/Film this week reported something very disappointing:

For years Steven Spielberg has been developing a biopic of Abraham Lincoln, and Liam Neeson has long been attached to the title role. But the film has failed to come together for various reasons [...]. “I’m not actually playing Lincoln now,” Neeson said to GMTV. “I was attached to it for a while, but it’s now I’m past my sell-by date.”

I hope this changes, because Liam Neeson as Lincoln would be spectacular.

And for the support of this Declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes, and our sacred Honor.
— The 56 signers of the Declaration of Independence

Happy Independence Day.

Continuing my discussion on Lisle Moore’s outstanding theme for ESPN’s coverage of the World Cup, here’s a better recording-session video that showcases the music better.  If you’ve been watching ESPN’s coverage of the World Cup, you’ve heard the music.

Also, the Salt Lake Tribune wrote about the Utah-native Moore:

The theme you will hear during ESPN’s monthlong soccer coverage was written by Highland composer Lisle Moore. Moore, with the assistance of Salt Lake City’s Non-Stop Music, created the grand, inspiring music that melds African voices with a full orchestra.

Moore, a graduate of the Berklee College of Music and a Utah resident since 1994, has written music for TNT’s coverage of the NBA, and has worked with ESPN before on golf and tennis coverage. “This is a bigger deal,” said the sports buff who calls himself a die-hard Jazz fan. “This is worldwide.” [...]

When ESPN contacted him about a year ago asking for a proposal for 2010 World Cup music, Moore knew the network was looking for more than a traditional score for the event. It wanted a musical reflection of where the tournament was being held, while enticing ESPN viewers to keep watching throughout an entire month of programming. “I had to do a lot of listening on iTunes to see what I was up against,” Moore said. [...]

With the go-ahead from ESPN, Moore composed 16 variations of the theme so the music could be used in multiple ways on TV, such as during the highlights show, promos, and before and after commercial breaks.

Again, outstanding effort from Moore.  Awesome music that captures the excitement and the setting of the games.  Bravo!

(Before LOST ended, I saved the website and article I discuss below for after the show was over, but I forgot about them.  Fortunately, Instapaper did not, and now they are found again.)

An indelible part of the six seasons of LOST was the musical score provided by Academy-Award-winning composer Michael Giacchino.  With his purposely scant ensemble of strings, trombones, and percussion, he crafted a sometimes subtle, sometimes striking, and often moving musical counterpart to the mysteries and the characters of the island.

The first five seasons of music are available to purchase (hopefully the sixth will be soon, too).  But if you want a closer look at each theme and each motif Giacchino created for characters, events, and specific situations, check out the website Music by Michael Giacchino.

On the site’s special LOST page, each episode is listed with samples of the themes and motifs that episode introduced.  Every theme and motif — quite an impressive undertaking by whomever is behind the site.

Some of my favorites:

• Suspense motif
• Locke’s theme
• Life and death theme
• Rescue theme
• Jacob’s theme
• Richard Alpert’s theme
• Oceanic Six theme

Giacchino’s Oceanic Six theme is probably the finest theme he wrote for the show.  Beautiful.

Finally, if you’re interested in a little behind-the-scenes action, Maria Elena Fernandez of The Los Angeles Times blog Show Tracker featured exclusive video of a rehearsal for a LOST concert with Giacchino and his ensemble.  Below is one of the videos, but be sure to check out the rest.

Jon Stewart had a pretty good take-down of the president this week (starting around 4:39):

Whether or not there is more that the president can do, he needs to convince the American public that he is doing all that he can. Every classic story has a villain and a hero. We have a villain: BP and Big Oil. Now we need a hero. Especially if the computer models are correct (via Discovery News) or if a hurricane (or two) blow through the Gulf.

