On the outside chance you haven’t already seen this, here’s Andy Serkis reading several tweets from Donald Trump in the voice of Gollum on the July 12 episode of The Late Show with Stephen Colbert.
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Rahat is back at the drive-thru, this time with characters from the Five Nights at Freddy’s video game family. If like me you’re not sure what that is, see Wikipedia’s article on it. Basically, the games are inspired by the notion of animatronic characters from a Chuck E Cheese-like pizza place who run riot at night. But you don’t need to be familiar with the game world to enjoy the reactions of people at the drive-thru, mainly a mix of shock and amusement. It’s one of Rahat’s better pranks in my estimation, and the video runs only 3½ minutes.
More posts with Rahat’s prank videos here.
by A number of countries in the world have decided to set a minimum age of 18 or higher for both men and women, including China, Denmark, Egypt, Kenya, the Philippines, South Korea, Sweden, Switzerland, and Vietnam, among various others. (In some countries that officially do not recognize younger marriages they still take place.)
Most jurisdictions — including all U.S. states — still allow minors to marry with permission from one or both parents, the approval of a court, or both. For details by country, see this Wikipedia article. The rules for U.S. states can be found in this one.
Despite tradition, there’s much to be said for preventing marriages by people too young to sign a contract or buy a house or car. In most places marriage is supposed to be a long-term commitment, and 17 or younger is pretty young to make a decision that could affect the rest of your life. True, some marriages to very young spouses are happy and enduring, the classic example being that of Will and Ariel Durant. (He was a teacher in his late 20s when they married and she was a student in her mid-teens. According to their autobiography, she had pursued him rather than the other way around. The Durants died two weeks apart in 1981 when he was 96 and she was 83. She had stopped eating when he was taken to the hospital and died first. His death came very soon after he learned of her death from a television news report.)
But most child marriages are not so romantic and the great majority end in divorce, at least when divorce is allowed. In many cases the woman is much younger than the man and not particularly interested in marrying him but is coerced into doing so. When both parties are relatively young, it’s still pretty common for the marriage to follow pregnancy and to serve as a way to avoid a charge of child molestation or statutory rape.
Various groups and individuals have been trying to get the law changed. As Samantha Bee reports below, in New Hampshire, which now allows boys to marry at 14 and girls at 13 with the consent of a judge, a Girl Scout is leading an effort raise the marriage age to 18.
by I hesitate to add to the cacophony over this, and by “this” I mean Donald Trump Junior’s confirmation that despite months of emphatic denials, very senior members of the Trump campaign were involved in efforts to get anti-Clinton information from the Russian government. But I wanted to put in one place links to some of the most interesting commentary on the subject.
First a quick summary of what I’m talking about:
Over the last several days The New York Times published a series of articles about a meeting in Trump Tower on June 9 of last year between Natalia Veselnitskaya, Donald Trump Jr, Jared Kushner, and Paul Manafort. Veselnitskaya is a Russian attorney with reported ties to the Russian government (though she denies that). Jared Kushner is married to Ivanka Trump and apparently very close to his father-in-law, having been given a number of major assignments in the administration. Paul J Manafort was at the time the head of the Trump campaign.
Trump Jr had previously denied ever taking part in campaign-related meetings with Russian nationals, but in response to the new revelations he offered a changing story that culminated yesterday — hours before a new story was expected from the Times — in his release on Twitter of the email exchange that led to the meeting in question. (For a more readable version see this this article at Talking Points Memo.)
The emails as well as Trump Jr’s recent public statements make it clear that he expected the meeting to be about information that would be harmful to Hillary Clinton and hence helpful to his father’s campaign, information he was expressly told was part of the Russian government’s efforts to help the elder Trump.
Moreover, in one email he wrote of the advantage of having the information come out later in the summer, and as you probably recall, damaging hacked DNC emails were indeed released later in the summer, emails that U.S. intelligence agencies concluded were obtained by their Russian counterparts in an effort to influence the U.S. election.
Even if it’s true, as Trump Jr says, that no anti-Clinton information was forthcoming at the meeting, the point remains that he along with other senior people in the Trump campaign pretty clearly expected to get aid from the Russian government to help defeat Clinton. A number of lawyers of both parties suggest this was likely a violation of U.S. law. (Trump Jr recently hired a criminal defense attorney.) Others, including Republicans, have gone so far as to label it “treason.”
