A complicated movie

I watched No Sudden Move on Netflix on the weekend - the recent movie directed by Steven Soderbergh and written by Ed Solomon (Men in Black, amongst many other likeable credits.)

It's well directed, well acted, looks really good, and things are always happening;  the only problem is, it does take too long to understand what the movie is really all about.  I mean, on one level, I did admire the complexity of the screenplay - it  keeps half a dozen balls in the air all the time, and is written very realistically, so that it's like how overhearing conversations in real life often presents a puzzle as to what is being discussed.  But it's a fine line to walk, and at certain points, it does verge towards "this is requiring too much concentration. And can some character just explain to another what's going on?"

In general atmosphere, it reminded me both of Mad Men (which I haven't watched, but by reputation, its full of adultery, smoking and drinking, as is this movie) and some of the Fargo TV series (general gangster world vibe).

It's enjoyable enough, but....

SPOILER ALERT SPOILER ALERT

As this article explains, it is a completely fictional story that is spun around one true life corporate scandal.   That's a little disappointing, because while it never claims directly to be "based on a true story" or even "inspired by real life events", the explanation at the end of the film gives the impression that there probably is some truth to the key crime that takes up, like, the first half of the movie.   It feels like it should be at least an elaboration of some true life event, but it turns out it isn't.

Oh well - I guess if I had known that at the start, it would have saved the disappointment.

The cow problem

I love milk and cheese, and there's no way I'm giving them up, but the issue of how the industry deals with calves does give ethical doubts.

From a recent story at the ABC, which is an odd mix of sort of good, and sort of bad, news:

* Dairy Australia says 300,000 calves were slaughtered at five days of age during the 2021 financial year

• It says that number is down from 450,000 calves

 It is common practice on the majority Australian dairy farms for calves to be separated from cows within 24 hours of birth.

The calves are then taken to rearing facility or another shed and fed milk by farmers.

A percentage of female calves will stay on farm to be used as replacement heifers, and the remaining become surplus and are used for beef production.

Calves under 30 days old are known as bobby calves and must be at least five days old before they leave the farm.

Dairy Australia animal welfare national lead Sarah Bolton said the number of bobby calves going to slaughter in Australia was dropping.

"More and more dairy farms are looking to increase the number of calves raised for mature beef production, as opposed to slaughtering them as bobby calves," Dr Bolton said....

Dr Bolton, who is also a veterinarian, said there were several key reasons to separate calves and cows soon after birth.

"The first is the management of colostrum," Dr Bolton said.

"Dairy calves are born without a functioning immune system and rely on their first milk, which we call colostrum, to receive their immune system."

She said data showed that if left to suckle the cow on their own, at least 40 per cent of calves wouldn't get enough, which left them without an adequate immune system.

"We also have good data that shows the longer we leave a calf with a cow, the more stressful it is when we do separate them," Dr Bolton said.

Hmm.

That colostrum story sounds a bit suspiciously convenient for farmers who just want to get the calves separated and off to the slaughterhouse as soon as possible.

The story featured a small scale Victorian dairy farmer who says she doesn't separate the calves from the mothers,  although doing so seemingly halves the amount of milk that can be taken by the farmer.

Dr Bolton goes on to explain:

Dr Bolton said the industry was always looking at the issue of calf and cow separation and early life slaughter as public values evolved.

"The practice of culling calves at five days of age hasn't been undertaken because dairy farmers want to, or because it's particularly appealing for anyone," she said.

"It's been largely motivated by the fact those calves have historically not been seen as economically viable for beef production as a result of their genetics being selected for milk production.

"But the great news is as a result of research and innovation we are getting better at breeding dairy calves for beef production.

This article at The Guardian talks about "ethical dairy" methods:

The calves still need to be separated after weaning at around five months, a process Finlay and his new herdsman Charles Ellett have learned to manage by starting off with overnight periods of separation first.

“That first day we don’t open the gates in the morning though there is a huge outcry from the calves and cows,” says Finlay, who has got round it by introducing a surrogate mother – usually an older cow not producing much milk. They then use this cow to lead all the calves into a field on the other side of the farm to settle them.

