Friday Ephemera
Stalker. (h/t, Damian) // Chores. // Horse yoga. // The wrong sperm. // Clothes-folding robot steams and de-wrinkles. // Ravel conducts Boléro, 1930. // On the distribution of lions. // We three. // Robotic bee. // Christopher Snowdon debunks some myths. // Who earns what (maybe) in a hypothetical $200M blockbuster movie. // It is difficult to overcook mushrooms. // Discuss. // An oldie but a goodie. // The strange story of Tetris. // “On September 3, 1967, all traffic in Sweden switched from driving on the left-hand side of the road to the right.” // Levitating plant rotator. // This. // “The heart has already formed.” // Concentrated coffee. // Attack of the clams. // Picasso meets Kubrick. // “The largest private residential ship on the planet.” // The crushing patriarchy.
Picasso meets Kubrick.
Disney meets Dali.
Regarding the Huxley quote, I think the same reasoning explains the popularity of zombie fiction. Turning someone you dislike immensely into a brain-eating, undead wraith gives you license to blast them with a shotgun without violating the injunction in the Sermon on the Mount about fantasizing doing ill to your fellow man.
I’ve sometimes wondered if the occasional occurrence of lions in British iconography, folk tales, and poetry isn’t part of a residual race memory or a lingering folk memory of encounters with Britain’s now extinct cave lions.
George Monbiot has the quite batty (but fun, in a dangerous way) scheme of repopulating Britain with lions and mammoths (I suppose elephants are his replacement creature) and all manner of other mega and micro-fauna. For the environment, or something.
The crushing patriarchy
Just realised it’s not a joke.
Just realised it’s not a joke.
So far as I can make out from her other tweets, Ms Benamy expects to be taken seriously. After all, she’s a salad dressing hate crime survivor.
Editor with New York publishing company interacts with low-level service industry employee and persuades herself that he’s the one who belongs to the more powerful and privileged group. Ferrovie federali svizzere!
Editor with New York publishing company interacts with low-level service industry employee and persuades herself that he’s the one who belongs to the more powerful and privileged group.
Yes, it’s quite a feat. Few people would be comfortable turning a polite enquiry about salad dressing preference into a display of womanly victimhood. Based on her reluctance to pursue the point further, I don’t think Ms Benamy is much good at playing social justice warrior, at least not yet; but she’s evidently trying to master the gestures and hooting that signal that all-important put-upon status (and, simultaneously, moral superiority).
I suspect this may have legs as a reality TV show.
Oh come on.
“…salad dressing hate crime survivor…”
What a time to be alive!
In other news, science isn’t helping:
http://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2016/jun/10/supersized-sheep-are-too-big-to-shear-australian-livestock-expert-warns
I’m sure the Aussies have got this covered.
I suspect this may have legs as a reality TV show.
Unbearable.
Unbearable.
But just imagine it. A chance to see, round-the-clock, in real time, just how well Laurie’s terribly sophisticated political philosophy survives amid communal squalor and rows over who bought the last roll of toilet paper.
You know you’d watch.
“A beauty queen in high heels fought off a mugger with her martial arts skills moments before auditioning for Miss Universe.”
http://nypost.com/2016/06/02/she-took-down-a-mugger-with-mma-then-auditioned-for-miss-universe/
Disney meets Dali.
Why am I not surprised? Dali, after all, worked with Hitchcock, doing the dream sequence in Spellbound.
“Who earns what (maybe) in a hypothetical $200M blockbuster movie.?”
I invested nearly 5 minutes of my life in seeing what a gaffer earned.
Couldn’t find it…
“Sharing and managing ‘Emotional Labour’”
Because, you know, emotions are like, a chore, especially if you’re a leftist automaton programmed and skilled in only the usual agitator psychological toolkit of anger, aggression, contempt and hate while projecting these attributes onto ‘the enemy’.
Possibly related.
Revisiting the dark comedy Death Becomes Her, which, a quarter of a century later, still makes me laugh.
Meanwhile, in Canada:
http://news.nationalpost.com/news/canada/crime-of-bestiality-limited-to-penetration-supreme-court-of-canada-rules-in-case-involving-b-c-man
Canada: where men are men and sheep are nervous.
This
With regards to that Huxley quote, I have felt quite disturbed by what can accurately be described as the unstinting torrents of exuberant joy that Brock Allen Turner’s (entirely justified) conviction and sentence have unleashed.
