #1.

If you take a long look ar AFI’s top 100 films you’ll notice that 70% of the films deal with life or death, or at least significant life and career blows. Great conflict.

Citizen Kane
Casablanca
The Godfather
Gone with the Wind
Lawrence of Arabia
The Wizard of Oz
On the Waterfront
Schindler’s List

When you talk about life and death a lot is at stake. 

If you look at the all time box office hits you’ll find a majority also have life or death, or significant life or career blows.

Titanic
Star Wars
Spider-Man 
E.T. (the immigrant from outerspace)
Lord of the Rings
Jurassic Park
Pirates of the Caribbean

No one said all successful movies had or needed to have this element but obviously it increases your odds of having an award winning film as well as one that finds a large audience.

Maybe that’s the simple secret to horror films and super hero films usually doing well at the box office.

As I made the hour and a half drove home from Postville yesterday I thought of all lives involved in Monday’s raid. Certainly surrounded by agents with guns and helicopters overhead was a dramatic and traumatic situation. Now many are separated from family members and facing deportation. Others face changes of identification tampering.

It made me recall my days in Miami when Haitians would risk their lives to come to the United States on overcrowded and poorly constructed boats. And sometimes they died in the process.

The mayor of Postville said if the meat packing plant closed then his town would become a ghost town. 

"What’s at stake?" is significant question in life as well as drama.

What’s at stake in the script you are now writing? 

copyright 2008 Scott W. Smith

Jennifer Hooper McCarty disagrees. She discussed the book she co-authored, What Really Sank the Titanic, with Stephen Colbert on The Colbert Report tonight. After traveling to England for the research, McCarty found the board was under pressure at the time to find rivets to finish building the ship, so they used “substandard rivets” as well as “unskilled workers.” Read more about it here at the official Web site: CSI: Titanic. Read The New York Times article about it here: In Weak Rivets, a Possible Key to Titanic's Doom.

Also, my parents gave me a printout of a short article from Texans for Texas to read. Even though it's still some time before Memorial Day and Independence Day, it's too interesting not to share "The Cycle of Democracy" with you now:

“A democracy is always temporary in nature; it simply cannot exist as a permanent form of government. A democracy will continue to exist up until the time that voters discover that they can vote themselves generous gifts from the public treasury. From that moment on, the majority always votes for the candidates who promise the most benefits from the public treasury, with the result that every democracy will finally collapse due to loose fiscal policy, (which is) always followed by a dictatorship.”

“The average age of the worlds greatest civilizations from the beginning of history, has been about 200 years. During those 200 years, these nations always progressed through the following sequence:

From Bondage to spiritual faith;

From spiritual faith to great courage;

From courage to liberty;

From liberty to abundance;

From abundance to complacency;

From complacency to apathy;

From apathy to dependence;

From dependence back into bondage."

America, we are now somewhere between the "apathy" and "complacency" phase of the democracy cycle with some 40 percent of the nation's population already having reached the "governmental dependency" phase.

Think about it.

Let Freedom Ring.

In an interesting segment in When I Don’t Desire God, Piper describes joy and the essence of it in Jesus, with images of the Titanic in mind. I’d like to share the picture.

“Nothing is more foundational for the joy of undeserving people than the cross of Jesus Christ. The fight for joy is a fight to grasp and marvel at what happened in the death of Christ—and what it reveals about our suffering savior. If it were not for the death of Jesus in our place, the only possible joy would be the joy of delusion—like the joy on the Titanic just before it hit the iceberg, Without the cross, joy could be sustained only by denying (consciously or subconsciously) the inevitability of divine judgment. In fact, that’s the kind of joy that drives most of the world—a joy that preserves the power of its pleasures but being oblivious to the peril just ahead. If the passengers were suddenly made aware that in a matter of hours most of them would drown in the icy ocean, all their merrymaking would cease. Their joy depends on their ignorance.

However, if the passengers knew that the ocean liner would sink, but that a great armada of utterly dependable ships and sailors was already on the way and would arrive and save everyone who followed their instructions, something very different would happen. To be sure, the lighthearted merrymaking would cease, and a great seriousness would spread over the Titanic; but there would be a different kind of joy—a deep sense of gratitude for the rescuers, and a deep sense of hope that, though much would be lost, life would be saved. Some may panic in unbelief, doubting the promise of rescue. But others would rise in strength and hope and do great acts of love in preparation for the coming destruction.”

(Agency: Giovanni + DraftFCB São Paulo. Illustrator: Up Ilustração.)

General Admission: $10
Seniors/Staff/Students: $5
Parking: $1

]]> http://strategieevolutive.wordpress.com/2008/05/12/delirio-con-iceberg/ Mon, 12 May 2008 09:28:25 +0000 Davide http://strategieevolutive.wordpress.com/2008/05/12/delirio-con-iceberg/ Prendo lo spunto dal post su Speculum Maius relativo alla proposta di legge del Mistro Gelmini sulla meritocrazia.
La proposta, tra l'altro, è scaricabile da qui.

