Protest

Cairo yesterday:

Washington DC 1967:

True Hollywood story

I stumbled across an old interview with Gary Wolf, the author of the original novel Who Censored Roger Rabbit? My favourite little bit.

I can say that Bugs has a tough agent. He and Mickey had to appear on screen for the exact same amount of time, they had to be in every scene together, and they had to have exactly the same number of words of dialog.

Why am I not surprised?

Bertie Wooster, Batman

Alfred Pennyworth has so much in common with Jeeves.

“Enough talk about that, Jeeves. I think I’ve made it quite clear that the cape represents my bat-wings, for I am a child of the night, and so forth.”

“Could not some other form of abstraction suffice, sir?”

“Well, without the wings, I’m hardly a bat, am I? I’m sort of a black badger.”

“I understand badgers can be quite nasty in a pinch.”

“Yes, but it’s not like a great roaring badger came smashing through my window at Brinkley, is it? It was a bat. That’s an omen, Jeeves. Can’t mess about with omens, that’s bad luck.”

PasswordCard

Via @acrylicist, I learn about PasswordCard, a cunning little web utility that helps with the problem of remembering lots of strong unique passwords. Frustratingly, I find it almost useful. But I have some ideas for how to make it so that it would be a great solution for me, and I think a lot of other people.

PasswordCard generates a unique batch of random alphanumeric characters for you, arranged in a grid:

The idea is that you keep your PasswordCard with you, and then any time you need a password you use this proceedure, described on the PasswordCard website:

• Pick a direction. You don't have to go from left to right to read your passwords, you can go from right to left, up or down, or even diagonally. It's probably a good idea to pick one direction though, even if you use your PasswordCard for multiple passwords.
• Pick a password length. Eight is pretty secure and usually acceptable. Again, it's a good idea to pick one length.
• Pick a colour and a symbol for each password. You can use one password for all your sites, but that still wouldn't be very safe. It's a good idea to at least have different passwords for very important sites, such as Internet banking sites.

So if you use 8-character passwords and read to right-to-left, and you remember that your Facebook password is “green diamond”, then you know that your Facebook password is r8tzkE5H.

It's a very clever idea, but I have a problem with it. You need to remember the color and symbol for each password you have. If you're like me, you have a lot of passwords; I would not feel confident that I will remember the mnemonic for every password I create.

But with a slight change to the design of the card, that's easy to fix:

With the grid organized this way, you can have the name of the thing for which you need a password act as the mnemonic that tells you where on the card to start. So let's say you do the first letter of the name of the site from the top list of columns, and the second letter of the name of the site from the side list of rows; that makes your Facebook password jdFQqeea. This makes your passwords a bit more exposed if someone gets hold of your card, since the key mnemonic isn't in your brain, but you could be clever about where you start: instead of the first and second letters of the site name, you could use the third and fourth ... and shift over by two from there ... and so forth.

For folks who still want to use the card the old way, I've left the colored rows.

The weird extra set of characters at the bottom of both formats of card is a seed number which will produce the PasswordCard again at the website. That way, if you write down just that seed number somewhere secure, if you lose your PasswordCard you can reproduce it exactly. But it would be nice if you could use any arbitrary key you want, that you already have memorized, and then have the option to leave that off of the card.

Slices of film

The New York Times Magazine offers us a beautiful piece: Fourteen Actors Acting: A Video Gallery of Screen Types, a series of little vignettes. They offer about the minimum of what you need to qualify as “cinema:” each features a single actor shot in black-and-white in a single take that lasts about a minute, with a simple music score. Each repeats a cinematic trope you'll undoubtedly recognize.

I have a soft spot for this sort of thing in part because it provokes a confrontation with the nature of the medium. How little can a scene contain and still tell us something? What comes from story, and what from pure action? Why do we love these iconic scenes so much that we create them again and again in films? What makes them work? And what makes them work again and again, in countless movies, without becoming stale?

