Mr. and Mrs. North comes from the early days of American TV, starting when Harry Truman was still technically present. It ran a couple of seasons and was largely forgotten after that. You can tell by watching old episodes on YouTube or Dailymotion, because they almost all have scratches and blotches.
It still tends to be a diverting show, though. The lead characters are adapted from a then popular series of mystery novels by Richard and Frances Lockridge. The plots are fairly simple so as to fit in a half hour running time, but they're varied. Whodunits predominate, but they also did other kinds of thriller plots. Leads Richard Denning and Barbara Britton also showed a notable amount of chemistry.
Something that recently penetrated my headspace, somehow, is the tiff between Moby and the Davies brothers, caused by the former Richard Melville Hall calling "Lola" (deep weary sigh here) "a gross and transphobic song."
Now it must be said that this characterization was part of a Guardian feature, and one of their prompts was "The song I can no longer listen to." If you give it some thought, it should be fairly obvious that at least some of their interview subjects were going to use that part as an opportunity to virtue signal. And here we are.
Dave Davies has jumped in to defend his big brother, and there have been other rebuttals. But justifications for "Lola" aren't what's needed. What is needed is for more people to tell the HR regime to take a hike. Ray Davies's songs reflect the thoughts and emotions of a human being, which is what music should do. Take it or leave it, but don't try to hector it over Zoom.
I just found this interview with Chuck Palahniuk where he reminisces about a youthful enthusiasm for Ellery Queen, both in the books (he slightly exaggerates their number) and the Jim Hutton-led TV series. It's interesting to see how they might have shaped his own identity as an author, particularly as both the Queen series and The Big Valley―with which I'm not really familiar―depicted single-parent families.
I just reread Double, Double. This is a good mystery but an oddity in the series of Ellery Queen books. A young woman hires him to investigate the death of her father, which seems a little off considering that he's a novelist and not really a PI. His father, Inspector Richard Queen, only makes a one-paragraph cameo despite his importance in the series overall. The new client also briefly works as Ellery's secretary, so Nikki Porter seems to have been forgotten for the time being. I sort of suspect that Danny and Lee roughed this out for another character and added Ellery later. The bare bones of his personality do appear, though.
Ten Days' Wonder, by contrast, could only be about Ellery Queen. It might be the most psychological book its authors ever wrote. The amateur sleuth's wit and background give him hints, but also cause him to have blind spots about the other characters, leading to tragedy. Claude Chabrol filmed this one, although for some reason he replaced Ellery Queen with an alternate fictional character.
I watched this out of curiosity last night. It's the first ever appearance of the character of Columbo. The episode's story would later be expanded as Levinson and Link adapted it into a stage play, and that play itself would be adapted into Prescription: Murder, the 1968 TV movie that introduced Peter Falk in the role.
It's interesting to note that "Enough Rope" is in color. NBC was in business with RCA, which made color TVs, and while the majority of their lineup was black-and-white until 1966, they always had a few exceptions. It's a dainty use of color, quite different from the garishness of a lot of later 1960s TV, or the deserty look of the 70s.
The $64,000 is how Bert Freed does as the Lieutenant. Well, it's weird to see a guy who looks so much like a thumb in the role. But he does pretty well. He's kind of sneaky, which is good. Peter Falk didn't really catch fire in the role until the second pile, Ransom for a Dead Man.
Definitely more of a curiosity than anything else, though.
Not going to really go into it right now but suffice it to say that Jacques Maritain had quite an interesting life. It probably helps that―for a time, at least―he was a pupil of one of my favorite philosophers, Henri Bergson.
I've been reading a collection of Maritain's works, The Social and Political Philosophy of... and several bits of it wow me. Here's one.
The end of society is the good of the community, the good of the social body. But if this good of the body is not understood to be a common good of human persons, just as the social body itself is a whole of human persons, this conception would lead in turn to errors of a totalitarian type. The common good of the body politic is neither the mere collection of private goods, nor the good of the whole which, like the species with respect to its individuals or the hive with respect to its bees, draws the parts to itself alone and sacrifices them to itself. It is the good human life of the multitude, It is the good human life of the multitude, of a multitude of persons; it is their communion in good living. It is therefore common to the whole and to the parts; it flows back to the parts, and the parts must benefit from it.
Dense stuff, perhaps. But the central theme―that the good of the people can only be applied to that which respects their life as humans, with all that includes―is as relevant as ever.