The initial period of overnight separation helps create social bonds between the calves, says Finlay, making the final separation easier. The female calves will then stay on the farm to become milking cows, while the male calves are sold after five to seven months to produce veal.

And there's an argument that the early separation is actually less stressful:

Academic researchers say early separation within 24 hours has been found in some cases to reduce distress for both beef and dairy cows and calves, although the evidence for dairy calves is still inconclusive. “The faster you break the bond [between cow and calf] the fewer vocalisations you are going to get from calves,” says Marina Von Keyserlingk, a professor in animal welfare at the University of British Columbia.

Helen Browning, dairy farmer and CEO of the organic trade body the Soil Association, separates her calves and cows within 24 hours, but then keeps them with a surrogate mother cow who has been retired or rested from the dairy herd. Under organic standards, calves are separated from their mothers after birth, but are always kept in groups and must be given cow’s milk for their first 12 weeks.

“Calves hate being weaned and cows hate their calves being taken away, whether after one day or five months. But it is better to do it before a bond has developed. In nature cows would live together as a family with cows and their grandchildren and great-grandchildren, so we are already interfering a lot with that family process,” she says.

I don't know - killing animals within days of birth seems a waste of pregnancy and birth.  Same as I don't care for baby roosters going straight into the grinder at an egg farm.   Seems you should let something that has gone through birth at least a chance to see what life's about.   Is 6 months enough?  I guess they are being killed while they're cow teenagers.   Is that better or worse than being killed as a 7 day old calve?   This is complicated.  But if the calves are with their mother for 6 months, then that's better for the mother.  Isn't it?   

I wish someone would get on with making lab milk - not plant milk, but something pretty much identical to dairy milk.   They're working on it, but it seems to be taking too long...

 

Happy Friday thoughts

*  I'm not at Splendour in the Grass.   Never seen the appeal at being at a massive outdoor music festival where you stand a good chance of either sunburn or being in a mudbath.  Each to their own, I guess.

*  Someone on Twitter posted about this dress this morning, and it is very stylish, and very old.  (Apparently, the string was mostly gone, so it is a restoration of how it is believed to have originally looked.)  But were there any undergarments at all?:

*  Lots of publicity being given to the claim that in fact, low levels of serotonin in the brain are not shown to be the cause of depression.   While I haven't read much about it yet, I would have thought that proper blind trials would have been done to show that selective serotonin-reuptake inhibitors are of benefit for some people, and if can rule out a placebo effect, they must be doing something?   Is this happy news?   No, not really.   But it's interesting, at least.

Electric bus type things coming to Brisbane

I don't know who this guy is who has made this video, which is obviously very supportive of the Brisbane Council's plan for improving public transport with electric long bus things (the first of which is apparently currently undergoing testing), but I do have the say, the whole system and idea sounds pretty impressive: 

 

I like the way the "buses" recharge themselves, too (see at the 3min 50 sec mark in the video). Another video indicated they are made in Switzerland. We can trust the Swiss not to use batteries that blow up, can't we?

When the Holocaust came to Paris - updated

It surprises me a little to realise that there are people still alive with cogent memories of World War 2, but this article from France 24 has interviews with 6 people who were kids when this terrible incident occurred:

Over two days in the summer of 1942, French police carried out Western Europe’s largest wartime roundup of Jews, acting on orders from occupying German forces and their French allies in the Vichy Regime.

On July 16 and 17 of that year, a total of 12,884 Jews – men, women and children – were snatched from their homes in Paris and in neighbouring suburbs. Some were taken directly to an internment camp in Drancy, northeast of the capital. The rest were crammed into the Vélodrome d’Hiver, a stadium located on the banks of the Seine in the 15th arrondissement (district) of Paris, which would give its name to this sinister chapter in French history.

This reminded me about a book I mentioned back in 2007:  a biography of a French sleazy character who profited greatly out of adopting Nazi anti-Semitism.   I don't think I ever fully finished the book, actually, but I think I got through most of it.  I should find it on the shelf and check it out again.

An interesting way to fictional success

At the Washington Post, a story about how fictional stories that have started on Reddit have met with success.

