10 interesting things
Sep. 17th, 2019 08:19 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
shadowkat1. Superfans: A Love Story - via the New Yorker.
Okay, that's just scary. But I've admittedly seen it. And it has pre-existed the internet. We've just become more aware of it.
I actually found that to be hilarious. Particularly when GoT got a record number of Emmy nominations this year. I mean I agree the last season of GoT did not work, but to redo it? Do people have any idea of how many people liked it? Over 20 million watched it. And it's expensive to produce and the actors long gone.
I'm not entirely sure this journalist understands the permutations of fandom. But sports fans can be just as crazy.
Cubical Mate: I'm going to become a Chiefs fan by proxy.
Me: The Kansas City Chiefs, really?
Cubical Mate (who is a diehard Jets fan): Anyone who can beat the Patriots. I hate the Patriots more than I hate climate change, global warming, Trump..
Me: Any reason other than the coach?
Cubical: No that's basically it and they are a nasty team.
See? Everybody gets obsessed with something.
2. Unfriendly Climate - Texas Tech’s Katharine Hayhoe is one of the most respected experts on global warming in the country. She’s also an evangelical Christian who is trying to connect with the very people who most doubt her research. Too bad the temperature keeps rising.
"One clear day last spring, Katharine Hayhoe walked into the limestone chambers of the Austin City Council to brief the members during a special meeting on how prepared the city was to deal with disasters and extreme weather. A respected atmospheric scientist at Texas Tech University, the 43-year-old had been invited to discuss climate change, and she breezed through her PowerPoint slides, delivering stark news in an upbeat manner: unless carbon emissions were swiftly curbed, in the coming decades Texas would see stronger heat waves, harsher summers, and torrential rainfall separated by longer periods of drought.
“Why do we care about all of this stuff?” Hayhoe asked. “Because it has huge financial impacts.” The number of billion-dollar weather disasters in the United States had ballooned from one or two per year in the eighties to eight to twelve today, Hayhoe explained as she pulled up a slide with a map of the country. “Texas is in the crosshairs of those events, because we get it all, don’t we? We get the floods and the droughts, the hailstorms and the ice storms, and even the snow and the extreme heat. And we get the tornadoes, the hurricanes, and the sea-level rise. There isn’t much that we don’t get.”
Soon afterward, Don Zimmerman, a conservative councilman who, before being elected, regularly sued the city over tax increases, declared from his seat on the dais that climate change was a “nebulous” and “foolish” field of study. Zimmerman, wearing a banker’s collar and projecting an officious air into the room, continued, “We have maybe thirty years of satellite data, and the world is maybe millions of years old. I have a really visceral reaction against the climate-change argument, for the simple reason that when you look back in time, there have been dramatic climate changes before humanity ever existed.
“The worst thing that can be done to humanity is put government bureaucrats in charge of carbon dioxide emissions,” he said as Hayhoe listened politely. “You don’t have to be as smart as a fifth grader to know that what causes the climate is the sun. I have people tell me, ‘Carbon dioxide warms the earth.’ No, it doesn’t. The sun warms the earth, and there is more energy in our sun than humanity can comprehend.” Zimmerman then insisted that the sun didn’t need “a permit from the EPA” to emit solar flares.
An uncomfortable silence settled over the chamber for a moment before Hayhoe joked, “I think if the EPA could be in charge of the sun, that could create bigger problems than we have today.” She then proceeded to gut Zimmerman’s arguments. “A thermometer is not Democrat or Republican, and when we look around this world, it’s not about trusting what our thirty-year-old satellites say. It’s about looking at 26,500 indicators of a warming planet, many of them we can see in our own backyards,” she said. The climate was not changing because of orbital cycles, which bring about ice ages, Hayhoe maintained. “The Earth’s temperature peaked eight thousand years ago and was in a long, slow slide into the next ice age until the Industrial Revolution,” she said. Instead of being in this cooling period, the planet had seen its average temperature steadily rise. The sun was also not the culprit: “If the climate were changing because of the sun, we’d be getting cooler, because energy from the sun has been going down over the last forty years,” she said."
