Chronological Ethnocentrism

Chronological ethnocentrism… oooo, big words, that must mean I’m smart. Alright, now that we’ve gotten that out of the way we can be serious… maybe.  I find this subject actually quite fascinating because it speaks to this little nagging voice in your head, the voice that questions common truth and accepted thought. When people say at least it’s not the cold war, or at least it’s not the fifties, or at least we’re not in Russia, these are all various examples of ethnocentrism. It means that we, as a culture, kind of blot out the truth to an extent by the thought that we uniformly march forward in time progressing evenly.  So twenty years ago we had to have been more racist and less intelligent, handsome what have you, and in twenty years time we’ll all be better, less racist, more intelligent and more handsome.  Except for you Kyle, you suck.  Also we, the place we are in now, most obviously is better than other places.  The United States must be the best, regardless of my lack of experience or knowledge of other places.  Seem silly?  Draw it in a few steps.  Does your region seem better than others?  Obviously New England is far more sophisticated that other regions.  Al other states are far behind the intellectual discourse of New Englanders.  This could only be true is intelligence was inversely proportionate to driving acumen.  And, oh my god Rhode Island drivers make me swear and scream in my car.  Adi was bewildered by this behavior.  Driving in Long Island, New Jersey, Massachusetts, Connecticut and Delaware have never given me such aggravation.   She stared, mouth agape at my transformation from rational human being to knuckle dragging insult generator and rage-bot as my fingers curled around the driving wheel shaking with fury.  Not my finest hour but I digress.

So why is that true?  Are we just so self obsessed we feel things are better because we’re around?  Or is simply more comforting to think that our ancestors were idiots and we’re better?  Maybe it is some misguiding optimism that things have to get better.

I bring this up because of this article:

http://www.salon.com/2012/05/14/our_real_first_gay_president/

In the article it talks about the new moniker given to Barack Obama as the first gay president due to his recent outpouring of support for gay right and marriage.  I appreciate his sentiment but it always seems odd when we get character revelations around election time.  If it were near the beginning of his presidency it would seem less smacking of a grab for positive public attention.  But I’ll take what I can get.  The article goes on to say that the praise is nice but it grossly wrong.  It’s wrong because of James Buchanan.  Time to drop some knowledge.  Several article point to James Buchanan being gay.  That kinda one ups approving of gay marriage.  Now, this kind of factoid is one that must be questioned and scrutinized.  But there is enough evidence of homosexual tendencies to at least point out that while President Buchanan may or may not have been gay he was probably a bit more rainbow proud than our sitting President.  Not to detract from Obama’s stance.  Political maneuver or not I’m glad Obama is siding progressively.  At this point it seems that politician’s lag far behind popular opinion and we as a people are dragging them by the nose forward towards a brighter future.  Whereas it should be the bright luminaries of our day influencing the American public towards that beacon of improvement.  In my humble opinion it seems politics in this country have degraded and faded from their austere and pure form into backdoor dealing snake oil hucksters.

But let’s find fault in our political system another day (It’s always easy to complain about greedy politicians, regardless of the whole burden of truth).  I think a major part of the problem I history and those who tell it.  Partly I blame history teachers.  Anyone who says history is a hard subject to teach is an idiot.  History is awesome.  Its filled with wars, betrayals, illicit sex, espionage, romance, treachery, debauchery, explosions, and mystery.  No book or movie can be as awesome or unbelievable as the stuff that we as a race have done.  The problem is book make things boring.  And they shouldn’t.  Books can be wonderful amazing thins but history books for the majority of my school career were boring and at many points, wrong.  We like to think of the whole serf class during the period of the dark ages as being constantly downtrodden, horribly abused, bent backed, black teethed, malodorous perverts.  Sorry some Python leaked in at the end, ignore it and move along.  That premise is inherently false.  Serfs didn’t have it that bad.  We have this problem as seeing people living in thatch cottages near animals being the lowest of the low and that we have elevated ourselves to be better and greater.  It isn’t totally true.  There were hierarchies within the serfs.  There were those who could read.  There wasn’t as much filth and disease as everyone thinks.  IN the cities of course there tends to be much more due to chamber pots being emptied directly onto the streets hence why men were supposed to walk on the outside bit of the sidewalk and women in side and why they put their coats down when the ladies crossed the road.  Because of shit.  Men didn’t want their ladies covered in filth.  That was the code of ethics for being a gentlemen.  You wonder why we don’t hold open a door and you say chivalry is dead.  Nope it’s just there isn’t as much poop out there with the whole advent of sewers.

