Hmmm:
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The hosts are both likeable and their scripted bits are fine: what I find problematic is how too many of the guest comedians find too many of their own scripted bits hilarious. (Wil Anderson often laughs too much at them too.)
It's a program that just seems to be trying too hard - or is too amused with itself - for too much of the time.
Update: This, on the other hand, is genuinely funny:
What “longtermism” gets wrong about climate change
This tech boy "longtermism" idea has been attracting a lot of criticism lately, all of it justified as far as I can tell. I doubt that as a semi philosophical idea it has really attracted that much of the public's attention. But still, it is a worry when the super rich start believing in reasons to downplay the issue of climate change, because they have the capacity to influence public opinion which, in democracies, can lead to inaction.
What a good thread at the now crappy Twitter! (And really, I wish people would just run free blogs - use Blogspot, it doesn't matter) and write their short essay on it and link to it from Twitter, rather than doing Twitter threads that are hard to save and might end up disappearing.) Apart from that gripe, here we go:
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Wow, there's a lengthy, heavily illustrated, article in the Washington Post about the remarkable Dutch efficiency at food production - which is very research and science based. I guess I knew they did well for their size, but I didn't realise how much it was based on high technology. I bet Singapore is jealous. But then, I see Singapore is far smaller in proportion that I would have guessed - 728 square km versus 41,542! Less than 2% the size. No wonder they have trouble being truly independent.
In my final Washington Post gift article for the month, there is also an answer to the question - can you really eat until your stomach explodes? As I would have guessed, the answer is yes, but it's very rare, and vomiting takes care of the issue for most people. Regarding competitive eating, there is the matter of training:
The average human stomach can hold about one liter before that feeling of fullness kicks in. But some stomachs can stretch to hold as much as two to four liters.
If the pressure in your stomach significantly increases, you’ll feel nauseous. If the pressure becomes severe, vomiting may occur. Both protect from gastric rupture: The nausea limits how much more you can eat, while the vomiting will decompress the stomach.
In rare cases, the stomach can expand to a dangerous size, known as acute gastric dilatation. When this happens, blood vessels delivering nutrients to the stomach are compressed. The decrease in blood flow can cause damage to the organ’s lining and potentially lead to a tear or rupture. But in the medical literature, there are very few cases of this actually happening due to overeating....
You may wonder why this doesn’t happen to competitive eaters. Joey Chestnut broke a record last year by devouring 76 hot dogs in 10 minutes. His stomach didn’t explode because it’s possible to train your stomach over time to accommodate such large volumes of food in short spans.
Certain medical conditions can increase risk for experiencing acute gastric dilatation and subsequent perforation, including episodes of severe hyperglycemia, in which a person with diabetes experiences dangerously high levels of blood sugar or if an area of the stomach is obstructed. While it is uncommon, chronic disordered eating, including a genetic condition called Prader-Willi syndrome that results in constant hunger and binge eating, can cause stomach rupture. When not caught in a timely matter, these conditions can indeed be fatal. But again, all are exceptionally rare.
Early human ancestors living 780,000 years ago liked their fish well-done, Israeli researchers revealed Monday, in what they said was the earliest evidence of fire being used to cook.
Exactly when our ancestors started cooking has been a matter of controversy among archaeologists because it is difficult to prove that an ancient fireplace was used to prepare food, and not just for warmth....
Previously, the first "definitive evidence" of cooking was by Neanderthals and early Homo sapiens 170,000 years ago, according to a new study published in the journal Nature Ecology and Evolution.
The study, which pushes that date back by more than 600,000 years, is the result of 16 years of work by its first author Irit Zohar, an archaeologist at Tel Aviv University's Steinhardt Museum of Natural History.
During that time she has catalogued thousands of fish remains found at a site called Gesher Benot Ya'aqov in northern Israel.
That's pushing it back quite a lot!
The evidence is that certain fish teeth have been found in fireplaces and seem to have been "cooked". They are from a very large carp species:
And most of the teeth belonged to just two particularly large species of carp, suggesting they had been selected for their "succulent" meat, the study said. Some of the carp were over two meters (6.5 feet) long.
Given how much Australians disdain eating carp, these hominids would not do well on today's cooking shows.
So, Twitter hasn't yet broken down, even temporarily, due to lack of staff. Instead, we just have been watching the increasingly gratingly immature tweet behaviour of the new owner. He's giving off a strong "please look at me/like me" vibe, which is something I would have thought having a squillion dollars might cure, but apparently not.
