“Morgues and crematoria are overcrowded.”

There is no official data on the number of smog-related illnesses and deaths but a Moscow registry service official told AFP late last week the mortality rate in Moscow soared by 50 percent in July compared to the same period last year.

A doctor with a Moscow ambulance crew told Russia’s top opposition daily Novaya Gazeta on condition of anonymity that the number of ambulance calls and deaths had gone up in recent days.

“We have been strictly forbidden to hospitalize people barring the most extreme cases,” he said, complaining of hazardous working conditions.

“There are no air conditioners in vehicles and those that are simply do not work. Temperatures inside reach 50 degrees…Sometimes our doctors faint.”

A surgeon at a major hospital described a similar picture, saying the smog and heat were taking its toll on both patients and medical staff.

“Air conditioners work only on the floor of the administration, temperatures reach 30 degrees in the operating room,” he told Kommersant on conditions of anonymity. “It’s hard to work in these conditions.”

An ice island four times the size of Manhattan broke off from one of Greenland’s two main glaciers, scientists said on Friday, in the biggest such event in the Arctic in nearly 50 years.

The new ice island, which broke off on Thursday, will enter a remote place called the Nares Strait, about 620 miles south of the North Pole between Greenland and Canada.

The ice island has an area of 100 square miles (260 square km) and a thickness up to half the height of the Empire State Building, said Andreas Muenchow, professor of ocean science and engineering at the University of Delaware.

The Nares Strait (had to check that definite article, as Reuters uses it but Wikipedia omits it) looks like a place I’d like to visit. And Hans Island, situated in (the) Nares Strait, is subject to a territorial dispute: Denmark and Canada, head to head (what a war that would be).

Wonder where the new island will go.

(via GamesRadar)

(via clusteflock)

Tokusatsu (特撮) is a Japanese term that applies to any live-action film or television drama that usually features superheroes and makes considerable use of special effects (tokusatsu literally translates as “special filming” in Japanese).

Tokusatsu entertainment often deals with science fiction, fantasy or horror, but movies and television shows in other genres can sometimes count as tokusatsu as well. The most popular types of tokusatsu include kaiju monster movies (the Godzilla and Gamera film series), superhero TV serials (the Kamen Rider and Metal Hero Series), and mecha dramas (Giant Robo). Some tokusatsu television programs combine several of these subgenres (the Ultraman and Super Sentai series). Tokusatsu is one of the most popular forms of Japanese entertainment, but most tokusatsu movies and television programs are not widely known outside Asia.

I like how it means “special filming”: perversely cogent or bewilderingly broad? I’m not sure. This poster from the Wikipedia page, illustrative of the form, is definitely special:

A poster for Godzilla (1954).

Anyway, lets take a little bit of that, throw in some steampunk tropes, and then ask Zack Snyder to wave his magic wand of light and noise. And what do we get? Well, we get Sucker Punch, obviously. Is this what the collision of Western and Japanese pulp cinema looks like? Is Zack Snyder best understood as a cross between Roland Emmerich and Quentin Tarantino? Again, I’m not sure. There is a trailer here and it is lovely, but clearly it is only a trailer: the film might not be nearly that cool. But I really don’t care: just a small dose of the cool seeping through that trailer would be nice. (It also strikes me that Sucker Punch could be viewed as the anti–Inception, as both films seem to touch similar bases, albeit with very different methodologies; put another way, Sucker Punch might turn out to be to Inception what The Evil Dead was to The Shining.)

Here are some (okay, 30 — I couldn’t stop) screenshots from that trailer:

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And the trailer is only about a minute and a half long. The man is clearly a little mad. But he’s a madman with a lots of money (upwards of $85 million for Sucker Punch) to spend on “special filming”, which frankly is awesome (and a little frightening).

Journalism is just a gun. It’s only got one bullet in it, but if you aim right, that’s all you need. Aim it right, and you can blow a kneecap off the world.

Will what has happened change journalism? Maybe. Many interesting thoughts over at PressThink, here.

The soundtrack to this whole thing, for me, has been a little interesting, or odd, depending, I suppose, on how you look at it: snatches of Arcade Fire, a chunk of Bowie’s Heathen, a Gil Scott-Heron track, something that might have been Chrissie Hynde, Stars, and part of Bitches Brew.

This (found here alone is enough to raise serious questions about how the war is being fought:

Americans fighting the war in Afghanistan have long harbored strong suspicions that Pakistan’s military spy service has guided the Afghan insurgency with a hidden hand, even as Pakistan receives more than $1 billion a year from Washington for its help combating the militants, according to a trove of secret military field reports made public Sunday.

The documents, made available by an organization called WikiLeaks, suggest that Pakistan, an ostensible ally of the United States, allows representatives of its spy service to meet directly with the Taliban in secret strategy sessions to organize networks of militant groups that fight against American soldiers in Afghanistan, and even hatch plots to assassinate Afghan leaders.

