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Oct. 29th, 2019 09:33 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
shadowkat1. For those who had issues with the Christmas Song -- "Baby, It's Cold Outside", good news, Kelly Clarkson and John Legend are recording a new updated politically correct version. For those who could not care less -- good news, the old version still will exist. Choices, choices...
2. And the Mandalorian actually looks more interesting and innovative than Rise of Skywalker...sort of a sci-fi meets Sam Peckinpah
3. Well, this was predictable... the show-runners/writers of HBO's GoT, Weiss and Benioff are no longer connected to the Star Wars franchise
Game of Thrones writers David Benioff and DB Weiss have left the next Star Wars trilogy, which is due to launch in 2022.
The news comes after the pair signed an exclusive deal with Netflix.
"There are only so many hours in the day, we could not do justice to both Star Wars and our Netflix projects," a statement given to Deadline read.
They added that "getting to talk about Star Wars" with creator George Lucas had been "the thrill of a lifetime".
Lucasfilm president Kathleen Kennedy said that they would be welcomed back in the future. "David Benioff and Dan Weiss are incredible storytellers," she said.
"We hope to include them in the journey forward when they are able to step away from their busy schedule to focus on Star Wars."
According to a Disney release schedule published in May, the trilogy is due to be the next set of Star Wars films, following this December's The Rise of Skywalker, the final chapter of the Skywalker family chronicles.
The next films are scheduled for 2022, 2024 and 2026, and are set to usher in a new era for the famous franchise.
Kevin Feige to the rescue?
Analysis by Lizo Mzimba, BBC entertainment correspondent
Benioff and Weiss aren't the first film-makers to unexpectedly leave the Star Wars universe before getting to realise their vision of a galaxy far, far away.
Josh Trank left a planned Boba Fett spin-off, Lego Movie makers Phil Lord and Chris Miller departed the Han Solo film, Colin Trevorrow left Star Wars Episode IX, and even Rogue One's Gareth Edwards found that someone else was brought in to oversee re-shoots.
In most cases, it seems the original directors' visions eventually clashed with that of Lucasfilm head Kathleen Kennedy. That perhaps isn't the case with Benioff and Weiss. When their Netflix deal was announced, many wondered what might take priority and whether Netflix might have to wait until after the planned Star Wars trilogy to see the results of their $250m (£195m) deal.
The pair's departure isn't a huge body blow to Star Wars, though. The recent news that Marvel chief Kevin Feige will develop at least one Star Wars movie, and perhaps even take on a larger role, is good news for the franchise. One of his great strengths with Marvel has been taking directors with disparate visions and allowing them to make films that simultaneously reflect their differing talents and still make the movies feel part of the same cohesive universe.
The gist? They weren't fired, folks, they left due to a $250 Million deal with NETFLIX. (Yes, really. Netflix stole them out from under Disney's nose, along with Whedon, Murphy, and Rhimes at various points.)
I'm beginning to wonder how Netflix is going to continue to sustain itself with all of these multi-million dollar deals it keeps signing with various television writers, several of which have yet to do much. To date the only one who has done anything is Ryan Murphy. Shondra Rhimes? Eh. Joss Whedon? Eh. How many multi-million dollar deals can they do? Inquiring minds want to know?
Eh, Disney may not care -- they have Kevin Feige, whose outdone everyone with the MCU.
4. why the narcissist in your life is a happy asshole, while you are miserable (Sigh, now if Thanos would just snap these folks out of existence, we'd all be better off.)
5. 10 Scientifically Proven Ways to Be Happy (But only if you aren't a narcissist.)
Well, I've managed three out of ten (help others, meditate, plan a trip - and by the way, planning a trip is stress-inducing for most people not happy inducing, (silly freelance writers with too much time on their hands and not enough to write about)), that's not bad. The sleep more, exercise more...sigh, not happening any time soon. Spend more time with friends and live closer to work are sort of out of the question. Honestly, I think these articles are designed to make people miserable, unless of course you are a narcissist, and don't care.
Also apparently there are people out there who Hate Vegans. Why? Read the article to find out. Personally I think it's because they are insecure about what they are eating.
6. According to this article the collasping Crime Rates of the 1990s may have been Driven by cell phones -- Wait. Were there cell phones in the 1990s? I don't remember seeing them. I'm sure they were about...