3. A 350 Year Old Trick to Get People to Change Their Minds is Now Backed Up with Psychological Evidence?
"The 17th century philosopher Blaise Pascal is perhaps best known for Pascal’s Wager which, in the first formal use of decision theory, argued that believing in God is the most pragmatic decision. But it seems the French thinker also had a knack for psychology. As Brain Pickings points out, Pascal set out the most effective way to get someone to change their mind, centuries before experimental psychologists began to formally study persuasion:
When we wish to correct with advantage, and to show another that he errs, we must notice from what side he views the matter, for on that side it is usually true, and admit that truth to him, but reveal to him the side on which it is false. He is satisfied with that, for he sees that he was not mistaken, and that he only failed to see all sides. Now, no one is offended at not seeing everything; but one does not like to be mistaken, and that perhaps arises from the fact that man naturally cannot see everything, and that naturally he cannot err in the side he looks at, since the perceptions of our senses are always true.
Pascal added:
People are generally better persuaded by the reasons which they have themselves discovered than by those which have come into the mind of others.
Put simply, Pascal suggests that before disagreeing with someone, first point out the ways in which they’re right. And to effectively persuade someone to change their mind, lead them to discover a counter-point of their own accord. Arthur Markman, psychology professor at The University of Texas at Austin, says both these points hold true."
4. For the Price of $85 and a lengthy interview...you too can get TSA Pre-Check.
5. How to Get Paid to Travel Cheaply
6. A Fire Lookout on What's Lost in a Transition to Technology
"Connors is a fire lookout, and as such, he's paid to notice small, faraway things.
For more than 100 years, the U.S. Forest Service has been posting men and women atop mountains and trees, and in other hard-to-reach places, to wait and watch for smoke. They're the eyes in the forest, even as the forests they watch have changed, shaped by developers, shifting land management policies and climate change. At times, fire lookouts were part of that change. At times, they critiqued it.
But in recent years, the number of active lookouts has dwindled from thousands to hundreds as technology has encroached.
Why pay a person to sit on top of a mountain when you can plop down a 360-degree camera? Why try to discern a fire's heat and intensity from the color of its smoke when you can get an infrared image? Why pay Connors to plot a fire's location with a faded map, a line of string and a pair of binoculars, when you can get a precise location from drone Unmanned 201?"
7. You can thank Dolly Parton for Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel...?
"In the early 1990s, Sandollar president and CEO Gail Berman read Joss Whedon’s screenplay for the 1992 Buffy the Vampire Slayer movie when Sandollar became its distributor. She immediately saw its potential as a TV show and set about acquiring its television rights.
Because the film wasn't a hit, it took the success of 1995's Clueless, which Berman thought shared tonal similarities with Whedon’s original movie script, for her to start pursuing the idea of a Buffy TV show in earnest. Berman contacted Whedon, who was by then writing movies—including Toy Story and Alien: Resurrection—but agreed to come back to television to run the show. Seven seasons and one spinoff later, the rest was TV history.
Writing the checks all the while was Sandollar Television, the small-screen arm of Parton and Gallin’s production company. Sandollar co-produced Buffy the Vampire Slayer and its spinoff, Angel, with Whedon’s company, Mutant Enemy. Berman and Gallin were listed as executive producers on both shows, while Parton’s name stayed out of the credits.
Without Parton’s cash though, Buffy Summers may never have made it to television. For that, fans will always be grateful. Perhaps that gratitude also explains why the fictional vampire slayer shares a birthday—January 19—with the world-famous country singer?"
I don't know, I thank Gail Berman.
8. Rest in Peace Ric Ocasek, former lead singer of The Cars. Dead at 75
You Might Think I'm Crazy Video
(That's the song I listened to endlessly back in the 1980s on the radio.)
9. Rest in Peace Cokie Roberts at 75
This is unnerving. My mother is 77 turning 78. Also, hello -- Universe? Politicians! We need to get rid of some 70 something Baby Boomer politicians!! (I'm beginning to think they are too rotten to die...they'll probably outlast us all like vampires.)
