World Wide What? 01-10-2011

Chernobyl 25 Years Later offers you a chilling set of photos from one of the worst disasters in Industrial history. Not to be missed or viewed with the lights on.

The End (A Film Review)

One problem that exists for any film-maker with an interest in cinema as art and not entertainment is message.: Will your audience be able to follow you? For this reason, "Art Films" seldom make it into the mainstream. But what becomes of a movie when it is being smothered under the weight of over-extended vision?

Richard Kelly's Southland Tales is a classic example of a film with a vision that, to a wider audience, looks like a hallucination. On paper, Southland Tales has all the makings of a hit: a big-name cast, compelling visual direction, and a strong enough concept to just wild enough to be different and sell. As well, Kelly had scored a big hit with Donnie Darko so a large budget and wide viewership should have naturally followed and been a boon, allowing him to break further into the mainstream. Unfortunately this vision appears to suffer from chronic myopia and falls flat on it's face. Southland Tales almost immediately slips into parody despite every attempt to salvage the effort.

But how does this happen? Wasn't everything in Richard Kelly's favor? How does a director snatch Defeat from the jaws of Victory? The film is primarily an elaborate and unique allegory for The Apocalypse, but it was Kelly's method of dealing with the subject matter and subsequent media presentation that ultimately stifled Southland Tales. The quirky dialog and casting are actually quite charming, albeit bordering on non-sequitor.

Kelly's mistake was believing that the audience could follow him. The movie was preceded by three graphic novels, most of which had never been seen or read (as of this writing, they are out of print) by a wide audience. Furthermore, anyone who lacks more than a passing understanding of The Book Of Revelation will not catch most of the symbolic references. At Cannes, the film was effectively jeered into submission; without bloggers and websites like The Onion's AV Club, the film would have slipped deeper into disrepute and obscurity (and likely would not have seen the latter-day success of Donnie Darko.)

This being said, the movie is worth seeing: Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson plays a neurotic action film star with amnesia, Sarah Michelle Gellar plays a porn actress with artistic pretension, and the film is veritably loaded with cameos at every angle. But the charm of such a unique piece is ultimately fatally flawed by the directors lack of direction itself. It would be a stretch to say that Southland Tales is not to be missed, but would be more accurately described as great for late nights and a lot of alcohol.

'Twas the morning before Christmas...

...and all through my apartment, I've been moving. Slowly. Which is funny, considering the lull I have taken through the month of December regarding The Obscuritan Journal. To my readers, I apologize - deeply - but this month has been crazy. I won't go in to any details, but suffice it to say that I miss unwinding every Friday with a new tale of something peculiar.

Christmas, for those of you who are culturally disposed to celebrate it, is supposed to be a time of giving, reflection, and bonding with your loved ones. As one might have guessed, I have no attachment to the holiday season, and as an American, the religious significance is all but lost, instead replaced often by crass consumerism, stress-related illness, and financial strife.

Yet when I hear stories such as this, I am given some hope for mankind. Then again, when you take into account these statistics, anything seems optimistic.

So consider this my gift to the World Wide Web: This blog, which I intend to resume after the start of 2011, has been the fruit of my mind for sometime. Sure, it might not bring "good Will towards man" or unite any families, but it's a start.

World Wide What? Dec. 15

Sorry I haven't been around. The Holidays inevitably cause all sorts of havoc on my schedule. In the meantime, here is a little something amusing...

Medical and Doctor Slang How accurate this is, I can't say. But having spent more time in hospitals than I care to admit, it really makes you wonder...

Just Something To Think About...

Kent M. Keith, "The Paradoxical Commandments":

People are illogical, unreasonable, and self-centered. Love them anyway.

If you are kind, people may accuse you of selfish ulterior motives. Be kind anyway.

If you are successful, you will win some false friends and true enemies. Succeed anyway.

The good you do today will be forgotten tomorrow. Be good anyway.

