Category Archives: Pop Culture

It’s “Da Vinci” Meets “Depp in Eyeliner”

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Yup, the time has come for high concept plagiarism lawsuits, because that’s where the money is, of course.

Royce Mathew has sued the Walt Disney Co., Buena Vista Home Entertainment, Jerry Bruckheimer Films, Touchstone Home Video and 24 other related enterprises that had a stake in the 2003 blockbuster Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl for copyright infringement.

Mathew claims he’s spent 20 years working on “drawings, screenplays, outlines, blueprints, storyboards, and other original materials” and that he’d filed the lot with the U.S. Copyright Office, to boot. He also claims he’s shown his ideas to Disney people and their cronies, “both privately and through the William Morris Agency and Creative Artists Agency.”

I’m sorry. I realize this may be some poor little fella who’s been slowly draining the very blood of his veins into a creative obsession for his entire adult life (or his golden years, or whatever). But you can’t copyright a creative concept. You just can’t.

If people could copyright creative concepts, we writers would all be doomed. It would be like Internet domain names, a whole mini-industry would spring up aswarm with people copyrighting every conceivable plot line.

So some squatter would own the rights to “girl meets boy, girl denies attraction to boy, girl realizes oops boy is her One and Only” and just like that, every romance/chick lit/commercial women’s fiction writer on the planet would be back to their day jobs.

Via the always worth-the-read Booksquare. With a nod to E is for Editrix, who’s all excited about the eyeliner thing :-)

Update: see also this post on “extreme copyright.”

Blake break

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This is a pleasure: an animated short, inspired by Blake’s The Tyger, by Brazilian Guilherme Marcondes.

Do take a look, it’s amazing.

Tyger! Tyger! burning bright
In the forests of the night,
What immortal hand or eye
Could frame thy fearful symmetry?

In what distant deeps or skies
Burnt the fire of thine eyes?
On what wings dare he aspire?
What the hand dare sieze the fire?

And what shoulder, & what art.
Could twist the sinews of thy heart?
And when thy heart began to beat,
What dread hand? & what dread feet?

What the hammer? what the chain?
In what furnace was thy brain?
What the anvil? what dread grasp
Dare its deadly terrors clasp?

When the stars threw down their spears,
And watered heaven with their tears,
Did he smile his work to see?
Did he who made the Lamb make thee?

Tyger! Tyger! burning bright
In the forests of the night,
What immortal hand or eye
Dare frame thy fearful symmetry?

Ignore what you read

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A few days ago I blogged about Newsweek‘s lame-acre retraction of a story they published 20 years ago. The story claimed unmarried women over 40 were more likely to die by a terrorist attack than find a husband. The claim was bogus; Newsweek‘s attitude contemptible.

Now comes this article by Philip E. Tetlock at Project Syndicate,  “How Accurate Are Your Pet Pundits?”

Tetlock has written a book (Expert Political Judgment: How Good Is It? How Can We Know?) that looks at pundit predictions, reported in the media, and whether they’ve come to pass.

This guy deserves a medal for calling attention to this. A big flashy platinum medal with a huge cash prize attached:

[W]hen hordes of pundits are jostling for the limelight, many are tempted to claim that they know more than they do. Boom and doom pundits are the most reliable over-claimers.

Between 1985 and 2005, boomsters made 10-year forecasts that exaggerated the chances of big positive changes in both financial markets (e.g., a Dow Jones Industrial Average of 36,000) and world politics (e.g., tranquility in the Middle East and dynamic growth in sub-Saharan Africa). They assigned probabilities of 65% to rosy scenarios that materialized only 15% of the time.

In the same period, doomsters performed even more poorly, exaggerating the chances of negative changes in all the same places where boomsters accentuated the positive, plus several more (I still await the impending disintegration of Canada, Nigeria, India, Indonesia, South Africa, Belgium, and Sudan). They assigned probabilities of 70% to bleak scenarios that materialized only 12% of the time.