Do we live in a clockwork universe? I would say that the fact that we're not clockwork says no.
But clockwork representations of the universe can still be very cool, Besides their considerable aesthetic charm, they show makers engaged with the big and little questions around them. And this craft goes back a long way. At least to Ancient Greece with the Antikythera mechanism. That's a wild story.
Orrery makers in our own century would have their hands full with updates. A few years back we had the first new planet adapted as part of the solar system since Pluto in the 1920s. Then they tried rounding out our new 10-planet solar system with asteroid Ceres and Vulcan, a near-Mercury planet no one had ever actually seen. Then it all collapsed and we wound up with an eight planet system.
I found this to be an interesting story. Jesse Appel studied in China. As he gained fluency in Mandarin, he started doing comedy there. In fact, he had a Chinese mentor.
I can't judge whether he's funny in Mandarin Chinese. But there's a good chance he's a harbinger of upcoming trends. China is thriving in many respects. Even as they're a rival country, there could be a lot of Americans and Westerners in general living there in the near future. And they'll be doing all sorts of things. From the Chinese perspective, "American" may become an ethnicity, more or less.
Lewis Mumford is a new name to me, but this overview does a very interesting job placing his work and ideas in the context of modern society. Specifically, society's relationship with technology.
The most striking evidence of the myth’s cultural pervasiveness is that many avid accelerationists do not deny that AI could mean the end of humanity. They merely differ from the doomers in believing that this risk is necessary—even desirable—to achieve the spectacular increases in efficiency and productivity promised by AGI. Mumford foresaw this extreme endpoint. “The myth of the machine,” he wrote, “the basic religion of our present culture, has so captured the modern mind that no human sacrifice seems too great provided it is offered up to the insolent Marduks and Molochs of science and technology.”
Those branded as skeptics or doomers also still accept the premises of the myth of the machine. The stated aim of many organizations concerned with avoiding the worst AI outcomes is that we should “realize the benefits while mitigating the risks” of the technology. Mumford would argue the first half of this statement concedes too much, accepting the basic premise of the myth of the machine while presenting the task as removing the obstacles to realize its benefits. Many skeptics also share a basic misanthropic premise of machine superiority, focusing as they do on the biased, irrational, and flawed nature of human beings that needs machinic augmentation.
This is it, of course. There's a new generation of business tycoon. Peter Thiel, Sam Altman, and Alex Karp are representative. While he has a nicer demeanor, Dario Amodei probably fits here too. While they are government contractors and, to a lesser degree, producers of goods for the consumer market, they're not satisfied with being seen as the widget makers they are. So they've taken it upon themselves to redefine the role of humanity. And of course that role is subservient to their machine god.
Sixty-odd years ago, on The Jetsons, mundane sitcom suburbanites were depicted as living in splendor above the skies. A homey kind of splendor, to be sure. They had a robot maid, but she sounded just like Hazel. Now, in order to get that level of futuristic ease, we're expected to submit to robots we're not allowed to question. Have they done a good enough job at changing and replacing the audience that people will take this deal. Some probably will. Time will tell how many.
The gentleman playing the rather Seussian-looking musical instrument is also the man who invented it. His name is Gorkem Sen, and he's a Turkish musician and instrument maker. It's called the yaybahar, and it's only been around for a few years. It's the twenty-first century and we don't expect to see new instruments invented that aren't synthesizers or otherwise somehow electronic. Which is also in some ways a surprise because that big echoing effect sounds like something you might need to go to a studio to get.
In the coming years―assuming the years continue to come―it's interesting to ponder if this thing might take off the way steelpans did in the 20th century.
The other day I was in a bookstore looking in vain for a decent book of crosswords.* While in that part of the shop I saw a weighty tome called Hated by All the Right People: Tucker Carlson and the Unraveling of the Conservative Mind by Jason Zengerle. Reading the jacket copy didn't convince me that it was much more than a hatchet job, and nor do the glowing reviews. The publisher being founded by former Obama staffers doesn't help.
Carlson was also lampooned on SNL as a paranoid Oscar commentator, although if you can take more than thirty seconds your tolerance is higher than mine. This comes at a time when talk is being floated of prosecuting Carlson for not being down with the war effort. It's all just a wacky coincidence, I'm sure.
