My brother Tom recommended that I watch last night’s episode of The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, and he was right; it was definitely worth seeing. I can’t embed the whole episode here, but you can watch it on the Comedy Central site. Here’s the link.
Stewart devoted the first segment to Tuesday’s Supreme Court oral arguments on same-sex marriage, with hilarious commentary on the demonstrators outside, and the observation that the marriage equality opponents inside (including some members of the Court) basically had nothing.
In fact, the level of legal representation for the anti-marriage side was was downright embarrassing. Any halfway competent attorney (or member of a middle-school debate team for that matter) anticipates what the other side is likely to say and prepares an answer that gives at least a superficial impression of being reasonable. So if you’re going to argue, for example, that same-sex couples shouldn’t have the right to marry because they can’t procreate, you better have some plausible-sounding reason for applying this argument only to same-sex couples and not to other couples who are unable to have children.
But when Justice Ginsburg asked, “Suppose a couple, 70-year-old couple, comes in and they want to get married?” the attorney representing the forces of evil seemed taken by surprise and said something to the effect that well, a 70-year-old man could be fertile, and it would be preferable for him to be so in the bonds of marriage. Not only does that entirely miss the point, if anything it could be interpreted as a suggestion that 70-year-old heterosexual men should be allowed to get married, but only to much younger women.
(Justice Ginsburg single-handedly blasted pretty much all the opponents’ arguments to smithereens and Riverdanced on the rubble. For a brief summary see this link.)
Opponents are right in arguing that marriage helps provide a stable home environment for raising children, but since many same-sex couples are in fact raising children, this is another good reason to extend marriage rights to same-sex couples.
(For my own take, such as it is, on the day at the Supreme Court, see this previous post.)
The remainder of last night’s Daily Show was devoted to Stewart’s interview of Judith Miller, the New York Times reporter whose credulous parroting of the Bush administration’s claims about weapons of mass destruction helped promote the Iraq War. Stewart is critical but fair and respectful, something it would be nice to see on non-comedy news programs.
Apparently McDonald’s is trying out a design-your-own-burger kiosk in some of its restaurants. Here someone attempts to create the maximum possible burger with reasonably amusing results. Among other things, he discovers a bug in McDonald’s point-of-sale software, and McDonald’s might want to rethink its upper limit on some of the items. The crew and manager do their best to accommodate the customer, and a good time is had by all.
Nothing profound or original here, just a few observations:
It appears that quite large peaceful protests were largely ignored by the news media, especially outside the local area. Only when they turned violent and destructive did they excite much attention. Not only does this create a false impression about the overall reaction, it might conceivably even encourage destructive violence as a way of getting noticed.
Of course, rioting is stupid and counterproductive. The following commentary by a Baltimore resident explains that. The language in this video is definitely not safe for work, but however offensive his manner of speaking might be to many, it actually might help get across his message:
This reminds me a little of a now-common distortion of the concept of nonviolent civil disobedience. Back in the early 1960s there were protests in which African American citizens lined up to register to vote, knowing the local authorities would not permit it and would very likely arrest them (which indeed often happened). The organizers were careful to urge those taking part to make sure they did not block the sidewalk or do anything else that might justify police intervention, so that when they were arrested, it was clear that it was for exercising a basic right of citizenship. The same is basically true of Gandhi’s acts of nonviolent civil disobedience, such as the boycott against British textiles and defiance of the British salt monopoly. Now it’s not unusual for nonviolent demonstrators to intentionally block streets, sidewalks, public transportation, or building entrances (from college administration buildings to women’s health clinics) in an attempt to draw more attention or to provoke arrest. But in such cases the arrests are not for exercising one’s own rights but for denying others theirs. That strikes me as something of a different order, an assertion not of one’s equal right but of one’s imagined superiority, and it troubles me whether I agree with the protest in question or not. It is, of course, far better than resorting to violence, but that doesn’t automatically make it OK.