Sewers remind me of something important.  The Romans, predating the dark ages, had working and efficient sewers.  They had n earlier from democracy (which we Americans stole and melded with French and English thought).  Not only that but the gay thing wasn’t such a big deal.  Roman sexuality however was a bit odd in the idea of penetration equals power and oral penetration meant that your mouth and then therefore you word was sullied.  Those receiving were in no way sullied.  But worse still anyone who performed on a woman was even more sullied and thus their words were sullied.  So there were some forward thinking ideals mixed in with very archaic ones.  Which is more how I like to think is history.  We just stumble forward and some things advance while others stagnant and others, worse still, feel the effects of entropy.  So the Romans had working sewers then the dark ages didn’t.  A whole bunch of time and we as the western society took massive steps backwards in basically every bit of study like we got a bad card in Monopoly or land in Chutes and Ladders.

So I get to thinking why do we forget about all those forward thinking parts of history.  Like the great gay men who have shaped our history.  There is no denying Alexander the Great was gay.  And we obviously pretty great it was in his name and not one went about changing it to Alexander the pretty ok.  We’ve had a bit of time to revise and edit so it could have been done.  But ignoring the hot button topic of homosexuality why do we forget these ebbs and flows of culture?  Why during the dark ages did it take so long to have that amazing resurgence of art, science and philosophy of the Enlightenment and the Renaissance?  Why now do we forget our history?  Is it our fault for not educating ourselves?  Is it some darker plot of nefarious (I love that word) invisible forces censuring our intellectual consumption so we cannot know the truth of our past?  I doubt this to a certain extent as I cannot believe the government so capable of conspiracy.  It just isn’t that easy to hide massive plots regardless of what the lone gunmen say.  And yes, I just pulled an X-files reference.

I think it’s probably just our perceptions.  You get used to your environment and because it’s what you know it’s what you love.  And what you love must be the best.  So you convince yourself the rest of the world the rest of the time isn’t better than it is now.  In some ways this is right.  But mostly it is always wrong.   One thing that blew my mind recently was my preconceived notion of what certain countries look like.  What an average street looks like in Chain, in South African, in Yemen.  I thought about it and I realized I only know what has been represented in film essentially.  And I know half the time most locations are represented by Toronto.  It’s cheap to shoot there and they a bunch of different sections that mimic other cities.  There was a post online with two pictures.  Both had what appeared to be Muslim people walking down a shopping area on a busy street.  In one you see a young couple, smiling, in jeans and polos.  The other, in more traditional garb.  Obviously I can’t comment on the smiling.  The picture with the smiling couple was taken in Pakistan.  The other was in England.  I would never have guessed.  Processing that I began to think what other preconceived notions do I have?  Am I just a sponge absorbing the thought of those around me and that shapes my idea of the world?

All I know is I owe a few history teachers a swift kick in the ass for making such an interesting subject so boring.  I mean they could people talking about people flinging shit in the streets or fellatio but they talk about all the boring bits.  History should be fun.  And history makes us better people.

Ben

http://lindholm.jp/chinf_buc.html

http://newsfeed.time.com/2012/05/17/who-was-our-first-gay-president/

http://www.salon.com/2012/05/14/our_real_first_gay_president/

Avenging Comic Book Movies

Hollywood started as simple theft from plays, novels and short stories.  Copyright laws have changed considerably giving some protection to authors.  Nosferatu, a classic, was made because the Stoker family wouldn’t give the rights for the film.  So they just changed the name and made it anyway.  Copyright laws are also the happy birthday song is evil.  I say this because if you into the song on television you have to pay.  Not so much as say the Rolling Stones but you have to pay for the song you hear at the very least once every year of your life.  It’s also the reason chain restaurants make up their own goofy as shit version with off kilter clapping that makes you want to punch them all as they crowd lackluster around your melting ice cream and sparkly candle trying desperately not to think about their failures as human beings.  You might think this harsh condemnation but I’ve worked in the food industry, it’s not harsh enough; all those people are broken and many I consider friends.

Lately we’ve had a very strong comic book presence in film.  I am in no way opposed to this.  The last two Batman films have been amazing after the clusterfuck that was the Clooney Batman.  I’ll never forget and I’ll never forgive you George.  In my dreams Clooney is beaten senseless by Michael Keaton and Christian Bale.  He is left almost lifeless and bereft of will.  He whispers his apologies and pledges to donate half his fortune to funding a camp for younglings to train them as real life batmen.  But ignore such fantasy.  Except for the camp of future batmen because that’s fucking awesome and someone should do that.  Not one of those too eccentric rich guys because we don’t want car loads of impressionable young men alone with those people.

