ITV2 HD to launch on Sky HD on October 7

ITV will launch a high definition simulcast of the ITV2 channel on Sky on October 7.

In August, ITV confirmed its move into pay-TV with the launch of high definition versions of ITV2, ITV3 and ITV4 exclusively on Sky.

According to advanced programme listings information, ITV2 HD will be the first channel to launch, becoming available to Sky+ HD subscribers on October 7.

The channel will carry

ITV2 HD testing?

There are reports that test have strated for the soon to be launched ITV2HD.

As prevoisuly mentioned this will only be available on Sky HD boxes, and at the moment, looks like it will only be available with a Sky HD subscription.

ITV2 HD is said to be testing on 11758H 29500 3/4

This is an Astra 2A north beam, which may be tricky to receive in certian areas of Spain mid afternoon.

Will try

Free Sky Movies - for a weekend

Sky Movies for Free - Free weekend soon
According to the latest Sky magazine, Sky movies will be free to all nonsky movies subscribers.

Tihs will also apply to the HD Sky Movie channel also.

This will be from 6pm on Friday October 2010 until 6am on Monday 1st November 2010.

This will be similar to this last weekends free sky sports day, and will be available to SKY SUBSCRIBERS ONLY.

It will

Giant bubbles....

旅美數位藝術家李小鏡 2010新作品 "馬戲團" / East Gallery Taipei

旅美數位藝術家李小鏡 2010新作品 "馬戲團" / East Gallery Taipei

Art Show opening Oct. 9th @ East Gallery Taipei.
臺北市忠孝東路四段218-4號 阿波羅大廈(B棟八樓) 電話:、27527679

3D artist Mark / Sways Digital Art

Good 3D digital art works from Mark's personal websit http://www.inwheel.com.tw/my/index.html

Thanks Mark's great input and continue the profession in future....

Direct TV Hack

A Direct TV hack can get you satellite programming for free, but it can cost you in the long run in many different ways. It may sound like a good idea, but it is something that needs to be carefully considered before you decide to try to hack Direct TV.

Satellite television is becoming more and more popular, which is why people are trying to find ways around paying for the service. This may end up costing you more in the future, however, so you want to make sure that you are making the best decision for you.What is a Direct TV hack?

A Direct TV hack is when you get service from the satellite provider without paying the company for it. You may have to pay someone to get the codes for you to get the programming for your home and this amount is usually around the same cost as it would cost you to get programming for one year. This may sound good, but it may end up costing you more money than you had planned. Why?

For the most part, the codes that you get that allow you to get satellite television programming will not last very long. In most cases, these codes will not last any longer than a day or two, which will mean that the money that you spent will be a waste. And anyway, why on earth would you want to get Direct TV service illegally when they have great afordable deals going on all the time?

This is due to the fact that Direct TV has stringent methods of preventing hacking of their service and so it is difficult to do it. This is good for them, but not so good for you if you think that you are going to get service for free. You would be much better off to simply purchase the service legally.

Legal problems could also be coming your way if you are caught with a Direct TV hack. Even if you had someone else do it, you are still responsible if the service is coming into your home. This could cause you to be listed in a lawsuit or you could be fined. Either way, you will be spending additional money on either a fine or court costs if you get caught, which could be a lot more expensive than just purchasing the service legally.

It is a much better idea, both financially and legally, to just simply sign up for the Direct TV service the legal way. It is not worth taking the chance that the hack won’t work or that you will get caught. It could cost you much more in the long run financially and it could cost you your good name, as well. It is a much better idea to look at the many Direct TV packages that you can choose from to help you find the one that best fits your budget and your needs. In this way, you can save yourself money and trouble. Just think again why it's a lot cheaper (and safer) to get your Direct TV the legal way.

The Simpsons in HD on Antena 3 HD on Spanish Digital TV

Antena 3 has announced that the new season of the Simpsons, wil be broadcast in 16:9 widescreen format and native HD.

This Tuesday September 28 Antena 3 will launch its new channel, a simulcast of the Antean 3 channel in HD

This announcement was made on the same day that Telecinco HD was announced as the first private channel to adopt this format. In some areas Telecinco HD is already

End of an Era for Arab Music in the USA

On 26 September 2010, Rashid Sales, the premiere source for Arab music in the US, held its grand closing. Amidst Middle Eastern grocery stores, shops and restaurants, Rashid Sales had been a mainstay of the Atlantic Avenue Arabic cultural scene in Brooklyn, New York, for decades. But due to dwindling sales of CDs and other physical media, which the owners attribute to availability of music on the internet, the shop can no longer make ends meet. They will, however, migrate part of their business to the internet and offer some of their wares for sale online. It was just a few short years ago that the shop was hailed as a 'Musical Oasis' in Brooklyn, and so in honor of that legacy TV Multiversity is reprinting here a 2004 article from the pages of Aramco World magazine. We wish Rashid Sales all the best in their new endeavor and hope that they can continue to bring Arabic music to the masses.

Step a block and a half off Brooklyn’s busy Atlantic Avenue into the modest storefront of Rashid Music Sales, and you can feel that you’re entering a time warp: Black-and-white stills from classic Arab films hang on the wall. The floor is checkerboard tile, and beyond the small showroom, rows and rows of metal shelves hold boxes filled with Arab-music CDs. It looks as if a musical archive had taken over a 1950’s soda shop.

It’s a humble setting for the United States’ oldest and largest purveyor of Arab music, a family-owned business that almost closed its doors in 2001. Now in the hands of 57-year-old Raymond Rashid, one of founder Albert Rashid’s two sons, the business is stronger and better-known than ever, offering recordings found nowhere else in the country and mining its own holdings to release historical recordings that are putting a new generation in touch with virtuosos of the past.

In the United States, few people have done more than the Rashid family to keep Arab musical traditions alive. 'There’s no one like them. They have a deep historical consciousness, a sense of culture,' says Ali Jihad Racy, performer and professor of ethnomusicology at the University of California at Los Angeles. 'They’re more than sellers of good music; they’re like an institution that has furnished the country with so much of the artistic heritage of the Arab world.'