On a lighter note, Nicole Lafond at Talking Points Memo yesterday quoted journalist Jared Yates Sexton as saying over a series of tweets, “That sound you just heard was every Trump lawyer in DC opening the window and screaming. […] I chased this story for a year and he just…tweeted it out. Like, I spent hours and days and weeks and months. And his son just, hit tweet. I tracked down sources. Followed so many dead leads. Labored over this. And then, he just, you know, tweeted out the proof.”
Below is Senator Mark Warner (D-Virginia), ranking member of the Intelligence Committee, which is investigating Russian influence on the 2016 election, on PBS News Hour yesterday. Warner, a former governor of Virginia who was previously a venture capitalist, is a moderate Democrat known for working across the aisle and not an extreme partisan.
Of course, late night comedy shows have had a grand time with the news. My favorite bit was this from Stephen Colbert (who makes some pretty valid points along with the snarky jokes):
Trevor Noah also did a god job with the story on The Daily Show Monday and Tuesday nights:
That’s enough for now, but at the rate things are going you should probably keep watching the news, or at least the political comedy shows.
by Ally Hord and Amber Ruffin, a couple of writers for Late Night with Seth Meyers offer up contrasting views on the film Wonder Woman. The bit itself is OK (and Ally sneaks in some legitimate serious points), but from the point when Amber demonstrates some really bad aim a little past 2 minutes and 45 seconds in, I admit I cracked up.
by The Funny Times is a tabloid newspaper published monthly and full of cartoons (political and otherwise) and comic essays, along with other nifty things such as “News of the Weird” and “Harper’s Index.” I highly recommend it. And if enough people keep subscribing, they’ll keep publishing and I’ll be able to keep reading.
One of my favorite regular features is the “Curmudgeon” column by Jon Winokur, which lists quotes on a different topic each month. A couple of examples from a recent issue having to do with insects:
In the 2016 June issue former medical transcriptionist M.K. Wolfe wrote about experience using an automatic voice recognition system that would take a first crack at transcribing the doctor’s words, after which a human would clean it up, because the software was not exactly perfect. Here, for example, are actual automated transcriptions, which the author swears are real:
| AS DICTATED BY THE DOCTOR | AS TRANSCRIBED BY THE SOFTWARE |
| His girlfriend told us … | His neural foreman told us … |
| Both of his parents are alive and fairly well. | Both of his calves are alive and fairly well. |
| The patient was discharged to Eden Springs. | The patient was discharged to eat his brain. |
| The patient was prescribed Dexilant. | The patient was prescribed Dixieland. |
| Dr. J removed her pins. | Dr. J removed her pants. |
| The patient was accompanied by his spouse. | The patient was accompanied by his bowels. |
| The wound was dressed with antibiotic ointment. | The wound was dressed with antibiotic vomit. |
| … history of hepatitis B virus infection … | … history of up his beavers infection … |
| I also added Coreg … | I also added cornbread … |
| … referred for medical workup … | … referred for metal pole workup … |
| … with hep C … | … with Pepsi … |
| The pain only occurs on eating. | The pain only occurs on the 18th. |
| The patient had a biopsy of his rectum. | The patient had a biopsy of his raccoon. |
A few items from Roz Warren’s The Bigger Book of Parenting Tweests as excerpted in The Funny Times:
by Every year Bill and Melinda Gates write a letter on behalf of their foundation reporting on world trends. This year they address it to Warren Buffet, the famously wealthy investor who in 2006 donated the bulk of his assets to the Gates Foundation. (This was the single largest charitable donation in history.)
As it happens, I’m not particularly a fan of Bill Gates, and I think some projects of the Bill and Melinda Gates foundation (none of them relevant to this particular post, however) are based on bad ideas. But what they have to say in this latest letter is worth reading. The world faces some very serious problems, including global warming, but there are also some positive trends. See my previous post for more about that.
There are a number of reasons to take note of positive trends, starting with the fact that there’s a lot to be said for acknowledging reality both good and bad. But if you assume that everything is getting worse, that crime and poverty and war and so on just keep getting worse and worse and worse despite everything we try to do about it, that encouraging just giving up. Recognizing that some things are getting better, that our efforts are paying off, encourages us to try harder. So we should pay attention, for example, to the fact that
As the letter acknowledges, not all the news is good. In 2016 a million babies died the day they were born, and in 2015 2.6 percent of babies died before they were one month old. But even some very poor countries have found ways to reduce that death rate by training people in how to help mothers and newborn infants, or example by encouraging breastfeeding and mother-child contact. Doing something about hunger and malnutrition would be a tremendous help, since 45 percent of child deaths are linked to malnutrition.
