Passion Fruit – 2010 48-hour Film Project Winner

What if you were given only 48 hours to write, shoot, edit and score a film? This is the challenging premise of the 48-Hour Film Project: "On Friday night, you get a character, a prop, a line of dialogue and a genre, all to include in your movie. 48 hours later, the movie must be complete." Local competitions occur in more than 80 cities worldwide. The 2010 winner of the 48 Hour Hampton Roads Film Project was "Passion Fruit," by Jon Abraham (Jon also happens to be a friend of mine--I wrote about his still photography here). Check Jon's winning film at the accompanying YouTube. He is now going to compete against the 80 other international 48 Hour Project city winners--10 of the films will be featured at Cannes. After watching Jon's film, I viewed the winners from some of the other cities. There is a lot of film-making experience on display. For instance, here is the St. Louis entry (the specific requirements for St. Louis were: Charles Crosby, Grocery Store Employee. Prop: a brick. Line of Dialogue: "We'll just have to wait."). Many of these entries are quite humorous. In addition to the above entries, consider this film called "Unwanted," the winner of the Portland Oregon competition.

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Our overreaction to 9/11

Ted Koppel reminds us that we have been tricked into destroying ourselves, and wonders whether we will ever have the courage and wisdom to stop:

The goal of any organized terrorist attack is to goad a vastly more powerful enemy into an excessive response. And over the past nine years, the United States has blundered into the 9/11 snare with one overreaction after another. Bin Laden deserves to be the object of our hostility, national anguish and contempt, and he deserves to be taken seriously as a canny tactician. But much of what he has achieved we have done, and continue to do, to ourselves. Bin Laden does not deserve that we, even inadvertently, fulfill so many of his unimagined dreams. It did not have to be this way. . . . Could bin Laden, in his wildest imaginings, have hoped to provoke greater chaos? It is past time to reflect on what our enemy sought, and still seeks, to accomplish -- and how we have accommodated him.

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Stop the mobile cupcake peddlers

Just when I thought that the streets were getting safe, I spotted this ominous-looking van in front of the office building where I work: Talk about attractive nuisance! Notice the growing line of docile people above, each of them helpless to resist the temptation of the active ingredient one finds in cupcakes, C12H22O11. Check out the mountain of icing towering over the cupcake pictured on the side of the van. Talk about superstimulus! "Three dollars per cupcake," said the cheerful woman working in the back of the truck. She insisted that her cupcakes were "made with love." Maybe so, but this is a product that will make a lot of people fat. 65% of Americans are overweight as it is. These cupcake trucks, if allowed to roam freely, would probably kick that percentage up to 95%. We just can't allow that to happen, but how could one stop it? My first reaction was that these cupcake trucks should be made illegal. But then I took a deep breath and pondered the long-term situation. If we made cupcakes illegal, then people would start selling them in dark alleys, and even in the proximity of schools. And then gangs would spring up to defend their respective turfs in the cupcake street wars. Teenagers would start running cupcakes for the young adult pushers. Police would be chasing cupcake dealers from one end of the city to the other. Families would be broken up as parents were caught dealing in cake. People would be hurt. Some people would die ignominious street deaths, shot to pieces by cupcake gang members bearing AK-47s. Prisons would become crammed even more than they currently are. New social programs would need to be created to deal with the cupcake eating underclass. Some kids would see their schoolwork suffer as they abandoned their homework, their shopping malls and their Wii's and, instead, sat around and obsessed about their next hit of cupcake. The attempt to enforce new anti-cupcake laws would jack up the cost of the cupcakes, and the quality of the product would diminish--disreputable dealers would cheat customers by putting less icing on top. Innocent obese people would suffer withdrawal symptoms. Cops would increasingly crack down on peddlers, and the local news would feature pallets full of seized cupcakes that would start disappearing as soon as the hit the "safe" confines of the police evidence lockers. As much as I'd like to put a stop to this new temptation, the best way to deal with these cupcake pushers is public education. We need billboards, Internet ads and television spots informing people that cupcakes do not taste good. We need to educate people that if they see one of these vans along the street, that they need to keep looking straight forward and walk on by, paying no heed to the amoral peddler within.

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My kind of house

Unlike Tony Coyle, I'm an introvert (I've tested off the charts as an introvert). Also, the pace seems to be getting too frenetic down in the city these days. My life seems to be in balance about like this hammer and ruler. You see, I'm not in a Koyaanisqatsi phase. Therefore, when I found this site, I starting thinking that I'd like to live in one of these houses, just for a month or two or three.

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