Joe: I don't think it's nice, you laughin'. You see, my mule don't like people laughing. He gets the crazy idea you're laughin' at him. Now if you apologize, like I know you're going to, I might convince him that you really didn't mean it.
The film's US release was delayed when Yojimbo (1961) screenwriters Akira Kurosawa and Ryuzo Kikushima sued the filmmakers for breach of copyright. Kurosawa and Kikushima won and as a result received 15
percent of the film's worldwide gross and exclusive distribution rights for Japan, Taiwan and South Korea. Kurosawa said later he made more money off of this project than "Yojimbo".
INFLUENCE -
Although the film was advertised in trailers as "the first film of its kind", the plot and even the cinematography was based almost entirely on Akira Kurosawa's film Yojimbo (written by Kurosawa and Ryuzo Kikushima). Yojimbo itself is believed to have been based on Dashiell Hammett's novel Red Harvest, although Kurosawa never credited the author, despite acknowledging the source. Kurosawa himself reportedly liked Leone's film, but remained insistent that he receive compensation. He wrote Leone: "It is a very fine film, but it is my film." The producers of Yojimbo successfully sued the production of A Fistful of Dollars for copyright infringement, and gained an apology, $100,000 dollars and 15% of the box office totals in Asia to the movie in compensation. Kurosawa later admitted he quite liked A Fistful of Dollars and considered it a worthy remake.
from A Fistful of Dollars
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Fistful_of_Dollars
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Watchdog protests blogger conviction
By MARTA FALCONI, Associated Press WriterFri Jun 23, 3:00 PM ET
A media watchdog group protested the conviction of an Italian blogger for defamation, warning Friday that such a verdict could lead to censorship of blogs in Italy.
Blogger Roberto Mancini, 59, was convicted of defamation last month in Aosta, northern Italy, and sentenced to pay $16,900 in fines and damages.
Four people, including two journalists, had filed a complaint against him over the content of his blog, which reports on local news in sarcastic and sometimes crude terms.
"It looks like the blogger is being punished for his bad language and not because he posted false information, which is unacceptable," Paris-based Reporters Without Borders said in a statement Friday.
The group also said Mancini wrongly was held responsible for comments posted by readers.
Mancini denies writing the incriminating comments, according to his defense lawyer, Caterina Malavenda. She said he would appeal the verdict.
In Italy, explanations of rulings generally are made public weeks after the ruling is issued, and the grounds for the verdict against Mancini have not yet been released.
Blogs, short for Web logs, are Web sites that allow one or more people to mix opinion, reporting, gossip and even musings about daily life, usually with links to news stories and other items on the Web.
They have become popular in recent years because they are easy to use and give bloggers, many of whom remain anonymous, a relatively wide freedom of expression and a potentially wide audience.
According to court documents, messages posted on the blog made clear, unflattering references to the four who filed the complaint, in one case mentioning that one of them had taken part in a bank robbery.
Malavenda, Mancini's lawyer, argued that the author of the defaming pieces could not be identified with certainty. She said authorities had seized in a raid photographs that appear on the blog, books on blogging and passwords.
"All the material shows he can be someone who used the blog, but there's no evidence that he is the author of those defaming pieces," she said.
Reporters Without Borders added "the complainants were not able to show (the reports) were untrue" and warned that the verdict might induce people who manage blogs to censor messages posted by visitors.
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TECHNEWS
Media watchdog protests defamation ruling vs blogger
Sat Jun 24, 2006
ROME (AP) -- A media watchdog protested the conviction of an Italian blogger for defamation, warning Friday that such a verdict could lead to censorship of blogs in Italy.
Blogger Roberto Mancini, 59, was convicted of defamation last month in Aosta, northern Italy, and sentenced to pay euro13,500 (US$ 16,900) in fines and damages.
Four people, including two journalists, had filed a complaint against him over the content of his blog, which reports on local news in sarcastic and sometimes crude terms.
``It looks like the blogger is being punished for his bad language and not because he posted false information, which is unacceptable,'' Paris-based Reporters Without Borders said in a statement Friday.
The group also said Mancini wrongly was held responsible for comments posted by readers.
Mancini denies writing the incriminating comments, according to his defense lawyer, Caterina Malavenda. She said he would appeal the verdict.
