The Adventures of Accordion Guy in the 21st Century

Near the heart of the Euromaidan — the protests that have been taking place in Ukraine since late November — was IT#Namet, which translates as “IT Tent”. They’ve been there from the beginning, providing internet access and acting as a gathering place for tech- and communication-inclined protesters. In a statement released earlier today, the IT#Namet people say that they were attacked by police last night, resulting in one of their number being badly beaten, a journalist killed, and their tent burned down.

Here’s how Google Translate renders their statement into English:

Today, on the night of February 19, 2014, Special Forces soldiers broke into the town Square, which was IT # Namet. As a result of the fighting and arson by the security forces IT # Namet burned. Fortunately, there were people inside were able to respond quickly and leave the room, so they survived.

Since the foundation of IT # Namet, the aim of this organization was a peaceful protest. IT people never were carrying weapons, except for the tablet and smartphone connected to the Internet. Accordingly, the actions of security forces were not anti-terrorist nature, which they claimed it was deliberate destruction of unarmed people.Unfortunately, that night suffered an IT specialist Alex Limarenko, who was a journalist with the “news” Vyacheslav Veremiyem. Vyacheslav died, and Alex, who was severely beaten, was seriously injured person. 

Notwithstanding that fact IT # Namet was today destroyed the belief of people and support their peaceful protest remained unchanged. “IT community”, which united people representing IT industry, is expanding its activities beyond IT # Namet. 

“IT community” requires a cessation of hostilities on the part of authorities to save lives. 

Now every member of the IT Communities can choose their own way of further fighting and defending their rights, and the rights of people who yesterday were affected by their actual death.

Armed with only computers, mobile devices, internet access, and the truth, these guys continue to fight the good fight. I’m a little strapped for cash right now, but I’m going to find some way to pitch in.

Click the poster to see it at full size.

In 2004, a French action flick called Banlieue 13 — “Suburb 13” — was released. It was written and produced by Luc Besson, who’s brought numerous thrillers to the big screen, some of which you may have even seen:

• Subway, a film that’s greatly underappreciated on this side of the pond
• La Femme Nikita, which became the inspiration for the Nikita TV series
• Leon: The Professional, which introduced us to Natalie Portman
• Taxi, which got remade into a less interesting film with Jimmy Fallon and Queen Latifah
• The Fifth Element, which you’ve probably seen
• The Messenger: The Story of Joan of Arc
• Kiss of the Dragon, a.k.a. Jet Lee kicks Paris’ ass
• The Transporter
• Taken
• Hitman
• Colombiana

Banlieue 13, which in English became District 13, became the parkour thriller movie, largely for this sequence:

Ten years later, a trailer for a new movie hitting the big screen in a couple of months is making the rounds. It’s for a film called Brick Mansions, it’s produced by Luc Besson, and there’s a scene and even a guy in it that seems…familiar:

It looks as though Besson simply asked “Why mess with success?”, brought back David Belle, who played the protagonist in Banlieue 13, to do what seems to be a shot-for-shot remake of that famous parkour sequence.

The problem is that he’s dealing with this as his target audience:

They could simply watch Banlieue 13, but these factors are holding them back:

• It takes place in a country other than America, and that country is being portrayed not as an exotic backdrop or enemy hideout, but as a place where people actually live and call home. Too foreign.
• It’s in French. It is subtitled, but they want to be entertained, not to read.
• They can’t relate to a French protagonist. They need an American one.

There’s also the matter of Besson standing to make some decent coin and save work by re-doing his own ten-year-old film. He knows what side his baguette’s buttered on, so he gave it an American setting, and made it a buddy film with Paul Walker as the “familiar character we can relate to”. Since this was one of Paul Walker’s last film appearances before his James Dean-ish death, it’s sure to bring his fans, now infected with “necrofilmia” to the theatres or the torrents in droves.

So there you have it: if you always wanted to see Banlieue 13/District 13, but were too illiterate and unworldly to watch it, and you need to satisfy your Paul Walker necrofilmia, the newer, dumber remake called Brick Mansions is just around the corner. Enjoy.

My friend Erinn Day pointed me to Thrillist’s article on the caffeine levels of coffees from various vendors of the black sweet nectar of life. It turns out that Starbucks, thanks to their relatively high caffeine levels (more than twice that of McDonald’s coffee, ounce for ounce) and being just about everywhere, is your best easily-found bet for a good jolt. Yeah, they over-roast the beans, but if you remember what coffee in North America was like before they entered the game, you can appreciate what they’ve done.

