Why It Seems Like Half of All Diseases Originate Within this Circle
Half of everything that occurs to people occurs inside this simple circle, because half of humanity lives within this simple 4,000-kilometre circle.
Author: vcrosbie
Dear Believers in Conspiracy Theories about the Press
Finally unveiled: the ‘Deep State’ plot by the press, who are against Trump!
Social Media Distancing
The Dunning-Kruger Effect has changed Social Media: those who know not opine and those who know know better.
‘Kesari’
Thanks to streaming video websites such as Netflix, Amazon Prime, and the Criterion Channel, I’m enjoying many of the best films in the world, not just those few available at my local ‘art house’ cinema. Last night’s was Kesari (‘Saffron’), this year’s Bollywood film about the 1897 Battle of Saragarhi, in which 21 Sikhs fighting for the British Raj held off 10,000 to 12,000 Afghan warrior attacking their small fort. As an American, I wasn’t aware of that battle, for which all 21 Sikhs were posthumously award the Indian Order of Merit, that nation’s equivalent of the British Victoria Cross or American Medal of Honor. Kesari, is one of this year’s top ten box office films in India, is reminiscent of other ‘hopelessly outnumbered’ war films, such as the 1964 film Zulu (starring Michael Caine in his first major role) about the 1879 Battle of Rorke’s Drift (150 British soldiers vs. 4,000 Zulu warriors) or the 1962 film The 300 Spartans or 2007 film 300, both of which were about the ancient Battle of Thermopylae (in reality a few thousand Spartans against 70,000 to 100,000 Persian warriors). Good war film, yet with a minor romantic subplot. (And being a Bollywood film, at some point in the 21 Sikhs must dance and sing!) Starring the Canadian Akshay Kumar, India’s highest-paid actor, the fourth highest-paid in the world. Available on Netflix, in Hindi with English-subtitles.
Seeking a Shorter Commute
Although I’m scheduled in late August to start my eleventh consecutive academic year teaching New Media Business, a required course which I wrote and for which I am the sole instructor in the S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communication’s master’s degree in New Media Management curriculum at Syracuse University, I’m seeking either a supplemental or else full-time academic position closer to New York City area. Or in any U.S. or foreign major city having a hospital that can provide excellent outpatient care for my disabled wife. When my wife became disabled in 2010, doctors at the three hospitals in Syracuse told her that the she required specialized care that only hospitals in New York City, Boston, or other larger cities could provide. So, she and I moved to the New York City suburbs, where we’d lived before each taking teaching positions at Syracuse, and I began commuting weekly back to Syracuse (a 500-mile/800 kilometer round-trip) to teach postgraduate New Media Management. But I am now almost a decade older and have grown fatigued of that eight-hour weekly round-trip, even to job I love. I would like to teach either closer to where I now live or else move to a new major city with a shorter commute. I’m enthused to teach more graduate students in Syracuse this autumn; yet I think that, either this coming academic year or during the 2020-21 one, I should begin teaching elsewhere rather than continuing so overly-long weekly commute. Moreover, as my wife and I have ‘downsized’ our household as we’ve grown older (and because she is a dual citizen of the US and the EU) we’re open to the possibilities of living and teaching elsewhere in the U.S. or abroad. If you know of anything apropos, please let me know.
R.I.P., Matthew Buckland (1974-2019)
I’m shocked by news that Matthew Buckland, Africa’s leading expert about New Media, died today after a short battle with an apparently fast-acting cancer. Shocked because during May in Cape Town, when I last saw Matt, he apologized because his speech to a conference we were attending had been held later than scheduled and he couldn’t have lunch together because he was entered in a competitive bike race elsewhere in the Western Cape that afternoon. So, I walked him to his car, his off-road bicycle mounted atop its roof, and he went off, strong, determined, as he always was. That’s how I’ll ever remember him. As I recollect, I first met him during 2007 at the IFRA ‘Beyond the Printed Word’ newspaper New Media conference which was held in suburban Dublin that year. He was attending it with his fellow South African friends and competitors Elan Lohmann and Colin Daniels who (along with Vincent Maher and Lukanyo Mnyanda) I sometime light-heartedly refer to as the ‘Rhodes Mafia’. Each of them were journalism students at South Africa’s Rhodes University who were the first generation of their countrymen to be born ‘digital natives’; each becoming a leader with global renown for their continent’s unique forms of New Media. In Matt’s case, that involved a few years after graduation working as a web producer at the BBC in London, a job which soon led to seven years working as the general manager for online operations at the Mail & Guardian in Johannesburg, post-apartheid South Africa’s major weekly newspaper. After that, he headed the New Media lab for Naspers, South Africa’s major media company, for whom he became general manager of Publishing and Social Media at age 36. In 2010, he founded and became managing director of Creative Spark, a +70-person digital marketing agency that he last year sold to the London-based M&C Saatchi PLC global advertising & marketing agency for a reported 50 million rand (US$3.5 million). Since then, he’s been entrepreneur-in-residence for the global Media Development Investment Fund (disclosure: one of my former clients) where one of his roles has been to teach online publishing and online marketing to media in poor countries or those arising from repressive governments. Matthew Buckland had a rare combination of knowledge, drive, and integrity. My relationship with him during the past dozen years had gone from mentoring to instead referring my former graduate students to him […]
