Avatar Watch: Day Two

I thought a 1% drop per day might be too big... holy crap did I underestimate it.  Today, Avatar's RT ranking dropped 5 points, landing it at 86%.  I have got to get to the bottom of why film review aggregation drops off so predictably as opening night draws close.  At this rate, Avatar will be in the 70s by Friday.

Avatar Watch: Day One

Rotten Tomatoes currently has Avatar ranking at 91%, pretty stellar for any movie.  But early reviews are notoriously overly positive, and as opening night approaches the ranking almost always goes down.  I don't know why that is- presumably, critics have all seen the movie around the same time, so I would assume the rating would stay about the same; but it almost never does.   Is Avatar good enought to resist the trend?  I'll look at it each day to see.  I predict it will go down at least 1% each day until Friday, giving it an opening-night RT ranking of 86%.

If you start forgetting faces…

There is a psychological condition known as Cotard’s syndrome where people are possessed by the idea that they are dead and no longer exist.  To them, they are no longer here or, at the very least, missing important organs. 

The French (who discovered it) called it the “negation delirium”.

This is another thing that makes me uncomfortable--even more than the Wikipedia photo of a White Man.

Your Colorful Past

To those of us who didn't live through it, the Great Depression is a period that evokes little more than a handful of iconic, black and white images. Often haunting, sometimes beautiful, those images are twice removed from us - once by the passage of time, and again by the absence of color.

That's one reason I'm so taken with this collection of images captured on behalf of the Farm Security Administration and the Office of War Information. Taken during the the late 1930s and early 1940s, these photographs document Depression-Era life as people really experienced it: in color. Check it out.

Ray Manzarek speaks Egyptian

"The Golden Scarab is the story of a young man's journey into the consciousness."

Indeed.  This rolled around in my music library.  And like the picture of the iconic white person, this too made me uncomfortable.

“In Egypt on the Nile in Memphis-Heliopolis
Scarab roll your dung ball
Roll away the night
Push away the sun ball
Golden scarab light”

What white people look like

According to wikipedia's article on the topic. This makes me uncomfortable, but I can't put my finger on why.

Corruption Quantified

Every year, Transparency International puts out its Corruption Perceptions Index (CPI), which aggregates polls and data relating to government corruption, and assigns each country a numerical ranking from one to ten, one being the lowest score and ten the highest.  According to the CPI, the least corrupt country is New Zealand, clocking in at 9.4; the most corrupt is Somalia, with a paltry 1.1.  The U.S. comes in with a respectable 7.5, which is much, much better than I'd have thought.  Now, this is obviously very imprecise work.  Countries go up and down in ranking every year, and there's no way to tell if they're more or less corrupt, or if the data is simply more or less accurate.  But TI does their homework, and I think this is potentially useful as a rough guide.  It's also interesting to me that it roughly corresponds with the Quality of Life Index, and DOES NOT correspond to GDP rankings.  Again, this isn't science or anything, but it's interesting to think about, and interactive maps are always a fun waste of time.

"What" indeed

I was entering a search query on Google, but didn't get farther than the word "what" when autofill kicked in:

You can try the experiment yourself if you like.  Anyway, I draw your attention to the sixth query from the top.  Selecting it brought up this results page:

 But the real fun is in the Amazon.com page.  From the Suggested Reading list to the Comments Page, it's pure gold, and well worth checking out.  Only then may you go to the Wikipedia entry.

Jesus: Outlier?

Hilarious Malcolm Gladwell send-up in Vanity Fair.

Why baby Jesus? Research confirms there were upwards of 157 hotel-cum-stables in Bethlehem that night, with estimated 97 percent occupancy levels. So why did that star shine so brightly over his?

Imagine that I were to ask you to dress up as a baby and lie in a manger...

Et cetera, et cetera.

The re-definition of the re-definition of marriage

Dan Savage makes a good point:

Joseph had a coat, Moroni had a sweater

Holy shit. Real.

Leaking Levi - The Daily Dish | By Andrew Sullivan

Leaking Levi - The Daily Dish | By Andrew Sullivan

How to become a Russian artist and mislead critics

Which begins with greasing your hair back and adopting ‘Pavel’ as your first name. 

Paul Jordan Smith created a hoax in the 1920’s that mocked the standards of what was considered good art.   That was his intention.

He wanted to undermine the tastes of the contemporary art world by drawing “squiggles and eyeballs” and having it received as fine art.  But does that prove anything?  Probably, but Paul was also an ass for thinking he knows what really is good.  One man’s squiggly lines and eyeballs is another’s Cezanne (or Escher; Cezanne didn’t paint eyeballs). 

I like his squiggly lines and eyeballs and do not care if it was a hoax.

Thanks for coming out tonight

Testing again....

Hey, is this thing on?

This is the maiden post of our new blog. Umm... Look at this!