These are the saddest of all possible flicks,
Fire up 'Bambi' and 'Champ'.
Duo of movies as sad as the Styx,
Fire up 'Bambi' and 'Champ'.
Ruthlessly jerking the tears from our eyes,
Turning a giddy mood into a cry,
Watch them only to see happiness die.
Fire up 'Bambi' and 'Champ'.
Wednesday, July 27, 2011
Tuesday, July 26, 2011
Live, Cause You're Living Today
Barring a deal- and honestly, I'm increasingly doubtful that one will be reached (though I've made wrong predictions here before)- on August 2nd, the United States will default on its debt.
We've already covered here a rough overview of what would happen in a default. Pain. Lots of pain.
And also, reality shows.
In our last talk about debt default, it was noted that when Argentina defaulted in 2002, as part of the fallout, their local television stations moved heavily towards reality shows. They are the cheapest to air, and anything else was simply too expensive to keep the network afloat. So if and when we default, if you don't like reality shows, bad news: it's gonna get a whole lot worse before it gets better.
And with reality shows come people you really don't want to get to know very well. You may have wondered at some point what would happen if a reality show simply filled the cast with generally decent people who enjoyed each others' company. What would happen if there were a reality show without jerks. Without contrived conflict.
It has already happened. And it was a laughingstock.
Flash back to July 2000. The first season of Survivor had just wrapped up a few months ago. It was not merely a smash hit, it was an American cultural event. How much of one? Ask around, and odds are eventually you will find someone who can, 11 years later, still give you the first and last names of all 16 original Survivors. Not only that, they could quite possibly name them in the order they were voted off. Some of them, such as Richard or Susan, can still be found kicking around the news wires every so often. Others, such as Colleen and Greg, have essentially dropped off the face of the earth with no intention of being found again. It took the Survivor Sucks board's "where are they now" thread, named for fan favorite Colleen, until this past June to get a lead on Colleen's current whereabouts after a four-year search- apparently, she's a producer for an intentionally-unnamed company in New York and, while as good-natured as she was on the show, really wouldn't mind if people stopped bringing up her Survivor tenure to her because it was a whole entire decade ago and she's done other things in her life too, you know. The search for Greg has been entirely fruitless.
I, incidentally, happen to be one of those people that can still name all 16. Play along if you wish; the answer is at the end of the article. Needless to say, you've already been given four first names.
Now try the same thing with any other elimination reality show, including future seasons of Survivor. Including shows that are airing right now. I'd bet cash money that you can't do it. That's how big Survivor 1 was.
A few months after that, Survivor's network, CBS, launched the second reality show of the modern era (which basically means everything but Real World and An American Family). This second show had already proven itself in Europe as a drama-filled screamfest.
This show was Big Brother.
The format for the fateful first season was quite different from the form Big Brother currently takes. In Big Brother's 2000 incarnation, ten people were placed into the house. There was no immunity, merely nominations. Each week, each contestant would nominate two of their fellow contestants for elimination. The two with the most votes would be put to a vote amongst the audience, who would decide which one left.
This sounds reasonable enough. It worked just fine in Europe, and would continue to work fine, with various tweaks, as each of the international editions ran through their respective lifespans (or continue to do so). Even so, America's Big Brother, in its current format, is a unique incarnation. It remains the only version of Big Brother, out of 45 franchises worldwide (one of which happened in the online game Second Life), to have the contestants vote each other out directly.
America's Big Brother 1 is why.
Big Brother 1 opened to high hopes. Much was made on premiere night about all the cameras in the Big Brother house, the total lack of privacy, how the toilet was the only place where footage would not be broadcast-- unless, of course, things started happening in there.
Here's that happening:
Who's that guy? I have no idea. I forget. But look at he and main-and-soon-only host Julie Chen go on and on about this house and what a huge event living in the house is going to be. Look at the sheer production made out of this. Look at the crowd gathered to see them go into the house. This went on for the rest of the premiere. Clearly, everyone involved expected another huge hit. Clips from foreign versions were played as well, just to make everyone aware of exactly what to expect.
Had they cast properly, odds are they would have been just fine. A game that takes the ultimate power of elimination out of the hands of the players requires a cast that is naturally antagonistic, that needs little to no prodding to set upon itself, so as to create more interesting television. An audience, or at least an American audience, is not overly inclined to provide a large cash reward to someone they find abhorrent. Should a contestant figure this out and become more likable than the others, all the nominations in the world will not eliminate them, as the audience will vote to save them every time. Their victory is assured. Therefore, a good cast must be full of people to whom such a thing would never occur while in each other's company.
Big Brother 1 had two contestants that fit this role: Will "Mega" Collins of Philadelphia, who upon his elimination would be revealed as a Black Panther, and Jean Jordan, a stripper and exotic dancer from Roanoke, Virginia who went by her last name.
The problem, of course, was that there were ten contestants, not two, and none of the other eight would prove to have much of a problem with each other. They did, however, have problems with William and Jordan; William quickly made enemies by accusing fellow contestant Brittany Petros of racism. So when it came time to nominate two people for the vote, William got 6 nominations out of a possible 9, and Jordan, who hadn't exactly been friendly either, got 5. Nobody else got more than 3.
Uh oh.
William was promptly booted. Jordan was the subject of a campaign by David Letterman, also of CBS, called "Save The Stripper", in both rounds 1 and 2.
It didn't work. Jordan was the second person cut loose, with New York lawyer Curtis Kin kept in favor in the Round 2 vote. Gone were the linchpins of drama in the Big Brother house. And with those linchpins gone, the other eight came to enjoy each other. And with little to do in the house but hang around, talk, and participate in the occasional reward challenge- some of which were done over the course of an entire week- all drama vanished in a flash. The house had eight nice, decent people, and nobody there to wreak havoc as they sat around and generally enjoyed each other's company for the remainder of the summer. Voting held little interest for them, because all eight knew that in the end, the audience would decide which of them would win. So they all just hung around and let the audience do just that.