Tetlock calls for tracking pundits’ records publicly, so that media consumers have a way of judging their credibility.

I say, we should also hold the media to account. After all, if false pundits weren’t hugged and kissed and led out into the spotlight, “here’s your microphone, dear,” their silly pronouncements could do no harm . . .

Why you’re better off being skeptical

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About what you “read in the papers,” that is. You know that Newsweek story from 1986 that said single women over 40 were more likely to be killed by terrorists than find husbands?

It was bunk.

Here, via CJR Daily, is a quick recap of the original piece.

Newsweek’s cover was premised on a single demographic study on marriage patterns in America which included these “dire statistics”: “white, college-educated women born in the mid-’50s who are still single at 30 have only a 20 percent chance of marrying. By the age of 35 the odds drop to 5 percent. Forty-year-olds are more likely to be killed by a terrorist: they have a minuscule 2.6 percent probability of tying the knot” — figures which, Newsweek noted, were creating a “profound crisis of confidence among America’s growing ranks of single women.”

Here’s Newsweek’s mealy-mouthed retraction, 20 years later.

You know what? The 1986 Newsweek article includes all the elements that ought to make one instantly suspicious about a so-called news story– and no, I’m not even talking about the “single demographic study” bit. That’s too easy.

I’m talking about the combination of a hysterical cadence of direly regressive statistics and the assertion that the aforementioned statistics are causing terrible emotional duress–i.e., that they’re already exacting a measurable toll on peoples’ day to day lives.

It’s contemporary journalism’s equivalent of frenzy-inducing demagoguery. It doesn’t have to make sense. All it has to do is tap into some primal fear–fear of being alone, in this case–and ladle on a bunch of numbers that make it look like the reader is doomed.

But it gets worse. Here’s CJR Daily again:

How did that “terrorist” line come to pass? The magazine explains that it was “first hastily written as a funny aside in an internal reporting memo” by a Newsweek correspondent, then “inserted … into the story” by an editor on the opposite coast. Although this editor and her colleagues “thought it was clear the comparison was hyperbole … Most readers missed the joke.”

Not only was this a piss poor piece of journalism–they were flip about it.

Flip. As they launched a meme that, although subsequently debunked, remains widely believed.

Moral of the story: if it reads like hype, it is hype. Ignore it, for the sake of your own mental health.

Update: Also ignore the pundits.

40 million acres

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That’s how much of America is lawn, according to Brian Black in CS Monitor. He’s reviewing “American Green: The Obsessive Quest for the Perfect Lawn,” by Ted Steinberg.

Black admits he doesn’t care for lawns, and Steinberg, apparently, thinks they’re “an instrument of planned homogeneity.”

As Americans sought to fit in with one another during the cold war, writes Steinberg, “…what better way to conform than to make your front yard look precisely like Mr. Smith’s next door?”

Sorry, but I think that’s just silly (although not quite as silly as “we descended from savanna dwellers,” lol). If it were true, then we’d all be painting our houses the same color. For that matter, we’d all want houses built exactly alike. We’d demand cookie-cutter landscaping. But we don’t. Even in relatively homogeneous tracts, builders know to vary the color, orientation, floor plan etc. of the houses — and the longer they’re lived in, the more we alter them to make them unique.

Lawns are simply a fashion — a landscaping fashion — and like all fashion, the reason they’re popular is esthetic. People like the way they set off our homes and gardens, forming a kind of matte within the frame of road, sidewalk, or property line which borders our homes.

That’s why uniformity (i.e., no weeds) is considered so desirable. We don’t want the matte to call attention to itself. It’s supposed to be even-textured and uniform in color.

Are lawns a good ideal from an environmental standpoint? Probably not. But it’s facile to dismiss them with singsong “they’re all made out of ticky tacky” platitudes, particularly when your platitudes are tinged with condescension. Tastes change, and there’s no reason our collective eye couldn’t begin to appreciate other ways to frame our homes. But the way to get people to change is by presenting alternatives they find beautiful, not sneer at them for being mindless conformists.

