Branko’s Weblog

The street I am moving out of is rapidly yuppifying, just like the rest of the neighbourhood. Every week now an empty container placed in a parking space signals that some house somewhere is being cleared out, to be rebuilt as a ‘luxury’ appartment and to be rented out for thrice the price or more. From where I am sitting you can even see the empty appartements. Almost with every garbage collection day you can now see pieces of furniture too old to be taken to the new house placed by the roadside.

Of course, you will see happen here what happens everywhere yuppies move in: all the things that made the neighbourhood attractive in the first place will have gone. The foreign restaurants, the artists and their artistry, the interesting bums, the noise, the stench, the colours…

I don’t like it, but it’s a natural developement. And other places will become more interesting because of it, so I guess it’s not too bad. Poor yuppies. Always chasing what they never will have.

When looking at my favourite comedies, I began to see a pattern. Some of my favourite (br|s)itcoms are Are You Being Served, Fawlty Towers and Absolutely Fabulous, and one of the funniest movies I know is Mon Oncle.

The four of them have in common that a part of the set invites physical comedy. Mon Oncle has the curved garden path and the stepping stones and the tiny outdoors dining spot, AbFab has the stairs leading down to the kitchen, the heart of the house, and Are You Being Served has wide stairs that the staff continuously have to run up or down.

The latter requires that the stairs are written into the scripts, but luckily Croft, Lloyd, Knowles and Chapman were smart enough to do so, and do so often.

The biscuit is being taken by Fawlty Towers, though. One of the common locations is the upstairs hallway, connected by a stair to another common location, the downstairs hallway. At the top of the stair, there is a daize that serves absolutely no other purpose than to enforce physical comedy for every character walking onto or off the stage.

For a long time, I just figured that these physical situations were the hallmark of truly great comedy. However, I saw two shows the past two days that suggested another explanation.

Keeping Up Appearances is said to be filled with bad actors. I wouldn’t know, but I noticed the episode where Hyacinth and Richard had rented (or bought) a cottage in the country. Normally, it is understood that when well-to-do people say they buy a cottage, they mean a huge house; but in this case, it really was a cottage: tiny. Almost all the jokes revolved around the lack of room, and many were physical in nature.

Today I saw for the first time an episode of Whoopi. I noticed that Rita either performed physical comedy or word play, which made it hard for me to judge her comedic abilities. After all, playing the physical jokes seemed to be no more than following the script.

It started to dawn on me that perhaps another reason to use physical situations is to give the script writer some control. I know an actor who doesn’t like doing comedy, and it showed when he tried his hand at it once. He had to act his whole scene, rather than to stumble through funny sets and situations.

A physical situation can be some sort of guarantee that something funny will happen. For instance, in Whoopi, Mavis Rae hates Rita, so it is funny that in their moment of reconciliation, when Mavis Rae wants to make it clear that the truce is only temporary, Rita inches closer to her again and again while Mavis Rae inches away and away.

When refurbishing an empty house, buy band-aids before you start work.

The sounds of David Bowie singing Major Tom floated from the coffeeshop on the ground floor to my appartment three floors up. Coffeeshop is the ‘Dutch’ word for a place where marihuana is sold and enjoyed.

I realized how that sound anchored the place where it came from. If you sell weed, you play Bowie, and reggae, and Pink Floyd, and Led Zeppelin. It was at once very trite and very reassuring.

Ah, that great promise of the web! Self-publishing, without interference of the type of middlemen who will take 90+ % of your earnings and hardly give something in return.

Comictastic is a computer program for the Apple Macintosh that will collect your favourite webcomics and show them to you. No banner ads, no annoying download waits, just comics, comics, comics.

So what does this have to do with self-publishing? Well, three things really: Comictastic is shareware, distributed from the site of the maker. It satisfied readers’ demands quickly and on a small-scale, the way only the products of small, self-publishing enterpreneurs can. And finally, it royally pisses off the self-publishing authors of web comics, who see their banner advertising schemes circumvented. These advertising schemes carry the huge hosting costs that come with high-bandwidth art like comics.

So there we are, no middle-men to argue our points for us. Just citizens and authors in what appears to be a copyright brawl. None of the participants particularly versed in copyright law, and none of them particularly versed in the law that code may be.

Something I refuse to believe is that the major publishers have the legal high ground; like everybody else, they probably are large scale copyright infringers too. So why not turn their own laws on them?

But how are you going to catch an infringing publisher? They are probably not going to use your software, your songs, your blog entries, your essays, your home movies.

Virus fighters use a technique called the honey pot: they put something out there that is too good to be missed. In the case of virusses, it’s a PC connected to the internet. Ah, a PC, thinks the virus, and tries to infect it. Instead, an alarm goes off and the virus fighters know there is a new virus out there.

What would a copyright honeypot look like?

On one of the blogs in the left menu there was a link to another blog, and that blog had a link to a Flash game called Lightning Break. Stupid game.