The intriguing new theory suggests that the arrival of mobile phones made holding territory less important, which reduced intergang conflict and lowered profits from drug sales.
Lena Edlund, a Columbia University economist, and Cecilia Machado, of the Getulio Vargas Foundation, lay out the data in a new National Bureau of Economic Research working paper. They estimate that the diffusion of phones could explain 19 to 29 percent of the decline in homicides seen from 1990 to 2000.
“The cellphones changed how drugs were dealt,” Edlund told me. In the ’80s, turf-based drug sales generated violence as gangs attacked and defended territory, and also allowed those who controlled the block to keep profits high.
The cellphone broke the link, the paper claims, between turf and selling drugs. “It’s not that people don’t sell or do drugs anymore,” Edlund explained to me, “but the relationship between that and violence is different.”
Edlund and Machado used Federal Communications Commission data on cellular-infrastructure deployment and matched it against the FBI’s (admittedly spotty) database on homicides across the country. They demonstrated a negative relationship that was even stronger for black and Latino populations. The title of their paper suggests that a crucial aspect of understanding declining crime has been hiding in plain sight for years: “It’s the Phone, Stupid: Mobiles and Murder.”
Apparently they were about in the 1990s preventing crimes. Shame they aren't doing it now...
7. When the Beatles Walked Off Stage Fifty Years of Abbey Road
The unpleasantness that George Martin ascribed to the Beatles stood in stark contrast to the first impression he formed of this oddly named group from Liverpool when they auditioned for a recording test at Abbey Road, in the spring of 1962. At that time, Martin had his doubts about their musical potential, but he was totally charmed by their personalities and repartee. The change he perceived in their behavior toward one another during the course of 1968 was very recent and very real, and it was due to many sources, including the travails of Apple Corps, the Beatles’ farcically naïve attempt to run their own business following the death of their visionary manager, Brian Epstein, in 1967, and their disillusionment with the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, the jet-setting Indian swami who had filled the void left by Epstein’s death by serving as the band’s brazenly entrepreneurial spiritual adviser. But the root cause of disaffection in the group involved something much more fundamental than its efforts to dabble in hip capitalism or pop mysticism.
By the late nineteen-sixties, the artistic basis of the Beatles’ preëminence in the world of popular music was plain for all to see. Here was a band comprising two of the greatest pop singers and songwriters of their generation, supervised by a supremely innovative pop record producer, and supported by a pair of highly competent and resourceful instrumentalists, one of whom, George Harrison, was emerging as a gifted songwriter in his own right. The axis of the group’s genius, of course, was the collaboration between John Lennon and Paul McCartney. For more than ten years, the musical friendship between these two partners had remained the predominant relationship in both of their lives. But that had changed abruptly in the spring of 1968, when Lennon returned to London from the Maharishi’s ashram in Rishikesh, blew up his marriage, and threw himself into a romantic and creative partnership with Yoko Ono, the fame-obsessed Japanese performance artist who had been pursuing him for more than a year. Ono would later be demonized by the press and the public as the cause of the Beatles’ downfall, but she was more like the solvent that Lennon used to dissolve the bonds of solidarity and common purpose that had distinguished popular music’s most exalted band of brothers. From the moment Lennon and Ono moved in together, in June of 1968, Ono displaced McCartney as Lennon’s collaborator, muse, and sounding board. That she knew virtually nothing about singing, songwriting, or music-making bothered Lennon not at all. If anything, Ono’s brand of dilettantism came as a great tonic to a renowned musical artist whose insecurities about the pretensions of art-making had recently led him to insist to the Beatles’ authorized biographer, Hunter Davies, that “Beethoven is a con, just like we are now.”
McCartney responded to the advent of Ono with all the powers of musical persuasion at his command. The many months of rehearsal and recording it took to make the White Album had brought about a striking improvement in the Beatles’ ensemble playing. The “Get Back” project, as conceived by McCartney, began as an attempt to restore the group’s sense of personal and musical camaraderie by returning it to its roots as a performing band. Toward this end, several of the songs McCartney unveiled at those sessions had been expressly designed to encourage Lennon to share the lead singing with him. (“Two of Us” was self-explanatory, whereas “I’ve Got a Feeling” reversed the pattern of “A Day in the Life” by joining McCartney’s verses to Lennon’s release.) In April, when Lennon sought to celebrate his recent marriage to Ono by rush-recording “The Ballad of John and Yoko” at a time when George Harrison and Ringo Starr were otherwise engaged, McCartney threw himself into the session, making up for absence of the others by playing bass, drums, piano, percussion, and singing harmony on the track. When Harrison and Starr rejoined them a few days later, it marked the start of a productive series of sessions in which all four of the Beatles introduced new songs.
