Circa 1968. Via Vintage Los Angeles.
Mashable recently posted a list of 14 Google tools you didn’t know existed. Most of them are designed to view and filter data in different and hopefully useful ways.
We got lost for a few hours last night in the Ngram Viewer. It lets you search keywords in millions of books over the span of half a millennium, and displays the results in a graphic chart.
We created a game out of it. Try it with somebody. Taking turns, pick a word in the English language that you deem “trending” in recent years. Enter it. Observe the result. Then it’s your opponent’s turn. The person who achieves the most vertical spike in the graph wins the round. Results can be enlightening.
I had winning results with “internet”, “email”, “fuck”, “pitbull”, and “lesbian”.
Paul Walker has died. Car accident, ironically enough. He was 40. RIP
The first time I ever saw Paul was in 1986 on an episode of ‘Highway to Heaven’ with Michael Landon. He played a mentally handicapped little boy in the Special Olympics. After the boy is disowned by his biological parents, Jonathan orchestrates things with The Man Upstairs and connects the boy with a self-pitying quadriplegic lawyer and his barren wife. The threesome eventually learn how much they need each other, and they become a family. One of those sappy “count your blessings” tales that you hate to love.
The episode was a double banger, two hours long. Featured Josh Brolin as the older biological brother. It was a bit of a cult classic with me and my own brothers, inspiring countless adolescent impersonations.
It’s been quite a trip to see Paul blow up into the huge star that he became in the years that followed, and it’s rare to find somebody who remembers that classic Highway episode. Or even watched the show, for that matter.
The episode’s on YouTube in two parts. Enjoy.
Part 1:
Part 2:
A Moscow-based photographer and makeup artist created a series of portraits that play with the natural lines of their models’ faces, twisting them into strange new forms. =check it out=
LIFE ITSELF, the first ever feature-length documentary on the life of Roger Ebert, covers the prolific critic’s life journey from his days at the University of Illinois, to his move to Chicago where he became the first film critic ever to win the Pulitzer Prize, then to television where he and Gene Siskel became iconic stars, and finally to what Roger referred to as “his third act”; how he overcame disabilities wrought by cancer to became a major voice on the internet and through social media.
Director Steve James (HOOP DREAMS) has conducted interviews with over two dozen people, including lifelong friends, professional colleagues, the first ever interview with Gene Siskel’s wife, and filmmakers Errol Morris, Werner Herzog, Ramin Bahrani, Gregory Nava, Ava DuVernay, and Martin Scorsese, who is one of the executive producers along with Steven Zaillian.
“This movie is a love story really –– Roger’s love for movies, for Chaz, and even in his own way, his love for Gene. Ultimately, though, it’s a film about Roger’s love for life itself.”
— Steve James
More info here.
I kid you not. I even have a witness. The story went something like this:
It was Saturday night, just before 1AM. M and I’d met some people down off Yucca and Cahuenga, and were taking the scenic — and safer — walk home by way of the more traversed Hollywood Boulevard. We hit Highland, and started walking back up toward the house along the west side of the street. Just the two of us. She was on my left.
A young guy came trotting up to me on my right, and began walking along with us. Purposeful, between me and the curb. =more=
