These kinds of lists are catnip for me.
Luxury Paradox: The more expensive something is the less likely you are to use it, so the relationship between price and utility is an inverted U. Ferraris sit in garages; Hondas get driven.
The Middle Ground Fallacy: Falsely assuming that splitting the difference between two polar opposite views is a healthy compromise. If one person says vaccines cause autism and another person says they don’t, it’s not right to compromise and say vaccines sometimes cause autism.
Focusing Effect: Overemphasizing factors that seem important but exist as part of a complex system. People from the Midwest assume Californians are happier because the weather is better, but they’re not because Californians also deal with traffic, bad bosses, unhappy marriages, etc, which more than offset the happiness boost from sunny skies.
I encounter the Focusing Effect regularly. I live in San Diego and do business with people from all over the world. I think they think my life is just surfing and campfire parties on the beach with Gidget.
It’s All Bullshit: Performing productivity at Google.
Journalist JS Tan, writing at The Baffler, argues that Google has become a cesspool of bullshit jobs—engineers rewarded for building projects that are never deployed, or deployed and quickly abandoned, and bloated middle management. The company is trying to change its culture.
I’m reminded of Cory Doctorow’s observation that Google only ever built 1-1/2 products—search and I forget what else. It bought its ad business, which was like Jed Clampett luckily striking oil in his backyard. Google also bought other businesses that have been successful for it: YouTube, Google Maps, and Waze. (Maybe Gmail is the half-business of which Cory speaks?—Google did develop that.)
Google’s spectacular failures with Google Glass, Google+ and Google Reader, to name just three examples, suggest a company whose innovative powers are far more hype than reality. On the other hand, it’s no mean feat for Google to build and maintain its vast, global infrastructure of data centers and subsea cables, and keep its businesses—acquired or otherwise—successful.
Ars Technica rates 20 time travel movies by entertainment and scientific plausibility.
What modern science has to say about time travel can be summed up thusly: You can travel to the future, but you probably can’t travel to the past, although to be honest, we’re not really sure.
Their list includes a personal favorite of mine: “Time After Time” (1979), starring Malcolm McDowell as time-traveling H.G. Wells, Mary Steenburgen as his plucky feminist 1970s galpal and David Warner as Jack the Ripper.
The IMDB trivia page for “Time After Time” does not disappoint.
All four of the real H.G. Wells’ children were still alive at the time of this film’s release.
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Malcolm McDowell listened to recordings of H.G. Wells to prepare for the role. According to him, Wells’ voice was high-pitched and Cockney-accented, so he decided not to imitate
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The movie’s title inspired Cyndi Lauper’s song “Time After Time”, when in 1983 she browsed through a copy of TV Guide for “imaginary song titles”.
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A deleted scene featured Wells meeting a punk who was playing extremely loud boom-box music on a bus in San Francisco. [Director] Nicholas Meyer later reused this idea in Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home (1986).
Much of the action of “Time After Time” takes place in the Hyatt Regency San Francisco, as do a few scenes in Mel Brooks’ “High Anxiety.” I stayed in the same hotel in 2017; it hadn’t changed much, other than becoming deliciously dark and gloomy. A monument to 70s futurism.
One quibble with the Ars Technica list. Authors Jennifer Ouellette and Sean M. Carroll rightly praise the first Christoper Reeve “Superman,” including Gene Hackman’s “marvelous selection of outrageous wigs,” but add:
We’re knocking off a point for the cheesy “Read My Mind” spoken song as Superman takes Lois Lane (Margot Kidder) on a romantic flight over Metropolis, which has aged poorly.
No, that scene did not “age poorly.” It was always terrible. It was cringe in 1978 and it is cringe today.
Now I want to see “Superman” again, to enjoy Hackman, Ned Beatty and Valerie Perrine hamming it up as villains.
Reading “A Christmas Carol” as antisemitic is pretty easy. The main character, Ebenezer Scrooge, is a moneylender who doesn’t celebrate Christmas. Full stop there. But there’s more: the name Ebenezer is Hebrew, deriving from the phrase eben ha-ezer, meaning “stone of the help.” Scrooge’s dead friend and former business partner, Jacob Marley, sports a fully Jewish moniker – his first name one of the Jewish forefathers, and his Hebrew family name meaning “It is bitter to me.” Scrooge not only doesn’t observe Christmas festivities, he hates it. He’s a mean and nasty guy, and Dickens even gives him a “pointed nose” to boot.