The Rashids’ legacy stretches from the horse and buggy to the Internet. In 1920, nine-year-old Albert Rashid’s family left Syria and came to rest in Davenport, Iowa. Later, Albert sought work in Detroit, whose automobile factories were a magnet for Arab-Americans seeking work. His life changed in 1934, when he saw the Egyptian film The White Rose, with a soundtrack scored and performed by Mohammed Abdul Wahab.

By then he also possessed a newly minted degree in business administration from Wayne State University, and he began importing Arab films and showing them across the country. He also made a good living selling movie soundtracks and other recordings. He moved to New York City in 1949, and he opened a shop in Manhattan.

Work on the Brooklyn–Battery Tunnel uprooted the Arab community that had grown up near the island’s southern tip, and with others Rashid relocated to Atlantic Avenue in Brooklyn. There, in 1951, he opened what became a legendary emporium that attracted Arab immigrants and other visitors to the United States, who all regarded it as a gathering place, something between a salon and an oasis. 'People called that store an institution,' says Raymond. 'It was a place they would come to after leaving their homes behind. My father always helped people locate a relative or acquaintance, find a newspaper with news from home or get the latest recordings.'

Rashid stocks Arab pop and non-Arab 'world music' in addition to the most extensive collection of Arab classical music for sale in the us. 'I do a lot of research,' he says. 'Sometimes I find music the labels didn’t even know they had.' Recently he’s tapped boxes of his father’s forgotten reel-to-reel tapes to publish a 'Masters of Arabic Music' series.

Stan Rashid, Raymond’s older brother who helped run the business until he retired in 2001, remembers one well-known musician who received old-world hospitality at Rashid Sales. 'This singer came in and didn’t have any money or anything,' he says. 'We knew who he was and knew he was in bad shape, so my Dad gave him some money and said, "Pay me back whenever you can." The guy actually became very successful. He came back and said, "I’ll never forget what your father did for me." That’s the way my Dad acted with people.'

The influence of the Rashids’ business soon reached beyond the confines of the Arab-American world. Folk musician Pete Seeger wandered in one day, and another day Raymond provided music for a party given by artist Andy Warhol. Stan remembers the day Malcolm X visited. 'He was looking for music on 45’s for the jukebox in his mosque in Harlem,' he says. 'I was impressed by him more than anyone else who ever came into the store. I found him to be quite engaging and knowledgeable.'

The family also showed Arab movies at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, the Detroit Institute of Art, and in San Francisco, Los Angeles and Texas. They also mingled with local musicians, since Raymond himself played the dumbak (the goblet-shaped drum) as an amateur. Composer and international multi-instrument virtuoso David Amram recalls meeting Raymond at a jam session at Cafe Feenjon in Greenwich Village in the 1960’s. Thanks partly to such occasions, Amram incorporated Middle Eastern rhythms and melodies into several of his compositions. And of course, he stopped by the store to stock up on recordings. 'I realized that here was a place where people not only loved the music as much or more than I did, but knew so much and had so many different kinds of music that I had never even heard of,' Amram says. 'It’s still that way.'

In the 1980’s, the family began promoting concerts in the city, including the first Arab concert held in New York by the Manhattan-based World Music Institute, says Robert Browning, WMI’s executive director. Browning’s institute sells discs from all over the world, and he gets the majority of his Arab titles from the Rashids. 'They have the broadest range of styles imaginable,' he says. 'Most places that do bring stuff in only deal with pop, whereas they import a variety of classical and regional traditional music.'

The brothers also supplied discs to major music retailers, including Tower Records, Virgin and HMV. Thanks to the Internet, they now sell around the world: Customers include a shepherd on the Baltic island of Gotland who likes Umm Kulthum and a Saudi man who sought an archival recording of three Saudi singers that had been released in France. 'He couldn’t find it over there, but we had it,' says Stan. And when the composers of the soundtrack of the Dreamworks film The Prince of Egypt sought Arab music to inspire them, they too came to Brooklyn.

Raymond says he has made some changes since he took over the business, which moved to its present location on Court Street in 2000. In addition to giving the storefront a facelift and cataloguing every title, he has begun selling DJ mixes and recordings by Arab rap groups, and he’s offering non-Arab world-music discs on the Putumayo label.

Perhaps most important, he’s joined with Michael Schlesinger of Global Village Music, advised by Rashid’s renowned Brooklyn musician neighbor Simon Shaheen, to tap the past for direction for the future. He has released eight new titles on the 'Masters of Arabic Music' series, all culled from reel-to-reel recordings collected by his father that were mostly stored in unmarked boxes.

One find included a recording of a 1952 Cairo concert by Farid Ghosen, whom Raymond likened to Paganini and whose discs disappeared after his death in 1985. 'Ghosen was a remarkable performer,' says Racy. 'To have this made available again is a revelation! Who knows what else Ray is going to find?'

[This article was written by Marc Ferris, with photographs by Naomi Harris, and originally appeared on pages 16-19 of the July/August 2004 print edition of Saudi Aramco World. Rashid Sales will maintain on online presence at its website here. To learn more about Arab Americans in New York City, readers might find useful the book by Kathleen Benson and Philip M. Kayal, A Community of Many Worlds: Arab Americans in New York City (Syracuse University Press, 2002), which was published in conjunction with an exhibit at the Museum of the City of New York.]

simple Fresnel shader for maya

Thanks Matte's class:

use samplerInfo node's facing ratio > ramp's vCoord (by middle mouse drag simplerInfo to ramp, and select "Other" to open Connection Editor!)
and use mentalray render...
and better output format like 16bits Tiff or float EXR

Furry Ball 1.3 realTime render plugin for maya...

