September 30th, 2006

Banana Man Captures Peeping Tom

September 30th, 2006 September 30th, 2006
Posted in Kakaiba
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Banana_man
Faster than a slippery peel, a man dressed as a giant banana caught a man filming peeing female athletes.
29-year-old Christopher Swyer was alleged to be filming female athletes on a camcorder when he got caught.
A court was told how the pervert hid in bushes and laid in wait for the women.
The women were desperate for the loo when they were running along the route of the Great North Run on Tyneside, and Swyer zoomed in on their actions as they pulled down their pants. Some 15 women were filmed.
The court asked the peeping tom to stay away from the Great North Run in the future. As for the Banana Man, like all superheroes, he quickly changed back into his ordinary middle-class clothing to flip burgers, stalk unwary female co-workers, and live in death-defying obscurity.

Hollywoodland

September 30th, 2006 September 30th, 2006
Posted in Film
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Who killed Superman?

George Reeves’ death remains one of Hollywood’s juiciest unsolved mysteries. After years spent clinging to the industry’s fringe, the performer shot to stardom in 1952 when he hopped into Superman’s red-and-blue tights for a Saturday-morning serial. The role made Reeves an overnight sensation, but also damaged any chances he had of becoming a serious actor.

Off camera, Reeves (Ben Affleck) reportedly wallowed in a directionless affair with Toni Mannix (Diane Lane), the two-timing wife of MGM executive E.J. Mannix (Bob Hoskins). Seven years after agreeing to play the Man of Steel, an unsatisfied Reeves was discovered shot to death in his Beverly Hills bedroom while his selfish fiancée, Leonore Lemmon (Robin Tunney), and a handful of strangers, partied downstairs.

What happened? Did Mannix have Reeves murdered? Could Lemmon have pulled the trigger? Or did the actor finally give in to his depression and commit suicide? During production, when the movie was titled Truth, Justice and the American Way, director Allen Coulter’s modern noir biopic of the late Superman star looked like it was going to try and solve the mystery behind the actor’s peculiar death. But the studio changed the title, opting for the generic Hollywoodland, and Coulter switched his focus away from Reeves and onto Louis Simo (Adrien Brody), the two-bit, ambulance-chasing private detective who latched onto Reeves’ case.

The decision might have been paid off, save for the fact that Simo’s pedestrian troubles are far less interesting than the ones plaguing Reeves. He’s separated from his wife (Molly Parker), sleeping with his assistant, and too drunk to notice the emotional damage he’s inflicting on his only son. Brody’s defiant attitude slices through Coulter’s glum, leaden atmosphere. His dull domestic issues aside, Brody proves adept at playing the amoral, borderline-sleazy gumshoe and almost wrings some suspense from Reeves’ unsolved murder. It’s not unheard of for a movie detective to be more interesting than the corpse he (or she) is investigating. This just isn’t one of those times.

It’s worth noting Affleck’s presence after a self-inflicted exile. The general consensus around Hollywood is that the actor’s professional career is dead, done in by a lethal combination of tabloid overexposure (not always his fault) and a string of underperforming duds (almost always his fault). So it’s morbidly appropriate that the first time we see the Oscar-winning star in Hollywoodland, he’s a bloated, blue corpse resting peacefully on the mortuary’s slab.

Things gradually improve for Big Ben. Told in golden-hued reverence, Reeves’ flashbacks involve corruption that stretches from the studio system to the front offices of the L.A.P.D. Affleck and Lane are puffed-up and stilted, presenting these figures as if the industry elite never stopped overacting in the ’40s. I’m giving Affleck the benefit of the doubt, assuming his stiff turn is because he calculated Reeves’ inabilities as a natural performer. Regardless, the Reeves-Mannix affair is bolstered by luscious nostalgia, and I longed for more scenes recounting the day-to-day happenings in America’s dream factory.

So rest easy, Bryan Singer. Even though your summer blockbuster took a beating in the press for going over budget, Superman Returns remains the more interesting of the Man of Steel movies released this year.

Hollywood

Try to break this with your heat vision.

How to Remove burn in on plasma screens

September 30th, 2006 September 30th, 2006
Posted in CJknowsHow
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Plasma screens suffer terrible burn-in if an area of the screen does not change for a long period of time. Patterns on such areas will still be noticeable when new images are displayed. For TV input, channel logos often burn into the screen. For digital signage systems, the problem can be even more severe where words can still be read months after they were originally displayed.

Steps:

1 Connect the plasma screen to a computer.
2 Increase display resolution to the maximum supported by the screen.
3 Increase the screen brightness and contrast levels to maximum.
4 Launch JScreenFix (link below).
5 Allow JScreenFix to execute for 6 hours and observe the results.
6 Repeat if necessary.

Tips:
Ensure the plasma screen is clean to observe the burn-in properly.
Many people report success with this technique but these instructions won’t work in every case.