But any hopes that this renewed spirit of collaboration might carry over into the work on the band’s next album were dimmed when a mounting series of business crises caused Lennon and McCartney to square off over whether the group’s financial management should be entrusted to McCartney’s new in-laws, the entertainment lawyers Lee and John Eastman, or to Lennon and Ono’s proxy, the music-business fixer Allen Klein. Klein and the Eastmans, in their efforts to outdo one another, squandered the opportunity for the Beatles to gain control of both their management and music-publishing companies, forcing E.M.I. to pay their record royalties into escrow until the courts could sort things out. For the first time in a long time, the world’s most successful rock group convened to make an album because it needed the money to pay its bills.
Despite this imperative, McCartney was the only Beatle who showed up at Abbey Road at the start of the sessions in July. (He spent the day refining his singing on “You Never Give Me Your Money,” which summed up his opinion of Klein.) Lennon was over four hundred miles away at the time, on a road trip with Ono and their respective young children in Scotland, where, that same day, he flipped their car into a ditch. The children were merely shaken up, but Lennon suffered a gash on his head, and both he and Ono had to be hospitalized. Harrison and Starr joined McCartney at the studio the following day, and, for the next three weeks, while Lennon recuperated, the remaining three Beatles worked together amicably on songs by McCartney and Harrison.
Shows that all good collaborative efforts, sometimes the best -- just don't get along and have personality conflicts at various points. Let's face it, people are tough to get along with on a daily basis.
8. Canadian Ad Agency applies to trademark the term Fake News, and sends Trump a Cease and Desist Letter
I don't know if that's true or not, but...hee hee hee hee...
Hmmm...apparently it is:
Calgary advertising agency Wax Partnership and the Florida Chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists have teamed up and applied for a trademark on the term.
They sent a cease-and-desist letter to Trump, in a tongue-in-cheek move they hope will spark a conversation about the difference between credible news and the mountains of incorrect information being disseminated, according to CBC.
Cackles with witchy glee.
2. And the Mandalorian actually looks more interesting and innovative than Rise of Skywalker...sort of a sci-fi meets Sam Peckinpah
3. Well, this was predictable... the show-runners/writers of HBO's GoT, Weiss and Benioff are no longer connected to the Star Wars franchise
Game of Thrones writers David Benioff and DB Weiss have left the next Star Wars trilogy, which is due to launch in 2022.
The news comes after the pair signed an exclusive deal with Netflix.
"There are only so many hours in the day, we could not do justice to both Star Wars and our Netflix projects," a statement given to Deadline read.
They added that "getting to talk about Star Wars" with creator George Lucas had been "the thrill of a lifetime".
Lucasfilm president Kathleen Kennedy said that they would be welcomed back in the future. "David Benioff and Dan Weiss are incredible storytellers," she said.
"We hope to include them in the journey forward when they are able to step away from their busy schedule to focus on Star Wars."
According to a Disney release schedule published in May, the trilogy is due to be the next set of Star Wars films, following this December's The Rise of Skywalker, the final chapter of the Skywalker family chronicles.
The next films are scheduled for 2022, 2024 and 2026, and are set to usher in a new era for the famous franchise.
Kevin Feige to the rescue?
Analysis by Lizo Mzimba, BBC entertainment correspondent
Benioff and Weiss aren't the first film-makers to unexpectedly leave the Star Wars universe before getting to realise their vision of a galaxy far, far away.
Josh Trank left a planned Boba Fett spin-off, Lego Movie makers Phil Lord and Chris Miller departed the Han Solo film, Colin Trevorrow left Star Wars Episode IX, and even Rogue One's Gareth Edwards found that someone else was brought in to oversee re-shoots.
In most cases, it seems the original directors' visions eventually clashed with that of Lucasfilm head Kathleen Kennedy. That perhaps isn't the case with Benioff and Weiss. When their Netflix deal was announced, many wondered what might take priority and whether Netflix might have to wait until after the planned Star Wars trilogy to see the results of their $250m (£195m) deal.