In recent years, there's been a different kind of anti-establishment movement on the Right, Tucker included, which has more than once aligned with dissident voices on the left (Glenn Greenwald being one example) and free agents like Joe Rogan. The people who have power in both major parties and consider themselves responsible stewards of public thought aren't keen on this. Big Lib does its best to make these people seem icky. Big Con is less shy about being openly authoritarian, and so threatens them with jail. It's a process that can be used and reused against many different targets, which seems to have at least someone at Daily Kos rightly worried.
* Sad to say, crossword content outside of The New York Times tends to be wan. I wound up turning to Thriftbooks.
It's interesting to find out that the Tarot began as a deck of playing cards and wasn't associated with divination until the eighteenth century. That doesn't mean that the use of cards―playing and otherwise―to divine the future doesn't go back further. But these particular cards had been around for a few centuries before they picked up that reputation.
The Visconti-Sferza deck is quite pretty and distinctive. There's obviously a lot of craft involved in these things. An almost lost craft at that.
The Princess Bride has to be in the running for the most Jewish American movie of all time. At least among popcorn movies. Written by William Goldman, adapting his own novel, which has autobiographical elements―or at least the framing device does. Directed by the late Rob Reiner, son of Carl. The cast isn't entirely Hebraic―the two leads are quite Aryan―but includes Mandy Patinkin, Peter Falk, Fred Savage, Wallace Shawn, Billy Crystal, and Carol Kane. (I don't think you could get away with casting Irish people as Miracle Max and his wife.)
On the other hand, I only thought of this recently. Watching the movie never gave me the feeling that I was being immersed in someone else's culture. (I'm not Jewish.) In some ways it may have been someone else's culture, but didn't seem that way, which probably makes me something like the typical viewer. And it doesn't demand any a commitment to any particular kind of Jewish politics. One might add that Shawn's political stances haven't endeared him to the Zionist faction.
But I digress, maybe. The point is that regardless of who it's by, it feels like it's for everyone. It's very American that way.
Up until last week I don't think I had ever really read John Brunner. Not a matter of conscious avoidance, I just hadn't gone beyond hearing the name and some titles.
Over the past few days I've read The Shockwave Rider. It's an interesting read, about a rebellious spirit named Nickie Halflinger who flees from place to place, using a few other names. It's known for foreseeing the development of the internet and being sort of a proto-cyberpunk novel. Brunner did guess well at how the 21st century would actually feel, although his Midwestern United States may feel more British than he intended. It's sort of a more optimistic 1984, in part because the O'Brien figure (Paul T. Freeman) is redeemable.
The Paramount-Warner Brothers merger which seems almost certain to go through is depressing but also weird. And for the record, Netflix buying Warner out was also a glum prospect, but in a way made more sense.
Larry Ellison, who's certainly involved, wants to add CNN to his pro-Israel network of networks, this much is obvious. This despite the fact that no one under 40 pays any attention to CNN, or CBS, or what have you. It's still an area where he wants to flex his muscles.
Netflix didn't want CNN, though, which probably means that the Ellisons could have bought it separately. So Larry Ellison seems to be supporting the ambitions of son David. And David actually does want to be a big studio head.
Looking into Skydance Media, though...They've backed some hits, but these were mostly part of established franchises. Other movies weren't hits. But in both cases, they've been silent partner financers. They haven't actually been in distribution, which is what a film studio primarily does. What I take away is that while the Paramount people have the money to do this takeover, there's not much reason to expect it to work in the long run.
Seen above: a screenshot of a recent Google search. Specifically, the AI Overview that got spit up in the course of said Google search. According to Gemini, the lyric "Life is hard, and so am I. Better give me something so I don't die" has been appearing in forum posts since 2006 but isn't derived from anything identifiable.
It is actually not hard to find the source, at all. And now that AI has been embedded in Google searches, these overviews usually do produce germane results for quoted song lyrics. But in this case the AI basically said that it's not really anything in particular.
You've seen more flagrant AI fails than this one. So have I, although most of them aren't recorded. It's a technology that brings very quick results, but a lot of the time not high quality ones. Aside from factual errors, there's not really a mind there.
Which is why when you hear about jobs being eliminated in favor of AI, it suggests a certain preference. The question is, "Can LLMs do the job better than humans, or even as well?" And the answer is very often, "No, but who cares?"
