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viewsnake · 发表于 2006-2-10 11:10:50

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viewsnake · 发表于 2006-2-10 11:10:56

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viewsnake · 发表于 2006-2-10 11:11:00

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viewsnake · 发表于 2006-2-10 11:11:03

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viewsnake · 发表于 2006-2-10 11:11:06

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Lepapillon0311 · 发表于 2006-3-7 17:40:00

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Lepapillon0311 · 发表于 2006-6-3 14:38:49

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Lepapillon0311 · 发表于 2006-6-3 22:56:41

Interview with Former CIA Case Officer Robert BaerFormer CIA Case Officer Robert Baer on attacking Iran, oil at $300 a barrel and dealing with the smartest crazy man in the world.Q: President Bush said today that the ball is now in Iran's court, how do you think the Iranian government will react? A: The Iranians believe they are winning in Iraq. They now see themselves as an equal with the Unites States in the region. They now have no reason to agree to preconditions imposed by the United States. Iran's Ahmedinajad sees this as a unique opportunity for Shia domination in the Gulf. He does not intend to give up this chance. It's also a classic situation where he thinks that he can use an external enemy to solve problems he faces within Iran, like problems with Sunni Iranians and disenchanted students, and a divided leadership. Q. Were you surprised by Secretary Rice's announcement yesterday to change US policy and do you think it will work? A. My new book "Blow The House" down is loosely based on Ahmedinajad. Those of us who have followed his career know he is a person who has in the past and will again take on the US. He's a formidable opponent. In order to employ military force against him we definitely will need the assent of the international community, especially Russia and China, who right now do not want war. In fact, the Bush administration would prefer economic sanctions doing the job. Q. Will sanctions work? A. Probably not. If we understand Ahmedinajad, he welcomes a confrontation. He is feeling supremely confident he could win it. He wants to right Shiite grievances that go back hundreds of years. Q. What do you think will happen next? A. Look, the Israelis are coming to us and saying that they are vulnerable. Iran can hit Israel with a Shahab missile — one day armed with a nuclear warhead — and destroy Tel Aviv. The Israelis are saying that they will take care of Iran if the US does not. This would be worse than an international coalition taking care of the problem. I don't know for sure what Bush will do. But there are many smart people in DC who say that armed conflict is inevitable. As for the Arab states, they are saying the current Iranian regime has to be decapitated. An Arab head of state told me last week that Ahmedinajad has directly threatened to destroy Arab governments' oil supply and facilities in retaliation for a U.S. strike. Q. This all sounds too bad to be true& you agree with Sy Hersh then that an attack on Iran is quite possible? A. If we destroy the Iranian nuclear facilities in the Elburz mountains, Iran will disrupt oil supply in the Gulf. The US will then be face with oil as high as $300 a barrel, will need to send a lot more troops in the region, including into Iraq. This is a nightmare scenario yes, but it's not that far fetched. Again, Ahmedinajad would prefer to get what he wants without a conflict but if he can't he's ready for one. Some think he would even prefer war to peace. The same goes for Bush. In spite of the certain blowback, he does not intend to appease Iran. It's a situation almost like 1914 — no one will come out of this undamaged. Yes I do think Sy Hersh is right. Q. It sounds like you are saying the US wants peace and Iran wants war. A. Look at it this way: Iran wants to be recognized as a pre eminent power, and wants the US out of the way — out of the Middle East. It wants the destruction of Israel. These are demands of course the U.S will never accept. There's this logic of war that worries me. I worry about Ahmedinejad's sanity. When Ahmedinajad denies the holocaust its more than propaganda. He is an apocalyptic Shiite who believes in a final bloody, struggle the way some evangelical Christians do. Q. Where is the hope then? A. The only hope is in that the Iranian clerics will make Ahmedinajad stand down, maybe some saner political forces will take over. Q. Can the US help facilitate regime change in Iran? A. I cannot put a percentage on it. I'm not sure what's happening in the street in that country. And I am skeptical about how much any of the experts on Iran know what is really going on there. Ahmedinajad came out of nowhere, at least for most experts. Also, neither the experts nor the US government know precisely how much control Ahmedinajad really has over Iran. They do know that his power base in the south of the country is very strong. Through the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps he can rely on an almost parallel government. In effect, we are as blind in Iran as we were in Iraq. Q. This all sounds very bad for the U.S. A. It is. Very few foresaw we'd end up in this situation after invading Iraq. Although we should have seen that by putting the Shiites in charge of the Iraqi government we would rekindle Shiite chauvinism. Anyhow, the Shiites have never been as dominant in the region as they are now. Q. Do you think the US would alienate itself even more from the so-called Muslim world if it attacked Iran? A. Sunni look at the attack on Iraq as an attack on Sunni Islam. The Shiites would look at an attack on Iran as an attack on all Shiites — in effect we would be at war with all Muslims. The skeptics say Ahmedinajad is blufffing, he cannot influence the Arab street But what if Ahmedinajad is right? Q. If the US removed Ahmedinajad do you think there would be a power vacuum of the sort we saw in Iraq after Saddam? A. There could be civil war in Iran, but it's the same problems as with Iraq, we just don't know. In Iraq the Neocons said that they could push Iraq down a democratic path but they didn't. They gave us a civil war instead. America does not have anybody in Iran to tell us the situation on the ground, besides a few journalists going on and out. It's a black hole.