Update: For something that might have helped provoke the destructiveness in Baltimore, see this later post.
Finally, we should recall that major or minor riots happen many places with even less provocation than in Baltimore, for example in response to a major victory or loss by a local sports team, as noted in this article.
Yesterday the Supreme Court heard oral arguments in cases concerning same-sex marriage. You can find summaries and analyses and readings of entrails all over the place, so I’ll just briefly mention that there are two principal questions before the Court:
Do same-sex couples have a constitutional right to marry?
Do states have to recognize same-sex marriages legally performed in other states?
It’s very hard to imagine that the Court will produce a negative answer to Question 2, given that at least one or two conservative members of the Court yesterday seemed to suggest that a split-decision — “No” on Question 1 but “Yes” on Question 2 — could serve as a compromise. Of course, such a ruling would have the practical effect of legalizing same-sex marriage nationwide, except for couples unable to travel for health or financial reasons.
Question 1 is a tougher call, but only because of ideology. The Court already ruled — unanimously — in the wonderfully named Loving v Virginia (1967) that “Marriage is one of the ‘basic civil rights of man,’ fundamental to our very existence and survival.”
The only real objection against same-sex marriage is that many people think it as unnatural, immoral, or contrary to the will of God, which are of course exactly the same complaints raised against mixed-race marriages 50 years before and gave rise to Supreme Court decision just quoted. (In fact, the trial judge who originally sentenced the Lovings wrote in his ruling that their marriage not only violated Virginia’s 1924 Racial Integrity Act but was against the will of God.)
In Lawrence v Texas (2003) the Court held that mere popular disapproval was on its own not sufficient grounds to deny a fundamental right, prompting Justice Antonin Scalia to write in dissent, “If moral disapprobation of homosexual conduct is ‘no legitimate state interest’ for purposes of proscribing that conduct … what justification could there possibly be for denying the benefits of marriage to homosexual couples exercising ‘[t]he liberty protected by the Constitution?'” Indeed.
Usually there is some validity to both sides in a dispute. Even opponents of mixed-race marriage could point to the potential problems children of mixed-race parents might encounter. (For example, they risked being elected president.) But opponents of same-sex marriage haven’t been able to think of anything that holds up to serious scrutiny.
Same-sex couple can’t have kids: (1) We don’t make fertility a prerequisite for mixed-sex marriage, and (2) lots of kids are in fact being raised by same-sex couples, and denying their parents the right to marry doesn’t help those kids.
Same-sex marriage will somehow damage or diminish mixed-sex marriage: The assertion never made any sense to start with and, now that same-sex marriage is legal in some many states and countries, it’s pretty obvious that the world hasn’t ended. Same-sex marriage has no affect on traditional marriage at all. The institution is entirely unchanged. All it means is that a new group of people are also able to marry.
Marriage equality is new and goes against tradition: (1) So did the abolition of slavery and every other advance in the human condition. (2) So there’s now a waiting period on human rights?
Homosexuals already enjoy an equal right to marry; they just have to marry someone of the opposite sex: (1) This is a recycled argument against mixed-race marriage that was just as silly half a century ago. (2) I wonder if the people saying this actually believe it (which strongly suggests they haven’t thought the matter through) or merely hope that somebody else will fall for it.
Same-sex marriage redefines marriage: (1) Even if it did, so what? Words change meanings all the time. (2) Think about this a minute: If someone started talking about “same-sex refrigeration” you wouldn’t know what they meant unless they explained that they’d redefined “refrigeration” to mean “marriage,” but you know what “same-sex marriage” is because you already know what “marriage” means. Changing who can get married (for example, raising the marriage age) doesn’t alter the meaning of the word “marriage.”
Update: Jon Stewart had a similar reaction to supposed arguments against same-sex marriage, as for that matter did Justice Ginsburg. See this later post.