Greer has an interesting take on what's behind this. Namely, technology―overhyped as it is―is being used to clear out deadwood that couldn't be gotten rid of any other way. If so, the people making these decisions aren't really more valuable than those their getting rid of/automating, and in some cases much less so. But that's how it often goes.
In discussions of Einar Jolin, the word "naive" seems to come up a lot. And there's something to that. His faces tend to be cartoony, for one thing.
But if he remained crude in some ways, he was a curious artist and truly applied himself. His pictures have a snap to them and make an impact.
"At the Circus", above, is a nifty composition. It uses its space well. And the horses are gorgeous in their simplicity. You can see why the audience members nearest us are so rapt in attention.
Conservative anti-interventionist Tom Woods has written that "No matter who you vote for, you get John McCain." Which is to say, office seekers love to talk about how they will prioritize American interests and end regime change wars, and then when they actually take office they develop a strange case of amnesia about all these promises.
Second, there’s the role of anti-woke-ism as new skin for old wine. The hawks — not least Weiss, through her outlet The Free Press — championed popular grievances with the inanities of the “peak-woke” moment and successfully married this to the same old agenda. Many of the would-be populists were all too happy to go along, hailing a once-more culturally muscular and unembarrassed America as it pursued the very policies that they’d deplored just a few years earlier. As one online wit remarked somewhere: “Good thing [Secretary of War] Pete [Hegseth] purged the trannies from the military so beefy white guys can do a regime change in Iran.” Based and red-pilled!
Now, I'd be a knave and a fool if I'd ever believed that Bari Weiss's foreign policy priorities were the same as mine. But the anti-woke movement ―and in truth, the anti-lockdown movement as well―did have a lot of people who sounded indifferent to or skeptical about foreign adventurism. Until, that is, it came time to promote a new war.
One of Donald Trump's tragic flaws is that he's incapable of saying "no" to his big money contributors. Of course in the face of that kind of money and those kind of demands, his recent predecessors have only maintained a fig leaf of dignity, and he's just been more blatant. But it's also important to recall that that wasn't the promise.
Prepared piano is an interesting method, altering the tone produced by the keyboard by placing objects between the strings. Its modern use has been credited to John Cage, who wrote his piece Bacchanale for percussion ensemble but found it was being performed in a space that didn't have room for one. As the Wikipedia page shows, there were precedents before that.
This performance of a cage piece is a good example. Likely not all good pianists are good at prepared piano. This one gets a lot of mileage out of it.
A lot of Nabokov's novels start with author's notes warning the reader not to apply the theories of Freud (identified as "the witch doctor from Vienna" or some such) to the book. This always seemed a little weak to me. If you've written a compelling work, you needn't fear fashionable critical theories. You can wait them out until they're no longer fashionable.
Pale Fire has no such warning. You could read that as a sign that Nabokov was really in the zone with this one, which he was. What it does have is an epigraph from James Boswell's Life of Samuel Johnson, which sets the tone and gets you scratching your head. But I repeat myself.
John Shade, the author of the 999-line poem within a novel, does in one stanza provide a list of things he hates: aside from Freud and Marx, there's also jazz. The same things Nabokov hated, in other words. For all that, there's a certain irony between the real author and the fictional one. Charles Kinbote, another fictional author providing commentary on the poem, is a whole kettle of fish in himself.
Being stuck indoors all day, and apparently limited to maybe a few blocks tomorrow, is certainly not fun. How are the people who lost power making out, I wonder?
One odd distraction. There's a car parked in front of one of the houses across the street. It's had its taillights blazing all day, and seems like it will have them going all night, too. If the car has the juice to keep them going. No one seems to know what to do about it, or why the owner has left it like that.
I read a crime story today. It was about a modern day expedition climbing Mt. Everest, a client determined to reach the top, and someone else in the party looking for revenge against that person. It's a good story in itself―the author's name is William Hall―but it also started me thinking about those who climb big mountains like that.
Some Sherpas do climb Everest without bottled oxygen. Ang Rita Sherpa did so ten times. No sane Western climber would attempt that. It's also true that the the Sherpa culture's religion holds that the Himalayas are sacred.
There's probably a connection between these two things. Sherpas revere the mountains as loci of godly activity. This encourages a certain carefulness.
As has been said elsewhere, they sound somewhat like they're laughing. They seem to be social birds, as well. These little auks are congregating, as they do, in the Norway's Svalbard archipelago. Svalbard didn't really have a population until the 17th century. I wonder what the first human settlers made of these cackling birds.
