Friday Ephemera (828)
Confounding house numbers, 1961. || “Dad, you can carry big rocks.” || Dawn upwardsness. || It’s possible they went too far. || The formidable Miss Whiplash. || Boy Wonder, big pants, Batman in a jam, 1943. || “Photography not permitted.” || Japanese people encounter Marmite. || Mole relocation. || For manly striding. || “White empiricism” oppresses magic black womanliness, claims bint featured here. || At last, Star Wars… in Welsh. || Mauler parses the moral logic of the latest Spider-Man film. || It’s all in the neck. || Look away now. || The Englishwoman and the Horse, 1981. || Visible roots. || A tour of ancient Rome. || You want one and you know it. || I’m not sure what to call this. || For children of all ages. || Blinky. || And finally, the thrill of smoking toad venom. “Relax,” says he. “Feel the love.”
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It is presumed that black women are “excluded” from physics. Physics is the ultimate objective field but to enter you must be very very smart. Only pure math requires a higher IQ. BUT: plenty of Indians, Chinese are in physics. There is no sense in which physics is “white” nor any probability that subjective blackness can improve it or make new discoveries. Its very virtue is that it is true no matter who you are.
40 yrs ago (yes, I am that old) I saw an article claiming that a group of feminists were going to develop a feminine mathematics. No outcome from this claim that I ever saw and for the same reason.
Don’t recall. But perhaps that is to my benefit.
[ Considers adding hallucinogenic toad venom to contents of cigarette machine. ]
I see your big, confident American woman and raise you a confident American man.
It was when he produced an alarmingly large spoon. Shortly before the ruddiness, sweating, tears, etc.
Also, “Nor-witch.”
Why do they think it’s generally sold in tiny jars? You’d think that would be a clue.
[ Considers adding hallucinogenic toad venom to English mustard. ]
Seems almost redundant.
See: Higher Superstition: The Academic Left and Its Quarrels with Science, by Levitt and Gross.
And edited by them: The Flight from Science and Reason.
Mauler & Spiderman…
Ok, I made it 10 minutes into that and fled because I wanted to fill my ears with concrete. I wasn’t going to see the movie anyway.
Trying to tone it down?
I can’t recall a time, even as a wee seedling, when I believed that mustard was something that you could spread like cream cheese, or could consume with a dessert spoon.
Some kind of molecular tweezers, possibly.
Place-in-food-chain negotiation. A possible series.
Speaking of food chain . . .
Younger Sibling visiting and we went over to the TVA dam on Douglas Lake to see if we could spot some bald eagles. We did and I managed to get this shot of a lucky osprey.
I don’t think my local hairdresser offers that service.
You do get coffee and a posh biscuit. And a glass of plonk at Christmas.
As Alexander Pope said, a little Norwich is a dangerous thing.
You can ship anything these days.
I did this to my Japanese housemates when I lived in Yokohama. None liked it (but they all loved natto…)
Make her walk the plank. (But it will have to be a reinforced plank.)
Professional level trolling.
The thing that never happens….
Thomas the Tank Engine? That’s enough internet for today.
https://x.com/Breaking911/status/2085739381139099777
It doesn’t seem likely, no. So far the Spider-Man films have been largely free of the stupidity that wiped out the brand value of the MCU, but this might be the turning point.
I’m probably being overly optimistic here but part of me is wondering whether, between the Scarlet Witch and Jean Grey, MarDisVelNey isn’t setting up the X-Men to just be straight up mutant terrorists. Mentally unstable walking nuclear bombs, every one of them. It would be an interesting approach, given that nobody seems to know what to do with the X-Men franchise.
But in truth, they’ll probably make them all a Free Palestine allegory or something.
There’s an extant theory that the reason the 1977 Star Wars was so popular was not the film, but the zeitgeist – in a time of cynicism, economic malaise, post-Vietnam, gritty black-and-grey-morality cinema, it was bright, simple, had Good Guys and Bad Guys, encouraged you to cheer for the Good Guys and boooo the Bad Guys, and everybody agreed which was which.
That’s what superhero movies ought to do, and the beginning of the MCU largely did that. The more “complex” and “nuanced” a superhero film gets, the more it tries to parody or deconstruct, the more it misses the fundamental appeal of the genre. Even Nolan’s Dark Knight trilogy, for all its stentorian pretentiousness, was fundamentally as simple as order vs. chaos. Batman as “rough men standing ready to do violence” on behalf of the peaceful citizens of Gotham.
I’m going to go rewatch the 1978 Superman film now.
Case in point.
The solution is mob violence, and militant intolerance of their apologists: Do not hire them, do not do business with them, make them unwelcome in your community, and never, never, never render aid.
A felicitous sequence of events.
“Black looping.” I learned something today.
Heh. But the current writers’ struggles with the concept of heroism, and morality more generally, are quite something. A bit of an issue, given their chosen line of work. And the jarring blind spots, the faeces in the cheesecake, do seem to follow from the writers’ own political leanings. Their fixation with identity groups.
And so, for instance, we get supposedly sympathetic female characters, notionally heroes, who read more like villains, indeed sociopaths. And these murderous, sociopathic women somehow escape the normal moral consequences of their own sociopathy simply because they are women, a symbol of women, the real victims. And we’re not supposed to notice how jarring this is.
And this is not some writerly cleverness. There’s an air of the clueless and cack-handed, an obliviousness. And once you spot the pattern, again and again, it does rather disrupt any hope of suspending disbelief.
Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness was the last Marvel film I paid to see. I recall the exact scene in which I gave up on any expectation of it being a good film. Early on, when Strange and Wanda have their first discussion and he reassures her that she “put things right” and has nothing to atone for. Despite her torturing, for weeks, hundreds of innocent people, including children. It’s such an inapt, morally grating thing to say, it destroys his credibility as a moral hero. It just throws you out of the film.
And none of the writers seemed to register this. Which suggests either colossal ineptitude or a moral sensibility that is deeply, irretrievably perverse. Or both.
“I hope you haven’t spent your entire month’s salary on something unnecessary and expensive again”
Swingin’
Thanks for the 1943 mid-war Batman! I hear it’s utterly jingoistic and racist, and I’m totally up for that :-). Imagines… “Take your stinking paws off me, you damned dirty yellow nip!”
I’m a huge fan of the 1949 series. It used to get played movie nights at university before the main feature, and it was an enormous hit.
Oh, to be clear I wasn’t criticizing the video by saying I’d only seen the first ten minutes.
(I’ve never seen any of his videos before, but I have heard him speak on Livestreams by Critical Drinker and Nerdrotic).
If anything my comment was more about feeling a bit sorry for today’s film makers because, critically and/or financially, they seem less and less able to get away with howlers of the kind that North by Northwest is chock full of.
In other words, this likely is about {dramatic echo} “Modern Audiences”, but not in the way Critical Drinker usually means it.
I think there is significant chunk of actual modern audiences that are sophisticated viewers who are more likely to notice gaping plot holes (regardless of whether they decide to see a movie or not.
This absolutely.
And not just at Marvel, either.
I got that. And hey, his videos can require a certain bloody-minded commitment. I have to be in the right mood, and have sufficient free time.
Listening to them while doing ironing can work.
The comments are largely what you would expect for that kind of video – except for this one, which I was quite tickled by
These gratingly bizarre story-telling choices become sort-of comprehensible in light of the writers’ politics, which they feel a need to announce, and, say, Kevin Feige’s statement that he didn’t want “another white male” in a position of authority over Wanda, as a mentor or teacher. Even though Strange would be the obvious character to function in that role with regard to preceding events.
So they’re ruling out in advance, for ideological reasons, avenues of storytelling that suit the characters as established and which make sense in-universe, in order to maintain some identitarian hang-up. In which, the writers fret about who’s white or male or whatever. And in which dull, unpopular characters have to be inserted and featured prominently because they are female or “queer” or have darker skin.
But what you get as a consequence is clumsy and dissonant. And worse, boring. The fingerprints of such fretting, the underlying ideology, are all too obvious.
With regard to the scene mentioned above, in the conjured garden, it could have been played much more effectively, with greater tension, with Strange not being so casually, weirdly forgiving, and not excusing Wanda’s sadistic self-indulgence, but still having to tread carefully around a dangerous, unstable character.
But hey.
See also the passing-of-the-shield scene in Avengers: Endgame, which makes no sense in-universe, or in terms of characters’ skill sets. It’s only there, a supposedly Important Gesture, because of the racial hang-ups of the writers and producers. But it’s incongruous and jarring.
And then there’s all the crap that followed from that decision – Captain African-American, which turned a charming supporting character, one I was always happy to see, into an unloved headliner that didn’t make any sense, and who was prone to naff and unwarranted political statements in a terrible, morally bewildering TV series, and in an even worse and hugely expensive film that was shot and reshot umpteen times and which bombed catastrophically.
As did I. Here’s a picture of a dog I met, in gratitude (and as a bookmark). Her name is Winter.
Even the resignation.
Today in Deep Thoughts™…
First up, an economic policy is explained.
Second, works (and I use the term loosely) from our best and brightest. Be sure to hit the links and read the abstracts for quality learing like this:
Before anyone asks, that Muldoon chap (I am presuming gender);
is no relation, and WTF are “cultural memory studies”. Clearly I have no future in academia.
Inadequates driven by spite. In case that wasn’t clear.
This came to mind.
Measure the mustard to the man, sir.
Andrew Lloyd Webber wept.
Pretty much the definition of unserious people.
Added: They are essentially children. “I want a pony!”
OK…where will the pony sleep? Who will feed the pony? Who will clean the stable? Where will we put the ponyshit?
They don’t think through the implementations because they have never had to produce anything real. This should be bloody obvious to thinking people. We just do not have many thinking people anymore because either the welfare state or Daddy’s inheritance enables them to exist without putting effort into dealing with the real world in any objective sense. And as much as we like to blame the socialism of the welfare state, the genesis of most of this nonsense are spoiled rich kids. Especially Marx and Engels.
Precisely, almost word-for-word, an exchange I had with the pastor of my church. With one glaring difference. Replace the word “conservative” with “Liberals” and that “liberal” was me. I was trying to get across the point that the church was failing to adapt to new knowledge (“new” in the sense of 19th century knowledge) by its rigidity in regard to evolution and sexuality. That failure to dispose of the bathwater was killing the baby. Of course that was taking the analogy too far. Of course. Something that I am reminded of every time I pass a Methodist Church and see their rainbow motifs. Even here in “conservatives” Appalachia. Bah! But who could have perceived of such idiocy getting a foothold, let alone taking over virtually all of Christianity? Certainly not even cynical me.
Don’t forget the effect of technology. How many processing cycles are spent in masking incapability?
Again, the inadequate and resentful should not be put in charge:
They are the bathwater.
They got what they asked for, still not happy.
Now a break from the idiocy, strong genetics at 5:30.
I have a precocious daughter, and she’s driving me crazy. Just saying.