Archives for the month of: September, 2003

“More than 500 years ago, when the Span­ish Con­quis­ta­dors landed in what is now Mex­ico, they encoun­tered natives prac­tic­ing a rit­ual that seemed to mock death.

It was a rit­ual the indige­nous peo­ple had been prac­tic­ing at least 3,000 years. A rit­ual the Spaniards would try unsuc­cess­fully to eradicate.

A rit­ual known today as Dia de los Muer­tos, or Day of the Dead.
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Since its debut and unvail­ing its prod­uct line, Liber­mann Inc. has recieved a spark of con­tro­versy over the legit­i­macy of the busi­ness. The site spot­lights hard­ware that cer­tainly evokes pro­fes­sion­al­ism in its keen­est sense. From the lap­tops to the desk­top con­fig­u­ra­tions, every­thing screams style. Espe­cially the embed­ded ‘L’ logo which accord­ing to their site is “carved by nature for mil­lions of years, then indi­vid­u­ally sculpted and crafted by hand into the shape that makes our trade­mark so unique.”

Why then, if the legit­i­macy hangs loosely in the air has Liber­mann been fea­tured on Mac­Cen­tral as “top prize” or Forbes — if in real­ity it’s actu­ally a hoax?

plex​.us explains their the­ory and inves­ti­gates what they call a hoax:

bq. “On Sep­tem­ber 22, 2003 I was first made aware of this company’s (fic­ti­tious) dis­play prod­uct known as the Grand Canyon. I looked briefly at the press release on their site and thought: ‘oh that’s cool, but too exotic for me.’ On Thurs­day the 25th, I some­how got the idea that there was a con­tro­versy over the legit­i­macy of Lieber­mann, Inc. I went back to their site, and went to their home page for the first time. I was imme­di­ately sus­pi­cious and, with Steve’s help, we pieced together a lot of the scam that evening. Aside from out­landish claims, gen­eral unre­al­ism and a bro­ken e-commerce sys­tem, there were numer­ous other dis­crep­an­cies con­tained within their site. Most sur­pris­ingly and amus­ingly, sev­eral Mac news sites, and even Forbes​.com were befooled by this hoax — and con­tinue to believe that it’s real. [Forbes has since come to its senses.]“
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Could you ever imag­ine a Bat­man film as directed by Orson Welles? How about James Cagney as the Rid­dler or George Raft as Two Face? Some might call this ludi­crous and oth­ers might pro­claim genius. The same man who adapted H.G. Wells’ War of the Worlds to radio (and fright­ened thou­sands of lis­ten­ers across the Nation) might very well have breathed new life into this comic book character.

Accord­ing to comic​bookre​sources​.com:

bq. “Orson Welles seri­ously con­sid­ered doing a Bat­man pic­ture and even got as far as pro­duc­tion designs, an early draft of a script and some cast­ing pho­tographs fea­tur­ing var­i­ous friends and col­leagues in pro­to­types of what would even­tu­ally become the fin­ished cos­tumes.” (link)

Many of us remem­ber the movie, A Beau­ti­ful Mind, win­ning Best Pic­ture of the Year in the Acad­emy Awards in 2002. How­ever, what most peo­ple don’t real­ize (or the ones I’ve talked to) is that the real John F. Nash, Jr. is some­what dif­fer­ent from the char­ac­ter of the same name in the movie depic­tion of his life.

For instance, many of the sequences in the movie were exag­ger­ated for the typ­i­cal Hol­ly­wood effect of instill­ing emo­tion and drama within a 2-hour time frame. The movie was inspired of course by the life of John Nash as writ­ten in the biog­ra­phy “A Beau­ti­ful Mind: The Life of Math­e­mat­i­cal Genius and Nobel Lau­re­ate John Nash” by author Sylvia Nasar.

How­ever, a man’s life is best told through his own words:

My begin­ning as a legally rec­og­nized indi­vid­ual occurred on June 13, 1928 in Blue­field, West Vir­ginia, in the Blue­field San­i­tar­ium, a hos­pi­tal that no longer exists. Of course I can’t con­sciously remem­ber any­thing from the first two or three years of my life after birth. (And, also, one sus­pects, psy­cho­log­i­cally, that the ear­li­est mem­o­ries have become “mem­o­ries of mem­o­ries” and are com­pa­ra­ble to tra­di­tional folk tales passed on by tellers and lis­ten­ers from gen­er­a­tion to gen­er­a­tion.) But facts are avail­able when direct mem­ory fails for many cir­cum­stances.” (John F. Nash, Jr.)

http://​www​.nobel​.se/​e​c​o​n​o​m​i​c​s​/​l​a​u​r​e​a​t​e​s​/​1​9​9​4​/​n​a​s​h​-​a​u​t​o​b​i​o​.​h​tml

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