Fascinating example of retrograde amnesia, wherein the person who suffers a head trauma may forget events leading to the traumatic event. In the case of Formula One Driver Fernando Alonso, the memory loss amounted to a whopping 20 years!
The most fascinating thing was what he said to doctors following the crash:
“I’m Fernando, I drive go-karts and I want to be a Formula One driver,” the 33-year-old two-time Formula One champion is quoted as telling doctors.
He further went on to state that he believe it was 1995!
The scariest thing, to me, about the article is how quickly it moves from the injury and accident and to whether Mr. Alonso will drive again and how soon. Granted, it appears the retrograde amnesia was temporary and he appears to be doing much better, but still…
If I were involved in such an accident and sustained an injury severe enough to cause me to forget 20 years of my life (think about that folks…think about the type of concussion/head trauma necessary to cause this!), I’d be rethinking (no pun intended) what I do for a living and maybe moving on to something else.
Fascinating bit of history found at gizmodo.com regarding advertisements for the Commodore Hotel (first opened in 1919) and the fact that they had alarm clocks in every room!
Of course, what may blow us away technologically today is something far, far above what may have been a technological wonder to people over a century ago. And the graphics presented above clearly illustrate this.
But I have an even more interesting story!
A few years back I was visiting St. Augustine, whose founding in 1565 makes it the oldest continuously occupied and European established city in the entire United States. Many years after the founding, industrialist Henry Flagler built a hotel there. Called the Ponce De Leon Hotel and opened in 1888, the Hotel still stands today, though it no longer operates as a Hotel and is now part of the Flagler College.
When I visited the area and was on one of those informational excursions, we were told that when the Ponce De Leon Hotel opened, it catered to the very wealthy friends of Mr. Flagler and was one of the first structures (I hope my memory is correct here!) to actually have electricity.
However, because electricity was a relatively new invention at the time, it didn’t work quite as… safely as we’re accustomed. Hitting a switch to turn on, say, a light, was an iffy proposition and there was a good chance you would get shocked in the process. Naturally this was not a good thing to have happen to the upper echelon of society that were guests in the Hotel!
Flagler’s solution?
He hired staff to attend to the various switches. Whenever a guest wanted lights, the staff member would hit the switch rather than the guest him/herself and if any shock was to be experienced, it would be to the help rather than the upper crust!
Ever since (perhaps before!) Abbott & Costello bumped into Frankenstein, there has been this cinematic sub-genre which mixes horror with humor in equal doses.
Perhaps one of the most famous relatively recent successes is Evil Dead II (1987), which featured literally buckets of blood poured onto its lead character -the immortal Bruce Campbell- who, as the film moved on, became a real live cartoon character.
The New Zealand movie export Housebound exists in the same general sandbox, though the movie doesn’t feature anywhere near the amount of gore/blood or cartoonish characterization that made Evil Dead II so delightful.
But that doesn’t mean the film didn’t succeed on its own!
The lovely Morgana O’Reilly (her eyes are sooo damn expressive!) is Kylie Bucknell, a young hooligan who, at the start of the movie, attempts to steal the money in an ATM machine. Assisted by her (it turns out very quickly) completely useless boyfriend, she manages to get the loot but is unable to make her getaway. In short order she is arrested and sent before a judge for sentencing.
Because of previous arrests, all involving petty criminal activities, Kylie is sentenced to house arrest. She’s to wear an electronic monitor around her ankle and spend the next eight months at her home, a place we find she has little desire in returning to.
As it turns out, her relationship with her somewhat (!) daffy mother is very strained while her relationship with her stepfather (her father divorced and doesn’t communicate with either Kylie or her mother) is virtually nonexistent. Worse, there’s this creepy neighbor living next door and at night she hears weird sounds…
Oh, and her mother believes the house is haunted.
What works so well for Housebound is the way the characters first appear as one note constructions yet over the course of the film become multidimensional people. Kylie’s daft mother, for instance, turns into an interesting person who, while still daft, clearly means well. Her stepfather’s silence is revealed to come from a pain he carries with him. The officer in charge of monitoring Kylie’s home arrest, delightfully, is revealed to be much more than he first appears. And even the creepy neighbor next door turns out to be not quite what you think.
But what makes the movie work is the fact that on top of the interesting characterization there’s a solid story being presented. Is Kylie’s house haunted? If so -or not- what secrets does it hide? And what happened a number of years before in the house which may be the reason for all the eerie stuff happening now?
I’m being deliberately vague because I don’t want to get too deeply into spoiler territory. Suffice it to say that I recommend the film…with some minor reservations.