The supermarket did not have Chianti. I talked to four employees, and they did not know what Chianti is. (“Candy?”) Does no one watch “Silence of the Lambs” anymore? What do hippie college students use for candleholders if they don’t have Chianti bottles?
“Elf” + “Enchanted” = “Noelle”
The premise of the movie “Noelle” is that Santa Claus is a family business, with each Santa passing the pom-pom to his son. A few months ago, the last Santa died, and the responsibilty to pilot the sleigh falls on son Nick, who doesn’t want to do it and is terrible at it. Nick’s sister, Noelle, advises him to take a weekend to relax in someplace warm, and he does so—and disappears.
Now everybody in the North Pole is mad at Noelle. “Noelle” continues the tradition of “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer” in portraying most of the denizens of Santa’s village as jerks.
Noelle tracks Nick to Phoenix, where Nick has reinvented himself as a yoga instructor, and she attempts to get him to return to the North Pole and fulfill his responsibility.
All of this is in the movie trailer, and if you watch the trailer, you can figure out how the movie ends.
Noelle is played with, well, elfen adorableness by Anna Kendrick of the “Pitch Perfect” trilogy, which I haven’t seen, and the 2009 Great Recession dark comedy “Up in the Air,” starring George Clooney as a consultant who specializes in laying people off. I did see that one—on the day I myself got laid off—and loved it.
Nick is played with gormless charm by Bill Hader, of “Saturday Night Live” and “Barry.”
Also featured are Shirley MacLaine as a grouchy elf; Julie “Airplane” Hagerty as Mrs. Claus; and several scene-stealing CGI reindeer, particularly a little white reindeer named Snow-Cone.
Kingsley Ben-Adir plays a divorced father facing his first Christmas alone without his family, in a storyline that’s surprisingly moving for such a fluffy movie.
Both Julie and I enjoyed “Noelle.”
“Noelle” is the latest of my ongoing series of completely avoiding important or consequential entertainment, because the news is consequential enough, inspired by John Scalzi’s December Comfort Watches.
Here’s Scalzi’s review of “Noelle.”, from which I learn that “Noelle” was written and directed by Marc Lawrence, who also wrote and directed “Music & Lyrics,” which starred Hugh Grant as a washed-up 80s pop music star who experiences a career comeback as a songwriter after he meets and partners with aspiring lyricist Drew Barrymore. “Music & Lyrics” is a solid romantic comedy—like “Noelle,” it’s fluff entertainment—and also a surprisingly thoughtful exploration of the value of fluff entertainment. I’d like to see “Music & Lyrics” again.
“Some thoughts on the real world by one who glimpsed it and fled." Bill Watterson’s 1990 commencement speech at Kenyon College.
Lately, I’ve been realizing the value of having something that excites me enough to jump out of bed for it. So, I’ve decided to fully immerse myself in whatever comes next, knowing that these enjoyable times might not last forever.
Here’s the thing: whether or not these obsessions lead to something useful in work or life isn’t the main point, although they often do. More importantly, as various monks and philosophers say, the greatest happiness for humans is to live in the moment.
Apparently, when humans have free time, they tend to stress over the past and future instead of focusing on the present.
Thus, those who discover a hobby they can deeply immerse themselves in are fortunate….
Tyler Cowen: Is Bach the greatest achiever of all time?
Stackexchange discussion: Can Microsoft Flight Simulator help me learn to fly (or make me a better pilot)?
Ace Atkins bids Robert B. Parker’s Spenser farewell. After 10 novels, Atkins looks back at what makes the Boston detective character so compelling.
The Surprising Possibilities of See-Through Wood. Transparent wood is tougher than transparent plastic and glass and has potential practical applications in smartphone screens, insulated windows and more.
How the press manufactured consent for never-ending COVID reinfections. Continual reinfection was not the “new normal” Biden advertised. How did we get here?
Walking the dog in the park this morning, I saw a runner wearing a Santa hat, a runner wearing a Christmas sweater, and a pack of bicyclists that included one wearing a rope of Christmas lights around his neck—the old-style, big teardrop-shaped lights.
Every once in a while, I pick up a call from an unidentified caller rather than letting it ring through. It’s almost always a telemarketer or other variety of scammer. And then I’m disappointed because I can’t think of a way to mess with them.
Maybe I should take improv classes?