Son of Jean Painleve

Who is Geoffrey Burbidge?

Anybody taking psych 101 accompanied by Gleitman's textbook was bound to discover the mystery of Louis Wain, a prolific illustrator of Victorian pet-themed postcards whose descent into madness was well documented as Wain never gave up his brush as sanity departed. These are some pre-slide-into-madness images.

Before Jacques Cousteau, Microcosmos and BBC's Blue Planet, there was Jean Painlevé, whose strange, hypnotic shorts explored sea and land creatures. His commentary is unbelievably divergent, too bad these are un-subtitled.

Resolutely simplistic, seemingly complex, Hurt Locker bears the mark of all mediocre films, its tensions disappear on second viewing. Without the perceptive distortions we share with Renner's central character, all cheap gotchas that usually are tools of the horror film, the film is merely a stylized, largely static war drama with a component fate: the tension of defusing catastrophic bombs. Interspersed is the paranoia of cultural confusion and divided languages. The technical nightmares of urban warfare in a city only temporarily conquered are never fully realized: the plot has to depart the city to duel with ultra-long lenses where its one Iraq-conflict-signature-jarhead-moment, the sniper exchange and outcome, falls this side of flat.  For all the supposed technical charms of Bigelow's macho bravo eye, it still feels more transvestite than transcendant. Moments like the boy's reappearance and the confused home invasion have contrivances that weigh sentimental rather than paint the film with radical shifts in wartime paradox. Generals, medics, buddies, even cameos like Fiennes and Pearce are modulated into a gruff anyspeak.  Its mediocrity rises full pitch as the film ends with his child's jack-in-the-box routine, a metaphor so leaden, Bigelow may as well be saying: do you get it? The way she displays data is glaring, his box of denatured devices, what is being left in the transitions, nothing. Fear? Do we really obtain a sense of the streets?  Culture is still awaiting this war's watershed flick: the Deer Hunter-Apocalypse Now-Full Metal Jacket lens. Where plot is only a decoy to obtain the visual epic.

Ancient temple found under Lake Titicaca, estimated 1000-1500 years old.

2004: A man kills his wife and stepson, leaves behind certain disturbing things, among them a suicide note and this undeciphered page

2006: The note finds its way to a cryptographer.

The link to the story, without a decryption.