Nobody likes their world-view challenged:
The Vatican has banned the makers of Angels & Demons, the latest book from Da Vinci Code bestseller Dan Brown to be turned into a movie, from entering the Holy See and any church in Rome.
The Catholic Church is still angry over The Da Vinci Code, which suggested that Jesus may have been secretly married to Mary Magdalene. When the movie came out, Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone, the Vatican’s secretary of state, said: “Boycotting this film is the least we can do. The book and the film are a pot pourri of nonsense, a phantasmagorical cocktail of inventions.”
Link
Blogs are like any other form of media. Once they challenge values of the dominant class or societal group, they are often censored. This is mostly the case when you talk about politics. Blogger arrests have hit a record high.
More bloggers than ever face arrest for exposing human rights abuses or criticising governments, says a report.
Since 2003, 64 people have been arrested for publishing their views on a blog, says the University of Washington annual report.
In 2007 three times as many people were arrested for blogging about political issues than in 2006, it revealed.
More than half of all the arrests since 2003 have been made in China, Egypt and Iran, said the report.
The first time I’ve heard the term ‘green noise’ was today, in this NY Times article about how environmentally conscious consumers are beseiged by a great deal of information on how to lead an eco-friendly life. Are we having too much information about the environment? What’s the solution? Who is right?
Ms. Burnham, 35, recycles religiously, orders weekly from a
community-supported farm, buys eco-friendly cleaning products and
carries groceries in a canvas bag. But she admits to information
overload on the environment — from friends, advice columns, news media,
even government-issued reports. Much of the advice is conflicting.
“To
say that you are confused and a little fed up with the often
contradictory messages out there on how to live lightly on the earth is
definitely not cool,” she said in an e-mail message. “But, heck, I’ll
come out and say it. I’m a little overwhelmed.”
She is, in other
words, a victim of “green noise” — static caused by urgent, sometimes
vexing or even contradictory information played at too high a volume
for too long.
The Guardian has a hilarious side-splitting review of The Incredible Hulk, done entirely in Hulk speak. Go read it.
Hulk. Smash!” Yes. Hulk. Smash. Yes. Smash. Big Hulk smash. Smash cars.
Buildings. Army tanks. Hulk not just smash. Hulk also go rarrr! Then
smash again. Smash important, obviously. Smash Hulk’s USP. What Hulk
smash most? Hulk smash all hope of interesting time in cinema. Hulk
take all effort of cinema, effort getting babysitter, effort finding
parking, and Hulk put great green fist right through it.
The NY Times has an interesting article on female sexuality, which one researcher refers to a continuum between heteosexuality and homosexuality:
Heterosexual women, Dr. Chivers and her colleagues found, were no more excited by athletic naked men doing yoga or tossing stones into the ocean than they were by the control footage: long pans of the snowcapped Himalayas. When straight women viewed a video of a naked woman doing calisthenics, on the other hand, their blood flow increased significantly.
What really matters to women, Dr. Chivers said, at least in the somewhat artificial setting of watching movies while intimately hooked up to a device called a photoplethysmograph, is not the gender of the actor, but the degree of sensuality.