In Italy, explanations of rulings generally are made public weeks after the ruling is issued, and the grounds for the verdict against Mancini have not yet been released.
Blogs, short for Web logs, are Web sites that allow one or more people to mix opinion, reporting, gossip and even musings about daily life, usually with links to news stories and other items on the Web.
They have become popular in recent years because they are easy to use and give bloggers, many of whom remain anonymous, a relatively wide freedom of expression and a potentially wide audience.
``This is the first time I hear of a case of a blogger who's been found responsible for what is posted on his blog,'' said Julien Pain, the head of the Internet Freedom desk for the watchdog, speaking from Paris.
According to court documents, messages posted on the blog made clear, unflattering references to the four who filed the complaint, in one case mentioning that one of them had taken part in a bank robbery.
Reporters Without Borders warned that the verdict might induce people who manage blogs to censor messages posted by visitors.
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Press freedom group criticizes Singapore over blogger
Fri Jun 23, 3:30 AM ET
Singapore's police investigation of an Internet blogger who posted cartoons mocking Jesus Christ shows the city-state has scant regard for media independence, a press freedom group says.
"It is not the job of the police to intervene in this kind of case. By targeting this blogger, the authorities have once again shown they attribute scant importance to media diversity and independence," the Paris-based Reporters Without Borders (RSF) said in a statement.
"In their view, the role of press is simply to educate and orientate the public, a position not very dissimilar to the one taken by the Chinese and Vietnamese regimes."
The Straits Times has reported that the 21-year-old blogger, who described himself as a "free thinker", first posted a cartoon in January depicting Jesus Christ as a zombie biting a boy's head.
He ignored an online message asking for the cartoon's removal and went on to post more caricatures of Christ to spite the sender.
"I never thought anyone would complain to the police because the pictures were not insidious," he told the newspaper, adding that the cartoons had already been removed from his site.
Police told AFP Friday they are continuing to investigate the blogger after first questioning him in March.
The blogger could be jailed for up to three years or fined 5,000 Singapore (3,148 US) dollars or both if convicted under the Sedition Act.
"It is a serious offence for any person to distribute or reproduce any seditious publication which may cause feelings of ill-will and hostility between different races or classes," an earlier police statement said.
RSF said it understood that sections of the community might find cartoons relating to religious symbols shocking, "but they should be tolerated for the sake of free expression."
Singapore, a multi-racial island nation, clamps down hard on anyone inciting communal tensions. Two ethnic Chinese men were jailed last year for anti-Muslim blogs.
Ethnic Chinese make up 76 percent of Singapore's resident population of 3.4 million. Malay Muslims account for 13.7 percent followed by ethnic Indians and other racial groups.
In April, RSF condemned Singapore's restrictions on political discussions in blogs and websites ahead of general elections held in May.
Last year the group ranked Singapore 140th out of 167 countries in its annual press freedom index, alongside the likes of Egypt and Syria.
Singapore's ruling party is credited with turning the city-state into one of Asia's richest and most modern societies, but condemned by critics for restrictions on dissent.
Foreign publications have paid heavy damages or suffered circulation restrictions after publishing articles critical of Singapore's leaders.
But in a forum with foreign correspondents in April, Singapore's founding father Lee Kuan Yew defended the country's record.
"We're not going to allow foreign correspondents or foreign journalists or anybody else to tell us what to do," said Lee, 82, the former prime minister who holds the position of minister mentor in the government of his son, Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong.
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Dropping the F-Bomb
By Joel Achenbach Sunday, June 25, 2006; Page B01
The most versatile word in our language can do almost anything, other than be printed in a family newspaper. It can be a noun, a verb, a gerund, an adjective or just an expletive. It can be literal or figurative. Although it has an explicit sexual meaning, it's usually used figuratively these days, as an all-purpose intensifier.
The F-word remains taboo. But just barely. We may be entering an era in which this fabled vulgarity is on its way to becoming just another word -- its transgressive energy steadily sapped by overuse.
From hip-hop artists to bloggers to the vice president of the United States, everyone's dropping the F-bomb. Young people in particular may not grasp how special this word has been in the past. They may not realize how, like an old sourdough starter, the word has been lovingly preserved over the centuries and passed from generation to generation. For the good of human communication we must come together, as a people, to protect this word, and ensure that, years from now, it remains obscene.