Recently confirmed: in the aftermath of a violent event like a random shooting, those immediately effected are traumatized. People on the periphery go through something different. Some are rubberneckers, of course. But a lot are just trying to get through their day and avoid the wreckage.
For my part, I was on a RIPTA bus, coming back from a light shopping trip to Rumford. The bus driver stopped when we were in sight of downtown Pawtucket. Detour, end of the line. He didn't tell us how to get to our destinations. We were just on our own. The Pawtucket/Central Falls commuter rail station wasn't far off, but any halfway direct route was blocked off by police. I followed a mother and adult daughter who lived near the station and thus were going in the same general direction. They kindly gave me directions when our paths diverged.
When I was on the bus for home, a guy got on a few stops after me. He was already talking about the shooting. I didn't learn anything from listening to him except that the rumor mill was still in good working order.
Only after getting home did I look up any media reports on what happened. It was bad. Every time I read about it, it seems to get worse. Condolences to everyone who was close enough to it to be considered a survivor. Peace to those who didn't make it.
The bottom line is that space is a frustrating, ungiving environment, and you are trapped in it. If you're trapped long enough, your frustration metastasizes to anger. Anger wants an outlet and a victim. An astronaut has three from which to choose: a crewmate, Mission Control, and himself. Astronauts try not to vent at each other because it makes a bad situation worse. There's no front door to slam or driveway to speed out of. You're soaking in it. "Also," says Jim Lovell, who spent two weeks on a loveseat with Frank Borman during Gemini VII, "you're in a risky business and you depend on the other guy to stay alive. So you don't antagonize the other guy."
from Packing for Mars: The Curious Science of Life in the Void, by Mary Roach
Space travel and the preparations people go through in order to get into space are always interesting. In a way, the Gemini program was the last great moment of midcentury American culture. And certainly there are still people willing to take the risks needed for space travel.
One wonders, though, how far this thing can be taken. As a species we evolved for the conditions prevalent on Earth. Some have taken a step or two off the planet. But colonization is a whole other basket of fish. Does anyone really want to live in the void? In theory, there are plans to settle Mars and then move on from there. This would require long periods, maybe lifetimes, of voyagers denying their human side. In practice we're not really exploring space as much as we're throwing our toys into it.
It's been about eight and a half years since I put some Milt Jackson on this blog. Looking at that post now I see a notice on the square where the video should be telling me that it's unavailable. On the internet, as in life, pleasures are often ephemeral.
Anyway, this is the Modern Jazz Quartet, and they seem to like what they do.
On Taxi, when the Sunshine Cab Co. is temporarily shut down, the drivers reunite a few months later to talk about what they've been doing in the interim. Louie has essentially been stoking a boiler room, selling stock over the phone. He quickly loses the job, because regardless of how much money he pulls in, he's still Louie De Palma. But one of his pitches keeps coming back to me.
Tom, listen to the words that are going to send you to an early retirement: Genetic research. You know, cloning and stuff like that. Listen, today they're doing it with rats. Tomorrow, they'll be cranking out Cheryl Tiegs by the dozens.
Ah, I know what you're going to say. I know, you got a philosophical problem because there'sa possibility that something maybe could go wrong. I mean, some mutant virus could wipe out half the world. If you're in the half that's still around do you want to be rich or not?
And what makes me think of this is, of course, artificial intelligence. There is, in practical terms, no difference between AI doomerism and AI boosterism. The theorists with their dark theories tell you that it's going to make us all obsolete and end humanity as we know it. The salesmen and advocates say exactly the same thing, and then they pass the hat. It's the same spiel Louie was doing, only without the charm.
As the Center for Working Class Politics found, her “democratic threat” message was resoundingly unpopular. Especially with working-class voters. That’s no doubt because the #Resistance philosophy behind it dripped with condescension. It reminded everyone that liberals think Trump voters are a bunch of irredeemable fascists.
Ganz might argue that Harris’s failure was in pushing her democracy-mongering without an attendant economic agenda. In this way he could try to rescue the utility of his thesis. This won’t do. The social challenge is much more basic: if you think the person you are trying to win over is an Untouchable, they will smell your hatred from a mile away. Even if you insist that you just want to give them healthcare.