Lepapillon0311 · 发表于 2006-6-3 23:03:34

The 'Poseidon' Effect: Hollywood's Greatest DisastersA Tradition of Big-Budget, Star-Studded Earthquakes, Tidal Waves, Killer Storms and Other CatastrophesMay 9, 2006 — ?Never fear a 150-foot tidal wave if you're in Hollywood. The Poseidon will keep sailing as long as it sells, and even if you're not going down with this ship, you're still doomed … to watch the same movie again and again. You can't talk about the remake of "The Poseidon Adventure," which opens Friday, without first mentioning that it's hitting theaters less than six months after a TV remake, also called "The Poseidon Adventure," and we should also acknowledge that the 1972 classic spun off a laughably bad sequel, "Beyond the Poseidon Adventure." Oh, you can quibble with plot changes, if you must. In the NBC version last year, it was a terrorist — not a tidal wave — that caused the cruise ship to capsize. The boat still goes bottom up, and a ragtag group of passengers — led by a priest and a homeland security agent — must scale the decks of the upside-down vessel, if they are to survive. Of course, the new version, simply called "Poseidon" and starring Josh Lucas, Kurt Russell, Richard Dreyfuss and Emmy Rossum, can't help but conjure up memories of a certain iceberg-ravaged ship that counted Kate Winslet and Leonardo DiCaprio among its flotsam and jetsam. Indeed, the original "Poseidon" had a tremendous impact on Hollywood, starting a tradition for big-budget, star-studded disaster films that became the rage in the 1970s, and, while fading at points, never really went away. In subsequent films, it was never again quite so easy to recapture those magic, big-screen moments on the sinking boat, like when the grandmotherly Shelley Winters dives into a submerged deck to rescue Gene Hackman or when Ernest Borgnine — in his tattered tuxedo — cries over his dead wife. But producer Irwin Allen — the so-called master of disaster — would move on to "The Towering Inferno" (1974) and then to his killer bee saga, "The Swarm" (1978), before taking on volcanoes in "When Time Ran Out." Perhaps no Hollywood genre gets kicked around as much, but disaster films say a lot about what scares America the most — and those fears have shifted over the years. These films have also had tremendous impact on popular culture, as well as the stars who have appeared in them. Here are reflections on a few of them: "The Towering Inferno" (1974) — The world's largest building burns down on the night it opens in this Allen extravaganza. Few movies grow scarier as the years pass, but the scenes of people jumping from skyscraper windows are nearly impossible to watch without being reminded of the tragedy at the World Trade Center. Don't expect a remake any time soon. Also frightening, but in a far different way, is watching O.J. Simpson in the role that helped launch his film career. In its day, however, "Inferno" was a smash success, earning eight Academy Award nominations, including best picture, and winning in three technical categories. One more scary thought: This film earned the legendary Fred Astaire the only Oscar nomination he'd ever receive, and he doesn't even dance. "Earthquake" (1974) — While an over-emoting Charlton Heston has sent chills up many spines, in this film he's aided with a cinematic innovation — called Sensurround — that caused theater seats to shake as an earthquake reduces Los Angeles to rubble. The Sensurround technology was achieved by installing high-powered bass amplifiers on the theater floor, and the sensation was so strong when the movie premiered at Hollywood's Grauman's Chinese Theatre that it caused plaster to fall from the ceiling as it was being tested. Thank goodness the script for "Earthquake 2" was never produced. In it, stars from the first movie — including George Kennedy, Victoria Principal and Richard Roundtree — were supposed to move to San Francisco to recover from their seismic trauma. Heston — who was uneasy about having to appear in the embarrassing sequel "Beneath the Planet of the Apes" — actually insisted that his "Earthquake" character be killed off. Los Angeles again faced destruction in 1997's "Volcano" and would have been buried in molten lava if not for Tommy Lee Jones and a brainy Anne Heche. "Airport" (1970) — While Kennedy didn't star in "Earthquake 2," he had the distinction of being the only star to appear in all four "Airport" movies, helping to explore nearly every calamity an air traveler could endure, including a hijacking (the original), a midair collision ("Airport 1975"), a nose dive into the ocean ("Airport '77"), and dodging nuclear missiles at supersonic speed ("The Concorde: Airport '79"). While the series didn't actually do much to inspire air safety innovations, surely it inspired the great spoof "Airplane" (and, as Leslie Nielsen would say, don't call me Shirley.) "Twister" (1996) — Before Bill Paxton became TV's most famous polygamist on HBO's "Big Love," he was a weatherman trying to get his storm-chaser wife to sign divorce papers so he could run off with his girlfriend. Soon, the three get caught up in the "suck zone" as it's called, and old passions are stirred up. Paxton could have forecast an advancing front of weather-related disaster films. In the years to come, we'd find George Clooney and Mark Wahlberg as fishermen swallowed by a killer hurricane in "The Perfect Storm" (2000) and Dennis Quaid as a heroic climatologist in "The Day After Tomorrow." "Deep Impact" (1998) — Disaster films are usually a race against time. In this case, it was a race between two asteroid-hitting-Earth movies, both premiering in 1998. "Deep Impact" won the foot race, hitting theaters on May 8, two months ahead of "Armageddon." "Armageddon" won the more important battle by outgrossing its rival internationally by about $200 million. Perhaps moviegoers just went with the more lighthearted film, and that tone was clear in the movies' tag lines. "Deep Impact": " Heaven and Earth are about to collide." "Armageddon": "Earth. It Was Fun While It Lasted." It also might have come down to this: Whom do you want to save the planet? Bruce Willis, Billy Bob Thornton and Ben Affleck, or Robert Duvall, Tea Leoni and Elijah Wood?

