Scott Gant

Farrah Fawcett, 1947-2009

As some of you may know by now...since the news media seems to think this is bigger news than the Iranian elections and that country's voyage to civil war....David Letterman made some jokes about Sarah Palin in his monologue and the "Top Ten List". They were just goofy jokes and taken as themselves they were harmless. 

But you wouldn't know this from how it was being covered. People came out of the woodwork to voice their indignation. Some even going so far as to call Letterman a sexual predator or a hater of women. What do I have to say about this? Get a grip people. This was the goofy top-ten list, yet everyone is making it out like he wrote and op-ed piece for the New York Times or something. 

Kerry Conran. Raise your hand if you know this name. Anyone? Yeah, didn't think so. Kerry Conran is a very talented and innovative person that probably had a nice career ahead of him in the film industry...that is until a Hollywood Producer saw what he was doing and decided to exploit the hell out of him and in turn ruin his future.

Kerry was working on his own, on his little Macintosh computer in his home, on a short project called The World of Tomorrow. It was an animation in the spirit of the 1930's sci-fi serials with giant robots invading the Earth. It was really good and it showed off the skills of Conran and his designer brother Kevin. It may have been a great demo-reel for Kerry that could have gotten him into ILM or Weta or a number of special effects houses and he could have floated to the top of his profession. This didn't happen of course.

A producer named Jon Avnet came along, saw the footage and must have thought to himself "wow, I can make a buck off of this". Through the well oiled hype-machine of Hollywood, Avnet soon had Conran set up as a director of a full feature film centered around The World of Tomorrow. Written and directed by Conran, production designed by his brother and "filmed" entirely in front of a blue screen, the movie was called Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow. I suppose it wasn't a bad movie...but it was very stilted and had quite a few rough spots. Conran was WAY over his head in writing and directing this and it shows. Another victim of "too much too soon" syndrome.

That was in 2004. Kerry Conran has pretty much gone on to do nothing. He doesn't work at a special effects shop, where his talents would probably have flourished. He hasn't directed another movie. Hasn't written anything. No more demos. He was slated to direct a version of Edgar Rice Burroughs John Carter of Mars, but that fell through. Honestly I think it was more of a gimmick to even have considered Conran to shoot this, so they can splash across the posters "from the director of Sky Captain", but then they reconsidered since Sky Captain was pretty much a flop.

It infuriates me that we could have seen great things from Kerry Conran, yet due to Hollywood seeing something it can consume and exploit, he's left by the wayside.

Blender is an open-source 3D modeling and animation program that's been out for some time. It have very powerful features and can actually compete with the big boys of 3D in terms of power. The only thing that held it back for so many is the obtuse interface and the learning curve on trying to figure the thing out. Granted, there are a ton of tutorials online and books written that will get you up to speed with Blender, but it's still not very user friendly.

That will all change when version 2.5 hits the streets. It was designed from the ground up to be much more intuitive and the interface is one of the best I've seen...so far that is. It's still a work in progress. You can download the nightly builds of it at Graphicall.org. It's pretty stable, but not everything has been implemented yet. But you can get a feel of the program. Now if only they would redesign Gimp.

If you want the current version of Blender, 2.49, then you can get it in your flavor of OS at Blender.org.

We've all seen them before in one form or another. AFI's 100 best movies of all time. Rolling Stone's top 100 albums of all time. The 100 best guitarists of all time. The top 10 this or that. Lists are all over the place.

But are any of the valid? Seriously, how can someone say that this movie is better than that movie when two movies are still great? When it comes to art, there is no "best". It's all subjective. You ask 10 people what the best movie or album is and you'll get 20 different answers.

Don't get me wrong, there are top movies or top albums. Ones that further their genre or artform. But you can't place one above the other as they effect different people in different ways. I suppose it's human nature though to place things in some semblance of order. To tidy things up. It's the anal-retentive in us all that likes things categorized and placed in a sequence. Perhaps it gives us comfort. For one we don't have to think about things, we let the experts or the majority do the thinking for us. "Oh, these are the top albums of all time picked by the experts, so it must be true". Others say that lists like these help generate dialog and discussion as to their merits. This explanation is the one I like the most because I've always liked a good argument/discussion of intangible things like "what art is best" or some non-sense like that.

