Got to be careful when you toss words like Fascism around:

PARIS, France (Hollywood Reporter) — One of France’s leading independent cinema groups has refused to program Mel Gibson’s “The Passion of the Christ,” which it has branded “fascist propaganda.”

“I refused to program the film in my network of theaters,” MK2 president Marin Karmitz said in a written statement forwarded to The Hollywood Reporter. “I have always fought against fascism, notably through my exhibition activity. For me, ‘Passion’ is a film of fascist propaganda.”

Uh, yeah, right. I wonder what he will show in his “exhibition activity”? Sounds like he needs to read the definition of the word.(via CNN, Reuters)

The kids and I picked up a fun DVD at Circuit City yesterday that brought back a lot of memories for me, the complete School House Rock. While the kids have never seen any of the famous 5 minute shorts that used to play on Saturday mornings between cartoons, they thought they were pretty cool. And they’ve been going around all day today singing about “E-lec-tri-city” and how they just “Unpacked their Adjectives.”

They’re all here, all 46 original songs. Cynthia and I got a kick out of “I’m just a Bill”, “The Preamble”, and other favorites. Who could forget “Conjunction Junction,” “Verb: That’s What’s Happening,” and one of my faves, “Rufus Xavier Sarsaparilla”? True greatness.

The funny thing is quite a lot of these couldn’t safely air on modern television, with the PC movement and all. Heaven forbid we should talk about such concepts as winning, male and female roles, etc. I’d hate to see what an updated version of these classics would look like.

Interesting thing: there’s a brand-new SHR song included in the set. What subject did they choose? Why, the electoral college, of course! My, how timely.

There’s a whole second disc in the set that goes behind the scenes with info and interviews with the series creators. I haven’t gotten to that disc yet, but it looks to be loaded with interesting stuff. One note I found on the website:

Series co-creator George Newall recalls: “It all started in 1972 on a horseback ride in Wyoming where my boss, David McCall of McCaffrey & McCall Advertising, heard his young son, who couldn’t begin to remember multiplication tables, singing Rolling Stones and Grateful Dead lyrics. When Dave got back to New York, he commissioned musician Bob Dorough to set the multiplication tables to rock music. Bob responded with “Three is a Magic Number.” The lyrics were so visual that my partner, Tom Yohe, drew a storyboard and met with Michael Eisner, who was then ABC’s Vice President of Children’s Programming. On the recommendation of the legendary animator, Chuck Jones, Eisner bought it on the spot. All it took was that one meeting. And that first song is still my favorite.”

That’s right, none other than Michael Eisner, now head of Disney (who owns ABC), was the head of Children’s Programming and bought the original series.

Great series of shorts that are really catchy. As I told the kids last night, “Watch out! You might just learn something!”

By the way, you can go here to listen to a sample of the songs.

Here’s a neat little site, the Guidebook, or Graphical User Interface Gallery. The attempt here is to catalog screenshots of every major (and many minor) GUI-based operating system. There’s still plenty of holes (most notably missing is MacOS 9 and MacOS X), but the author is off to a good start.

And yes, I know it’s been a while since I posted. I’m out of town, although that’s no particular excuse. I’m trying to catch up now. See, I updated the books on the right side…

I’m in San Antonio, recording voiceover and video for a training series we’re doing for the US Courts. Long hours in the sound booth, woo.

There’s a lot going on, both at work and at home. And in the world. Hopefully I’ll get a chance to comment on some of it soon.

Intriguing site: True Desktop Project

People submit a digital picture of their workspace. Interesting to see the desks behind some of the popular websites on the ‘net.

In the mood for a little 80’s nostalgia? Here’s a page with a dozen or so flash implementations of arcade games from the early 80’s. Space Invaders, Pac-Man, Pong, Asteroids, Frogger, Moon Patrol… ah, the days of 8-bit arcade goodness.

A reader of this post pointed me at a Griffin Technologies‘ newly announced RadioSHARK, a USB based radio reception device and software bundle that allows you to schedule aural recordings off-air from AM or FM, thereby allowing you to timeshift radio, ala TiVo. Very nifty, and the price isn’t exorbitant. I’ve purchased Griffin stuff in the past, and have always been very pleased.

From what I’ve seen on the product page, it records straight to AIFF, which makes sense for a first-generation product, but is quite expensive from a disk-space perspective. Hopefully a software upgrade will encode to MP3 or MP4 on the fly.

It would be interesting to see how scriptable the software might be, or how hard it would be to hack together a quick plug-in to allow the recorded programs to be streamed. It would be great to hook this up permanently to a Mac at the house, and then stream Rush to my Mac at work or where ever I happen to be.

Might just have to place a pre-order for this gadget.