Jim dandy if you're one of those eight. Absolute catastrophe if you're a producer looking to get ratings out of it.
Third to go was Karen Fowler of Columbus, Indiana. Why did she leave? She asked the audience to vote her out so that she could see her kids.
The fourth elimination saw the votes fall in such a way that five of the seven contestants were tied for second. Had one vote fallen differently, all seven would have been tied with two votes each. This is how much they acknowledged their ultimate control over their fate. When the audience voted out Brittany, the surviving contestants all ran to the walls of the house and screamed "WE LOVE YOU, BRIT!" as she departed.
Double uh oh.
In Round 5, the contestants openly talked about mutually splitting the money for the top three places- the only three that earned money- evenly amongst themselves. Ratings were plunging. "Chicken" George Boswell of Rockford, Illinois, who got the nickname from caring for the chickens the house was given, debated whether to lead the house in a mass walkout, which would basically bring the season to a screeching halt.
This could be exploited. In fact, the producers had little choice.
First, CBS played up the walkout in an attempt to boost ratings. Second, they grabbed an alternate from the casting process, Beth. She described herself as "opinionated" and a "bitch". She was a bald-faced attempt to inject drama back into the house. The only problem was, in order to get her into the house, someone in the house would have to leave voluntarily. The producers weren't particularly worried. After all, George was leading a rebellion! They were going to offer $20,000 to the first person to volunteer, but, as they stated, only the first person. So speak up quick! Beth, for her part, was informed that upon entering the house, if she won, she would only be eligible for $140,000, an amount based proportionally on the amount of time she would be in the house.
There were just two little snags in this plan:
1: By the time of the live elimination show, the walkout had been cancelled. "The Chicken Man's staying." And so was everyone else.
2: When actually offered the money, none of the contestants wanted it. The offer was upped to $50,000- "third-place money", as Chen made sure to note to the contestants. And remember, one of you is leaving tonight in sixth and getting nothing! You might as well take it! Come on! Anyone!
Anyone?
Please?
Pretty please with sugar on top we're on our knees begging here?
No takers. Beth would never enter the house. The elimination proceeded as normal, knocking out Cassandra Waldon of New York City, and the season proceeded to play out its boring, boring life. By the time it got down to four, said four were given the task of playing the show's official board game. It was a long way south of the sex, profanity and titillation promised on premiere night. When those four went to nominate for eviction, it was, in fact, a four-way tie.
Eventually, the game was won by Eddie McGee of Commack, New York, who received 59% of the final, three-way vote. Eddie was a one-legged cancer survivor. Audiences, at least what is left of them, feel warm and fuzzy giving money to one-legged cancer survivors when given the option to do so.
At the finale, Will Mega proclaimed that, without him, the show was "Big Boring". He found little disagreement, and while the producers were duty-bound to put a happy face on the numbers in public, behind the scenes they bowed to reality.
The season was swiftly disavowed. The game format was torn down and rebuilt from the ground up to become "a summer-long power struggle", with twist after twist dominating the proceedings ever since. Contestants would now not only nominate each other, but vote each other out directly, veto and/or replace each other's nominations, compete against and alongside exes and blood relations and previously unknown blood relations and former contestants, and institute Survivor's jury system, in which previously-voted-out contestants vote for the winner. Only two people would ever be nominated at a time from then on. For several years afterward, not only was Big Brother 1 not mentioned by the show, but future contestants were asked not to bring it up either. The house was changed. The logo was changed. The theme music was changed. The live audience would not return until season 10.
The only true nod to Big Brother 1 came in season 7, an all-star game, in which all previous seasons contributed at least two players to the cast... except Big Brother 1, which contributed one out of a sense of obligation more than anything else. The producers sent in Chicken George. Placed in a game alien to him and thrown to the wolves against some of the most skillfully manipulative people ever to play a game that now attracted them like flies, he came in 5th in a field of 14, surviving three consecutive nominations before losing to eventual winner Mike "Boogie" Malin of Concord, New Hampshire.
This time, people were actually interested in seeing how he did.
Three postscripts to this story:
1: Will Mega ran for Philadelphia City Council in 2003 as a member of the Education Party, describing himself as a "hip-hop political activist candidate". Shockingly, this didn't work.
2: In season 12, the American producers made another attempt at adding a Beth-style mechanic to the game. This time, they added a 'Saboteur' to the initial cast, Annie Whittington of Tampa, Florida. She was not eligible to win, but if she could wreak five weeks of havoc in the house without being voted out, she would win $50,000.
She was voted out in round 1. In fact, she was voted out unanimously. This was the big twist of the season. Panicking again, in round 5, another player, Ragan Fox of West Hollywood, California, was offered the Saboteur role for two weeks and $20,000. He warily accepted and avoided eviction, though only because he had won the right to veto his own nomination in the second week.
3. In case you're wondering about the article title, at one point the Big Brother 1 contestants were subjected to their own season's theme song. It had lyrics.
-----------------------
As for the identities of the original 16 Survivors, in the order of their ouster, here's the answer: Sonja Christopher, B.B. Andersen, Stacey Stillman, Ramona Gray, Dirk Been, Joel Klug, Gretchen Cordy, Greg Buis, Jenna Lewis, Gervase Peterson, Colleen Haskell, Sean Kenniff, Susan Hawk, Rudy Boesch, Kelly Wiglesworth, Richard Hatch.
We've already covered here a rough overview of what would happen in a default. Pain. Lots of pain.
And also, reality shows.