10. Tonight's episode of "Country Music" discusses the singing cowboys (sigh - Gene Autry and Roy Rodgers), (Coulie) Minnie Pearl (really cool -- she decided to be an actress, and went to the best finishing school in the country, studied Shakespeare, and traveled around the country collecting folk stories and anecdotes -- developed a character with those stories in mind and didn't put on freckles or anything else. She was a sophisticated woman but wore a straw hat with a price tag, and scream out Howdy, talked about a character named brother, and she poked fun at herself -- and made fun of how she looked.
She started on the Grand Old Opry at the age of 28. (I remember her on Hee Haw in the 1970s and various variety shows.) She was amazing -- she developed through improve a series of characters based on real stories.
It also talks about ASCAP and BMI, and how BMI came about as an alternative to ASCAP, the music rights warehouse that doubled the rates charged to radio stations. So, BMI - Broadcast Media International came about -- which allowed for the first time black music to be aired. Black music had been shunned by ASCAP. (Country music was hillbilly and race music at this time.) BMI allowed songs from a broader group that ASCAP had shunned such as hip-hop, black song-writers, the Carter Family, and various others.
ASCAP eventually negotiated an agreement with BMI, but BMI had becomes so popular it stayed around.
De Ford Bailey -- one of the few black country musicians, got kicked out of the Grand Old Oprey, at 42 years of age, because he didn't play ASCAP songs. So he moved to a storefront in downtown Nashville and refurbished as music store -- in 1965, he was finally invited back to the Grand Old Oprey.
This is good, if you find the history of American music at all interesting.
On June 29, 2018, Wanna Thompson, a freelance music journalist, was in an Uber with her boyfriend, headed into downtown Toronto to watch a podcast taping. Thompson had spent part of the day listening to new music by Nicki Minaj, including a typically braggadocious track called “Barbie Tingz.” (“I’m still fly, just bagged a white guy, / Ritchie-like guy and I still eat Thai.”) Thompson, who was twenty-six, could recite most of Minaj’s lyrics by heart. Minaj, like Thompson’s mother, is from Trinidad, and Thompson admired her as one of the few female rappers to become mega-famous. “I was a hundred per cent a fan,” she told me recently.
But, listening to the new stuff, Thompson worried that Minaj’s musical progression had stalled. From the car, she tweeted to her fourteen thousand followers, “You know how dope it would be if Nicki put out mature content? No silly shit. Just reflecting on past relationships, being a boss, hardships, etc. She’s touching 40 soon, a new direction is needed.” When Thompson got to the show, she put her phone away. By the time she checked it again, two hours later, her tweet had gone viral. “I had, like, hundreds of superfans just trashing me,” Thompson recalled. She was receiving so many direct messages—some telling her to kill herself, some accusing her of not being a “true fan”—that her phone kept crashing. And there was a message from Minaj’s official account. It read, “Eat a dick u hating ass hoe. Got the nerve to have a trini flag on ur page.” The message added, “Just say u jealous I’m rich, famous intelligent, pretty and go! But wait! Leave my balls! Tired of u sucking them.”
Thompson, convinced that the message was fake, showed it to her boyfriend. “I was stunned,” she said. She responded with some lines from Maya Angelou: “You may kill me with your hatefulness / But still, like air, I rise.” Minaj later denied sending the messages, but, on her own Twitter account, which had twenty-one million followers, she posted a list of songs that presumably proved her maturity, including “Pills N Potions.” Thompson set her Twitter account to private, but, at around 10 p.m., her phone began lighting up with angry text messages; someone had circumvented the lax security measures on her Web site and leaked her number. She changed all her passwords and frantically scrubbed her old tweets of any mention of her day job, in human resources, or her middle name, which she used at work.