America has some problems (part 1,000)

I keep saying that, like Noah Smith, I am basically optimist about America eventually getting over its current problems, but news like this makes you wonder:

And this:

Takeaways: Overdose rates were highest in areas with the most treatment options available, in 25 states and the District of Columbia, where data was available, the report found.

• "Just because there's availability of services doesn't meant they're necessarily accessible," Mbabazi Kariisa, a CDC health scientist, told reporters.
• Systemic racism, income inequality, and lack of reliable housing, transportation and health insurance all play a role in why drug overdoses are disproportionately affecting Black and Native American people, CDC officials said.

By the numbers: In 2020, there were 91,799 Americans who died of a drug overdose, according to HHS, and from 2019 to 2020 overdose rates increased the most among teens and young adults.

• Black youths and young adults ages 15 to 24 years old experienced the largest overdose death rate increase at 86%.
• Native American people ages 25 to 44 years old saw an increase of 49% in the rate of overdose deaths.
• White people ages 15 to 24 years old had a 34% increase in overdose death rate.

Foolish old people watch

areff says:

July 20, 2022 at 3:39 pm

Daughter-in-law is pregnant and due in September. Just heard from my son that the baby, as revealed by sonogram, has an aortic stenosis. It’s apparently a mild case and, if surgery is needed, it’s a tried and true procedure.

So I ask the fruit of my lines when his wife got her COVID jabs.

Pause on the line, then this:

“Yeah, I thought of that and I figure she was jabbed around conception time.”

Another pause.

“And then she got another about three months later on doctor’s advice”

Jeez.

Which was followed by this supportive comment:

Old bloke says:

July 20, 2022 at 4:01 pm

areff says:
July 20, 2022 at 3:39 pm

Serious question, why aren’t we seeing people hanging from the street lamps yet?

Meanwhile, neither of these geezers, I am sure, think anything is significant about England having its first 40 degree day yesterday. 

Yes I know, cranky old fools who think they know better have been with us always.   The problem is, the internet now lets them find each other and mutually reinforce their dangerous and obnoxious beliefs.  

And what's worse - people like Rupert Murdoch and Tucker Carlson make a worldwide career out of pandering to them.    I honestly don't think there is enough daily outrage about this pathetic and dangerous man:

Update:  a bitter truth - 

 

The problems of cannibalism

From a story at Science, handily listing the main problems with cannibalism:

Eating your own kind is fairly common throughout the animal world, from single-celled amoebas to salamanders, he and his colleagues report in a new review in Ecology. But not as many species snack on their brethren as one might expect—and the team has detailed the reasons why.

First off, cannibalism is risky. If you’ve got dangerous claws and teeth, so do your comrades. Female praying mantises are notorious for biting the heads off of much smaller males during mating, for example, but they also occasionally go toe to toe with an evenly matched female. “I’ve seen one female chew the leg off another,” Rosenheim says, “and then the female who lost the leg somehow manages to kill the other one.”

Cannibalism is also dicey from a disease perspective. Many pathogens are host specific, so if a cannibal devours an infected companion, it risks picking up the same disease. Different populations of humans have found this out the hard way multiple times. One of the most famous examples is the spread of a rare and fatal brain disease called kuru that ravaged the Fore people of New Guinea in the 1950s. Kuru raged across the Fore community through a cannibalistic funerary ritual in which families cooked and ate the flesh—including contaminated brain tissue—of deceased relatives. Once the Fore phased the ritual out, the spread of kuru was stopped in its tracks.

Finally, cannibalism is a terrible way to pass down one’s genes. “From an evolutionary perspective, the last thing you want to do is eat your offspring,” Rosenheim says. That’s a major reason big-eyed bugs limit their population sizes by snacking on their own offspring. If they grow too numerous—as happened with the aphid experiments—they deposit eggs all over the place. And because they can’t recognize their own eggs, they end up devouring their own brood.

Oh, so there's a cannibalism hormone?:

Although cannibalism is far from ideal, certain conditions appear to make the risky behavior worthwhile. Even if you’re eating a friend—or an heir—if you’re starving, you’ve got to protect your survival, says Erica Wildy, an ecologist at California State University, East Bay, who was not involved with the study. In her own work, Wildy has found that hunger makes long-toed salamander larvae more likely to nibble on—and occasionally eat—one another.

