Where the magic happens

Hello boys and girls and welcome to another installment of Eccentric Spheres!

Today we're going to the land of magic and make-believe, or Hollywood to exact. I have a hankering for odd movie trivia, so that's the main feature of tonight's performance.

We'll star off with a true classic: Gone with the Wind.

They originally shot half a million feet of film (152400 meters), and then edited it down to 20000 feet. (6096 meters). Since it's 238 minutes long that means that every minute is about 84 feet long. Had they left it uncut (impossible, I know) Gone with the Wind would have been 5952 minutes long, or 99 hours, in other words just over four days!

As anyone who has read the book knows (I haven't by the way) Scarlett O'Hara has green eyes. Now Vivien Leigh has blue eyes. So what? Well, the GwtW was produced by David O. Selznick, who was a stickler for details. Sure contacts did exist back then, but Vivien couldn't wear them. So they did all they could to reflect green into her face, and when that wasn't enough, they recolored her eyes on the final print, by hand. By hand! They went through 20000 feet of film with a pen in hand painstakingly recoloring her eyes. I'm getting a cramp just writing this...

Keep the above mentioned fact in mind. Now consider that 1400 actresses were interviewed for the role, and 400 got as far as doing readings. And still they ended up with a blue eyed girl.

OK, enough with the romantic drama. Time for some crime!

Most of you have probably seen The Godfather, right? Even if you haven't, you have most likely heard of the famous horse head scene right?

In a nutshell, a big time movie producer, Jack Woltz (based on Warner chief Jack L. Warner) refuses to do a favor for Don Corleone, so one morning, he wakes up with the severed head of his favorite horse in his bed.

That was a real horse head. A real, severed head.

They practiced with dummies, but got a real head from a dog food factory. Eewwwwww.

Finally, did you know an X-rated film has won an Oscar for Best Picture? It's true, but not the way you think. It's not a porn film so good it got an Oscar. You would have heard about that!

No, it's Midnight Cowboy, starring Dustin Hoffman and Jon Voight.

Back when the MPAA came up with the movie ratings system, the G, PG, PG-13 (invented later), R and X, they intended for X to stand for Mature Audiences Only. Sure sex is that, but Midnight Cowboy is a drama about male prostitution, poverty and the mean streets. It's by no means a skin flick. The MPAA however made a huge mistake. They forgot to copyright the X rating, and in no time, every porn producer out there used it so sell their films.

And when one X wasn't enough, they added a couple more. That's where the “XXX stands for hardcore sex” thing comes from.

So find yourself a good movie, settle down and wait out the rest of the winter.

See you next spring! (That's next Monday in case you didn't know).

It's only a theory, right?

Conspiracy Theory.

How do these two words make you react? Do you get a creepy feeling that everything is not quite right? Or do you automatically scoff and set your brain to disbelief mode?

Me, I fall somewhere in the middle. I do love a good conspiracy. They fall in between compelling fiction and a whodunit.

So this week on Eccentric Spheres I'm going to talk conspiracies. They'll range from possible to what-are-you-drinking-please-stop-it's-clearly-melting-your-brain. I'll even add one that's confirmed.

First up is Paul is dead.

This theory states that Paul McCartney actually died in 1967 in a car crash late at night following an argument with John Lennon. Of course the band and the label, and some say MI6, needed the success of the Beatles to continue. They feared this would be impossible without Paul, so they found a lookalike, gave him some minor reconstructive surgery, and voila, Paul is alive and well.

This of course seems pretty damn far fetched, so to substantiate the claim, believers say the band – wracked by guilt - placed tons of clues on their album covers.

Now I do not believe this for an instant. But the clues do add up. At least if you look at the m selectively. If you want to know more about this theory, here's a film about it. It's subtitled in Spanish, and you want to ignore the intro. It's supposed to be a testimony by George Harrison (it isn't) but it does list the clues very well.

Next up is the Moon landing.

Some claim we never went to the moon, and that the whole thing was shot in a studio by no other than Stanley Kubrick. There tons of books, documentaries etc. about this, some more compelling than others. Some even say Kubrick hid clues in The Shining. Personally I think it's pretty ridiculous. After all, faking the whole thing would have been as expensive as just going.

But there's a fun twist here. Some people claim we went, but that the U.S government still had Kubrick fake the footage, in order to hide what we found there. Namely aliens. Mull on that. If you want to know more, go to YouTube and start watching.

Naturally no conspiracy list can be complete without the JFK assassination.

I'm not going to go too deeply into this, since like the moon landing, it's very well known, and you already know the gist of it.

I will say however, that I've always been extremely skeptical about this kettle of fish. The odd way the investigation was handled, witnesses hushed up and threatened etc.

The kicker is that in 1976 the United States House of Representatives Select Committee on Assassinations was established, and in 1978, they concluded that Oswald could not have acted alone, which by definition makes it a conspiracy. They offered no further suggestions of people involved, and neither will I.

As we are nearing the end, I'll summarize a bit. In the field of really wacky theories, we have Vaccinations control your mind, Saddam Hussein owned a Stargate and the Catholic church assassinated President Lincoln (or the Rothshilds did it ).

But I did promise you a proven conspiracy theory didn't I? Well here you go: The Gulf of Tonkin.

