📽Last night we watched “Saving Mr. Banks,” about the making of Mary Poppins. The movie stars Emma Thompson, Tom Hanks, Bradley Whitford, etc. — excellent cast.
“Saving Mr. Banks” takes great liberties with historical reality. In reality, PL Travers, the author of the series of Mary Poppins novels, never cared for the movie “Mary Poppins,” and wouldn’t permit another adaptation for 30 years. When she finally relented, for a stage production in London, she stipulated no Americans could be involved. And she had a much more interesting life than “Saving Mr. Banks” portrays. She was a successful actress and dancer and poet and studied philosophy and lived with Native Americans for a time and studied their philosophy and folklore. She adopted a boy, from whom she was later estranged.
Walt Disney, in real life, was kind of a bastard.
The movie is bullshit and propaganda and I loved it anyway and would gladly watch it again.
Much of the movie focuses on Travers’ childhood in Allora, Australia, in the early 1900s. It was a small town then and it’s no metropolis today, with a population of 1,223.
“There’s a very strong case to be made for [Joey Pantoliano’s character, Cypher], like, ‘No. Plug me the fuck back into this,’ Oswalt said. [Cypher is] one of the freed humans who regrets the decision to take the red reality pill, since the simulation was so much more warm and satisfying than reality.
“‘I’m nude with atrophied muscles, hairless in a jagged wasteland of radioactive slag, or I can be in this world where I have a nice job, where I eat a steak and marry someone,'” Oswalt ranted. “‘Can I just live in this — I am fine with it. Morpheus, who the fuck are you helping?! Why are you dragging us out?! The machines aren’t trying to kill us.'”
He continued from the point of view of the machines: “‘And by the way, you guys fucked up the Earth. We’re doing the best we can for you guys. We could have just let you all die in the wasteland, but instead, we found a way so that you can live.'”
Back speaking for himself, Oswalt added, “People always miss that line where [Agent] Smith (Hugo Weaving) says, ‘You know, when we first did the Matrix, it was just flat-out paradise, and you guys couldn’t handle that and you rejected it.’… Probably the first version of the Matrix, everybody could fly and orgasms lasted three months and you could just eat all the chocolate you wanted. And people were like, ‘No! I want a goddamn cubicle job!’ And the machines went, ‘OK. I guess they want cubicles. Give ‘em that. We tried to be nice.'”
The ribbon has run out on the last typewriter at a Manhattan writers' den.
Skye Ferrante has spent six years at the Writers Room in Greenwich Village, blissfully banging away on his grandmother’s 1929 Royal typewriter.
The 37-year-old writer represented a bygone era, the last typewriter-user in a special room devoted to typists.
“In the event that there are no desks available, laptop users must make room for typists,” read a sign posted in the “Typing Room” for years.
When Ferrante returned to the Writers Room in April after an eight-month break, the sign was gone and his noisy typewriter was no longer welcome.
“I was told I was the unintended beneficiary of a policy to placate the elderly members who have all since died off,” said Ferrante, a Manhattan native who’s writing children’s books. “They offered me a choice to switch to a laptop or refund my money, which to me is no choice at all.”
Ten years later, Ferrante is still around, doing wire sculptures, which he shares on Instagram. The Writers Room is still around too, and looks lovely, though I expect it’s on pandemic hiatus.
The Renaissance was in many ways a terrible time to be alive; Europeans fought many fierce wars and lifespans were drastically shorter than the preceding Middle Ages. Other parts of the world, particularly China, were far more advanced than Europe, and Europeans knew it.
But the Renaissance also produced great art and scientific breakthroughs. Then as now, it was the best and worst of times.
Francis Bacon invented the idea of progress in 1620. There was plenty of progress before then, of course, but until Bacon, people viewed history as more or less the same. They were some places and times that were better to be alive than others. Empires rose and fell. But our ancestors lives were the same as ours and our children’s would be the same as well.
Bacon had the idea of using science to cumulatively improve all peoples lives today and in the future into the future. For that reason, he said science was the best form of Christian charity.
We didn’t see the first breakthrough from Bacon’s insight for 150 years, until Benjamin Franklin invented the lightning rod. But since then he’s been proven right. Refrigeration, the rule of law, medicine and other advances have improved life for everyone, and will continue to do so.
Accepted wisdom today for many people is that one of the advances of the Renaissance was the break with religion and move to secularism. But great scientists like Isaac Newton and Descartes were devout Christians. Newton was deeply immersed in beliefs that we would consider occult.
People today sometimes say that figures like Newton were actually closet atheists, and could not share their beliefs because of censorship and fear of the Inquisition. And it’s true that censorship makes it very hard for later historians to find out what was actually going on. But we can deduce people’s actual beliefs by looking at other things they did say that they believe. And Renaissance intellectuals espoused beliefs that were far more dangerous than atheism. The Inquisition was far more concerned with heresy than atheism. If people like Newton and Descartes were atheists, they would have said so.
Atheism developed as a by-product of publishers making hyped claims in trying to flog translations of the work of the Greek philosopher Epictetus.
People calling themselves “transhumanists” today look forward to the Singularity, when artificial intelligence surpasses human intelligence. But we’ve already been through a kind of Singularity, in the 17th Century, when for the first time it became impossible for an educated person to familiarize himself with every book ever written. With the invention of the printing press, books were being published faster than they could be catalogued, let alone read and understood! Until then, an educated person was considered to be one familiar with the total of all human knowledge. After that, we get the idea of specialization.
