mimblr.com

Rock beats pulse through the music studio as Josh Deuyour, 12, takes center stage.
He’s been practicing the guitar for less than two months, but his fingers dance from fret to fret like an expert. He bobs his head, his mop of hair swaying with his body. He looks like a real rock star — except for one important point: He’s not playing the guitar. He’s playing “Guitar Hero.”
The video game has become so popular it’s attracting a new generation to guitar lessons and the classic rock music of their parents, music tutors say.
At this studio, the owner has set up the game in a common area. His students are playing between their real lessons, which seldom sound as polished. Although some guitar instructors resent the game as a distraction from actual practice — and no one claims that playing “Guitar Hero” compares to the real thing — others are encouraged by the interest it’s generating.
Josh says the game is the reason he decided to take guitar lessons.
“It was fun and interesting. I thought: ‘This is something I could do,’ ” he says.
Same goes for Dalton McLaughlin, 12, who waits for his turn to play.
“Some of the songs sounded really, really awesome, so I’m like, ‘Why can’t I learn this on a real guitar?’ ” Dalton says.
For the uninitiated, “Guitar Hero” and similar games such as “Rock Band” are equipped with guitar-shaped controllers that have five color-coded fret buttons. Players press the corresponding buttons as colored “notes” stream across the TV screen in time to the music.
Skilled players earn bonus points and applause from onlookers. Poor ones are booed off the stage.
North American sales of “Guitar Hero” topped $1 billion in the previous 26 months, video game publisher Activision reported in January. The game first came out in 2005.

modbee.com

The Preakness Stakes is finally upon us and Maryland students couldn’t be more eager to get fucked up in celebration (it’s not a real party without Scott Van Pelt). Since I know incredibly little about horse racing, I’ve turned to Randy, a lover of both equines and Deadspin. His words are after the jump.
The 133rd running of the Preakness Stakes, located in the armpit suburbia of Baltimore might as well be called the Big Brown show. He arrived Wednesday with a UPS brigade in tow, sans men in village people outfits with electronic pens. He is putting his undefeated record, as well as the hopes of the racing community, on the line, in hopes of bringing some much needed excitement to the sport in wake of the Eight Belles tragedy.
There is scheduled to be a roundtable panel on NBC prior to the race to discuss the current state of affairs and various problems of the industry. Buzz was too busy with a raging hard-on to be invited, while Leitch was busy taking pictures of jockeys doing beer bongs in the paddock.
The only real storyline for Saturday will be to make sure the run for the Triple Crown remains in tact for the Belmont in 3 weeks. Big Browns performance in the Derby, breaking from post 20, finding multiple gears throughout the race, ending with the final backstretch, was nothing short of sensational. While many, including his trainer, expect a bounce (horsey speak for a horse not performing as well as he did in his prior race), that should still be plenty for this field. 3 time Derby winner Bob Baffert has always claimed that the winner of the Derby should win the Preakness, due to the short 2 week layoff, and the fact the horse had already beaten the top 3 year olds in the world. The fact that his trainer, Richard Dutrow Jr, and his jockey, Kent Desoormeaux, both deeply rooted in Maryland horse racing, only adds to the back story of this horse making his quest at history here in Pimlico.

deadspin.com

DURHAM, N.C. — Walking into his “Race and Politics” class recently, David Sparks, a white Duke University political-science graduate student, considered whether to move from his usual seat in the group of white students who always clustered at one end of the seminar table to sit with the black students who typically sat at the other end.
After classes and the occasional rally, many black and white students go their separate ways. Was there more interaction among blacks and whites when you went college? Can the rise of Obama lead to changes in the way blacks and whites relate? Join a discussion.
Mr. Sparks didn’t do it. “It would have felt too conspicuous,” he says. Still, on Tuesday’s primary here, Mr. Sparks plans to vote for Sen. Barack Obama for president. That’s an easier choice, he says.
“When you’re actually trying to change your behavior, you are putting more on the line compared to voting in the privacy of the booth,” he says. “There are millions and millions of people voting for Obama. In no way are you sticking your neck out.”
Across the country, college campuses have become hotbeds of support for Sen. Obama. Nationally, 70% of Democrats ages 18 to 24 favor Sen. Obama compared with 30% for Hillary Clinton, according to a recent poll by Harvard’s Institute of Politics. Many black and many white students wear their Obama buttons and “Got Hope?” T-shirts proudly as a sign that they are part of a post-Civil-Rights generation more welcoming of change and diversity than their parents.
But after classes — and after the occasional Obama rally — most black and white students on college campuses go their separate ways, living in separate dormitories, joining separate fraternities and sororities and attending separate parties.
“It’s much harder to be a white person and go to an all black party at Duke than vote for Obama, says Jessie Weingartner, a Duke junior. “On a personal level it is harder to break those barriers down.”