I am very sure that as soon as an alternative is ready to fly, most of the centrist/Leftist/anti-Trump people I follow will happily migrate to it very quickly regardless of whatever changes Musk may want to make. (No one seems to have any idea as to what he thinks it can do in future that will make it the essential app that will conquer the world.) Twitter will just be left to the Musk fanboys and Right wingers who don't care about misinformation and moderation.
There are some who argue that it's giving up too easily to abandon the place - it'll be letting the MAGA and the culture warring Right have a win! But really, you can't keep participating at a site which does more harm than good without tacitly endorsing it, and I can't see that there is any chance of changing Musk short of personalty transplant.
Mastodon is, it seems, not going to be the alternative (too many people saying that it is too complicated, and I don't understand how decentralised moderation can work), but there's one or two others which seem to be waiting in the wings, probably with people trying to line up enough funds fast enough for it to be able to cope with an onslaught of new users.
Interesting times, but not very gratifying...
I'm three episodes into the Guillermo del Toro's Cabinet of Curiosities series on Netflix.
It's an anthology horror story show, so it's always hard to know if a random episode is going to really hit it out of the ballpark, as the Americans would say.
But so far, my feeling is that the series is big on atmosphere, but at the cost of satisfying payoff. And rather than any substantial scares, or even horror that really lingers after viewing, the show plays more to me as just "deeply unpleasant" in a very transient sort of way.
Again, I admit that horror is far from my favourite genre, but this series is making me feel it is a bit like what I said about science fiction in (gosh!) 2008: have all the good themes really been done as well as they ever will be, and it's pretty much an exhausted genre?
I am looking to replace a couple of ceiling fans in the house, and the choice is more confusing than ever: AC or DC; wall control or remote; remotes that are old fashioned IR or wireless; blades made of some sort of plastic, wood or metal.
So, you pick a model that seems to have all the features you need, then look at the consumer reviews on Google or elsewhere. A key feature for a ceiling fan - whether they are noisy or not - on the model I had pretty much settled on, featured about 12 consumer reviews on the matter, and the break down was 6 said it was very quiet; 6 found it noisy!
A key reason I want this model, though, is that it is controllable through an app on your phone. That seems a useful feature that should be more common.
My son wanted to watch the well reviewed dark comedy Barry, and we finished the first season last night.
It's mostly enjoyable, for black comedy of the type I am usually pretty leery about. But I am a bit puzzled about how the last two episodes pretty much ruin the ability to sympathise with the title character. I mean, while he is shooting up other criminals, there's not too much to have qualms about. But by the end, the innocent are being killed, after his earlier reluctance to do so. To be honest, this doesn't give me much incentive to continue with series 2 and 3, and I note that comments on line indicate that series three is ever darker. :(
I haven't noticed anyone on line saying it, but thematically it has an obvious antecedent in Grosse Point Blanke, the 1997 John Cusack movie that I actually remember little about, except it being about a hit man not enjoying his job anymore, and one particularly unpleasant line of dialogue that stuck in my mind for being too extreme.
My problem with the end of the first series also relates a little to the depiction of violence - for a show with a high body count, it was formerly somewhat discrete in the depiction of gunshot wounds, but that goes out the door in the last episode too.
It's clearer than ever to me, too, that the key to the entertainment value in this type of story is the compounding trouble that the characters get themselves into, and the audience wondering how they might get out of it. Pulp Fiction, Breaking Bad (which I will never bother with - but I have a good idea of the plot), Goodfellas: they are all about how things are falling apart for characters and what they are prepared to do to try to get out of trouble. But, I will continue to be a conservative-ish stick in the mud and say that, despite the entertainment value of the plotting, I still don't think it is good for anyone's soul to spend too long living in these violent fictional worlds. I wish there were less of them made - or perhaps, that they were more old fashioned in terms of morality stories.
So, it seems that Elon's attempt to force employees to work 16 hour days and sleep in the office, all in the interests of changing Twitter into something that can make money for him, has resulted in so many resignations that many now expect it will break soon, and perhaps permanently.
This is resulting in many amusing, near final, Tweets:
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Not only is crypto credibility finally collapsing fully, it seems to me that the whole vapourware-ish concept of blockchain technology and Web 3 being something fantastically useful might be on its last legs too. (Mind you, it is a bit hard to tell from that link whether the problem with ASX's planned new system was that it was blockchain based, or not.)
Oh well. It kept Sinclair Davidson and Chris Berg off the streets (well, sent them to other countries' streets for a few blockchain conferences, I'm sure) for a few years. Better than running a conspiracy/hate/defamation blog for conservatives and reactionaries.
I thought I would have a look at the RMIT Blockchain Innovation Hub and how it's selling itself. I had quite the LOL at this part of it:
That's pretty embarrassing....