Honesty and frankness will make you vulnerable. Be honest and frank anyway.

The biggest men and women with the biggest ideas can be shot down by the smallest men and women with the smallest minds. Think big anyway.

People favor underdogs, but follow only top dogs. Fight for a few underdogs anyway.

What you spend years building may be destroyed overnight. Build anyway.

People need help, but may attack you if you do help them. Help them anyway.

Give the world the best you have, and you'll get kicked in the teeth. Give the world the best you have anyway.

Something New: "World Wide What?"

I've been kicking around a new idea. The Internet, for better or worse, is loaded to the brim with strange websites and other unforeseen oddities. With that in mind, I've been thinking about posting some of the weirdness I find here. I present to you a few links of note...

Found Magazine: Strange notes, pictures, and other bits. A true example of the "Found Art" concept. This website will repulse, compel, warm the heart, and boggle the mind. Well worth clicking around!

RandomPics.net The name says it all. You can lose a lot of time on this website.

This should keep you going for a bit. More to come!

Outside The Box, Part III

For our final trip down the proverbial rabbit hole of Thought Experiments, it's time we get inside the box, in a manner of speaking. Of the countless potentials for Thought Experiments, this particular example calls for the greatest ability for mental Yoga.

Imagine, for a moment, that there is a box which is opaque. The only way to see inside is to open the lid. Inside this structure is a a vial of a highly toxic substance, generally listed as hydrocyanic acid. Next to the vial of acid is a radioactive substance. Positioned nearby is a Geiger Counter, which when it detects radiation, causes the the vial of acid to break. Topping off this peculiar set-up is a cat. Now, the Geiger Counter is on, and the lid is sealed. What happens?

Presumably, one of two outcomes: The vial is broken by the Geiger Counter (given the radiation inside the box), and the cat is killed. The only other outcome is that the Geiger Counter never registers the radiation, and the cat lives.

So, is the cat alive or dead?

The only way to know for sure is to open the box. At this point, we can determine the state of things but we cannot know anything until then.

This argument is a classic in the world of Quantum Physics known as Schrodinger's Cat. The point of the arguments is best described by Erwin Schrodinger himself. "It is typical of these cases that an indeterminacy originally restricted to the atomic domain becomes transformed into macroscopic indeterminacy, which can then be resolved by direct observation. That prevents us from so naively accepting as valid a "blurred model" for representing reality. In itself, it would not embody anything unclear or contradictory. There is a difference between a shaky or out-of-focus photograph and a snapshot of clouds and fog banks." This experiment has been the subject of countless arguments, articles, and pieces of fiction since it was written initially in the German magazine Naturwissenschaften in 1935.

The two most common outcomes of the Schrodinger's Cat experiment fall to the "Copenhagen Interpretation" as set forth by Niels Bohr and the "Many Worlds" model of Hugh Everett. Bohr believed that all situations were relative to observation and could thereby simply be determined by opening the box, and that no real conclusion could be drawn or theorized otherwise. Everett, on the other hand, would have argued that the conclusion was that the cat would be both dead and alive. The "Many Worlds" view would say that the instant the box was closed, two points diverged, one in which the cat would be killed, and the other where the cat would survive the encounter. These two separate worlds would split off and go forward into their logical futures.

There have been many arguments made regarding this experiment. An earlier version of the experiment that was posed to Albert Einstein by Schrodinger replaced the acid with active gunpowder and a detonation method. Einstein's response, when addressing Schrodinger in a 1950 letter, was illustrating the point of other scientists and Schrodinger. "Most of them simply do not see what sort of risky game they are playing with reality—reality as something independent of what is experimentally established. Their interpretation is, however, refuted most elegantly by your system of radioactive atom + amplifier + charge of gunpowder + cat in a box, in which the psi-function of the system contains both the cat alive and blown to bits. Nobody really doubts that the presence or absence of the cat is something independent of the act of observation."