(Update: I see I managed to post this review twice. I’ll leave both in place to avoid possible broken links. The later version is here, but except for possible typos I don’t think there are any differences.)
James Franco plays the not-very-bright host of a popular celebrity interview show. Seth Rogen is his producer and best friend but regrets not having followed his dream of being a serious journalist. But then he scores a journalistic coup: It turns out that North Korean Supreme Leader Kim Jong-Un, a big pop culture fan, watches Franco’s show on satellite and is willing to be interviewed live and in person in Pyongyang. Not only are Franco and Rogen delighted, so is the CIA, which concocts a way for them to assassinate Kim with a slow-acting poison.
Randall Park plays Kim Jong-Un, which Kim should probably find flattering. Lizzy Kaplan plays a hot CIA agent and Diana Bang is the stern North Korea propaganda official Rogen finds himself lusting after even though she never smiles and earnestly insists that Supreme Leader Kim lacks a lower orifice since his excellence precludes any need for him to poop.
As you no doubt recall, North Korea threw an international hissy fit on learning of this film and theater chains canceled bookings in response to terror threats, but public outrage led to Sony’s releasing it on schedule (as a Christmas movie yet).
Some cynics have suggested that the studio might have engineered at least some of this, because the film probably wouldn’t have done as well financially on its own merits. That might be giving them too much credit for cleverness.
James Franco is mainly annoying, though he has his moments. Seth Rogen (who also co-directed with Evan Goldberg) has most of the funny bits, and there are enough to keep the film from being downright bad if not sufficient to make it good. That assessment seems shared by most reviewers, though at least one (Drew McWeeny at HitFix) found the film “laugh out loud funny all the way through” and another (Scott Foundas at Variety) called it an “alleged satire that’s about as funny as a communist food shortage, and just as protracted.” Even the fratboys who might be the film’e target audience are apt to be disappointed, perhaps even outraged, by the tiny amount of screen time allocated to breasts.
(Update: I see I managed to post this review twice. I’ll leave both in place to avoid broken links. The other version is here, but with the possible exception typos I don’t think there are any differences.)
Ben Affleck and Rosamund Pike are writers who met, fell in love, and got married in New York and now live in Missouri, where he teaches creative writing and helps his twin sister run a bar. They’re just about to celebrate their fifth wedding anniversary when she goes missing, and a shattered glass coffee table suggests something bad happened.
Her wealthy parents, writers themselves, fly in to launch an effort to find her, and when the media discover that the missing woman was the basis for their hugely popular series of “Amazing Amy” children’s books, the disappearance becomes major national news.
Adapted by Gillian Flynn from her 2012 bestselling novel and told partly in flashbacks, this a quite good mystery-suspense film full of twists and surprises. There’s one scene of fairly graphic violence, and some elements of the plot are disturbing, but the story is also satirical, nicely skewering the modern news media’s tendency toward herd coverage of Big Stories, and some might view the whole thing as a very, very dark comedy. The cast is excellent, including Tyler Perry as a celebrity lawyer, Neil Patrick Harris as Pike’s now-ultra-rich high school sweetheart, Carrie Coon as Affleck’s supportive twin sister, Kim Dickens as a local police detective, Missi Pyle as a parody of Nancy Grace, and Sela Ward (who incidentally looks about 30 but is nearly 60) as the host of a talk show.
(Update: I see I managed to post this review twice several months apart with slight differences. I’ll leave both in place to avoid possible broken links. The later version is here.)
This is a fun space opera with a nice sense of humor and flashes of humanity, but it has so many characters and such a convoluted plot that it would have helped if the film had come with orientation briefings on who’s who and what’s going on.
The main protagonist is Peter Quill (Chris Pratt), who as a child back in 1988 was abducted from Earth by a gang of space pirates known as the Ravagers. He grew up to became a member of one of their outlaw bands., and he’s ready to strike out on his own whether his redneck pirate captain (and former kidnapper) Yondu (Michael Rooker) likes it or not.