Poverty is a tax on intelligence. If you’re spending a lot of time worrying about paying bills, you don’t have that intelligence to think about other things. Palmer estimates that if we lift a person out of poverty, we raise their intelligence 25%.
All knowledge is useful, if for no other reason than it’s satisfying to learn things. Even finding out whether giraffes can swim is satisfying.
Humanity is a very young species, and we will get our act together eventually. Until a few centuries ago, it was considered fine and ok for people with powerful patrons to go around murdering people and bragging about it. Now, we believe all people should be subject to the law. That’s a big deal!
Progress comes from everyday people doing small things, more than from geniuses and great men and women doing great things:
The small things that we are achieving that feel small are the way that the civilization-wide big things happen. The more I look at history and zoom in the less it is the geniuses and the people whose names we know that made the world shift and the more it is, in fact, the microscopic – from a historical standpoint – teamwork of everybody. So never feel that the stuff you’re doing isn’t important.
Scientific studies suggest no conclusive evidence that cloth masks help slow the spread of coronavirus. N95 masks are definitely helpful, but we’re not sure whether the same is true for surgical masks, or homemade cloth masks, or bandanas.
I’m going to keep wearing a mask anyway, when I go out in public, because the difficulty is low and potential payoff is high. Also, social signaling matters.
The only effective way to do contact tracing is by paying an army of people to do it – the “shoe leather” approach. Contact-tracing apps are at best helpful in automating record-keeping.
It appears that the countries that have done best at containing coronavirus are those where the people trust their government, and that government is worthy of trust. These are two conditions that do not exist on a national level in the US.
I do trust our local, county and state governments in matters like this. Although I may not agree with them, they seem to me to be competent people who are acting in good faith to serve their constituents. The same is not true on a federal level, and has not been for a long time, predating Trump.
Readers should turn to the Bible and Lord Dunsany instead, said Lovecraft in a 1920 letter to the editor of the Omaha Bee.
I interviewed the science fiction writer Robert Charles Wilson, who said he read a letter or essay from some 19th Century person who was denouncing the “boys books” of the time, with their preposterous, ridiculous stories of little boys who run away from home to become sea captains. T
These sorts of books (said the 19th Century literary person) were awful stuff, to be avoided.
Wilson said they sounded awesome to him, and he sought out and read a few, and that became his own excellent novel, “Julian Comstock: A Story of the 22nd Century.”
Saying you want technology companies to make a backdoor that only “good guys” can use is like saying you want guns that only “good guys” can fire. It’s not possible, and no credible cryptographer would say that it is. You might as well say that you want Apple to come up with a way for 1 + 1 to equal 3….
The DOJ is not asking for Apple’s cooperation unlocking existing iPhones — they’re asking Apple to make future iPhones insecure.
++ This is the first pandemic ever experienced by a society that understands how pandemics work, and other insights from Renaissance historian and science fiction writer Ada Palmer.
++ You can raise a person’s IQ 25% by getting that person out of poverty, as that person no longer has to devote attention to jugging bills all day, Palmer says.
++ Gig economy companies are massive Ponzi schemes. A restaurateur fights back by arbitraging pizza.
++ England’s storks have returned for the first time since 1416.
++ The case for universal broadband.
++ “Platform coops” are gig economy services where the workers own the platform.
The 10,000-step rule is completely arbitrary, writes journalist Tanner Garrity at InsideHook. There is zero science behind it. The figure was plucked from the air by a Japanese electronics company trying to sell a new pedometer in the 1960s.
In the mid-1960s, a a Japanese watch company called Yamasa Clock debuted the figure that has been associated with daily step-counts, activity meters and modern wearables like Fitbit and Apple Watch ever since.
What We Might Learn From The 1918 Flu Pandemic – Fresh Air – In broad outlines, public reaction to the the 1918 flu pandemic and covid epidemic follow the same course, says historian John Barry – “the outbreak was trivialized for a long time.”
Also, Woodrow Wilson was almost certainly sick with the 1918 flu during the Geneva peace talks. He wanted to argue against punitive settlement with Germany, but was too sick to do so. So, while it’s a stretch to say the 1918 pandemic led to the Nazis, it’s not a HUGE stretch.
Knockoffs – 99% Invisible – Dapper Dan went from street hustler to fashion impresario and has spent time on both sides of American trademark law. In the world of fashion trademarks and knockoff merchandise, it’s hard to tell the legitimate merchants from the outlaws. They’re often the same guys.
Edward Luce delivers a fast but deep read on the Financial Times, about how Trump and his henchmen have bungled pandemic response, unnecessarily killing tens of thousands of Americans — so far! — and destroying America’s world leadership.
“America is first in the world in deaths, first in the world in infections and we stand out as an emblem of global incompetence. The damage to America’s influence and reputation will be very hard to undo.
Yesterday, Lake Murray was open for the first or second day since the social distancing order became law in California (which was March 20, by the way, so that’s nearly two months now). I went there on my daily walk.
Too many people! Social distancing was difficult, too easy to slip inside the six-foot distance. Only about half of the people were wearing masks. Maybe less than half. You could walk in and out freely but they had park workers set up on the entrance road to keep the parking lot from filling up.