There's a pretty compelling article at NPR that explains how an often overlooked aspect of the death penalty is the psychological toll it often takes on those who have to implement, or be involved, in it.
There are quite a few people interviewed who explain how it caused them serious, ongoing, post traumatic stress. I can understand that - reading the article is enough to make me feel bad!
(For those outside of the age range to know - Cosmo G Spacely, CEO of Spacely's Space Sprockets and boss of George Jetson. Catchphrase: "Jetson! You're Fired!")
I mean, honestly, Elon's going to be catching that rocket to Mars alone:
Elon Musk has told staff they must commit to a new “hardcore” Twitter or he will fire them, according to reports.
Staff received an email at midnight local pacific time telling them that the company will become “extremely hardcore” in the future.
“This will mean working long hours at high intensity,” he said, according to a number of reports. “Only exceptional performance will constitute a passing grade.”
Staff were forced to click “yes” on a link to pledge themselves to the “new Twitter”, with a commitment required by Thursday. If they do not sign that pledge, they will be fired with three months pay, the email reportedly threatened.
I recently posted about some pilot sightings of so called "racetrack" UFO lights - lights which were distant, high, and seemed to circle around each other.
However, that Mick West, who debunked some of the famous military recorded videos, has identified these sightings are almost certainly satellite flares from Starlink. I think the idea is also that the "racetrack" aspect (of them seeming to move around each other) is a misidentification of separate satellites moving in different paths - so that one fades, and then a new one turns up in the other direction, but it's not the same satellite changing paths (in the way that satellites don't move).
I think this is a pretty plausible explanation - the problem being that Starlink is really filling the sky with so many satellites it is easier than ever to see them crossing paths, flaring, etc.
However, if there was a pilot sighting (and video) which definitely did show one apparent satellite doing a substantial change of course (without fading first), that would be different. I am not sure that we have that currently, though.
I should also add that one reason I found these reports interesting was because they sparked a memory of a subtle UFO report that I probably read about in one of J Allan Hynek's books, and dates back to perhaps the 1960's or 1970's. It involved, (as far as I can recall) a star gazer seeing two high altitude lights which he assume were two satellites, but which then abruptly changed path and started silently circling each other - really ruling out the satellite explanation. I think they were watched for some time, too. Of course, high altitude aircraft might do something similar, but they really did just look like satellites until their path changed, making it a pretty peculiar sighting. (I mean, aircraft lights also usually are going to be flashing, and not be constant like a satellite.)
Anyway, here's the Mick West video:
I did see some bits of the speech - all the greatest "hits" delivered in rambling fashion: the nation under his reign was like heaven on Earth; it's now a crumbling, wretched wreck again that only he can fix.
Couple of new things I noticed: death penalty for drug dealers (expressing approval of execution immediately after trial - pretty much the same day - like he reckons Xi told him is the system in China.) Also a bit of the trans gender stuff (no men in women's sports), which wasn't such a thing back in his first campaign.
Anyway, he'll be charged before too long, I reckon. I wonder if that will be the opportunity for Hannity and Carlson to withdraw support?
Update: George Will putting out the strong anti-Trump case in the Washington Post points out a few things worth remembering:
Among the Republican nominating electorate, Trump has a floor of forever Trumpers, but the floor is sagging. If his bitter-enders were the questioning sort, they would ask: What states that he previously carried might he lose in 2024, and what states that he previously lost might he conceivably carry in 2024?
His 2016 victory was sealed by wafer-thin margins (a combined 77,744 votes out of 13,940,912 cast) in Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. All three just elected Democratic governors, two (Gretchen Whitmer in Michigan and Josh Shapiro in Pennsylvania) by landslides over notably supine Trump grovelers who were out of their depths and perhaps their minds. Trump’s marathon post-2020 tantrum was ignited when he was declared the loser in Arizona, which has just elected a Democratic senator and perhaps governor. Georgia, which Trump won by 211,141 votes out of 4,114,732 cast in 2016, and which he lost by 11,779 votes out of 4,999,960 cast in 2020, just emphatically reelected Gov. Brian Kemp (R) and Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger (R), both of whom Trump reviles because they acknowledged the arithmetic of his 2020 Georgia loss....
What handhold can Trump, the entertainer turned bore, now grasp to stop his current slide? He has always been a Potemkin tycoon, parasitic off the superstition that great wealth is somehow symptomatic of other greatness. Hence his tenacious secretiveness regarding his tax returns, which might reveal the fictitiousness of his financial wizardry. New York prosecutors could soon lift the veil....