In our last talk about debt default, it was noted that when Argentina defaulted in 2002, as part of the fallout, their local television stations moved heavily towards reality shows. They are the cheapest to air, and anything else was simply too expensive to keep the network afloat. So if and when we default, if you don't like reality shows, bad news: it's gonna get a whole lot worse before it gets better.
And with reality shows come people you really don't want to get to know very well. You may have wondered at some point what would happen if a reality show simply filled the cast with generally decent people who enjoyed each others' company. What would happen if there were a reality show without jerks. Without contrived conflict.
It has already happened. And it was a laughingstock.
Flash back to July 2000. The first season of Survivor had just wrapped up a few months ago. It was not merely a smash hit, it was an American cultural event. How much of one? Ask around, and odds are eventually you will find someone who can, 11 years later, still give you the first and last names of all 16 original Survivors. Not only that, they could quite possibly name them in the order they were voted off. Some of them, such as Richard or Susan, can still be found kicking around the news wires every so often. Others, such as Colleen and Greg, have essentially dropped off the face of the earth with no intention of being found again. It took the Survivor Sucks board's "where are they now" thread, named for fan favorite Colleen, until this past June to get a lead on Colleen's current whereabouts after a four-year search- apparently, she's a producer for an intentionally-unnamed company in New York and, while as good-natured as she was on the show, really wouldn't mind if people stopped bringing up her Survivor tenure to her because it was a whole entire decade ago and she's done other things in her life too, you know. The search for Greg has been entirely fruitless.
I, incidentally, happen to be one of those people that can still name all 16. Play along if you wish; the answer is at the end of the article. Needless to say, you've already been given four first names.
Now try the same thing with any other elimination reality show, including future seasons of Survivor. Including shows that are airing right now. I'd bet cash money that you can't do it. That's how big Survivor 1 was.
A few months after that, Survivor's network, CBS, launched the second reality show of the modern era (which basically means everything but Real World and An American Family). This second show had already proven itself in Europe as a drama-filled screamfest.
This show was Big Brother.
The format for the fateful first season was quite different from the form Big Brother currently takes. In Big Brother's 2000 incarnation, ten people were placed into the house. There was no immunity, merely nominations. Each week, each contestant would nominate two of their fellow contestants for elimination. The two with the most votes would be put to a vote amongst the audience, who would decide which one left.
This sounds reasonable enough. It worked just fine in Europe, and would continue to work fine, with various tweaks, as each of the international editions ran through their respective lifespans (or continue to do so). Even so, America's Big Brother, in its current format, is a unique incarnation. It remains the only version of Big Brother, out of 45 franchises worldwide (one of which happened in the online game Second Life), to have the contestants vote each other out directly.
America's Big Brother 1 is why.
Big Brother 1 opened to high hopes. Much was made on premiere night about all the cameras in the Big Brother house, the total lack of privacy, how the toilet was the only place where footage would not be broadcast-- unless, of course, things started happening in there.
Here's that happening:
Who's that guy? I have no idea. I forget. But look at he and main-and-soon-only host Julie Chen go on and on about this house and what a huge event living in the house is going to be. Look at the sheer production made out of this. Look at the crowd gathered to see them go into the house. This went on for the rest of the premiere. Clearly, everyone involved expected another huge hit. Clips from foreign versions were played as well, just to make everyone aware of exactly what to expect.
Had they cast properly, odds are they would have been just fine. A game that takes the ultimate power of elimination out of the hands of the players requires a cast that is naturally antagonistic, that needs little to no prodding to set upon itself, so as to create more interesting television. An audience, or at least an American audience, is not overly inclined to provide a large cash reward to someone they find abhorrent. Should a contestant figure this out and become more likable than the others, all the nominations in the world will not eliminate them, as the audience will vote to save them every time. Their victory is assured. Therefore, a good cast must be full of people to whom such a thing would never occur while in each other's company.
Big Brother 1 had two contestants that fit this role: Will "Mega" Collins of Philadelphia, who upon his elimination would be revealed as a Black Panther, and Jean Jordan, a stripper and exotic dancer from Roanoke, Virginia who went by her last name.
The problem, of course, was that there were ten contestants, not two, and none of the other eight would prove to have much of a problem with each other. They did, however, have problems with William and Jordan; William quickly made enemies by accusing fellow contestant Brittany Petros of racism. So when it came time to nominate two people for the vote, William got 6 nominations out of a possible 9, and Jordan, who hadn't exactly been friendly either, got 5. Nobody else got more than 3.
Uh oh.
William was promptly booted. Jordan was the subject of a campaign by David Letterman, also of CBS, called "Save The Stripper", in both rounds 1 and 2.
It didn't work. Jordan was the second person cut loose, with New York lawyer Curtis Kin kept in favor in the Round 2 vote. Gone were the linchpins of drama in the Big Brother house. And with those linchpins gone, the other eight came to enjoy each other. And with little to do in the house but hang around, talk, and participate in the occasional reward challenge- some of which were done over the course of an entire week- all drama vanished in a flash. The house had eight nice, decent people, and nobody there to wreak havoc as they sat around and generally enjoyed each other's company for the remainder of the summer. Voting held little interest for them, because all eight knew that in the end, the audience would decide which of them would win. So they all just hung around and let the audience do just that.
Jim dandy if you're one of those eight. Absolute catastrophe if you're a producer looking to get ratings out of it.
Third to go was Karen Fowler of Columbus, Indiana. Why did she leave? She asked the audience to vote her out so that she could see her kids.
The fourth elimination saw the votes fall in such a way that five of the seven contestants were tied for second. Had one vote fallen differently, all seven would have been tied with two votes each. This is how much they acknowledged their ultimate control over their fate. When the audience voted out Brittany, the surviving contestants all ran to the walls of the house and screamed "WE LOVE YOU, BRIT!" as she departed.
