Yup, here we go again. Time to get some tabs closed.
:: This is an older article, so I don’t know if the phenomenon described here has continued, but…as you know, our dear dog Carla is considered a “pittie”, though breed-wise she’s not an American Pit Bull Terrier but rather an American Staffordshire Terrier (plus some other stuff in there…we had her genetics done some years ago, mainly out of curiosity). There are a number of outlets on Facebook for pittie appreciation, as you might expect…but many of these also draw attacks from trolls who insist that the entire pittie “breed” is deeply dangerous. It’s very annoying…but one night when I was looking for some actual research I turned this up. Ontario banned pitties years ago, and the effect in Toronto was that the pittie population dropped to almost nothing.
And yet, dog bites went up.
Hmmmmm.
:: An AI-developer convention called “Dreamforce” booked comedian John Mulaney to perform at its closing ceremonies. It did not go well for them.
“You look like a group who looked at the self-checkout counters at CVS and thought, ‘This is the future,’” Mulaney said.
“If AI is truly smarter than us and tells us that [humans] should die, then I think we should die,” he said, looking out to the crowd from center stage. “So many of you feel imminently replaceable.”
Ouch!
:: Some swimmer tied for fifth at a swim meet, which is something that happens all the time, right? And given that, you’d expect that swimmer to never become anyone of note in any capacity that relates to swimming. Ahhhh, but wait! The swimmer tied for fifth with a transgender athlete, and therein a young woman named Riley Gaines saw an opening for her real career goal: to become the next big name in the Ann Coulter-Tomi Lahren “blonde MAGA doll” pipeline. Right-wing heroes even have nauseating origin stories.
:: How shitty is Jill Stein? This shitty. The woman is completely useless, and if you’re thinking of voting for her “just to keep the Green Party relevant” or some such crap, you’re falling for a bill of goods. Just ask yourself: What has Jill Stein done, ever, to help the Green Party, other than emerging from her coffin every four years?
:: How shitty is the guy who came up with Project 2025? Even shittier than Jill Stein. No, I’m not typing the words out. I’m just going to note that so many of these people are human filth.
:: Justice for Alex Forrest.
OK, after a couple of angry links, time for some positivity again. This article takes a sympathetic look at one of the most notable film antagonists of the 1980s, Alex Forrest (Glenn Close) of Fatal Attraction.
As she is framed by Lyne [Adrian Lyne, the film’s director] and as she is seen by Dan [the Michael Douglas character], Alex is the film’s villain. She functions in the film as a femme fatale—with her audacious autonomy, self-assuredness, and heavily-kohled eyes, Alex is the dictionary definition of the archetype—a function that gives her a sinister sheen. She is a dangerous specter that haunts, a hangover that refuses to take a hint. As a product of the ’80s—an era with strict, almost post-WWII-like gender roles delineated by the Reagan administration as a backlash to feminism’s gains, and re-articulated by Hollywood, which was incentivized, Faludi notes, to leave the status quo unchallenged because it received much of its financial backing from the rich, who Reagan favored with his policies—Alex, a single woman with her own income and a clear understanding of her desires, is cast as a threat to the married man’s way of being, to patriarchal ideals, and therefore needs to be punished. Lyne held the Reaganite understanding of gender: he thought single women in the publishing world were “sad” and “lacked a soul,” while his own wife, a woman who “has never worked,” quotes Faludi, has no ambition nor an interest in a career, simply lives with him, and so is “a terrific wife. […] I come home and she’s there.” Just like Dan’s wife Beth. Accordingly, by its end, the film brutally snuffs Alex out.
But as she is portrayed by Close, Alex is also the film’s victim. Just as Lyne didn’t hear about how women, for the most part, remained silent during screenings, many don’t hear Alex’s words throughout the film. Time and again, she articulates exactly what it is she wants; time and again, she asserts her humanity, but it is ignored by Dan, silenced by the film itself. When considered with the respect that she demands, it’s fairly easy to see that Alex is not so evil, her desires and wants are not so terrible. She is not a calculating and machinating monster existing solely to ruin a man’s life. She is a woman who is aching and vulnerable and scared, quick to fall in love, but most importantly, she is a woman who refuses to be used by a man, used and discarded as though she were an object.
:: Contact: Looking Outward from our Pale Blue Dot
A lovely article looking back at Contact, the film of Carl Sagan’s novel. I admire the film a great deal, though certain aspects of it always hold me back a little (I’ve written about this before), but it is a thoughtful science fiction film that poses interesting questions and considers real issues.
Carl Sagan died before the film was finished. He worked on it right up until his death, but he never got to see it. So he never had the chance to say what he thought about it, nor about how the movie’s ending differs from the book’s—the bit about the 18 hours of recorded static is an addition that implies less ambiguity about Arroway’s experience. I think that addition was the right choice for the movie, as it provides us with a satisfying little ah! moment, the sort of conclusion that implies forward momentum rather than a big question mark.
As I was watching, I kept thinking about one aspect of the story that’s somewhat rare in science fiction cinema, although it’s more common in sci fi books and television. Sci fi movies in particular tend to be rather skeptical of science and technology, and cynical about what humanity will inevitably do with the things we invent and discover. That wariness is present in Contact, but it’s not the driving force behind the story. The premise is not built on the assumption that humanity can’t handle future discoveries or advancements, even one so astonishing as first contact with an alien civilization.
:: Finally, here’s a piece on Point Nemo, the remotest location on planet Earth.