The midterm elections indicate that a growing number of voters seem inclined to make cool-eyed calculations as unenthralled adults: Do not seek the best imaginable political outcome; seek instead to avoid the worst.
The problem is, though, the Trump base is in a cult and immune to such reasoning. How the party and its "establishment" is going to deal with that is the puzzle. (Even though I suspect they will hope that his legal problems will help solve it, we know that Trump will just paint those as the Deep State against him, and fund raise off it.)
The Washington Post has an interactive graphic article that lets you put in your age and then learn some specific facts. I was a bit surprised by much of it. Here are a bunch of screenshots:
I was expecting more people of my age....
The Washington Post has a piece by Jim Geraghty (from National Review) entitled DeSantis would pave the way for a post-Trump GOP return to normal, and it does offer some explanation as to why he did so well in Florida.
I don't want to come across as a DeSantis apologist, but the article makes its case pretty well, I think. For example, as I said in an earlier post the "Don't Say Gay" stuff was Right wing populist, but it was more a case of legislative virtue signalling than making dramatic changes:
Next to his pandemic policies, DeSantis might be best known for Florida’s Parental Rights in Education Act — better known by the name its critics gave it, the “don’t say gay” law. Liberals howled that the measure was pure discrimination, targeting teachers and students who wanted to discuss sexual matters openly. But many Florida parents saw it as a common-sense restriction keeping explicit materials out of elementary school classrooms.
(That said, the move then to punish Disney for complaining about it shows a dangerous side - what's he willing to do to Google and Meta in future, I wonder.)
But as Geraghty argues, DeSantis is not really as "Trumpy" in policy as it might initially seem:
If DeSantis the nominee became president, Democrats and Republicans would no doubt disagree just as strongly as before. But there would be one big difference: They’d spend more time arguing about policy and what the federal government ought to do, and less about whatever crazy thing Trump said or did that day.
Independents and centrists might find themselves disappointed or irked with a President DeSantis. But they’d be irked within normal parameters, not fearing that he’d burn the country down in a fit of rage because he thinks someone wasn’t being fair to him.
As is all too well known, Trump on social media is a taunter, a belittler, a braggart. Compare that with DeSantis’s Twitter feed, which might or might not be administered by the governor: It is an anodyne scroll of alerts about the weather, news about Florida government initiatives and occasional retweets of messages from his wife, Casey, on such controversial matters as having “a happy and safe Halloween.”
And this next part is pretty important:
It’s worth noting that DeSantis, unlike many elected Republicans, has never claimed the 2020 presidential election was rigged or stolen, and he rejected calls for a statewide audit of Florida’s 2020 vote. It would have been preferable if DeSantis hadn’t campaigned in the midterms for bona fide election deniers such as Doug Mastriano in Pennsylvania and Kari Lake in Arizona, but that might be too much to expect of any Republican with aspirations for higher office. By the low standards of today’s GOP, though, a Republican who ignored Trump’s 2020 bellyaching is a step in the right direction.
Now we get to the "doesn't always govern like a Republican" part:
If you let the smoke clear from the high-profile fights over pandemic policies and parental rights in education, DeSantis emerges as a committed conservative, yes, but also one with some ideological wrinkles that those on the left might find surprising.
As governor, DeSantis increased spending on environmental projects by $1.5 billion compared with the previous four years.
He and the state legislature approved $800 million to increase salaries and raises for teachers across Florida, boosting the average starting salary to at least $47,000 a year, ninth-highest in the nation.
DeSantis also launched a $100 million program for home purchases by educators, health-care professionals, child-care workers, law enforcement officers, firefighters and veterans or active members of the military.
Yes, on abortion rights, DeSantis is much more conservative than liberals would prefer, but not so drastic as leaders in many other red states. In April, he signed a law making abortion legal until the 15th week of pregnancy, or later to protect the mother from injury or death. DeSantis seems content for his state’s laws to align with those of many European countries — banning elective abortions after 15 weeks, with certain exceptions for a woman’s health.
Every now and then, DeSantis takes the not-so-conservative path when it’s popular with his constituents. This doesn’t mean liberals will embrace him; it’s just an observation that a DeSantis presidency wouldn’t mean enduring four years of an inflexible, hardcore conservative. There would be occasional areas of agreement.
On the matter of climate change and the environment, this article in The Guardian suggests that he is a very mixed bag, who seem willing to play up to climate change denial when it suits (although one would think the reality of his State going literally underwater more frequently must make that hard to sustain. I wonder if the reality is that the advanced average age of Floridians means that their attitude is usually "well, yes, seems it might be a problem, but I won't be around to see how bad it gets.")