來自捷克的產品, 分明要Vary RT for Maya難看....

downside:
so far only support file texture...
seems only use maya software shader...
no Ray Trace shadow...hmmm...
GIsetting's AO type "Geometry Elements" ...GPU fail???
DOF, when camera change too extreme focal length and Camera hit object... GPU fail????
need more shader support....

the biggest downside is no linear workflow ... should I ask a realTime system has linear color workflow feature?

Sky Sports Free - Sunday 26th September

Sky SPorts is opening up all 4 Sky Sports channels on Sunday the 26th of September so that you can experience Sky Sports for yourself. To enjoy the day all you need to do is tune in!

There's a wide range of sport on across the day including live coverage of two Barclays Premier League games, Spanish Football, the Tour Championship and European Golf on Sky Sports 1 & 2, SPL, Rugby League and NFL

Sky 3d TV - coming soon - explained by Stephen Fry

With the launch of Sky UKs 3D TV channel to the public, in addition to the select few UK pubs, on the 1st October 2010, Sky and Stephen Fry take you through what to expect with Sky 3D and the technology involved for 3d television.



For more information please visit:

The Sat and PC Guy - Digital Satellite and Terrestrial Installations and Maintenance for the Costa Blanca

or the forum

The

WWE wrestling on Spanish TDT TV

Marca TV makes a move with WWE wrestling.

With millions of fans around the world Marca Tv, on SPainish TDT Digital TV, will broadcast every weekend the best fights of the two WWE brands, Smackdown and Raw.

In the nineties, a group of titans, men of colossal strength able to knock down on the mat to anyone who tried to shade them in a ring, raided Spanish television willing to become heroes of

Live Football on Spanish GOL TV - TDT

Sunday's spectacular three classics of world football, MANCHESTER UNITED vs. LIVERPOOL, AT. MADRID vs. FC BARCELONA and Benfica vs. SPORTING

Four Liga matches, ahead of the Premier League on GOL TV

VIERNES 17 DE SEPTIEMBRE FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 17

Jose Mourinho PRESS CONFERENCE (13:00) LIVE

WORLD GOL: PREVIA LIGA ADELANTE (20:00) LIVE

LIGA ADELANTE: VILLARREAL “B” vs. LAS PALMAS (21:00)

Bravo and Channel One (Virgin) to close on Sky TV

BSkyB is to close Bravo and general entertainment station Channel One, putting more than 50 jobs at risk, as part of the integration of Living TV Group.

BSkyB has decided to focus on the Living TV channel portfolio, which will see a 25% boost to its programming budget, and the gameshow and quiz channel Challenge. According to media reports, Sky has decided to focus all of its attention on the

Ring Road (autostrade to airport) - I cuss and finger other drivers much less now

Previously,I posted comments about this death road but now I am very pleased to say action has been taken with advent of radar installations. Wonder upon wonder, drivers are driving at, or below 90 KMH, (well not all), and mostly driving in lanes. The change is due to installation of camera radars located along the road.

I was told the camera's nailed over 40,000 speeding cars in first days of operation. Now think about this -the cameras are spaced about 2 km apart so you could conceivably get about 8 tickets while speeding along the route. Whether correct, or not,but was told, the fines are mailed to car owners address and if they pay in specified time the fine is 150 LE per offence. If not paid the fine is 300LE payable when you go to re-licence the vehicle. Think about contract drivers in Egypt getting 8 tickets in one journey. What are his chances of keeping his job? One speeding trip would cost him likely more than he earns in a month.

I mentioned almost all drivers are now following the speed limit and driving very nicely. There are still some bad actors speeding along, weaving between lanes, cutting people off. One thinks now - "go for it guy you have just been nailed." Worst offence that happened to me was a large petrol tanker was roaring along in fast lane, flashing lights but I saw him coming as one still must be very wary and use the rear view mirrors for self protection. Hope they nailed that ass good.

Here is a quirk about Egypt - drivers rarely get fined but the cars do!

Gosh I hope they keep these radar camera's working.

Hopefully some reader can confirm the fines and other details as info I have was not from published sources, only word of mouth.

Comprehending the Vietnam War in Film

For those who like their Vietnam films in Technicolor and Dolby stereo, Karma would probably be a disappointment. But this stark, simple - and black and white - venture has other things to commend it, beginning with the fact that it is a Vietnam film made by and about the Vietnamese. Directed by Ho Quang Minh, an overseas Vietnamese based in Switzerland, Karma was in fact the first independent production undertaken in Vietnam since 1975, and, in marked contrast to official Vietnamese cinema and Hollywood alike, it focuses on what Minh described as 'the only real losers of the conflict - the South Vietnamese Republications.'

The story, told in flashback, traces the war's human toll, not in terms of battles and body counts, but through the destruction of a marriage. The husband, Binh (played by Vietnam's most popular actor, Tran Quang), a South Vietnamese soldier, is reported dead; shortly afterwards, his wife, Nga (Phuong Dung), is forced to evacuate her village and resettle in a strategic hamlet outside of Saigon. As it turns out, Binh is still alive, but when he finally makes his way back to Nga, he discovers that she, like thousands of other women in her situation, has become a bar girl in the capital. At this point he gives himself up to the military machinery, joining the Special Forces and participating in the most dangerous operations (as well as the brutal and humiliating rejection of his wife) until he virtually commits suicide by exposing himself to a bombing raid.

The antithesis of an action film, Karma, is a slow, somber evocation of a moment that went on for years. There is no suspense - the film opens with Binh's funeral - and no heroics (also no Americans). Like a tapestry of memories, it is woven with details of daily life and custom, much of which, as Minh himself points out, is bound to escape non-Vietnamese viewers. but the drama of loss, the images of decadence, and the rhythm of despair convey an unmistakable message.

Karma was filmed on location in the south, with camera equipment and materiel inherited from the Americans, and technical advice from former members of the South Vietnamese Special Forces (who also served as stuntmen). The film premiered at the Montreal Film Festival in 1986 and has been making the rounds of other festivals in Europe and Asia. It was also showcased at the Film Forum theater in New York but so far does not have an American distributor. Nor has it been screened publicly in Vietnam, because the original production agreement was limited to foreign distribution, although extensive private screenings have elicited enthusiastic response, and the film has now been cleared for release there as well. Ho Quang Minh spoke with Cineaste Associate Miriam Rosen at the Three Continents Festival in Nantes, France.