Double uh oh.
In Round 5, the contestants openly talked about mutually splitting the money for the top three places- the only three that earned money- evenly amongst themselves. Ratings were plunging. "Chicken" George Boswell of Rockford, Illinois, who got the nickname from caring for the chickens the house was given, debated whether to lead the house in a mass walkout, which would basically bring the season to a screeching halt.
This could be exploited. In fact, the producers had little choice.
First, CBS played up the walkout in an attempt to boost ratings. Second, they grabbed an alternate from the casting process, Beth. She described herself as "opinionated" and a "bitch". She was a bald-faced attempt to inject drama back into the house. The only problem was, in order to get her into the house, someone in the house would have to leave voluntarily. The producers weren't particularly worried. After all, George was leading a rebellion! They were going to offer $20,000 to the first person to volunteer, but, as they stated, only the first person. So speak up quick! Beth, for her part, was informed that upon entering the house, if she won, she would only be eligible for $140,000, an amount based proportionally on the amount of time she would be in the house.
There were just two little snags in this plan:
1: By the time of the live elimination show, the walkout had been cancelled. "The Chicken Man's staying." And so was everyone else.
2: When actually offered the money, none of the contestants wanted it. The offer was upped to $50,000- "third-place money", as Chen made sure to note to the contestants. And remember, one of you is leaving tonight in sixth and getting nothing! You might as well take it! Come on! Anyone!
Anyone?
Please?
Pretty please with sugar on top we're on our knees begging here?
No takers. Beth would never enter the house. The elimination proceeded as normal, knocking out Cassandra Waldon of New York City, and the season proceeded to play out its boring, boring life. By the time it got down to four, said four were given the task of playing the show's official board game. It was a long way south of the sex, profanity and titillation promised on premiere night. When those four went to nominate for eviction, it was, in fact, a four-way tie.
Eventually, the game was won by Eddie McGee of Commack, New York, who received 59% of the final, three-way vote. Eddie was a one-legged cancer survivor. Audiences, at least what is left of them, feel warm and fuzzy giving money to one-legged cancer survivors when given the option to do so.
At the finale, Will Mega proclaimed that, without him, the show was "Big Boring". He found little disagreement, and while the producers were duty-bound to put a happy face on the numbers in public, behind the scenes they bowed to reality.
The season was swiftly disavowed. The game format was torn down and rebuilt from the ground up to become "a summer-long power struggle", with twist after twist dominating the proceedings ever since. Contestants would now not only nominate each other, but vote each other out directly, veto and/or replace each other's nominations, compete against and alongside exes and blood relations and previously unknown blood relations and former contestants, and institute Survivor's jury system, in which previously-voted-out contestants vote for the winner. Only two people would ever be nominated at a time from then on. For several years afterward, not only was Big Brother 1 not mentioned by the show, but future contestants were asked not to bring it up either. The house was changed. The logo was changed. The theme music was changed. The live audience would not return until season 10.
The only true nod to Big Brother 1 came in season 7, an all-star game, in which all previous seasons contributed at least two players to the cast... except Big Brother 1, which contributed one out of a sense of obligation more than anything else. The producers sent in Chicken George. Placed in a game alien to him and thrown to the wolves against some of the most skillfully manipulative people ever to play a game that now attracted them like flies, he came in 5th in a field of 14, surviving three consecutive nominations before losing to eventual winner Mike "Boogie" Malin of Concord, New Hampshire.
This time, people were actually interested in seeing how he did.
Three postscripts to this story:
1: Will Mega ran for Philadelphia City Council in 2003 as a member of the Education Party, describing himself as a "hip-hop political activist candidate". Shockingly, this didn't work.
2: In season 12, the American producers made another attempt at adding a Beth-style mechanic to the game. This time, they added a 'Saboteur' to the initial cast, Annie Whittington of Tampa, Florida. She was not eligible to win, but if she could wreak five weeks of havoc in the house without being voted out, she would win $50,000.
She was voted out in round 1. In fact, she was voted out unanimously. This was the big twist of the season. Panicking again, in round 5, another player, Ragan Fox of West Hollywood, California, was offered the Saboteur role for two weeks and $20,000. He warily accepted and avoided eviction, though only because he had won the right to veto his own nomination in the second week.
3. In case you're wondering about the article title, at one point the Big Brother 1 contestants were subjected to their own season's theme song. It had lyrics.
-----------------------
As for the identities of the original 16 Survivors, in the order of their ouster, here's the answer: Sonja Christopher, B.B. Andersen, Stacey Stillman, Ramona Gray, Dirk Been, Joel Klug, Gretchen Cordy, Greg Buis, Jenna Lewis, Gervase Peterson, Colleen Haskell, Sean Kenniff, Susan Hawk, Rudy Boesch, Kelly Wiglesworth, Richard Hatch.
Sunday, July 24, 2011
Grief Bacon
Back in May, I brought up a quirk of the English language: its ability to basically kidnap foreign words and press-gang them into service as English words. Words are brazenly stolen from other languages and made into English all the time. If we have no word to describe something or someone, but some other language does, well, congratulations, foreign word. You're English now.
Today, per the suggestive influence of Mental Floss, we're compiling lists of words with no English equivalent. We'll start with their list. Then we'll add this one, this one, this one, this one, this one, and oh my word this one.
Some highlights from the lists:
Pana Po’o (Hawaiian)
To scratch your head to remember something you forgot.
Iktsuarpok (Inuit)
To go outside to see if anyone is coming.
Ilunga (Tshiluba, Southwest Congo)
Someone who will forgive an abuse the first time, tolerate it the second time, but never a third time.
Ya’aburnee (Arabic)
Translates as 'you bury me', this is telling someone you hope you'll die before them because of how hard it would be to go on living without them.
