Day: July 2, 2004

… have I mentioned that I'm a kick-ass PHP guru recently?

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) – Marlon Brando, one of the most influential actors of his generation, has died, according to media reports on Friday citing his lawyer. He was 80.

A family friend told Fox News that Brando died on Thursday night at 6:20 p.m. (2220 GMT) in a Los Angeles-area hospital after being taken there on Wednesday. The cause of death was not immediately known.

Brando, with his broken nose and rebel nature, established a more naturalistic style of acting and defined American macho for a generation with classic performances in “A Streetcar Named Desire” (1951), “The Wild One” (1953) and “On the Waterfront” (1954).

To many, Brando remained the motorcycle-riding rebel he played in “The Wild One.” Asked what he was rebelling against, Brando replied, “Whaddya got?”

Brando won an Academy Award for “On the Waterfront” and another for his brooding, at times mumbling, portrayal of the patriarch of a Mafia family in “The Godfather” (1972).

But Brando also railed against Hollywood and chafed at the pomp of stardom throughout a stormy career. In 1973, he refused to accept his second Oscar to protest the treatment of American Indians and later professed not to know what had happened to the award. In more recent years, Brando's brilliance as an actor was overshadowed by his eccentric reclusiveness, the turmoil in his family life and financial disputes.

Christian Brando, his son by his first wife, Welsh actress Anna Kashfi, was sentenced to 10 years in prison for the 1990 murder of his half-sister Cheyenne's boyfriend. Cheyenne later committed suicide, in 1995, at the age of 25.

Brando, who was paid a then-staggering $14 million for his walk-on performance in 1978's “Superman,” remained enmeshed in legal disputes over money up until his final weeks.

He poured millions into Tetiaroa, a South Seas atoll he bought in 1966 and where he spent much of the 1980s living out a boyhood fascination with Tahiti rekindled during the shooting of “Mutiny on the Bounty.”

Movies, he said, he made only for the money. “Acting is an empty and useless profession,” he said. Still, Brando inspired a generation of beatniks and rebel actors, including James Dean.

“There was a sense of excitement, of danger in his presence, but perhaps his special appeal was in a kind of simple conceit, the conceit of tough kids,” wrote critic Pauline Kael of the New Yorker.

“Brando represented a contemporary version of the free American,” she wrote.

THE UNIVERSAL ACTOR

Brando was born on April 3, 1924, in Omaha, Nebraska, the son of a calcium carbonate salesman and an actress who coached a local drama group. He was sent to a Minnesota military academy but was soon expelled.

He headed to New York, where his two sisters were studying art and drama. There he took up drama, studying with famed teacher Stella Adler and the Actors' Studio.

“Marlon never really had to learn how to act. He knew,” Adler once said. “Right from the start he was a universal actor. Nothing human was foreign to him.”

In 1946, critics voted Brando Broadway's most promising actor for his role as a returning World War II veteran in the flop “Truckline Cafe.”

Brando broke his nose in backstage horseplay and gained a reputation for being moody. Auditioning for a Noel Coward comedy, Brando tossed the script aside, saying, “Don't you know there are people in the world starving?”

In 1947, playwright Tennessee Williams approved selecting Brando to play the brutish Stanley Kowalski in the stage production of “A Streetcar Named Desire.”

Brando resisted Hollywood until 1950, but then turned in memorable performances in Elia Kazan's 1951 film version of “Streetcar” and “Viva Zapata!” (1952), the story of a Mexican peasant revolutionary.

'I COULD HAVE BEEN SOMEBODY'

In “On the Waterfront,” Brando played a one-time boxer who turns against his friends and brother in a corrupt union.

In one of the most famous scenes in cinema, Brando tells his brother, played by Rod Steiger, “Oh, Charlie, oh, Charlie … you don't understand. I could have had class. I could have been a contender. I could have been somebody, instead of a bum — which is what I am.”

In the 1960s, Brando became active in the civil rights movement, especially for American Indians. He sent Indian actress Sacheen Littlefeather to the Academy Award's platform in 1973 to describe the plight of Indians.

Critics both hailed and panned his performances in “Last Tango in Paris” (1972) and “Apocalypse Now” (1979), but Brando was also legendary for being one of his toughest critics.

“To this day, I can't say what 'Last Tango in Paris' was about,” he wrote in his 1994 autobiography. He also claimed to have talked Francis Ford Coppola into marginalizing his role as the enigmatic Col. Kurtz in order to heighten the mystery.

“What I'd really wanted from the beginning was to find a way to make my part smaller so that I wouldn't have to work as hard,” he said.

In the 1990s, Brando emerged from a decade hiatus to take small roles in minor films, often for outsized fees. He played a Godfather-like mafioso for laughs opposite Matthew Broderick “The Freshman,” and his portrayal of a kindly psychiatrist in 1995's “Don Juan DeMarco,” opposite Johnny Depp, earned him about $3 million in a movie budgeted at $15 million.