Cineaste: Although you were born in Hanoi and grew up on Saigon, you studied engineering in Switzerland and filmmaking in Paris before returning to Vietnam to make Karma. How did that come about?

Ho Quang Minh: I went home in 1981, for the first time in fourteen years, for what was supposed to be just a short visit to see my family. I have a friend there who's a cinematographer, however, and he introduced me to the Vietnamese cinema and other filmmakers, and I wound up staying for a whole year. That's how I found out it would be possible for me to make films in Vietnam as an independent filmmaker.

Cineaste: When you were filming in Vietnam, did you have the feeling of being a foreign director or an overseas Vietnamese director?

Minh: As an overseas Vietnamese, I'm also Vietnamese, but, at the same time, I have a different background. The South Vietnamese cinema - and that's where the people I was working with had their training - was totally commercial, and even if they're making serious films now, maybe too serious, what they're aiming at technically is what they were used to doing before. The actors, for example, don't want to work: they want to sit in the shade and come out when you're nearly ready to shoot. Then they don't know their lines and they don't concentrate, and, if you want to do two or three takes, they get mad. It's not like here, where you do it fifteen times, until it's right. They're also afraid of being filmed without makeup, and sometimes, even when they're playing peasant roles, they want to wear nail polish.

Cineaste: You're obviously still glad to be working there.

Minh: Every time I go back - and I've been there ten times since 1981, or what amounts to about half of my time - it's really good to work in my own language. Even if my French is sometimes better than my Vietnamese, because I know my vocabulary is richer in French, it's  something running in my blood, I think, to speak Vietnamese and to direct in Vietnamese. Its a very strong experience for me. Just like the rest of my generation, I've been marked by the Vietnam conflict and contemporary Vietnamese history so much that I don't think I could do anything else without coming to terms with my memory. There are so many things I'd like to understand, and I'd also like to convey that understanding to other people through filmmaking.

Cineaste: When you say 'other people,' do you make a distinction between Vietnamese and foreigners? Is one more of a priority than the other?

Minh: This is an important point for an artist. I think first of all you have to be authentic, but you also want your work to be seen, so you always try to reach a universal truth. But one of the most powerful ways of reaching the universal is to be authentic. That's the reason why, when you see a film like mine, you sense that it's dedicated or devoted to the Vietnamese, and I think that's true, because I tried above all to make it authentic, to show the reality of Vietnam in it specificity. I didn't want to internationalize the content, to say things in a certain way to make the film more understandable to the Americans or the French. I just made it as I felt it would have been, and, if its good enough, I thin it'll interest everyone. To be honest, I never saw Karma as an isolated film. From the beginning, I decide that I would focus the first stage of my filmmaking career on a few films about Vietnam, to unwind my memories, and I had a program. I wanted to start with this film to focus on the only real losers of the Vietnam conflict, the South Vietnamese Republicans.

Cineaste: Why was that?

Minh: I have a compassion for the weak, the losers, because they're more tragic; there are more dramas, more sacrifices involved.

Cineaste: Do you identify with them? There's a difference between compassion and identifying.

Minh: I wouldn't say that I identify, but I'm very close to them because I lived with them when I was growing up in Saigon. I had a South Vietnamese passport, so I understand them more, I understand their problems more than the North Vietnamese. That was the first priority, and the most powerful sentiment I had about the war, which is what I tried to convey in Karma. From the beginning, I intended to make a second film on the winners, the North Vietnamese. Again, I don't want to talk about heroism, I want to show what kind of sacrifices they had to make in order to endure, to be heroic. That is the point of my next film, which is in preparation now. And the third film will embrace the international point of view, either French or American. If I succeed in making the series, people will get a sense of an entire landscape of moral values and sentiments.

Cineaste: How as the screenplay written?

Minh: I worked from a short story called 'The Wounder Beast' written by Nguy Ngu. I was able to collaborate with the author, who happened to be both a good war correspondent and a good short story writer, and e gave me a lot of help in terms of direct experience of the war, which I didn't have. His story was written in 1969 or 1970, and, to give you and idea of how powerful it was in human terms, it was not only praised in the South Vietnamese press, but it was also published during the war by the Viet Cong and read over Radio Hanoi. When you remember that this was a civil war and people still reacted in that way, it really means something. I'd read a lot of short stories about the conflict, but when I read this one, I decided right away that was it. It was only ten pages long, but I realized right away that the author and I shared the same feelings, the same sentiments of waste and despair, of what to do now. These were remote feelings, not very engaged, just a kind of profound sadness, and that's what I wanted to convey in my film. That's also why the story isn't important to me as a plot but as a means of creating this atmosphere. Of course, this might make it difficult to understand for people who aren't ready to go with it - one criticism I've heard is that it's too long - but what I really wanted was for the audience to feel a bit heavy at the end. I hope at least that they stay until the end - that it's not boring - but at the end they should have a hard time getting up from the seat.

Cineaste: What kinds of considerations went into the style of the film?

Minh: If I can make a parallel with literature, I think there's a common dilemma confronting Third World writers and filmmakers. In the Western cinema, most of the traditional themes have been told and retold, just like in novels, so the difference, the plus, has to come from they way you tell the story, the style. That's the reason why newcomers are at their best when they propose a revolutionary form; sometimes it won't last, but that's the way to get noticed as a new director. If you must have good content, however bold it is, without a new form, you won't make that much of a mark. But in the Third World, there's still a lot to tell, so the content remains very important. When these works of are or literature are brought to Western audiences, they have the added advantage of exoticism: people are less choosy about the form. That's why Latin American novels have been so successful - they're very strong in content, even if they're quite traditional in form. What I'm getting at is that we, as filmmakers from the Third World, also have to think of form. It's not just a meeting of telling a story, but also how to tell it. The problem is that cinema is a Western language. From that point of view, at least, style and form are automatically Westernized. There is also a whole technology involved - it's not like the poet who is happy with a pencil and a blank page.

