CSotD: The Attack of the Dreaded ‘Actually’
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Here’s one of my favorite “actuallys,” because modesty is the least of the Invisible Man’s problems, starting with the fact — and I use the word “fact” recognizing that we’re starting a long way from facts to begin with — but starting with the fact that, actually, in order to be invisible, he’d have to fast and do a more rigorous system cleanse than a mere colonoscopy prep.
But he’s got a bigger problem to deal with, since having transparent retinas would give light no place to focus, rendering him totally blind.
I realize I’m supposed to back off and enjoy an Invisible Man movie, not nitpick it to death. I think it was Sophocles who wrote, “Just repeat to yourself ‘It’s just a show, I should really just relax.'”
There is a “willing suspension of disbelief” required to enjoy much of the entertainment media, and Siskel & Ebert used to speak of “idiot plots,” which were movies in which having one intelligent character speak up would have resolved the whole thing. It’s not just science fiction and action movies in which you can pick things apart and ruin it all; screwball comedies rely on everybody in the movie actually being a screwball.
Knowing how hard it is to hit anything with a pistol shouldn’t keep you from enjoying an action movie in which the heroes are deadshots and the villains can’t quite hit anything. But when the hero hangs onto a jet in flight, well, now the idiot factor is not in the script but in the audience.
I’ve no doubt you could produce action flicks with AI and they’d be just as popular as handmade ones, because Weenus and Eight Ball are right: Original material is neither expected nor demanded.
I cited Topkapi the other day as the granddaddy of heist films, but what difference does it make whether all those replicated plot elements were scraped by AI or ripped off by a roomful of hack writers?
Check it out yourself: Watch the original 1968 Thomas Crown Affair with Steve McQueen and Faye Dunaway, and then watch the 1999 remake with Pierce Brosnan and Rene Russo and ‘splain to me why an AI version would be any more derivative and inartistic.
Wiley offers a more challenging mindgame, which is finding the crossover points that delineate belief, agnosticism and atheism.
Most of the Founders seem to have been Deists, which means they didn’t believe in harps and clouds, but suspected there was something out there, or at least had been at the beginning.
But there is also a type of agnostic who behaves morally just in case there’s an afterlife, which suggests that, like the Deist, he skews vaguely towards belief without committing.
Meanwhile, there’s actually no difference between an atheist and a fundamentalist: They’re both absolutely certain about something neither one of them can prove.
Juxtaposition of the Day
I’m seeing a lot of chatter about bear/human interactions, which may be a real issue or it just might be something getting more attention than it used to. This pair illustrates all you need to know, which is that blackies are mostly a nuisance but polar bears, like grizzlies, can actually be a threat.
Which is why, while we used to drive up to the dump at sundown in our own cars and toss marshmallows to the blackies, if you go to Churchill to see polar bears, you’ll find yourself in something a great deal less ursine-accessible.
Black bears are like moose, in that while they’re mostly harmless, “powerful” and “stupid” can be a nasty combination. The dumps are all closed now, and you don’t want to encourage them to hang around your house, because it never works out well, the operative phrase being “A fed bear is a dead bear.”
Actually, most wildlife is best appreciated at a distance.
Juxtaposition of the Day #2
Speaking of nuisances, marauding black bears don’t begin to compare with leaf-blowing neighbors. There are places, notably California, in which gas-powered leaf blowers are banned or restricted, but not here and, since my house backs up on commercial properties, I get to hear them start at about 7 a.m. so they can be done by opening time.
Apparently they’re legal in Australia, where both Jess Harwood and Cate Blanchett live. Which disrupts Australia’s reputation as a place safe from abuses the rest of the world must endure.
Wallace the Brave either read the long-range weather predictions or had an exceptional stroke of luck, producing a story arc about trick-or-treating in the rain, which kids around here will be doing in a few hours.
I don’t know if it’s a sign of climate change, but I remember several Halloweens as the first snowfall of the season, and our costumes always had to fit over snowsuits.
However, I grew up in the Adirondacks, and now live in the more temperate Connecticut River Valley. I just looked up the weather prediction back home and, actually, they’re predicting snow to start at 5 pm, which is just as I remember things.
Gonna have to hit Trudeau with a charge of Old-Fartism here. It’s kind of like, when same-sex marriage first became legal, asking people “But which of you is the husband and which one is the wife?”
It’s not quite a dumb question, but, in retrospect, it seems awfully naive and we ought to be well past both issues by now.
The next-generation hyphenation quandry was widely discussed back in the mid70s/early 80s when couples first began hyphenating, but their kids are now closing in on 50 and mostly all dealt with it long ago.
Some hyphenated kids dropped one name, some without hyphens each kept their original names, but I don’t know anyone who double-hyphenated. What I know is that there have been some parental knickers in a knot over how their kids resolved the matter.
But, actually, I can’t think of a better way to begin a marriage than by accepting those knotted knickers as a healthy opportunity to establish that, if you’re old enough to marry, you’re old enough to make your own decisions.
If you want your love to last.
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