An article in Time explains it this way:
DeSantis has piloted a new Republican approach to climate change by spending money on climate adaption but not on mitigation. In other words, he has sought to pay for his state to adapt to a changing climate but not to address its greenhouse gas emissions, the root causes of climate change. DeSantis’ Resilient Florida Program is politically savvy, passing nearly unanimously in a bipartisan vote in 2021 and receiving enthusiastic plaudits from local officials. And, experts say, it’s also good policy that will help allocate money to the places that need it the most. But it does nothing to cut carbon pollution, and DeSantis has dismissed such efforts as “left-wing stuff.” And there’s another issue: adaption alone isn’t enough. Florida is at risk of hundreds of billions of dollars in climate damage in the coming decades; the program allocates hundreds of millions. Even with state adaptation funds, climate change presents a dire, potentially cataclysmic problem for the state.
There are lessons in Florida’s shifting climate politics. DeSantis’ embrace of climate adaptation is an indicator that climate change will lead even the most hardened ideologues to acknowledge the real harm caused by a warming planet. But his approach should also alarm anyone concerned about the future. We will all be in trouble if merely bracing for impact becomes a mainstream approach to address climate change in the U.S.
Yeah, he's not good; but (how to put this) not completely outside the bounds of reason, which seems all that you can hope for on the Right at the moment.
As the Guardian notes:
The Democratic candidate for governor in Arizona, Katie Hobbs, has defeated her far-right, Trump-endorsed opponent, staving off a major threat to voting rights in the state.
Hobbs, who is Arizona’s outgoing secretary of state, defeated Kari Lake, a former TV anchor who denies the 2020 election results. Lake has refused to say if she would accept defeat this time around but tweeted “Arizonans know BS when they see it” after Monday’s result emerged. The Associated Press projected Hobbs as the winner on Monday evening with more than 95% of votes reported.
I haven't read all that much about her before, but I see this article in The Atlantic sets out the reasons to believe she is a giant, opportuntistic, political fake:
I talked with half a dozen of Lake’s former Fox 10 co-workers for this story, and all but one requested anonymity—partly because current employees are not authorized to talk to reporters about Lake, and partly because they fear retaliation from the candidate and her supporters. She was demanding, they told me, and always wanted her lighting just so. She would sometimes belittle the production staff. But she was good at her job, fluent and warm on camera. Viewers liked her.
Back then, most of her friends at work assumed that she was politically liberal. She was a casual Buddhist, they said, and she’d donated to John Kerry and Barack Obama. She’d once called for amnesty for the roughly 11 million immigrants living in America illegally. (Lake was reportedly a Republican before she registered as an independent in 2006, and as a Democrat in 2008. She reregistered as a Republican in 2012.) Plus, Lake was fun. She liked to host dinner parties, and entertained guests with her bawdy sense of humor. She was good friends with some of the gay men in the newsroom—she’d vacationed with a few on occasion. And she sometimes attended drag shows at a local bar with other newsroom staff, former colleagues and friends told me. She even became friends with the well-known Phoenix drag queen, Barbra Seville. Lake “was the queen of the gays!” a former colleague told me.
Nowadays, Lake wears a small gold cross on a chain around her neck. She prays before rallies and has warned of the dangers of “drag-queen story hour.” “They kicked God out of schools and welcomed the Drag Queens,” she tweeted in June. “They took down our Flag and replaced it with a rainbow.” This is puzzling and hurtful to Lake’s former friends. Lake was not always the “anti-choice, anti-science, election-denying caricature that she’s become,” Richard Stevens, who performs as Seville, told me. A former colleague sighed when I asked him about Lake’s evolution, “It’s like the death of a friend.” (Lake’s campaign did not respond to requests for comment for this story. Previously, her campaign has acknowledged that Stevens was “once a friend” and that she attended an event with a “Marilyn Monroe impersonator,” but has accused Stevens of spreading “defamatory lies.”)
Before her campaign, Lake had praise for the late Senator John McCain, and she was friends with his son Jimmy for years. But during her bid, Lake has repeatedly attacked the late Arizona politician. “It’s extremely upsetting on a personal level,” Meghan McCain, the senator’s daughter, told me. “I don’t know if it’s authentic,” she added, referring to Lake’s campaign persona, but “she is a savant at imitating Trump.”....
People change. But some people who knew Lake view her evolution—and her unflinching support for Trump—as mostly an act. Lake has always been good at image management, Diana Pike, the former HR director at Fox 10, told me. “She’s a performer.” Lake “read the room, took the temperature, and realized there’s an anti-media sentiment for a lot of people,” Stevens said. “Rather than using her platform to fix it, she chose to throw fuel on that fire.”
Update: lulz -
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