I'd like to broaden my horizons by getting a better understanding of life in different cultures and time periods. Please recommend great books or films (fiction or non-fiction) which paint a broad, immersive, reasonably accurate picture of a place and time. [more inside]
posted on Jul 12, 2008 - 29 answers

I need some old-time footage of San Francisco in the 40s or 50s, and of Shanghai in the 20s. Anyone have any ideas of DVDs I could rent and rip some shots off of? [more inside]
posted on Feb 20, 2007 - 5 answers

I have been scouring the web for a way to get easily-available local-area movie schedules via RSS. Yahoo, Google, and IMDB all present perfectly decent HTML of this information, and there is one My Yahoo to RSS service; sadly, it's ad hoc and frequently fails to set the localization cookie. What am I missing? This should be a revenue oppotunity for the studios and theaters - where is the sweet creamy RSS I crave?
posted on Apr 1, 2006 - 6 answers

Who was the first to "freeze time"? [more inside]
posted on Mar 8, 2006 - 49 answers

What span of time elapses in episodes 4, 5 and 6 of Star Wars? [more inside]
posted on Jul 18, 2005 - 9 answers

I remember back in the 70s seeing a story on TV about an artist who filmed himself punching a timeclock every hour 24/7 for a whole year. At the end of the year he had a short time-lapse film of himself punching a clock 365 times. He had shaved his head at the beginning of the year, so you could see his hair growing over the duration of the film. He described how he had to structure his life in order to be able to do the filming every hour and how his mind began to short circuit from not getting enough REM sleep from sleeping in only hour-long stretches at a time. I'd like to see that film again. Does anybody else remember this story and/or who this guy is?
posted on Feb 19, 2005 - 5 answers