Entertainment

Here’s a fascinating post by Martin Filler about the history of staging Wagner’s operas:

A video has been leaked featuring George Bush Sr. visiting NASA which inadvertently shows British Astronaut Tim Peak standing in front of a blue screen with a grid pattern on it. The screen appears to be between him and a film set showing the ISS.  This appears to be the first “behind the scenes” look at how the green screen is used when filming the “experiments” on the ISS, such as the water CGI shots, and other CGI overlay shots. A grid, or key points on a green screen is one way to do motion-overlay/image overlay in after effects.

Wendell Berry, at his writing desk (Photo courtesy www.theseerfilm.com)

If the literary establishment ever decides to invent a prize for a 20th-century author with the greatest output of work, a portly English gentleman by the name of Edgar Wallace would be a serious contender. In terms of sheer quantity, Wallace’s output was simply astounding: he wrote over 170 books that were translated into 30 languages; more films were made out of his books than any other writer in the 20th century; and, during his most successful publishing year in the 1920s, one out of every four books sold in England had his name in the title.

You’ll have to wait until tomorrow for my Super Tuesday predictions – but here are my right-down-to-the-wire Oscar predictions.