In their review, Rosenheim and his colleagues pinpoint specific hormones—octopamine in invertebrates and epinephrine in vertebrates—that appear to be linked to increasing rates of cannibalism. As conditions become crowded and food becomes scarce, the amounts of these hormones spike and “hangry” animals attack whatever they can snatch with jaws, legs, or pincers.

Huh.

Political comedy considered, again

Over at Hot Air, Ed Morrissey notes that Stephen Colbert ran with Biden age jokes (and attacked him for the Saudi visit) the other night.   He starts:

Has Joe Biden become so unpopular that late-night comics might actually move away from their clapter production and start being funny again? Bill Maher made this transition months ago, but the rest of the late-night comics have been as loathe to target Biden for pointed political jokes as they were with Barack Obama. Or so it has seemed, anyway; late-night TV comedy has been pointless for well over a decade as it went from being funny to being didactic.

Now, this raises something I refuse to believe - that comedians who move to support of the current American Right are actually capable of being funny.   I know, I know - I can readily be accused of suffering from the same problem as conservatives - letting political views influence what I allow myself to find funny.  But I'm certain any objective observer would have to agree with me - with my main evidence being the absolutely woeful "Gutfeld!" on Fox, which I have watched sometimes recently on Youtube.  

Despite getting some attention not so long ago for apparent ratings success (which I think has diminished again), he and the show is painfully unfunny.  And weirdly, I noticed, he seems in his monologues to often try to do self deprecation of the "maybe I'm gay" kind, only to have it fail utterly.  Why would he even try that with the type of audience he has? 

As for Bill Maher - I had been meaning to say that his segments (increasingly frequent) where he just wants to attack the Left for wokeness and political correctness, and not talk much about the Right turning the country into Christian fascism (because that doesn't annoy him as much), have also been poorly written and pretty painful to watch.   I was never a big fan, but he has become much, much worse.

It's not just a current thing - over my life, even when I voted Liberal, I knew that comedy sympathetic to Right wing politics has very, very rarely worked.   I mean, I don't like all Left wing comedy either - I was never a fan of Max Gillies, for example, and more recently, I couldn't stand Tom Ballard's shows.  But Left leaning comedy at least has the capacity (in a way Right wing comedy virtually doesn't) to be funny, even if it didn't always work for me.  Right wing comedy especially doesn't work now, when the worst of the Right (and that's a disturbingly large part of America) has developed clear sympathy to religious fascism.   

   

 

Not convinced

That's a co-incidence:  The Guardian has a very positive review up of Midnight Mass, the (sort of) horror series which has been out on Netflix for maybe 6 months, although I have only recently started watching it.

I'm 3 episodes in, and I'm not convinced.   It's way, way too talky, and the dialogue is often very "stagey" - it feels unnatural to me a lot of the time.  And now that I have seen the apparent explanation for the mysterious young priest appearing on the (admittedly interesting as a location) small island, I admit it wasn't exactly a normal supernatural trope, but it was so novel, I didn't know what to make of it.  I'm probably going to go with reading a synopsis of the rest of the show, rather than devoting time to finding out more about what is going on.  

It's a weird show, and I don't think it's very good. 

That's odd: having Covid has made me want to post really unimportant stuff

 

Back to Lost in Space

While I was convalescing at home with Covid, Youtube kept insisting I watch a series of interviews of the old Lost in Space stars Bill Mumy and Jonathan Harris (aka Will Robinson and Dr Smith).  

Mumy seems a particularly nice person, and a (seemingly unusual?) case of a child actor (he really did a lot of work I wasn't aware of) who grew up normal and not scarred by the experience.  Or maybe by the 1960's, there was enough care of child actors in the studio system - I mean, I guess Ron Howard turned out fine too.

Things I learned from watching these interviews:

*   Jonathan Harris was given carte blanche to re-write his lines.  This meant that Mumy would have to visit Harris's trailer to go over the re-written scripts and re-learn his cues from those in the original.  (I feared for a moment that there was going to be some shocking incident of abuse while alone with him, but no.  In fact, I checked Harris's Wikipedia page to check about his sexuality - I mean, it would hardly be surprising to learn he was gay.  But he was married and had a son, and there are quite a few websites noting that he counts high on the list of actors you thought could be gay, but apparently wasn't.)

