David Spain wrote:
Yeah and I know all about the iPod/iPhone magnifier, if I could
only see it and not press somthing else when I try to select it.

That's straight out of the movie "Brazil".
I can't figure out what is going on either.
It seems the world has gone "Tiny Crazy" and the smaller something is,
the better it is considered to be, beyond the point of any common sense
regarding ease of use.

But to get back to Pat's original observation, it'd be cool to video
edit the BBC interview segment from 2001 to play as a stand alone
video on the iPad while eating a microwave TV dinner made for people
with no teeth. You suppose this was thought through in the movie?

Yes, that was to show just of bland the future had become; even the food
was featureless gunk. That's also why the movie had hardly any dialog -
that was to show that people had become halfway automatons and were
bored to death...just like the movie's audience, who could also add
confusion to their complaints, and really wanted to see those monkeys
come back on screen and start beating the crap out of each other again.
By the time HAL started croaking everyone I was definitely on his side.
All this was discussed in way-too-many deep studies on the movie's
"meaning" by film critics, no two of who could agree on what its true
meaning was, except that it was a work of genius, due to its being
incomprehensible.
Its true meaning was of course to point out to studio executives that
unless monkeys were pounding the crap out of something (2001 came out
the same year as Planet Of The Apes) or there was a killer robot or
computer involved, sinking big bucks into a sci-fi movie was as good as
sinking it into a toilet bowl.
And until that guy in the Nazi helmet showed up and started strangling
people from across the room, sci-fi movies ended up in a real studio
funding doldrum.
It would have been better if that monolith on the Moon had turned the
people who found it into prehistoric monkey-men of some sort, and Earth
had to fight the Moon monkey-men and then send the Discovery, with a
crew of killer robots, out to blow up Jupiter.
And when the Jupiter people stick Bowman into that room, so they can
suck the youth out of him?
The ******* has a machine gun hidden under the sheets of that bed, and
he wastes them, then detonates a antimatter bomb he has hidden up his
ass that turns the whole planet into a star.

Audience would have gone for that, big time!

Pat