We’ll be announcing our speakers very soon, but they’re a pretty solid bunch, as good as last month’s. If you are a programmer who’s thinking about making the move to being a founding member of a startup, or if you’re just interested in hanging out and talking about some really high-quality startup ideas, you need to be here.

Date: Thursday July 22, 2010
Time: 6:30- 8:30pm
Location: AOL, 770 Broadway (entrance on 9th St.), 6th Floor

RSVP here.

The further adventures of giving cute animals unfamiliar foods that hopefully will not poison them:

I saw Winter’s Bone over the weekend and can’t recommend it enough. This film has been critically praised since its Sundance debut, and in my opinion it isn’t just hype: I can’t think of a single way this film could’ve been better. It’s scary and gritty and heartfelt all at the same time.

The story focuses on Ree, the 17-year-old caretaker of her family, looking for her father so the law won’t repossess their home. As she searches, the film gently but thoroughly fleshes out her small world in the Missouri Ozarks. The story ping-pongs from a local high school, to the quiet forest behind her house, to a crowded, booming livestock auction, and you get a sense of the community she lives in. You might get the same sense of place from a slower verite story, or a documentary, but here it’s used expertly as a backdrop for a harrowing noir tale full of dangerous secrets and violent standoffs.

I think that’s why a film like this, made by educated urbanites for educated urbanites, doesn’t come off as condescending to this way of life. (Or at least that’s how it felt to me; I wonder how poor white folks would feel about it.) Winter’s Bone shows a world full of violence and poverty, but there is still neighborly compassion and the harsh beauty of the landscape. Over the course of the film you see Ree shine as a tough, compassionate heroine, but perhaps just as importantly, you start to understand why somebody so strong would choose to stay in the Ozarks, close to the land and the people that she knows. This is pretty much a perfect film.

GRAAAAAAAAAHHHHH!

Today’s sperm whale has no functional teeth in its upper jaw and only small ones in its lower jaw (which are mostly used in fights). It feeds through suction, relying on a rush of water to carry its prey into its open mouth. But Leviathan’s mouth was full of huge teeth, the largest of which were a foot long and around 4 inches wide. This was no suction feeder! Leviathan clearly grabbed its prey with a powerful bite, inflicting deep wounds and tearing off flesh as killer whales do, but with a skull three times bigger….

The skull is beautifully adapted to capture large, powerful prey. The snout was short and wide, allowing it to bite more strongly with its front teeth and resist the struggles of its prey. Its temporal fossa – the shallow depression on the side of the skull – was enormous and could old huge jaw-closing muscles. The bite would have been the largest of any tetrapod (the animal group that includes mammals, birds, reptiles and amphibians). And the teeth were deeply embedded in the jaw bones for each support, and interlocked to give the animal a shearing, meat-carving bite. They were also angled forwards, giving Leviathan a better grip on prey with curved bodies.

Behold Leviathan: the sperm whale that killed other whales

Who in their right mind spends money on branded game controllers? I mean, just use the ones you’ve already got. Seriously. So what if they’re pegged to the upcoming Tron sequel. Or that the design is actually pretty nice. And who cares that they actually light up like you were sitting in the Tron universe piloting a solar sailer or something. I just don’t see the point of having them sitting around, looking cool, and glowing all the time. Um.

[Via Kotaku and Gizmodo]

It’s probably unfair to judge a movie unseen by its trailer, but I’m not always a fair person. The Hollywood remake of Let the Right One In looks pretty ham-handed to me:

I’m now trying to think of a Hollywood remake that actually improved on the original, but not coming up with much. It doesn’t seem completely impossible, though.

Somewhere in the future, there is a midnight screening with my name on it:

In the aftermath of the McChrystal affair, CBS News Chief Foreign Correspondent Lara Logan slams Rolling Stone’s Michael Hastings, which then leads to a scorched-earth rebuttal from Matt Taibbi:

If I’m hearing Logan correctly, what Hastings is supposed to have done in that situation is interrupt these drunken assholes and say, “Excuse me, fellas, I know we’re all having fun and all, but you’re saying things that may not be in your best interest! As a reporter, it is my duty to inform you that you may end up looking like insubordinate douche bags in front of two million Rolling Stone readers if you don’t shut your mouths this very instant!” I mean, where did Logan go to journalism school – the Burson-Marsteller agency?

I should really buy an issue of Rolling Stone sometime. Too bad about the music coverage.

Nancy Griffin writes about the making of the “Thriller” video in Vanity Fair. There weren’t even plans to promote “Thriller” as a single at first, but as time went on Jackson wanted to stay on top:

... the Thriller campaign, concocted by the album’s brain trust—Jackson; his lawyer and closest adviser, John Branca; CBS Records chief Walter Yetnikoff; and Epic head of promotion Frank DiLeo—did not include plans for a third video, and certainly not a video of the title track, which wasn’t even going to be released as a single. “Who wants a single about monsters?” says Yetnikoff, summing up how the group felt at the time about the song’s potential.

But in June of 1983 the album, after four months as No. 1 on the Billboard 200 chart, was bumped from the top slot by the Flashdance soundtrack. It briefly regained the top position in July, then was toppled again, this time by Synchronicity, by the Police…. Jackson was upset. Obsessive about tracking his sales figures, he compared them constantly with those of his competitors in the top echelon, including Prince and Madonna. “He enjoyed being on top,” says Larry Stessel, Epic’s West Coast marketing executive, who worked closely with the star. “He reveled in it. He didn’t like it when it ended.” With his own album making history, Jackson yearned to shatter records held by the Fab Four. “It was all about the Beatles,” says Stessel. “He knew in his heart of hearts that he would never be bigger than the Beatles, but he had such tremendous respect for them, and he certainly wanted to come as close as he could.”

In the summer of ’83, Yetnikoff and Stessel answered calls at all hours of the night from Jackson. “Walter, the record isn’t No. 1 anymore,” Yetnikoff remembers Jackson saying. “What are we going to do about it?” “We’re going to go to sleep and deal with it tomorrow,” Yetnikoff told him. It was DiLeo who first mentioned the idea of making a third video, and pressed Jackson to consider the album’s title track. “It’s simple—all you’ve got to do is dance, sing, and make it scary,” DiLeo recalls telling Jackson.

Of course, as we know now, the result made history:

The A-list turned out for the premiere at the 500-seat historic Crest Theatre: Diana Ross, Warren Beatty, Prince, Eddie Murphy…. [Co-star] Ola Ray looked for Jackson before the lights went down and found him in the projection booth. He told her that she looked beautiful, but refused her entreaty to come sit in the audience. “This is your night,” he told her. “You go enjoy yourself.” Landis warmed up the audience with a new print of the Mickey Mouse cartoon “The Band Concert.” Then came “Thriller,” with its sound mix cranked up to top volume. Fourteen minutes later the crowd was on its feet, applauding and crying, “Encore! Encore!” Eddie Murphy shouted, “Show the goddamn thing again!” And they did.

I still can’t get over the fact that the video makes you wait almost ten whole minutes to hear the chorus. I recommend reading the whole article: It’s a great tribute to a phenomenal moment in pop culture history.