At the time, Thompson was an unpaid intern for a hip-hop blog run by the marketing strategist Karen Civil. Within hours, the site manager e-mailed Thompson to tell her that her internship had been terminated. The company said that she had violated a nondisclosure agreement and that Minaj was one of Civil’s clients. (Thompson says that she didn’t know this and has denied violating the N.D.A. Civil told me that Thompson had seen her client list and that the site didn’t allow “hot takes.”) The next day, Thompson posted screenshots of the messages from Minaj’s account, but this only inflamed the rapper’s fans. One harasser lifted an Instagram photo of Thompson’s daughter, who was four years old, and photoshopped her face onto a gorilla’s body.
Like most music idols, Minaj has a hardcore fan base with a collective name, the Barbz; Beyoncé has the Beyhive, Justin Bieber the Beliebers, and Lady Gaga the Little Monsters. The most fervent among them are called “stans.” The term derives from a 2000 track by Eminem, in which he raps about a fictitious fan named Stan (short for “stalker fan”), who becomes so furious that Eminem hasn’t responded to his letters that he drives himself off a bridge with his pregnant girlfriend in the trunk. Unlike regular fans, stans see themselves as crusaders, pledging loyalty and rushing to their idol’s defense against dissenters. Thompson was on the receiving end of a maneuver known as the clapback, in which a star actually responds to a lowly hater. Like Queen Victoria’s cavalry, the stans follow suit and attack.
“When it comes to stans and how they operate on social media, it’s crazy to witness,” Thompson told me. “These people really think that they’re doing some due diligence by the celebrity.” More than a year later, she continues to receive messages from angry Barbz. She ended friendships with people who she says didn’t defend her online, and she no longer listens to Minaj’s music. “I felt very weird when this whole thing happened,” she said, “because I was such a huge fan of hers.”
Okay, that's just scary. But I've admittedly seen it. And it has pre-existed the internet. We've just become more aware of it.
A glance around the pop-culture landscape gives the impression that fans have gone mad. In May, viewers of HBO’s “Game of Thrones” revolted against the show’s final two episodes, in which the dragon queen, Daenerys Targaryen, took a turn toward the genocidal. Some critics accused the showrunners, both of whom were men, of propagating the idea that women in power are inevitably crazy. Others complained that the personality change was too implausible, or that the whole season was rushed, or that it simply sucked. More than 1.7 million people signed a petition on Change.org to “remake Game of Thrones Season 8 with competent writers.” At a press conference, HBO’s programming president, Casey Bloys, turned down the request, though he acknowledged the fans’ “enthusiasm and passion.”
I actually found that to be hilarious. Particularly when GoT got a record number of Emmy nominations this year. I mean I agree the last season of GoT did not work, but to redo it? Do people have any idea of how many people liked it? Over 20 million watched it. And it's expensive to produce and the actors long gone.
The outcry bore similarities to the fan uprising against “Star Wars: The Last Jedi,” released in 2017. Much of the backlash had to do with Luke Skywalker not acting quite like Luke Skywalker, now that he had rematerialized as a sour middle-aged hermit. Like Daenerys, he wasn’t the hero that fans had long held him to be. Some fans were also mad that Rey, the orphaned heroine, was revealed not to be secretly of noble lineage, undercutting two years of carefully worked-out fan theories. Detractors swarmed Rotten Tomatoes, posting bad reviews, and petitioned Disney to strike the film from the “official canon.” (Again, no dice.)
Some of the crankiness had a Trumpian cast. Many of the new “Star Wars” characters were women and people of color, and the Asian-American cast member Kelly Marie Tran was harassed online so violently that she quit social media. The episode echoed previous fan wars such as Gamergate, in which male video-game fanatics targeted feminist gamers, and the troll campaign against the all-female “Ghostbusters” remake and its black star, Leslie Jones.
Most people are fans of something, whether it’s the Red Sox, “Hamilton,” or Agatha Christie. But the nature of fandom seems to have morphed in the past decade. In the old days of sci-fi conventions and Bobby Sherman fan clubs, fandom was a subculture reserved for the very young or the very obsessed—or, in the case of the Grateful Dead, the very stoned. As fantasy and comic-book franchises have taken over the entertainment industry, nerd culture has become mainstream. Now that couch potatoes have social media, they have risen up and become active, opinionated participants. As a result, movie studios and TV showrunners have to cater to subsets of diehard devotees, who expect to have a say in how their favorite properties are handled.
