A carnival of technology

Fed up yesterday with the obstacles between me and watching Giù la Testa on a television—I haven’t given up yet, but I need a break—I went out yesterday and bought a movie that I can actually watch: Yojimbo. I figure that I enjoy Leone’s westerns, and the first of them, Fistful of Dollars, was successfully sued for ripping off Yojimbo, so why not? As it turns out, samurai movies are exactly like spaghetti westerns, but with Japanese people. There was a dusty wind blowing across the set during the standoffs and everything. I wonder if anyone other than Leone realized this? Another thing different about Yojimbo besides being Japanese is, unlike my copies of Italian movies about the American West, Yojimbo is subtitled, so I had to look in the foreign film section instead of the more intuitive “Action.” No one complained that I wasn’t wearing a black turtleneck, so I guess I slipped one by them.

In other news, mail today has been weird. I got a postcard from the Nielsen TV company letting me know that they will be calling me in the next few days to ask me some questions about the television I watch. I suppose that if I watched or knew anything about what’s on TV or had a phone connected to my listed number, I could have had a say in what you see and think. Another arrival today was a magazine from APC, “Currents.” They probably put me on the mailing list after that the adventures with the terrible, horrible, no-good, very broken UPS earlier this year. It’s a 24-page magazine, but it strikes me as odd for several reasons. First, it’s the “Business Edition,” targeted at people with racks and data centers and very large things. These are not things that I own or control, and I wouldn’t think that replacing a broken 900VA UPS would trigger such an assumption. The other odd thing is that this obvious propaganda piece is really formatted like a magazine. There are full and half-page ads for APC products, a section with letters to the editor, and articles with topics ranging from how APC worked for some other company to figure out just how many 9’s you need at your datacenter (the chart puts me around the one 9 level). Why was this thing printed? Why was it sent to me?