It’s one hell of a trail of paper. And we can thank these people for organising it all into such a convenient electronic format.

Now, I need to read some more of this stuff.

This is surely one of the most ambitious lists currently on Wikipedia. Personally, I’d be more interested in seeing a list of all the films that begin with a montage of “real life” footage before segueing into the fictional world of the film. I watched Dark Blue earlier this week, and in that, the director, Ron Shelton, used the footage of Rodney King being assaulted\beaten\subdued by the Los Angeles Police Department to open his thriller about corruption in the LAPD. There must be hundreds more (I’m fairly sure JFK opens with “real” footage, and of course Stone weaves a great deal of archive material into the body of the film).

Another interesting list would be a list of novels directly inspired by actual historical events. I was thinking about this while listening to an audiobook of James Ellroy’s American Tabloid because I found myself trying to figure out who was fictional and who wasn’t. There are thousands of historical novels, of course, but I’m thinking specifically of novels that build themselves around recognisable “events” or “points” in history (The Cold Six Thousand, the sequel to American Tabloid, opens just after news breaks that John F. Kennedy has been assassinated). I can’t find a list that does what I want, though, and I’m not in the frame of mind to make one. But books and films that use historical events (or narratives) as texture, or as structuring elements, are on my mind.

Over the last few weeks I’ve mean mulling a little excessively on the question of verismilitude and art, and I need to mull some more, form up some thoughts.

I have mulled some more, but not enough. Will return to this in the future.

‘No Sound But the Wind’ is a track by Editors that I discovered by accident: I was looking for information about the composers who had scored Twilight, New Moon, and Eclipse (Howard Shore, an amazing composer, produced one) and happened to see that Editors featured on the soundtrack to New Moon. I read somewhere that the track was originally written for the film adaptation of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, but was dropped and was changed a bit so it could be used in New Moon. I’ve not seen that film, so I’ve no idea where it features, or if it adds anything to the experience. However, as a track in its own right, it has had me on a short leash, has truly captivated me, which frustrates me, a bit, as there isn’t much substance to it at all. After listening to it (and I’ve been listening to it a lot) I feel a bit used.

I managed to pull myself away from the track, but after reading this want to go back to it and listen again. Maybe a bad idea. But we’ve got to have guilty pleasures.

Arcade Fire: Old vs New

‘Neighborhood #1′ vs ‘Black Mirror — I think this one has to go to Funeral, as no matter how intriguing ‘Black Mirror’ is at times, ‘Neighborhood #1′ will always win over, for me, as it has so many mental associations, particularly from around the time I was staying in Moscow. But, the more I listen to Neon Bible (and I’m listening to ‘Black Mirror’ right now, in fact), the more I feel that the new album is a very interesting progression. But this one, for now, is going to go to Funeral.

‘Neighborhood #2′ vs ‘Keep The Car Running’ — This one is a bit trickier, as I like both the tracks, but don’t really love either. I guess I’m going to go with ‘Funeral’ again, because it seems a little less cluttered: ‘Keep the Car Running’ seems, at moments, to lack clarity. However, I might change my mind later.

‘Une Année Sans Lumiere’ vs ‘Neon Bible’ — I think the newer of the two tracks is the clear winner, here. Yes, the lyrics in the older track are great (“…eyes are shooting sparks…”), but ‘Neon Bible’ is excellent both lyrically and musically (the segment from around 1:15 to 1:36 is lovely), so the winner by a mile seems here to be Neon Bible. But, wait, two minutes and forty-six seconds into ‘Une Année Sans Lumiere’, something amazing happens. And it keeps on happening for almost a minute. So, I’m not sure. But I’ll be firm: this time, Neon Bible wins. Close, though — very close.

‘Neighborhood #3′ vs ‘Intervention’ — Much as I love the older of the two, not least because of that storming opening, I think ‘Intervention’ was the first track on the new album that made me sit up and really listen. I’m practically listening to it on repeat right now, and the layering is magnificent. So, yes — the winner here is definitely Neon Bible.

‘Neighborhood #4′ vs ‘Black Wave, Bad Vibrations’ — I don’t actually like the old track, the fourth Neighborhood, all that much. But I really like the vocals and the arrangements in ‘Black Wave, Bad Vibrations’. It is funny: taking them one by one, Neon Bible is doing pretty well. But having said that, I think Funeral is hanging together better as an album, for me, right now.

‘Crown of Love’ vs ‘Ocean of Noise’ — Well, ‘Crown of Love’ is a masterpiece, and I need to keep reminding myself of that, as I sometimes forget. But ‘Ocean of Noise’ is cool, too. Here, though, Funeral gets it, even though “an ocean of violence, between me and you” is a fantastic lyric.