The ramifications can be loud and, occasionally, expensive. This spring, Paramount released the trailer for “Sonic the Hedgehog,” a movie based on the vintage Sega character, featuring live action and C.G.I. Fans were so disturbed by the title character’s creepy human teeth that Paramount postponed the release date three months to give him a dental makeover, at great cost. (One person wrote on Twitter, “I’ve thought about Sonic the Hedgehog’s creepy lipless mouth and his horrible human teeth more times today than I want to in my entire life.”) “That’s the power of fandom,” a producer who worked on the 2014 reboot of “Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles” told me. That film weathered its own fan blowback, when Michael Bay, another producer on the movie, implied, in an interview, that the turtles were aliens (every fan knows they were mutated by toxic ooze) and then had to walk back his comments. For the sequel, the producers incorporated everything the fans said they wanted—among other things, making the villain Krang, a talking brain—but the movie earned less money than the first one. The producer I spoke to said, “The question we always ask ourselves in the room is: Is the fan base so strong and such an important part of the box office that we have to change something to keep them happy?”
Other fan movements are more sinister. Right after “Avengers: Endgame” was released, in April, Taiwanese media reported that a man in Hong Kong was beaten bloody by a crowd of moviegoers after he stood outside a cinema shouting out spoilers. Four months earlier, fans of the pop star Ariana Grande—the Arianators—relentlessly targeted her ex-boyfriend, the “Saturday Night Live” cast member Pete Davidson, after her breakup anthem “thank u, next” hit No. 1. Davidson, who had spoken publicly about being bipolar and having suicidal thoughts, responded in an open letter: “No matter how hard the internet or anyone tries to make me kill myself. I won’t.” Grande tried to call off the hounds, writing online, “i feel like i need to remind my fans to please be gentler with others.”
One of the most belligerent—and embattled—fan phalanxes belongs to Michael Jackson. In July, three fan groups announced a joint lawsuit against James Safechuck and Wade Robson, the two men who detailed horrifying child-molestation allegations against Jackson in the documentary “Leaving Neverland.” The suit was filed in France, where tarnishing the image of the deceased is a crime. Each fan group demanded a nominal payment of one euro, and their lawyer, Emmanuel Ludot, called the allegations a “genuine lynching.” Frivolous as it seems, the suit gets at the heart of modern fandom: an attack against a celebrity or a beloved character is an attack against the fans, and it is their duty to retaliate.
Fan dustups are often proxy wars for larger social conflicts, like changing demographics or post-#MeToo feminism. The language of fandom, in turn, has invaded politics; supporters might “fangirl” Beto O’Rourke or cheer on clapbacks from Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. (A recent Twitter prompt: “Stan Elizabeth Warren, but make it poetry.”) The rise of Donald Trump, who was a pop-culture icon before he was a politician, neatly overlaps with the rise of toxic fandom, and Trump has pronounced himself “not a fan” of Jeffrey Epstein, the Vietnam War, and cryptocurrency. Some fan wars may themselves be wag-the-dog scenarios. Last year, a researcher at the University of Southern California’s Center for the Digital Future found that a significant percentage of the negative tweets about “The Last Jedi” came from Russian trolls.
In 1986, “Saturday Night Live” aired a sketch, written by Robert Smigel, set at a “Star Trek” convention, where attendees greet one another with Vulcan salutes. William Shatner, that week’s host, played himself, as the guest of honor. Barraged with inane and arcane questions, Shatner takes a deep breath at a lectern and says, “Get a life, will you, people? I mean, for crying out loud, it’s just a TV show!” The geeks are shell-shocked. “When I was your age, I didn’t watch television,” he continues. “I lived. So, move out of your parents’ basements and get your own apartments—and grow the hell up!”