Several friends of mine have already shared the following blog post which includes quite a high level of vindictiveness such as:
I know that the judge sentenced you to six months in jail. I know that this joke of a sentence is yet another in a long line of obscene and infuriating re-victimizations of this brave young woman. I know–we all know–that justice has not been done here.
But I am going to do something to you that might be worse than jail, Brock Allen Turner. Actually, we all are. All of us who are enraged at what you did […]
We are going to splatter your name and face across social media so that everyone knows who you are and what you look like. So that everyone knows what you’ve done. […]
Let us gather, as a community, on behalf of this woman for whom justice was not served, with our torches and pitchforks, ready to put Brock in his place. Because the justice system failed not only her, but all of us. And goddammit, if the justice system is not going to protect us, I guess we are just going to have to fucking protect ourselves.
We’ve got our torches and pitchforks ready. We know who you are. And we are watching you. Remembering your face. Remembering your name. Putting up invisible walls around you, boxing you in, shutting you out. Shunning you.
It’s not that I doubt Turner’s guilt – he is quite blatantly and unambiguously guilty as charged – and I can genuinely understand why some people are outraged by both the story and the apparent lenience of his sentence – but does that really justify these people displaying the aggressive baseness of their private Id in quite such a public way?
Another part of this ghoulish celebration is the ‘rain dance’ factor – propitiate the Gods for rain for long enough and eventually the rain will come; insist that university campuses are rape gulags for young women long enough and eventually the evidence will come (so long as you can manage to ignore all the times nothing happened or the misfires such as at Duke or UVA).
So not surprisingly the Internet is also awash with this kind of thing:
I’m willing to bet that more than a few men read the victim’s letter and had a pang of recognition—not of her experiences, but his. Because most men have done at least some of what Turner did […] And the brutal truth is, they’re right. A lot of men, a lot of self-professed good men, have done something like what Brock Turner did […] Most rapists aren’t monsters who lurk behind bushes and in dark alleyways [ …] Most rapists are men we know and like: our neighbors and our colleagues and sometimes even our friends. […] Men we think of as nice guys. Men who look just like everybody else. […]
But please, tell me again about how our society takes rape very seriously. […]
And this is what we need to talk about over and over: the fact that nice boys from nice families commit rape. […]
We need to talk about how so many reactions to stories like these center the mens’ feelings.
And then we need to talk about how we can drown out those voices with the voices of survivors.
I confess I even feel a little uncomfortable writing this – what if someone thinks I’m trying to defend a rapist? Or as this young lady memorably once put it, why would you say something like this unless you were a rapist yourself?
I hope it’s clear that is not what I’m doing.
I fear the mob and that fear seems to me to be more than a little rational given the way it seems to indulging itself in this righteous rage as if it were a warm bath.
Regarding the Turner case, does anyone have a link to a good description of the events, including a timeline? Everything I’ve read (filtering out the bile) sounds like “drunk guy and drunk girl drunkenly leave bar, sex happens behind a dumpster, girl says she was passed out while it happened, guy is convicted of rape”.
I’d like to see some more detail. Were they hooking-up? Did it become rape because she passed out and couldn’t enjoy it? Was it NOT intended, on the part of either, as a hook-up, and he just followed her and took advantage when she passed out? Is it another case of the woman regretting her actions and deciding that she wasn’t responsible because she was drunk, but the guy *was* responsible despite his being drunk?
Given the ubiquity of false rape cases lately, I’d like more than an outraged FaceBook or Twitter post before I pass judgement.
On a lighter note, there’s no need to wait for the automated clothes folding machine, you can build your own! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gzCHk0JZ2hY
As for the sheep that are “too big to shear”, perhaps some llama shearers could be brought in as consulants.
“As for the sheep that are “too big to shear”, perhaps some llama shearers could be brought in as consulants.”
Now that’s lateral thinking…
Few people would be comfortable turning a polite enquiry about salad dressing preference into a display of womanly victimhood.
Even money says she would have had her panties equally in a twist if the luckless server hadn’t asked her.
The intro to the Christopher Snowdon PDF (which I’ll peruse later with a cold Guinness at the ready) contains a phrase I’ve never seen before, me being on this side of the Big Pond: The moral right of the author has been asserted.