Fin dall'inizio, mi viene da storcere il naso...

ONOREVOLI COLLEGHI ! — La presente proposta di legge intende agevolare la diffusione e l’attuazione concreta nella società italiana del principio del merito.

Ora, saranno le mie eterodosse posizioni politiche, ma trovo molto difficile credere che una legge possa radicalmente e concretamente alterare le posizioni della società italiana.
Se la società italiana fosse fondata su principi meritocratici, non servirebbe una legge per inculcarli ai cittadini.
Se serve una legge, questa andrà contro il sentire comune della maggioranza, che farà resistenza - anche inconsciamente.

Diciamocelo chiaro e tondo - ad invocare sistemi di merito sdono i tagliati fuori, non quelli inseriti nelle strutture grazie a nepotismi, spinte, mazzette o semplice capacità di abusare del sistema... `

L’impostazione statalista e dirigista che ha imperniato l’ordinamento degli ultimi cinquanta anni ha portato con se la marginalizzazione del merito, che non e mai`assurto a principio guida in grado di regolare i fenomeni sociali, i processi economici e le relazioni di lavoro, in favore di criteri di uguaglianza formale che, di fatto, si sono tradotti in forti disincentivi alla capacita individuale.

Curioso che si proponga una legge per ovviare alle magagne.
Non una campagna culturale, ma una imposizione per legge - quanto di più statalista e dirigista si possa immaginare.
O no?

Perché poi, a cosa si riduce la proposta?
Nel valorizzare i risultati superiori alla media - misura statistica pericolosissima -, nell'eliminare i meccanismi automatici di avanzamento professionale (bye bye anzianità di servizio), nell'istituzione di fantomatici organismi atti a valutare...

Insomma, un ulteriore layer burocratico, con un forte sentore di ennesima marchetta per le aziende.
Suona particolarmente subdola la voce 4.g

ampliamento della nozione di mansioni equivalenti;

Mah!
Io non mi posso lamentare - anche se sono sicuro che ci sia una trappola da qualche parte - ad una prima lettura questa proposta di legge potrebbe avvantaggiare le mie attività come freelance.
Però...

Nel commentare la proposta di legge, Speculum Maius invoca l'esempio del Titanic - da un articolo di Simone Brero...

A cosa serve al capitano ordinare una virata di emergenza, o al timoniere e al macchinista eseguire l’ordine, se la nave non e’ progettata per effettuare una simile operazione in tempo utile? Esiste un ruolo di leadership, tanto importante quanto trascurato dai dirigenti: quello del leader come progettista. Del resto, nell’ultimo costoso film di James Cameron dedicato alla tragedia del Titanic, il progettista riconosce le proprie responsabilita’, affondando volontariamente insieme alla nave…

Ho spesso usato i dati sui sopravvissuti del Titanic (se ne trovano varie versioni on-line, basta cercare "Titanic Dataset" tramite Google) come eterodosso esercizio per i miei studenti di statistica ambientale.
Di solito mi becco un'infilata di occhiate strane, come se fossi appena sceso da un disco volante - quando va bene: quando va male, i più ortodossi si inalberano perché l'esercizio non è serio.

Eppure, a ben guardare, l'affondamento del Titanic è una catastrofe ambientale, con conseguente estinzione di massa.

E il fatto che ne abbiano fatto un film di grande successo significa oltretutto che tutte le persone in aula sono a conoscenza delle dinamiche dell'evento, e possono quindi affrontare i numeri senza bisogno di lunghi spiegoni.

Ed i numeri dicono chiaro che per sopravvivere sul Titanic, con buonapace di James Cameron, bisognava essere
a . passeggeri di prima classe
b . membri dell'equipaggio

Lasciamo come esercizio per il lettore l'estensione di questa osservazione allo stato del merito in Italia.

So I was watching Elite XC on the Fight network today, and one of the commentators made a really stupid comment. Two of the fighters went to punch each other, and one knocked the other out cold. The commentator said "I hate to say it, but he went down faster than the Titanic". Didn't the Titanic take like three hours to sink?

]]> http://mrniccce.wordpress.com/?p=371 Sat, 10 May 2008 20:31:59 +0000 genitalssky http://mrniccce.wordpress.com/?p=371

¡Waa!, acabo de cenar, y no se si decir cenar, o tragar como cerdo, o en su caso, como diría Leny de Homero (Los Simpsons) tragar como pato.

Anoche cené si no mal recuerdo, un pan "tostado", que mas que tostado estaba aguado X_x, totopos de maíz con chile, mejor conocidos en el bajo mundo como rancheritos, con mucha salsa XD, pizza hawaiana con ketchup =P, y un plato de cereal de arroz inflado cubierto con chocolate, también mejor conocido en el bajo mundo como choco krispis.

Y amm me siento mal XD

Puede que vomite, no lo se, solo espero algo bueno de todo esto.

=P

P.D. Dicen que esta es la nueva versión remasterizada del Titanic:

Cast & Credits