At the time, Henry Jenkins was a twenty-eight-year-old doctoral student at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He had grown up reading Famous Monsters of Filmland and bonded with his wife, Cynthia, over “Star Trek.” (He explained to me that the preferred term is Trekkers, not Trekkies.) Jenkins was fascinated by their different interpretations of the 1966 episode “The Menagerie,” in which Spock acts uncharacteristically emotional in flashbacks. Jenkins had read up on production history and knew that the show had reused footage from an unaired pilot; Cynthia had thought that Spock had been exploring his human side, as opposed to his more stoic Vulcan side. When Jenkins saw the “S.N.L.” sketch, it “got in my craw a bit,” he told me recently. “But so did academic writing about fans, which also treated them as blind consumers who just bought everything with a ‘Star Trek’ logo on it.”
Jenkins spent the next several years researching fan activity. He visited a group of women in Madison who wrote “Quantum Leap” fan fiction. He lurked on the newsgroup alt.tv.twinpeaks, dedicated to the David Lynch mystery series. In 1992, Jenkins published “Textual Poachers,” an “ethnographic account” in which he defended fans against pernicious stereotypes: the basement-dwelling virginal dweeb, the screaming teen girl hurling panties at Elvis. Jenkins saw fandom, he told me, as “a source of creativity and expression for massive numbers of people who would be otherwise excluded from the commercial sector.” These communities, he said, gave rise to such vernacular forms as fanzines, cosplay (fan-made costumes), and fan fiction.
“Textual Poachers” became one of the founding texts of fan studies, a field that now surveys everything from adult Lego enthusiasts to Black Twitter’s relationship with “Scandal.” Since the book’s publication, the Internet has magnified what Jenkins calls “participatory culture.” At the site An Archive of Our Own, which hosts more than thirty-three thousand fan communities, you can read fan fiction inspired by “The Hobbit,” One Direction, and “All About Eve.” Many of these stories are “slash fic”—erotic fantasies, often teasing out homoerotic subtext between the likes of, say, Kirk and Spock—but there’s a wide variety of genres, including “curtain fic,” which imagines characters going about everyday domestic activities. (Kirk and Spock go appliance shopping.) Fan fiction reached a high-water mark in 2011, when the writer E. L. James took her erotic “Twilight” fiction, changed the characters’ names, and published it as “Fifty Shades of Grey.”
Fandom, Jenkins told me, is “born out of a mix of fascination and frustration. If you weren’t drawn to it on some level, you wouldn’t be a fan. But, if it fully satisfies you, you wouldn’t need to rewrite it, remake it, re-perform it.” Nowhere is Jenkins’s constructive view of fandom more evident than at Comic-Con International, in San Diego. Comic-Con started as the Golden State Comic Book Convention, in 1970, attracting some three hundred people. It’s now a four-day bonanza attended by a hundred and thirty-five thousand fans of all stripes, many of whom show up in elaborate cosplay. When I arrived at this year’s edition, in July, I started seeing Spider-Men five blocks from the convention center. Near the entrance, a group of Christian protesters—the oldest fandom, really—was yelling, “The Syfy channel cannot save your soul!” I turned around and saw a guy dressed as Lumière, from “Beauty and the Beast,” shrugging at me with candlestick hands.
I'm not entirely sure this journalist understands the permutations of fandom. But sports fans can be just as crazy.
Cubical Mate: I'm going to become a Chiefs fan by proxy.
Me: The Kansas City Chiefs, really?
Cubical Mate (who is a diehard Jets fan): Anyone who can beat the Patriots. I hate the Patriots more than I hate climate change, global warming, Trump..
Me: Any reason other than the coach?
Cubical: No that's basically it and they are a nasty team.
See? Everybody gets obsessed with something.
2. Unfriendly Climate - Texas Tech’s Katharine Hayhoe is one of the most respected experts on global warming in the country. She’s also an evangelical Christian who is trying to connect with the very people who most doubt her research. Too bad the temperature keeps rising.
"One clear day last spring, Katharine Hayhoe walked into the limestone chambers of the Austin City Council to brief the members during a special meeting on how prepared the city was to deal with disasters and extreme weather. A respected atmospheric scientist at Texas Tech University, the 43-year-old had been invited to discuss climate change, and she breezed through her PowerPoint slides, delivering stark news in an upbeat manner: unless carbon emissions were swiftly curbed, in the coming decades Texas would see stronger heat waves, harsher summers, and torrential rainfall separated by longer periods of drought.
