Digital Wanderer

We live as long as we fly

Movies from childhood

 2006-10-20

   Although scientists say that people tend to forget the bad stuff, I remember mostly the negative from my childhood. Of the positive I only remember that being 7-10 years old,  I rode buses till I dropped and roamed on foot all over the city - for free and without the slightest adult supervision. I would get back home sometimes closer to 12. And nothing bad could possibly happen to me, because it was childhood and because it was the USSR. I was talked into traveling by a friend who always promised me mountains of money for it. He later kept his promise, when  all the promised untold riches had depreciated just enough to pay for one hour of playing on a Sega 16 bit console.

From the negative I remember having my hat taken away and not given back, getting called Paganel, getting my glasses smashed (about three times, probably). This, however, is more from school, rather than from childhood in general. My first school (N16) was huge - it had 11 fifth grades, including mine, which for some reason turned from a Cyrillic 4A into a Latin 5K. Living in this anthill wasn't very pleasant, but that's not why I left. I left for a math class, because that was the tradition in my family. And my friend didn't get in, because he ended up with fractional houses, but I've already written about that.

But sometimes strange and  inexplicable memories pop up. That's just how the brain is wired, building chains of bizarre connections between neurons that are strangers to one another.

Periodically I would recall a fairy-tale movie that made quite an impression on my childish mind. It was about a girl whose brother was kidnapped by evil forces, and he had to be rescued within 13 hours, otherwise something bad would happen. All I remembered - was the appearance of the main villain and the fact that the movie featured an analog clock with a dial up to 13 hours.

A search on Google yielded nothing, only Yandex barely managed to dig something up.

Who knows the movie, who can tell me what it's called and who played the main villain?

UPDATE:
In the comments they easily solved the mystery. Here it is, LJ in all its glory :-)

The movie is called "Labyrinth"
And the main villain there was the famous musician David Bowie

https://web.archive.org/web/20010724005426/https://www.dvdspecial.ru/disk_article.phtml?disk_id=137&article_id=318
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0091369/

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Pelevin

 2006-10-16

I've just read  the freshly stolen Pelevin
I'd hardly read him before because he's not really my thing. But, basically, he's cool. The heaps of internet (and even LiveJournal) allusions are amusing. But overall it's rather gloomy, and the ending is muddled.

Most likely, though, the stolen version really does differ considerably from the one that will be published, while the "theft" itself is an artificially created viral marketing campaign.
Those who still happen not to know what that is should head to the Media Virus Laboratory


And here's another funny thing
As far back as 1981, the Policy Research Committee of Japan's National Defense Agency conducted studies into the possibility of developing the country's own nuclear weapons, but at the time concluded that such a project was unfeasible because of the colossal burden it would place on the country's industry and infrastructure.

Monstrously impoverished North Korea is capable of making nuclear weapons, but one of the world's most industrially developed countries isn't.

Apparently, though, only the aforementioned committee thinks so, while everyone else is still of sound mind:

According to military experts, Japan has the technical capability to produce nuclear weapons on its own in no more than one month.

Now that sounds more like the truth.

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