Lepapillon0311 · 发表于 2006-6-3 23:06:28

Why Is New York City Called "The Big Apple"?"When and how did New York City come to be called "The Big Apple'?" This is by far the most frequently asked question—and the most hotly debated—to reach our New York History Hotline. There are actually several answers (nothing about New York City is simple, after all). All are explained below, with the last word going, appropriately enough, to SNYCH’s own Joe Zito, one of this burg’s finest purveyors of high-quality urban history. A veteran both of New York City’s inimitable press corps and its police department, Joe—happily for us—is able to provide authoritative first-hand testimony on this topic. Read on! Various accounts have traced the “Big Apple” expression to Depression-Era sidewalk apple vendors, a Harlem night club, and a popular 1930s dance known as the “Big Apple.” One fanciful version even links the name with a notorious 19th-century procuress! In fact, it was the jazz musicians of the 1930s and ‘40s who put the phrase into more or less general circulation. If a jazzman circa 1940 told you he had a gig in the “Big Apple,” you knew he had an engagement to play in the most coveted venue of all, Manhattan, where the audience was the biggest, hippest, and most appreciative in the country. The older generation of jazzmen specifically credit Fletcher Henderson, one of the greatest of the early Big Band leaders and arrangers, with popularizing it, but such things are probably impossible to document. Be that as it may, the ultimate source actually was not the jazz world, but the racetrack. As Damon Runyon (among many others) cheerfully pointed out, New York in those days offered a betting man a lot of places to go broke. There were no fewer than four major tracks nearby, and it required no fewer than three racing journals to cover such a lively scene—The Daily Racing Form (which still survives on newsstands today) and The Running Horse and The New York Morning Telegraph (which do not)—and the ultimate credit for marrying New York to its durable catchphrase goes to columnist John J. FitzGerald, who wrote for the Telegraph for over 20 years. Joe Zito, who joined the paper as a young man some 70-plus years ago, recently reminisced about Jack FitzGerald and his times. In FitzGerald’s honor (and due largely to the strenuous efforts of attorney-etymologist Barry Popick, who, like the columnist, had migrated to NYC from upstate New York) a street sign reading “Big Apple Corner” was installed at Broadway and West 54th Street in 1997, near the hotel where FitzGerald died in poverty in 1963—although a location near the old Telegraph office might arguably have been a happier spot for it. Despite its turf-related origins, by the 1930s and ’40s, the phrase had become firmly linked to the city’s jazz scene. “Big Apple” was the name both of a popular night club at West 135th Street and Seventh Avenue in Harlem and a jitterbug-style group dance that originated in the South, became a huge phenomenon at Harlem’s great Savoy Ballroom and rapidly spread across the country. (Neat cultural footnote: the great African-American cinema pioneer Oscar Micheaux liked to use the Big Apple as a venue for occasional screenings of his latest feature film or documentary.) A film short called The Big Apple came out in 1938, with an all- Black cast featuring Herbert “Whitey” White’s Lindy Hoppers, Harlem’s top ballroom dancers in the Swing Era. In a book published the same year, bandleader Cab Calloway used the phrase "Big Apple" to mean "the big town, the main stem, Harlem." Anyone who loved the city would have readily agreed with Jack FitzGerald: “There's only one Big Apple. That's New York." The term had grown stale and was in fact generally forgotten by the 1970s. Then Charles Gillett, head of the New York Convention & Visitors Bureau, got the idea of reviving it. The agency was desperately trying to attract tourists to the town Mayor John Lindsay had dubbed “Fun City,” but which had become better-known for its blackouts, strikes, street crime and occasional riots. What could be a more wholesome symbol of renewal than a plump red apple? The city's industrial-strength “I ? NY” campaign was launched toward the end of the Lindsay administration in 1971, complete with a cheerful Big Apple logo in innumerable forms (lapel pins, buttons, bumper stickers, refrigerator magnets, shopping bags, ashtrays, ties, tie tacks, “Big Apple” T-shirts, etc.). Apparently Gillett was on to something, because at this writing, over 35 years later, the campaign he launched—it won him a Tourism Achievement award in 1994, by the way—is still going strong.

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