I need to get me one of those…
Nikw211- cut yourself some slack. Mob mentality is pretty scary no matter how horrible the crime. You can criticize the behavior of the hordes without condoning the crime this man committed.
I was an ADA early in my career and I (and the juries-bless them) put a good many people in prison, but I had some empathy for almost all of the defendants. I think the guilty should be prosecuted to the full extent of the law, but the process should be civilized. Otherwise we as a society are embracing a form of lawlessness as well. Mobs are not civilized and in today’s world mobs are often virtual.
All of the above sounds rather highfaluting, but you get my point.
It’s not that I doubt Turner’s guilt – he is quite blatantly and unambiguously guilty as charged – and I can genuinely understand why some people are outraged by both the story and the apparent lenience of his sentence – but does that really justify these people displaying the aggressive baseness of their private Id in quite such a public way?
I pity them. They missed their chance to do the same with Bill Clinton, Roman Polanski, Woody Allen, Sean Penn, Jimmy Page, Bill Cosby, etc. etc. etc. That’s a lot of pent up anger that simply had to explode at some point. Prolly similar to what happened with Fatty Arbuckle. Or not. I just look for reasons to bring up the name “Fatty Arbuckle”.
For the “there’s already a heart” entry – go to https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uomd1qX5feI .
Original was deleted.
“displaying the aggressive baseness of their private Id in quite such a public way”
Crowd-intensified moral superiority signalling, I’d guess. “Look at and punish extra-severely that horrible person (and please don’t take too close a look at my own behaviour).”
Sometimes so much of the over-the-top antics almost seems like preemptory deflection, but hey, I’m no psycholyatrist. I might need one, but I ain’t one.
Original was deleted.
Link fixed. Thanks.
When a server asks me :”Cream in your coffee”?
I say “No, not lately”.
Ferrovie federali svizzere!
I FIGURED IT OUT AND I’M JUST A STUPID YANK.
Ok, I googled it.
FFS
The moral right of the author has been asserted.
There’s even a Wikipedia page on it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moral_rights
Part of the oddity is that “moral” comes from the French, I believe, and in French “moral” means something almost — but not quite — the same as English.
It’s pretty standard in some parts of the world to include it as a phrase.
Regarding PennyRed’s commune’s different way of managing “emotional labour”. Well in our house we manage it differently again. For a start we don’t refer to it as “emotional labour”. And we don’t “manage” it. In fact I don’t even know how to manage emotional labour.
And yet we still manage to be happy most of the time. And no happy person I know “manages” “emotional labour”.
Odd.
I wonder how much a space on that boat costs (did any one click through to find out?) and whether you have to pay taxes to any country if you aren’t living on land. Also, do you get your money back if you get seasick on the first trip out.
“Also, do you get your money back if you get seasick on the first trip out.”
Not to mention hazardous ice cubes.
jones
1:33 Gaffer $125,468.
I was looking for Best Boy myself, (about half that). No idea what one does, but always wanted to introduce myself as a “Best Boy”.
Pricing a residence on a boat would be like pricing a residence on land. They go for what people are prepared to pay. Based on its competition, $250,000 to $1,200,000. http://www.businessinsider.com/what-are-condo-cruise-ships/?r=AU&IR=T
Country’s tax their residents and their citizens, which are not always the same people. If you don’t live permanently* anywhere and don’t carry a passport of one of the ones that taxes non-residents you are sweet and can live tax free.
* most countries have something like a 90-day-a-year rule, but it also depends on your possession of things like a house and if your kids go to school there.
JuliaM, I think this picture might explain some of the potential problems in a larger supersize sheep: http://www.bigmerino.com.au/images/rambo-on-the-move.jpg
Picture taken in Goulburn, a traditional sheep raising area in New South Wales, Australia (and no, that is not a Photoshopped picture).
… traffic in Sweden switched from driving on the left-hand side of the road to the right.
I guess it’s confirmation that I’m a car nut when the very first thing I noticed was the TR-4 on the right side of the photo. Only then did I notice all the people standing around in the street.
We three.
I’d have paid to see that:-
“Hijinks ensue as Muhammad Ali, Liberace and newcomer Hulk Hogan hit the Highway in the craziest Roadtrip movie you’ve ever seen!”