Quill has his own spaceship called the Milano (after his childhood crush, actress Alyssa Milano). He still listens to his Walkman and his one cassette, a mix tape of 70s hits his mother loved (“Hooked on a Feeling,” “Come and Get Your Love,” etc.). He calls himself Star Lord but has trouble getting anybody else to do that.
The background involves two stellar federations, the relatively benign Nova Empire, headed by a prime minister called Nova Prime (Glenn Close), and the militaristic Kree Empire, which had been at war with the Nova Empire for centuries but has just signed a peace treaty. The peace really pisses off a militant Kree named Ronan (Lee Pace) who hates anything Nova. Ronan has a tough henchman named Korath (Djimon Hounsou) and is also somehow allied with a vastly more powerful bad-guy über-alien named Thanos (glimpsed at the end of the first Avengers movie), who has only a minor part in this film but has lent Ronan two of his very dangerous adopted daughters. One of them, Gamora (Zoe Saldana), is an attractive green and the other, Nebula (Karen Gillan), is more a metallic two-tone. Both have enhanced speed and strength and are deadly in combat. In addition, Nebula has the ability to walk and pose like a model. She’s the bad one.
Early on, Quill (that’s the Earth guy turned rogue space thief, remember) finds himself in possession of the film’s MacGuffin, a mysterious and powerful orb. (Mysterious and powerful orbs served a similar plot function in the nineties sf-comedy-western series The Adventures of Brisco County Junior, but Bruce Campbell’s orbs were bigger.) A lot of people want this orb, including a broker called The Broker and a collector called The Collector, possibly because the writers themselves were having trouble keeping all the alien names and job descriptions straight. The Collector’s collection includes a Russian cosmonaut dog and another item not revealed until after the end credits, but which you’d find mildly amusing if you’re not Lea Thompson. Anyway, Yondu the space pirate captain wants the orb for its market value and Ronan the militant Kree wants it for more ambitious reasons, so he sends Gamora (that’s the green Zoe Saldana, remember?) to fetch it from Quill.
And yes, this will all be on the exam.
Amazingly, there are some major characters who aren’t after the orb, notably a raccoon and a tree. They’re after Quill, but only to collect a 40,000-monetary-unit bounty separately offered by his pissed-off former abductor-turned-employer Yondu for Quill’s capture and return in good condition so Yondu can get to be the one who puts him in bad condition.
No, I didn’t make up the tree and the raccoon to see if you’re paying attention. The raccoon-looking thing, called Rocket, is a genetically and otherwise modified creature with a high order of intelligence, technical skill, and a tendency to be a smart-ass. He’s voiced by Bradley Cooper (who also plays the title role in American Sniper), though he was portrayed on set by director James Gunn’s brother Sean in a green (or sometimes blue) body suit, so the other actors would have somebody to interact with. He also did Rocket’s lines during shooting and apparently ad-libbed a lot of things later recorded by Cooper. Sean Gunn happens to be a tall, thin guy, so he had to squat for almost all his scenes, including walking that way. It’s worth watching the “making-of” extra on the DVD or Blu-ray just to see how weird this looks.
The tree can walk and talk, but he only knows how to say “I am Groot.” Despite that limitation, he is able by means of expressive inflection to convey a lot more meaning than you might expect. Groot’s voice is supplied by Vin Diesel, and not just in English but also in Russian, Mandarin Chinese, Spanish, Portuguese, German, French, English, and perhaps a few other languages as well for the international versions of the film. Diesel says that counting all the variant intonations, languages, and multiple takes, he said “I am Groot” over a thousand times.
The other major character is Drax (former pro wrestler Dave Bautista), a hulking pile of muscle who wants to kill Ronan for murdering his wife and child. As with the other characters, he turns out to be much more interesting than he first appears.
The film is of course crammed full of computer-generated special effects and fight scenes, but for once they don’t entirely replace characterization or ideas, which might help explain why the film was such an unexpected hit.
