These 3 movies were terrible, and for multiple high crimes against the viewer, including extreme character inconsistency, they will not be granted the 3 sentences each they would normally receive if they were just bad.

Mike sent over this video comparing the future of biking on 2 of Boston's bigger streets, Mass Ave and Comm Ave. The short documentary makes the point that the streets are going in opposite directions (as it were) in regards to bike safety.



And here, via Dave, is a short story about London city planners using a 3D sidewalk design to try to slow bikers down. I don't think it's going to work more than once.

It's been only a few months since the last time I breathlessly reported on the health of the Arrested Development feature length film. I did a double take when I saw a post on Kottke about an Arrested Development documentary. A movie about the show, but not the movie of the show. Here's the trailer.


The website for the documentary is also kind of a trip.

This seems like a pretty obviously good idea.

Tell me what you think. Is this little dude dancing on stage with Lucero better than Courtney Cox onstage with Bruce Springsteen? Hopefully he becomes famous and this video gets played a zillion times 10 years from now.



Another view here.

Matt pointed me to this post by Joe Posnanski where he gets FIRED UP and spends about 50K words talking about an infomercial.

ZeroPaid has a good write up of the MPAA's Lost PR War against the ‘Enemies of Copyright’. In it is a scathing paragraph detailing discussing most of the ways the MPAA may have gone wrong over the past couple years. I read this and it screamed 'LIST TIME' to me. (To be clear, I took the paragraph and turned it into a list changing very little of the text. Go read the whole thing.) Reading this list just makes me think, 'Hey, MPAA, you're not doing it right!'

1. Destroying Napster and Audio Galaxy and not creating an alternative from the get-go.
2. Raiding people’s homes because they uploaded Star Wars (but not necessarily leaked it).
3. Hacking the URN hash and polluting FastTrack.
4. Hacking The Pirate Bay.
5. Having Viacom serve DMCA notices to people posting videos of people eating in a restaurant on YouTube.
6. Suing tens of thousands of average American’s including fining one individual $222,000 for sharing a couple songs.
7. Saying that having files in a shared directory is copyright infringement in court.
8. Saying that evidence is too hard to get and that the industry shouldn’t be burdened to prove their cases in court.
9. Suggesting that iPods are little more than little pirate ships.
10. Saying in court that even making one back-up copy of a DVD is illegal.
11. Lobbying to put in the DMCA
12. Demanding that laws should be in place to prevent any tinkering with DRM including for research purposes.
13. Installing rootkits on people’s computers.
14. Installing spyware on people’s computers via the MediaMax technology.
15. Being outed for being hypocrites for pirating a documentary movie and claiming that it’ll only be in a safe place.
16. Trying to bring people a broadcast flag and telling people you can’t record TV shows if the broadcaster doesn’t like it.
17. Trying to bi-pass the backfiring of WIPO and the FCC to bring in the broadcast flag anyway.
18. Trying to get ISPs to do all the copyright industry’s dirty work.
19. Pressuring and bullying other countries to implement laws the industry saw fit and using shady lobbying tactics to accomplish this.
20. Trying to sell us music that cannot be copied through the internet and on discs.
21. Trying to bi-pass the will of the European Union and getting countries to pass “three strikes” laws even if artists disagree with it.
22. Attempting to price fix music albums.
23. Secretly holding negotiations to pass draconian copyright laws that would see people’s physical property effectively stolen on the mere suspicion of copyright infringement through ACTA
24. Demanding that laws be passed that mandate the promotion of legal alternatives, then not providing the kind of deals that would allow legitimate services to flourish with internet groups and businesses like ISPs.
25. Alienating an entire generation by labeling customers as pirates.
26. Likening downloading music on the internet to terrorism.
27. Likening internet users who download music online to “bikey gangs”.
28. Spreading blatantly false information about file-sharing.
29. Forcing people to watch anti-piracy ads on movies.
30. Suing people who had a recently deceased family member.
31. Arguing that the industry is for artists, then going to court and demanding that royalty rates should be lower for artists – thus having to pay them less and keeping more money from album revenues.
32. Forcing radio broadcasters to pay royalties even if they don’t play music from the copyright industry.
33. Suing a lawyer for blogging about court cases related to copyright.
34. And possibly the whole issue of listing countries that hold 70% of the world’s population and labeling some as rogue nations that need to update their copyright laws via the USTR Special 301 report – thus alienating many countries in the first place.

(Via Kos)

I'm very pleased that this show was picked up for 2 more seasons. Season 3 was better than season 2, it was less rushed and less forced. And now, think of the drama available now that loyalties have been split.

Bonus Linkb: Here's the Friday Night Lights creator, Peter Berg, on the BS Report with Bill Simmons.

I can't believe it took me 2 months to get to this, but I'm kind of glad it did because of the happy ending. At the beginning of April, Union Square's Grand came in to find their Shepard Fairey mural defaced and if you look at the pictures, not even in a creative way. Fairey had put up the mural and others like it all over Boston, Cambridge, Somerville, etc this winter in advance of his show at the ICA. While some of these murals, like the one on Grand, were officially approved, some were not, resulting in a legal storm with charges being added as quickly as they were dismissed. The police are so interested in adding additional charges, they recently came in to Grand to ask if the mural had been approved.
All this to say, that in the meantime, Fairey sent a local friend some replacement posters and the mural at Grand has been restored to it's original design. This makes me happy.

I suppose everything can get repossessed if someone falls behind on their payments. This story from Boing Boing about a guy who repossesses planes, small and large reads like a Hollywood story:

Popovich's first rule of firearms is pretty simple: The man who tells you he's going to shoot you will not shoot you. So without so much as looking back, he got on the plane and flew it right to Chicago. "My job is to grab that plane," Popovich says. "And if you haven't paid for it, then it's mine. And I don't like to lose." Nick Popovich is a repo man, but not the kind that spirits away Hyundais from suburban driveways. Popovich is a super repo man, one of a handful of specialists who get the call when a bank wants back its Gulfstream II jet from, say, a small army of neo-Nazi freaks.

As does this story I remember reading a couple years ago about a cargo ship repo man:

Meanwhile, an oceangoing tugboat also hired by Hardberger slipped into port and backed up to the Aztec Express. Under a full moon, the crew began cutting the anchor chains with blowtorches. In case harbor officials noticed and tried to call for help on their cellphone, Hardberger had paid a witch doctor $100 to cast spells on the port's soccer field. The witch doctor marked the field with gray powder, a clear warning to believers in voodoo, the nation's dominant religion. No call ever went out.

However, this story about another boat repo man, not so much.