If you haven’t seen The Big Picture’s post yesterday of birds caught in the oil spill, check them out.  The pictures are as disgusting as they are heartbreaking, and thinking that they’re just the beginning is difficult.  I drive a car everyday.  This is my spill, too.  Below, a bird caked with oil:

One of my coworkers this week (thanks, Steve!) enlightened me to something deliciously interesting about the musical theme Michael Giacchino wrote for Jacob on LOST.  Here’s Jacob’s theme:

The main construct of the theme is a suspended note followed by two ascending notes.

Now here is John Williams’s theme for the Ark of the Covenant from Raiders of the Lost Ark:

The main construct of this theme is a suspended note followed by two descending notes.

Very clever.  A theme for a mystical, god-like person paying homage to a theme for a mystical, god-related object.  Nice work, Michael.

News reports must stop referring to the Gulf oil gusher as a “leak.”  Drippy faucets leak.  THIS is not a leak:

I don’t have anything profound to say, but I’ve been kicking some thoughts around in my head since Lost ended last night.  If you’ll excuse me, the show really Lost me last night.

Lost was most successful combining character-driven stories with supernatural, mythological stories — character drama coupled with science fiction.  People who grew an attachment to the series largely because of the mystery of the island and the happenings on it, though, were summarily dismissed last night.

The series finale was overflowing with character drama — and great drama at that.  The reunions all throughout the show and the flashbacks to the characters’ good times and bad were poignant reminders of how great the show was.

But Lost built itself on the magic of the island, and that magic was all but forgotten in favor of the lousy and confusing final 15 minutes.

I’m a details person, and I feel like Lost often was, too.  How many times did the numbers, either together or separate, come up?  From the car odometer to the 108-minutes (the sum of the numbers) between Desmond entering them to the table number the Losties sat at for the concert benefit in last night’s episode (table 23, Jack’s number), the numbers were woven into the details of many episodes.  What will bug me for as long as I think about this show is how many little things will never be explained.  The Hurley bird?  The outrigger shootout?  The Egyptian hieroglyphics?  Why did the light cave release the smoke monster when He Who Shall Never Get A Name went in but when Jack, Desmond, and Locke went in nothing happened?

But more importantly, what about all the things we were led to believe were important?  How about the numbers?  How did the guy at Hurley’s institution know about the numbers?  How did they end up on the hatch?  Why were they in Rousseau’s radio transmission?  What about the statue?  Why was it important?  Why was Walt special?  And what really happened to him?  Were these and other never-to-be-explained things not really important at all?

And what about the battle between good and evil?  The entire sixth season was setting up for an epic showdown.  Where was it?  So this wasn’t about good and evil?  Light and dark?  White and black?  What made Jacob “good” and Man in Black “bad”?  What would really happen if Man in Black got off the island?

But then there were those last 15 minutes.  What we learned last night was that the flash-sidewayses didn’t matter for anything.  Nothing that happened in them mattered at all — what happened, didn’t happen — which begs the question, what was the point of them?  Were they just to fill air-time?

The Lost series as a whole made me think and made me ask questions.  But last night, the Lost finale tossed out thinking and relied solely on feeling.  “The End” definitely made me feel — feel like I was cheated out of closure.  If Lost is to be viewed as a story, I’m still waiting for a real ending.

Here, though, is what I did like about “The End”:

• The opening sequence cutting back and forth between on-island and off-island characters accompanied solely by Michael Giacchino score.
• All the rest of Giacchino’s score in this episode was hands-down the best of the season, if not the last two or three seasons.  The music of this episode deserves an album release by itself.
• The nostalgia factor with the various character returns and the reunions.
• Sawyer calling Man in Black “Smokey.”
• The Target smoke detector commercial.
• The camera pull-back with Locke and Jack looking down the waterfall just like they looked down the hatch early on in the series.
• The look on Ben’s face when Jack told Hurley he would be his replacement.
• The look on Ben’s face when Hurley asked him to be his number two.
• Frank finally having a purpose.