"Fascism" is a handy epithet. It evokes the dangers of a relatively recent past without being quite as blatant about it as "Nazi." Leftists calling out things as fascist are the photo negative equivalent of rightists saying that everything they don't like is communism. And as has become increasingly clear, it's just about as useful in the long run.
It's an interesting hypothesis. From the Triassic through the Cretaceous, mammals were somewhat marginal. A lot of burrowers, and they were by-and-large nocturnal. Dinosaurs might have seen them as nocturnal pests. Since dinosaurs―or at least non-avian dinosaurs―some mammals have adopted diurnal lifestyles. Some, but not most.
Again, it's a hypothesis, not a confirmed fact. But it highlights some interesting facts about us. One is that humans are much more visually oriented than other mammals. We have more acute vision than most mammals and can see in three colors. (If we had UV vision we might find it more trouble than it was worth.)
Then there's our ambivalent attitude toward the night. We don't, most of us, operate primarily at night. Some are afraid of it. But night also appears to us as a time of possibility, not bound by humdrum rules. That could be the old part of us calling out.
For all his Midwestern charm, Ray Bradbury could be disturbing even when he wasn't working in Weird Tales mode. One example is "The Watchful Poker Chip of H. Matisse." It's a tale of exploitation, addictive fame, self-mutilation, and the loss of self. I'm not the only one who remembers it, and the text can be seen here. (While he wasn't the loudest Cold Warrior, Bradbury may have been surprised to see his work memorialized on an international computer network by Russians who leave Cyrillic comments.)
It might be overly dramatic to say that we are all George Garvey now. Still, it's true that the kind of image consciousness that was once limited to entertainers and aristocrats has spread to the general population. And many have found that they have no natural defenses against it.
The Chinese writing system is pictographic. Written characters represent entire words, not just phonemes as in our Latin alphabet. There are currently more than 100,000 of these characters. The advantage of this is that people who speak entirely different languages can understand what each other write if both are familiar with Chinese writing.
One disadvantage is that mechanical reproduction of this language isn't exactly straightforward. If a Chinese-language typewriter (or computer keyboard) were made on the same principle as an English-language one, it would be about the size of a truck and no one would be able to find anything on it.
In the forties, a Chinese author named Lin Yutang had a remedy. He invented a typewriter where a relatively small number of keys could be used to select from a much larger number of characters. The invention actually took some time to take off, but it was absolutely crucial in spreading the language.
I don't know or much care how Dame Edith Sitwell is ranked as a poet these days. She speaks to me, anyway. She pursued her vision with verve, and it remains infectious.
Façade came early in her career. She'd do many other great poems. But this suite with accompanying music is a terrific example of her having fun.
I just watched Obsession. That's Brian De Palma's Obsession. De Palma had gained attention with a few thrillers in the preceding years, very much descendants of Hitchcock. This one feels like the first time he had something of a big budget. As a couple of examples, the middle of the film is shot on location in Venice, and he got to work with composer Bernard Herrmann.
The story is a bit of a midpoint between Vertigo and Oldboy, and it doesn't always make sense. Genevieve Bujold is quite lovely, though, and gives an engaging performance once she appears as the second of her two characters. John Lithgow is good too. Oddly enough, he was actually younger than Bujold.
Aubrey Beardsley, avatar of Art Nouveau and the Decadent movement. He may be the best remembered of Oscar Wilde's collaborators. Certainly he's left his mark on the world of illustration in the years since he worked.
One thing I didn't realize about him until very recently. Besides his getting a free bowl of soup with his haircut, I mean. With all the drawings he did, prints he made, all the indelible images, he was only 25 when he died. Who knows what he would have gone on to do.
In his death throes he begged his publisher and a friend to destroy all of his obscene drawings, which by some standards would be the majority of them. They didn't obey, of course. He could still tell St. Peter that he'd given it the old college try.
Sunday we got a titanic amount of snow. Come this morning, it was still snowing, but not nearly as fast or at the same volume. It had basically stopped accumulating, although it got a little fluffier after 8PM.
Lots of shoveling going on. There were impacts on other things. All the banks were closed as far as I could tell. So were most eateries. Garbage day has been pushed back by a day...at least. Not many of the neighbors have their barrels out, so I don't know.
Groceries were still open. Buses still running, thank God. And I think I saw a mail truck driving along, so the creed appears to be in effect.
