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You are here: Home / Music / Late Night Open Thread: Back to the “Real World”, One Step At A Time

Late Night Open Thread: Back to the “Real World”, One Step At A Time

by Anne Laurie|  December 26, 201512:08 am| 20 Comments

This post is in: Music, Open Threads, Decline and Fall

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(h/t Yutsano)

AGE 7, 1948— I SAT ON SANTA'S LAP TOLD HIM ALL I WANT FOR CHRISTMAS THIS YEAR IS TO KNOW IF THE ELVES HAVE UNIONIZED

— Bernie Thoughts (@berniethoughts) December 24, 2015

December Heat Tricks Flowers Into Putting On Spring Display https://t.co/KN5IHfGPuN @nytimes pic.twitter.com/a6EulvDu18

— Dennis Dimick (@ddimick) December 25, 2015

"In the Nativity play, the role of the innkeeper who turns away Mary and Joseph will be played by Donnie Trump." https://t.co/sPpzOwOzdk

— Daniel Drezner (@dandrezner) December 25, 2015


Wear a helmet: All those Christmas drones are falling out of the sky https://t.co/6SSCVAcCEV

— Washington Post (@washingtonpost) December 25, 2015

It's a huge oversight that none of the academic articles about the deadweight loss of Christmas even mention wrapping presents.

— Justin Wolfers (@JustinWolfers) December 25, 2015

The way economists write about Christmas gets us pretty close to what's wrong with economics as a discipline. https://t.co/N2BD8CsGCB

— Jeet Heer (@HeerJeet) December 25, 2015

American Krampus. pic.twitter.com/VkOLV3uuXM

— Bob Schooley (@Rschooley) December 25, 2015

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Reader Interactions

20Comments

  1. 1.

    Ninedragonspot

    December 26, 2015 at 12:25 am

    Since many folk in the previous thread were discussing their Chinese Xmas dinners, I’ll post here a special, 40-second Beijing opera called “Jin Gou Bei”…

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lPMiYenPOM4

  2. 2.

    Ridnik Chrome

    December 26, 2015 at 12:36 am

    Just saw the new Star Wars, and it was so amazing that after I left the theater I walked from Union Square all the way to Grand Central Station in order to come back down to earth. And I’m someone who only ever saw the very first Star Wars, back when it came out…

  3. 3.

    maeve

    December 26, 2015 at 12:41 am

    Happy St. Stephen’s Day to all (depending on your time zone)

    Music for the day:

    The Chieftans & Elvis Costello – St Stephen’s Day Murders

  4. 4.

    redshirt

    December 26, 2015 at 12:42 am

    Ah, right now is one of my favorite times of the year.

    The absolute longest time till Christmas.

  5. 5.

    Felonius Monk

    December 26, 2015 at 12:47 am

    Well, now that THAT is over, it’s time for THIS.

  6. 6.

    Suzanne

    December 26, 2015 at 2:29 am

    Just got home from seeing “The Big Short”. Good movie, though upsetting, of course. Had that shaky camera work that makes me feel like I’m gonna hurl. Back is still hurting from falling. God. I’m old.

    Cleaning out my pantry tomorrow. WOOT.

  7. 7.

    NotMax

    December 26, 2015 at 2:39 am

    Savoring seconds of what turned out to be the best meal of the year, accompanied by a more than good bottle of wine.

    Scintillatingly succulent.

  8. 8.

    BillinGlendaleCA

    December 26, 2015 at 3:04 am

    @Suzanne:

    God. I’m old.

    Ah, get back to me about that old stuff when you get to be my age, or better yet efgoldman’s age. Jebus, do I need to load or give you my walker?

  9. 9.

    Tissue Thin Pseudonym

    December 26, 2015 at 3:27 am

    The part of this job I hate the most is having to call someone at 2am to tell them that an alarm has gone off that he needs to come in and take a look at. That goes double if it’s an alarm that we both know is just a sensor error because it’s gone off four times in the last week; triple if it’s Terry Wilson that I have to call out.

