From an NYT article about a new documentary focusing on the the many interpretations/analyses of Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining:

“Room 237,” the first full-length documentary by the director Rodney Ascher, examines several of the most intriguing of these theories. It’s really about the Holocaust, one interviewee says, and Mr. Kubrick’s inability to address the horrors of the Final Solution on film. No, it’s about a different genocide, that of American Indians, another says, pointing to all the tribal-theme items adorning the Overlook Hotel’s walls. A third claims it’s really Kubrick’s veiled confession that he helped NASA fake the Apollo Moon landings.

For the record, I think Kubrick did the right thing by never stating what he thought the film was supposed to “mean.” Like any good work of art, the film is open to the viewer’s interpretation.

If you have some time to kill, I highly recommend watching some of the fan-made analysis videos on YouTube. As mentioned in the Times article, Rob Ager’s videos are particularly good:

I stumbled across his spatial analysis video a while back. It’s a little further down the road toward crank-dom, but worth watching nonetheless:

Matt Yglesias, on the need for a different approach to campaign finance:

What you need to cut down on the time politicians spend fundraising isn’t less money in politics. It’s easy money. Generous public financing of the campaign of any major party nominee for Congress would ensure that even a terrible fundraiser stands of chance of getting elected. Being bad would still be a disadvantage. But today it’s a disadvantage to be ugly, stupid, inarticulate, or corrupt, and yet we still have ugly, stupid, inarticulate, and corrupt members of Congress. What we don’t have are members of Congress who can’t raise money.

This got me to thinking about campaign finance reform, which I haven’t written about much since the whole Citizens United brouhaha last year. My feeling then (and still now) was that I think it’s bad for democracy that anyone and everyone is able to pour bazillions of dollars into elections. However, I have yet to hear a solution that doesn’t cast far too wide a net.

Reading Yglesias’s post sent me down a slightly different path, though. Political campaigns cost huge amounts of money—national campaigns, certainly, but even state and local races are expensive affairs. There aren’t laws or regulations we can pass that will change that fact in any meaningful way, so people running for political office are going to need a lot of money, and it’s going to come from somewhere. We can write all the laws we want saying one group or another can’t spend in elections, but the money will still find its way into the process, because the people running for office need it.

So in that description, replace the word “money” with the word “drugs,” and you’ve basically got the argument for the legalizing drugs and eliminating the supply-side approach of prohibition-type strategies. What’s weird, though, is that I’d be willing to bet a large percentage of the people who think we need to keep money out of politics also think we ought to legalize drugs.

I tend to agree with Matt that public financing of elections would be the best solution to the problem, but I just don’t see how that’s going to happen in the current climate of anti-spending hysteria. Absent that, it really seems like disclosure of contributions is what we’re left with.

So a while back, Amazon shut off purchasing within their Kindle app for IOS, and then created their Cloud Reader. Now we hear that Facebook has been holding off releasing its iPad app and is working on an HTML5 version (I would provide a link, but it’s to TechCrunch, and I refuse to send them traffic).

Most of the analyses I’ve read of these decisions comes to the conclusion that they are mostly means of avoiding giving Apple its 30% cut on in-app purchases.

Thus, my question: why would Apple stop with in-app purchases? Why not declare they are going to take a cut of in-browser purchases as well? It’s their platform/channel, so I’m not sure how the same logic used to justify the in-app purchase tax doesn’t apply to the browser as well. The obvious response is “They would be crazy to do that,” but that doesn’t actually answer the question.

Update: It seems that the Financial Times has gone the HTML5 route as well, and to some degree of success.

An exec from Opera tosses some sour grapes regarding Amazon’s announcement today about their Silk browser:

A senior executive at Opera Software said he was “very flattered” that Amazon launched its Silk browser on Wednesday, but that Opera had already refined the concept of cloud browsing years earlier.

Seriously?

Opera is the BeOS of the browser world. Barely anyone uses it, but the few people who do use it are constantly clogging up user forums and comment threads going on about how amazingly awesome it is, how much more advanced it is than anything else out there, how it will make sandwiches for you (and tasty ones, too!), and on, and on, and on.

Great, so you refined the concept of cloud browsing five years ago. How’s that working out for you and your 1.65% market share?

Well this is annoying:

Big Y Foods, which has 61 locations in Connecticut and Massachusetts, recently became one of the latest to announce it was phasing out the self-serve lanes. Some other regional chains and major players, including some Albertsons locations, have also reduced their unstaffed lanes and added more clerks to traditional lanes.

Market studies cited by the Arlington, Va.-based Food Marketing Institute found only 16 percent of supermarket transactions in 2010 were done at self-checkout lanes in stores that provided the option. That’s down from a high of 22 percent three years ago.

Overall, people reported being much more satisfied with their supermarket experience when they used traditional cashier-staffed lanes.

Maybe I’m just a weirdo, but I vastly prefer the self-check lanes to dealing with those staffed by cashiers.