And finally, here are some of my favorite lines from the episode:

• Frank: “In case you haven’t noticed, I’m a pilot.”
• Smokey to Jack: “You’re sort of the obvious choice, don’t you think?”
• Jack to Smokey: “You’re not John Locke.  You disrespect his memory by wearing his face.”
• Jack: “What happened, happened.”
• Kate: “I saved you a bullet.”
• Juliette: “We should get coffee sometime.”
• Jack to Desmond: “I’ll see you in another life, brother.”

So here’s to a Lost movie?

I flagged this a while ago but forgot to post it.  Jay Rosen imagines how CNN can transform — and save itself from sinking.  His ideas:

• 7 pm: Leave Jon King in prime time and rename his show Politics is Broken. It should be an outside-in show. Make it entirely about bringing into the conversation dominated by Beltway culture and Big Media people who are outsiders to Beltway culture and Big Media and who think the system is broken. No Bill Bennett, no Gloria Borger, no “Democratic strategists,” no Tucker Carlson. Do it in the name of balance. But in this case voices from the sphere of deviance balance the Washington consensus.
• 8 pm: Thunder on the Right. A news show hosted by an extremely well informed, free-thinking and rational liberal that mostly covers the conservative movement and Republican coalition… and where the majority of the guests (but not all) are right leaning. The television equivalent of the reporting Dave Wiegel does.
• 9 pm: Left Brained. Flip it. A news show hosted by an extremely well informed, free-thinking and rational conservative that mostly covers liberal thought and the tensions in the Democratic party…. and where the majority of the guests (but not all) are left leaning.
• 10 pm: Fact Check An accountability show with major crowdsourcing elements to find the dissemblers and cheaters. The week’s most outrageous lies, gimme-a-break distortions and significant misstatements with no requirement whatsoever to make it come out equal between the two parties on any given day, week, month, season, year or era. CNN’s answer to Jon Stewart.
• 11 pm: Liberty or death: World’s first news program from a libertarian perspective, with all the unpredictablity and mix-it-up moxie that libertarians at their best provide. Co-produced with Reason magazine.

This would be a network actually worth watching.

(Via The Daily Dish)

Via Discovery News, French astrophotographer (how’s that for a job title) Thierry Legault snapped a photo of Space Shuttle Atlantis just before it docked with the International Space Station — while they both traversed the sun.  Check out the full version here.

At work, I recently heard the theme music for ESPN’s coverage of the 2010 FIFA World Cup.  After listening to the music a few times, I’ve not been so impressed and so in love with a singular piece of music in a long time.  Composer Lisle Moore has created a remarkable piece of music which terrifically marries traditional Western orchestration with African-inspired rhythms and vocals to achieve a stunning and even uplifting result.

You can hear a tiny bit of the music toward the end of this video.  Although these few seconds don’t do any justice to the amazing music, it’s at least something until you can hear the full theme in a few weeks:

On a related note, here’s a very well done ESPN promo — narrated by Bono — for the World Cup.  One game changes everything.

I just watched Jon Stewart’s Sir Michael Caine interview from last Friday’s The Daily Show, and I thought the whole interview was delightful.  Michael Caine seems like a great person to have a conversation with, and the way and the length of time he directly talked with the audience was something very refreshing.  The interview is a nice, little end-of-the-day wind-down.  Enjoy:

This is old but still worth posting because Morgan Freeman is awesome.  This chart is just missing Lucius Fox.

(Nod: Roger Ebert)

When these powers combine… they’re gonna take pollution down to zero!

Well that’s the idea, at least, behind a recent study. From Wired:

A 1,550-mile-long network of offshore wind stations could provide power from Massachusetts to North Carolina with minimal threat of outages, according to a new study.

Scientists had considered offshore wind as a potentially limitless source of power. Compared to land, the ocean has stronger and more constant winds, though still not constant enough to be a primary energy supply. This study indicates that offshore wind deserves more serious consideration as an energy alternative.

“The technology’s there, the materials are there, we have the willpower to reduce carbon emissions, we have a reliable power supply that doesn’t lead to fuel shortage,” said Mark Jacobson, a civil and environmental engineer at Stanford University. “The next step is really to start implementing this on a large scale.”