online.wsj.com

Site Announcements: Toon Zone’s Links section is back up and running. If you own and run a site that’s directly related to the art, industry or fandom of animation, feel free to submit it for consideration. Updates on the status of the Links section may be found in this thread. Questions and feedback are welcome there as well.
Warner Bros. seems to be discovering just how hard it is to censor its past embarrassments in the age of file sharing and video hosting, The New York Times reports.
The paper notes a recent spate of appearances, disappearances, and reappearances of the infamous “Censored 11″ Looney Tunes/Merrie Melodies shorts on YouTube. These cartoons, which have not circulated in officially licensed channels since the late 1960s, have been quietly suppressed by the studio out of concern about their content. The shorts feature caricatures and story elements universally regarded as racist by today’s standards.
That has not daunted cartoon fans and historians, though, who praise such shorts as “Coal Black and de Sebben Dwarfs” for the talent and artistry they display. The shorts are widely available on DVD in bootleg form.
Until earlier this month many of them could also be found on YouTube, until they were removed, apparently, for copyright violation. The Times notes that neither YouTube nor Warner Bros. would confirm that they had tried to remove the shorts, and the paper notes that several of them have since reappeared on the video-hosting site.

news.toonzone.net

The same issue is back before the council for a do-over Monday after the state’s City Development Board rejected the previous annexation plan.
While two new councilmen are on board — Steve Schmitt and Quentin Hart — supporters of the proposed 750-megawatt Elk Run Energy Station are confident city leaders will once again approve the development.
A support group known as Progress Cedar Valley is emphasizing the city’s role in considering zoning and annexation issues related to the plant, leaving public health and emissions regulation up to experts at the Iowa Department of Natural Resources.
Opponents believe local and national attention focused on coal-burning power plants over the past year, including potential health risks and global warming, will lead elected officials to reach a different conclusion.
“It seems like there are just that many more people involved in the process, and I think the council members have been paying more attention,” said Don Shatzer with Community Energy Solutions, a group of residents that formed to oppose the project.
“We delivered 4,000 signatures to the council last year and there’s more and more people every time,” he added. “We are really looking for a positive experience Monday night.”
City officials, expecting another overflow crowd for the hearing, moved all other business on the regular council agenda up to 4 p.m. Plans call for the meeting to adjourn; council chambers will be cleared; and residents will be allowed to re-enter the room for the power plant hearing. That session will begin at 5:30 p.m.
Speakers will be given three minutes each to express their thoughts. Council members have already received stacks of written comments and e-mails on the subject.
Elk Run Energy Associates, an affiliate of LS Power, which is based in New Jersey, has asked the city to annex 348 acres along Newell Road. The property is east of the John Deere Donald Street operations and Tyson Fresh Meats. The request is to rezone about 260 acres for the $1.5 billion power plant, which would sell electricity wholesale to local and regional electric utilities, municipalities and cooperatives.

tradingmarkets.com

Frankie Howerd used to talk about Robin Day and his cruel glasses. The glint of Peter Taylor’s specs have lately become of interest to his directors, who tend to zoom in on them and his furrowed forehead as he ponders his past. Although he has worn them for as far back as I can remember, they are there, I would guess, to suggest age and wisdom. As a “green young reporter” in the 1960s, he told us last night on Age of Terror (BBC Two), he had hardly heard the word terrorism. Yet terrorism, particularly Irish terrorism, would become his specialist subject.
The first of this four-part series was a completely gripping and completely balanced account of the hijacking in 1976 of an Air France liner en route from Tel Aviv to Paris. The aircraft ended up in Entebbe airport in Uganda, leaving its Jewish passengers at the mercy of the four hijackers - two of them from the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine and two Germans from something called Revolutionary Cells - and, God help them, Idi Amin.
After some government-level vacillation, the Israeli Defence Forces launched a night raid that saved 100 hostages. Partly the success was due to their hitting upon an inspired solution to the problem of transporting soldiers quietly from the airport to the terminal. They ordered a black Mercedes of the type Amin himself travelled in, to which the typical Ugandan response was a salute. When Mossad instead delivered a white one, they thought laterally, and painted it.
Most of us know the story roughly, if only through movies such as Raid on Entebbe, but many details have faded. That made for suspense as the story unfolded mainly in the words of the hostages but aided by news footage and some discreet re-enactments. I did not remember that the one Israel soldier killed was the leader of the assault, Yoni Netanyahu, a man with such iron nerves that he slept all through the flight over even as his comrades puked out of nerves and air turbulence. His older brother, Binyamin, went on to become Israeli Prime Minister in the 1990s. Nor did I recall the disgusting detail that after the operation, Amin ordered the murder of Nora Bloch, a 75-year-old taken from the plane with a choking fit in order to recover in hospital.