Brando was married three times, choosing little-known actresses as his brides — Kashfi, Mexican actress Movita Castenada, and Tahitian Tarita Tariipia, who co-starred with him in “Mutiny on the Bounty.”

“He's full of deep hostilities, longings, feelings of distrust,” director Kazan once said of him, “But his outer front is gentle and nice.”

The Department of Homeland Security's U.S. Computer Emergency Readiness Team touched off a storm this week when it recommended for security reasons using browsers other than Microsoft Corp.'s Internet Explorer.

The Microsoft browser, the government warned, cannot protect against vulnerabilities in its Internet Information Services (IIS) 5 server programs, which a team of hackers allegedly based in Russia has exploited with a Java script that is appended to Web sites.

The particular virus initiated this week inserts Java script into certain Web sites. When users visit those sites, it initiates pop-up ads on home and office computers, and allows keystroke analysis of user information. The target is believed to be credit card numbers. CERT estimated that as many as tens of thousands of Web sites may be affected.

CERT said vulnerabilities in IIS and IE could include MIME-type determination, the DHTML object model, the IE domain/zone security model and ActiveX scripts. Alternative browsers such as Mozilla or Netscape may not protect users, the agency warned, if those browsers invoke ActiveX control or HTML rendering engines. The only defense may be completely disabling scripting and ActiveX controls.

Microsoft said earlier in the week it is working with law enforcement officials to identify the source of the latest Internet virus.

From Wired news: Downloads of Mozilla and Firefox — an advanced version of Mozilla — spiked the day CERT's warning was released, and demand has continued to grow. According to Chris Hofmann, engineering director at the Mozilla Foundation, formed last July to promote the development, distribution and adoption of Mozilla Web applications, downloads of the browsers hit an all-time high on Thursday, from the usual 100,000 or so downloads on a normal day to more than 200,000.

Hofmann said the Mozilla team wasn't surprised when CERT issued its warning. “Mozilla and Firefox downloads have increased steadily since last fall, with the Firefox user base doubling every few months, as more people seem to have reached their threshold level of frustration dealing with problems with IE and Windows, and have found the Mozilla software a good solution to solving those problems,” said Hofmann. “CERT's recommendation is just a reflection of the trend we have seen for quite some time.” Security experts said Mozilla's lack of ActiveX support makes the browser more secure than IE. ActiveX was intended to allow websites to add multimedia and interactive features, but has lately been used to slide spyware onto PCs without the user's knowledge or explicit consent.

Story links:
Wired: http://www.wired.com/news/infostructure/0,1377,64065,00.html
Yahoo: http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=74&e=3&u=/cmp/20040702/tc_cmp/22103407

Evil Mom's Brownies

Ingredients
1 cup unsweetened cocoa powder
1/2 cup melted butter (for extra chewey, substitute with Canola oil)
2 cups granulated sugar
2 eggs
1/4 teaspoon salt
1 cup all-purpose flour
2 teaspoons pure vanilla extract (if you use artificial, I'll never speak to you again)

Directions
* Preheat oven to 350 degrees F. Lightly grease one 9 X 9 inch pan.

* Combine the cocoa, melted butter or oil, sugar, eggs, salt , flour and vanilla. Mix until well combined. It should be very thick and sticky.

* Spread mixture into the prepared pan. Bake at 350 degrees F for 30 minutes. Cool completely before cutting into squares.

And my icing: cover just out of oven brownies with chocolate chips (I use half semi-sweet, half milk chocolate) and put back into the warm (but off) oven. When sufficiently melted, spread with spatula. Enjoy!

Recipe yoinked from evil_mom and originally posted here.

That hits way too close to home :)

My day:

• Woke up late, always good.
• Had many laughs with Tia, always good.
• Caught the beginning of a Star Trek – Next Generation TV marathon on space, always good.
• Went to see Fahrenheit 9/11. That movie is… something else. I read many comments and reviews from people on LJ who've seen it, and by far the statement that really stayed with me is that there are always 3 sides to any story: their side, your side and the truth. Still, the movie is very disturbing at many levels – from battlefield journalism with bloaded, fly-riddled corpses to hearing all the back-room politics that you never even imagined were possible. You have to think that, no, it's not possible that this is known and there aren't riots in the streets of Washington. It's a sad truth that most people, when kept in a state of constant stress and worry about a shadowy enemy, will not realize that their basic freedoms are being revoked by, essentially, a puppet. God bless Ameria.
• Went to P.O.s place for burgers on the BBQ, always good.
• Spent the evening playing board games with a bunch of friends, laughing and drinking beer, always good.

So basically, I had a good day :D