This leads me to The Avengers the epoch of Marvel’s movie series.  Ignoring the X-Men (film rights owned by Fox) and their five films as well as Spiderman (film rights owned by Sony) and his three, but son to be four, films we are left with:

1. Iron Man
2. Iron Man 2
3. The Hulk (Edward Norton vehicle not the Eric Bana/Ang Lee disaster)
4. Captain America
5. Thor
6. The Avengers

That’s a couple of movies.  There are sequel plans for Iron Man, Cap, Thor and the Avengers group as a whole.  Hank Pym and Wasp wait anxiously off frame hoping to be remembered or even mentioned.  Outside of the Batman revamp this is about as good a series of unfucked with comic books as we are likely to get.  Superman  is always going to be bad in film.  He’s just boring.  Sorry.  He’s invulnerable for crying out loud.  They killed him off in the nineties because the nineties hates everything especially placing things like an ‘e’ in front of XTREME.

Dear 90’s,

Fuck you.

Sincerely,

The letter E 

And that ended in disappointment.  Banner sales for a flagging series for a short period of time but crap nonetheless.  No one wants to see invulnerable.  It’s like playing with the kid who chooses like seventeen superpowers or all powers combined or his only weakness if getting stronger or some bullshit like that.  Fuck you Kyle and you’re immature bullshit.  I’m never playing with you again.

But what about the X-Men you say, or Spiderman?  Well the first two x-Men were fine.  Sadly they set up a promise Hollywood wasn’t ready to deliver on.  Those of you familiar with the dark phoenix knows the third x-men was probably the worst possible rehashing of crappy storylines.  It should have been more like the X-men were Japanese scientist and the Phoenix was Godzilla.  They get crushed.  Until they figure something out at the end or Jean’s humanity someone wins over in the end so they can kill her.  Not fall on the crutch of Sir Ian McKellan being awesome and able to save a shitty film.  Then there was the Wolverine movie.  I give them points from trying to build plot.  But that gets tossed out the door by convoluted plotlines, poor character decisions, as  well as their handling of two fan favorites Gambit and Deadpool.  The plot had the makings of being moderately acceptable.  But they achieved the feat of being complicated but completely stupid.  Poor character decisions come from a character making a necessary decision for the plot to progress but not correct in terms of the character we’ve seen developed.  If I create class bully as a character without signs of remorse he cannot simple turn over a new leaf once embarrassed once by the protagonist.  No after being embarrassed he tries to kick the shit out of him even harder. Why?  Because that’s how bullies fucking act.  It’s their nature.  Why did Gambit suck?  We spent three films waiting for him and he barely does anything.  Plus, worst of all, he’s kind of boring.  The man kicks boring in the face.  Why did deadpool suck?  Because they cast the right person for it and then ruined the fucking character, took away his ability to speak at one point and gave him fucking laser eyes.   He was only fun for a minutes and then basically of screen pasr the first ten minutes. Fuck you movie studios.  Why must you shit on the things I love?  On that note, special shout out to George ‘I hate my fans’ Lucas.  Evidence that it is never a good idea for one and only one creative input to have total reign with no censure or confines placed on them.  For Spiderman see emo Toby Maguire and the ruining of Venom.  Much smaller and staid fuck you that studio.

Quick note on the Hulk’s tumultuous film past.  Ang Lee’s movie was awful because they made the decision of removing, by choice, emotion from the lead character.  We as an audience want to relate to someone.  We’ve related to killers, assholes, vagabonds and weirdos but it’s hard to relate to someone who barely shows emotion.  Yes, I understand the point  But even as the Hulk he seemed quite.  He needs to snarl and snap.  Be violent.  The character needs to struggle to contain.  Not be so copped up he is unable to smile or frown.  There is tension to be had here.  The Edward Norton movie wasn’t that bad.  Certainly nothing special but not a crime against film or comic books.  I’m sad there was issues between him and the film studio but I do think Mark Ruffalo was better in the role.

The Avengers had a strong cast of relatable complicated characters with back stories, flaws and personality quirks.  It had snappy dialogue, and not just from the always witty Robert Downey Jr., and good pacing.  So much depends on things like pacing, development of tensions and correct easing of tension.  Too many movies deflate tension too quickly or too soon or don’t develop tension at the right moments.  Building proper tension is akin to boiling water.  You can’t do it in seconds.  You can create some jumps with cheap tactics like loud dramatic sounds cues from out of nowhere(usually called ‘the bus’ from a horror films use of a loud bus noise to cause the audience to jump).

