Category Archives: Popular Culture

Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Popular Culture, Social Commentary

Stand-Your-Ground Laws

2 Comments

As Glenn says, Hollywood dumbasses.

In addition to his points, a) there’s nothing wrong with stand-your-ground laws and b) the Zimmerman case had nothing to do with stand your ground.

These morons just can’t stand the notion that people should be able to defend themselves.

[Update a few minuts later]

Hey, remember when Barack Obama supported stand-your-ground laws? Well, neither does he. To repeat: dumbasses.

[Update a while later]

OK, you’ll be as unsurprised as I am to learn that John McCain has decided to become one of the dumbasses.

Administrative, Popular Culture, Technology and Society

Light And Scattered Posting

5 Comments

I have a niece and nephew visiting from Michigan. We went out whale watching today from Dana Point (saw at least two blue whales and a mother and calf fin whale, and hundreds of common long-nose dolphin). Then Aquarium of the Pacific in Long Beach. Tomorrow, it’s California Adventure in Anaheim (where I’ve never been).

[Tuesday-morning update]

It was a long day, but we had a good time. Advice in the comments about getting there early for the Cars Racers is right — they were sold out of Fast Pass, and the wait was in the two-hour range for the bulk of the day. But we saw everything else (that we wanted to Bugs — the insects, not the Bunny, which is a different cartoon franchise– World was worth a miss unless you had little kids), and toward the end of the day, we went in the singles line, and only waited twenty-five minutes. Since the car seating is three and three, it’s not that big a deal to split up the party anyway, and it actually gave the kids an opportunity to race each other instead of being in the same car.

My overall verdict: like an alternate-universe Disneyland, with more California flavor (the restaurant we ate at had vineyards leading up to it), and with more modern, as opposed to classic characters. Disneyland has Cinderella’s Castle, CA has the Mermaid. Disneyland has Thunder Mountain, CA has Grizzly Rapids. Disneyland has Frontierland and Tom Sawyer’s Island, CA has the Redwood hiking/rope trail. I’m not a roller coaster connoisseur, but California Screamin’ seemed to pull some good gees, particularly backward at the launch. And I have to say that the World of Color light/water/flaming-gas-jets show was pretty spectacular. I was impressed by the power of the pumps that could generate eighty feet of head, and the precision and control over the valves. I’d never seen lasers painting on mist before. No one, including Disney, could have done this twenty years ago, I think, without modern computer technology. And we got a bonus of watching the early fireworks display across the way at Disneyland. So definitely worth a do once.

Media Criticism, Popular Culture, Science And Society, Space

Superman

14 Comments

Could he punch someone into space?

My answer is no, without even reading the link. I think that he could throw someone there (though they’d get cooked from the air friction on the way up), and they’d come back down unless they had escape velocity when they got to the top of the atmosphere, because there wouldn’t be an orbital insertion impulse. But if he punched them hard enough to do so, his fist would probably just take their head off. If he did it through their solar plexus, it would probably just go right through. People don’t consider the structural issues associated with superheroes and normal-human interactions with them.

Now Ralph Kramden, on the other hand… But then, he never carried out the threat.

Education, Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Popular Culture, Social Commentary

Cybershaming In The Science Fiction Community

109 Comments

It can get very ugly when the Left starts to eat its own:

The virtually thoughtless piling on is perhaps the most appalling. So many of the criticizers whose comments I have come across admit they haven’t even read the columns in question. Once the ball of shunning and shaming got rolling, hundreds of onlookers, alerted by social media, jumped on the bandwagon, attracted by the enticing glow of participating in shared moral outrage. Moral preening is on overload; industry professionals and would-be professionals frantically signal to each other that they are right-thinkers. According to the mau-mauers, Mike and Barry did not merely misspeak (miswrite?); they did not have decent-enough intentions which were ruined by Paleolithic habits and blinkered upbringings; they are morally suspect, malign and vicious and evil. It’s burn the witch! all over again, but this time on a pyre of blog posts and Tweets.

I mentioned before that I completely understand the vehemence of Barry’s reaction to all this. One sadly ironic aspect of this brouhaha is that Barry is a lifelong man of the Left. He was staunchly antiwar during the Vietnam era (see early stories such as “Final War”), and his dream president was (and remains) Eugene McCarthy. I fully believe, based on his writings about Alice Sheldon and Judith Merril, that Barry considers himself a feminist, and an avid one. Condemnation from one’s “own side” always burns hotter in one’s craw than condemnation from “the other guys,” which can be easily rationalized away; just as criticism (especially when viewed as unfair) from one’s own family hurts much worse than criticism from relative strangers. Forty years ago (and in all the years since), Barry was a fierce advocate of the New Wave in science fiction, whose practitioners (with the sole exception of R. A. Lafferty) were all politically aligned with the Left, as opposed to old-timers such as John W. Campbell and Robert Heinlein. Now Barry must feel as though the children of the Revolution are eating their elders (as so frequently happens, it seems).

This is actually one reason that I don’t read anywhere near as much SF as I did when I was a kid.

Culinary, Health, Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Popular Culture, Science And Society, Social Commentary

James Gandolfini’s Heart

9 Comments

Was he really a walking time bomb?

Maybe. He certainly sounded like a good candidate, given his weight, though we don’t really know what his other stats were, probably for privacy reasons. I think that the doctor quoted is just speculating, and his credibility went down with me when I read this:

A holiday heart attack is a surprisingly common phenomenon, said Dr. Crandall, chief of the cardiac transplant program at the world-renowned Palm Beach Cardiovascular Clinic.

“Heart attacks often manifest on holidays when you’re not eating the normal meals,” he said. “You eat excessively, indulging in high fatty foods, and this causes the blood to thicken. The result is a blood clot, which can rupture, resulting in the blockage of blood flow to the heart, causing heart attack and sudden death.”

Do “high fatty foods” really “cause the blood to thicken”? Is there any actual empirical evidence for this? Or is it just nutritionally ignorant lipophobia?

Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Popular Culture, Social Commentary

“Art”

8 Comments

A screed:

I’m not in favor of obscenity trials, except when children are involved. You can make the case that a talented photographer forces us to confront adolescent sexuality by taking pictures of naked young people, and I can make the case that he’s a creep, because there has to be something . . . askew in an adult’s makeup to find this a compelling subject that must be expressed explicitly. There is something lacking in the hearts of people who dasn’t admit to themselves that the artist might be trusting the critical establishment to give him cover precisely because he dresses up his dank needs as Art.

If someone wants to protest child abuse, well: a painting of a child with haunted eyes, a dim room, a figure in the background. Color, composition, tone, shadow, the horrible truth implied with all the power Western representational art accumulated over the centuries.

Or, you can glue pictures you got from a google search, printed out and cut up and pasted on screen grabs from porno movies. Because you’re working in the new vernacular, the new global interconnected web of mysterious source material given meaning by recontextualization.

Also, you can’t draw worth a damn, so that whole “painting” thing is off the table.

No one skewers pretentious “transgressives” like Lileks.