There are currently no commercial offshore wind stations, though companies have started developing six wind farms along the east coast. Together, the developments could produce as much energy as a large coal or nuclear power plant.

These seems very promising.  Couple this with developing super-efficient solar panels, and, well, we might just make that green-haired captain proud.

Sporcle Alert!  Can you name the LOST characters from these limericks?  User rockgolf, who created the quiz, must have spent a good amount of time writing these.

On The Island, a man without doubts
He and Jack had their share of fall-outs
He had only one kidney
When he flew off to Sydney
But he couldn’t go on Walkabouts

A killing machine on two legs
Shoots Ben’s girl tho she kneels down & begs
But his resume’s greater
Than the rest on the freighter
‘Cuz he whips up a mean batch of eggs.

The Institute for Justice produced this nice motion graphics piece on “the abuse of civil asset forfeiture.”  The content is interesting, too.  From their site:

Civil forfeiture laws represent one of the most serious assaults on private property rights in the nation today. With civil forfeiture, police and prosecutors can seize your property and use it to fund their budgets—all without charging you with a crime. Americans are supposed to be innocent until proven guilty, but with civil forfeiture, your property is guilty until you prove it innocent—and law enforcement has a huge incentive to police for profit, not justice.

(Nod: The Daily Dish)

Calculated Risk posted this job-losses chart on Friday (click for larger version):

Have we bottomed out?

(Nod: Chart Porn)

Back when the iPad was first announced, I typed up some notes that I was planning on developing into a full post about my thoughts on the iPad.  I never wrote that post, but here are my unedited, never-before-seen (that makes this exciting, right?!) notes:

The big question amongst Apple junkies: buy an iPad or not.  My decision was easy: I don’t need one.
I don’t need a device to duplicate functionality; replace, perhaps, but not duplicate.

I think it’s cool like the iPhone is cool
It’s a scaled-up and scaled-down iPhone
Scaled-up in terms of size and ability (with its iWork apps and book reader). But scaled-down in terms of surprising lack of features: no camera for one

I don’t know, because I look at the iPad and see an iPhone.  I don’t think it changes anything about OSX that the iPhone wouldn’t already
What I DO think will change is our current model of a computer
I think this is Apple’s first step toward a fully touchscreen computer

I guess think of this as a trial balloon.  This is the future.  This device is definitely not there yet, but we’re most definitely headed there

Some time in the last week, however, I solidly swung the opposite direction.  On a personal-needs level, I don’t need an iPad.  I have an iPhone and an extremely portable laptop (MacBook Air).  The iPad will replace neither but will duplicate some functionality.  As I said in my notes, I don’t need a device to duplicate functionality.

But thinking this week about what the iPad and the thousands of apps are capable of, on a business-needs level, I must have an iPad.  Given that my role at ESPN is to develop touchscreen graphics, having an iPad makes sense for me.  The world of multi-touch is growing large, and Apple is the leader in inventing multi-touch standards.  Me being exposed to all the multi-touch possibilities with the device and the associated apps would most definitely spawn new ideas I could use to enhance ESPN’s on-air presentation.  A sure win-win situation!

I was at my local Apple Store tonight and was able to play with and experience an iPad. Walking out of the Apple Store without one was excruciatingly difficult.  Sure the gadget geek and Apple fan-boy in me wanted the device because it’s new and it’s uber-cool.  But in reality, the pragmatic, forward-thinking voice in my head realized how important having an iPad really is for me.

So here’s to the iPad.  Hopefully soon.

TUAW tells the story of the iPad home screen image:

Richard Misrach had submitted 10 photos for Apple to consider for “wallpaper” some time ago, but they had all been rejected, he told Art Info. There was no mention of the iPad at the time, but they eventually called back to say yes, they’d like to use his “Pyramid Lake (at Night)” photo.

