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Webitz - Checking out the Web from an amateur's point of view
It’s rather strange that the movie, Kingdom Come, due to be made in NZ over the next several months, is getting minimal publicity. Go to imdb.com and you can only access info if you’re a pro member. Look it up on Google and everyone who’s talking about it is telling you pretty much the same bits of information:
It’s a movie about the life of Jesus. Its director/producer is Dean Wright, a visual effects supervisor on The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe and Prince Caspian. He was visual effects producer on two Lord of the Rings films and worked on Titanic. The film's producer, Wellington company South Vineyard, confirmed yesterday the independent film would be based in Wellington. Shooting would be done in the North and South islands from early next year. A village is being built by Lake Benmore, which is to double for the Sea of Galilee.
And nothing more. No cast, no nothing. Dean Wright isn’t listed anywhere as having produced or directed any other movies, though he has a strong resume in the area of visual effects. And apparently he’s a Kiwi.
Why all the secrecy? Is it part of the publicity, a way to keep people speculating? Where are the promotional products? I can’t even find South Vineyard listed on the Net.
I was almost tempted to take up the offer of 14 days free IMDB Pro just to find out a bit more, in fact, but I didn’t want to go through all the rigmarole of putting in credit card details and then having to remember to cancel the thing before the 14 days were up.
So I can’t tell you any more than anyone else, but I’ll keep trying to find out!
Meanwhile check out this superb photo of Lake Benmore on a site called simply, West Coast.
It’s ten days since I last wrote in here. I knew it was a while, but time flies by when you having fun doing other things beside blogging (yes, there is a life outside the blog world, for those who’ve forgotten).
I was just looking up the Wikipedia entry for elliptical galaxy, and note that at the top it says: This article needs additional citations for verification.
Personally I think it needs a dictionary running alongside the text, since I keep running into words which are obviously plain as day to people in the astronomical world/universe, but which mean next to nothing to me. Certainly the writer doesn’t stint when it comes to job jargon, and kowtows to no one of a lesser brain.
Elliptical is okay, roughly, but ellipsoid? Globular clusters? Low-mass stars? Old stellar populations?
The list goes on. I haven’t even mentioned the following yet (because my quota for the week of question marks has run out). It’s a paragraph in the middle of the article:
The Hubble classification of elliptical galaxies ranges from E0 for those that are most spherical, to E7, which are long and thin in profile. It is now recognized that the vast majority of ellipticals are of middling thinness, and that the Hubble classifications are a result of the angle with which the galaxy is observed. The classification is typically determined by the ratio of the major (a) to the minor (b) axes of the galaxy's elliptical profile as follows:
Thus for a spherical galaxy with a equal to b, the number is 0. The limit is about 7, which may indicate a physical process that prevents further flattening.
Time to get a local astronomer to give me a helping hand, I suspect.
When I was a kid, I fancied being an astronomer. It seemed a cool thing to be, and I had a little star chart of the Southern skies. Well, the enthusiasm lasted for a short season, flickered, and, like a star on its last legs, eventually died. Occasionally since then I’ve picked up the interest, but life has too many other things to check out, and I’m afraid astronomy has gone the way of a few other hobbies.
For many years now I’ve managed to misspell the name of one of New Zealand’s excellent artists, a fellow by the name of Karl Maughan. I’ve misread this as Maugham (like the old writer, Somerset Maugham, whom no one seems to read anymore) and
consequently, every time someone else misspells the name in a search on Google, up pops one of my posts.
This is kind of a handy, though rather embarrassing, way of being found in search results. It’s curious how you can have a certain mental block like this about certain words. On the whole I’m a very good speller, and have been since I was first in my class at school when I was five or six (!) In fact you could say it’s one of my unique baby gifts – that is, I was given it at birth!
But even the best spellers (and I include Microsoft’s Spellchecker in this) have blind spots. One of mine, for many years, was the word, similar. Until a friend pointed it out to me (when I was in my fifties), I’d always spelt it in a way akin to ‘familiar.’ Similiar.
Fifty years of spelling it wrong. Crikey. And no one else appears to have noticed!
Here I am, sitting on my discount furniture (what other kind is there to buy?), when I come across a comment I’ve never noticed on my other site. For some reason, even though the thing is set up to send me an email whenever a comment is made, it seldom does. (Of course, having said that, it immediately did!)
picture
Anyway, this comment concerned one Andrew J Hiduke.
Andrew J Hiduke first turned up on my blog after someone went looking for him on Google, and Google picked up on a post I’d written about one Jim Hiduke, who was also known as Dr Grammar, because he had a site where he used to specialise in sorting out grammar for people. I discovered this via HitTail.com
[ Click here to read more ]
Maori Language Week has not long passed us by, but it wasn’t because of the week itself that I came across a site today called NZ History online. (I was working on things Maori in my job.) It has a page focused on 100 Maori words every New Zealander should know, and I’ve just been looking down the page to see how much I do know.
Maori words have become more commonplace in the everyday speech of most New Zealanders: we hear and read the words in the media, and people use them as part of the normal language now. Not always accurately, maybe, but at least they use them. It’s another way the two peoples of the land are coming closer, I feel
[ Click here to read more ]
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