Cineaste: The role of the woman, and the presence of women in general, is one of the most striking aspects of Karma, and what really keeps it on a human scale. How did you decide on this approach?

Minh: When I was talking with my friends in Vietnam and they'd ask what kind of a film I wanted to make on the war, I'd tell them that I wanted to start with the South Vietnamese Republicans and I really wanted to have female characters, prostitutes and bar girls if possible, because they were really mistreated in the conflict, with all this propaganda about Vietnam as one big whorehouse. It's true that were a lot of prostitutes in Vietnam during the American war, even the Indochina war, but when you think that there were a million South Vietnamese solders and half a million American soldiers, who were really tourists there, it's understandable that you had at least a few hundred thousand prostitutes. I wanted to explain, at least on this level, to show that they were human beings.

Cineaste: Do you think audiences in the U.S. will be able to appreciate your film, especially since Vietnam War films there are getting more and more epic, with more mud, more battles, and more Americans.

Minh: That's a problem with movies in general - the action film has more chance of drawing a large audience. I don't think my film will touch a wide audience, but my hope is that it'll be there for people who are ready to see it. There are a lot of people, especially in the United States, who were really affected by the war and who will be able to get something out of my film because they wanted to understand more about what they experienced.

[This article was originally published in Cineaste, Vol. XVII, No. 2, September 1989, pp. 38-39. Ho Quang Minh's fourth film, Thoi Xa Vang, premiered at the Gothenberg Film Festival in 2005.]

MTV will launch for free on TDT in Spain on September 16

MTV will launch for free on TDT in Spain on September 16

It will start by broadcasting the most spectacular music awards and shocking the world: the MTV Video Music Awards.
At 21:00 Johann Wald will welcome all viewiers with a special program from Los Angeles, on the red carpet at the MTV VMAs. Then the 2010 MTV VMAs will be shown, on MTV Spain, whch will be available for free and with no

Sky Sports 3D football fixtures for this season - September and October

Sky Sports 3D football fixtures for this season

Sky Sports has just released more 3D football fixtures for this season.

SEPTEMBER

Sun 12 Everton v Manchester United

Tue 14 Man Utd v Rangers (7.45pm) Champions League

Sun 19 Man Utd v Liverpool (1.30pm) Premier League

Sat 25 Man City v Chelsea (12.45pm) Premier League

OCTOBER

Tue 12 Scotland v Spain (8.00pm) Euro 2012 Qualifier

Sun 17

Live NFL - American Football back on Channel 4

It's coming home! Channel 4 to show live American football again on Sunday nights



Channel 4 will show American football again this season, bringing back a mountain of memories for long-time supporters of the sport.
The channel will screen the late Sunday match live every week, with coverage beginning at 1am and the matches at 1.20am.
The first match will be between Washington Redskins and

9/11 again....

To me... the 9/11 memory will never go away....

小米記趣～『小米的異想世界+童言童語之大便篇』

從小米1y2m真正開始了解字義的學講話到現在，當父母的才會知道到究竟平日我們給予他的能量他到底吸收到什麼？或者是吸收了多少？當中曾經發生一些好笑的趣聞，但今天這有圖為證喔！
話說陳小米一路走來對於吃正餐都不在行（不知道是阿母的手藝欠佳還是他個人因素，但身為北木還是會盡量帶她試試不同的食物），那天正好去仁愛圓環雙聖吃完午飯，出來往NY BAGLE的方向去搭公車回家，就在那轉角處，陳小米煞有其事的指著那顆石頭說：媽媽，大便！我我我。。。當下不知該如何解釋，我只是說：親愛的，他是顆顏色很像大便的石頭。但他還是喃喃自語的說：大便～大便。（這就是我平日要他大便後跟自己的大便打聲招呼，看看顏色形狀是否正常的結果嘛？！）

Reports: La Sexta to start two more channel on TDT in Spain

Later this year, La Sexta will start a second free channels on TDT, and also start another pay channel on DTT.
This was confimed today by Jose Miguel Contreras, CEO of La Sexta, in the presentation of the 2010/11 season.

"We want to complement La Sexta,which has a very specific audience." Contreras said

On the third pay channel on TDT, the CEO said he hopes to launch in October. Thus, the La

Canal + Football HD on Spains satellite Tv

High Definition is growing day by day in Digital +, Spain Pay TV satellite operator



From today, the platform incorporates Canal + Football HD, a new way to watch the best football in the world in detail, with the clarity and sound that High Definition television technology can offer.

With the addition of CANAL + Football HD, Digital + HD has now 15 channels of all genres, such as Canal +,

Review of 'The Atomic Cafe'

As part of its recent offering of films for free on demand viewing, YouTube has made available the complete 1982 film 'The Atomic Cafe.' Produced and directed by Kevin Rafferty, Jane Loader, and Pierce Rafferty, the film is comprised entirely of archival footage of atomic age American civil defense and propaganda shorts, along with newsreel footage and clips from film and television programs of the period. Eschewing the usual over-arching narrative voice typically used in many documentary films, 'The Atomic Cafe' took the unique approach of telling its story solely through creative manipulation and intercutting of these various archival and found sources, weaving a spellbinding pastiche, at times both farcical and tragic, depicting America during the post WWII era into the Cold War of the 1960s. To commemorate this important film, TV Multiversity is reprinting here a review from the year of its release.

The Atomic Cafe is a shockingly entertaining film about a subject hardly calculated to elicit gales of laughter. Combining vintage newsreels, kinescopes, government information films, radio broadcasts, and some improbably pop tunes of the late Forties and Fifties, filmmakers Jayne Loader and Kevin and Pierce Rafferty present a seamless chronology of the Cold War years, focusing on the hilarious, absurd, and ultimately dangerous government propaganda about the atomic bomb.

