Russell Brand finds a way to endear himself to his audience

Russell Brand’s frantic fast-talking comedy never really appealed to me, but he seems to have found a new audience in the past several years as a fast-talking conspiracy theorist on a podcast I’ve never listened to. Braying out loud weird claims just doesn’t appeal, but OK, he’s successfully tapping into a revenue stream that exists.

Except now he’s got criminal charges hanging over his head, being accused of rape and sexual assault. It’s all so predictable: volatile personality gets rich, acquires lots of privilege, uses it to treat other people like things. How will he get out of it? By talking fast, of course.

Brand had already moved to deny what he called “very serious criminal allegations” on Friday night. In a video posted online, he said he had received correspondence from a media company and a newspaper detailing the claims; this is standard practice for journalists preparing to report serious allegations about a named entity.

He issued his denial in a video posted across his accounts on several media platforms, insisting his relationships had always been consensual.

He portrayed the reports as a “litany of extremely egregious and aggressive attacks” and said they pertained to a period of his career when he was working “in the mainstream … As I have written about extensively in my books, I was very, very promiscuous [at that time].”

Brand continued: “Now, during that time of promiscuity the relationships I had were absolutely always consensual. I was always transparent about that then, almost too transparent, and I am being transparent about it now as well.

“To see that transparency metastasised into something criminal, that I absolutely deny, makes me question: is there another agenda at play?”

Somebody explain to him that promiscuity is one thing, but rape is a completely different other thing. You do not get criminally charged for consensual promiscuity.

At least he knows that “consent” is a useful word to deploy when your behavior is brought to light, but I don’t think he grasps what that is, either.

According to the paper’s report, one of the women said Brand entered into a relationship with her while he was 31 and she was still a 16-year-old schoolgirl. She reportedly said he referred to her as “the child” during an alleged emotionally abusive and controlling three-month relationship.

She told Dispatches the presenter once “forced his penis down her throat”, making her choke, which led her to punch him in the stomach to make him stop.

I think we can reject his version of consent when the words “16-year-old schoolgirl” enter the picture.

He has at least dug up the formula that will keep his gullible audience in thrall: it’s a paranoid conspiracy, they’re all out to get me. It’s true, a lot of people will be out to get you if you commit reprehensible crimes.

You just can’t hide in darkness anymore

I don’t know why, but it’s so satisfying to see a liar exposed. Lauren Boebert was thrown out of a theater for being loud, disruptive, and vaping. She denied it all, of course. But boy, surveillance video tech has gotten scary good, and she was caught on video doing all those things. Bonus: her boyfriend copping a feel and the two of them getting a bit handsy.

Next time I’m in a dark theater, I’m going to be conscious that someone might be watching everything. Not in Morris, though — we’re about 30 years behind the times on everything.

I still need glasses, and my eyes get worse every year

Have you heard about this latest loony claim that you don’t need eyeglasses? It’s all a scam by Big Opthalmology, and with a heavy dose of woo you can see perfectly clearly.

Rebecca Watson digs into it — it turns out this is nothing new, there was something called the Bates Method about a century ago that didn’t work, either.

I don’t know how long I’ve needed glasses. I know I couldn’t see clearly for a good chunk of my childhood, and it was only in my second year of high school that my mother took me in to get my eyes examined (I am very nearsighted) and I walked out with a new pair of glasses. I still remember how astonishing it was to be able to read a big “DRUGSTORE” sign from across the street, and see birds a whole block away. If only I’d known earlier that I could have fixed the whole problem by flexing my chakras and sniffing aromatic oils.

These ‘aliens’ wouldn’t be out of place in a roadside museum

The USA has been one-upped. Our congress listened soberly as crackpots told them all about UFOs whizzing about through our skies, but the Mexican congress got to see alien bodies.

Are you impressed by all the anatomical details, the CAT scans of the bodies, the boldness of the speaker? I hope not. Here’s a video of these specimens.

They’re doll-sized. They look like they’re made out of papier mache.