He describes the image as “…a long night exposure where the moon is lighting up the mountains in the distance. I shot it on an 8×10 camera, so the quality is really beautiful and you can see star trails going through the sky.”

(Image: Apple.com)

/Film is reporting Tim Burton will work on a 3D, stop-motion Addams Family film—something that seems better fit for Tim Burton than a glove is fit for a hand—based on the original cartoon by Charles Addams.  So if his past films are any indication, Gomez will be voiced by Johnny Depp and Morticia by Burton’s wife, Helena Bonham Carter.  And we’ll get a Danny Elfman score instead of a Marc-Shaiman-doing-Danny-Elfman score as we did in Barry Sonnenfeld’s 1991 film (terrific score nonetheless).  Seems like this good be great.

I haven’t posted a Sporcle quiz lately, so here you go: Name the movie based on other characters the actors have played.  This is what I call “The Movie Game” and have played with people in the past.  The idea is this: An actor in movie ‘A’ and an actor in movie ‘B’ starred together in movie ‘C’.  Got that?

For example, I would say, “Edward Scissorhands and The Lord of the Rings,” and you would say, “Pirates of the Caribbean” because Johnny Depp in Edward Scissorhands and Orlando Bloom in The Lord of the Rings starred together in Pirates of the Caribbean.  It’s a fun game for when you need to pass some time (waiting, driving, etc.).

Sporcle takes this concept a little further.  Instead of giving movies, they give you character names from those movies.  This version is a little harder, I think, because if you don’t know who played the character and don’t know what movie that character is from, you’re stuck.  At least with knowing the movie (in my version), you might have an idea who was in that film.  With this version, there are enough clues that you can still probably have a shot.  Try it!

We all should have seen this one coming: The jokes about the iPad’s name continue.  The iPhone Blog posted yesterday Etsy is releasing a case for the iPad called the iMaxi.  And it has wings.

This is as creative of a case as AirMail’s folder sleeve for the MacBook Air:

Which was made in response/homage to Steve Jobs at the keynote address announcing the Air.

Well done.  Well done.

Saturday Night Live head writer Seth Meyers on Twitter yesterday confirmed on 08 May, Betty White will be hosting the show.  Fantastic!

“Dr. Linus” certainly wasn’t the most exciting or most tense episode of the series, but it was a great episode to move the story along and start giving us answers (keep reading).  Here are a few thoughts:

But something that I wanted an answer for didn’t get: How did Ben escape from the temple?  Last week we left him in an unsettled state backing away from Sayid, and this week we see Ben running through the jungle.  Did he use the secret passage, too?  If not, how did he get past smokey?

Some future action (don’t know what yet) will reset everyone’s timelines at some point before the crash of Oceanic 815.  Therefore, the flash-sideways that we see now really isn’t an alternate realty like the writers have said; instead, it’s THE timeline.  This theory of mine was backed up by:

The most revealing piece to me was when Roger Workman mentioned the Dharma Initiative and leaving the island.  That was the first mention of the island in any flash-sideways we’ve seen so far.  Something happened to change what we know of their past.  What was it?  And when was it?  We also found out that Richard Alpert was given a gift by Jacob and that presumedly Richard came to the island on the Black Rock.

Back in “The Substitute” when we were first introduced to Dr. Linus, a friend of mine and I thought that his teaching subject, European history, wasn’t an accident.  For instance, why not have Ben be a statistics teacher or a grammar teacher; European history was chosen for a reason.  Perhaps that reason was revealed in this episode.  When discussing Napoleon on Elba, Dr. Linus mentions something about Napoleon being powerless on his own island—a parallel to Ben on the LOST island.

That wasn’t the only parallel between on-island and off-island Ben.  In both story lines, Ben was tempted by Locke and was given the choice of being the Ben we’ve known for so long or a different Ben; he could choose the self-interested path to power, or he could act for the greater good.  Both on-island and off-island, he resisted temptation and chose the more righteous path.

Final thought: Walter Peck is still a dick.

Can’t wait for next week!