There were one or two not so fantastic parts.  (spoilers).  As per usual the Hulk’s condition is complicated.  His grappling with his inner beast is centric to his story and his reason for being.  He is our reflection of our unexpressed rage personified.  We all wish sometimes to be able to blindly let loose pent up emotion.  But Banner must deal with keeping it in check for fear or constant eruption and endangerment of others.  In various points on the comic he is control to varying amounts.  The ‘heroes’ sent him off planet at one point as he was too dangerous to stay on earth.  The original reason for the Avengers to unite was to defeat the Hulk.  In the movie Banner is only partially in control.  He goes into Hulk rage twice.  Once with no control almost smashing up Black Widow.  Then the second time revealing that he was always angry simple changes at will and seems able to have some manner of control over himself but attacking the bad guy only (save for a ‘personal’ moment with Thor).  At what point was there a difference.  Yes it was necessary to have the Hulk be good guy at the end but how is there logic for the change?

Another problem is why did Loki piss off each Avenger individually.  Without doing so SHIELD would be unable to repell his assault.  But by angering each member of the team he effectively united them against him.  His psychological win in the second act only served to create a wedge for a short time.  One might argue that Loki wanted to win by going through these men and women instead of simply just subterfuge alone.  But who knows, he was adopted anyway (end spoilers)

But hopefully with its enormous box office wins Hollywood will pay attention to the kind of geek friendly movies they should be making.  You can make a smart action explosion special effect extravaganza.  The good films that should have been made instead of the crappy bastardized version Hollywood hacks churn out due to boring test groups may very well be avenged.

Ben

Who watches the watchmen? or why the hell are police still beating people up

There is a common joke about the nature of police.  That we fear and hate them.  Feel maligned by them but, at the slightest hint of danger, we call them and wait, incredulous they did not arrive sooner.  The reasoning is pretty simple.  If you get into an altercation with someone in power there is a distinct and natural fear that even by winning you will ultimately lose.   I’m not talking about beating a Lieutenant in bowling and he ships a horse’s head to my mother mind you.  There is also the thought of which side of the baton are you on.  Are you pointing at some invisible boogey man encouraging the police to get rid of the bad man or are you pulled over on the side of the road screaming in your own head ‘oh crap, oh crap, oh crap, what do I do?”  There is a justifiable fear in our country over the intention of our boys in blue.

Now cops are just a mass of people like any other job with wide range in personality and beliefs.  What is true about one police officer is utterly false about another.  But there tend to be overt similarities between this group due to the very specific nature of the job and they often tend to be not so good.  Like the whole idea of the grown up boys club.  Or the idea of abuse of power.

With the internet being such a strong medium for expression it’s difficult to keep stories of unexpected and extreme breeches of justice from leaking.  If you don’t think there is an issue with police brutality let me remind you of what is being done to peaceful protestors.  Whole parks were swept and removed of peaceful protestors during the 99%/occupy movement.  People were pepper sprayed by uncaring, remorseless, supposedly faceless cops.  Not so much anymore.  Sadly the internet instead of rage turned the pepper spray cop in all his in glory into a meme.

“On November 18th, 2011, a group of students at the University of California Davis campus gathered on campus for an Occupy protest, during which they formed a human chain by linking their arms together. When they refused to comply with the police request to leave, UC Davis Police officer Lieutenant John Pike and another officer walked across [the] group, administering orange pepper spray straight down the line of unmoving students”

http://knowyourmeme.com/memes/casually-pepper-spray-everything-cop

While there was outrage against the incident there was also the usual subterfuge, obfuscation and defensive maneuvering to avoid scrutiny or wrongdoing.  Unsurprisingly Fox News, which is starting the slowly lean back to center after years of listing to the right, took the side of the police in this incident.  The police issued a statement that was proved false by video evidence.  To my knowledge no formal apology was made and no hard repercussions have hit Lieutenant Pike.  But hopefully the constant internet memes, some of which are actually quite good, have brought some shame to his abhorrent actions.

The problem with protest is it can be easy to get agitated and violent in which case cops not only have the right to remove people but a necessity to do so.  A police officer’s job isn’t easy but that is never an excuse to pepper spray, to beat up someone, to plant evidence, or to pervert justice because of your position in the system.  The problem with crowd control is people don’t like being forcibly removed and they resist.  The issue is they scream they writhe they catch attention.  They think they aren’t being dangerous but to some guy whose job it is to secure safety this idiot needs to get tazed.  So events spiral  into violence and bad times.  Many times however cops simply are asked to show up and they remove protestors without good cause.  Or city councils declare reason to eject groups for superfluous and false reasons such as waste management.  Interestingly many of the occupy movement had a very smart structure set up in order to deal with waste, keeping clean, keeping fed and other necessities that didn’t come to mind in the first few days of gathering awareness.

