Somebody’s Judgement of Music

Aside October 23, 2021October 23, 2021 Markozen.com Music

Don’t know who made this list. But it looks like the Soviets may be involved here.

Village People, violence? Those characters were as wimpy as it gets.

Is Bigfoot Possibly an Alien Entity?

Aside October 23, 2021 Markozen.com Paranormal

Are Sasquatches related to Wookies? The possibilities are mind-boggling.

Sasquatch having a crap at left, Wookie relaxing after a crap at right.

Rather than being a missing link between man and the apes, Bigfoot may possibly be an alien entity. This intriguing possibility is derived from evidence in several solid UFO cases.

The earliest clues date back to 1888, when a cattleman described an encounter with friendly Indians in Humboldt County, California. They led him to a cave where he saw a hefty humanoid creature covered in long, shiny black hair, with no neck, sitting cross-legged.

One Indian told him three of these “Crazy Bears” had been cast out of a small moon that dropped from the sky and landed.The “moon” then ascended back into the air. So it’s highly likely the “Crazy Bears” were really Bigfoots, and the “moon,” a spacecraft.

Now fast-forward almost 100 years to 1973… and Mrs. Reafa Heitfield. She and her 13-year-old son were sleeping in a trailer in Cincinnati, Ohio on the morning of October 21. Reafa arose at 2:30 a.m. to quench her thirst, and noticed strange lights in the adjoining parking lot. Looking out the window, her attention was drawn, in particular, to an inexplicable cone of light, shaped like a huge bubble umbrella — about seven feet in diameter.

Nearby she spotted a grayish, ape-like creature with a large, downward angled snout, no neck and a sizable waist. Moving slowly, it then entered into the light. About five minutes later, both apeman and UFO disappeared.

Another dramatic incident occurred a few days later on October 25, 1973. A group of farmers in Fayette County, Pennsylvania caught sight of a dome-shaped UFO that was brightly lit and about 100 feet in diameter. As the locals drove toward it, they saw a pair of gargantuan creatures covered with thick, matted hair, luminescent green eyes and long arms that dangled below their knees.

A farmer’s son fired a gun shot at the creatures, one of which raised its right hand in the air. At that very moment, the UFO disappeared. Then, the two Bigfoots escaped into the woods and were never seen again.

Dairy farmer William Bosak of Frederic, Wisconsin was returning from a co-op meeting about 10:30 p.m. on December 9, 1974, when he nearly slammed into a globular UFO on the road in front of him, its bottom half enshrouded in fog.

Inside the visible transparent dome was a six-foot-tall ape-like creature with reddish-brown fur covering its body (except for the face) and distinctive pointed ears. It appeared to be operating a control panel. As Bosak passed by, the object suddenly arose and disappeared.

In August,1976, after a series of UFO sightings around Rutland, British Columbia, Canada, several men and their children saw a hairy ape-like entity, six to seven feet tall roaming about a mountainside. They also found a clump of hair that was sent to the Royal Canadian Mounted Police for identification. Laboratory analysis confirmed it was primate hair, but, significantly, it could not be matched to any known species on earth!

Perhaps the Bigfoot creatures are UFO pilots, landing on earth for exploratory purposes. Or, conceivably, higher level ETs are leaving behind some specimens as “guinea pigs” to test our environment for long-term survival. Or, possibly,these Bigfoots are criminal entities being deposited on Earth as a form of cosmic deportation!

A hybrid cyborg?

Romulan hybrid?

Somebody has to set up a big net out in the forest and get one of these sneaky critters!

German Teenager Makes Illegal Climb of The Great Pyramid of Giza

Aside October 23, 2021 Markozen.com Geography

A German teenager found himself in hot water with Egyptian authorities after being arrested for climbing the Great Pyramid of Giza.

Andrej Ciesielski scaled the legendary monument back in 2017 in a daring daylight climb that amazingly only took him about 8 minutes to accomplish.

Despite being spotted by police during his ascent, Ciesielski continued to the top of the pyramid to savor the once-in-a-lifetime view and document his incredible feat.

Upon returning to ground level, the young man was arrested and could have faced up to three years in jail for the stunt.

He was eventually released after agreeing to let authorities delete the footage and photos from his climb.

Fortunately, Ciesielski had a way to recover the digital material and is now sharing the evidence of his awesome adventure with the world.

One slip and it’s going to be a head-over-heels crash that could cause permanent damage.

Here are some photos of Russian adventurers who climbed the pyramid a few years ago.

After a hard day of pyramid climbing, go to the KFC and indulge in local chicken cuisine.

Flying Vehicle Dubbed Jetson One

Aside October 23, 2021 Markozen.com Aviation

The real life Jetsons! Start-up develops a $92,000 flying vehicle dubbed Jetson One that ‘anyone can own and fly’

The electric flying vehicle can operate for about 15 minutes on a single charge
It comes 50 per cent complete with the rest built at the new owners home
The device, which sells for £66,000 ($92,000) is sold out completely in 2022

A startup from Sweden has developed a personal flying vehicle that it says ‘anyone can fly’ called the Jetson One, and it is available for £66,000 ($92,000).