“Why do we care about all of this stuff?” Hayhoe asked. “Because it has huge financial impacts.” The number of billion-dollar weather disasters in the United States had ballooned from one or two per year in the eighties to eight to twelve today, Hayhoe explained as she pulled up a slide with a map of the country. “Texas is in the crosshairs of those events, because we get it all, don’t we? We get the floods and the droughts, the hailstorms and the ice storms, and even the snow and the extreme heat. And we get the tornadoes, the hurricanes, and the sea-level rise. There isn’t much that we don’t get.”
Soon afterward, Don Zimmerman, a conservative councilman who, before being elected, regularly sued the city over tax increases, declared from his seat on the dais that climate change was a “nebulous” and “foolish” field of study. Zimmerman, wearing a banker’s collar and projecting an officious air into the room, continued, “We have maybe thirty years of satellite data, and the world is maybe millions of years old. I have a really visceral reaction against the climate-change argument, for the simple reason that when you look back in time, there have been dramatic climate changes before humanity ever existed.
“The worst thing that can be done to humanity is put government bureaucrats in charge of carbon dioxide emissions,” he said as Hayhoe listened politely. “You don’t have to be as smart as a fifth grader to know that what causes the climate is the sun. I have people tell me, ‘Carbon dioxide warms the earth.’ No, it doesn’t. The sun warms the earth, and there is more energy in our sun than humanity can comprehend.” Zimmerman then insisted that the sun didn’t need “a permit from the EPA” to emit solar flares.
An uncomfortable silence settled over the chamber for a moment before Hayhoe joked, “I think if the EPA could be in charge of the sun, that could create bigger problems than we have today.” She then proceeded to gut Zimmerman’s arguments. “A thermometer is not Democrat or Republican, and when we look around this world, it’s not about trusting what our thirty-year-old satellites say. It’s about looking at 26,500 indicators of a warming planet, many of them we can see in our own backyards,” she said. The climate was not changing because of orbital cycles, which bring about ice ages, Hayhoe maintained. “The Earth’s temperature peaked eight thousand years ago and was in a long, slow slide into the next ice age until the Industrial Revolution,” she said. Instead of being in this cooling period, the planet had seen its average temperature steadily rise. The sun was also not the culprit: “If the climate were changing because of the sun, we’d be getting cooler, because energy from the sun has been going down over the last forty years,” she said."
3. A 350 Year Old Trick to Get People to Change Their Minds is Now Backed Up with Psychological Evidence?
"The 17th century philosopher Blaise Pascal is perhaps best known for Pascal’s Wager which, in the first formal use of decision theory, argued that believing in God is the most pragmatic decision. But it seems the French thinker also had a knack for psychology. As Brain Pickings points out, Pascal set out the most effective way to get someone to change their mind, centuries before experimental psychologists began to formally study persuasion:
When we wish to correct with advantage, and to show another that he errs, we must notice from what side he views the matter, for on that side it is usually true, and admit that truth to him, but reveal to him the side on which it is false. He is satisfied with that, for he sees that he was not mistaken, and that he only failed to see all sides. Now, no one is offended at not seeing everything; but one does not like to be mistaken, and that perhaps arises from the fact that man naturally cannot see everything, and that naturally he cannot err in the side he looks at, since the perceptions of our senses are always true.
Pascal added:
People are generally better persuaded by the reasons which they have themselves discovered than by those which have come into the mind of others.
Put simply, Pascal suggests that before disagreeing with someone, first point out the ways in which they’re right. And to effectively persuade someone to change their mind, lead them to discover a counter-point of their own accord. Arthur Markman, psychology professor at The University of Texas at Austin, says both these points hold true."
4. For the Price of $85 and a lengthy interview...you too can get TSA Pre-Check.
5. How to Get Paid to Travel Cheaply
6. A Fire Lookout on What's Lost in a Transition to Technology
"Connors is a fire lookout, and as such, he's paid to notice small, faraway things.