  10. 10.

    mclaren

    December 26, 2015 at 5:35 am

    @Ridnik Chrome:
    “Just saw the new Star Wars and it was so amazing…”
    You misspelled shitty as “a-m-a-z-i-n-g.”

  11. 11.

    Thoughtful David

    December 26, 2015 at 8:37 am

    @Suzanne:

    that shaky camera work that makes me feel like I’m gonna hurl.

    Yeah, I don’t get this technique. It’s totally annoying and very distracting, and all the rage. I haven’t figured it out, but I’m guessing that directors think it makes their film look “less refined” and therefore “more realistic.” But it doesn’t. Don’ they realize that to a person as you walk around, although your head moves and maybe even jerks around, to you the world looks stationary. It never looks like it’s jiggling or bouncing, even if you’re running up stairs.

    To get the world to jiggle or bounce, you have to work at it. Little kids discover how to do it, by placing their chin on the window frame of a moving car, but to the rest of us, the world doesn’t seem to bounce or jerk.

    In a movie or show where the camera is bouncing around it is just a distraction that takes your mind away from the story and starts making you think about camera technique. Which out to be the LAST thing a director wants you to be thinking about.

  12. 12.

    debbie

    December 26, 2015 at 8:44 am

    @Thoughtful David:

    I could only listen to the first season of Homicide on the Streets. They really overdid the shakiness.

  13. 13.

    The Pale Scot

    December 26, 2015 at 9:39 am

    I logged into BBC iPlayer for the first time in a while and have discovered something wonderful;

    A new episode of Sherlock is playing on New Year’s Day, And the 4th season of Luther started up a couple of weeks ago.

    I thought I Idris was done with Luther

  14. 14.

    Doug R

    December 26, 2015 at 10:50 am

    @Thoughtful David: Your brain actually automatically compensates for your head and eye motions which is one reason the world looks so shakey when you’re impaired. J j Abrams has a technique where he shakes the camera in opposition to his camera operator. The natural reaction to the external forces makes the motion more realistic and less distracting.

  15. 15.

    Doug R

    December 26, 2015 at 10:55 am

    @mclaren: I think you and my wife saw the same picture. I don’t know what you guys were expecting, the first star wars was a fun space opera, I know I wasn’t expecting citizen Kane.

  16. 16.

    raven

    December 26, 2015 at 11:33 am

    Now I haven’t gotten sick in 3.5 hours!

  17. 17.

    Matt McIrvin

    December 26, 2015 at 12:37 pm

    @Thoughtful David: I think what they’re trying to replicate is not the experience of being on the scene, but the experience of watching a documentary or investigative news report shot with a shaky hand-held camera. A different type of artificial framing.

  18. 18.

    Matt McIrvin

    December 26, 2015 at 12:42 pm

    …I remember thinking the same sort of thing when I saw the opening miniseries of the revived Battlestar Galactica: the space shots in that made a lot of use of ostentatiously jerky zooming, finite depth of field and slightly delayed changes in focal plane, as if the scene were being shot by a camera operator who was being surprised by the action and winging it. Some of that had been done earlier in a couple of unusual episodes of Babylon 5, but there it had a specific diegetic purpose: those episodes were framed as news reports on the scene, and most of the space-battle scenes in other episodes of the show weren’t rendered that way. On Battlestar Galactica they were just doing it all the time, and I kept wondering whose fly-on-the-wall perspective the rendering was trying so hard to give us. There wasn’t any story reason for it other than to create a sense of urgency.

  19. 19.

    Zinsky

    December 26, 2015 at 5:28 pm

    @NotMax: Wow! Scintillatingly succulent, huh? Mine was merely “extraordinarily ethereal “.

  20. 20.

    Fred

    December 27, 2015 at 9:46 am

    Santa to Bernie: Yeah the little Commies want more cookies and milk so screw ’em. We’re doing a lock out and me and Rudolf are flyin’ in scabs from Romania. Let the little ingrates eat snow!

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