The all electric vertical take-off and landing (eVTOL) aircraft was launched this month, three years after the firm released a ‘proof of concept’ prototype in 2018.

‘Our mission is to make flight available to everyone. The Jetson one is an electric helicopter that you can own and fly. We intend to make everyone a pilot,’ said Jetson co-founder Peter Ternstrom.

The single-seat ‘built at home’ kit-copter can zoom along at 63 mph thanks to its lightweight aluminium and carbon fibre frame and 118 horsepower engine.

A startup from Sweden has developed a personal flying vehicle that it says 'anyone can fly' called the Jetson One, and it is available for £66,000 ($92,000) +

A startup from Sweden has developed a personal flying vehicle that it says ‘anyone can fly’ called the Jetson One, and it is available for £66,000 ($92,000).

The car is named after The Jetsons, a fictional 'future family' created in the early 1960s by Hanna-Barbera Productions, and including UFO-like flying cars +

The car is named after The Jetsons, a fictional ‘future family’ created in the early 1960s by Hanna-Barbera Productions, and including UFO-like flying cars.

Science Fiction and High-End Fashion

Aside October 23, 2021 Markozen.com Fashion, Science Fiction

Beam me up, Gucci! New campaign inspired by vintage sci-fi

North Korea launches ballistic missile at North America

Aside October 22, 2021 Markozen.com Animals, Drugs, Geopolitics, Scary, Weapons

After doing some bad methamphetamine, Kim Jong Un and his brown nosing generals decide to hit the U.S. with their new long-range missile the KN-08. The intended target was either Los Angeles or San Francisco according to RAND Corporation analysts.

The missile guidance system fails, as predicted by Stephen Colbert, and lands a thousand miles to the north. The missile and its nuclear warhead land in southern Alberta, Canada. Barley missing blowing up a herd of 10,000 black Angus cattle.

It is time Canada gets on board with the U.S. anti-ballistic missile defense system.

How many people work on a Hollywood film?

Aside October 22, 2021October 22, 2021 Markozen.com Movies

The statistics below are somewhat dated.

I watched a movie the other day and when ‘The End’ text appeared a really catchy song started. So I listened to the song and began watching the credits. It seemed to never end, credit after credit with name after name. A question arose in my head; how many people are in a crew for a Hollywood film?

By Stephen Follows

Last week I ran a course in Malaysia for the Met Film School and the Malaysian Government. Malaysia is set to be a popular destination for Hollywood projects, thanks mostly to the 30% tax break and the brand new Pinewood Studio complex. The studio is not officially open yet but already ‘Marco Polo’ has set up shop and is hiring. The Malaysian government is funding courses to prepare locals for work on huge Hollywood productions and my course last week was for would-be Production Assistants.

In order to give the students a sense of the scale of these productions I asked them to guess how many people worked on the movie ‘Avatar’. Guesses ranged from a few hundred up to a thousand. The actual figure (according to IMDb) is 2,984.

This got me thinking about what the number of crew members could tell us about a production. There are few caveats to this approach which I’ve laid out at the bottom of this article, but nonetheless it’s quite a revealing process. I took the 50 highest grossing films of each of the past 20 years (giving me 1,000 films to study) and looked at the number of people credited on IMDb. In summary…

Iron Man 3 credits 3,310 crew members
The average number of crew credits in the top 1,000 films between 1994 and 2013 was 588.
Over half of the top films had under 500 people in their crew
On average the top films of the past two decades have each had 3.5 writers, 7 producers, 55 people in the art department, 32 in sound, 55 in camera / electrical and 156 in visual effects.
The Butler had 39 producers – 5 producers, 17 executive producers, 6 co-executive producers, 4 co-producers and 7 associate producers
A third of the workers on Love Actually were in the art department
Crew credits suggest that Peter Jackson favours special effects over visual effects more than the industry average.
Now You See Me has six times the average number of people in the camera department
23% of the people who worked on ‘Pokemon: The First Movie’ were in the music department

The largest crew on a Hollywood film

The biggest crews are rather staggering, with 3,310 people receiving a credit on Iron Man 3.