However, if you really want to go for the max, you’ll want to go online and place an order for Deathwish Coffee, which has more than twice Starbucks’ coffee, ounce for ounce. Just remember Spider-Man’s maxim when drinking the stuff: With great power comes great responsibility.

Me, at the time of this writing.

In advance of a couple of other changes that will take place soon, I thought I’d see what I looked like without the goatee and ‘stache I’ve been sporting since 1998. My beard’s had been getting increasing grey and course, making every kiss I gave the girlfriend an increasingly stabby proposition. I lopped off the goatee Saturday morning, and despite my reservations about going moustache only — a look that I associate with either cops or creepy guys parked in white van near playgrounds — I didn’t mind the look.

This morning, I thought: Hey, while I’m still in experimental mode, why not lop off the ‘stache, just to see what I look like? The photo above is the result. The girlfriend hasn’t seen it yet — I wonder what her reaction will be.

Me at the “office”, circa September 1998.

The goatee was an accident. Back in 1998, I was one-half of Datapanik Software Systems, a custom software development shop. We worked out of the brownstone apartment of Adam P.W. Smith, Datapanik’s other half, as it had plenty of room, with an office for Adam, and a makeshift office for me in the guest bedroom. We put in some pretty long hours, and I often crashed there.

Me at Club Havana in Manila, circa October 1998.

We were working on our biggest project, an application for National Research Bureau (NRB) in Chicago called Shopping Center Directory on CD-ROM. NRB was a research company specializing in data about shopping centers across the U.S., and had collected data on most of the 50,000 or so malls that were in the country at that time. They charged top dollar for this information, which was available either in four very large phone-book sized volumes, or as raw, poorly-normalized (for you non-computery people, think of this as “poorly thought-out”) database files. They hired us to take their databases and turn it into an easy-to-use product so that their customers — custodial services looking to make money off all the floors to be mopped at a mall, or researchers at The Gap or Starbucks who wanted to find new malls to occupy — could find information more easily. For two guys working out of an apartment at St. George and Dupont, it was a pretty sweet deal.

We had a particularly vexing bug in the application, and it had to be dealt with. In a fit of programmer bravado, I told Adam that I would stay at his place until it was fixed. I thought it would take a day or two to fix completely, but quashing that bug required fixes to a host of other bugs, and before I knew it, I had been at his place for eight days. The one thing I’d not brought with me was a razor, and over the week, I’d discovered that yes, I could actually grow a beard. So I kept it.

This is me using Photo Booth to take a picture of myself while reading.

Without the beard and ‘stache, I can see a lot of Dad in my face. I’m still thinking about whether to keep the look or go back to just the ‘stache, and I’m curious to see how the girlfriend reacts.

Before this gentleman became TV’s best known sexy bald ship’s captain…

…this guy was, and he had his own fragrance, too:

Click the ad to see it at full size.

Gavin MacLeod, who played “Happy” Haines on McHale’s Navy in the 1960s and “Murray” on The Mary Tyler Moore Show in the 1970s, played Captain Merrill Stubing on The Love Boat from the late ’70s to mid-’80s. For those of you who never saw the show — consider yourself fortunate — The Love Boat was a sitcom that revolved around a cruise ship, its wacky crew, and guest stars that would appear in every episode.

The show enjoyed consistently high ratings for most of its run, which made MacLeod a big enough star to rate his own cologne…made by Hormel. As in the people who make Spam (the woefully-underappreciated luncheon meat, not the unsolicited commercial email).

The great injustice is that there was never a fragrance named for “Julie, the cruise director”. I had such a crush on that character:

The two captains would finally overlap in the early 1990s, when Patrick Stewart guest-hosted Saturday Night Live, taking some very un-funny writing and through his acting and charm, turned them into some very funny skits. The most notable of the skits was Love Boat: The Next Generation, where Stewart played Picard as the captain of a spacefaring cruise ship:

The skit was popular enough among Trek fans that people have cosplayed it:

I’ll close with the 1979 opening of The Love Boat, complete with that karaoke-friendly stick-in-your-head theme song:

Found via Rob Elliott. Click to see the source.