Our leaders aren't helping. Before he was elected president, George W. Bush used the word repeatedly during an interview with Tucker Carlson. Dick Cheney on the Senate floor told a Democratic senator to eff himself. Presidential candidate John F. Kerry said of Bush and the war, "Did I expect George Bush to [mess] it up as badly as he did? I don't think anybody did." No one is shocked that these people use such language, but as statesmanship it's not exactly Lincolnesque.
More generally, the word is imperiled by the profusion of communications technologies. Everyone's talking, e-mailing, blogging and commenting on everyone else's comments. Combine that with partisan rancor and a general desperation to get one's message across, and naturally the word gets overtaxed. In Blogworld there are no idiots anymore, only [blithering] idiots. The most opportunistic move in the corporate realm may have been the decision by a retailer to call itself French Connection United Kingdom, which allowed it to put the company's initials on T-shirts everywhere. Jeepers, that's clever!
I don't want to make a federal case out of all of this -- but that's what the government is doing. The Federal Communications Commission in recent years has cracked down on "indecency" in general and this word specifically. The FCC's fines for indecency have risen steadily: a mere $4,000 in 1995, then $48,000 in 2000, then $440,000 in 2003 and finally a whopping $7.9 million in 2004. President Bush signed a bill last week increasing by tenfold the maximum fine for indecency on radio or TV, to $325,000. Broadcasters have sued to overturn recent FCC rulings, arguing that broadcasters shouldn't have to abide by laws that don't affect cable and satellite providers (which is why HBO's "Deadwood" can clock, by one Web site's calculation, 1.48 F-words per minute). The inability to be indecent is, for broadcasters, a competitive disadvantage.
In any case, government fines for indecency are something of a rearguard action, unlikely to stem the tide. It's like trying to fight rising sea levels one sandbag at a time.
A landmark case revolves around the word used by Bono, the rock star, at the 2003 Golden Globe Awards. He blurted out that winning an award was "[bleepin'] brilliant." The FCC first ruled that his comment wasn't indecent, because it didn't describe a sexual act. But in 2004, after the Janet Jackson breast exposure during the Super Bowl halftime show, the commission reversed the Bono ruling, saying the singer's comment was indeed profane and indecent.
The FCC's logic, however, was a stretch. It argued that any use of the word "inherently has a sexual connotation." But that's just not true. In fact, the reason it is used so often is because it has escaped the bonds of its sexual origin. It's now used as a generic intensifier. It makes plain language more colorful and emphatic.
The reason it must be suppressed in polite society is not because it's a bad word, but because, in certain circumstances, it is a very good word. It is a solidly built word of just four letters, bracketed by rock-hard consonants. It is not a mushy word, but one with sharp edges. Consider how clunky the term "the F-word" is. The authentic article, by contrast, explodes into space from a gate formed by the upper incisors and the lower lip. Then it slams to a dramatic glottal cough.
I'd even argue that it has therapeutic properties. Ponder, if you will, how critically important this word can be when you stub a toe. It serves as an instant palliative. It's like verbal morphine. You can't hop around the dining room, holding your foot, shouting "Drat!" or "Dagnabbit!" or "Heavens to Betsy!" Those words don't work.
"It's a sexual word in origin but it's not used that way very often," says Jesse Sheidlower, editor at large of the Oxford English Dictionary and editor of the 1995 book "The F-Word," a 224-page dictionary in which some of the permutations of the word are absofreakin'lutely ridiculous.
"It does not have the sting that it used to," he says. "For young people, it just doesn't have that much power for them."
The word has been around since at least the 15th century. The English word with which we are familiar is related to similar words found in the Germanic languages, such as Dutch, Norwegian, Swedish and German. These words meant "to thrust" or "to strike" or "to copulate." The first known printed appearance, Sheidlower says, comes from a text around 1475, in a poem that more or less said the monks of Cambridge did not go to heaven because of their sexual dalliances with women. For the next four centuries it was almost always used in a literal sexual sense. The figurative uses so common today didn't arise until the late 19th century, Sheidlower says.