entertainment.timesonline.co.uk

Though she was a native of Detroit, Michigan, Vaughn had worked in Africa for most of her life and considered it home. So she and her husband returned there to raise their new brood and "watch the coconut trees grow."
"But the universe had other things in mind for me," says Vaughn.
She couldn’t have imagined those plans would include both further tragedy and the motivation to provide educational opportunities to hundreds of failing schoolchildren.
Soon after their move to rural Kaolack, Senegal, in 2000, Vaughn’s husband — jazz musician Sam Sanders — died of black lung. Amid her grief, she found comfort in her grandchildren, ages 4 to 12, and filled her days home-schooling them. Her success soon garnered attention from the locals.
"There was a little girl that my granddaughter played with. This little girl kept coming around and wanting to be taught with my grandchildren," recalls Vaughn.
"I went to see this child’s mother, and her mother said she had already failed school once, that she couldn’t pass because she wasn’t smart enough. Well she was smart enough to come find me. And I said, ‘OK, I’ll help you.’ "
Within two weeks, Vaughn had 20 girls in her house who were failing school and asking her to teach them.
Vaughn learned that the regional pass rate for girls was low because it was rooted in the economic need of young girls to work at home. They begin missing classes, then failing exams, often ultimately failing or dropping out of school.
"I found every one a girl younger than she and said, ‘You’re responsible to make sure she learns.’ I taught them how to teach each other."
It worked. In two years, the group of girls had grown to 80 — and they were succeeding in school. With a grant, Vaughn was able to hire teachers, and the program continued to expand despite her attempt to set a limit of 100 girls.

edition.cnn.com

No one was seriously hurt but several police departments were on the scene for several hours. CBS 21’s Liz Collin explains what happened.
It all started just after 12:30 Sunday a teenager says he was shot in the foot outside the Great Escape entrance at the mall. Then he ran through the mall leaving a trail of blood behind.
Jason Pooler pulled up to run some errands with his family, he knows work’s going on at the mall for months.
"The first thing you think is what’s that noise. The second thing maybe I shouldn’t be here. I looked at my wife and i said there’s no construction that had to be gunshots."
Several shots fired outside, police say the group of young guys responsible fled the scene in a black Dodge Magnum - that’s why the mall stayed open: police decided shoppers were safe.
Mark Nobile, Harrisburg Mall General Manager:
"It’s just unsettling whenever you hear you hear it you don’t think of other incidents you think of your own and that’s what we were thinking of."
Nearly an hour after the victim went to the hospital with no signs of the shooter police cuff two guys driving a black Charger in the parking lot after spotting guns on both of them.
Swatare Township Police Chief David Bogdanovic:
"It was discovered they had a license to carry. They were released and sent on their way. He just happened to be at the wrong place at the wrong time."
Police say people were safe the entire time and that the incident was over before it even started, but as always they say shoppers should pay attention.
The mall just installed 47 new security cameras. Police are currently reviewing that footage. The Harrisburg Mall also has a phone system that called each store in the mall to tell workers what was going on.
Police are still looking for that black Dodge Magnum. They are hoping to get more information on the suspects from the victim. The victim has already told police he doesn’t know the group who shot him.
Copyright 2008 Clear Channel Broadcasting. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
To Email is Required. A valid email address is required.
Your Email is Required. A valid email address is required.