The pair's departure isn't a huge body blow to Star Wars, though. The recent news that Marvel chief Kevin Feige will develop at least one Star Wars movie, and perhaps even take on a larger role, is good news for the franchise. One of his great strengths with Marvel has been taking directors with disparate visions and allowing them to make films that simultaneously reflect their differing talents and still make the movies feel part of the same cohesive universe.
The gist? They weren't fired, folks, they left due to a $250 Million deal with NETFLIX. (Yes, really. Netflix stole them out from under Disney's nose, along with Whedon, Murphy, and Rhimes at various points.)
I'm beginning to wonder how Netflix is going to continue to sustain itself with all of these multi-million dollar deals it keeps signing with various television writers, several of which have yet to do much. To date the only one who has done anything is Ryan Murphy. Shondra Rhimes? Eh. Joss Whedon? Eh. How many multi-million dollar deals can they do? Inquiring minds want to know?
Eh, Disney may not care -- they have Kevin Feige, whose outdone everyone with the MCU.
4. why the narcissist in your life is a happy asshole, while you are miserable (Sigh, now if Thanos would just snap these folks out of existence, we'd all be better off.)
5. 10 Scientifically Proven Ways to Be Happy (But only if you aren't a narcissist.)
Well, I've managed three out of ten (help others, meditate, plan a trip - and by the way, planning a trip is stress-inducing for most people not happy inducing, (silly freelance writers with too much time on their hands and not enough to write about)), that's not bad. The sleep more, exercise more...sigh, not happening any time soon. Spend more time with friends and live closer to work are sort of out of the question. Honestly, I think these articles are designed to make people miserable, unless of course you are a narcissist, and don't care.
Also apparently there are people out there who Hate Vegans. Why? Read the article to find out. Personally I think it's because they are insecure about what they are eating.
6. According to this article the collasping Crime Rates of the 1990s may have been Driven by cell phones -- Wait. Were there cell phones in the 1990s? I don't remember seeing them. I'm sure they were about...
The intriguing new theory suggests that the arrival of mobile phones made holding territory less important, which reduced intergang conflict and lowered profits from drug sales.
Lena Edlund, a Columbia University economist, and Cecilia Machado, of the Getulio Vargas Foundation, lay out the data in a new National Bureau of Economic Research working paper. They estimate that the diffusion of phones could explain 19 to 29 percent of the decline in homicides seen from 1990 to 2000.
“The cellphones changed how drugs were dealt,” Edlund told me. In the ’80s, turf-based drug sales generated violence as gangs attacked and defended territory, and also allowed those who controlled the block to keep profits high.
The cellphone broke the link, the paper claims, between turf and selling drugs. “It’s not that people don’t sell or do drugs anymore,” Edlund explained to me, “but the relationship between that and violence is different.”
Edlund and Machado used Federal Communications Commission data on cellular-infrastructure deployment and matched it against the FBI’s (admittedly spotty) database on homicides across the country. They demonstrated a negative relationship that was even stronger for black and Latino populations. The title of their paper suggests that a crucial aspect of understanding declining crime has been hiding in plain sight for years: “It’s the Phone, Stupid: Mobiles and Murder.”
Apparently they were about in the 1990s preventing crimes. Shame they aren't doing it now...
7. When the Beatles Walked Off Stage Fifty Years of Abbey Road
The unpleasantness that George Martin ascribed to the Beatles stood in stark contrast to the first impression he formed of this oddly named group from Liverpool when they auditioned for a recording test at Abbey Road, in the spring of 1962. At that time, Martin had his doubts about their musical potential, but he was totally charmed by their personalities and repartee. The change he perceived in their behavior toward one another during the course of 1968 was very recent and very real, and it was due to many sources, including the travails of Apple Corps, the Beatles’ farcically naïve attempt to run their own business following the death of their visionary manager, Brian Epstein, in 1967, and their disillusionment with the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, the jet-setting Indian swami who had filled the void left by Epstein’s death by serving as the band’s brazenly entrepreneurial spiritual adviser. But the root cause of disaffection in the group involved something much more fundamental than its efforts to dabble in hip capitalism or pop mysticism.
