2020
Good to know the ‘doomsday asteroid’ is not going to destroy the Earth Saturday, because I’m not going to be done reading Mary Robinette Kowal’s “Calculating Stars” by then.
Dave Winer makes the case for Bloomberg: More than a candidate for president.
I’m reserving judgment. I expect I’ll vote for Warren in the primary, assuming she’s still in the race, but other than that I don’t expect to support a candidate until the convention. And then I’ll support whichever Democrat wins.
Until a month ago I would have said “except maybe Bloomberg.” But I like the way he’s going after Trump. I still have strong reservations about Bloomberg, though.
Molly Ringwald revisits “The Breakfast Club” and the other 80s teen movies that made her a star. The films were often homophobic, misogynistic and racist but they inspired women, LGBTQ people and African-Americans with their depictions of kids who were estranged from the world they lived in.
The US is charging Huawei with racketeering
The DoJ alleges that Huawei and a number of its affiliates used confidential agreements with American companies over the past two decades to access the trade secrets of those companies, only to then misappropriate that intellectual property and use it to fund Huawei’s business.
As part of his research into Trump’s $1+B disinformation campaign, journalist McKay Coppins “tried to live in the same information world as Trump supporters so that he’d receive the same disinformation supporters did.”
He said he ended up believing everything and nothing. Rumors, lies and reported journalism ended up seeming roughly equal in credibility, even though he was following the impeachment hearings closely and could see for himself that Trump supporters were lying about what transpired there.
This is exactly how censorship works in autocratic regimes nowadays, Coppins notes – no need to shut down opposition journalism; better to just flood the information channels with bullshit.
Journalist Details ‘Brazen Ways’ Trump Will Use His Power To Get Reelected - Fresh Air
A brief history of the "I, Claudius" TV series
The TV production had a lot of problems, but Robert Graves, who wrote the 1930s novels on which the series is based, had faith:
“I’ve communed with Claudius,” he said at the time, “and he reassured me that this would be a great success.”
The series launched Derek Jacobi’s career.
“I owe ‘Claudius’ so much on both sides of the Atlantic,” Mr. Jacobi said in a telephone interview. “If he has haunted me, it’s been a beneficent ghost.”…
The durability of “I, Claudius” began with Graves’s books. Cast as the secret memoirs of Claudius himself, they were grounded in exhaustive scholarship but imbued with a novelist’s imagination. They had plenty of skulduggery, perversion and other delectable malfeasance, set against the marble majesty of Roman antiquity.
The TV version, however, came close to missing the mark. “It was so badly received in its first two weeks,” recalled Sian Phillips, who played the empress Livia, “because it was so different.”
That difference lay in the series’s down-to-earth treatment of epic material. Despite its imperial setting “I, Claudius” was a small studio effort devoid of huge sets and sprawling battle scenes.
In whittling down Graves’s tomes (which total some 1,000 pages in paperback) to a little over 11 hours of television, the scriptwriter Jack Pulman, who died in 1979, effectively rendered them as a soap opera, emphasizing the dysfunctional relations inherent in any extended clan. At various points he called his teleplay a Jewish family comedy and a treatment of a Mafia dynasty.
The TV show used natural language, rather than the high prose that was common in previous Roman stories. Scenes were small. The action encompassed huge battles and riots sweeping the city, but we don’t see those. We just see and hear a few people talking about them.
Phillips, who played the ruthless villain Livia, had difficulty finding her character, but finally, director Herbert Wise told her to just ham it up.
‘Just be evil. The more evil you are, the funnier it is, and the more terrifying it is.’ ”
In the TV series and books, Rome is portrayed as being in decay, due to its transition from republican government to monarchy. But this is a bit of authorial fudging.
In reality, Rome peaked long after the action of the stories.
The Emperor Claudius died in AD 54. The land area of the empire peaked around 100 AD.
Prior to the empire, Rome wasn’t a republic as we think of it today. Only a very small aristocracy participated in government, and millions of people were slaves. Many historians say that the life of a Roman citizen was best in the period 100-200 AD., and Rome extended citizenship broadly to the people who lived within its borders.
Rome finally fell in 476 AD, four centuries after the action of I, Claudius. And that’s only the Western Empire. The Eastern Empire, which we now call Byzantium, continued on until it fell to the Ottomans in 1453 AD.
I Claudius seemingly influenced The Sopranos – though Sopranos creator David Chase doesn’t acknowledge it. They’re both stories about men who build empires despite being undermined by toxic, maternal women named “Livia.”
Hulu is doing gender-flipped miniseries based on “High Fidelity,” the excellent Nick Hornby novel and John Cusack movie.
If I can get used to a woman Doctor Who, I can give this miniseries a try.
“It’s a strange existence, being an autistic adult in a profession overflowing with autism mommy-ism and misinformation.” https://theaspergian.com/2020/01/30/im-dreading-april-the-trials-of-an-autistic-teacher/amp/?__twitter_impression=true
We’ve started rewatching “I Claudius.”
“I Claudius” is the story of a great empire that decays as its chief executive seizes dictatorial power while the Senate flatters him and otherwise stands idly by.
It’s nice to escape from the news into a TV fantasy now and then.
Oracle founder Larry Ellison is hosting a fundraiser for Donald Trump www.vox.com/recode/20…
Michael Bloomberg says 2015 stop and frisk comments were ‘five years ago’ and are ‘not the way that I think’ www.cnn.com/2020/02/1…
I am prepared to call the 2020 presidential election: it’s going to be Amy Klobuchar.
The Democrats will be split between Sanders and Bloomberg going into the convention. Supporters of each will loathe and despise the other.
On the 60 gazillionth ballot, some desperate person will suggest Amy Klobuchar and everyone will look at each other and say actually, yes, I kind of like her.
And she will easily trounce Trump, who will prove to be too chickenshit to stage a coup d’état. Trump’s supporters will crawl back to their basements and conspiracy theories. And a new golden age for America will dawn.
Fresh Air: Michael Pollan Explains Caffeine Addiction & Withdrawal
As part of the research for a new audiobook about caffeine, author Michael “Omnivore’s Dilemma” Pollan gave up caffeine cold turkey for three months. Now that’s sacrificing for the craft!
‘Omnivore’s Dilemma’ author Michael Pollan talks about his new audiobook, ‘Caffeine: How Coffee and Tea Created the Modern World.’ He describes caffeine as the world’s most widely-used psychoactive drug. “Here’s a drug we use every day. … We never think about it as a drug or an addiction, but that’s exactly what it is,” Pollan says. “I thought, why not explore that relationship?”
Affluent parents are giving their children growth hormones, to keep the kids from growing up short.
Seems like a bad idea. There’s nothing medically wrong with the kids, and studies have shown that short people’s lives are no less satisfying and happy than anybody else.
Being short just isn’t a disability to be corrected. And we don’t know what the long-term effects of the treatments might be.
I’m 5'9" tall – precisely average.