Monthly Archives: August 2005

.xxx domain hits roadblock

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Plans for a .xxx top-level domain (effectively a virtually red-light district) were supposed to be finalised by ICANN this week. But according to Good Morning Silicon Valley, they’ve hit a snag.

In a letter to the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), Michael Gallagher, assistant secretary at the Commerce Department, asked that approval of the planned domain be postponed pending further study. “The Department of Commerce has received nearly 6,000 letters and e-mails from individuals expressing concern about the impact of pornography on families and children,” Gallagher wrote. “The volume of correspondence opposed to creation of a .xxx (domain) is unprecedented. Given the extent of the negative reaction, I request that the board (provide) adequate additional time for these concerns to be voiced and addressed before any additional action takes place.” The Department of Commerce isn’t the only agency suggesting ICANN put the brakes on .xxx. ICANN’s Government Advisory Committee recommended a similar course recently as well, noting a “strong sense of discomfort” over the domain in a number of its member countries. All of this leaves ICANN in a difficult position and one for which the agency has no one to blame but itself.

Da Vinci Code film (contd.)

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Apropos my earlier observations about the film, how about this from the Lincolnshire Echo?

A Corner of Lincoln was today being transformed into a Hollywood film set as the stars of The Da Vinci Code arrived.

Film-makers have moved into Lincoln Cathedral to begin filming the highly anticipated blockbuster based on Dan Brown’s best-selling novel.

This morning big name stars Tom Hanks, Audrey Tautou and Ian McKellen were ushered into the cathedral under the tightest security to start filming.

Excitement in Lincoln is running high.

Butcher Kenny Roberts, owner of Elite Meats in Bailgate, said having the film crew visit Lincoln was a real plus for him.

“I’m doing the catering for 400 of the crew each day,” he said.

“Somebody called me last week to place an order.

“I’ll be supplying 400 individual pork pies, 300 Lincolnshire sausages and 500 rashers of bacon for the bacon sarnies. It’s a real coup for me.”

For weeks, it seems, an area of the cathedral has been slowly transformed into a section of Westminster Abbey. The scenes to be shot in the cathedral come towards the end of the film, when characters played by Tom Hanks and Audrey Tautou finally discover the tomb of Sir Isaac Newton.

Thanks to Dave Hill for the link, though what he’s doing reading the Lincolnshire Echo I cannot imagine! And can it really be the case that it takes 400 people to shoot a few scenes? No wonder Hollywood’s in trouble.

Gmail Tips

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If, like me, you find Google Mail indispensable when away from home, then you will find this collection of Gmail Tips very useful.

I now copy all my mail from my mail server to my Google account, which then becomes a highly accessible back-up archive. It’s proved unbelievably useful in the last few months.

The colour of English

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Well, here’s what it says:

Color Code is a full-color portrait of the English language.
The artwork is an interactive map of more than 33,000 words. Each word has been assigned a color based on the average color of images found by a search engine. The words are then grouped by meaning. The resulting patterns form an atlas of our lexicon.

The Da Vinci Code

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One of my kids is avidly reading Dan Brown’s best-selling book, and so we’ve been talking about it. The question of whether it had been turned into a movie came up, but none of us knew whether the film had actually been released or not. However, all were agreed that it was a certainty that Hollywood would do it.

Now comes an interesting article in today’s New York Times which sheds some light on the matter. It seems that Sony is making the film (directed by Ron Howard, who won an Oscar for A Beautiful Mind, and starring Tom Hanks), but a tight curtain of secrecy surrounds the project. Why?

Well, essentially because the central tenet of the book’s plot (which is is that Jesus had a child by Mary Magdalene and the Catholic Church has been ruthlessly trying to kill the story ever since) upsets certain powerful groups in US society. For example, the US catholic lobby and christian fundamentalists are very hostile to a movie which might lend credence to Mr Brown’s interesting conjecture. So Sony is wriggling on the horns of a dilemma. There are rumours of strong pressure on the film-makers to change the plot of the book (thereby, it seems to me, missing the entire point of the book).

Here’s how things stack up: on the one hand, there are all those Da Vinci Code fans out there (37 million copies sold, so far); on the other, all those devout Christian fanatics. Which way will Sony jump? Watch this space…

Emigration

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The view from Owey, an uninhabited island abandoned by its last residents in 1973, off the coast of Donegal. There’s something very poignant about these relics of what was once a thriving community, which once even supported a school.

Quagmire News

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From this morning’s New York Times…

The explosion that killed 14 marines in Haditha yesterday was powerful enough to flip the 25-ton amphibious assault vehicle they were riding in, in keeping with an increasingly deadly trend, American military officers say.

In recent months the roadside bombs favored by insurgents in Iraq have grown significantly in size and sophistication, the officers say, adding to their deadliness and defeating efforts to increase troops’ safety by adding armor to vehicles.

The new problems facing the military were displayed more than a week earlier, on July 23, when a huge bomb buried on a road southwest of Baghdad Airport detonated an hour before dark underneath a Humvee carrying four American soldiers.

The explosive device was constructed from a bomb weighing 500 pounds or more that was meant to be dropped from an aircraft, according to military explosives experts, and was probably Russian in origin.

The blast left a crater 6 feet deep and nearly 17 feet wide. All that remained of the armored vehicle afterward was the twisted wreckage of the front end, a photograph taken by American officers at the scene showed. The four soldiers were killed.