Overhead: the World’s Longest Airline Flight
[If the color photo that heads this post doesn’t appear on you smartphone, click here to view it.] Each morning at approximately 10:15 a.m. New York time (15:15 UTC), I can gaze upwards from my home a watch a jet airliner pass three miles over me and heading northeast. While that’s not unusual because I live 30 miles (48 kilometers), 40 miles (63 km), and 50 miles (96 km) respectively from the New York City area’s LaGuardia, John F. Kennedy (JFK), and Newark Liberty airports, this daily airliner is special. It’s approximately six minutes into the world’s longest non-stop airliner flight. Even without binoculars, I can see the stylized gold dragon against a blue background on the tail of this mostly otherwise white aircraft: a new, twin-engine Airbus a350-900 ULR (Ultra Long Range) model. It’s Singapore Airlines’ legendary Flight SQ21 and will be aloft some 18-hour before it completes its 9,534 mile non-stop flight from Newark Liberty International Airport (EWR). Singapore Airlines flew this route, setting the all-time record for a scheduled jet airline flight, from 2004 to 2013, then relaunched SQ21 this past October. (By the way, Cable News Network covered the relaunch of the route as if no airliner had ever flown that far before. Didn’t anybody at CNN know that Singapore Airlines had flown it from 2004 to 2013?) The earlier version of SQ21 used a long-range version of the four-engine Airbus a340 aircraft and carried a mix of coach and business class passengers. However, the route perennially lost money because these a350s had to be fitted with fewer than normal seats in coach due to the extra weight of the fuel needed to fly that long. By 2010, Singapore Airways had converted the a350s on this route to carry only 100 business class seats. Nonetheless, that wasn’t economical. The airline revived the route after Airbus Industries designed for it this special model of the new a350, which can carry both coach and business class while using less fuel than the a340s did. The a340 versions of SQ21 usually headed due north from New York City, flying over the North Pole, then south across Siberia, China, and Southeast Asia to Singapore. Depending upon the jet stream in the northern hemisphere, the a350 new versions of this flight will use that same route or follow a much more divergent route: using the jet stream to give the aircraft […]
Impressions of Sagrada Familia
I’d only 45 minutes to visit la Basilica de Sagrada Familia after speaking at conference in Barcelona on the afternoon of September 14, 2018. It had been 20 years since I’d seen the world’s most audacious church, which back then hadn’t yet a roof. My wife was with me, there were hundreds of tourists there, and I’d carried with me a single camera (a Sony a77 mirrorless DSLR) and two lenses (a Sony-Zeiss 24-70mm and a Sigma 8-16mm). Yet the warm, angular light was nearly a late summer sunset, and those two lenses are nearly perfect for photographing architecture of such scale. I knew that I’d have just enough time to do justice to the colors of this wondrous building still under construction. What do you think? (Click here to see the individual photos.)
Comic Book Films [2010s] Versus Class Action Films [1950’s]: Part Three
[Viewing this on a smartphone? If you don’t see the video referenced, here is its hyperlink: https://youtu.be/jGc-K7giqKM ] Finally, here’s a third video comparing the comic book superhero action movies of today against action movies of the past. Again, I’m using Akira Kurosaw films the 1950s to contrast with current movies.
Comic Book Films [2010s] Versus Class Action Films [1950’s]: Part Two
[Viewing this on a smartphone? If you don’t see the video referenced, here is its hyperlink: https://youtu.be/jZSRxp-dJ-Q ] Here’s a second video comparing the comic book superhero action movies of today against action movies of the past. Again, I’m using Japanese films from the 1950s. In this case, films from director Akira Kurosawa. Hear how the narrator of this video, a different narrator and writer than from my last example , contrasts action films of today versus then.
Comic Book Films (2010’s) versus Classic Action Films (1950’s). The Winner Is …
[Viewing this on a smartphone? If you don’t see the video referenced, here is its hyperlink: https://youtu.be/jZSRxp-dJ-Q ] No, sorry! My young friends, the films about Marvel or DC comic book superheroes or the past five ‘Star Wars’ films aren’t — unlike what some of my under age-30 (or even some under age-40) friends tell — me “the greatest action movies ever made!” I’ve given up watching those films, with their leaden plots, chaotic actions sequences, and think characterizations. And because approximately eight out of the ten top box office hits last year were sequels of those films, this means I no longer go to the cinema as much as I had for decades. You want great actions films, go online and look to the past. Here is the first of three blog posts I’m posting that compare today’s comic book superhero or ‘Star Wars’ films with better actions films of the past. Because the ‘Star Wars’ films themselves are based upon 1950’s Japanese samurai films (known as Jidaigeki films in Japanese, a term borrowed in ‘Star Wars’ as “Jedi”), let’s start there. Compare how the master director Akira Kurosawa directed action in Seven Samurai (1954), considered by most serious critics as the best action film ever made. The narrator of the YouTube video above is himself a little dull, but his points aren’t when comparing the direction of today’s comic book superhero or ‘Star Wars’ films with that of this Japanese classic action film.