Google Blogoscoped

Wednesday, August 13, 2003

Advanced Tables, HTML vs XHTML, SEO

Three tutorials have been lying on my server for a while, so I’ll publish them now: Advanced Tables, HTML vs XHTML, and Search Engine Optimization.

Hitchcock Logo

Today, Google.com honors legendary director Alfred Hitchcock (born 13 August 1899) with a special logo: the yellow silhouhette of Hitchcock makes for the second “o” in Google, along with a black bird sitting on top (in reference to one of his most famous movies — The Birds from 1963).

Hitchcock Quips

“Drama is life with the dull bits cut out.”
– Alfred Hitchcock

“Seeing a murder on television... can help work off one’s antagonisms. And if you haven’t any antagonisms, the commercials will give you some.”
– Alfred Hitchcock

“Television has done much for psychiatry by spreading information about it, as well as contributing to the need for it.”
– Alfred Hitchcock

“The length of a film should be directly related to the endurance of the human bladder.”
– Alfred Hitchcock, In Simon Rose, Classic Film Guide (1995)

“I have a perfect cure for a sore throat: cut it.”
– Alfred Hitchcock

“Television has brought murder back into the home — where it belongs.”
– Alfred Hitchcock

“When an actor comes to me and wants to discuss his character, I say, ’It’s in the script.’ If he says, ’But what’s my motivation?, ’ I say, ’Your salary.’”
– Alfred Hitchcock

On the Element of Suspense

“There’s no emotion in a who-dun-it because you withhold information from an audience. The element of suspense is giving them information.

You and I are sitting here . . . . suddenly a bomb goes off and up we go, blown to smithereens. What have the audience had while watching this scene? Five or ten seconds of shock. Now we do the scene over again, it’s a five minute scene. You and I are talking about football, something very innocuous, but the audience are informed by a method unknown to us that there’s a bomb under the table and it’s going to go off in five minutes.

Now this innocuous conversation about football becomes very potent. “Don’t talk about football, there’s a bomb under there”, that’s what they want to tell us, as the bomb ticks away aand we keep telling the audience there’s a minute to go; half a minute and finally ten seconds. That is when it must not go off. If we let it go off, the audience will be as mad as hell with us, they’ll be disgusted. They’ll say, “Don’t go and see that movie or that play”.

Your toe MUST touch the bomb at the last minute, you must look under the table, grab the bomb and throw it out of the window, then it can go off; but you and I must be saved. An audience needs that relief after you’ve put them through the ringer.”
– Alfred Hitchcock, from the book ’Heard in the Wings’ (edited by Roderick Bloomfield, published by Stanley Paul), 1971

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