I tend to do my grocery shopping in small, frequent chunks, and that probably works better for the self-check lanes than if I had to ring out a huge shopping cart filled with stuff and then bag it all myself. Additionally, a significant part of the appeal of the self-check lanes is that there is almost always at least one totally open, whereas the cashier lanes tend to have lines.

Mostly, I think it would be a shame if store eliminate the option due to the technological aversion of some of their customers.

With a one-year-old in the house, I now watch movies in 15-20 minute segments over the course of several days. Consequently, the past few nights have gotten me about half-way through Ip Man:

So far, it’s pretty great. The opening 30ish minutes are fairly light-hearted, with Master Ip trying to balance his quiet home life with a stream of martial artists showing up on his doorstep to challenge him to duels. The story turns darker with the Japanese invasion of China. While it is relatively standard “Will the reluctant warrior emerge from retirement to defend his people?” sort of tale, it is well done.

This is a kung fu movie, though, so the story is really only a vehicle for getting us to the fighting. While I am not a connoisseur of these movies, the fighting in this one is awesome. The choreography is quite good, and the film avoids the frenetic editing that tends to plague action movies.

Ip Man is available on Netflix streaming, and definitely worth checking out.

Note: Slightly modified version of this post on Google+

WebWorkerDaily has a post about a recently released survey showing a gap between what employers say about flexible work schedules, and how the implementation of those policies is perceived by employees:

Recently, HR consultancy WorldatWork decided to take a closer look at managers’ true attitudes towards flexible working, polling 2,312 employees in six countries (Brazil, China, India, Germany, the United Kingdom and the United States) in late 2010. The results out now show a chasm between rhetoric and reality when it comes to flexible working:

While, 80 percent of respondents claimed to support family-friendly workplaces and arrangements such as remote work, more often than not their behavior didn’t match their beliefs

My personal experience is that the gap results from a failure of the overall organization to adapt to the existence of flex-work programs. Sure, we’ll let employees work from home, or set up alternate (i.e., non-9to5) schedules, but we won’t give them any support in maintaining those arrangements.

There is an implicit assumption that everyone works the same hours. Even if an you have worked out an alternate arrangement with your manager, you’re the one stuck telling people “Sorry, I’m not in the office on Mondays” when they send you a meeting request, and you end up looking the jerk who is getting something for free.

Behold the first trailer for Don Coscarelli’s John Dies At the End:

And yes, that was Angus Scrimm. I suppose it is probably a bit too much to ask that he actually be playing The Tall Man, but still… ANGUS SCRIMM.

I realize that it is generally a fool’s game to attempt a meaningful judgement of a film’s worth based solely on a trailer, but good lord—THIS MOVIE LOOKS AWESOME.

This:

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

QUESTION: In 2010, when I was deployed to Iraq, I had to lie about who I was, because I’m a gay soldier, and I didn’t want to lose my job.

My question is, under one of your presidencies, do you intend to circumvent the progress that’s been made for gay and lesbian soldiers in the military?

(END VIDEO CLIP)

(BOOING)

SANTORUM: Yeah, I — I would say, any type of sexual activity has absolutely no place in the military. And the fact that they’re making a point to include it as a provision within the military that we are going to recognize a group of people and give them a special privilege to — to — and removing “don’t ask/don’t tell” I think tries to inject social policy into the military. And the military’s job is to do one thing, and that is to defend our country.

We need to give the military, which is all-volunteer, the ability to do so in a way that is most efficient at protecting our men and women in uniform.

(APPLAUSE)

And I believe this undermines that ability.

So, Rick, if I read this correctly, you believe that active heterosexual members of the U.S. military should be prohibited from any discussion that relates to or might reveal their sexual orientation?

Just checking.

The crew over at Digby’s place is upset that the “Occupy Wall Street” protest isn’t being treated seriously by the media. According to David Atkins,

One of the challenges of the protest movement on the left is resistance to the forms of coordinated discipline that maximize the efficacy of group action.

But this also isn’t exactly the fault of the protesters. The reality is that labor orgs, Democratic clubs and central committees and other left-leaning organizations should be putting the full weight of their money, messaging and organaizing [sic] capacity into a directly anti-wall street movement. In the absence of that, particularly in New York, the action is left to a ragtag bunch of college kids and disparate activists with little in the way of media skills and organizational experience. That makes it prime fodder for very marginal groups with their own agendas to glom onto the protests for their own ends.

Yeah, or, maybe the left-leaning organization with money, messaging, and organizing capacity have decided not to waste it on a bunch of knuckleheads with drum circles and street puppets.

Look, I get that you’re pissed that the media isn’t treating this protest with the same fawning credulity it gave to the Tea Party idiots last summer. That sucks, but it’s nothing new, and that fact that the two are not treated equally doesn’t make “Hell no we won’t go”-type protests any less of a useless waste of time.