Word: mooning
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...Just from this synopsis of Moon, a searching and worthy first feature by Brit fashion maven Duncan Jones, you'll glean that the writer-director has maybe watched Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey once or twice, and is familiar with the stories of SF master Philip K. Dick, who wrote frequently about guys who don't realize they're robots. But Jones, 38, isn't just riffling these oeuvres in order to riff on them. He's long been fascinated by the evolving identity of man in the cyber-era. In 1995, as a philosophy major...
...Earth scientists have discovered a way to solve the planet's energy crisis: harvest an element called helium-3 from the Moon. Apparently this vast effort requires only one human: Sam Bell (Sam Rockwell), who's nearing the end of a three-year contract working alone in a station on the lunar surface. All that time alone, with only a talking computer and some old TV shows as company, has made Sam edgy; he can't wait to be picked up and taken back to Earth, to his loving wife and child. His anxiety escalates to horror when he discovers...
...child was called Zowie Bowie - but only because there is an tantalizing connection between a song of the father and the film of the son. Bowie's Space Oddity, from 1969, takes its punning title from the Kubrick movie the year before. Released nine days before the Apollo 11 moon landing, and played by the BBC in its coverage of the event, it describes the communication of a lonely astronaut: "This is Major Tom to Ground Control... / Here am I sitting in a tin can / Far above the world./ Planet Earth is blue,/ And there's nothing...
...conversations people are having about a presidential debate or the American Idol finale or Tiger Woods - or a conference in New York City on education reform. For as long as we've had the Internet in our homes, critics have bemoaned the demise of shared national experiences, like moon landings and "Who Shot J.R." cliff hangers - the folkloric American living room, all of us signing off in unison with Walter Cronkite, shattered into a million isolation booths. But watch a live mass-media event with Twitter open on your laptop and you'll see that the futurists had it wrong...
...what does Somalia receive? Around 4,800 African Union troops from Burundi and Uganda. Last month, the British ambassador to the U.N. assured reporters in the capital of neighboring Ethiopia that although U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon has so far demurred on Somalia, "the question of a United Nations peacekeeping mission remains on the table...