* Mumy is an excellent voice mimic.

* Mumy worked for Alfred Hitchcock on a few episodes of his TV show, and really disliked him.

* He explained how he felt sorry for Guy Williams, his fictional father, who was given less and less to do in the show, while the Dr Smith character more or less took over.  And after the show, he went and retired in Argentina, where he was considered a hero because of his role in Zorro (!).

* His first serious girlfriend, when he was old enough to drive, was his co-star Angela Cartwright (Penny).  They remain good friends.

* I thought the anecdote in this clip was pretty funny:

*  Jonathan Harris paints a funny picture of Irwin Allen as a blustering, old style cranky Hollywood producer.

Not much charm

It might just be me - it's not like I watch sport to any significant degree (although last week's State of Origin was very good) to assess the degree of charm of individual sporting champions.  But after watching Cameron Smith's bit of media after winning the British Open, it occurred to me that golf seems to have trouble attracting champions who have any particular charm.   Perhaps people used to think that about Tiger Woods, but then his personal life became a mess and I don't think people like him much anymore?

I wondered if this is more the case with individual sports than team ones?  Maybe - but while there have always been jerk tennis champions, it seems a sport which has always had a reasonable number of seemingly likeable personalities.

Golf, though...

(People used to like Greg Norman, I guess, but he became increasingly weird as he aged.  He is perhaps a symbol of the Right wing character of the sport.  I mean, it is considered a rich person's game in many countries, I guess - although not as much in Australia, perhaps.)  

A familiar refrain, but this time it's deserved: waiting for the next new, cool thing to replace the stale old thing

I'm talking movies and TV.   And yeah, every year or two there's a journalistic burst of "Everything at the cinema/on the streaming service is a sequel and/or a superhero movie.  Where's the mature cinema/TV for adults we used to enjoy?  Why can't Hollywood give us more original stories? etc etc"  Perhaps the Covid break from cinema going cooled down that talk for a while, but now that we are out of that, I get the feeling we genuinely are in a particularly clear "stale idea" crisis.

I don't write this out of particular disappointment with current movies - I still haven't even seen the Top Gun movie, or the new Thor.   The latter is definitely suffering a bit of a Marvel fan backlash (it's too jokey for many, apparently, and feels more like a parody.)  

But more generally, based on watching quite a few Youtube reviewers, it's safe to say that:

a.   it's clear that Disney has milked the Star Wars universe dry. The critical reception to their series is just getting worse and worse, and as I didn't even care for the Mandalorian, it's not like I'm hanging out for anything new from that world.  The universe, as I have written before, has a fatal flaw:  no consistent view of the Force, which was the key appeal of the first couple of movies.  The TV shows are not fixing that.  It's incapable of retrospective correction, probably.

b.  Similarly, the same can be said of their Marvel content, with general dissatisfaction growing with the way the movies and series are messily dealing with a multiverse.   (I also watched a long Youtube video by someone very keen to explain that the Endgame movie, and subsequent stuff, has dealt with time travel inconsistently.  I never did like the Endgame explanation.)

c.  The Jurassic franchise is dead - there are so many terrible reviews for the current one.  

d.  Hard to believe the (not Spielberg directed) Indiana Jones movie will be good. Due out next summer.

e.  Honestly, who cares that there are at least two Avatar movies coming out.   Had no interest in the first movie, less in any sequel.

f.  People went to see (yet another) dark Batman.  But I don't get the feeling it re-started any particular new enthusiasm for the character.  DC based movies, few of which interest me, have a very high "miss" rate.

g.   Has their ever been more knives sharpened to attack a series than those waiting for the Amazon Tolkien prequel-ly show to start?   

It just truly feels that everything has been sucked dry, and everyone can see it.

Sure, there will always be a couple of exceptions such as the surprise quality, apparently, of the Top Gun sequel - although it is not like that is going to be a franchise as such.   There's a good chance the next Mission Impossible will still be good, too.  (Although I found the last one underwhelming.)

But overall, at no time have I have felt that the complaints about lack of creativity from Hollywood were ever more deserved.  