And, apropos of the collection's title: What do actors do, really? I started asking that after I read Stephanie Zacharek's review of Monster, which she opens with that haunting question. All of the performances in these micro-cinematic efforts impressed me with the magic of acting, and they act as meditations on what makes film actors interesting. Robert Duvall's clip gave me a chuckle because he reminded me of showrunner Ron Moore talking about how Edward James Olmos shaving constituted one of the major themes of Battlestar Galactica. Vincent Cassel reminded me of my theory that God gave us movies so we could watch people dancing beautifully, which explains why we make so many action movies these days — they provide a substitute for the musicals which have gone out of style. James Franco manages to make a two-character scene work through the use of a mirror. Matt Damon revealed a series of thoughts and emotions without benefit of either his voice or much time on screen. (I've sung the praises of Damon's gifts as a physical actor since I saw the scene in The Bourne Identity in which, early in the film, his amnesiac character gets awakened on a park bench by a cop's nightstick, and Damon communicates with a little shrug hey, I just realized that I know how to take this cop's nightstick away from him and beat him up with it, which I find both astonishing and disturbing. How did he do that?)

And Michael Douglass provides an utterly compelling performance by pretty much just sitting there.

Which brings me to If We Don't, Remember Me. When I started writing this post, I had meant to call it a different take on the same project, but I realize that in truth it has a profoundly different project.

Remember offers a series of animated GIFs made from great movies. I ordinarily think of animated GIFs — a technology for showing brief looping animations — as the scourge of the web, but Remember does something marvelous with them. Stills taken from movies generally seem surprisingly sterile; movement plays such an essential part in what makes well-composed film shots work that taking a single frame out, even if we choose carefully, loses much of the magic. Remember gives us not stills but what we want from stills: a single, atomic moment, including the essential movement. And by essential movement, I do mean essential: often the faceless author of Remember has included only the movement in one part of the frame, or has the image hold perfectly still for a second or two before showing something small move in a flicker, or includes just a tiny sway or flick of an actor's eyes.

The moments captured by Remember don't really show us acting at all, I think. Acting means revealing a character through action. (There it is, lurking in the word itself!) The moments of Remember don't do that, they show no progression, else they would not work as endless loops the way they do.

But they often do show a thing that film actors do — the thing that Michael Douglas did in his Fourteen Actors clip — which has only a loose connection with acting: exhibiting screen presence, that subtle and mysterious quality by which some actors can hold our attention. Some actors, indeed, have very modest acting abilities but an extraordinary screen presence: think of Arnold Schwarzenegger, Ruth Gordon, Keanu Reeves, or countless classic-era stars like Bogart, Hepburn, John Wayne, Rita Hayworth, Jimmy Stewart. I suspect that skilled actors can cultivate this, but some actors just have it.

How the heck does that work?

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Update: I cannot resist adding a little video essay of closeups, plus these animated movie posters.

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Update: Tech Noir is another collection of almost-stills like If We Don't, Remember Me, and Scènes Cultes de Films en GIFs Animés is similar, with little GIFs.

Airport groping

Furry Girl at Feminisnt gives us what may be the blog post of the year: My experience mocking TSA security theater at Seatac as a nearly-naked enfant terrible. Like Dancing Matt, it's delightful in part because it is at the intersection of so many things of our particular historical moment: security theatre gone haywire, sexual politics, the democratization of video, feminism, situationist social criticism ...

The TSA wanted to feel me up or see what I look like without clothes. I get it. I'm a sex worker. My main porn site gets about 3 million unique visitors a year, and clients pay ^$4 a minute to see me naked on my web cam, so the TSA's interest in me came as no surprise. Normally, I would charge for such a service, but this one was on the house. Duty, country, sacrifice, patriotism, all that.

So that link is, as the saying goes, Not Safe For Work.

(And Furry Girl, if you're reading? It breaks my heart that you feel like you can't fit into a “silly feminist framework.”)

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Update: The wittiness of her blog post is not matched by the video she took of the incident, in which her enthusiasm for stripping down for the search seems forced on her part, rather than an organic absurdist response to security theatre.

Deficit spending

Brad DeLong explains why deficit spending is a very good idea right now.

The principle to which Interfluidity refers is that when times are bad--when your present and expected future resources fall--you should cut back on your commitments. The fact is that these are bad times for private economic actors: their current incomes have fallen, and the high interest rates charged them means that their future resources are worth a lot less than they used to be when translated into claims on today.

But things are completely different for the government.

The terms on which the U.S. government today can borrow are extraordinarily, unbelievably good. The government's current resources have declined with the decline in tax revenue, but the taxes the government will receive in the future are--according to a bunch of calculations John Cochrane made when he came to Berkeley to give a seminar--worth roughly four times as much when translated into claims on goods, services, and labor today as they were worth three years ago. The resource constraints binding private economic actors have become much tighter. But the resource constraints binding the government have--because of the extraordinary falls in interest rates--become much looser. And high unemployment and slack capacity mean that the terms on which the government can get goods, services, and labor are significantly more advantageous than they were three years ago.