By the late nineteen-sixties, the artistic basis of the Beatles’ preëminence in the world of popular music was plain for all to see. Here was a band comprising two of the greatest pop singers and songwriters of their generation, supervised by a supremely innovative pop record producer, and supported by a pair of highly competent and resourceful instrumentalists, one of whom, George Harrison, was emerging as a gifted songwriter in his own right. The axis of the group’s genius, of course, was the collaboration between John Lennon and Paul McCartney. For more than ten years, the musical friendship between these two partners had remained the predominant relationship in both of their lives. But that had changed abruptly in the spring of 1968, when Lennon returned to London from the Maharishi’s ashram in Rishikesh, blew up his marriage, and threw himself into a romantic and creative partnership with Yoko Ono, the fame-obsessed Japanese performance artist who had been pursuing him for more than a year. Ono would later be demonized by the press and the public as the cause of the Beatles’ downfall, but she was more like the solvent that Lennon used to dissolve the bonds of solidarity and common purpose that had distinguished popular music’s most exalted band of brothers. From the moment Lennon and Ono moved in together, in June of 1968, Ono displaced McCartney as Lennon’s collaborator, muse, and sounding board. That she knew virtually nothing about singing, songwriting, or music-making bothered Lennon not at all. If anything, Ono’s brand of dilettantism came as a great tonic to a renowned musical artist whose insecurities about the pretensions of art-making had recently led him to insist to the Beatles’ authorized biographer, Hunter Davies, that “Beethoven is a con, just like we are now.”
McCartney responded to the advent of Ono with all the powers of musical persuasion at his command. The many months of rehearsal and recording it took to make the White Album had brought about a striking improvement in the Beatles’ ensemble playing. The “Get Back” project, as conceived by McCartney, began as an attempt to restore the group’s sense of personal and musical camaraderie by returning it to its roots as a performing band. Toward this end, several of the songs McCartney unveiled at those sessions had been expressly designed to encourage Lennon to share the lead singing with him. (“Two of Us” was self-explanatory, whereas “I’ve Got a Feeling” reversed the pattern of “A Day in the Life” by joining McCartney’s verses to Lennon’s release.) In April, when Lennon sought to celebrate his recent marriage to Ono by rush-recording “The Ballad of John and Yoko” at a time when George Harrison and Ringo Starr were otherwise engaged, McCartney threw himself into the session, making up for absence of the others by playing bass, drums, piano, percussion, and singing harmony on the track. When Harrison and Starr rejoined them a few days later, it marked the start of a productive series of sessions in which all four of the Beatles introduced new songs.
But any hopes that this renewed spirit of collaboration might carry over into the work on the band’s next album were dimmed when a mounting series of business crises caused Lennon and McCartney to square off over whether the group’s financial management should be entrusted to McCartney’s new in-laws, the entertainment lawyers Lee and John Eastman, or to Lennon and Ono’s proxy, the music-business fixer Allen Klein. Klein and the Eastmans, in their efforts to outdo one another, squandered the opportunity for the Beatles to gain control of both their management and music-publishing companies, forcing E.M.I. to pay their record royalties into escrow until the courts could sort things out. For the first time in a long time, the world’s most successful rock group convened to make an album because it needed the money to pay its bills.
Despite this imperative, McCartney was the only Beatle who showed up at Abbey Road at the start of the sessions in July. (He spent the day refining his singing on “You Never Give Me Your Money,” which summed up his opinion of Klein.) Lennon was over four hundred miles away at the time, on a road trip with Ono and their respective young children in Scotland, where, that same day, he flipped their car into a ditch. The children were merely shaken up, but Lennon suffered a gash on his head, and both he and Ono had to be hospitalized. Harrison and Starr joined McCartney at the studio the following day, and, for the next three weeks, while Lennon recuperated, the remaining three Beatles worked together amicably on songs by McCartney and Harrison.
Shows that all good collaborative efforts, sometimes the best -- just don't get along and have personality conflicts at various points. Let's face it, people are tough to get along with on a daily basis.
8. Canadian Ad Agency applies to trademark the term Fake News, and sends Trump a Cease and Desist Letter
I don't know if that's true or not, but...hee hee hee hee...
Hmmm...apparently it is:
Calgary advertising agency Wax Partnership and the Florida Chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists have teamed up and applied for a trademark on the term.
They sent a cease-and-desist letter to Trump, in a tongue-in-cheek move they hope will spark a conversation about the difference between credible news and the mountains of incorrect information being disseminated, according to CBC.
Cackles with witchy glee.
no subject
Date: 2019-10-31 07:21 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-10-31 07:56 pm (UTC)Hee, thanks.