Peak perversion

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It’s become a cliche to assume that individuals who aspire to perform physically grueling feats somehow embody humankind’s highest ideals. So we rush to applaud people who reach Everest’s summit and hold them up as worthy of our admiration.

Yet, as recent news stories have suggested, people who climb Everest can be a nasty lot. Granted, we don’t know what really transpired up there on the day David Sharp died. There’s been speculation that some 40 people may have passed him, but who knows how many realized he was there or was in trouble. Another key qualifier: of the people who did see him, how many were descending? Climbers can’t carry extra oxygen on these trips, so trying to save him under those circumstances may well have led to additional deaths.

By way of analogy, suppose you and a companion are on a boat, and it capsizes. There are no life preservers. You are a fairly strong swimmer, although not trained in life saving techniques. Your companion, on the other hand, is a poor swimmer, and panics. Every time you try to approach him, he attempts to climb up on you, which pushes you underwater.

At what point do your companion’s actions, even if they are the actions of someone “not in his right mind,” essentially become homicidal?

That said, it seems that at least one party passed him while ascending (I’ll get to that in a minute). So it’s little surprise that people now suspect the “code of ethics” among so-called high-altitude mountaineers is laced with a big dose of “every man for himself.”

And while leaving other climbers to die is the most appalling example of this, it’s not the only one. In another moral compromise, Mt. Everest is also piled high with garbage. The logic is identical to that which dictates dying climbers be left behind: the conditions are so difficult, climbers can’t expend the energy needed to carry out spent oxygen containers, food packaging, or their own bodily waste. So it, too, is abandoned. Garbage now litters the summit and its approaches–as much as 100 tons of it. (I don’t know if that figure includes the 180 frozen bodies of climbers who have died on the slopes.)

Okay, so you have strewn garbage and people left to freeze. What, then, is important to the climbers? How about disrobing on the summit? To “set a record.”

In fact, setting records seems to be what it’s all about. One of the parties that passed the dying Sharp featured a double amputee. He summitted and returned to his New Zealand home to “cheering crowds.”

According to a number of media reports, Inglis’ party passed Sharp on the way up, not the way down. So although he claims Sharp couldn’t have been saved, the fact is if they’d aborted their ascent, they could have used the oxygen allotted for that ascent to keep Sharp alive while trying to get him down.

Instead, Inglis set a record.

Climbing Everest. The new definition of baseness.

Where’s George?

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I got a “Where’s George” -stamped dollar bill yesterday.

If you haven’t heard of this, it’s a website that lets you track the location of paper currency. If you get a bill with a Where’s George stamp on it, you go to the website and enter the serial number, and a page will come up that shows who else has logged that same bill. (There’s a Where’s Willy? option for Canadian currency, too.)

The bill I have has one other entry. Webster, New York, 57 days ago.

Oh well. I was hoping for something more glamorous. But Webster’s nice.

[tags] Webster, New York, Where’s George [/tags]

I long, long for the perfect pizza pie

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It seems like I’m eating a lot of pizza lately, and it’s begun to eat at me, because none of the pies I’m buying have been particularly satisfying.

Somethings always not-quite-right. Sometimes it’s the texture of the crust. Or the flavor of the sauce. Or the amount of sauce.

I’m beginning to wonder if the perfect pizza pie isn’t an illusion . . .

O, what a haunting idea. Then I found this article tonight, by Hanna Miller, in American Heritage Magazine. It’s got paragraphs & paragraphs on the history of pizza, and then at the bottom, a side bar (bottom bar? it’s not exactly to the side of anything, is it) by John Mariani listing the 10 best pizza parlors in the U.S. It’s called a coast-to-coast guide, even though five of the 10 are in New York, making it more of a New York-plus-a-couple-footnotes guide. None of them are closer to me than maybe 7 hours by car. I’m guessing delivery is out of the question.

So what’s a lady to do?

Give up pizza for awhile, I suppose.