I suspect they’re a bit like the Fiji mermaids, which were made from monkey bodies stitched to fish. I’m going to guess these are mangled and manipulated animal bones, crudely covered with a rough matrix of some sort, and that’s it.

Putting three eggs in one of them was a nice touch, though.

He should have stopped with the first line

Bill Maher made an announcement.

I agree. That is very unfortunate.

He kept writing, and made it even worse.

He’s a scab. OK, it’s coming back, only now with no writers and just his trademark smarmy ignorance.

I haven’t watched his show in years, maybe a decade or so. I’m confident that it has not improved, and this will simply be another inflection point in which the quality of the show nosedives for the garbage heap.

This is no way to run a movie theater

I was alone. Totally alone in the dark. Well, sure, there was the ticket-taker and the refreshment bar person, but they sent me off into the darkness by myself; the ticket-taker looked mildly surprised, and said, “I didn’t expect you here. Are you here for the science?” He shook his head as he pointed to the doors to my screen.

I went in. I had my choice of seats. The theater was completely empty. I got the best seat in the house, and sat and wondered where everyone was. Both screens were totally abandoned, the theater was dead silent, even the popcorn machine was turned off. I waited, and the movie started.

“The Cretaceous,” a title card announced. We see a scene of a beach, with some kind of shredded dinosaur carcass rotting, while a swarm of weird-looking reptiles with long needle-like fangs and long sinuous bodies squabble over it. Suddenly, a T. rex appears! It charges, eats a few fang-beasts, and the rest leap into the ocean and swim expertly away. I guess these are amphibious fang-beasts. The T. rex wades out into the ocean in pursuit, when…suddenly, a giant shark appears! It jumps onto the shore and chomps on the T. rex. I guess Megalodon’s ecological niche was cruising shallow seas near shore and occasionally leaping on to the land to ambush a dinosaur.

Title card: Meg2. Title card: The Trench.

Oh, yeah. I guess there’s no mystery why the theater was so empty.

Cut to action scene: Jason Statham has snuck onto a freighter dumping toxic waste into the ocean. He runs around taking photos, documenting the crimes — he’s an eco-warrior. Along the way, he beats up the entire crew, then leaps into the ocean and is scooped up, literally, by an airplane. This interlude has no bearing on the rest of the movie.

Cut to futuristic research station somewhere near the Philippines. They are studying the Trench, an abyssal canyon isolated from the rest of the ocean by a thermocline. It’s full of Megs. They also have a captured Megalodon swimming around in a blocked off lagoon. Don’t worry about it. This Meg will do nothing throughout the film. It’s going to escape to the open ocean shortly, but no one will care, and they’ll do nothing about it, and don’t even pay much attention to it. It’s purpose is solely for Statham to utter a throw away line, “maybe it’s pregnant,” near the end. It’s only there to justify Meg3: The Quest for More Chinese Investment Money.

The rest of the movie is a denial of physics, time, and space to set up a show about rampaging monsters on a resort island. Our main characters zoom down to the trench in some amazingly spacious submarines with gigantic picture windows everywhere. Don’t worry about them, they’re going to get wrecked in short order. There are bad guys down there, looting the sea bed for rare earth metals worth billions of dollars. The head bad guy immediately sets off explosive charges to kill Jason Statham, but incidentally kills all of his underlings, trapping all the good guys under boulders, and likewise trapping his own submarine. Don’t worry, they’re 25,000 feet under the sea, their ships are immobilized, but hull integrity is fine. They just get out through hatches and walk in their futuristic suits to the processing station the bad guys had set up.

The script writers apparently hadn’t paid any attention to the news about the Titan submersible that was crushed at a depth of 12,000 feet. They were too busy churning out schlock.

Their walk to the station is harrowing. They are pursued by the amphibious fang-beasts. They’ve been deep under the ocean all this time, holding their breaths for 65 million years! Some of the crew get eaten; we don’t care. It’s not as if they have personalities or something. We do get one brief nod to the idea of deep ocean pressure, though. One of the crew’s faceplates develops a crack that expands slowly, and then suddenly fractures as they are standing in the airlock, waiting for the water to be evacuated. Her head abruptly implodes as everyone watches.

