Agent Palmer

WarGames is a classic 1983 American Cold War science-fiction film. The film is about hacker David Lightman, played by Matthew Broderick, who unknowingly hacks into the United States Military WOPR (War Operation Plan Response) computer when trying to get early access to some ProtoVision video games.

What is it about this movie that makes it a classic and one of my favorites? Is it the acting? The plot? The Lesson? The Nostalgia? It’s a wonderful combination of the acting, the plot, the lesson, and most recently the nostalgia that sets it apart for me.

With the news of researchers at the University of Rochester developing a “three-dimensional, transmitting, continuously multidirectional cloaking” device, it’s time to dream big.

This cloaking device is being related to Harry Potter’s invisibility cloak but, in truth, cloaking or invisibility has been a part of Dungeons & Dragons, science fiction, comics, gaming, and literature well before J.K. Rowling put pen to paper.

Joseph Ferdinand Cheval was a French postman who spent 33 years building Le Palais idéal (the “Ideal Palace”) in Hauterives, France.

The building began in earnest in April 1879, at first with stones from his pocket. It gradually moved to stones in a basket and eventually included a wheelbarrow to move larger stones. It took him 33 years to build the palace, 20 of which were spent on the outer walls alone. From one stone to another along his postal route, he collected them while thinking to himself, “Since Nature is willing to do the sculpture, I will do the masonry and the architecture.”

Beginning with the heart-wrenching bus accident that claimed the life of Cliff Burton and then chronicling the band and its many players through the release of Death Magnetic, Enter Night: A Biography of Metallica by Mick Wall is brilliant.

Who better than Mick Wall, as classic a name in Rock journalism as there is, to chronicle the life and times of one of the biggest bands in the world.

Recently, I stumbled upon an amazing documentary housed in an equally brilliant site: Clouds Over Cuba which is hosted at www.cloudsovercuba.com. It’s been around for a while and was produced by The Martin Agency.

The documentary is an “interactive multimedia documentary” of the Cuban Missile Crisis, narrated by Matthew Modine, conceptualized by The Martin Agency and created by Brian Williams, Wade Alger, Joe Alexander, and Ben Tricklebank on behalf of The JFK Presidential Library.