1st\NW Quadrant 01\07 '08

The Approval Matrix: Week of January 7, 2008

Quality-Film Fatigue

1. Juno
2. Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street
3. Persepolis
4. Charlie Wilson's War
5. I couldn't determine the last one. Please post in the comments if you know the answer.

Happy New Year via Text Message

Rather than conveying [Happy Chinese New Year] greetings via telephone as she had done in the past, Zhang Lan, used her cell phone to send more than 20 text messages to her relatives and friends, and Zhang Tao received more than 30 New Year's greetings in the form of text messages, and sent about 50 himself. (China)

In the UK, people went text messaging crazy and sent 77.5 million text messages on New Year's Day - far surpassing any previous record for text messaging. (Tech Dirt)

[And] Americans who want to say Happy New Year to a U.S. soldier can send a text message straight to Times Square. "Operation New Year's Eve" charges cell phone customers 99 cents to send messages to soldiers overseas. Beginning Friday, the messages were being displayed on a video screen from the tallest building in Times Square. (News Day)

Fungus on Leonardo's Codex Atlanticus

Leonardo da Vinci’s Codex Atlanticus, the largest bound collection of his drawings and writings, has been infiltrated by mold, Italian scholars said Friday [12/21/07]. The extent of damage to the Codex — an assemblage of 1,119 pages of drawings and writings dating from 1478 to 1519 on topics ranging from flying machines to weapons, mathematics to botany — is not yet known, but the mold is not spreading, they said.

But officials appealed for aid in restoring and conserving the Codex, saying it would be highly expensive and that there were no public funds for the project.

The Codex, which consists of 12 leather-bound volumes, is kept in a vault at the Biblioteca Ambrosiana where temperature and humidity are constantly monitored. The mold was first identified in April 2006 by Carmen Bambach, a curator of drawings at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York...(New York Times)

Queens Library Reports
Overdue-Books to Credit Bureaus

Abraham Kleinman, a lawyer from Uniondale, N.Y., represented a Queens man who sued Unique Management Services for reporting his $295 late bill from the Queens Library system to credit bureaus. The man, Rabbi Avrohom Sebrow, won a settlement on a technicality — Unique’s license to operate in New York State had lapsed when it reported him — but Mr. Kleinman is still angry about the tactic that was used against his client.

Mr. Kleinman argued that if library fines are reported, they should also be used to establish a positive credit record. “It should be the good, the bad and the ugly,” Mr. Kleinman said.

“If you can report a library record, it should be balanced and should include all the times that a consumer visited the library and followed the rules.”(New York Times)