… when we were little kids, and we went to ask our parents this seemingly innocuous question:
where did we come from?
and witness their flustered faces as they turned away, and dismissively mumbled something about being picked up from the rubbish dump?
Recently, a little girl asked her daddy the same exact question. And when he again showed the same signs of a flushed face (some things never change), she calmed his nerves by saying:
Don’t worry daddy, I just wanted to know… was I downloaded?
baby-making... not as fun as it was in 1996
So cute, yet the thought of it being remotely possible some time in the future is so, so terrifying.
Among the many tentpole films coming out in 2012, this little film, made on a shoestring budget of US15 million, is punching way above its weight, and in my opinion, delivering quite the fight.
Chronicle tells the tale of 3 teenagers, whose bond is strengthened when they develop powers of telekinesis after literally exploring a hole in the ground.
The 3 teenagers are Andrew, the primary cameraman, who’s abused by his alcoholic father at home, and bullied by his peers at school; his more socially adjusted cousin Matt; and Steve, the athletic all-round nice guy running for school President.
just 3 dudes.. exploring a hole. *wink*
As they explore their new found powers, they try out schoolboy pranks like levitating bears to scare little girls, and move cars from the parking lot to a different space. But as their powers develop, and they find themselves handling much trickier maneuvers with ease, who’s to say its right or wrong to teach a school bully or a tail-gater a thing or two about messing with the wrong people?
As the situations escalate and Andrew becomes more and more unhinged, its up to his friends to try and undo his damage.
What’s interesting about the film, is that it explores the very different outcomes the same power results in 3 people with a very different upbringing. It almost seems as if it were both the origin story of a hero and a villain.
I AM GOOD LOOKING! Anyone disagrees?
The action is mostly captured with Andrew’s camera, but as the action steps up, we also see the action from other camera vantage points such as security cams, police cams and even news crew footage.
While the entire film is based on “found footage”, for those prone to headaches due to the shaky cam nature of such films (think Cloverfield), rest assured that the shakiness is kept to a minimum due to Andrew’s advanced filming “technique”.
With this film, Director Josh Trank has cracked the found footage genre wide open, and provided other filmmaker/writers to work the found footage style onto genres other than horror.
As part of the viral campaign to raise awareness of the film, the marketing team took to the skies, creating 3 remote controlled planes shaped like men, and flew them over NYC and Liberty Island.
Over the past few weeks, I’ve been noticing that the bin in my office toilet has been filling up exceptionally quickly. And I started to think to myself: Exactly how much paper is used up in the world each day on a frivolous task as drying our hands?
After washing our hands, why can’t we just use an air dryer to dry our hands instead? There’s always the jeans option as well. The way we’re plowing through our planet’s resources is just astounding.
And as more and more cities expand and creep into rural and forested areas, these resources are just going to be depleted further and quicker. When the wife and I went to Japan for a holiday, we found toilets with washlets/bidets very common, and that after taking a dump, washing instead of wiping was the norm with the Japanese. Although it definitely felt weird at the time, it was certainly… refreshing to try.
Reading up more though (from cracked.com no less), it seems that the use of toilet paper is really causing a lot of damage to Earth. Using a washlet may be an alien concept to a lot of us, but think about it. When we’re dirty and sweaty, we take a shower. Water is the best cleaning agent, not paper. Otherwise, we’d be wiping ourselves, and not washing ourselves.
If the trend catches on, and the world at large used washlets to cleanse their anuses, and used airdryers to dry their hands after washing them, god knows how much paper and how many trees can be saved.
I would be very very keen to install for at least one toilet in my home, and take one small step towards saving Gaia.
Now, time to go convince the wife.
Fun fact: It takes 384 trees to make the toilet paper that one man uses in his lifetime. We’re hitting 7 billion people this year. Do the math.
MusingsComments Off on Saving the Earth, three-ply at a time