Every single particle of logic is crying out that now is the time for the government to pull its spending forward from the future into the present and push its taxes from the present back into the future.

The argument that “governments should be prudent in the same way as households” is not a moral argument: it is a stupid argument. It blindly closes its eyes to the reality that times feel very different for credit-worthy governments than for potentially insolvent private economic actors, and that what is prudence for the second is sheer idiocy for the first.

Tea Party

A terrific, sharp-tongued summary of the Tea Party's principles Digby:

• hatred of government
• a loathing for liberals (and other assorted unreal Americans)
• the Bible
• a cartoon constitution
• a fantasy America in which everyone agrees with them and does exactly what they want

Passion

Michael Been
1950-2010
Singer and songwriter

I just discovered that Michael Been, songwriter for The Call, died a few months back. I’m saddened, and selfishly disappointed that this means he won’t be gifting me with any more songs.

I am by no stretch of the imagination a Christian — though I’m syncreticist enough to refer to תפארת, अनाहत, Buddha Compassion, or Christ Love as occasion demands — but that surely isn’t Mr Been’s fault.

I have never heard a better love song than “I Still Believe”.

Just as Johnny Cash sang about the severe American Christ the Judge so that even if you didn’t believe in Him you could see how it felt if you did, Been sang about a universal Christ of Glory and Mystery. And like Cash, he didn't do it so it was a chore, taking your medicine — The Call was a rock ’n’ roll band, and they rocked.

I’m badly outvoted on how the cosmos works. If they’re right and I’m wrong, I expect that Been is now standing at God’s right hand now and singing His praises. And someday Peter will ask me in life, did you accept Jesus Christ into your heart? If that does happen, I think I might be able to get away with answering Peter that no, I did not … except during the time I spent listening to Micheal Been sing.

Prufhop

As part of my ongoing coverage of allusions to my favourite poem, I give you T. S. Elliot's Lost Hip Hop Poem:

Via @tristissima who knows from slam poetry.

Inconceivable!

I've been meaning to create a web image for this for a while. It should have a number of applications.

You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means:

Plus, fractal wrongness:

Huh?

Ezra Klein offers us this puzzling graph:

Digby explains:

Americans worship winners and they don't really care about unfair process. This is the nation that reveres the quote “winning isn't everything, it's the only thing.”
....
Similarly, the party in power is expected to do what's necessary to pass its agenda. If it can't, it is held responsible for the failure, not those who stopped them from doing it.
....
And there is another dimension to this which especially applies to the Obama administration. Since he ran explicitly on the promise to end the bickering, change Washington and create a post-partisan consensus, people see the failure of those things to materialize as a measure of his failure to deliver on his promise.

We can expect more Republican obstructionism to come.

Good recommendations

Well, I should think so.

Amor vincit omnia

A friend pointed me at this picture from a remarkable photo essay about the protests at the G20 summit.

It reminded me of an old favourite.

Reading on the iPad

I'm finding that the two most useful applications on my iPad are Instapaper and GoodReader.

Instapaper is a service for reading long articles published on the web. There's a little javascript link that you can bookmark in your browser that tells the Instapaper service that you want to read the article. The service then intelligently extracts the article content out from the navigation, advertisements, and other cruft, and makes that content available in a standard, readable format at InstaPaper.com and on your iPhone and iPad.

Over the past several years I've read more and more long-form stuff on the web, and it's always been a pain: often the articles are published in poorly readable formats, and more significantly if you find something you really want to read, you have to either read it right when you find it or keep track of the link to find it later. With Instapaper, I can find something interesting, hit the link to tuck it away for later, and know that I will read it eventually.

GoodReader is a PDF reader, and it has completely changed my relationship to PDFs. It used to be if there was something I wanted to read that was published as a PDF, I resented it: it meant either reading from a computer screen or printing it out and schlepping around the printout. This has deterred me from reading a lot of stuff. Now, I'm delighted when something is published as a PDF, because it means that I can get it immediately and I'll have it with me to read at my convenience.

Since I bring my iPad with me almost everywhere, with these two apps I know that even if I cannot connect to the internet, I always have a wide variety of interesting things to read: long and short, light and serious, improving and entertaining. Since I'm about to transition into a more public-transit-intensive lifestyle, this is a godsend.

