Sentence of the day, said by someone named "Cummings," no less. Click through if you want to find out what provoked the statement. It's quite safe for work. Via.
Nine Inch Nails: Lights In The Sky, Over North America 2008 Tour Sampler:
we are pleased to offer a free EP featuring songs from the talented group of artists who will be supporting us on the lights in the sky tour this summer.
the EP contains five high quality, DRM-free, fully-tagged MP3 files from a place to bury strangers, does it offend you, yeah?, crystal castles, deerhunter, and nine inch nails. your download will also include cover art and a pack of digital extras.
"The Fall" is so audacious that when Variety calls it a "vanity project," you can only admire the man vain enough to make it. It tells a simple story with vast romantic images so stunning I had to check twice, three times, to be sure the film actually claims to have absolutely no computer-generated imagery. None? What about the Labyrinth of Despair, with no exit? The intersecting walls of zig-zagging staircases? The man who emerges from the burning tree?
[snip]
Either you are drawn into the world of this movie or you are not. It is preposterous, of course, but I vote with Werner Herzog, who says if we do not find new images, we will perish. Here a line of bowmen shoot hundreds of arrows into the air. So many of them fall into the back of the escaped slave that he falls backward and the weight of his body is supported by them, as on a bed of nails with dozens of foot-long arrows. There is scene of the monkey Otis chasing a butterfly through impossible architecture.
And here's another article by Ebert full of fascinating information about the movie:
Now what about those miraculous locations? I asked him. No special effects? What about the zig-zagging interlocking black and white staircases reaching down into the earth?
"Its true. Its Ripley's. What people think is not true in the film is true. The steps that go down, it's a reservoir that has been there for 500 or 600 years. It's used for seeing how low the water level is, to determine how to tax people. If the water level is so high, they charge so much tax from the farmers. The problem is most of the time you never see those steps; they're underwater. Somebody showed me these steps and said they went really way down. And I said, well, has anybody seen that?
"They said, most Indians think they look cheap. But in fact they look like an inspiration by Escher. So labyrinthine and mad. The problem is, when you see the wide shot, you realize they're not what I'm making them out to be. What matters is how I'm framing it. If you see the wider shots, there are about 2,000 Indians on trees watching and wondering why we're shooting in a really crappy well. But since I shot those steps, three Hindi movies have gone and shot there because they figure, if its good enough for him, it must be beautiful."
[snip]
And as for the Blue City...
"Jodhpur, the blue city, is a Brahmin city where you're only supposed to paint your house blue. I made a contract with the city; we would give them free paint. We knew legally they could only choose blue. So they painted their houses blue and it looked more vibrant than it ever had before."
"Lawmakers chastised the Bush administration on Wednesday for allowing the Chinese government to interrogate Chinese Muslim detainees at the U.S. military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and demanded that they be freed in the United States," the Associated Press reports:
The two lawmakers, Reps. Bill Delahunt, D-Massachusetts, and Dana Rohrabacher, R-California, said the Uighurs--members of a Chinese ethnic group--should be compensated and apologized to for any abuse they may have suffered while held in the detention center at U.S. naval base in Cuba.
Uighurs fled their homeland in western China and settled in Afghanistan and Pakistan, only to be swept up in the U.S.-led dragnet for terrorists after the September 11 attacks.
We heard about the Uighurs when we visited Guantanamo in 2006. It is true that they do not belong at Guantanamo. But the AP's benign account of their having "settled" in Afghanistan and been "swept up" is at variance with what we learned at Guantanamo.
Officials at the detention facility told us that the Uighurs were in fact planning acts of terrorism--but against China. They are not enemies of the U.S., and hence do not belong in an American facility for enemy combatants.
The problem is what to do with them. Normally when a detainee is released from Guantanamo, he is repatriated to his home country. That is not an option in this case because they are Chinese nationals and, as the AP notes, U.S. law prohibits returning them to China, where "they are likely to face persecution and torture."
So the U.S. has been attempting to settle them in other lands. Albania admitted five Uighurs in 2006, but "as of two months ago, 17 Uighurs remained at Guantanamo, awaiting countries to take them."
As for the congressmen's proposal to settle them in the U.S., well, do you want to live next door to them? They are hard to place for a reason. More important, it seems to us that Beijing would have reason to view as a provocation an American decision to give safe haven to men who planned terrorist acts against China.
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