The famous incident that propelled the U.S. Fully into the Vietnam War was a lie. This has been admitted, but the NSA didn't lie to start the war, but to cover up their mistake. Kinda makes you think doesn't it?

See you all next week. Unless your all hiding under the bed so that THEY can't find you.

True Meanings

This past weekend I was fortunate enough to be invited to participate in an Elder Scrolls Online beta test.

As soon as I saw my invite I thought to myself “Aha, this will make for an interesting blog post”. Unfortunately the NDA is still in effect, and since I'm not fluent in legalese, I decided to err on the side of caution and say the only thing I know I'm allowed to say about the game:

I like it!

That's all I'm going to say to avoid any misunderstandings. But to leave this post at that wouldn't be very interesting, so I decided to mull over a couple of interesting other potential misunderstandings while I'm on the subject.

First up is a word that's often misused due to a slight misunderstanding. Evacuate. Way too often the word is used like this: The people in the boat were evacuated. This is wrong. Very wrong. The sentence should read: The boat was evacuated. You see, to evacuate is to empty something out, and to empty out people, is to give them enemas.

You can evacuate almost anything, boats, elevators, houses etc, and in so doing, the people do leave the premises. You just don't want to the fire brigade to evacuate you in the middle of a fire...

Next up is a common and fairly well known misunderstanding. Big Ben. This is not the name of the clock tower, but the name of the great bell inside the tower. The tower itself was up until 2012 simply called... the clock tower. Or the Parliament Tower.

During the jubilee in 2012 however, it was renamed The Elizabeth Tower in honor of Queen Elizabeth II.

Still most people will continue to call the whole shebang Big Ben, and to be fair, who cares? As long as everyone knows what their talking about.

And now I'm going to end with a tasty treat. How many of you have ever eaten a Danish? No not a person from Denmark, but the pastry.

Interestingly enough, they're not really Danish at all, but Austrian, Viennese in fact. But they quickly became very popular in the Nordic countries, and here they are in fact called wienerbröd (Viennese bread). They're known in the English speaking world as danish because they were made popular by Danish immigrant bakers in the early 20^th century. So now you know what you're eating when you are gobbling down those tasty flaky treats covered in jam.

That's it for this week. I hope have a good one!

Elder Scrolls Online

I have been aware of Elder Scrolls Online (ESO) for some time now. But when it comes to money, I like to be cautious. Games are expensive if you buy them at or just after release, so unless you like wasting cash, it pays off to do some research before buying.

Now with ESO, I've been doubly apprehensive. I love the Elder Scrolls, even though I got to the party late, as it were. I missed Morrowind, not to mention the ones before that, so I jumped on the train in Oblivion town. This was in the days before Steam, so I have no idea how long I played it, but it was a long time. If I had to guess, I'd say about 400 hours or so, and Skyrim is now at the 490 hour mark. I'm not saying this to brag, but to illustrate my caution regarding ESO.

You see, it's always scary when a game line you love makes the transition to an MMO. Many features can't be translated into the MMO-sphere, the game stops being all about your character, mechanics change, I could go on but I'm sure you get the idea. I've been terrified that ESO would turn out to be just another World of Warcraft clone.

Yesterday however, I sat down and watched some development videos, and I was blown away! Bethesda Softworks have done an excellent job. Unlike The Old Republic, I'm not in the beta for ESO, so naturally I have no hard, first hand facts. Besides if I did, I couldn't blog about it. The NDA is still in effect. The following observations are all based on the videos Bethesda has released.

One of the core points in both Oblivion an Skyrim is the freedom to pick up a weapon and learn how to use it through fighting. The same goes for all skills, spells and gear. If you want to play a necromancer, the games don't serve you the skills on a plate. You have to go out and figure out how to be the best necromancer you can be.

Now, MMO's are notoriously rigid in their classes in order to keep everything balanced and “fair” (and they never are). But it seems ESO will grant you the freedom to go the way you want when you want.

Sure there are four starting classes, but they are there to help you in the direction you want to go. Not to stop you from doing something, but to help you.

You could start as an assassin, train up some spells, then strap on heavy armor and become a battlemage, eventually transitioning into a full time mage, all on one character. This is revolutionary in this bloggers experience.

How many times have you been playing a character in an MMO, seen another player, and thought “Man, I wish I could do that, but I don't feel like re-rolling”? I have, and more than once. Of course in my case, I'm an Altoholic, so I love rolling new characters anyway. But this is still an awesome feature.

And speaking of character creation, take a look at the creation options. An incredible amount of alternatives, including height differences, separate hip and shoulder widths etc etc. I love it!

And finally, a game where you can learn all the crafting skills on one character should you choose to do so. Simply wonderful. I for one am going to pre order this game, and that's something I almost never do.

Finally I love the fact that there are three factions instead of the typical two. This should add a nice tension, particularly to PVP . Way too often, one side becomes irretrievably dominant in the PVP aspect, and that's a drag.

I'm looking forward to April 4^th a great deal now, and not just cause I'm sick of the winter time.

I was going to embed the relevant youtube videos here, but the sharing is disabled so here are the links:

Character creation: http://elderscrollsonline.com/en/media/videos/653

Gathering & Exploration: http://elderscrollsonline.com/en/media/videos/567

Character Progression: http://elderscrollsonline.com/en/media/videos/657

Good game y'all!