Throughout the film we laugh ourselves silly at 'Duck and Cover' drills and songs such as 'My Atomic Love' and 'I Ain't No Communist,' at Nixon and Khruschev in a comic Cold War debate straight out of Abbott and Costello, and the crazy logic of an army chalk-talk telling soldiers not to worry about radiation because 'you'd be killed by they blast, heat, and debris anyway!' We howl at how dumb we used to be, right up until the film's climax, when an anonymous talking head asks, 'What would it be like if the bomb were to drop here - say, tomorrow at 10?,' and a chilling simulation of the real thing - drawn from the very sequences we were snickering at moments earlier - wipes the smiles off our faces and leaves us stunned. 'There's nothing to do now but wait for orders from the authorities and relax,' says father to his 'nuclear' family in the film's ironic final words. If The Atomic Cafe succeeds in its purpose, no one who sees it will ever relax and trust the authorities again.

The filmmakers' mastery of the form, gained during five years of research and countless hours in the editing room, has earned The Atomic Cafe a distinguished place among the best compilation films of any year. None can deny the obvious craft involved here. What is disturbing, however, is the assumed naivete of the filmmakers. Loader has been quoted as saying that their intention was to have viewers come away with 'an understanding of the persuasive power of propaganda that will make them more skeptical about what they hear now.' In a background article, New York Times' writer Robin Herman refers to The Atomic Cafe as 'an unadorned menu of old... films,' which, in Pierce's words, 'force[s] people back on their own memories, on their own thoughts, on their own perceptions about this material.' In fact, The Atomic Cafe is a successful - even brilliant - propaganda film itself, one that steadily builds its message with every omission of sound or context, every layering of song or speech. Sounds editor Margie Crimmins' audio overlaps not only like the diverse sequences together, they subliminally create the film's editorial message. There is no voice-over narrator because none is needed: the filmmakers manipulate their material so invisibly - using ironic juxtaposition of film clip to film clip, or film with divergent music or speech - that their massaged message is wittily hammered home in every cut, leaving the viewer little room to doubt or question the filmmakers' picture of 'the way we were.'

It opens in July 1945 at the first A-bomb test at Alamogordo, New Mexico and then proceeds to Hiroshima - before and after the bomb's devastation. A lone Japanese man gazes up at the sky, becoming Everyman and an ominous figure resurrected for the film's finale. Newsreel footage of Truman announcing the attack pointedly includes his bantering laughter prior to his address. The inclusion of this out-take quietly underscores a message American callousness soon echoed by radio comedian Fred Allen, who compares the bombed-out city to Ebbets Field after a doubleheader with the Giants. We hear this over views of charred babies lying in the Hiroshima ruins.

The Nazi menace is fast replaced by the Communist threat, and maps now oozing with Red aggression recall the famous maps in Capra's 'Why We Fight' series. Newsreels report the first H-bomb test, the Korean invasion, the HUAC hearings, and the Rosenberg's execution - the stark reality which stands in sharp contrast to clumsily staged anti-communist minidramas and bland advertisements for shopping centers as 'the concrete expression of practical American idealism.'

With the Fifties comes Ike, TV dinners, and suburban sprawl. In a telling juxtaposition, an Eisenhower speech on America's greatness and the challenge of the Atomic Age is tactically poised over shots of fast-food joints, supermarkets, and the car culture metaphorically headed into the night. As if answer to the garden city solution to urban blight envisioned in The City, drab, undeveloped tract housing is panned. So much for American idealism. So much for the American dream.

Throughout the film are recurring shots of people tuning in their radios and TV sets, which effect smooth transitions between scenes and across the years while subtly pointing up the mass media's influential - and questionable - role as vehicles of American propaganda and misinformation.

Newsreels report more bomb tests, including the 1954 Castle Bravo tests and their effect on unsuspecting Pacific Islanders. Strauss, chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission, assures us that these people are fine as we see clumps of hair puled from the head of one radiation victim. The answer to 'nuclearosis' - a name given atomic fear by a cartoon doctor - fallout shelters. Scenes of shelters being frantically built are intercut with an interview with Columbia University Professor Seymour Melman explaining the futility of such shelters (one of the few sequences which suggest accurate information was available at the time). But the Cold War escalates, and silent movie chase music accompanies our race to build shelters and beat the Russians.

Preparing for that nuclear attack was everyone's business, kids included. In the film's most celebrated sequence, 'Duck and Cover' advice from a Disneyesque 'Burt the Turtle' shows Paul and Patti how to protect themselves (ludicrously) if an atomic bomb falls on their way to school. In a devastating montage, the filmmakers punctuate Burt's sappy lyrics, 'He did what we all must learn to do - you and you and you and you,' with the faces of Einstein, Oppenheimer, Truman, Eisenhower, Nixon and even Ronald Reagan.

Carefully developed are the film's major themes: the callousness, ignorance, or sheer inanity of America's leaders; the American people's gullibility in accepting simple answers to complex questions; the media's collusion as agents of propaganda; and the unholy reliance on religion in duping the people.

The Church is a curious and pervasive target here. We hear Truman urging Americans 'to pray God we use the power He gave us to do His ways,' while 'Jesus Hits Like an Atom Bomb' is the catchy country western tune heard over anti-communist parades. An army official rehearsing the Marshall Islanders n a newsreel on their evacuation of the Bikini Atoll concludes by saying, 'If everything is in God's hands, it cannot be other than good.' On-the-street interviews soliciting opinions about the H-bomb prominently feature pro-nuke clergy, and a cleric later discusses the 'situation ethics' of arming oneself in a fallout shelter. Last but not least, a now-classic army film shows an inanely grinning chaplain comforting his worried men with the memorized message that the mushroom cloud is 'a wonderful sight to behold!' Men, crouched in foxholes, emerge moments after the bomb blast and dutifully advance on the billowing yellow cloud - perhaps the most disturbing image in this film.