Or make a homemade pizza. Something weird, maybe a biscuit dough crust, chopped tomato salsa and some kind of weird strong cheese . . . fresh tomatoes, cheese old and a bit skunky. A serious change-up to purge my saddened palate . . . hold me over ’til I can get back down to NYC . . .

Do you know your own mind?

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Project Implicit is an online timed “Implicit Associaton Test” that lets you compare your conscious preferences to what they call “automatic” preferences — preferences of which you are not conscious.

The IAT was originally developed as a device for exploring the unconscious roots of thinking and feeling. This web site has been constructed for a different purpose — to offer the IAT to interested individuals as a tool to gain greater awareness about their own unconscious preferences and beliefs.

It works by flashing words at you; you assign the words to categories. Some of the words are obviously positive or negative. Some of the words are not. The test is looking for when you “accidentally” miscategorize a word. It’s kind of like inducing Freudian slips.

The topic of each session is assigned randomly. I got “coffee vs. tea.” My test results read:

Your data suggest a strong automatic preference for Tea compared to Coffee.

That’s news to me.

I drink a cup of coffee every morning . I often drink a cup of tea in the afternoon. I enjoy my afternoon tea — I view it as a treat. But I don’t look forward to it with the same, ahem, intensity that I seek my morning coffee.

OTOH, I’ve been exposed to a lot of claims that tea is the more healthful drink, and perhaps my ambivalence about my coffee dependency bled through a bit. Plus I’m, ahem, something of an Anglophile. For a variety of reasons, some too delicate to mention. So maybe that’s skewed me toward the cuppa . . . still, “strong preference”? That’s pretty . . . strong.

The test has been used to identify more controversial “automatic preferences,” including detecting unconscious racism. Is it valid for such applications? I don’t know.

If you try it, drop a note in the comments about your experience, or blog about it and I’ll link back to you.

Relationship farming

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This Mother Jones article by Michael Pollan ranges a bit too far for my taste, at times, into anti-capitalist/anti-globalist rhetoric, but there are some good points, too.

The article profiles Joel Salatin, a self-described “Christian-libertarian-environmentalist-lunatic farmer” who sees himself as the Martin Luther nailing a challenge on the door of 21st Century agriculture. His vision is to persuade people to opt out of our over-industrialized food production and distribution infrastructure and instead start buying locally — eating food for which we know the provenance.

Joel believes that the only meaningful guarantee of integrity is when buyers and sellers can look one another in the eye, something few of us ever take the trouble to do. “Don’t you find it odd that people will put more work into choosing their mechanic or house contractor than they will into choosing the person who grows their food?”

There are a couple of interesting objective facts in the piece about the economics of farming. One is that selling directly to consumers allow farmers to pocket “the 92 cents of a consumer’s food dollar that now typically winds up in the pockets of processors, middlemen, and retailers.”

It’s amazing to me that farmers typically only receive 8 cents for every dollar we spend on food.

I also think this is an important insight:

When you think about it, it is odd that something as important to our health and general well-being as food is so often sold strictly on the basis of price. Look at any supermarket ad in the newspaper and all you will find in it are quantities — pounds and dollars; qualities of any kind are nowhere to be found.

There was a time not too long ago when the cost of feeding ourselves exceeded the cost of almost everything else. Hunter-gatherers, for instance, devote considerable resources to ensuring they’ll have enough to eat.

So modern humans are an anomaly in this regard. One could even argue that the resources we now expend on luxuries and tchotchkes, on leisure activities and modern healthcare, represent resources we once would have devoted to feeding ourselves.

Perhaps, as this article suggests, the pendulum is now swinging the other way. Perhaps people are starting to look for other qualities in their foodstuffs than just low prices, and as part of that are beginning to allocate a greater portion of their resources on procuring food.

It will be interesting to see how this plays out. I don’t think it’s a change everyone will want to make (dare I predict that one day people will be demanding tax breaks for buying organic? lol)

But as the article suggests, people are drawn to the idea, and not just upper middle class people.