Both applications include a simple foldering system for organizing your stuff, and after a little experimentation I've converged on a satisfying set of folders that I use for both:

• Art
• Big ideas
• Design
• Games
• Kulturkampf
• Occult
• Popkultur
• Public interest
• Technoscience
• Weirdness

I'm almost embarrassed by how much I enjoy looking at that list.

California election day

What, again?

Vote early. Vote often. Vote no.

Except for 15 and (though I resent having to vote on something that passed the legislature with a supermajority already) 13.

Mengele

Physicians for Human Rights has a new report:

In the most comprehensive investigation to date of health professionals’ involvement in the CIA’s “enhanced” interrogation program (EIP), Physicians For Human Rights has uncovered evidence that indicates the Bush administration apparently conducted illegal and unethical human experimentation and research on detainees in CIA custody. The apparent experimentation and research appear to have been performed to provide legal cover for torture, as well as to help justify and shape future procedures and policies governing the use of the “enhanced” interrogation techniques. The PHR report, Experiments in Torture: Human Subject Research and Evidence of Experimentation in the ‘Enhanced’ Interrogation Program, is the first to provide evidence that CIA medical personnel engaged in the crime of illegal experimentation after 9/11, in addition to the previously disclosed crime of torture.

They were researching ways to torture better.

How I wish I were surprised.

Tricks for Entourage on the Mac

I just learned one of these tricks from a colleague, and circulated the other two to my coworkers in return, and it occurred to me that I might have readers who might find these tricks useful as well. So if you're doing email in Entourage, read on ...

Grouping conversations

If you don’t like the way Entourage’s default “Arrange By: Conversation” sorts messages within a conversation from oldest to newest instead of newest to oldest, you can create your own custom sort.

1. From the menu: View > Arrange By > Edit Custom Arrangements... > New
2. Do the following settings:

   Custom arrangement name: Conversation (Newest to Oldest)

   Group items by: Conversation

   Sort groups by: Received | Newest on top

   Sort items within groups by: Conversation Index | Newest on top

   Default display for groups: Expanded

Instead of deleting

Since Entourage’s Trash buffer doesn’t work the right way, I simulate the correct behavior by dragging unwanted emails into a folder named ZZZ. I periodically purge ZZZ, but always leave the last few days’ worth of emails in place. I also do an actual delete of emails I’m sure about not needing again, but having some recoverability in ZZZ means that I’m much more willing to z-delete items of only transient interest.

Managing my work queue

I fell off the wagon with my personal email, but I maintain Inbox Zero with my work email. Every message I receive I file into a folder as soon as I’ve read it. If I need to keep an email “on my desk” (usually because it’s something I need to do), before I file it into its topical folder (Design, Reference, Administridia, et cetera) I click the red flag. When I want to survey what I need to do, first I purge my Inbox of anything new, then I look in my saved search for flagged items. Then when I’ve dealt with the flagged item, I click the red flag again; it disappears from my saved search, but is still retained in the topical folder.

Here’s how to create the saved search:

1. Go into the menu bar: File > New > Saved Search
2. At the top of the workspace, click on All Messages
3. Leave “Match if all criteria are met” dropdown in place
4. Click “Item contains” dropdown to switch to “To Do Flag” then switch the secondary dropdown to “Not Completed”
5. Click [Save] in the upper right of the workspace
6. Name it “Flagged”
7. (If you don’t have the favorites folder bar shown below the icon toolbar at the top) Go into the menu bar: View > Show Favorites Bar
8. (If you don’t have the folder list shown on the left) Go into the men bar: View > Show Folder List
9. In the folder list, find Mail Views at the bottom. You should see your Flagged search listed among the default views
10. Drag the Flagged search you created into the favorites folder bar below the icon toolbar, so you can find it again

Escalation

Posts on this subject are obviously fraught, so first:

• I keep an index of resources
• the moral question is simple:
  Palestinian liberation is right & necessary
• the history is complicated:
  I have a survey which addresses many common misunderstandings
• the praxis is complicated:
  antisemitic entryism into the movement for liberation is subtle, pervasive, and unacceptable

Kevin Drum says what I’ve been thinking about Israel’s attack on the ship bringing aid to Gaza.