Tingo (Pascuense, Easter Island)
The act of removing everything you want from someone's house by slowly borrowing all of it.
Nylentik (Indonesian)
To flick someone with the middle finger on the ear.
Biritululo (Kiriwani, Papua New Guinea)
To settle a dispute by comparing the sizes of one's yams.
Kummerspeck (German)
Excess weight gained from overeating due to emotional problems. Translates as 'grief bacon'.
Koro (Japanese)
A man's fanatical fear that his penis is receding into his body and here is a link that'll tell you all about it if you don't believe me.
Taarradhin (Arabic)
To solve a problem in such a way that nobody loses face. Not the same as a compromise.
Guanxi (Mandarin Chinese)
A kind of informal social currency. Do things for others, you gain guanxi. Ask for things to be done for you, you spend guanxi.
Igunaujannguaq (Inuit)
A game that translates as 'frozen walrus carcass' in which a person is passed around overhead and tries to remain stiff throughout.
Today, per the suggestive influence of Mental Floss, we're compiling lists of words with no English equivalent. We'll start with their list. Then we'll add this one, this one, this one, this one, this one, and oh my word this one.
Some highlights from the lists:
Pana Po’o (Hawaiian)
To scratch your head to remember something you forgot.
Iktsuarpok (Inuit)
To go outside to see if anyone is coming.
Ilunga (Tshiluba, Southwest Congo)
Someone who will forgive an abuse the first time, tolerate it the second time, but never a third time.
Ya’aburnee (Arabic)
Translates as 'you bury me', this is telling someone you hope you'll die before them because of how hard it would be to go on living without them.
Tingo (Pascuense, Easter Island)
The act of removing everything you want from someone's house by slowly borrowing all of it.
Nylentik (Indonesian)
To flick someone with the middle finger on the ear.
Biritululo (Kiriwani, Papua New Guinea)
To settle a dispute by comparing the sizes of one's yams.
Kummerspeck (German)
Excess weight gained from overeating due to emotional problems. Translates as 'grief bacon'.
Koro (Japanese)
A man's fanatical fear that his penis is receding into his body and here is a link that'll tell you all about it if you don't believe me.
Taarradhin (Arabic)
To solve a problem in such a way that nobody loses face. Not the same as a compromise.
Guanxi (Mandarin Chinese)
A kind of informal social currency. Do things for others, you gain guanxi. Ask for things to be done for you, you spend guanxi.
Igunaujannguaq (Inuit)
A game that translates as 'frozen walrus carcass' in which a person is passed around overhead and tries to remain stiff throughout.
Saturday, July 23, 2011
An Open Letter To Norway
Yesterday, as you know, Norway was attacked by twin terrorist attacks, a pair of bombings in Oslo and a shooting on nearby Utoya Island. At least 92 are now confirmed dead.
For most readers here- the Americans, Brits, Spaniards, Danes, anyone from the Middle East, even the Mexicans- you more or less know the drill. It's happened in recent memory, and you have at least a dim view of what happens next.
For Norway, though, this is completely out of the blue. This is the single worst thing to have happened to them since World War 2. Norway is one of those completely innocuous countries, along with Belgium, Canada, Sweden, New Zealand and maybe a few others, an attack on whom is talked about largely as a joke, the action of someone so utterly war-happy that even these places seem a viable target, to be hit somewhere between the invasions of Antarctica and Mars.
Apparently, we are no longer joking.
The Norwegian people, distraught as they are, have shown themselves to be surprisingly level-headed in the face of such events. With an explosion, gunshots, and the sight of a man disguised as a police officer at a youth meeting full of Norway's best and brightest freshly seared into their heads calling people over and shooting them one by one, Oslo conducted a simple evacuation, as if this were a giant fire drill, and the shooter was apprehended, alive at that. He is Anders Behring Breivik, a 32-year-old man described as a right-wing extremist with ties to militant groups. A more complete profile, perhaps a bit too complete actually, can be found here. (The possibility of a second shooter is being explored.)
Now comes the aftermath. Norway, you may not have experienced this before, As an American, though, I have. Domestic, homegrown terrorism. We know that one. Oklahoma City. The Atlanta Olympic bombings. Unsuccessful attempts from shoe bombers and underwear bombers and every nut with a gun and a militia. The most analogous attack to yours is probably a combination of Oklahoma City and the 2008 hotel attacks in Mumbai, India.
So take it from an American... and don't take it from an American. This is, again, the worst thing to happen to you since World War 2, and in the worst thing to happen to us since World War 2-- 9/11-- we messed up the aftermath. We messed it up big-time. Learn from our mistakes.
In the immediate aftermath of 9/11, we Americans told ourselves, if we allow 9/11 to change our lifestyle, the terrorists have won. If that was the benchmark, the terrorists won so handily that we cancelled the rest of the season in shame. Our lives changed. They changed drastically. Our banks changed. Our airports changed. Our schools changed. Most importantly, our attitudes changed. We allowed the fear, the anger, the... well, the terror, to consume us and cloud our judgment. We lashed out at anything remotely, even tangentially connected to anything threatening. We went to war with people who were not even responsible for our plight and questioned the patriotism of anyone who objected, war that to this day we are still waging. Anyone that matched the description of the attackers, no matter how peaceful and kind they actually were, instantly became The Enemy and was treated as such.
9/11 was a decade ago and the man who plotted the attacks is dead by our hands, yet there are those of us who are actually more afraid now than they were on 9/11 itself.
And for our trouble, we have gained such a reputation that the website Wikitravel includes a page for non-American travellers about how to avoid setting foot in the United States for even so much as a refueling stop. Great care is taken on the page to instruct on the convoluted contortions a traveller from the Asian Pacific must take to avoid passing through Hawaii or Alaska.
