en_US http://temples.com http://temples.com/article.php?sid=2424 Sun, 31 Aug 2008 11:55:21 -0400 There's no question about it. Wall Street got drunk -- that's one of the reasons I asked you to turn off the TV cameras -- it got drunk and now it's got a hangover. The question is how long will it sober up and not try to do all these fancy financial instruments." --George W. Bush, speaking at a private fundraiser, Houston, Texas, July 18, 2008 from About.com http://temples.com/article.php?sid=2423 Sun, 17 Aug 2008 09:42:24 -0400 Well, the movie shoot for "A Last Resort" was a great success! [See The Birthing of a Film.] On July 19, we started at 1:00 p.m. and finished the final shot at 11:57 p.m. The tear down/clean up lasted another hour; we pulled out at 1:00 a.m. It was an awfully warm room. The windows were all covered on the outside with heavy pads to darken the interior. I and several others made ourselves useful as human-powered "fans" using the lids from large plastic containers in between shots. (Any electric appliances generated too much background noise so we could not use conventional electric fans.) The crew brought in a fake chandelier on a wooden device to suspend it over the center of the room. Ironically, several shots were ruined by spiders that kept dropping down from the chandelier in front of the actors' noses! I can't forget the hundreds of times I heard, "Quiet on the set... Sound okay? ... (Sound okay)... Camera... (Camera rolling... Camera speed...) Action!" I dreamt it in my sleep that night. [Photo Gallery is broken at the moment. I'll post a few photos in the near future.] http://temples.com/article.php?sid=2422 Fri, 18 Jul 2008 16:31:18 -0400 Goodbye from the world's biggest polluter." --George W. Bush, in parting words to British Prime Minister Gordon Brown and French President Nicolas Sarkozy at his final G-8 Summit, punching the air and grinning widely as the two leaders looked on in shock, Rusutsu, Japan, July 10, 2008 from About.com http://temples.com/article.php?sid=2421 Thu, 05 Jun 2008 00:04:02 -0400 Today I bid adieu to my trusty, reliable Sun Ultra 10 Sparcstation. For over ten years it's hosted this domain and multiple others that I've been responsible for. I purchased the CPU and external hard drives at auction from a dot-com that went bust back in 1998. The system was 1-2 years old when I purchased it. I paid approximately four thousand dollars at the time. Until just recently, I had a dozen or so domains hosted on it, providing email, web and remote login services. But today, I swapped over the last two remaining domains--including this web site, temples.com--to a newer, rack mounted Pentium quad CPU system with tons of memory and quarter of a Terabyte of disk space. I christened the old box "Io." It was named not for the computer abbreviation "input/output," but rather, for the intriguing moon of Jupiter. Nearly all of my computers have been named after moons of Jupiter. Io was loaded with Solaris 9 OS. It had a whopping 2 Gigabytes of memory, a quad-ethernet interface card, and four 8 Gbyte high performance, 10,000 RPM SCSI disk drives. Io never experienced a hardware failure. No hard disks gone bad. No failed memory. No fried fans. No blown power supplies. Nothin'. It just took a lickin' and kept on tickin'. Seven days a week, 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. Year after year--for more than ten years. Count'em! TEN YEARS! Sure, Io went down from time to time. It went down hard, but it always managed to boot back without much fuss. How many modern computer systems could boast that kind of record? In its day an Ultra 10 was the Cadillac. Or, to quote Snoop from HBO's The Wire, "Man said you wanna shoot nails this here the Cadillac, man. He meant Lexus but he ain't know it." Okay--so the old timer was actually a Lexus. I won't say, "I'll miss her." Io had no gender so far as I'm concerned. Io was an it. I'll miss it. Rest in peace, Io. http://temples.com/article.php?sid=2420 Sat, 24 May 2008 16:35:37 -0400 Afghanistan is the most daring and ambition mission in the history of NATO." --George W. Bush, Bucharest, Romania, April 2, 2008 from About.com http://temples.com/article.php?sid=2419 Sat, 24 May 2008 11:20:58 -0400 "Dogville (2003)" I started watching this movie while channel-flipping. The official plot from Internet Movie Database says, "A woman on the run from the mob is reluctantly accepted in a small Colorado town. In exchange, she agrees to work for them. As a search visits town, she finds out that their support has a price. Yet her dangerous secret is never far away..." All I can say is: "Wow." This plot line barely scratches the surface in describing this thought-provoking, innovative flick from director Lars von Trier. To say that this movie is sparse on scenery is an understatement. The set is really that of a play. Actors move into and out of non-existent houses, knocking on pretend-doors and turning imaginary door knobs. The entire town is sketched onto the set, including the imaginary streets whose names are written onto the floor. The effect is magnificent. It actually draws the viewer much closer to the actors, their action and their dialog. I'm also impressed by inclusion of many famous, big-name actors who obviously felt that this flick had great merit: Nicole Kidman stars as Grace Margaret Mulligan; James Caan plays the gangster boss; Chloë Sevigny of "Big Love" has a role; even Lauren Bacall is featured! After the first few minutes I was hooked. I'm only sorry that I tuned in in the middle. This movie is definitely bubbling to the top of my Netflix queue! http://temples.com/article.php?sid=2418 Mon, 19 May 2008 16:20:15 -0400 Seen on a bumper sticker: "Religion is not a prerequisite for morality." http://temples.com/article.php?sid=2417 Thu, 15 May 2008 11:04:21 -0400 I'm well-read. Go ahead! Ask me about Burmese relief efforts and Angelina Jolie's twins." --Zippy the Pinhead http://temples.com/article.php?sid=2416 Thu, 08 May 2008 17:16:02 -0400 Today I visited Jackie Grubb's 6th grade class St. Columbkill School in Brighton to present my last Share Aloud discussion of the academic year. Around 30 bright, attentive youngsters greeted me as I arrived at 12:30 p.m. I brought with me a very timely article from today's Boston Globe entitled, "Relief efforts hampered in Burma." It described the carnage and devastation to that country in the wake of a cyclone, a projected death toll of 100,000, and the military junta's hampering of international relief efforts greatly compounding the suffering. I let the kids read the article; I encouraged them to circle or underline any words or phrases that they did not understand. Then, I read the article aloud. I asked for volunteers to look up words that others were confused or unclear about. "What does 'anonymity' mean?" one girl asked. "What are 'mangroves?'" asked another. "Well, I think it's a kind of tree or shrub," I replied. "But let's look it up and make sure." We tackled a number of difficult words and phrases. One boy wanted to know the meaning of UNICEF. "That's an acronym," I replied, giving them a quick 30-second explanation of what an acronym was. The dictionary yielded the answer: United Nations Childrens Fund. (They wanted to know why the "I" wasn't a word.) http://temples.com/article.php?sid=2415 Wed, 07 May 2008 15:59:11 -0400 April 16, 2008: I happened to glance outside our balcony window around dinner time and saw a wave of thick black smoke and flames shooting up from the banks of the Charles River. Ariel and I had a ringside seat to a working fire. It was quite spectacular! I'm sure that the Sparkies would have envied me. Fire apparatus had arrived, and firemen were dumping large volumes of water on the brush fire. (I wonder if they were pumping directly from the Muddy Charles?) They stayed on-scene until well after dark.