FILMS WITH LARGEST CREWS (1994-2017)
Iron Man 3	3,310
Avatar	2,984
Marvel’s The Avengers	2,718
The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey	2,709
Chronicles of Narnia: Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe	2,622
Man of Steel	2,543
Captain America: The First Avenger	2,536
Thor	2,384
Transformers: Dark of the Moon	2,376
His Dark Materials: The Golden Compass	2,235

Overall, the average number of crew credits was 588, with the top 25% of films accounting for half of all credits. Out of my list of 1,000 films…

Only 1 film had over 3,000 credits
13 films credited between 2,000 – 2,999 people
133 films credited between 1,000 – 1,999 people
287 films credited between 500 – 999 people
566 films credited under 500 people

Visual Effects

Avatar just pips Iron Man 3 to the Oscar for ‘Most People Credited in the Visual Effects Department’. Interestingly, The Golden Compass is the only Hollywood film in the top 20 of this visual effect chart which was not released in 3D.

FILMS WITH LARGEST VISUAL EFFECTS DEPARTMENT (1994-2017)
Avatar	1,844
Iron Man 3	1,834
Marvel’s The Avengers	1,514
Man of Steel	1,445
The Golden Compass	1,252

For 57 of my 1,000 films, the Visual Effects Department made up over 50% of all crew members. If you meet someone in a pub who says they worked on Harry Potter there is a 62% chance they worked in visual effects. Similar numbers are true for Gravity, Pacific Rim, Avatar and Total Recall. In fact, the VFX department of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part II made up a larger percentage of the total crew than Avatar (62.0% versus 61.8%). This is surprising as Harry Potter appears to be an almost exclusively live action film whereas Avatar is largely CGI animation.

Special Effects

Special effects include on-set physical, mechanical and in-camera effects and should not be confused with digital / visual effects. Hollywood films by Peter Jackson take up four out of the top five places, revealing his love of real-world, on set trickery.

FILMS WITH LARGEST SPECIAL EFFECTS DEPARTMENTS (1994-2017)
The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey	225
The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring	217
Avatar	212
The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King	211
The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers	195

Stunts

The number of stunt performers involved with the most recent Batman film is rather impressive, due in part to the huge street battles.

FILMS WITH LARGEST STUNT DEPARTMENTS (1994-2017)
The Dark Knight Rises	258
The Green Hornet	223
The Bourne Ultimatum	188
Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer	177
The Lone Ranger	175

Woody Allen Life Quotes

Aside October 22, 2021 Markozen.com Funny, Philosophy

Heywood “Woody” Allen (born Allan Stewart Konigsberg; December 1, 1935) is an American filmmaker, writer, actor, comedian, and musician whose career spans more than six decades.
He worked as a comedy writer in the 1950s, writing jokes and scripts for television and publishing several books of short humor pieces. In the early 1960s, Allen began performing as a stand-up comedian, emphasizing monologues rather than traditional jokes. As a comedian, he developed the persona of an insecure, intellectual, fretful nebbish, which he maintains is quite different from his real-life personality. In 2004, Comedy Central ranked Allen in fourth place on a list of the 100 greatest stand-up comedians, while a UK survey ranked Allen as the third greatest comedian.

woody-allen-quotes-movie-film-filmografia-manhattan18

That mysterious lake in the Clint Eastwood movie High Plains Drifter

Aside October 22, 2021 Markozen.com Movies, Nature

High Plains Drifter is a classic Eastwood movie from the early seventies. I think I have seen the movie 7 or 8 times. And every time I watch it I am mesmerized by that beautiful lake.

High Plains Drifter is a 1973 American Western film, directed by and starring Clint Eastwood and produced by Robert Daley for The Malpaso Company and Universal Pictures. Eastwood plays a mysterious gunfighter hired by the residents of a corrupt frontier mining town to defend them against a group of criminals.

The film was shot on location on the shores of Mono Lake, California.

Mono Lake is a large, shallow saline soda lake in Mono County, California, formed at least 760,000 years ago as a terminal lake in a basin that has no outlet to the ocean. The lack of an outlet causes high levels of salts to accumulate in the lake. These salts also make the lake water alkaline.

This desert lake has an unusually productive ecosystem based on brine shrimp that thrive in its waters, and provides critical nesting habitat for two million annual migratory birds that feed on the shrimp.

Mono Lake

Max. length	15 km (9.3 mi)
Max. width	21 km (13 mi)
Surface area	45,133 acres (182.65 km²)
Average depth	17 m (56 ft)
Max. depth	48 m (157 ft)
Water volume	2,970,000 acre·ft (3.66 km³)
Surface elevation	6,383 ft (1,946 m) above sea level

Islands	Two major: Negit Island and Paoha Island; numerous minor outcroppings (including tufa rock formations). The lake’s water level is notably variable.

Clint riding into the town of Lago, on the shore of Mono Lake.

In the movie they paint the town red to try and disorient the killers who are on their way.

The movie set (town of Lago) in the first picture, and the same location with the town gone in the second.

The most unusual feature of Mono Lake are its dramatic tufa towers emerging from the surface. These rock towers form when underwater springs rich in calcium mix with the waters of the lake, which are rich in carbonates. The resulting reaction forms limestone. Over time the buildup of limestone formed towers, and when the water level of the lake dropped the towers became exposed.