For you, you don't have the factor of a minority group having perpetrated the attack, as much as most of the media so readily assumed. (That's why yesterday's update here was so brief. When you strip away all the speculation early in such an event, you're not left with much.) The attacker was the same blond white profile as the rest of the country. So that won't be a problem for you. However, the emotional aftermath is universal. That is where you must exercise caution.
Do not give in to fear. Do not pass laws for the sake of catharsis. Before you take future preventative acts, take a step back, take a deep breath, and calm and center yourselves. Only take action with a clear and rational head. Doing otherwise can and will result in legislation that may feel good at the time, but that you will soon come to loathe.
Ambrose Bierce once said, "Speak when you are angry, and you'll make the best speech you'll ever regret." Heed his words. This is especially important for those of you who happened to be on Utoya Island yesterday, those of you attending a meeting for youth members of the ruling Labor Party.
You on Utoya have a future in politics. If and when you run for office, odds are your presence on the island will to some degree consume your campaign. Don't let it consume your policy, and don't let it consume your life.
Don't do what we did.
For most readers here- the Americans, Brits, Spaniards, Danes, anyone from the Middle East, even the Mexicans- you more or less know the drill. It's happened in recent memory, and you have at least a dim view of what happens next.
For Norway, though, this is completely out of the blue. This is the single worst thing to have happened to them since World War 2. Norway is one of those completely innocuous countries, along with Belgium, Canada, Sweden, New Zealand and maybe a few others, an attack on whom is talked about largely as a joke, the action of someone so utterly war-happy that even these places seem a viable target, to be hit somewhere between the invasions of Antarctica and Mars.
Apparently, we are no longer joking.
The Norwegian people, distraught as they are, have shown themselves to be surprisingly level-headed in the face of such events. With an explosion, gunshots, and the sight of a man disguised as a police officer at a youth meeting full of Norway's best and brightest freshly seared into their heads calling people over and shooting them one by one, Oslo conducted a simple evacuation, as if this were a giant fire drill, and the shooter was apprehended, alive at that. He is Anders Behring Breivik, a 32-year-old man described as a right-wing extremist with ties to militant groups. A more complete profile, perhaps a bit too complete actually, can be found here. (The possibility of a second shooter is being explored.)
Now comes the aftermath. Norway, you may not have experienced this before, As an American, though, I have. Domestic, homegrown terrorism. We know that one. Oklahoma City. The Atlanta Olympic bombings. Unsuccessful attempts from shoe bombers and underwear bombers and every nut with a gun and a militia. The most analogous attack to yours is probably a combination of Oklahoma City and the 2008 hotel attacks in Mumbai, India.
So take it from an American... and don't take it from an American. This is, again, the worst thing to happen to you since World War 2, and in the worst thing to happen to us since World War 2-- 9/11-- we messed up the aftermath. We messed it up big-time. Learn from our mistakes.
In the immediate aftermath of 9/11, we Americans told ourselves, if we allow 9/11 to change our lifestyle, the terrorists have won. If that was the benchmark, the terrorists won so handily that we cancelled the rest of the season in shame. Our lives changed. They changed drastically. Our banks changed. Our airports changed. Our schools changed. Most importantly, our attitudes changed. We allowed the fear, the anger, the... well, the terror, to consume us and cloud our judgment. We lashed out at anything remotely, even tangentially connected to anything threatening. We went to war with people who were not even responsible for our plight and questioned the patriotism of anyone who objected, war that to this day we are still waging. Anyone that matched the description of the attackers, no matter how peaceful and kind they actually were, instantly became The Enemy and was treated as such.
9/11 was a decade ago and the man who plotted the attacks is dead by our hands, yet there are those of us who are actually more afraid now than they were on 9/11 itself.
And for our trouble, we have gained such a reputation that the website Wikitravel includes a page for non-American travellers about how to avoid setting foot in the United States for even so much as a refueling stop. Great care is taken on the page to instruct on the convoluted contortions a traveller from the Asian Pacific must take to avoid passing through Hawaii or Alaska.
For you, you don't have the factor of a minority group having perpetrated the attack, as much as most of the media so readily assumed. (That's why yesterday's update here was so brief. When you strip away all the speculation early in such an event, you're not left with much.) The attacker was the same blond white profile as the rest of the country. So that won't be a problem for you. However, the emotional aftermath is universal. That is where you must exercise caution.
Do not give in to fear. Do not pass laws for the sake of catharsis. Before you take future preventative acts, take a step back, take a deep breath, and calm and center yourselves. Only take action with a clear and rational head. Doing otherwise can and will result in legislation that may feel good at the time, but that you will soon come to loathe.
Ambrose Bierce once said, "Speak when you are angry, and you'll make the best speech you'll ever regret." Heed his words. This is especially important for those of you who happened to be on Utoya Island yesterday, those of you attending a meeting for youth members of the ruling Labor Party.
You on Utoya have a future in politics. If and when you run for office, odds are your presence on the island will to some degree consume your campaign. Don't let it consume your policy, and don't let it consume your life.
Don't do what we did.
Friday, July 22, 2011
Oslo Bombing
There has just been a pair of explosions in government buildings in Oslo, Norway; one near the Prime Minister's office and one nearby Parliament. Windows in multiple buildings were blown out. Two people are confirmed dead. Police are calling it a bombing.
At some point after the explosions, shots were fired at a politically-oriented youth meeting on Utoya island, just off the coast of Oslo by a man disguised as a police officer. The meeting was well-attended by the Labor Party, the party currently in power in Norway.
Right now, most other details are still very, very sketchy.
EDIT: The death toll now sits at seven.
At some point after the explosions, shots were fired at a politically-oriented youth meeting on Utoya island, just off the coast of Oslo by a man disguised as a police officer. The meeting was well-attended by the Labor Party, the party currently in power in Norway.