Next up, my top ten picks of the best "best lists"...

The new movie from Pixar, Up, opens today and while I haven't seen it yet I've heard wonderful things about it.

Pixar and myself go back a long time...well, let me clarify that I doubt anyone at Pixar today would even remember me, but back in around 1990 I was working hard to get Renderman ported over to the Amiga platform. Of course, nothing happened with this but I was in contact with quite a few people at Pixar. They were at that time still a very small company and hadn't taken off yet. I was excited by their potential though.

I also got a huge thrill when at a SIGGRAPH in Chicago...which I think was around 1991 or 92...I got to meet Ed Catmull. Pixar had a VERY small booth there and they were selling a videotape showing the four little short films they had made up to that time. Ed was there at the booth, he even took my money and bagged up my videotape. I was like "Ed Catmull is bagging up my purchace....Ed fricken Catmull!". My wife of course was like "Ed who?".

How far they've come, it's amazing. Back when I was dealing with them I doubt they had 15 people working there and I'm sure most of them were programmers working on Renderman as a majority of their money at the time was selling software. Does anyone remember Showplace, Typestry and Glimpse for the Mac? I was one of their beta-testers at the time for these products. They developed most of their high-end software though to the big-boys of special effects at the time.

Everything changed though when Pixar released Toy Story. The rest is history.

Update on Monday, June 1, 2009 at 06:28AM by Scott Gant

Okay, Up was the box-office champ this weekend raking in over 68 million dollars. Hey, congratulations to Disney and Pixar for making money. You'll see that box-office figure bandied about this week on various news organizations and outlets. Why? Why are the box office figures of such interest to people?

Everywhere you look you'll see what movies were the biggest winners...monetarily that is....for the weekend or season or year. Now, unless you actually have a financial stake in the movie, why would you or I care that this movie made more money that that other movie? As we've seen in the past, just because a movie makes a lot of money, that doesn't make it a great movie. The mediocre snooze-fest that is known as Titanic comes to mind. I suggest judging a movie on it's content and not on how much it makes.

The California Supreme Court on Tuesday upheld Proposition 8's ban on same-sex marriage, but said that the estimated 18,000 people that got married before Prop-8 went into effect could remain married. I guess lucky them and everyone else can suck it....so to speak.

What I still can't understand is why does anyone care if two gay people get married? All I ever read or hear from the people that oppose gay marriage is that it's an attack on traditional "straight" marriages. How? How does two gay people getting married had any effect on a straight couple getting married? Seriously, how does it do anything to anyone? Someone please give me a compelling, logical argument that supports the banning of two people of the same sex getting married.

Oh there are arguments out there now, but they don't make any logical sense at all. Here are some examples of these "arguments", mainly from "Dr" James Dobson:

1. Gay marriages will destroy the institution of marriage, thereby making children be born out of wedlock. Children will grow up with two mommies or two daddies or worse yet, single parent households. Seriously? This is an argument? There are children all over the world that grow up in single parent households that have nothing to do with gay marriage. Also, how does growing up in a household with two mommies or two daddies "confuse" a child? Children want to be loved and protected and engaged...they don't care if it's by two men or two women. Come on...

2. The legalization of gay marriage will lead to other unorthodox unions such as polygamy or marrage to animals. Are there really people out there arguing this? No, it won't. Plain and simple.

3. With the legalization of gay marriage, every school in the nation will be required to teach that this perversion is the moral equivalent of traditional marriage. Interesting. It's also interesting that when I went to school we never, ever talked about marriage at all in school. The public school I went to never taught me anything about marriage. My son is almost 16 now and they've never talked about marriage in the public school he goes to now. Why would this all of a sudden change? Straw man raises his ugly head...

