lunatechian (lunatech-ian)

The statue "Death Song" is one of the most moving pieces of art for me. I saw this statue at the Crazy Horse Memorial.

In my first viewing of the statue, it appeared to be the statue of a hunter standing over the animal he had just hunted.

I then read the description of the statue (quoted below)

"Death Song" depicts a heroic member of the Miwatani Society of the Western Lakota. The warriors of this elite group of fighters, called "Sash Wearers," would stake their sash to the ground in the face of an enemy attack. This allowed freedom of actions, but under no circumstance could the sash wearer pull out the lance and retreat-an action would bring scorn from fellow warriors and Tribal members. Only exceptional performance in battle would allow another warrior to remove the lance and permit the sash wearer to escape otherwise certain death. In the bronze sculpture, one warrior, with his sash pinned to the ground, is standing beside the body of his exhausted pony preparing to do battle, singing his "Death Song."

I did a double take after reading the description and looked at the statue from the side. I could see the stake and I could make out the horse lying on the ground.

The statue really amazed me. From the front, it appeared to be ahunter with his prey. But closer inspection showed it to be a warrior most probably making his last stand.

I wonder how much brain power they spent in thinking of the product name.

When George Lucas and screenwriter Lawrence Kasdan decided to make the ancient Jedi at the heart of Luke's spiritual journey into a two-foot tall, pointy-eared alien, it wasn't clear how the character could actually be realized on screen using 1980 technology. At the time, animatronic technology wasn't thought to be advanced enough to pull off Yoda. .... they decided to try putting a trained monkey in a Yoda costume, including a full Yoda face mask. Rinzler showed a picture of the monkey on set, but he explained this idea was quickly abandoned when one of the people who worked on the primate scenes in 2001: A Space Odyssey pointed out "Look, the monkey's just going to pull off the mask over and over again. It's never going to work."

In the picture, a monkey is outfitted with a cane and a mask and measured. The simian was also briefly considered for walking shots of Minch-Yoda that would have been impossible to execute with a puppet.

Pic taken from Vanity Fair

When doing an apt-get upgrade on my Debian (Lenny) box yesterday I received this message

Since release 150, udev requires that support for the CONFIG_SYSFS_DEPRECATED feature is disabled in the running kernel. Please upgrade your kernel before or while upgrading udev.

This was holding back the upgrade of all the packages. Looked around a bit and it seems that the solution for this problem is to let apt know that we do not want to upgrade the udev package. The way to do this is echo "udev hold"|dpkg --set-selections and then run apt-get upgrade