Right now, most other details are still very, very sketchy.
EDIT: The death toll now sits at seven.
Thursday, July 21, 2011
Random News Generator- Guatemala
Well, we should probably start with the lady who had a sinkhole open up under her bed. That happened in Guatemala City. As the linked article states, while sinkholes can happen anywhere, lots of rain and volcanic deposits make Guatemala City particularly susceptible. Eight sinkholes from the past couple years are given with the article; two of them are in Guatemala City.
How do you fix a sinkhole? There are a couple different techniques, which alternately involve dumping a whole bunch of rock into the hole, and shoring up the foundation followed by dumping a whole bunch of rock into the hole.
Alternately, you probably know that some illegal immigration into the United States originates from south of Mexico. We've already covered that here. That, of course, includes Guatemala, one of Mexico's neighbors. So today's RNG will be used to tell you that in addition to hiking, swimming, car trunks, tunnels, speedboats, trains of death and drug submarines, not to mention overstayed visas that came over with everybody else, the new mode of transportation in play in the illegal-immigration game is: zip lines.
How do you fix a sinkhole? There are a couple different techniques, which alternately involve dumping a whole bunch of rock into the hole, and shoring up the foundation followed by dumping a whole bunch of rock into the hole.
Alternately, you probably know that some illegal immigration into the United States originates from south of Mexico. We've already covered that here. That, of course, includes Guatemala, one of Mexico's neighbors. So today's RNG will be used to tell you that in addition to hiking, swimming, car trunks, tunnels, speedboats, trains of death and drug submarines, not to mention overstayed visas that came over with everybody else, the new mode of transportation in play in the illegal-immigration game is: zip lines.
Wednesday, July 20, 2011
Ur Mouth
One of the things we sell at work are those big letter stickers you use on your house or on signs or what have you. Every so often, some customer will come along and rearrange these stickers so as to form words or phrases, their own little unique take on the world and all its foibles.
Last night, one such person used these letters to announce to the world an earth-shattering hypothesis, something that could, if true, very well change everything we know about our civilization. According to this person, this prodigy, and I must take the utmost care in transcribing this theory to the letter, "BALLSACKINURMOUTH."
Now, for those unaware, 'ur' is a German prefix meaning original or primitive. Knowing that, what this theory clearly states is that not only did the first known mouth evolve after the invention of ball-related sports, but that a container for those balls could fit entirely inside this original, proto-mouth.
But like any potentially game-changing hypothesis, we should probably test it before we start throwing the Nobel Prize Minting Machine into overdrive so that we may shower this genius with the accolades befitting of a revelation on the scale of BALLSACKINURMOUTH.
So let's first figure out, when was this Ur Mouth conceived?
As it turns out, the origin of the mouth is caught up in a bit of a chicken-or-egg-type debate in evolutionary circles alongside the origin of the anus. Essentially, the debate is whether the anus came first and, as the gut evolved, it eventually reached the other side of the body to become a mouth; or whether the mouth evolved first and the gut eventually became an anus on the other side.
I'm not the best as deciphering the particulars here, but the focus centers around a certain part of the animal kingdom family tree. First comes bilaterians, which branch off to flatworms on one side of the tree, and protostomes and deuterostomes on the other. If none of these sound familiar except 'flatworm', that's because these aren't species. We're much higher up the classification scale, into the realm of subkingdoms and superphyla. (You were taught that it was just kingdom, phylum, class, order, family, genus, species, right? Not quite. Biologists have intermediate categories too. Also, there's another category, 'domain', that sits above kingdom as of 1990.)
We're not, however, interested in which came first. What we need is when the mouth showed up. That answer seems to be just as vexing as which came first. The answer is probably somewhere in a 2008 paper in the journal Nature called "Acoel development indicates the independent evolution of the bilaterian mouth and anus", by Andreas Hejnol and Mark Q. Martindale at the University of Hawaii, but the article costs $32 to read. Just in case you have $32 for this, here you go. It, by the way, appears to put together a weird third theory: that the gut came first in two parts- one for the mouth, one for the anus- and the whole mouth-or-anus question is simply a matter of which side the gut, which would of course connect into a single whole, busted through first. What I was able to coax out of the paper without having to hand over $32- which consists of three of the tables- seems to indicate that the paper centers around an acoel flatworm, Convolutriloba longfissura.
Outside of that paper, though, the focus on learning about it appears to center around how we can more effectively murder it (PDF), as it's seen as a pest in larger saltwater aquariums. As a result, we'll need to back up to the larger class, acoela, and go from there. Acoels, as it happens, date back to primitive times. We'll take that rough figure of 'primitive times', which in this context generally means hundreds of millions, potentially billions of years ago, and move to the other end of the equation, ball-based sports.
The question is, did ball-based sports come into existence billions of years ago? If so, we'll have to try and narrow things down further somehow. If not, though, eye-opening as it may seem, the BALLSACKINURMOUTH theory will have to go by the wayside.
Figuring out the ball's invention is murky as well; its creation can't be pinpointed to any one culture in particular. (Lot of definitive answers we're getting today, aren't there?) However, like the mouth, we can pin down a range. While documentation of the usage of balls dates to the Mayan culture, China's Ts'in Dynasty, and the ancient Romans and Greeks, the earliest of the known references to a ball used for sport comes out of ancient Egypt, at around 2500 BCE. Some in the Chinese camp claim as early as 5000 BCE.
The Ts'in Dynasty game vaguely resembles soccer. Two bamboo poles were set up, and a net was strung between them, with a hole cut in the net. In order to score, the ball- made of leather and stuffed with animal fur- had to be kicked through the hole in the net. Players could not use their hands.