By violence in protests is nothing new.  Economic inequality, which is seemingly tied to generational inequality, is just the latest global reason for protests (see Spain, Greece and Occupy movements).  There can be ties to other such important protests of equal rights from the sixties.  Economic oppression is still oppression just without the extra veneer of hatred that is racism.

There are many times officers hesitate and that results in injury or death on their part.  We as citizens cannot ignore the inherent danger in being an officer.  But we cannot let that danger cloud over the fact that often times that same hesitation means a kid doesn’t get shot.  Yes, maybe that kid was being an idiot and he had a paintball gun painted black, was wearing fatigues and prowling around (I’ve heard two different stories about idiots friends or acquaintances of friends with similar scenarios) but we can only hope the officer is trained and ready to resist the urge to shoot.  But the other options, the no lethal ones, they are being abused and they leave must nastier results that we’d like the think.  Like blindness.

http://www.informationliberation.com/?id=39592

Imagine being pepper sprayed so bad you can’t see.  Imagine pepper spray, which is meant to be fired from at least a minimum of six feet away was sprayed from blank range.  Spray that uses a charge to fire at 400 miles an hour.  Ignore the pepper just think of the force and the ocular trauma.   This time the officer was arraigned and found guilty on several charges.  But this won’t bring back sight to a newly blinded woman.  The term the used here was street justice due to contempt of cop.

I remember living in Philly if the cops were after you just don’t run.  Because if they catch you no matter whether you committed  crime you were going to get hurt.  It was not a city known for forgiveness with its law enforcement.

But back to the protests.  And protest are important.  We have a right, an innate right to peaceful protest.  We are not sheep.  It’s beyond disgusting that officials simply think it can be washed away and ignored.  Our cultural memory might be as long as etch a sketch in that news is consumed reacted and immediately discarded but at one point it begins to seep in.  One point there may will be more protests on the street.  There always has been and there always will be.  Whether these individuals are right isn’t relavent.  Their safety and right to free speech trumps that.  And it’s being trounced and ignored under dubious circumstances.

Chicago, a city found on violence and handling things its own way outside of normal legal boundaries, is now investing in using LRAD technology on protestors.  The same technology we’ve used in wars is being used on our own men and women.  Just how bad is this stuff.  People ran away from it into clouds of tear gas.  So not so good.

http://www.salon.com/2012/05/14/chicago_cops_new_weapon/singleton//

Maybe eventually we’ll move away and not towards a police state but right now it’s scary being an American and that is horrifying.  I’m not pleased with the amount of power our government has to detains, to hurt to censure and to monitor.  What protection do I have from those ‘protecting’ me?

Ben

Wrestling, the Male Soap Opera

I made fun of my wife for liking soap operas.  Mostly because they’re awful.  But there is a reason for them to be bad and there is, much to my chagrin, a real reason to like them.  Part of the reason they’re bad is that they have to make a couple hundred episodes a year and they are an hour long (around 44 minutes with commercials and intro) so that’s a lot of time to fill.  Even with the amount of characters they have to keep track of it isn’t easy.  That’s why there are so many Twilight like pauses of “intense” stares.  I put intense in quotes because I understand that’s what they are trying to convey intensity but most of the time I see bad acting or someone with bowel discomfort.  Kirsten Stewart didn’t invent bland bad acting with three possible emotional responses she just borrowed it from “The Bold and the Emotionally Vacant”… maybe not the name of the show but I actually prefer the honesty of it.  So some of the acting is bad on purpose to fill space, so we can forgive that.  The directing isn’t great because there a significant amount of crappy intertwining plot lines that they keep cutting between.   They do this to, again, fill time but also to slowly build the amount of tension.  But nothing fucking happens.    If you are familiar with Dragon Ball Z it’s kind of like that.  Ten episodes of buildup and one of actual culmination of action.  It’s like story foreplay.

Part of reason I can’t make fun of Adi is due to accidentally watching and following a soap opera.  At UPS I took my lunch around the time of a soap opera.  And it was always on in the background.  The silly inane prattling wormed its way in.  Bit by bit I caught myself paying attention.  Actually knowing who the character were.  All incidentally.  Incidentally is also how I ended up watching the stupidity that is professional wrestling.