‘Wake Up’ vs ‘The Well and the Lighthouse’ — I don’t actually like ‘Wake Up’ all that much, and ‘The Well and the Lighthouse’ has a spectacular opening, so this is an easy one: Neon Bible gets the prize.

‘Haiti’ vs ‘(Antichrist Television Blues) — ‘Haiti’ has this slightly dreamy, upbeat quality, which I really like; but the newer of the two tracks as a punchiness and passion, particularly in the lyrics, that really works for me. Another, then, to the newer of the two albums.

‘Rebellion’ vs ‘Windowsill’ — O, this one is tricky. ‘Rebellion’ is epic and very powerful, but I may actually have tired listening to it now, after over a year with the album in my life. But ‘Windowsill’ (if that is the correct title) needs to be with me a little longer before I can really be sure it is better than ‘Rebellion’. Actually, the segment from 2:02 to around 3:30 may just have swayed me, as something about that portion really does walk all over the now over-familiar ‘Rebellion’. But if you take 3:00 to on ‘Rebellion’, you get something very, very special, too. Particularly that little hand-clap at around 3:20. Problem, right now, is that the track feels too long. No, okay, if I allow for the fact that I’ve listened to it too much, I have to give it to ‘Rebellion’, right now.

‘In the Backseat’ vs ‘No Cars Go’ — I have to be in exactly the right mood to enjoy ‘In the Backseat’, which is a bit of a problem, right now, as I don’t think I’m in the right mood. ‘No Cars Go’ is wonderful. So, Neon Bible, again.

The last track on Neon Bible, ‘My Body Is a Cage’, really doesn’t work for me, though, so it is lucky it doesn’t have to go against anything on ‘Funeral’, as it would almost certainly lose. And it is an awful reprise of those organs from the wondrous ‘Intervention’.

As a side note, the cover of ‘Maps’ performed by The Arcade Fire on Radio 1’s Live Lounge might just beat everything on both of those albums. And the same is probably also true for the live version (also from Live Lounge) of ‘Rebellion’ — simply extraordinarily beautiful, particularly that piano playing.

I’m not sure who wins overall.

I’d completely forgotten about their cover of ‘Maps’. Need to dig that out. And digging out anything by Arcade Fire is always worthwhile.

Arcade Fire, live. (Source)

[…] In what law enforcements officials portrayed as an extraordinary takedown of a Russian espionage network, the Justice Department on Monday announced charges against 11 people accused of living for years in the United States as part of a deep-cover program by S.V.R. — one of the successors to the Soviet-era K.G.B.

[…]

According the the charges, the agents would communicate back to Moscow using such techniques as steganography — including secret encrypted data in an image that could be posted on a publicly available website but would appear unremarkable to the naked eye; radiograms — coded bursts of data sent by a short-wave radio transmitter; and setting up wireless laptop computer networks in public places.

Amusingly, I had listened to the BBC’s recent radio adaptation of John Le Carre’s The Secret Pilgrim just before reading that article. It’s hard to imagine that the spycraft John le Carré describes so vividly might still be in use today: the facts that contribute to the verismilitude of his fictional worlds have become so tied up with the fictions that contain them, with their narratives, characters, and plot twists, as to seem, in some strange way, inappropriate within “our” world. (Seeing “Moscow Centre” mentioned in the NYT piece produced in me what could be called — and I’m striving for the right word here — a phenomenological jolt.) Picturing them being bundled into cars, perhaps a little like Bill Haydn is bundled into a van at the end of Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, is possible, but somehow makes it all seem less real. I do wonder, though, quite why the Russians are still going to such lengths to spy on Americans; and also, more worryingly, if the Russians are going to such lengths, what might other countries, countries with more pressing reasons to know what is happening in America, be doing in America, or Europe?

UPDATE: There are a couple of articles (one here, one here) on the BBC News that provides more information about the spycraft employed by the suspected Russian agents.

Here are people who should know more than we do, but they don’t. In a lot of ways, you’re already ahead of them if you’ve bought a few packets of Panini stickers for the kids’ album because you know who the players are. It shouldn’t be that way. These people are being paid to be experts, yet they’re sitting back and approaching every game like a pleb. They talk only about the players they’ve heard of — Argentina is Messi and Tevez, for example; South Korea is Ji-Sung Park — from the Premiership or the Champions League, and that’s that. No bothering to look any further. There is no world of football outside of England, or the top teams in Europe — everyone else is just ballast. Just spin out some old flannel about shocking defending and put some whizzy circles around players in the replays at half-time, and that’s job done. It’s crass, ineffective, tedious, lacking in insight, and downright contemptuous of the vast majority of footballers and teams at the World Cup.