This is just a brief summary. The letter itself is not all that long and it’s worth reading. Here again is the link.
by Hans Rosling, who died of pancreatic cancer 2017 February 7 at the age of 68, was professor of international health at the Karolinska Institute in Sweden. He was a gifted public speaker who specialized in correcting popular misconceptions, including pessimistic ones about the Third World.
For example (as Amardeo Sarma points out in a brief article Rosling in the July/August issue of Skeptical Inquirer magazine), Rosling pointed out that it took just 30 years for the fertility rate in overpopulated Bangladesh to decline from aLmost seven children per woman to less then three. Poverty, high childhood mortality, and lack of education and family planning explained the previous high rate. And while many people think deep poverty is an intractable problem, Rosling demonstrated through hard numbers that extreme problem is in fact declining and actually can be eliminated.
Rosling’s son and daughter-in-law, Ola Rosling and Anna Rosling Rönnlund, plan to continue his work, writing, “Hans is no longer alive, but he will always be with us and his dream of a fact-based worldview we will never let die!”
Below is one of Rosling’s well-regarded TEDx Talks, this one about the drop in child mortality and the accompanying reduction in family size and population grown. For more of his talks, see https://www.ted.com/speakers/hans_rosling.
See also Hans Rosling’s website, Gapminder.org and the UN Development Goals websites UN Millennium Project and Global Goals, the latter for the newest, even more ambitious plans.
For more from this blog on the United Nations Millennium Deveopment Goals and other positive trends, see also these earlier posts:
And for other positive trends see this 2013 Business Insider piece by Rob Wile.
by Here’s Dr Aaron Carroll’s five-minute summary of the latest publicly released version of the Senate’s proposed healthcare changes.
If you’ve been keeping up with this, you’re probably already familiar with most of the bad news. Costs would rise and benefits would drop so much for people buying their own coverage that millions would decide they just couldn’t afford any health insurance. Federal Medicaid funding would be cut so much in the future that states (which administer and partly fund Medicaid) would likely have to cut way back on the number of people covered. In a decade or so 22 million fewer people would be covered than under the Affordable Care Act.
by This article on game designers from the July 5 issue of IndyWeek (a weekly newspaper in the Raleigh / Durham / Chapel Hill area of North Carolina) is definitely worth a quick read.
Just as there are scads of novelists, filmmakers, and computer game creators all over the place, there are also people who design more traditional board and card games, including some that sound very clever and original. One such game is Belle of the Ball, in which players play hosts of competing social events during which they compete to attract the Belle of the Ball to their own party. The creator of the game, Daniel Solis of Durham, has published over a dozen games and makes his living with them.
Nearby Chapel Hill is home to a game publisher called Dice Hate Me Games, founded by Chris Kirkman. They have 25 titles out, including Belle of the Ball. For links to more information on the games mentioned, see the article linked to at the start of this post.
My late younger brother Tom liked board games and would have loved to read about this. At odd moments of the years he worked on his own idea for a game parodying professional wrestling, in which players would manage “stables” of wrestlers, as in the WWE circa 1980. Since Tom didn’t want to pay any licensing fees, he provided a set of made-up wrestlers, but players were free to import their own, including not just their own creations but also (as in fantasy football) real persons. And the universe of possible draftees wasn’t limited to actual athletes but could include anybody at all, real or fictional, historical or contemporary. Granny from The Beverly Hillbillies could fight The Incredible Hulk. The Dr Watson from Sherlock (Martin Freeman) could wrestle the Dr Watson from Elementary (Lucy Liu). Aristotle could take on Mr Spock. It’s a shame he never published the game.
As for me, I like the idea in principle, but as I keep griping, I don’t have enough free time. In fact, I don’t seem to have enough free time to do much of anything at all, which seems impossible now that I think about it, the temporal equivalent of Yogi Berra’s “Nobody goes there anymore; it’s too crowded.” What’s weird is that Hank Green, the entrepreneur who’s all over YouTube and everything else, apparently has time to play board games with Wil Wheaton. (See this link if you don’t believe me.) How the hell does he get that much free time and I don’t get any?
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