Sad News: no more seasons/movies of Deadwood

Ian McShane Tells Ryan Stewart that HBO Has Scrapped Those 'Deadwood' Movies:
Earlier today, I got a call from Ian McShane to talk about his new family fantasy movie, The Dark is Rising, and I asked him the big question Deadwood fans have been wanting to know for a while now -- was HBO just blowing smoke with its promise to wrap up the series with a couple of made-for-TV movies? Well, the answer is yes, McShane revealed to us. "I just got a call on Friday from ... a dear friend of mine, who told me that they're packing up the ranch," McShane said. "They're dismantling the ranch and taking the stuff out. That ship is gonna sail. Bonsoir, Deadwood." He went on to say that even if the movies were happening, there would be the strike to consider, and on top of that, he's committed to a filming schedule that would prevent him from doing them anytime before late next year anyway.

I told McShane that as a fan, I felt completely cheated by this move on HBO's part. "You feel cheated? Imagine how I feel!" he replied. "We all do. We all do. It was one of those one-off jobs that you do which has got an extraordinary creative brain behind it, and it kept getting better, and the actors were great. It was a fabulous place to be and work. It was a workshop cum theater cum film. It was an extraordinary time. But everything has to come to an end, babe." So, there you have it.

By: Ryan Stewart - Via Cinematical

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Gregorius

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To Fly Free in Space

At about 100 meters from the cargo bay of the space shuttle Challenger, Bruce McCandless II was further out than anyone had ever been before. Guided by a Manned Maneuvering Unit (MMU), astronaut McCandless, pictured above, was floating free in space. McCandless and fellow NASA astronaut Robert Stewart were the first to experience such an "untethered space walk" during Space Shuttle mission 41-B in 1984. The MMU works by shooting jets of nitrogen and has since been used to help deploy and retrieve satellites. With a mass over 140 kilograms, an MMU is heavy on Earth, but, like everything, is weightless when drifting in orbit.

Lapetus- 3D Equatorial Ridge

This bizarre, equatorial ridge extending across and beyond the dark, leading hemisphere of Iapetus gives the two-toned Saturnian moon a distinct walnut shape. With red/blue glasses you can check out a remarkable stereo composition of this extraordinary feature -- based on close-up images from this week's Cassini spacecraft flyby. In fact, the ridge's combination of equatorial symmetry and scale, about 20 kilometers wide and reaching up to 20 kilometers above the surface, is not known to be duplicated anywhere else in our solar system. The unique feature was discovered in Cassini images from 2004 (seen below). It appears to be heavily cratered and therefore ancient, but the origin of the equatorial ridge on Iapetus remains a mystery.

Masi Oka

Oka landed his first job after graduation at Industrial Light & Magic, George Lucas's motion picture visual special effects company, with the hope of one day earning an Oscar for technical work on a motion picture. His first major project was co-developing a computer program to generate water effects, which was first used for A Perfect Storm but also used in later films such as Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest. He later created programs for computational fluid dynamics and surface-tracking, which also became used in multiple projects. He has also worked on the Star Wars prequel trilogy.

Camera Tests From The Muppet Movie - This footage is amazing! Frank Oz & Jim Henson fooling around, hilarious stuff!

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Click the image to see the full Michel Gagne article
on how the FX for this sequence were developed:

Thanks to Leisl for finding it!

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Sesame Workshop plans to release "Sesame Street: Old School - Volume 2" on November 6, 2007. The three-disc DVD box set is full of classic Sesame Street, focusing exclusively on the second five years set of show (1975-1979).

The DVD set will include five complete hour-long episodes from the series (the five season premieres) plus a collection of more than 57 additional clips from each season. There are featured appearances by Judy Collins, Henry Winkler, Paul Simon, Lily Tomlin, plus the first episode featuring Roscoe Orman as Gordon, "Telephone Rock!," "What's the Name of That Song?," "Pinball Number Count", Guy Smiley, Harvey Kneeslapper, Biff and Sully, Chris and the Alphabeats, and much more! Additional bonus features on the set include the first Sesame Street episode created (one of the many unaired pilots), a 12-page booklet full of behind-the-scenes information and phots, plus a collectible "Pinball Number Count" animation cel in every box

The total running time for the three-disc set is over 8-hours in total.

Via Muppet News Flash