Pentagon Advisor Leaves Notes at Starbuck’s

The Washington Times reports:

Eric Ruff, a political appointee at the Pentagon, left the notes at a Washington Starbucks Sunday, either before or after meeting with Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld in advance of his television appearance.

The notes were turned in to the Center for American Progress which has made scans of the notes available, along with answers to the “POSSIBLE Q’s FOR SUNDAY TALK SHOWS” among the notes.

The Knockdown Revisited

I just watched a bunch of trailers online and saw one for a Matthew Broderick and Alec Baldwin movie called The Last Shot that’s apparently based on a “true story.” Broderick plays a screenwriter who thinks he gets a lucky break when he’s hired to direct a script he wrote called Arizona. Unfortunately his producer (Baldwin) is really an undercover FBI agent, putting together a mob sting. Hi-jinks ensue as budget cuts force the Western-themed script to make do with shooting in New England.

When a movie is based on a “true story,” its makers make little effort to advertise what the truth is. It’s also rare that I am intrigued enough to search out more information about the “true story” in question, but the premise of The Last Shot sent my Spidey-sense a-tingling. A quick internet search confirmed I had heard a very similar “true story” broadcast on PRI’s This American Life (”MacGyver”, 08/15/2003) last year. Writer Elizabeth Gilbert told Ira Glass what she learned while writing about the misguided sting for GQ:

In the late 80s, a man calling himself David Rudder goes to Boston with a script and hires George Moffly to produce it. The Knockdown is a romantic comedy about an historic building preservation, and it stinks. Rudder turns out to be an FBI agent who wants to use the production as a sting to catch the Teamsters taking bribes. Production is halted when the sting fails, but a few months later a thug with a gambling debt offers to inform on mobsters associated with the Teamsters and Rudder rehires Moffly.

From the trailer, The Last Shot seems to ignore nuance in favor of cheap laughs and disposable, stereotypical characters. Too bad, because hearing Gilbert and Moffly talk about the fiasco, it’s easy to picture the details and contradictions of the personalities involved, and difficult to picture The Last Shot’s stars doing justice to any of them. The tragi-comic domino effect of the agent’s deception and subsequent obsession with becoming a real Hollywood mogul who happens to fight mob corruption on the side is a great sounding story. The Last Shot could still do it justice, but more likely truth will remain stranger, and more interesting, than fiction.

SCRAMJET!!!!!!

NASA’s prototype hypersonic scramjet is set for a flight test this weekend. The 12-foot scale mockup of the X-43A aircraft is expected to reach Mach 7 (approx. 5,000 mph) at an altitude of 100,000 feet. A scramjet, having few to no moving parts (unlike a conventional jet engine), is propelled by the combustion of the air that is compressed by its own forward motion. This alleviates the need to carry fuel, making the vehicle extremely light, but requires the use of a booster rocket to achieve a high enough speed for combustion to occur. A previous test in 2001 failed due to a booster malfunction.

Kartemquin Films’ The New Americans

I just started interning with a local documentary film group called Kartemquin Films. You may not know the name, but you’ve no doubt seen their work which includes Hoop Dreams, Stevie, and Vietnam, Long Time Coming. Kartemquin’s latest documentary is a three-part series on recent immigrants to the U.S. called The New Americans. I watched the first two parts, and was blown away. It will screen on PBS March 29 - 31. Check your local listings. In Chicago it’s on channel 11 at these times:

Part 1    Mar 29,  9:00PM
Part 2    Mar 30,  9:00PM
Part 3    Mar 31,  9:00PM

Rebroadcast
Part 1    Mar 31,  2:30AM
Part 2    Apr  2,  2:30AM
Part 3    Apr  4,  3:00AM

Rummy Force-fed Crow

Watch Donald Rumsfeld get caught lying. Very satisfying!

New Planetoid Dubbed Sedna

The rumor of a tenth planet has been bandied about by practical jokers and space geeks forever, so why did it take so long for scientists to confirm that this object exists? These images comparing orbits clears it up a bit, and there’s this: “The planetoid is so far from the sun, it takes 10,500 Earth years to travel around the sun.” Sedna, named after an Inuit goddess, is also not technically a planet…

Spanish Hold Government Accountable

Spanish voters held the Popular Party dominated government of Jose Maria Aznar accountable for it’s stand on terrorism and the war in Iraq by electing opposition Socialists to a majority of government posts. According to Reuters, “Opinion polls showed as many as 90 percent of Spaniards opposed the Iraq war.” Spain’s violent history with Islam may have played into the government’s decision to aid the U.S. war effort (along with favors from Bush), but Spaniards don’t seem to share that sentiment any longer. The six months I spent in that country during college gave me the impression that Spain has an undeniable fondness for it’s Muslim-occupied past, though not exactly sad they’re gone. Converted Muslim structures dot Spain’s cities and are revered as national treasures. Spaniards also apparently didn’t appreciate the government pinning the blame for last week’s train bombings on the Basque separatist group ETA after three Moroccans and two Indians were arrested in connection with the attacks. Bonus factoid: According to this date calculator there were indeed 911 days between the al Qaeda attacks on the U.S. and the train bombings in Spain.

DARPA’s “Grand Challenge” Produces No Winners

The Grand Challenge, a race between privately built robotic vehicles, ended without a winner today. The Department of Defense’s DARPA held the challenge as a fast and cheap way of advancing the field of unmanned autonomous vehicles for the military, but will have to parlay the $1 million prize to the next challenge in 2006. From photos, many of the vehicles look like stock SUVs fitted with a PC and several cameras where the driver would be, but the exceptions run the gamut. There are several compact designs apparently made from scratch, and many based on specialty vehicles like a sand dune racer, and a huge Oshkosh MTVR defense truck. The challenge of making a vehicle able to drive itself was well documented by Monster Garage’s Remote Control Car episode, but the Grand Challenge required vehicles to drive themselves. The teams were given two hours to program their robots with the race course’s hundreds of waypoints, beginning near Barstow, CA and ending near Las Vegas, NV, before letting them loose on the desert terrain. None of the vehicles got further than 7 miles within the 10 hour time limit of the race.

Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas

Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas is coming this October. Read the press release here.