By now people have heard about the hoopla Joe Jackson was a part of in New York where he wrote a couple of articles defending the rights of smokers in NYC after the wide-scale ban in nightclubs and public places. It was pretty pathetic, if you ask me, because he repeatedly talked about how much he hated politics, yet he wrote a song about it.

But recently he took his “non-political” approach to the issue further by simply moving out of New York and moving to Berlin. Why Berlin? JJ calls it “…an unusually free and tolerant city.” I guess that means he can smoke there. Good for you, Joey.

In light of this info comes a video I found that has Joe Jackson giving a small tour of Berlin. I guess I found it pretty funny to see a video of a 6′2″ pasty-faced guy from Portsmouth pointing out bad East-German architecture:

From the time-killing articles at boing-boing (via NYT), comes the story of Glenn Martin and his latest invention which is just about every dude’s dream: a jetpack.

Unveiled today at the EAA AirVenture show in Oshkosh WI, this thing has got the power to lift your average-sized male to the heavens and beyond. Martin dubs it “The world’s first practical jetpack” and its developers  note that the innovative technology will allow up to 30-minute flights and a total engine life of 1,000 hours. It took them around 27 years of research and development to make it and is a huge technological leap from the 25- to 30-second flights made by the Bell Rocket Belt of the 1960s. The downside is that the company who made it has no direct competitors which means the price tag (roughly $100,000.00) will be around for a while.

Rather clunky in design but it looks pretty sweet in action. Check it out on NYT’s site. NOTE: if you see the video clip, watch closely at around 40 secs. into it. You’ll see a couple of large, bushy branches get sucked into the props for a second or two. Then just imagine showing this toy to your drunk buddy or your long-haired girlfriend who “wasn’t watching where she was standing” for a moment. Rrrrrriiiipppp!!!!

Everyone knows movie director Stanley Kubrick (1928-1999) was extremely intelligent when it came to telling a story in cinema. A documentary by Jon Ronson came out recently about Kubrick that discusses his insight and vices which is definitely worth a look for anyone who can’t get the image out of their head of the two little girls in the hotel hallway from the movie “The Shining.”

Though, there wasn’t as much discussion as I would have liked about his last project “A.I.” which was turned over to Steven Spielberg, but I think I know enough of it to not like it. Although it was originally Kubrick’s idea to start A.I. which was based off a short story, he was considered a producer for the film while he himself deemed Spielberg the director, despite all of the best visuals came from Kubrick. I don’t care for the movie because of this very reason; it is painfully clear when Kubrick’s ideas are visible and when Spielberg’s ideas come in, and it’s conflicting at best. Instead of assuming Kubrick’s visions needed to be complete Spielberg decided to mix it up for his own vanity. He puts it differently from an interview he gave a couple years back:

Don’t get me wrong, I don’t hate Spielberg. He just makes your typical modern Hollywood movie which is nothing like what Kubrick created. And in Spielberg’s defense Kubrick died while A.I. was being made so something had to be added if it was to be completed. However I think it’s still a great way to see, virtually side-by-side, why Kubrick’s work far exceeded anything that came out of Hollywood.

Below is the full documentary called “Stanley Kubrick’s Boxes” (around 50 minutes.) It starts out with Ronson talking for a few minutes about his ideas behind it but I’ll be damned if I understand him.