Okay, there are many more arguments that Dobson brings up, but honestly they're even more silly than these. People oppose to gay marriage go on and on how this will destroy the traditional family. You know what really destroys families? Divorce. Divorce will split a family apart and really throw kids into turmoil. Why aren't these people passing legislation making divorce illegal? Think of the children being torn apart by divorce. It's the same mentality of banning toy guns...which can't kill....and keeping real guns that really can kill. Go after gay marriage because it "might" throw kids into turmoil, yet keep divorce where it really does throw kids into turmoil.

But again "Dr" Dobson, what do two people who want to get married, and just happen to be the same sex, have anything to do with your marriage? They're not going to be involved in a straight marriage anyway. They're going to live with their partners anyway. They're going to live their lives as gay people. Nothing is going to change that, no matter how icky it makes you feel. Why do these two people getting married threaten you?

What are you so frightened of? Aren't there more important things to worry about?

The main character in Philip Roth's novel The Dying Animal is David Kepesh, a literature professor who's in his 70's. Kepesh quotes Tolstoy in saying "the biggest surprise in a man's life is old age", as he tries to stave off this old age by seducing the young Consuela. For the most part, it works for David. Yet his poet friend George feels that David has gone too far in that he fell in love with Consuela: "You sentimentalized the aesthetic experience with this girl—you personalized it, you sentimentalized it, and you lost the sense of separation essential to your enjoyment". George, of course, is off-base in that he doesn't seem to understand that it wasn't the aesthetic part that revitalized David, it was the fact that he was in love with Consuela. At least that's how I read it.

David and Consuela end their relationship and eight years pass without him seeing her, yet he constantly thinks about her. She's always on his mind, to the point of obsession. He idealizes her from his memory, not knowing what has become of her. When she re-enters his life, it's naturally under different circumstances and not the memory he had of her when they last met. Books upon books have been written about men lamenting that they're no longer young, and think that seducing a younger woman will somehow bring about the fountain of youth...and it can happen, but the new youth they experience is only temporary. They're trying to recapture a memory they had, but they can't quite grasp it. Youth eludes them and they gaze upon the experience like ghosts jealously observing the living. Fading memories that get further and further away.

I have a memory of a girl, Wendy Young. She's the girl of my dreams, the girl of my thoughts. She was the girl that I wanted back in high-school, yet never got. I was dating someone else at the time, Mary, yet always wanted Wendy. I'm not sure if Mary ever knew of this love triangle playing out in my mind, but if she did she never let on about it. Come to find out, Mary's thoughts were on someone else too. She and I had a long distance love affair in that I lived about 90 minutes away...I know it was 90 minutes because I could play Pink Floyd's "The Wall" to it's entirety on the drive down to see her. But Mary had another suitor that lived close by and they eventually started going out after she broke up with me. Hey, it was meant to be with them because the last I heard, they were married and had four kids. While I was upset at the time, it was mainly because I was the one that was dumped. Ultimately it didn't matter much to me because I was in love with Wendy.

Wendy never went out with me. We never kissed. Never held hands. We did hug twice and the last time I actually saw her, she hugged me goodbye. This was in the fall of 1981, she was 16ish and I was 19. While she never went out with me, we used to talk on the phone for hours...which is how I fell totally in love with her. She was smart, beautiful, into the same things I was...but she was also smart enough to know that she shouldn't hook up with me. I can understand that of course, I was a bit needy and pushy. She looked at me as a friend and I appreciate that, but I wanted more. Wendy was the girl I couldn't have.

I lost all contact with her when I joined the Air Force in 1982. I don't know where she is. Don't know if she got married or had kids. I look at this because I'm 47, which would put her around 44, old enough to have kids in college by now. I have no desire to find out how she's doing though. No desire to see what her life became. No desire to even see her picture now. Why? Because she'll always be that 16 year old girl I saw back in 81. That lithe 16 year old body I hugged goodbye with my nose breathing in that gorgeous brown hair of hers. I'll admit, not a week goes by when I don't think about her, and I'll probably go to my grave thinking of 16 year old Wendy Young. I think if I reconnected with her even to just say hello, it would destroy my perfect memory of her. Part of who I am today owes, in no small part, a thanks to that memory. I love my wife of 17 years with all my heart and I wouldn't change a thing with my life now. Yet I also wouldn't want to change my memory of Wendy.

