Horseshoe vs. horseshoe

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. 

Temperance and friends

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.

As you wish

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.

Future shocking

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. 

Cue Porky

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.

Swapping out (Warning: some 90s ahead)

 

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.

Center ring

 

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.