Housebound does take a little time to get going and Kylie’s character, at least at the beginning, is very hard to root for. However, by the time we get to the idea there may be ghosts in the house, the film starts to take flight and keeps you interested and surprised by its various reveals.
While it may not be the very best horror/comedy I’ve ever seen, there is plenty to like about Housebound. If you have the patience to give it a few minutes to get started, you’re in for some great fun.
I’ve been intrigued by the last few features starring actress Scarlett Johansson. She’s been on a roll, starring as the Black Widow in The Avengers, then playing a genuine black widow in intriguing (but to my mind ultimately flawed) Under The Skin. Despite the success of the Marvel related films, as of yet there has been no indication that a Black Widow movie was in the works. Perhaps it was because of this that Ms. Johansson decided to “take the bull by the horns” and star in her own action/adventure film.
That film, of course, is Lucy. As directed by Luc Besson, a man who has made a fair amount of pretty damn good action films and produced/co-written a truckload more, the film concerns Lucy (duh), a woman living an aimless life in Hong Kong who, at the movie’s opening, is being implored by her current squeeze to deliver a suitcase into a building.
Lucy knows something is off by her boyfriend’s request and is very reluctant to do this for him. That is, until the boyfriend handcuffs her to the case and tells her the key to unlocking it is inside that building. Not being all that terribly bright (for now) Lucy does what the boyfriend wants and enters the building with said suitcase. Turns out there are new, experimental drugs inside it and a homicidal Hong Kong crime boss with little patience waiting for them.
Poor Lucy is beaten and drugged, though her fate turns out to be better than her boyfriend’s, and awakens to find that she has been operated on and forcibly turned into a drug mule for the crime boss. Inside her is one of the bags of drugs she had brought to him.
Fortunately/Unfortunately for her, she is beaten and nearly raped (!!!) in her cell and the bag within her ruptures. It winds up giving her super-mind powers (what, no one experimented on this drug before hand?!?), and she effectively becomes a superhero out to stop the other drug carriers before her system burns out.
What many wound up objecting to when this film was released was the long ago disproved concept that humans only use 10% of their brain and that if they could use more, they might become like Gods. If accepting this well discarded premise bothers you, then seeing the mighty Morgan Freeman spout that babble for most of his scenes will undoubtedly make you wince. A lot given he’s supposed to be this highly intelligent scientist who has devoted his life to researching this nonsensical idea. Even worse, Mr. Freeman chooses to deliver his silly dialogue soooo daaaaammn sloooowwwwly that I couldn’t help but wonder why the highly evolved Lucy, on time clock as it is, didn’t just jack into his brain and suck out what little she needed (by that point in the film she was capable of this, by the way).
Unfortunately, that is only one of the film’s sins in my eyes. Luc Besson appears to be trying to make a La Femme Nikita-meets-Inception/2001: A Space Odyssey type film and the mix just didn’t work. He gives us weird scenes involving predatory animals that hit you over the head with the danger Lucy is in early on, scenes that were unnecessary as we already knew exactly the danger she was in. He goes further and gives us prehistoric scenes as well, which clues us in to our Lucy’s name being symbolically tied with the prehistoric Australopithecus Lucy.
Why exactly? I guess the prehistoric Lucy is meant to be the equivalent of the “next level” of evolution just as our modern Lucy will be for us in the present. Otherwise, it is more unnecessary symbolic overkill, though I’d be the first to admit the scene where (MILD SPOILER!) the two Lucy’s sorta/kinda meet was the emotional high point of this otherwise ridiculous film.
There, I’ve said it: The film is ridiculous.
And not in a good way.
If it isn’t clear already, let me spell it out: Lucy strives mightily to be more than “just” an action film. And while one can admire the attempt, the end result just doesn’t work for me.
Yes, there are some decent action sequences and the film looks like a million bucks and Scarlett Johansson remains an intriguing screen premise, but let’s face it: The film’s story is hard to take seriously from the get-go and with each passing minute that silliness proved harder and harder to swallow.
For several years now it seems we’re not necessarily getting significantly better computers/devices but rather the real improvements, and they’re needed, are to both the memory capacity of said devices and the battery life.
As you can see mentioned above, SanDisk is working on the memory part and they appear to have created a (gulp) 200 GB microSD card:
I wouldn’t be surprised if sometime in the future we develop memory chips with a capacity so incredibly large that we are able to put our entire movie, book, music, TV show, etc. etc. collection on one chip and accessible whenever we should need to get to it.
And when that happens, however will we ever get our faces out of our phones/pads/computers?!