It’s also a little hard to write about since I don’t have anything original to say. A million people have already said it. Fanatics on both sides have been in control of the region for years — the hardline Orthodox population relentlessly gaining influence in Israel and Hamas terrorists among the Palestinians — both convinced that they can win if they can only provoke enough insane overreactions from the other side. Which they do with depressing regularity. Hamas’s rocket attacks are indefensible, the Gaza embargo in return is indefensible, the blockade runners in their turn were plainly hoping to provoke an overreaction that would force Israel’s hand, and the Israelis then went insanely beyond anyone’s expectations by landing commandos on one of the ships and killing more than a dozen people while it was still far off in international waters. And now, there are rumors that the Turkish navy might escort the next ship that tries to run the blockade.

In David Petraeus’s famous phrase, How does this end?

Not well, obviously. I despair.

Mine too

The Big Caption says:

Image from the Boston Globe's amazing collection.

A word about the Lost finale

I was reminded of Roger Ebert's review of The Village:

To call it an anticlimax would be an insult not only to climaxes but to prefixes. It's a crummy secret, about one step up the ladder of narrative originality from It Was All a Dream. It's so witless, in fact, that when we do discover the secret, we want to rewind the film so we don't know the secret anymore.

And then keep on rewinding, and rewinding, until we're back at the beginning, and can get up from our seats and walk backward out of the theater and go down the up escalator and watch the money spring from the cash register into our pockets.

Jimmy Kimmel's gag alternate endings were better than what we got.

Movie landscapes

Paramount Studio map of California's geographical facsimiles, fron The Motion Picture Industry as a Basis for Bond Financing, 1927

Via Warren Ellis, originally uploaded by Ambrosia Voyeur

You know, it's amazing how the English countryside looks in no way like Southern California.

—Austin Powers

The horror continues

Via Digby, I learn that the International Committe of the Red Cross confirms that the US is operating the torture prison at Bagram which the US military has been denying. Jeff Kaye has horrifying details.

Prisoners held at Tor, according to investigations by BBC, are tossed into cold concrete cells, where the light is kept on 24 hours. Noise machines fill their cells with constant sound, and prisoners are sleep deprived as a matter of policy, with each cell monitored by a camera, so the authorities will know when someone is falling asleep and come to wake them.

Prisoners are beaten and abused. According to BBC’s article last month, one prisoner was “made to dance to music by American soldiers every time he wanted to use the toilet.”

As Auschwitz was a murder factory, that's an insanity factory. Even the US military admits that most of the people held there are not terrorists. And do I even need to tell you that no one there has stood trial?

We need to let those people free, make apologies and recompense to them and their loved ones, raze the prison to the ground, salt the earth where it once stood, and send everyone involved to the Hague to stand trial for crimes against humanity, up to and including the President of the United States if he knew this was happening.

President Obama, I'm looking at you. I voted for you, and reason ^#1 was that I trusted you to do the right thing about this. I've been trying to believe that you've been slow to correct Guantánamo because institutional inertia has been stopping you. Fool me twice, and I won't get fooled again.

Elves vs Fairies

Patrick McGee, republished on Roger Ebert's blog, warns against losing a tooth on the wrong day.

Santa had a son who fell in love with the Tooth Fairy's daughter. Because Santa could not abide such a mixing of the species, he had the Fairy's daughter killed. The Tooth Fairy responded by killing Santa's son. So began the blood-feud. Elves and Fairies have fought and died by the thousands over the ages. But, most critical, is what happens on Xmas Eve. Should a child be unable to prevent the loss of a tooth on Xmas Eve, it's possible that the Tooth Fairy and Santa end up at that very house at the same time. When this happens, the resulting battle destroys several city blocks.

I should have known.

Cinco de Mayo

In the unlikely event that you saw Grindhouse, you undoubtedly recall the witty trailers for faux exploitation movies that didn't really exist. Perhaps you have heard that Robert Rodriguez was so pleased with his trailer for Machete, with the inimitable Danny Trejo in the title rôle, that he actually fleshed it out into a real movie, coming soon to a theater near you.

Well, Mr Rodriguez and Mr Trejo have a special message, just for today.

Ain't It Cool News helpfully informs us:

Rodriguez is calling this his “Illegal” trailer. You see, Robert talked Fox into letting him put together a Cinco De Mayo message for ARIZONA — given. Well, the way things are in Arizona at this moment — it is kinda insane that there is a movie that was shot over a year ago waiting to be released that is about — THIS EXACT ISSUE... but if, Danny Trejo and buddies went Revolution Wacko as a result.