The word was not openly printed in the United States until 1926, when it appeared once in Howard Vincent O'Brien's memoir "Wine, Women and War," according to Sheidlower's book. After World War II, writer Norman Mailer negotiated his way around the taboo by using the made-up word "fug" in the dialogue of the book "The Naked and the Dead." This spring, Andrew Crocker, a Harvard senior, turned in his thesis on the use of the word in post-World War II America, and he relates the famous story that Tallulah Bankhead (or, in some tellings, Dorothy Parker, or Mae West) said to Mailer at a cocktail party, "So you're the man who can't spell f -- ." Nice line, though Crocker says it's apocryphal.
James Jones used the word in his 1951 novel "From Here to Eternity." Like Mailer, Jones was reflecting the speech of American soldiers during the war. This point is key: The word was routinely used by real people, it just was rarely published and never broadcast. It was still taboo.
Liberating the word became a dubious triumph of the 1960s counterculture. At Woodstock, Country Joe and the Fish led a rousing cheer that began with "Give me an F!" and continued on through "K," finally asking, "What's that spell?" Now it sounds silly. Wow. They said a bad word out loud! What revolutionaries!
Soon, the word became common in popular culture, but still retained some of its sizzle. Consider the classic line by Otter in the 1978 movie "Animal House" after the fraternity brothers have wrecked Flounder's car: "Flounder, you can't spend your whole life worrying about your mistakes! You [effed] up -- you trusted us!" Drift a few years forward to 1989, and Spike Lee's "Do the Right Thing," and the word gets a real workout in the mouth of Sal, who at one point uses it six times in the space of five sentences.
Today it still has enough power to be memorable, as when Jack and Miles in the movie "Sideways" discuss the possibility of drinking merlot:
Jack: "If they want to drink merlot, we're drinking merlot."
Miles: "No, if anyone orders merlot, I'm leaving. I am NOT drinking any [expletive deleted] merlot!"
Just to clarify: This is funny not because Miles used a bad word, but because of the juxtaposition of the bad word with the one that follows. We do not expect to hear a person express such strong feelings -- to the point of vulgarity -- when discussing a particular kind of grape .
We must not overharvest the swear words that are part of the commons of our language. It is an adults-only commons, of course. Kids need to be told that they still can't use it. How can a 13-year-old be transgressively vulgar with the word if his 5-year-old sister already uses it? This word is supposed to be a reward of adulthood. We have to conserve it, so that our children and our children's children can use it when we're gone.
There is a wonderful scene in the 1987 movie "Hope and Glory." A gang of boys is rambling through the rubble of London during the Blitz. The new boy, Bill, wants to join. They ask if he knows any swear words. He says he does. Say them, the boys insist. He hesitates. He admits finally that he knows only one swear word. After much delay and agonizing, he says it, loudly.
The word.
The other boys are shocked into silence. "That word is special," the gang leader finally says. "That word is only for something really important."
Precisely.
achenbachj@washpost.com
Joel Achenbach is a staff writer for the Washington Post magazine.
For those of you who scan and surf the blogs like a mild reader, this should either scare you or incite you. Why ?
Cause they lose the point.
1. To get an idea or concept across hot button celebrities like Howard Stern, Jerry Springer, Maury Povich or Eminem,don't use profanity or shock all the time to get their thoughts across. All they have to do is allow their minds to think through issues and create a nexus of opinion that will cause us to react with or without thinking. For someone to use point blank cursing to cut down is too easy. It's the difference we have allowed ourselves to cultivate, from All In The Family to South Park. The insecurities that force those to use vulgarity replace those days when sarcasm and cynicism could allow the same insecure person to overcome, simply by using a Miriam Webster Dictionary and the human mind.
2. We have gone 1000% politically correct ... and its enough to make any logical human have a migraine. We alter the history to make it less sensitive to the new kids having kids.
3. Religion is getting to be a pedestal on which the fears of age old preconception can slap us against the cheek time and time again with their righteous anger. When taught to love those who are against them, they turn instead to Old Testament "eye for an eye" tentament.
4. When kids eight and under get a chance to slip into a R rated movie, with their parents in tow, F is the least sensitive word with which they are bombarded.
Sweeping off the issue under the rug doesn't cut it.
Till the next blog
Restriction is just Constriction's ugly as a stick brother
dr phibes
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