Is it the fault of the culture wars, perhaps?   It probably does have something to do with it, as even allowing for Disney and other studios being super keen to have "representation" of women and gay or trans, it is hard to imagine stories now that are unifyingly appealing to the extremes of politics now.  The world views have become so divergent.   

Heat waves and death in India, reconsidered

Here's a lengthy article looking at the question of why this year's pre-monsoonal heat waves in India and Pakistan did not seem to kill many at all - a bit contrary to expectations, actually.

I've always puzzled at how (many of) the poor in India manage to survive their incredible sounding heatwaves.  The answers are a bit complicated...

Makes Brisbane look cool

These Pub Choir videos, I'm talking about.  The latest is a version of Running Up That Hill, a song I don't particularly care for, but again, it's just the fact that it makes Brisbane look like its full of cool, community minded, and talented, people:

 

(I also believe that Camarata - the ensemble playing strings - is extremely good at what they do.)

The old folding handkerchief trick

Noticed this on Twitter not so long ago, with the handkerchiefs on display in some police museum or other in Malaysia:

 

I can tell you, Googling the topic "folding porn handkerchiefs" or "vintage porn on handkerchiefs Malaysia" has really thrown up a lot of results I didn't want, and nothing useful!

This reminded me of the old Mad Magazine fold in cartoons.   Wikipedia tells me they started in 1964, and were done by the same cartoonist - Al Jaffee - til 2020!  (Jaffee is now 101!  Talk about a long career.)

Anyway, I'm not sure that it took much imagination, looking at the drawings on those handkerchiefs, to see how the right fold could make it look like sex.   But I wonder how common this means of distribution was - just a South East Asia thing, or were they all over the West too?   Can't say I have heard of them before...

Wingnut regrets

Interesting story at the New York Times (gift link for you) about a Trump supporter who has had to go into hiding due to wingnut news sites, and Tucker Carlson, spreading a rumour that he was really at the Jan 6 riot as an FBI provocateur.  

He seems to have regrets, but the article avoids asking him if he still thinks the election was stolen...

When "being yourself" isn't all that it's cracked up to be

Of course, I am broadly sympathetic with the views expressed by Brian Rosner in his recent article

Is it good advice to “be yourself”? Why looking inward is not necessarily the answer 

Common wisdom today has it that there is only one place to look to find yourself, and that is inward. Personal identity is a do-it-yourself project. All forms of external authority are to be rejected, or at least questioned, and everyone’s quest for self-expression should be celebrated — personal happiness is the ultimate goal. Self-determination, once a principle for nations emerging from the First World War, is now the responsibility of every individual. A novelty in the history of ideas, this strategy of identity formation is sometimes labelled “expressive individualism”.

Clearly, there is nothing wrong with looking inward. There are many gains to living an examined life. And the alternative is far from attractive. As the philosopher Charles Taylor explains, the movement of expressive individualism is, in part, a reaction against a 1950s culture of conformity, which is believed to have “crushed individuality and creativity”.

Authenticity is also desirable. It is much better for a person to inhabit an identity that they own and can fully appropriate for themselves; there is something to be said for feeling comfortable in your own skin. Psychologists generally regard authenticity as a basic requirement of mental health.

So, are there any downsides to looking inward and being yourself? I can think of three pretty big ones: it seems to produce fragile selves; it’s failing in terms of outcomes for individuals and society; and it is faulty in its assumptions about human nature. Let me briefly discuss these in turn.

This is how it ends (and I think that second last paragraph needed some editing to make its meaning clearer, when it mention Nietzsche:

There is, in fact, a fourth direction to which you can look to find yourself — a direction that many believe offers a better story. They insist that personal identity requires looking up. Former Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, writes: “Without the transcendent we shall find ourselves unable, sooner or later, to make any sense of the full range of human self-awareness”. On the other side of the ledger, some have argued that Friedrich Nietzsche, sometimes described as the first real atheist because of his fearless pursuit of the consequences of his antitheist stance, has no place for the notion of personal identity. Does looking up have a role to play in identity formation?

The key to an authentic, stable, and satisfying sense of self is to inhabit a narrative identity that is worth living. One that deals well with life’s joys and sorrows, triumphs, and disappointments, and responds well to injustice.