Wrestling is not a product an intelligent adult admits to watching without a twinge of shame.  It has ridiculous story lines, an inherently flawed premise, twigs with engorged/enhanced front bits, needless (sometimes) violence, and generally very base subject matter.  Also its wonderfully contradictory.  There is such an air of hetero male superiority but at the same time we’re watching grown men who are shaved, oiled, in small amounts of spandex, aggressively grappling each other in attempts to force each other to the mat.  Another odd hypocrisy is the new bullying campaign the WWE is heading up.  While I commend them for helping kids by talking to them about the real dangers and effects of bullying I’m still confused.  I’m confused because it’s coming from pro wrestling.  This is the programming where two guys insult each other for twenty minutes before hitting each other.  And not like ‘you suck as a grappler,’ no, it’s ‘your momma’ jokes and worse.  So the guys who put on insult fest and smacking each other are standing against bullying.

But logic is not the strong suit of wrestling.  Remember this is a business where a guy who is 190 pounds can beat a behemoth of 350 pounds. That essentially doesn’t happen.  And yes you can make the argument that skill levels the playing field.  But both these men have presumably trained for a while.  You don’t pull people off the street and say get in the ring.  So giving up that much weight and winning is a wee bit beyond the whole willing suspension of disbelief.

The way I found wrestling was a friend of a friend was intensely passionate about it.  He would stop whatever he was doing and rush to the set to watch.  It was on in the background.  We made fun of him for it but we slowly gravitated to the couch and watched.  Week by week we started paying attention and stopped making snide comments.  Then it happened.  We were cheering, we cared about the fake wrestlers wins and losses.  The silly story lines and the sillier belts.  Then I realized ‘hey, this stupid wrestling thing is kind of fun.’  And it was.  And there have been gladiatorial references made and with good reason.  A crowd of spectators cheering around an arena with large sweaty men beating each other in combat.  And there is evidence that in many gladiator bouts they were entirely faked with false bloody ending.  Obviously it isn’t always a good a idea to kill half of your performers.  It might be more economic to simply stage the destruction and death.  Unlike gladiator bout anyone nowadays who argues that wrestling isn’t fake needs to grow up.  And yes I agree that you can’t fake falling off a ladder and you can’t fake it when you actually get hit.  But if wrestling was entirely real these men and women wouldn’t be one camera every week after the ‘beatings’ they take.  Unless of course you are talking about the indie wrestlers.

The independents are where most of the active wrestlers are.  You’ve got all the young talents looking for a break and the older ones who are winding down their careers.  The problem with the indy leagues is often times the wrestlers do silly dangerous things.  Like backyard wrestling jumping off house roofs though flaming tables kind of things.  There is reason why there is the airing of warning before pay per views.  But young men tend to ignore that warnings and severely hurt themselves.  In the indies they take is further.  I watched a documentary recently called Card Subject to Change about the independent wrestlers.  I was a little bit disgusted by the lifestyle and violence.  You had one young man living too hard and fast who hit rock bottom from drugs.  After close to a year of jail time he left with body near ruined, face bloated and muscles turned flabby.  A young man in his prime close to fame cut down.  Then you see him broken but optimistic on his reemergence and sincere hope to rise again.  But his second (or perhaps a number higher) overdose would not have him come back.  Then there was the dangerous Necro Butcher self proclaimed hick.  The name should warn you to his standards of safety.  I’ve seen horror movies without blinking but the human atrocities I saw this man inflict and go through made me a bit ill.  I won’t detail them here but that kind of mentality is what turns a fun possibly family friendly entertainment into something ugly.  Can I blame him for abusing his body to make money, not so much, but can I blame him for encouraging more dangerous stupidity into an already dangerous profession, yeah, yeah I can.

So why is wrestling the male soap opera?  Let’s compare the similarities first and then we’ll add the maleness.  Months long intertwining plot lines and many characters?  Check.   Silly storylines with not particularly good actors?  Check.  Lots of camera time for the attractive males and females and some camera time for the less attractive comedy characters?  Check.  Backstabbing, character revelations and surprise twists  – in wrestling it’s called turning as they go from face, good guy, to heel, bad guy, and vice versa – as well as the ultimate question who is sleeping with who.  Check.  The maleness in wrestling come s from well the overwhelming violence and the de-emphasis on story versus hitting.

So next time you see a wrestling fan before you make fun of them… nah, just make of them.  Wrestling is stupid and people who take it too seriously are most definitely in need of reminding.

Ben

ISP Rage

The absence of the internet for two days left me a quivering pile of childish rage.  Not my best moment.  I really wanted to play on the interwebs and, thanks to AT&T, I couldn’t.  I wanted to surf and play computer games.  Not earth shattering.  I also wanted to write for this blog which is a bit more important than simple hand eye coordination silliness.  Without the connection I felt it worthless to spend a few hours writing (It wasn’t but I was angry).  So I plugged and replugged.  I reset the modem.  I begged the web gods.  I called (well Adi called) and talked with tech support.  I hate tech support.  It isn’t the support people’s fault; I’ve run a support desk and the ingenuity of people’s stupidity simply astounds me.  One of the problems with tech support is they have a process to go through.  The plugging and replugging the simple checks.  Why, you might ask,  because it works a lot.  The replugging is often because of a snag on their end.  Your router was on when there was a hard reset somewhere down the line.