So I felt I needed to share.

Colours

Randall Munroe, who draws xkcd, “a webcomic of romance, sarcasm, math, and language,” did a survey of people's use of colour names.

First, a few basic discoveries:

• If you ask people to name colors long enough, they go totally crazy.
• “Puke” and “vomit” are totally real colors.
• Colorblind people are more likely than non-colorblind people to type “fuck this” (or some variant) and quit in frustration.
• Indigo was totally just added to the rainbow so it would have 7 colors and make that “ROY G. BIV” acronym work, just like you always suspected. It should really be ROY GBP, with maybe a C or T thrown in there between G and B depending on how the spectrum was converted to RGB.
• A couple dozen people embedded SQL ‘drop table’ statements in the color names. Nice try, kids.
• Nobody can spell “fuchsia”.

What's that about SQL? It seems that a lot of his readers remembered the comic “Exploits of a Mom.”

Lots more under the link. His discussion of his methodology is pretty interesting.

Deadly karaoke

Norimitsu Onishi at the New York Times offers a mindboggling piece about karaoke and violence in the Philipines.

Mr. Gregorio, 63, a witness to countless fistfights and occasional stabbings erupting from disputes over karaoke singing, did not dare choose one beloved classic: Frank Sinatra’s version of “My Way.”

“I used to like ‘My Way,’ but after all the trouble, I stopped singing it,” he said. “You can get killed.”

The article is primarily about “My Way,” but there are some really interesting digressions ...

A subset of karaoke bars with G.R.O.’s — short for guest relations officers, a euphemism for female prostitutes — often employ gay men, who are seen as neutral, to defuse the undercurrent of tension among the male patrons. Since the gay men are not considered rivals for the women’s attention — or rivals in singing, which karaoke machines score and rank — they can use humor to forestall macho face-offs among the patrons.

There's more, though the article leaves out this important tidbit from Wikipedia:

In the Philippines it was believed that [Syd] Vicious' version was inspired by deposed dictator Ferdinand E. Marcos, where in the first part of the song Vicious attempted to imitate the voice of the late dictator.

Of course.

MRE

Ragnell at Written World has an intriguing theory about the design of military Meals Ready to Eat.

All joking aside, MREs are an incredibly social food. Most contain an entree, a sidedish, a dessert, a snack, and a drink. Only one or two of these things will be edible to you (or you've gotten the only meal that anyone seems to feel is entirely good: The Chilimac. This is an anomaly, also no good for me because I don't like the entree--everything else on the menu rocks, though), the rest will either be disgusting or something you personally hate. You can, if you're hungry enough and alone, give up on your pickiness and just eat what you get. But I believe part of the point of the MRE (or an important side effect, since the main point was probably to make a meal that you could quickly eat a little bit of, work or get into a firefight, and then eat a little more of when the action dies down without it spoiling or spilling) is to build unit cohesion by forcing you to sit with the rest of your flight and trade food pouches to build an edible MRE (unless you got the cheese omelet, then you're shit out of luck. Though you probably will attract a crowd as it is such a legendarily disgusting entree that people will want to see your face when you eat it.)

Ragnell also has some good things to say about superheroes, especially Wonder Woman.

Walk on the mild side

That Lou Reed, such a nice young man:

We chatted for a while, and she asked me what my favorite music was. I said the Velvet Underground — assuming, of course, she'd have no clue who they were. Her face lit up and she said, You mean Lou Reed's band???? It turned out she was the cleaning lady for Lou's dorm when he was at Syracuse, and she LOVED him. She said he was the sweetest of all the boys in the dorm, the most well-mannered and the kindest to her. She'd bake cakes and treats for him, and when he left college he would write to her. She said they still corresponded.

Born Free

M.I.A.'s video for her new song “Born Free” is a well-crafted, harrowing political allegory well worth ten minutes of your time. I warn you: it's scary, gruesome and, as they say, “not safe to watch at work;” if you can't watch that sort of thing, check out Jezebel's synopsis.

It's better if you see it without having the surprise spoiled. But unhappily—and of course this is the point—the surprise isn't, fundamentally, surprising. Just like Zbigniew Libera's Lego kit, it is simultaneously absurd yet familiar, and that terrible familiarity is the point.