Today is Memorial Day. It's the day we all commemorate the men and women that have died while in military service. It's the day we all thank these men and women for giving their lives.

For the people that desecrate the flag, you have these men and women to thank that you're allowed to do that. For the people that protest against the government, you have these men and women to thank. For the people that don't stand when the national anthem plays or don't stand and hold their hands over their hearts when they see the color guard come by in a parade...you should thank these men and women. For the people that bad-mouth their leaders, openly call them stupid or ignorant or asses...thank these people that gave their lives.

They all gave their lives so you can speak your mind. You can openly hate your country. You can publish books or letters or scream it from the roof-tops proclaiming your dissatisfaction, without being arrested or harassed by your government. Others of course are free to yell and scream and complain about people that hate their country. Others still are free to ignore both sides and go do their own thing.

There's an old saying that some American's say: "I may not agree with what you say, but I'll fight to the death to defend your right to say it". Today we give thanks to those men and women that did give their lives.

I've been on the Internet for a long time now, relatively speaking that is. I've been connected for 20 years, and when I was accessing the net back in 1989 it was through a dial-up account and the "net" mainly consisted of Usnet newsgroups, email, IRC (Internet Relay Chat), Gopher and a few other things. You accessed everything, with the exception of Gopher through a telnet connection, which meant no great user interface or things like that...it was all command prompt. The World Wide Web and Mosaic hadn't hit the world yet and most of what I did was post on newsgroups and got involved in a few email groups.

When the Web and Mosaic came along, I looked at it as a fad. Honestly, I didn't think it would really do anything and that it wouldn't be embraced by many people. I of course was about as wrong as one could be. For many the Web is the Internet now and to a large extent they're right. As anyone reading this right now can tell you it's really changed the face of the Internet to the point that people don't even remember a time without it. They don't think about using it, it just "is".

The reason I bring all of this up is that I'm showing that I'm not a visionary. I didn't get the Web back when it first came out but I quickly adapted as more and more sites came online. Which brings me to all the social websites out there now...mainly Myspace, Facebook and Twitter. You can hardly watch a newscast, read a newspaper or online news source without some mention of Facebook or Twitter now. Whoever is marketing these services has really saturated the media with more and more mention. Facebook I've used and it has gotten me in touch with old friends I haven't heard from since high school. So far for me, it's mainly been a "hi, long time no see...how you been?" type of thing, but not really reconnecting with my old friends. I mean, it's been almost 30 years since I've seen these people and we've all lived different lives and just fell out of touch. We're not the same people naturally, so we've gone from close friends to almost complete strangers. Hey, it happens.

Some people live by Facebook it seems though, they spend hours and hours socializing. Hey, that's great and I get it. Facebook is a kind of cool in that regard. What I can't understand at all is Twitter. I still don't get it. Why on earth would I care what someone...anyone...is doing at any given moment in their day? I mean, it's so mundain. I know people wouldn't give a damn what I'm doing during the day. Hell, I doubt anyone gives a damn about this opinion blog. But at least it's a form that I can articulate....however hamfisted...my thoughts better than the limited text space that Twitter gives you.

I followed a few people on Twitter, such as Chicago radio personality Steve Dahl's Twitter page. Okay, the man has a full web page where he writes a full collum that's perfectly fleshed out and gives his thoughts on whatever he's talking about. Anyone that's listened to Steve knows that he's not one for brevity. But his Twitter page is just....and I never thought I'd say this about the man....boring. For instance, his "tweet" for the moment I write this: "Have a meeting at my corporate HQ in Lincolnshire. At Walker Bros. Getting bacon waffle :)". Seriously, do we really care about his waffle? Take into contrast that with his blog posting about going to the dentist and the winner of American Idol. Much more interesting than him getting a waffle...though that does sound kind of yummy.

I don't get it. I just don't get Twitter. Have I finally gotten old?