Director James Gunn, who co-wrote the screenplay with Nicole Perlman, started out making movies for low-budget comedy-horror producer Troma, and Troma-cofounder Lloyd Kauffman has a cameo as a prisoner in a violent space jail. Stan Lee (who invented the Groot character back in the 1960s as well as various pieces of the backstory) shows up briefly as well, as in every Marvel film, this time playing a sort of aging Casanova.
(Update: I somehow managed to post this review twice in slightly different form. The later version, with an additional clip of an interview with Neil deGrasse Tyson about the science in the film, can be found here, but I’m leaving up both posts in place to avoid possible broken links.)
A few decades in the future the Earth is suffering serious environmental problems and an associated economic depression. Diseases wipe out entire food crops while dust storms sweep across the landscape.
Matthew McConaughey is a former astronaut now trying to do his part as a farmer. He’s also raising a teen son and a 10-year-old daughter with the help of his late wife’s father (John Lithgow). The public has turned against such frivolous luxuries as space exploration, and the daughter gets in trouble at school for disputing the new textbooks that claim the Moon landings were Cold War propaganda and never really happened.
But it turns out NASA is secretly still a going concern where a team of scientist headed by one of McConaughey’s college professors (Michael Caine) is trying to come up with a way to save humanity, or at least as many people as possible, and to that end they want McConaughey and a small team of colleagues, including Caine’s daughter (Anne Hathaway) to take a spacecraft into a wormhole that’s been discovered in orbit around Saturn. The other end opens into a distant galaxy near some promising planets for colonization. But the cold equations of relativity may leave an uncrossable gulf between the astronauts and the people back home.
I don’t recall any other movie that so successfully combines high emotion with hard sf. One of the film’s executive producers is CalTech theoretical physicist Kip Thorne, famous among other things for a series of bets with Stephen Hawking about future discoveries in general relativity. The visuals for a scene set near a black holes event horizon were computer generated based on serious numerical analysis of some heavy-duty gravitational physics and the results turned out to give some new physical insights that led to at least one published scientific paper (as well as another on computer graphics).
There are some implausibilities in the plot and some might find it over-dramatic, but on the whole this is one of the better examples of honest-to-goodness science fiction on film I’ve ever seen, and I recommend it.
A woman trying to make some money selling flowers on the 6 train in New York back in June of 2013 encountered a buyer who didn’t want the flowers for himself. It’s worth being reminded that there are some nice people out there, and the clip runs under two minutes.
But people, please, please hold your dang phones horizontally when shooting video. It’s the right thing to do. For more on this, including the opinions of irate puppets and an attractive singer, see this earlier post.
Fast-talking Hank Green very concisely explains why there might be at least one planet larger than Earth well beyond the orbit of Neptune (and in passing why most astronomers think that’s unlikely):
Follow the link to the YouTube page and click on “More” under the description to see links to the original papers and other articles about the subject.
The video runs under four and a half minutes, but here’s an even shorter summary:
All the full-fledged planets orbit the Sun more or less in the same plane as the Earth, but more distant bodies, including Pluto, have orbits that are more tilted. Hence they spend part of the time “above” the plane of the Earth’s orbit and part of it “below”.
Now here’s something odd: a lot of these distant objects cross the plane of the Earth’s orbit at just about the same point in the orbit that’s closest to the Sun (the “perihelion”). They might just as well cross the plane anywhere else in their orbits, so this is curious coincidence. A team of astronomers has computed that a distant planet about ten times the size of the Earth could explain the phenomenon, and if it’s far enough away it’s not surprising we haven’t seen it yet. On the other hand, our understanding of how the solar system formed makes it unlikely such a massive body could have formed that far out. Meanwhile, another group has looked at a different line of evidence that suggests the existence of a distant planet, but not the same one.
(And no, none of this is evidence for the supposed mystery planet Niburu.)
by 