Category: Entertainment
The last time I was in Belize we met a freediver, but his limit was about 120 feet. This guy is in another category entirely. There is also a giant sink hole in Belize called The Blue Hole. This is a similar one near the Bahamas. Try not to hold your breath as you watch this.
Guillaume Nery is one of the foremost freedivers in the world. Freediving is the practice of diving into water without an oxygen tank — just holding your breath. Well, Nery decided it would be a splendid idea to do some freediving into Dean’s Blue Hole, west of The Bahamas. It seems Dean’s Blue Hole is the deepest underwater sinkhole in the world, dropping to a depth of 663 feet.
With his girlfriend working the camera, Nery plunged into the sinkhole, then climbed his way out. Nery told The Huffington Post in an email that he never actually reached the bottom — it would be impossible to go that far down without oxygen. But over the course of four afternoons, he and his girlfriend captured these mesmerizing pictures. Nery said, “This movie is an artistic project, a fiction.”
From Opposing Views.
P.S. . . . . .
Science and entertainment are blending again, as James Cameron, director of Avatar, is now working with NASA. He’s been everywhere lately, spreading his message of stopping the rainforest destruction and environmental degradation. We loved Avatar, and it’s great that he is following it up with lots of interviews explaining the message of the movie and he even knows quite a bit about climate change. (Sigourney Weaver has also done some interviews on the rainforest and ocean.)
Cameron was at last week’s climate rally in Washington, he was on Democracy Now, on other radio and TV talk shows, and now he’s even helping out NASA. They are in development sessions for the new Mars rover, Curiosity, and Cameron will be helping them design the 3D camera. Here’s the story from Information Week.
James Cameron is working with the space agency to outfit the next-generation rover, Curiosity, with 3D cameras.
NASA is getting help from Hollywood director James Cameron to build 3D cameras for the next Mars rover, Curiosity.The space agency abandoned plans to build cameras with the capability for the rover in 2007 due to budgetary concerns.
That prompted the director ” known for blockbuster films Avatar and Titanic– to step in and personally petitioned the agency to build the cameras, according to NASA. The agency this month said it has delivered the last two of four science cameras — called Mastcams — for the rover without 3D capability.
To all abusive, stalkerish ex-husbands, ex-boyfriends and other filthy disgusting animals out there, this is dedicated to you. Most of us know one or two, some of us have to deal with them even decades after we erased them from our minds. They still roam the earth, slithering around and leaving their slime trails and STINK where ever they go. I have two sentiments for you. And I hope the friends of these slobs get the message too. Stop writing lies about me. Stop writing about me PERIOD.
The following is published deliberately as a way of fighting back about lies that have been written about me online by Mike Haubrich and his Militant Atheist friends, and it will remain here until those people, the friends of my ex-husband, take the lies they printed about me off their websites.
I finally bothered to look at what the ass-lickers over at Quiche Migraine are writing about me now. It’s this idiotic: Someone lies about me, and as a result of me asking them to remove the lies, they go into FULL ON ATTACK MODE and upped the abuse. How fucking juvenile. So now it’s time to get this out there. There is just so much bullshit a person should take. When people attack me, I’m going to respond; it’s that simple.
The blog owner of two crappy, worthless blogs is Stephanie Zvan, an idiot who is in the business of writing lies and libel against individuals, including me. Let me get something very straight: she started this, by publishing libel about me on her website, and then responding to my request that she remove it with a big NEVER. Then she exploded with “revenge” and made the situation far worse. Hence this post.
Stephanie Zvan is a faux-intellectual blogger in Minnesota who counts among her friends my worthless, loser ex-husband, Mike Haubrich, a “customer service” person at Wells Fargo bank in Minneapolis. I can’t believe anyone hired him to do anything, much less work in a bank, given his record of stealing from people, selling drugs and sexually molesting someone in his own family. He’s an abuser and a manipulator, a liar and a person with no morals whatsoever. I wouldn’t trust him with babysitting my cat. When I knew him, he would have sex with anything that moved.