I saw a guy at the supermarket today wearing shorts. Short shorts. A friend of mine from a couple of years back was one of those guys who would switch to shorts as soon as it was spring on the calendar, even if the weather was still wintry. A little showoffy but I could see what he was going for. But today might turn out to be the coldest day of the year, and is likely to at least be in the top five. Whatever point you're trying to make, there are better ways to make it.
But that's me. I wore socks to bed last night and intend to do the same tonight.
Muriel Zagha may be right that studios wanting to give audiences added value as a way of coaxing them back to the theaters. Of course the problem is that it could very easily have the opposite effect. In their minds, I think most cinemagoers still think of it as a good way to spend a couple of hours. If the whole thing counting transportation runs into four or even five hours, that's a lot of your day that's now gone, which can be a frustrating experience.
One might blame James Cameron for starting this. His Titanic ran for three hours and a quarter and made zillions. Of course it wasn't the first long movie to become a hit. But there were doubters. In the months before it was released it became notorious for running way over budget and generally being out of control. Then it proved the doubters wrong. Now everyone wants to be James Cameron. It sometimes works out for them in a commercial sense, sometimes not, but it's led a lot of them astray.
Anyway, it's encouraging to hear that shorter screen classics are proving popular at Picturehouse cinemas. Hopefully that trend will spread to the other side of the Atlantic.
Let no one say that there are no wondrous sights in Canada. Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan has Mac the Moose, which at least approaches the level of twenty-first century Sphinx, north of the 48th parallel. Imagine the first gaggle of Saskatchewan motorists to drive by that one. The awe.
What makes this thing even better is the revelation that Mac had to have his antlers redone and built off a little to fend off a "world's biggest moose" challenge from the Big Elk from Norway. Who knew it was such a competitive field?
The mammoth hunters' hide-covered dwellings squat on a low promontory overlooking the broad river valley. Thin plumes of smoke rise from the houses into the cold, still air this late spring day 25,000 years ago. A group of skin-clad men scrape meat off a large leg bone. Children play nearby, while an adolescent watches the valley below. Suddenly, he calls out softly. The men stop work and gaze intently into the distance. They see a small herd of woolly mammoth making their way to the river. The hunters grab their weapons and descend into the valley. The children halt their play and watch as the mammoth lumber on unsuspectingly. The senior cow stops, as if sniffing danger. Reassured, she moves on to the river, and the others follow. one young beast lags behind. The hunters concentrate their efforts on this one animal.
Excerpt form The Great Journey: The Peopling of Ancient America by Brian M. Fagan. Fagan, a British anthropologist and archaeologist who taught in the US and Kenya, had an enviable grasp on his subject. Of course our understanding of the subject of early human migration has changed since the book's publication date in 1987. Notably, he addresses the subject of whether Neanderthals crossed over into the Americas. Since the starting point for humans crossing into the Western Hemisphere appears to have been Siberia, we'd now ask if Denisovans had done so. (That said, a number of Amerindian people have traces of both in their genome, not too surprising since the two species lived in overlapping turf in Eurasia.) But of course when the book was written, paleoanthropologists hadn't even discovered and identified Denisovan remains yet.
But the book has more going for it than Fagan's understanding of the science of the day. He's making a real and fruitful attempt to show how both the Old and New Worlds looked to our long-ago ancestors. It's a quest for understanding on a personal level as much as scientific knowledge.
The introduction of CDs was something of a disaster for the art of the album. I don't mean sound quality, although there probably is something to that. Nor am I talking about the fact that CDs were and are essentially computer software, making it inevitable that the computer savvy would eventually just loot the music. That's just a bad business decision. No, I'm just talking about overlength.
For good reason, you'll sometimes hear the complaint that 200-minute blockbuster movies seem to have three or four climaxes and endings. Some of us remember that movies are supposed to tell a story, and that to that end they should settle on one ending. But the filmmakers here (think horse by committee) are concerned with shooting a lot of footage, using it, and pleasing every sector of the market. If the result is incoherent, oh well.
Similarly, the music album is an art form developed in the decades after World War II. The final song should be a closing statement, something for the listener to deal with afterwards. Ending Revolver with "Tomorrow Never Knows" is a weird choice from a band that made several of them, but it's one you have to respect. A lot of albums from the CD era―probably peaking in the years 1995-2005―get to a nice closing point...and then just keep going. Hidden tracks and extra tracks are usually songs the artist didn't think were good enough for official inclusion on the album at all. Sometimes they're wrong, but not usually.
