Have you seen this robot?

Why Man Creates

One of my all-time favorites -- the edifice sequence from Saul Bass' "Why Man Creates."

In the Greek philosophy sequence, somebody asks the question "Who shall rule the state?" People pop out with various answers. Then a chorus says, "The people." Some guy asks "You mean, all the people?" at 1:24, some other guy stabs him.

Wall Street 2: Money Never Sleeps

Oliver Stone is still a titan of a filmmaker. Wall Street 2 rocks. It's a sprawling story, but it held my interest. The Gordan Gekko character screw people over, but finds redemption in the end. That's OK by me. If villains eternally stay villains, it's not a story, it's an allegory. As Anthony Burgess once said, people change. Novels are based on that fact. (And movies too, as I once said.)

Stone's movie puts in a serious plug for fusion power. The LA Times ripped this as an "informercial," but screw them. Fusion needs good press. The last movie that mentioned it was Spider Man II -- as the megalomaniac dream of Doc. Ock.

If we'd spent the TRILLION DOLLARS AND COUNTING we've spent on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan to develop commercial fusion power, we'd be riding high on a second industrial revolution.

But I digress.

Fugate's 53rd Law

Some geniuses are assholes. It does not follow that acting like asshole makes you a genius.

Happy Birthday June Foray!

Props to the woman behind the voice behind Rocky the Flying Squirrel, Cindy Lou Who and Tweety Bird's Granny.

Disgruntled physicist

"Disgruntled" and "physicist" are words you don't want to read in the same sentence.

The same applies to "Venezuela" and "nuclear bomb."

From NPR --

A former scientist at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, who left following a dispute over funding, and his wife — who also worked at the facility — face federal charges in a sting operation built on the scientist's alleged offer to help build Venezuela a nuclear bomb.

Pedro Leonardo Mascheroni, 75, and Marjorie Roxby Mascheroni, 67, were charged in a 22-count indictment returned Thursday in a federal court in Albuquerque, N.M.

NPR's Carrie Johnson tells All Things Considered co-host Melissa Block that Pedro Mascheroni worked in a secret unit called the X Division. The scientist held a Q-level security clearance that allowed him access to certain classified information, including "restricted data."

"He got into a big fight with the Department of Energy after speaking out over its failure to fund a project that he highly supported," Johnson says. "The government wound up investigating him and yanked his security clearance in 1987. He ultimately left and filed a lawsuit.

"Sources tell me he kept on being disgruntled all these years," she says.

Fugate's 113th Law

If you crack a joke about Eskimos, Nanook of the North will be sitting in the booth behind you holding a harpoon.