read_more

Like his previous feature The Science of Sleep, Michel Gondry’s gently outlandish Be Kind Rewind is a fantasy about fantasy—a fragile, somewhat precious celebration of DIY filmmaking and cult-film consumption that, given its gaps in logic, spectators are more or less obliged to mentally assemble on their own. The setting is a counterfactual universe in which VHS tapes remain rentable commodities, and Passaic, New Jersey, is the former world capital of jazz—mainly because someone claims it as the birthplace of the movie’s presiding deity, stride pianist Fats Waller. Although shot on location, Gondry’s Passaic is a sister city to Chelm, or one of the other towns found in Yiddish folklore that is populated by cheerfully self-absorbed fools. The two principle village idiots, Jerry (Jack Black) and Mike (Mos Def), are introduced painting a Fats Waller mural beneath a highway underpass—an example of vernacular surrealism in which an eye is mistakenly substituted for a nostril.
Mike is a clerk in the rundown Be Kind Rewind video store located, according to its crusty proprietor Mr. Fletcher (Danny Glover), in the ground floor of the very building where Waller was born. Jerry, an auto mechanic, is Mike’s childhood buddy and the store’s most annoying customer—his natural idiocy exacerbated by his trailer’s proximity to the local power plant. Hence the protective strainer he wears on his head. While Mos Def is effectively (and affectingly) dim, Black is iconic. He’s a fully developed comic presence—quick-witted yet stupid, charmingly obnoxious, expansively sarcastic.
“Microwaves” are not the only menace. The good folks of Passaic, which is to say the simpletons who patronize Be Kind Rewind, are menaced by the encroaching gentrification—or at least urban renewal—poised to level the video store. All that history turned to dust. Before the bulldozers arrive, however, Jerry’s paranoid attempt to sabotage the power plant backfires. Dressed in tinfoil and lurching like Frankenstein’s monster, he returns as a human magnetic force field who both distorts the movie’s image and provides its situation when he inadvertently erases all the VHS tapes in the store.
Jerry has the ability to create minimalist video art simply by touching a TV screen, but, to make up for the lost inventory, he and Mike begin producing new 15-minute videocorder versions of ’80s and ’90s movies—beginning with Ghostbusters. (”I’m Bill Murray—you’re everybody else.”) The hilariously impoverished special effects are predicated on scribbled pictures, giant cutouts, and pragmatic camera placement. Reducing movies to their most infantile level, they’re like kids at play. Jerry’s assistant Watson (rumple-faced Irv Gooch) assumes the female parts until the filmmakers draft Alma (Melonie Diaz), a bored employee at the dry cleaner next-door.
Subsequent productions include RoboCop, The Lion King, When We Were Kings, and Driving Miss Daisy (with Jerry an aggressive Jessica Tandy to Mike’s sullen Morgan Freeman), but not Back to the Future—the movie that Be Kind most resembles in its tricky premise, double-edged sentimentality, and convoluted nostalgia. Hardly industry calling cards, these ridiculously low-tech little movies—which Jerry and Mike refer to as “sweded”—are exercises in junkyard whimsy. The customers are thrilled (this is Chelm, after all), and anyone with a feel for film form will be delighted. The sweded productions are pure underground, somewhere between the 8mm epics the teenaged Kuchar Brothers made a half-century ago in the Bronx and the ritual developed by the Peruvian Indians in Dennis Hopper’s Last Movie.
Given the inspired cheesiness, obsessive object animation, and wild creative geography that enlivened The Science of Sleep, it’s obvious Gondry conceived Be Kind mainly as a means to orchestrate these grotesque fan remakes. It’s also unavoidable that their brio would overshadow everything else. For all of Black’s physical comedy, and despite Gondry’s attempt to texture Be Kind with throwaway sight gags and a Preston Sturges–like density of comic secondaries—most disturbingly Mia Farrow, genuinely nutty as the store’s most loyal customer, Miss Falewicz—the mini-movies inevitably drain energy from the straight narrative.
Is this comic bricolage a form of criticism? Gondry privileges audience devotion over corporate profit and argues that studio movies have grown ever more depleted since the ’80s and ’90s. (Having studied a successful DVD store, Mr. Fletcher realizes that there need be only two sections: Action Adventure and Comedy.) Villainy arrives in the form of an intellectual-property lawyer (Sigourney Weaver, herself a ghost of Ghostbusters), who shows up to enforce the piracy statutes and levy a $3 billion fine. The loss of the sweded tapes forces the community to produce an original movie—Fats Waller Was Born “Here.” (Mike and Jerry both assume themselves physically appropriate to play the lead; everything grinds to a halt when Jerry shows up in blackface.) Structurally, Be Kind Rewind is a sort of warped Möbius strip—only at the end does it become apparent that we’ve been watching bits of the Fats docudrama all along.
Although frequently funny, Be Kind doesn’t have the same pathos as The Science of Sleep. (Nothing approaches the loneliness projected by Gael García Bernal and Charlotte Gainsbourg.) As suggested by the recurring ensemble scenes that dramatize the filmmakers—Jerry, Mike, and Alma—trying to think, Be Kind is essentially cerebral. Their sweded films are serious examples of the grassroots “imperfect cinema” imagined by Cuban cultural theorist Julio García Espinosa back in the days of ‘68. And Be Kind’s utopian project is made explicit in several ringing declarations. Alma wants to involve the townspeople in the production, making them “stockholders in their own happiness.” Miss Falewicz is even more radical: “Our past belongs to us—we can change it if we want to.”
That’s easier said than done. Gondry’s fable ends with all Passaic united in shared wonder, transfixed by the spectacle of their collectively produced movie (or, more clinically, the realization of their shared fantasy). Such sentimentality might sound egregiously Spielbergistic, but Gondry strikes another chord: This illusion is an illusion. The studio that Jerry built is about to be demolished, and the music dubbed over the shot is Duke Ellington’s plaintive “(In My) Solitude.”

villagevoice.com