I was struck most by “ineffective, tedious, lacking in insight, and downright contemptuous [of the audience]” and it got me thinking about a documentary the BBC had put out about Atlantis (yes, really). When I watched a bit of the documentary, it intrigued me, and I was quite entertained by it (good production values, engaging host, etc.), but I discovered, after a series of short Google searches, that dozens of little details that were stated as “fact” (or not qualified in any way) were either largely discredited theories or incredibly tenuous extrapolations. And yes, of course: it’s television, it’s not a history book; but why shouldn’t it at least try to be a bit more rigorous? Telling us something is a theory (albeit a largely discredited one) doesn’t diminish its value as an interesting anecdote (I’m thinking of the small segment about “evidence” of human sacrifice at a Minoan site); but it does, perhaps, make everything less black and white, and the “plebs” who watch television need things to be simple. Or so the argument goes. But it’s not really an argument, just an excuse for lazy programmme-making.

It didn’t used to be like this: Kenneth’s Clarke’s Civilisation and Jacob Bronowski’s The Ascent of Man are two examples of engaging, entertaining programme-making that doesn’t skimp on its research or dumb-down its subject-matter. And there are still good programme’s being made, so mainly I’m just ranting.

Television has always been getting dumber, though, so none of this is especially revelatory. The frustrating thing when it comes to information and research, whether about footballers or Atlantis, is that here and now in 2010 information is incredibly easy to access, anywhere, and at any time. People, well-paid BBC pundits and documentary producers in particular, have iPads and netbooks, 3G and wireless, Google and Twitter. With the power of all that at our disposal, it shouldn’t be difficult to find out some anecdotes about the Serbian football squad, or to see what current thinking is on human sacrifice in Minoan civilisation. And if we really can’t utilise all this technology at our disposal, for simple tasks or for complex problems like fixing a broken oil well, then we’re probably doomed.

Well, there I was thinking I could read an article about Edward Heath, when I get stopped (somewhat slugglishly — lots of javascript seemed to be in play) by an invitation from The Times to sign up and “preview” their “new sites”. But I didn’t — still don’t — want to preview their site “for a limited period”, or learn about what makes them worthwhile, or become a member; I just wanted — still want — to read the article. I have been fenced out. If I was in the UK, I could go to the library and read the piece. And if the article was in today’s edition of the newspaper, I might even be able to buy a copy. But I’m not in the UK, so neither of those options are viable (and both are silly: I learned about the piece online, so I should be able to read it online). If I want to get through the fence, I must pay.

If I were to pay, what then? Would I subsequently pay for eye-catching, highly recommended articles from The New York Times and The Washington Post, The London Review of Books and The New Yorker? If I wanted to read a selection of, say, 6–12 articles (a not unreasonable number) during one 24 hour period, would I need accounts with each and every publication? Or would I “micro” pay, a dollar an article, perhaps? (I’m being deliberately difficult here, but it’s not a stretch.) If I did pay, could I share the link with others, or would they too hit a wall they’d have to pay to get through? It all seems immensely complicated, expensive, and unsatisfying.

The internet allows people to pick and choose from far more sources of content than ever before. This is not news, but it’s worth thinking about what things were like before the internet, RSS feeds, and the myriad delivery systems. We are no longer in a world of just newspapers, radio, and television. You don’t need to choose between The Guardian and The Telegraph: you can have both, in small doses. It’s up to you. You like the Sudoku at The Telegraph? Help yourself. But you think their editorials are a bit, how to say, conservative? No problem: switch tab to The Guardian. Neither of them have good book reviews these days? That’s fine, just head over to The Times Literary Supplement and see what essays they have on offer. This is the internet I know.

I’ve seen my first pay wall (see the image below) and I’m worried: it seems like the internet just got one site smaller; it feels like a step backwards; and what happens next? My students, many of whom frequently find themselves at sites like The Times, will find this sort of stuff limiting. Will they open accounts? Or will they just turn and go somewhere else? Some will try, but most won’t be able to pay, if it comes down to that: no credit cards, no electronic currency. Their curiosity will hopefully lead them to ingenious ways around the problem. But sites asking for money (micro or otherwise) will put off a great many of my students.

Anyway, enough hastily written venting.

“No, you can’t read the article.”

“No, I’m not going to give the logs to someone who suggests that I might have been drug-addled when I decided to turn in a spy,” says Lamo […]

In his chats with Lamo, copies of which were provided to Wired.com by the ex-hacker, Manning described a crisis of conscience that led him to leak a headline-making video of a deadly 2007 U.S. helicopter air strike in Baghdad that claimed the lives of several innocent civilians.

A spy? Perhaps. But to be honest, if I were asked to choose between a spy like Manning and a journalist like Poulsen, I’d take the spook, every time.

More on the wider story here, here, here, here, and here.