The ancient Egyptian game, brought up by Robert W. Henderson at the University of Illinois to dispel myths about Abner Doubleday inventing baseball, maintains that balls were used in a fertility ritual, replacing human heads. Several different makes of ball have been figured upon, including cloth balls filled with seeds, catgut wrapped in leather or deerskin, and one ball made out of linen found in a tomb, visible here. The bocce ball crowd, in an attempt to re-one-up the Chinese, pegs a stone ball as being used in ancient Egypt as early as 5200 BCE, according to hieroglyphics. Naturally, the game resembles bocce ball.
However- tragically as it is- all of these dates are nearly hundreds of millions of years more recent than 'hundreds of millions of years ago', and almost billions of years more recent than 'billions of years ago'. This is to say nothing of the sack the balls need to have been in, or the size of Ur Mouth, which considering the size of acoels is many, many times smaller than these earliest balls, much less their sack.
In fact, the year difference is so far off that it's almost a perversion of intelligence to make claims about BALLSACKINURMOUTH. It's really rather disgusting.
Last night, one such person used these letters to announce to the world an earth-shattering hypothesis, something that could, if true, very well change everything we know about our civilization. According to this person, this prodigy, and I must take the utmost care in transcribing this theory to the letter, "BALLSACKINURMOUTH."
Now, for those unaware, 'ur' is a German prefix meaning original or primitive. Knowing that, what this theory clearly states is that not only did the first known mouth evolve after the invention of ball-related sports, but that a container for those balls could fit entirely inside this original, proto-mouth.
But like any potentially game-changing hypothesis, we should probably test it before we start throwing the Nobel Prize Minting Machine into overdrive so that we may shower this genius with the accolades befitting of a revelation on the scale of BALLSACKINURMOUTH.
So let's first figure out, when was this Ur Mouth conceived?
As it turns out, the origin of the mouth is caught up in a bit of a chicken-or-egg-type debate in evolutionary circles alongside the origin of the anus. Essentially, the debate is whether the anus came first and, as the gut evolved, it eventually reached the other side of the body to become a mouth; or whether the mouth evolved first and the gut eventually became an anus on the other side.
I'm not the best as deciphering the particulars here, but the focus centers around a certain part of the animal kingdom family tree. First comes bilaterians, which branch off to flatworms on one side of the tree, and protostomes and deuterostomes on the other. If none of these sound familiar except 'flatworm', that's because these aren't species. We're much higher up the classification scale, into the realm of subkingdoms and superphyla. (You were taught that it was just kingdom, phylum, class, order, family, genus, species, right? Not quite. Biologists have intermediate categories too. Also, there's another category, 'domain', that sits above kingdom as of 1990.)
We're not, however, interested in which came first. What we need is when the mouth showed up. That answer seems to be just as vexing as which came first. The answer is probably somewhere in a 2008 paper in the journal Nature called "Acoel development indicates the independent evolution of the bilaterian mouth and anus", by Andreas Hejnol and Mark Q. Martindale at the University of Hawaii, but the article costs $32 to read. Just in case you have $32 for this, here you go. It, by the way, appears to put together a weird third theory: that the gut came first in two parts- one for the mouth, one for the anus- and the whole mouth-or-anus question is simply a matter of which side the gut, which would of course connect into a single whole, busted through first. What I was able to coax out of the paper without having to hand over $32- which consists of three of the tables- seems to indicate that the paper centers around an acoel flatworm, Convolutriloba longfissura.
Outside of that paper, though, the focus on learning about it appears to center around how we can more effectively murder it (PDF), as it's seen as a pest in larger saltwater aquariums. As a result, we'll need to back up to the larger class, acoela, and go from there. Acoels, as it happens, date back to primitive times. We'll take that rough figure of 'primitive times', which in this context generally means hundreds of millions, potentially billions of years ago, and move to the other end of the equation, ball-based sports.
The question is, did ball-based sports come into existence billions of years ago? If so, we'll have to try and narrow things down further somehow. If not, though, eye-opening as it may seem, the BALLSACKINURMOUTH theory will have to go by the wayside.
Figuring out the ball's invention is murky as well; its creation can't be pinpointed to any one culture in particular. (Lot of definitive answers we're getting today, aren't there?) However, like the mouth, we can pin down a range. While documentation of the usage of balls dates to the Mayan culture, China's Ts'in Dynasty, and the ancient Romans and Greeks, the earliest of the known references to a ball used for sport comes out of ancient Egypt, at around 2500 BCE. Some in the Chinese camp claim as early as 5000 BCE.
The Ts'in Dynasty game vaguely resembles soccer. Two bamboo poles were set up, and a net was strung between them, with a hole cut in the net. In order to score, the ball- made of leather and stuffed with animal fur- had to be kicked through the hole in the net. Players could not use their hands.
The ancient Egyptian game, brought up by Robert W. Henderson at the University of Illinois to dispel myths about Abner Doubleday inventing baseball, maintains that balls were used in a fertility ritual, replacing human heads. Several different makes of ball have been figured upon, including cloth balls filled with seeds, catgut wrapped in leather or deerskin, and one ball made out of linen found in a tomb, visible here. The bocce ball crowd, in an attempt to re-one-up the Chinese, pegs a stone ball as being used in ancient Egypt as early as 5200 BCE, according to hieroglyphics. Naturally, the game resembles bocce ball.
However- tragically as it is- all of these dates are nearly hundreds of millions of years more recent than 'hundreds of millions of years ago', and almost billions of years more recent than 'billions of years ago'. This is to say nothing of the sack the balls need to have been in, or the size of Ur Mouth, which considering the size of acoels is many, many times smaller than these earliest balls, much less their sack.
In fact, the year difference is so far off that it's almost a perversion of intelligence to make claims about BALLSACKINURMOUTH. It's really rather disgusting.
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