29 October, 2005: By the time you read this on Halloween, much of what I have to say abo ut the deplorable (not my word but that of Mayor of Atlanta, GA, USA) situation for former residents of New Orleans will be news you don't want to hear. Simply because I wrote a book about the city that I called my home does not mean that I need to belabor the topic week after week. We both agree on that.

Meanwhile, because of the issues of race and class, I've noticed that the Mouthpiece Media (MM) have gone back to subjects that suburban America is more comfortable listening to on their nightcasts: Plamegate, Judy Miller and the New York Times, Harriet ("Fall on your sword") Miers. Something vanilla and non-threatening to your moral conscience.

I can't say that I wholly blame them; the MM was out of character talking about real-life issues. They need something the Babbling Classes (a.k.a the wealthy Punditocracy) can more readily relate to while getting paid to waste oxygen.

I don't know one person, trying to hold onto a job or trying to get their kids through school , who gives a rat's ass whether the Times fires Judith Miller - awful example of professional journalism that she is - or erects a monument to her at Rockefeller Center in New York City. BUT if you listen to the Babbling Classes of the MM, this is a story we the people should care about.

Maybe I'm missing something here. ... READ MORE

New York, NY, USA - For Canadian director Atom Egoyan creating "Where the Truth Lies" offered the challenge of constructing something that was almost a genre film but not quite. In wrestling with musician/composer Rupert Holmes' novel of the same name, he takes a story that plays on the conventions of the classic comic/singing duo and turns it on its head. Egoyan has been good at doing that throughout many of his award winning features including "Felicity's Journey" and "Exotica."

G21: Are your characters in "Where the Truth Lies" mythic?

AE: Yes, I think that the very fact that they're on a telethon and a duo, yes, that question will come up. I think it's also a distracting question because there is something about the dynamic of any duo, going back to Laurel and Hardy, Cheech and Chong, Abbott and Costello. We don't have duos anymore. It's part of our popular culture that has faded away. There was this Freudian construction about it regarding "ego" and "id". There's always this person who's impulsive and who has unleashed another character that tries to civilize them. It's a recurrent theme. I wanted to make [them] mythological. I wanted to make them an amalgam of many diff erent acts. By virtue that it's a telethon, people are going to think of Martin and Lewis. It seems to me that that would be distracting. Given what the drama is about, for people to think whether or not this might have happened would be disruptive.

G21: The actors in this film go against their typecasting.

AE: It's also about actors looking at their own persona and wanting to challenge that. Approaching Colin Firth in the middle of the "Bridget Jones" junket, where he's being idolized as this gentlemanly, Darcy-like [as in Jane Austen's hero in "Pride and Prejudice"], civilized, [and] polite figure and say, "Let's kind of shake that up. Let's challenge that."

In the case of Kevin [Bacon], having someone who has a persona and then say, "Let's challenge that or reconstruct that." Or Alison Lohman, a 26 year-old who's played an adolescent all of her career.

So, [I said], "Let's actually play your own age. Let's work that persona to try and do something with the alchemy of the piece that's going to be unexpected."

I just think that casting is the essential thing because very often people are very conservative when it comes to casting. Many of the actors, who are a certain point, say they want to challenge themselves, but they really don't. It' s great wh en you work with people who are excited about arriving on set with a clean slate and [who try] to build something completely separate.... READ MORE


RON DIENER ON COMPUTING:

Wendell, NC, USA - A Saturday morning, my housemate in bed sleeping, I am feeling that I should accomplish something, a pile of work on my desk, the excitement of being challenged in front of me, I decided to tackle a programming problem that had haunted me for weeks.

Since I am a systems librarian, I work with computer programs that relate to library work -- editing of catalog or acquisition information, making a computerized catalog work well.

In the old days, we worked with mainframe computers and folks did their work by sharing time on a single large machine. Nowadays we prefer to work with small computers and use the facilities of browsers, the programs we use to surf the web or work our email or transfer information around the country and around the world.

I was working on a very specific problem: one cannot simply turn a program loose to display "all" of the results of a search.

For instance, if one were to search for "North Carolina" in our catalog -- the North Carolina Supreme Court Library catalog -- one w ould literally come up with thousands of answers. The browser cannot handle that much. There must be limits. And so, when looking up any names or subjects, I limit the browser so that it can give a maximum of thirty answers. That is a reasonable number: about as much as you would get from a single eight-and-a-half by eleven inch page.

Now here's the problem: how do I set up the browser so that it can deliver the NEXT thirty answers, and the thirty after that, and the thirty after that?