The lesson from Sweden is the government completely ignored the referendum where 80%+ opposed the idea.
A disgusting case of transphobia. You’d have to have a heart of stone…
Can everyone just leave everyone else alone, please!
As far as lions are concerned, I’m afraid that’s what happens when you confront those at the top of the food chain.
re: Bolero
I revisited this and it still gives me chills.
both the story and the apparent lenience of his sentence
BTW, I’m obviously not a rapist, but I do work in the judicial arena in California. The judge followed the sentencing recommendation of the Probation Department.
It works like this:
Whenever a defendant takes a plea or is convicted by a jury — unless the DEFENDANT waives a probation report and is sentenced forthwith; it is up to Probation to … look at the established facts of the case, interview the defendant, interview victim(s), assess damages for restitution (if any). The Probation Department does this hundreds of times a day across the state. They are trained officers of the court. They review every stitch of evidence (I’m in the DA office and we send our own files to Probation for review – which means they have access even to the DDA’s own notes).
And, IFAIK, the lead probation officer on this pre-sentencing report is a woman.
It isn’t at all that this perp is “getting off easy.” He has to register as a sex offender (PC290) for the rest of his life. He will be monitored by law enforcement for the rest of his life.
The disgust at the judge may be from people who *feel* the judge sentenced cuz WHITE PRIVILEGE but he did what the vast majority of judges do in this state – use the recommendation of the probation department.
The more OUTRAGE I see, and how it is being framed, the less inclined I’m to believing it is from a “perp not doing enough time” stance and more of a “AH HA! We finally have our poster boy for ‘White Male College Students Are All Rapists’ meme!”
Via Darleen’s link:
“At some point, the two lay down on the ground near a trash bin, where Turner assaulted the woman, who was unconscious when the Swedish students came upon the scene. He was convicted of assault to commit rape of an intoxicated woman, sexually penetrating an intoxicated person with a foreign object, and sexually penetrating an unconscious person with a foreign object.
CULTURE OF DRINKING
You don’t have to buy Turner’s story that he so was drunk himself that he did not realize she had passed out. But it’s hard to review this case without concluding that it has roots in a culture of campus drinking, the unindicted co-conspirator here.”
So it’s looking more and more like a mutually drunken hook-up and the guy’s life is ruined. This is my shocked face. 😐
I wonder (not really) how it would’ve played out if *he* had passed out and she’d taken advantage of him…
I wonder (not really) how it would’ve played out if *he* had passed out and she’d taken advantage of him…
Well, there’s this
Found this in the comment section of the earlier link: https://assets.documentcloud.org/documents/1532973/complaint-brock-turner.pdf
Witness testimony doesn’t look good for Brock. His attentions don’t appear to have been as welcome while the girl was conscious as he indicated. Still a messy situation.
@Darleen, I think I’ve read about the Amherst scenario before, but thanks for the reminder.
Ravel conducts Boléro, 1930.
Oh, right, and Bozzetto animates Bolero, 1976 . . .
Dilbert creator Scott Adams has an amusing piece on Gawker Medias impending demise.
Poor Gawker, all bashed up.
In all seriousness, isn’t Bolero a trite piece of music?
“The heart has already formed”. The video was taken down. What was it about?
The video was taken down. What was it about?
Chicken gestation.
Poor Gawker, all bashed up.
Imagine, no more Jezebel. Tragic.
Imagine, no more Jezebel. Tragic.
The unhappy ladies won’t be missed here. I wonder if io9 will survive. It was the only one of Gawker’s offshoots that I enjoyed poking through. Though even there, leftist politics has been shoehorned in with increasing frequency and precious little skill.
[ Added: ]
The assumption that any readers with an interest in science fiction, films, comic books, etc., must automatically share a rote leftist outlook is a tad grating. (See also Metafilter, where any political content almost invariably leans left, usually with the same air of “But how could anyone hip and happening disagree?”)
Whoa! Metafilter is still a thing?
“The assumption that any readers…”
I dropped Metafilter and BoingBoing from my daily reading for that reason. Those places are infested and make me a Sad Puppy. Jalopnik still seems to be OK.
I dropped Metafilter and BoingBoing from my daily reading for that reason.