For more than 100 years, the U.S. Forest Service has been posting men and women atop mountains and trees, and in other hard-to-reach places, to wait and watch for smoke. They're the eyes in the forest, even as the forests they watch have changed, shaped by developers, shifting land management policies and climate change. At times, fire lookouts were part of that change. At times, they critiqued it.
But in recent years, the number of active lookouts has dwindled from thousands to hundreds as technology has encroached.
Why pay a person to sit on top of a mountain when you can plop down a 360-degree camera? Why try to discern a fire's heat and intensity from the color of its smoke when you can get an infrared image? Why pay Connors to plot a fire's location with a faded map, a line of string and a pair of binoculars, when you can get a precise location from drone Unmanned 201?"
7. You can thank Dolly Parton for Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel...?
"In the early 1990s, Sandollar president and CEO Gail Berman read Joss Whedon’s screenplay for the 1992 Buffy the Vampire Slayer movie when Sandollar became its distributor. She immediately saw its potential as a TV show and set about acquiring its television rights.
Because the film wasn't a hit, it took the success of 1995's Clueless, which Berman thought shared tonal similarities with Whedon’s original movie script, for her to start pursuing the idea of a Buffy TV show in earnest. Berman contacted Whedon, who was by then writing movies—including Toy Story and Alien: Resurrection—but agreed to come back to television to run the show. Seven seasons and one spinoff later, the rest was TV history.
Writing the checks all the while was Sandollar Television, the small-screen arm of Parton and Gallin’s production company. Sandollar co-produced Buffy the Vampire Slayer and its spinoff, Angel, with Whedon’s company, Mutant Enemy. Berman and Gallin were listed as executive producers on both shows, while Parton’s name stayed out of the credits.
Without Parton’s cash though, Buffy Summers may never have made it to television. For that, fans will always be grateful. Perhaps that gratitude also explains why the fictional vampire slayer shares a birthday—January 19—with the world-famous country singer?"
I don't know, I thank Gail Berman.
8. Rest in Peace Ric Ocasek, former lead singer of The Cars. Dead at 75
You Might Think I'm Crazy Video
(That's the song I listened to endlessly back in the 1980s on the radio.)
9. Rest in Peace Cokie Roberts at 75
This is unnerving. My mother is 77 turning 78. Also, hello -- Universe? Politicians! We need to get rid of some 70 something Baby Boomer politicians!! (I'm beginning to think they are too rotten to die...they'll probably outlast us all like vampires.)
10. Tonight's episode of "Country Music" discusses the singing cowboys (sigh - Gene Autry and Roy Rodgers), (Coulie) Minnie Pearl (really cool -- she decided to be an actress, and went to the best finishing school in the country, studied Shakespeare, and traveled around the country collecting folk stories and anecdotes -- developed a character with those stories in mind and didn't put on freckles or anything else. She was a sophisticated woman but wore a straw hat with a price tag, and scream out Howdy, talked about a character named brother, and she poked fun at herself -- and made fun of how she looked.
She started on the Grand Old Opry at the age of 28. (I remember her on Hee Haw in the 1970s and various variety shows.) She was amazing -- she developed through improve a series of characters based on real stories.
It also talks about ASCAP and BMI, and how BMI came about as an alternative to ASCAP, the music rights warehouse that doubled the rates charged to radio stations. So, BMI - Broadcast Media International came about -- which allowed for the first time black music to be aired. Black music had been shunned by ASCAP. (Country music was hillbilly and race music at this time.) BMI allowed songs from a broader group that ASCAP had shunned such as hip-hop, black song-writers, the Carter Family, and various others.
ASCAP eventually negotiated an agreement with BMI, but BMI had becomes so popular it stayed around.
De Ford Bailey -- one of the few black country musicians, got kicked out of the Grand Old Oprey, at 42 years of age, because he didn't play ASCAP songs. So he moved to a storefront in downtown Nashville and refurbished as music store -- in 1965, he was finally invited back to the Grand Old Oprey.
This is good, if you find the history of American music at all interesting.