Random Access

Sunday – 23 August 2009
It’s been a rainy morning in the valley… but the sun has put in an appearance.

SaraRules and I watched Bridge on the River Kwai (1, 2), a movie I got from Netflix a couple of weeks ago. I had heard about this movie over the years, but never gotten around to watching it… until last night.

The movie told the story of two military colonels – Colonel Saito (Sessue Hayakawa), the commander of a Japanese P.O.W. camp and Colonel Nicholson (Alec Guinness), commander of British forces being held in that camp. Saito has orders to build a bridge over the Kwai River; he plans to use P.O.W.s  – enlisted men and officers – to accomplish the task. Nicholson, according to The Geneva Conventions, informs Saito that his officers will not submit to manual labor. Thus, the men engage in a battle of wills.

The movie also included William Holden, as Cmdr. Shears, an American naval officer who escaped the prison camp… only to be enlisted in the effort to return to the camp and destroy the bridge.

The first third (or so) of the movie established the relationship of the two colonels and their attitudes to their respective situations. Shears features, in a more minor role, as a man who’s biding his time while trying to find a way out of the camp. It’s in the second third of the movie where things pick up, when the colonels come to something of an accord… but both realize that they have to give up something to achieve their goals. In a bit of a twist, it’s also in the second third of the movie where Shears, now a free man, finds himself in the midst of a situation that has him just as trapped as he was in the prison camp.

On the whole, I thought that it was a good movie and worthy of being called a classic.

Stray Toasters

• Forget Teens: Gamers are 35, Overweight — and Sad
  

  The average gamer, far from being a teen, is actually a 35-year-old man who is overweight, aggressive, introverted — and often depressed, according to a report  from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) (download PDF). The study also shows that when children and teenagers become game players, a trend toward physical inactivity and corresponding health problems extends — and is exacerbated — into adulthood.

• Commentary: About that Saturday mail…
• A History of the Shrinking Game Console
• Bollywood starts celebrating Ganesha festival
• 
• PC Pro’s top 10 hard disk destruction methods
• IBM, Other Multinationals “Detaching” from the U.S.
• Mind the Gap: A Compendium of Disturbing British Public Information Films

Today… stuff and things.
Tomorrow: Ravens vs. Jets on Monday Night Football.

Namaste.