I can’t be sure how recent or widespread the shoehorning is, but over the last few months I started noticing lots of clumsy and, to me, incongruous political sermons, all of which presumed the reader’s agreement, as if no other position were conceivable among anyone with an interest in aspects of pop culture. These are, or were, non-political sites that I’d browse for fun, and so the intrusion of “social justice” blather and identitarian claptrap – and the assumption that readers ought to be sympathetic to it, by default – does rather poison the experience.
Tragic news from about a shooting attack on a nightclub in Orlando. Florida. Seems that the perp is a muslim man.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-36512308
Never let it be said though that our Penny Red ever misses the point:
@Jonathan
I’m sort of vaguely disappointed in Penny. I should’ve thought she’d have managed to blame this on the white, cis-heteronormative, male, Christian-ist Patriarchy by now.
From what I’ve read from commenter at reason.com who wade into sites like the Huffington Post, there are actually people claiming that the Christian fundies created the attitude that made Muslims hate gays. Or something idiotic like that.
The hysteria from the Left on the horrible Orlando murders is telling … Blame priority:
#1 guns
#2 homophobia
rinse, repeat
Bring up radical Islam and be scolded about Robert Dear (the Planned Parenthood shooter who lived in a hut & even the court has declared incompetent) or the Crusades.
“Muslim communities in US … will be feeling so much fear”
Well, those in dance clubs anyway.
In all seriousness, isn’t Bolero a trite piece of music?
A couple of years ago I heard a version that added a hint of pitch-bending to the horn swells, giving the whole thing a slightly monstrous and demented feel. It was quite invigorating.
Holy crap, but a man with explosives is arrested in Los Angeles; said he was on his way to LA Gay Pride parade.
LATimes wants you to know
I’m sort of vaguely disappointed in Penny. I should’ve thought she’d have managed to blame this on the white, cis-heteronormative, male, Christian-ist Patriarchy by now.
I’m just surprised they haven’t managed to blame it on Donald Trump. Anyway, this is a f**king preventable tragedy.
Now Darleen, there’s nothing in that LA Times piece that rules out his simply being an NRA gun enthusiast knocking on doors looking for someone to go shooting with. Though it does seem odd why he would be knocking on doors if he was planning to shoot up a parade. just as odd that nothing was reported as to who the guy might be. My money is on Lutheran kindergarten teacher.
Found this rather interesting, given that it was published last Wednesday,
http://news3lv.com/news/nation-world/isis-kill-list-targets-palm-beach-treasure-coast-residents-ex-fbi-agent
Ray,
“1:33 Gaffer $125,468.”
I must have blinked at the wrong moment. Thank you for that.
What does a grip earn though?
“‘m just surprised they haven’t managed to blame it on Donald Trump. Anyway, this is a f**king preventable tragedy.”
Oh they have. When Trump (crassly) pointed out “I told you so” – The left screams Nazi at him.
Of course Obama couldn’t use the words Islamic extremism either.
Expect the media to drive for a gun control narrative as usual, the brazenly cowardly bastards that they are…
“On September 3, 1967, all traffic in Sweden switched from driving on the left-hand side of the road to the right.”
Reminds me of a joke when I was a kid in France. Went something like this:
The Belgians have decided that they should switch to driving on the left side of the road instead of the right side, so they’ll change over the course of two weekends. Next Sunday all the trucks start to comply, and the following Sunday it’ll be the cars.
Spiny Norman: I guess I’m certifiable as well. Nice eclectic mix of European and US cars they had in Sweden at the time. I fondly remember the Ford Taunus in the foreground (the taxicab – and fondly mostly because I was a young lad at the time). Looks like there’s a Checker cab going in the other direction, behind a Mercedes W110 Heckflosse saloon, the one with the US-inspired fins in the back. Funnily enough no Saabs or Volvos that I can see.
In all seriousness, isn’t Bolero a trite piece of music?
If that. It’s a sonic warhorse for aspiring to high culture. Great things are as rarely appreciated as they are themselves rare.
I think the guilty should be prosecuted to the full extent of the law, but the process should be civilized. Otherwise we as a society are embracing a form of lawlessness as well. Mobs are not civilized and in today’s world mobs are often virtual.
Issued with the caveat that legislatures are typically quasi-ethical mobbists, I assume. But the bolded part is encouraging, force being what it is.
Having been once upon a time roundly informed in this space that the law cannot be an ass if erecting its industrialized ham sandwich nation, you can perhaps see my interest.