The film's principle targets, though, are our political leaders, and cheap shots at some easy marks provide some of the film's funniest moments. When not exhibiting callousness like Truman, our leaders are shown off as buffoons. Richard ('Always Good for a Laugh') Nixon is seen in long-shot ringing the bell for Mental Health Week and in close-up with what looks suspiciously like a herpes on his lower lip. Lyndon Johnson, then a Senator, tells us that now that the Russians have the bomb, any American city is a target - 'Dallas or Houston or Amarillo... or even Johnson City!'

Loader and the Raffertys know, as did Len Lye, that mockery is the best way to deflect propaganda's power. Lye paved the way for The Atomic Cafe back in World War II when he edited sections of Triumph of the Will to a popular British tune and made Swinging in Lambeth Walk, a pungently funny deflation of Nazism. (The Atomic Cafe has its own take-off on that well-known propaganda film, with interviews of soldiers at the Castle Rock tests cut to mimic the infamous Nuremberg soldiers' roll call.) But what Lye knew, and the makers of The Atomic Cafe seem to deny, is that the product of this mockery is still propaganda.

By going for the jokes, Loader and Rafferty have painted a one-sided view of Fifties' America. Their selections and omissions would lead us to believe that there was no anti-nuclear movement in the Fifties with scientists and citizens banded together to combat the forces of misinformation and aggression. Just how naive were we? As 'baby boom' children squatting in dark school corridors during air raid drills, we all knew somehow that we were waiting for 'The End.' Playing tag at fallout shelters on the way home from school had nothing to do with safety, it was all over. We knew, somehow. To reflect the complexity beneath the placid exterior of the Fifties would have detracted from the artistic shape the overall message of the film Loader and the Raffertys made.

By making a comedy of nuclear manners, the filmmakers have garnered theatrical release and media attention for their work. Making palatable a subject many viewers would ordinarily shun, they have engaged a mass audience in serious life-or-death issues. Raising mass consciousness through entertainment is admirable. But what is the film's final impact? Is the 'tragic relief' of the film's apocalyptic ending enough to balance the non-stop jokes? Does the real dilemma sink in or just roll off the viewer's back, with visions like Nixon's comical side kick, Robert Stripling, twitching his black eyebrows the film's lingering afterimage rather than Armageddon?

There is nothing here to nurture the hope that we can counter the powers of misinformation and, more importantly, prevent nuclear holocaust. There is nothing to temper the final impact of decadent cynicism, which both feeds the film and is fed by it. It is cynicism, and not skepticism as Loader claims, that is the film's final message, and it may be as dangerous as fallout. If we cannot trust anyone, why should we begin by trusting these filmmakers?

[This review was written by Deirdre Boyle and originally published in Cineaste, Vol. XII, No. 2, 1982, pp. 39-41.]

ESPN to offer free weekend

ESPN has confirmed plans to offer a free weekend of sport later this month, including Scottish Premier League games and Aviva Premiership Rugby action.

From 6am on September 10 to 6am on September 13, ESPN and ESPN HD will be available without charge to all customers on Sky, Virgin Media, TalkTalk TV and UPC. However, this offer may, like previous offers, only be available to Sky veiewers with a

Sky Sports for free - for a day say reports

According top reports all 5 Sky Sports channels will be FREE on Sunday 26th September.

This is billed as Free Sports Day.


At the moment I do not know if this is free to air (ie no sky card - highly unlikely), free to view (sky card required - likely), or free to all sky subscribers (ie anyone with any sky subscription - likely)

That Sunday has TWO LIVE English Premier League football matches

Sky Sports Red Button Match Choice

I have received an email about the Sky Sports Red Button Match Choice, and thought it would be useful to share the information.

This is a services used by Sky Sports for allowing the viewing of multiple matches, either tennis or football, that are not available on the main Sky Sports 1, Sky Sports 2, Sky Sports 3 and Sky Sports 4 channels.

During the US Open Tennis, the match choice allows the

Sky Satellite Default Transponder Frequency Settings For Sky TV in Spain

"What to do if you receive the message "NO SATELLITE SIGNAL BEING RECEIVED" on a Sky digibox receiver?"

"What to do if you are receiving a No Default Transponder message?"

"What is the best Sky Default Transponder frequency setting to use on the Costa Blanca Spain?"

"What is the best Freesat Default Transponder frequency setting to use on the Costa Blanca Spain?"

"My Sky digibox is showing a

ESPN to offer free weekend - September 10 to 13

ESPN has confirmed plans to offer a free weekend of sport later this month, including Scottish Premier League games and Aviva Premiership Rugby action.

From 6am on September 10 to 6am on September 13, ESPN and ESPN HD will be available without charge to all customers on Sky, Virgin Media, TalkTalk TV and UPC. However, this offer may, like previous offers, only be available to Sky veiewers with a

Hallmark Channel to rebrand as Universal Channel on Sky TV

Universal Networks International has today confirmed plans to rebrand the Hallmark Channel as the Universal Channel in the UK.

On October 18, the pay-TV channel and its high definition variant will become the Universal Channel and the Universal Channel HD on Sky and Virgin Media. The Hallmark Channel +1 will also take on the new branding.

To celebrate its launch, the Universal Channel will give

Race and Class in the Cinema of Apartheid

To write a Marxist history of an art form or a cultural process in a time designated as postmodern - or at least with the logic of postmodernism dominating cultural debates - is one of the central challenges of our time. In Europe, three responses from a Marxist perspective have been put forth as the dominance of poststructuralist theory begins to ebb. Italian architecture critic Manfredo Tafuri has argued convincingly that the essential task of today is not so much writing a history of modern art forms as writing a modern history of those forms. In his discussion of the politics of history writing, French philosopher Louis Althusser has theorized the imperative of producing a dialectical concept of the history of an art form rather than merely presenting a narrative account of its history. And in England, writing about the history of structure of the State, Perry Anderson has postulated that history writing should be theoretical and analytical as well as factual and descriptive in order to be adequately comprehensive.

