Only The Guardian could bring in a reference (twice!) to the Hundred Years’ War in a war that’s lasted 13 days ’til now. (via Inside Ventura County)

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If Google owned Pyra, it would have known that the news that Google had bought out Pyra was breaking on the Internet much before it in fact found out, via major newspapers, that Google was buying out Pyra. Neat, eh?

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Glenn Reynolds covers the shock of the crash, as well as an excellent response to the tasteless ‘arrogance‘ mudfling from the CBC. It comes, surprisely enough, from a weblog called Moderate Left:

Well, if this is arrogance–exploring space for science, pushing the envelope of the human experience, doing what our species has always done–then I support it. If it is arrogant to want to learn, we are arrogant. If it is arrogant to want to explore, we are arrogant. If it is arrogant to risk our lives for the possibility of a better future for all mankind, we are arrogant.

Mankind is arrogant. We believe foolish things–that we may one day cure cancer, that we may one day develop new forms of energy, that we may one day walk on Mars. We believe these foolish things, and we dedicate ourselves to achieving them. How ridiculous. How arrogant.

And people die for these things. And people are injured for life. The astronauts of Apollo 1, and the Challenger, and now, sadly, the Columbia have died for the arrogant belief that we can be more than we are, that we can walk on the moon, that we can touch the stars.

So call us arrogant for building the space shuttle. Call the men and woman who gave their lives today arrogant for believing they could fly to space and return to tell about it. But don’t call us wrong. For this arrogance defines humanity. And I would rather our species be arrogant than afraid.

Yes!

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The Telegraph: tremors in Bollywood as markets hug Hollywood. Not surprising. Given the most Indian directors haven’t gone beyond the tired themes of love, friendship and boy-meets-girl bubble romance, why should people pay to watch Hindi films, especially now that English ones are also available in the local lingo? Film music standards have come down, dialog has gone to the dogs, the dresses actresses wear are more substantial than the plot (and that’s not saying much for the dresses); in general, Bollywood has gotten predictable — and still refuses to acknowledge the advances Hollywood has made in cinema. The incredibly talented Govind Nihlani, who made Tamas and Hazaar Chaurasi Ki Maa and probably couldn’t make a bubble-romance movie to save his life, puts it very well: Audiences are not excited by us anymore. Their tastes have changed. Darn right.

Last week, it was my ill fortune to see Kaante, a bad re-make of Reservoir Dogs (hey, I was bored and had nothing else to do), which apparently had been shot fully in LA and promised ‘Hollywood production values’. Boy, was I disappointed. Bad editing, a cameraman who had a bad case of the jitters (guys, even heard of the Steadicam? Oh, the jitter was meant to induce a film noir effect, you say? Ok. but to me it mostly looked like film-noir-by-accident), the most ridiculous bank robbery ever committed onto film, and Sanjay Dutt (and most of the rest) spouting scatological profundities like he was still in the Mumbai docks — that surely left the largely ‘family’ audience embarrassed (it was the opening weekend, most came to see what Amitabh Bachhan was upto in this movie). Two days before, I was at the India premiere of Die Another Day — nothing earth-shaking, but solid production values and good, if mindless, fun. Don’t know why I bother with Hindi movies at all: guess its some renegade hope-against-hope within me that this time they’ll get things right.

Of course, when Nihlani says, We can’t make a Titanic here, he is only half right: Ang Lee needed only $12M to complete Crouching Tiger (which was the most expensive Chinese film to date): nowhere near $270M for Lord of the Rings or $300M for Titanic. Danny Boyle needed even less to complete 28 Days Later, which did well in the British charts this year (he used Digital Video to cut cost); whereas Sanjay Bhansali burned through almost Rs 50 crore ($10M) to create Devdas, the most expensive Hindi movie, which turned out to be a barely passable song-n-dance turkey where the sets looked very good. It barely made its money back. I think the lesson is clear: big budget (by Indian standards) films will have storylines to support their budgets, and (if used) the effects have to be real, not cheesy phong-shaded monsters. That means a world-class production facility in India. And ’til you have that, dramas (I thought Road was passable, and the box office gave its thumbs-up to Raaz, for example) will do well. And the further you are from boy-meets-girl crap, the better.

PS. This might be a good Hindi film to watch this winter: Mr and Mrs Iyer. Interesting storyline.

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TheNewspaperToday closes its doors. When they turned pay-only one year ago, I asked: Is the India Today brandname worth paying the (admittedly affordable) Rs500/$10.50 per year? I guess the answer was no. Existing TNT subscribers can use their subscriptions to access India Today’s web edition (normally available only to India Today subscribers). The end of free is more complicated than it appears to be, because it is not clear that all the content on the ‘Net — even the ones I read regularly — is worth paying for. It may also just be worth living without. Hey, back in the days when I didn’t have a IP connection bolted to my cranium, my favorite source of instant news was a pocket radio tuned to BBC World Service Radio.

In other news, Time-Warner content, such as CNN and Time, may soon only be available over AOL (or for pay over the Netscape Network). Let’s see how that does. At least, given the current web ad market, it can’t cause them to lose any (more) money.

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Stanislaw Lem’s Solaris is getting its first Hollywood interpretation — I don’t know how well Clooney will render Kelvin’s role, but given Soderbergh’s Traffic, he oughtn’t make a total hash of things. This book is probably one of the most beautiful works of literature ever produced under the SF umbrella, and it’s a shame that publishers continue to characterize it as SF. (Solaris is SF no more than A Voyage to Arcturus is). This is one movie I’ll look forward to.

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Bollywood waits for a December miracle. I don’t get these guys. For the past 50 years they’ve been feeding us rehashes of the same old song/dance + romance + token conflict, and they seriously expect audiences to take it sitting down year after year? C’mon guys, give us a little credit, if we want bad programming we’ve got cable TV. Why can’t I see a film like Bridget Jones’ Diary (random example) or Twister (another random example) in Hindi? Oh wait, one’s got too much talk about sex (taboo here, 1e9 population be damned) and another’s got too many special effects that cost money to create and which Bollywood is no good at anyway. Whatever they do, I don’t think that churning out the same old indistinguishable bubblegum romances (with the same motley crew of wannabe actors, er, stars) is a recipe for profit. Oh well.

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It is too much, I guess, to expect a Bollywood director to actually make an original film.

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Ziv Caspi’s succint rebuttal of Cringely’s latest pulpit post: EDI didn’t fail because it was big and slow. It failed because collaboration is hard, and because there’s far more to passing semantics between loosely-coupled systems than just agreeing on the syntax.

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The Times of India says it is now the world’s largest circulated English newspaper. On the other hand, it remains too ad-cluttered and badly written to be called a quality broadsheet in the same sense as the NY Times, Wash Post, LA Times, The Statesman or even that staid old lady of Mount Road, The Hindu (the same is true of the other rag it competes against in the North).

Reading Indian newspapers these days is definitely not a happy experience — budget cuts have led to a reduction in the number of overseas correspondents and an increasing reliance on Reuters, NYTNS and the like. Sport coverage relies heavily on agencies or syndicated columnists. Writing quality (bar The Hindu) is plummeting, and ads are encroaching on more and more column-inches. The Times of India (and India Today, and to a lesser extent the Indian Express and the Hindustan Times), in particular, have become massive — and unabashed — promotion engines for their parent media companies in ways that would make an AOLTW exec wistful.

I wouldn’t gloat if I were working at the ToI — in some ways, it still has a long way to go.

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