Is this such a big problem though?  Am I making too much out of it… not really.  Here is why.  We need the internet.  I’m not joking in the slightest.  It isn’t an inalienable right but it’s almost as important as the rest of utilities along with power and water.  It’s frightening to think that but imagine no more internet.  How do most people apply for jobs, find, respond and get jobs.  Through email.  Don’t think social media is important?  Social media drives marketing, data mining, gaming and tons of other industries on the rise.  It’s part of our social culture as well.  It’s like banning writing letters.  The internet is not a joke as much as it tries to act that way.  But moving along…

Comcast, my least favorite provider, was awesome at never alerting me to outages.  I lived in Philadelphia, the city where Comcast was spawned.  I spent hours on the phone haggling with them.  Often the signal was bad.  And they wouldn’t tell me until I went through the twenty minutes of waiting and then more twenty minutes of the normal bullshit process to eliminate those who A.) don’t have time, B.) have short fuses and C.) are idiots who don’t know what to do otherwise.  Then they’d try to hang up as soon as possible close out the ticket and tell me it will be fixed eventually.  This is why people hate cable and internet service providers.  The customer service sucks and outages are awful.  Outages are constant and never explained.  Worse they don’t refund your time.  I pay for a month of uninterrupted and unlimited service why should I pay full price when they don’t hold up their end.  I pay on time.  I guarantee if I don’t pay they’ll be calling and demanding their money.  They would be correct.  But I said I was experiencing technical difficulties and would get back to them in two days or so they wouldn’t laugh.  They lack humor.

Do these Internet Service Providers need to be held accountable for proper service?  How bad are they?  Well read this about Comcast and yes it’s from wiki so take it with a grain of salt.

“In 2004 and 2007, the American Customer Satisfaction Index survey found that Comcast had the worst customer satisfaction rating of any company or government agency in the country, including the Internal Revenue Service. However, the ACSI indicates that almost half of all cable customers (regardless of company) have registered complaints, and that cable is the only industry to score below 60 in the ACSI.”

http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comcast#section_5

So, that’s not so good.  Comcast is less liked than the IRS.  Think about that for a minutes, the only job of the IRS is to take your money.  And people like the IRS more than Comcast.  Thank god they are not running the prison system.  But don’t worry private business is gobbling up all the prison systems in an attempt to create a nice little relationship with the government which has been likened to the military industrial complex.  Which is bad in that it means these for profit companies want there to be people in jail and want to make it profitable and for the government to need to rely on them  Yay!

So how bad is Comcast?  Is it just constant outages, and garbage support?  Nope. Let me give you a small personal example of annoyance followed by a not so small but not personal example.  When we moved to Groton for about a year it was my turn to set up cable.  The wonderful complex – by wonderful I really mean monstrously bad people who suck the happiness directly out of their inhabitants like happiness succubi ­– told us in no uncertain terms get Comcast.  I’m rather sure this isn’t fair and perhaps even illegal but it isn’t worth calling Alaska to find out; my brother the lawyer is currently in Alaska being cold and doing various lawyery things.  So I set up Comcast.  I pull full Comcast prices but don’t get full services.  I get the bargain basement cable company they swallowed from the area.  So I get crap service for expensive prices with no ability to haggle.  Meanwhile the other cable company nearby is fair better and cheaper.  But Comcast doesn’t care.  They don’t have to care.  They have so much of the market share they can afford to upset most of the customers because they won’t leave.  Also some manner of apathy plays in.  It’s  a pain in the ass to switch so dealing with it seems a better prospect.  My Groton service included an outdated box, bad service, crappy signal, and full price.  So my internet speeds were less than advertised but still at the rate I should pay for full speed.  Sweet.

But that’s just annoyances.  What about profiteering during a natural disaster.  That sounds heartwarming and uplifting.  It’s like an uplifting Disney movie playing in reverse.  Things go from ok to awful to worse.  And then don’t get better.  Again this is from wiki so it could be incorrect, overstated or totally true.  Knowing Comcast I’m leaning towards factual.  During hurricane Ike Comcast charged for damaged and lost equipment.  Warms the cockles of your heart.  Plus they didn’t compensate the bill for interrupted service.  Even warmer cockles!

So, in short, fuck you Comcast, you’re bad people and should feel bad.  And AT&T, you suck too.