“. . . . at its core, Avatar’s philosophy is not new; it is ancient, profound, and liberating.” *
Most people who love movies and like pondering the future need to see Avatar, and see it in 3D. This movie is James Cameron’s masterpiece. It puts his work in the masterpiece category of other artists. It’s a stunning movie that costs a bit more than regular movies (in 3D at least), but it’s easily worth it. I have never seen a more beautiful movie. As for the plot and messages, these are themes I have thought about for years, so they were nothing new to me, but worth seeing how a master puts them all together for public consumption. With a movie so amazing, and so beautiful, it’s easy to forget you are absorbing much the same messages of other movie makers, perhaps even of a certain controversial documentary film maker.
This movie needs to be seen in 3D, because in 3D it envelopes you. You feel you are a part of the movie and right there on the planet, doing things along with the characters in the movie. It’s really astounding. And the 3D glasses are not like the old cheap bendy ones, they are in plastic frames with some type of polarized lens that is not colored. (They also fit over regular glasses, in case anyone is wondering.)
I wondered about some of the messaging in this movie. It’s obviously against wars fought for resources. At some point the disabled Marine that the movie centers around, Jake Scully, says something like (paraphrase): “We find something we want, the natives won’t let us have it, so they become our enemy and then we have an excuse to go to war with them. That’s how it works”. Obviously this is an allegory to Iraq and probably Afghanistan. The other theme that was clear was the perception of native people being “savages” as seen by the military and the Corporate Man, and in fact the Na’Vi were a far-advanced people who knew more about everything compared to the invaders. This is obviously also an allegory to the situation in Iraq and Afghanistan. But modern day wars can’t even take place unless the “enemy” is dehumanized, sub-humanized, or labeled something. Anything war-like will do: “insurgent” or “militant” transforms regular people who want the invaders out (like the Na’Vi did) into an Enemy. It’s a simple PR labeling trick. It works because Americans are gullible, (“You’re like a baby!”) so we buy it without even thinking about it.
That’s the definition of patriotism after all — blind devotion, or picking sides with your eyes and mind closed.
I also wondered about the subliminal messaging in this movie, if there actually is any. I thought I detected some. The People for instance, are called “the People” to ultra-humanize them, and also by their real name which is “Na’Vi” (na-VEE) which, come on, is almost exactly like the word Navy. James Cameron has always had military or police people featured prominently in his movies, usually as heroes. Aliens was the pinnacle of his love of the Marines. Terminator was his love of the police, but also their ineffectiveness. Titanic, well who knows. Cameron has always both liked and disliked people in roles of ultimate authority in his movies. In Aliens, the way he felt about the Marines was clear: “Abso-lutely BAD ASS”.
In this movie, it’s not so clear. He seems now to portray the Marines as both good souled (in Jake) and also as horribly corporate and evil, when they pair up with Big Corporations. So maybe Cameron now likes the Navy better, (given his obvious obsession with all things military) and is giving the audience a subliminal message: join the Navy instead of the Marines if you need a job. At least the people in the Navy are safer and rarely kill people, at least directly.
The other weird subliminal name I caught in the movie was that of the god of the Na’Vi. Their god is “everything” connected, or One Being, which they call Ai’wa. Now think in terms of the military theme. Could Ai-wa be AWOL? There is one line in the movie (which I can’t remember exactly of course) where someone says, the answer is the “Ai-wa”. There is another scene where something huge and important (trying not to spoil it for people here) and one of the pilots sent to destroy this thing stops and says forget this, “I didn’t sign up for this shit”. I thought to myself that James Cameron was telling the audience with this movie all of these things: Respect native people. And if you are going to join the military, join the Navy. If you are in battle, stop fighting, stop killing people. Don’t follow orders. (Hardly anyone in Avatar follows orders). And if you are a Marine, or killing people, go AWOL, — leave the fighting. It’s the right thing to do. I’d like to know if anyone else caught these messages or interpreted them differently.
Or are the names purely a coincidence?