Writing from a Marxist perspective and aware of these present-day challenges, Keyan Tomaselli has written a theoretically solid book that attempts to develop an overview of modern South African cinema during the era of Apartheid. Employing the concepts of class and race as structuring principles and as ideological determinants of South African film, Tomaselli's The Cinema of Apartheid is not so much about the history of filmmaking in that country as it is about the modern conditions that shaped its cinema. In other words, Tomaselli sought to unravel the historical bases of Apartheid cinema.

With a very few exceptions - which I will address later - South African cinema since its inception imbibed and regurgitated the ideology of Apartheid as if it was a natural phenomenon, whereas it was an imposed historical condition. Tomaselli shrewdly observes that Apartheid was predicated on the paradoxical notion that racism is mainly an attribute of blacks. In its attempt to advance such insidious ideas, official (that is, consciously or unconsciously upholding Apartheid) South African cinema was probably the only national cinema in the world that had the gall to purvey mediocrity as genial art. Witness the Broederbond antics of The Gods Must Be Crazy director Jamie Uys (Broederbond was a white Afrikaner Mafia that secretly formulated the rationale of Apartheid), who turned the tragedy of the displaced Khoisan people into a comedy rather than a serious historical lesson. Indeed, the ideological nature of South African cinema under Apartheid was so extensive and claustrophobic that it destroyed any aesthetic uses of film within the national culture.

In the first two impressive chapters of his book, titled 'Censorship' and 'Control by Subsidy,' Tomaselli examines the institutional controls that the South African state used to impose Apartheid on the nation's cinematic production. From the inception of the South African cinema in 1910 - the same year that the modern South African nation was founded - to 1963, most censorship was imposed on imported films and concentrated on representations of sex and nudity. Throughout this half-century, official South African cinema never challenged the status quo of Apartheid. From 1963 onwards, censorship became directly political, since some films reversed this complacent attitude towards Apartheid. Government control was also practiced in the form of subsidies for film production, the topic of Tomaselli's second chapter. In Apartheid South Africa, this system operated by funding only those films that overtly or tacitly promoted the state ideology. It's no coincidence that this kind of official support began in 1956, when oppositional forces were in the process of mounting their challenge to the government. As Tomaselli shows, the second major reason behind the policies of subsidization was that the government hoped to prevent the production of noncommercial films, especially those that displayed artistic intention and technical competence.

In this context, a very peculiar phenomenon emerged in the 1970s, one consonant with the perverted logic of Apartheid: the emergence of films for blacks about black people made in the African languages but written and directly by whites who did not speak these languages. (Here I must register a very strong objection to Tomaselli who consistently refers to black languages as 'vernaculars,' in contrast to English and Afrikaans, which are given the higher status of 'languages.' Zulu, Xhosa, Sesotho, etc. are languages. To think otherwise perpetuates colonialist ideology and prejudices.) In those films subsidized by the government of the time, the neo-fascist ideology of Apartheid ran amok. Accurately, Tomaselli refers to this type of cinema as films for blacks and never as black films even though only blacks acted in them - a very important distinction. Analytically, Tomaselli draws a distinction between these and Afrikaans films. In the former there is both an absence of 'politics' and of whites. Hence conflict is eliminated, and individual solutions, rather than collective actions, are emphasized. In contrast, the Afrikaans films examined the traumas of urbanization and the 'virtue' of the separation of the races. Tomaselli is at his best when he compares these processes and analyzes the formal configurations that resulted.

Although The Cinema of Apartheid is one of the most engaging and useful books written on a particular African national cinema, Tomaselli omits one of the country's major historical processes: the mining revolution (the discovery of diamonds in Kimberley and gold in Johannesburg in the late nineteenth century), which totally transformed the historical, cultural, political and social landscape of South Africa. It was the mining industry that set the stage for the emergence of the South African cinema. It was this same industry that transformed dance halls into cinema halls in the mining compounds, populated by the newly created black proletariat. The philosophy of Apartheid was first presented and justified in mining publications. Without considering the effects of this revolution, the emergence and the development of South African cinema becomes incomprehensible.

In his fascinating penultimate chapter, 'Independent Cinema,' Tomaselli situates the formation of the independent cinema in South Africa - which persistently maintained its opposition to Apartheid - in the wider context of the formation of Third World cinema: Brazilian Cinema Novo, Argentinian Tercine Cinema, and the African cinema of Ousmane Sembene. Tomaselli argues that the explosion of the independent, or oppositional, cinema of South Africa resulted from the establishment of film and television departments at the universities, which coincided with the reawakening of the labor and student movements in the 1980s. Many South African independent filmmakers based their work on these two areas of social mobilization. As opposed to being subsidized by the system of government funding explained and critiqued earlier in the book, most of these filmmakers have received funds from institutions outside government circles: the South African Council of Churches, European television stations, private benefactors, and so on. The state of emergency declared in South Africa in 1985 reduced the vigor and effectiveness of independent cinema, but it by no means eliminated it. This sector of the South African cinema remained impressive, both in terms of its innovation and in contribution to cultural debates of the day. It aligned itself with such new intellectual movements as the History Workshop at the University of Witwatersrand and with various black intellectual historical forces.

Tomaselli's last chapter, 'Social Polarization,' deals with, among other things, the African National Congress' establishment of a film unit. Tomaselli suggested that it is the independent cinema sector and the ANC film unit that would provide the foundation of a post-Apartheid cinema. In my view, Lionel Rogosin's 1959 film Come Back Africa - some of which was shot secretly in South Africa and not allowed a screening there until 1988 - prefigures the coming national cinema.

[This is a slightly edited version of a review written by Ntongela Masilela, a black South African independent filmmaker who at the time of its writing was residing in exile in West Berlin and who was attached to Berlin Technical University. It was originally published in the film and video monthly journal The Independent, Vol. 12, No. 2, March 1989, pp. 15-17. Readers interested in post-Apartheid South African cinema may find useful the recent book by Lucia Saks, Cinema in Democratic South Africa: The Race for Representation (Indiana University Press, 2010).]