Ben

Science in Advertising

Commercials make claims, it’s what they do.  “Make your hair shinier.”  “Make your hair less shiny.”  “Lose the weight.”   “Gain the weight.”  “Sleep better.”  And on and on.  But with all the noise does it mean anything anymore?  Do we care if four of five doctors say anything?  What if the four doctors got C’s through school and slept through half their residency and the last one is House?  I’m sticking with House.  But there are laws that deal with truth in advertising.  Laws meant to prevent purely false claims from misleading you for profit.  There are some loopholes and idiosyncrasies that allow some bad advertising get through.  But the intent is to get rid of purely spurious claims.  Spurious means apocryphal if you didn’t know.  Apocryphal means I’m being a word whore instead of just saying deceitful  or dubious in regards to authenticity.  The point I’m eventually grasping towards is there is line, albeit a hazy and wide one, which one side is acceptable behavior to boast about your product and then the other side is filled with very bad marketing people who don’t like to tell the truth. 

This leads me to online dating sites.  I’ve never used one but I know a lot of people who have.  Dating sites are the bane of eager nosy matchmakers everywhere stealing your ‘gossipy let’s introduce everybody to everybody’ friend’s thunder.  They represent, I think and kindly don’t quote me, about one fifth of all new relationships.  That’s a whole lot of people.  There are ton of sites out there.  There a religious oriented ones like Christian Mingle or J Date and a whole bunch of not so specific ones.  I don’t really need to utilize this service so I’m not sure how far down the rabbit hole it goes with specificity but this the internet I’m sure there is a geek site, various sexuality sites, and something’s that are probably illegal in several states/countries dating sites.

There are quite a few problems with online dating sites like a few actively screen out homosexuals.  I know a person who tested this by answering all questions truthfully save for orientation and was rejected with no reason given.  Obviously this requires further investigation to claim as true but it isn’t the best of indicators.  The newest trouble facing dating sites is this.  They’re full of shit.  That’s the scientific version in a nut shell.  No really.

So you’d think these sites employee social scientists.  Well they do.  But you’d think these guys might agree on proper metrics.  Not so much.  You’d think they might agree on process a wee bit.  Not even close.

“ “If you're gonna make scientific claims, act like a scientist. Or don't make scientific claims," UCLA social psychology professor Benjamin Karney says.”

http://blogs.laweekly.com/arts/2012/04/eharmony_research_bullshit.php

And yes the link even has the word bullshit in it.  This make me happy.

So it seems academia is divided here.  By academia I mean some Professors at UCLA are having a hissy fit over eharmony (one of them works there you see).  One of them states, and I am generalizing here, that eharmony doesn’t really have proper methodology for matching people.  It’s smoke and mirrors.  So you aren’t getting matched on compatibility you’re getting matched by chance.  Chance may be romantic but chance isn’t what those commercials say.  They act like there is this magical formula for human interaction they’ve cracked.  The love masters poured their thoughts  into cyberspace, man I hope that’s what they were pouring, to help your love life.  Awfully nice of them.  Except for the, you know, bullshit part it seems.

So while meeting someone on the internet might be a great way to find people don’t expect it be the way to match yourself mathematically.  But if they don’t have a proper system or even at least a reall good attempt at one is still fair for them to advertise saying you’ll find your soul mate.  Is that now in the realm of illegal claims with no backup.

My website claims to increase its members sex life exponentially though a specific algorithm of carefully matching, well not really carefully matching just throwing a dart at bunch of loose women who want free dinner. … That might actually work.   It wouldn’t be false advertising but it could very well be illegal for different reason.

Being serious for a moment I do have severe problem with dating sites making claims like this.  It’s one thing for McDonalds to say they have  delicious salad, fuck you, but it’s different to toss around people’s emotions.  These are people looking for a connection and they aren’t being treated with the respect they deserve.  You aren’t a number and you aren’t a payment.  You’re a person.  And yes I see the irony that this is coming from an analyst.

What does surprise me is if these dating sites aren’t using a formula why are they so behind.  Target know when girls are pregnant before their parents do.  No, I’m serious.  They look at your purchases and can link certain increases or habits to pregnancy.  Just from what you buy.  And not the obvious thing like a pregnancy test and baby clothes.  I’m talking about a shift in cosmetics and extra cotton balls.  Yeah, they haven analysts there that slick.  And then they tailor the ads to the individuals but not so much where it’s obvious you are getting the baby package.  You get ads similar but not the same as your neighbor possibly.  That’s form joining a club and having your purchases tracked.  Imagine what MasterCard and Visa could do and how much data they have on you.  But don’t worry I’m sure our government is really good at protecting our privacy rights especially against large corporations…

Ben