Worst are the alternate takes and remixes. In any decent comedy club, if the comedian said, "Now let me tell those jokes again, but pronounce some words differently," he'd be strung up.
Atlantis is an underwater city filled with mermaid people. People who can breath underwater anyway. That's at least how Marvel and DC depict Atlantis. Futurama played on that myth but changed it to Atlanta, as in Georgia.
In reality, Plato probably made up Atlantis as an allegory. There's no evidence a continent ever sank, especially one larger than "Asia and Libya combined." Although to be fair, they probably weren't measuring Asia from East Turkey to Eastern Siberia as we do now.
The possibly connection with the city state of Helike adds an interesting twist. Plato knew about the sinking of Helike of course. But for years it was itself considered a myth, and it's only been found quite recently. The truth is about as wild as the story, overall.
Not too long ago I saw a video that had been posted on Twitter. A polar bear, in a mad dash to protect its cub from an advancing orca, throws the cub onto the deck of a fishing boat, where the crew swaddle the cub in towels and otherwise provide care. Sweet, if a little fishy. The maker of the video might have gotten away with it if they hadn't gone for a close-up of the cub's face at the end. The cub looks like an abomination unto the Lord, and makes it beyond obvious that the whole thing is AI.
So, how about Iran? This past weekend that was supposed to be the story. The freedom-loving Iranians were rising up against the mullahs. The regime was about to collapse. A brave and sexy protestor was making acts of defiance in the streets of...Canada, it turned out. (About where my mother grew up, in fact.)
It's all a little late. Twelve years ago, when Obama was still in, you could have done a stage-managed revolution and mostly everyone would have gone along with it. The world has changed. Millions have seen through the Iran thing as the CIA and Mossad doing a color revolution, and would have done so even if Mike Pompeo hadn't come out and said it.
Anyway, if Reza Pahlavi wants to be king, he should storm Tehran himself. He won't earn any respect by sitting on his ass and letting foreign intelligence clear the way for him.
When I first saw the header for this video I said, "Wow, are they actually playing 'Rain', the song John Lennon wrote for the Beatles?" As it happens, the answer is "no." Or if they are, the tune has been altered beyond recognition. But they are playing something tuneful. I mean, I don't think I could play music that well with my nose. Same goes for pretty much everyone I know.
You've probably seen images of the Green Man seen around Britain. A face partly obscured by leaves, both the face and leaves generally rendered in stone.
These are seen on churches, among other places. And they do mark a connection between Christian and pre-Christian England. One thing I hadn't realized was that the name "Green Man" had only been used since 1939, when LadyRaglan published it in an article. Her research on the topic was quite thorough, and though she wasn't a prolific author that article continues to be influential. Before her, Green Man figures were known as "foliage heads." Not as catchy.
The dead Internet theory has interested me for a while. Certainly the net feels "deader" to me than it did in the first decade of this century. The weirder alcoves, the ones that justified the medium to begin with, have largely disappeared or, worse, been taken over and hollowed out. Automation through AI is a plausible explanation.
One problem with the theory as it is often discussed is that, as in this article, it tends to get mixed up with political concerns involving "misinformation." Misinformation is a slippery term, sometimes used to mean "things I disagree with." Which is not to say that there aren't bad actors manipulating gullible people in regards to politics, or that AI isn't one of their tools. But it's very easy to hit the panic button on this when there really are people out there who support things you oppose.
I suspect the primary purpose of bots is to make it look like the web is still an active, thriving place, rather than a mostly sterile and dull one.
Some painstaking work must have gone into putting this film together. Still, it winds up having a very playful air. And while you can't see any live human person, there's a feeling of someone being there, someone playing the music. The magic of stop-motion animation.
Made by Carmen D'Avino, who discovered filmmaking as a teenager in the Depression and was a painter as well.
Yesterday I met my downstairs neighbor by the stairwell. We chatted about a few things. She was nice enough to give me an extra flyswatter, as we'd both had recurring problems with the little things and she'd bought two.
Today I saw a housefly hovering in my bathroom. It flew up to the window over the shower and I swatted at it. Since I hadn't made contact with it, I assumed that it had escaped. But a second later, its body fell into the tub.
I don't enjoy killing flies, and I wish them a peaceful life wherever their natural environment is. However, neither am I going to let it pass as they invade my space, and this is at least a less stressful way of getting rid of them.