Then air fills the chamber, and everyone removes their helmets. Everyone is fine.

The next part of the movie is Jason Statham running around the station, pushing buttons and pulling levers, like it was some kind of video game, occasionally stopping to punch the bad guy, who also made it back to the station. Statham eventually gets the right combination, freeing the station’s submarine, so all the good guys can escape. The bad guy survives, grabs some kind of steel balloon, and rides it all the way to the surface.

At the surface, they return to the good guys’ futuristic research station, only it’s been taken over by more bad guys. Cue more punching and kicking. Statham leads the survivors to a Zodiac, and they zoom away. Their destination: Fun Island, 30km away.

Oh, yeah, the Megs. We’d kind of forgotten them for most of the movie. They had also risen to the surface, without rupturing due to the extreme pressure differential, and they too are headed for Fun Island, along with a troop of fang-beasts and a giant ockapus. The end is approaching. The final part of this movie is miscellaneous monsters romping about on a resort island full of attractive young Asian women and their attractive young Asian children, and one homely middle-aged white man who is crass and rude and cowardly, who is inevitably snatched up and killed by the ockapus. Everyone is getting eaten by giant sharks and fang-beasts.

There are explosions and guns, the bad guys are eaten or blown up, the good guys kill all the monsters, Statham makes some improvised exploding harpoons and rides a jet ski out to kill Megs. When he runs out of harpoons, he picks up a rotor blade from a crashed helicopter and stabs the last Meg to death with it.

Oh wait, not the last Meg: the original captive Meg shows up, everyone says “hi,” and then swims nonchalantly off to the open ocean. The good guys camp out on the beach, drinking whisky, surrounded by the few surviving attractive Asian women. Everyone laughs.

The End.

I left the theater as the credits started to roll. Apparently, the workers there had been waiting for me to leave, because the instant I walked out the door, all the lights in the building blinked out. I guess the 9:00 showing was canceled. Sorry, guys. I’m pretty sure the $7 I spent on a ticket didn’t cover your wages for two hours of waiting for the old guy to get out.

This movie is not recommended at all, unless you feel like you missed the theatrical run of The Core and you really want to be able to brag that you witnessed one of the worst science movies of all time on the big screen.

You’ll have to tell me what you consider the worst science abuse in a movie. Meg2 is right at the top of my list.

Surprise lecture!

It’s always fun to volunteer for an extra lecture — this time it’s for an honors series here at UMM. The theme is built around the essays of the late Renaissance humanist Montaigne, on the subject of “Of Family.” It’s also prompted by a visiting professor.

Monday September 18, 7pm in Imholte 109

Mark your calendars for the other three lectures in the series, all held in the same place at the same time: Dr. Stephen Gross on 9/25; Dr. Paul Z. Myers on 10/2; Dr. Sarah Buchanan on 10/9

Michelle Janning is a writer, social science researcher, speaker, and sociology professor and endowed chair of social sciences at Whitman College in Walla Walla, Washington. She teaches and consults on human-centered design, roles and relationships in families and workplaces, technology and social life, education, and inclusive data-driven assessment and strategic planning in organizations and architecture projects. Janning employs qualitative and quantitative methods in her academic and applied research, and has published numerous books, articles, and essays, including The Stuff of Family Life: How our Homes Reflect our Lives (Rowman & Littlefield, 2017), Love Letters: Saving Romance in the Digital Age (Routledge, 2018), and A Guide to Socially-Informed Research for Architects and Designers (Routledge, 2023). She has been interviewed about homes and family life, along with other social issues, in numerous media outlets, including Real Simple, Vox, The New York Times, BBC, The Atlantic, NBC News, and Parents.com.

There I am, on 2 October, speaking on the cryptic subject “Of Boundaries.” I’m a biologist, so they’re going to have to expect something a little different from those other speakers in the humanities/social sciences. Would you believe I’m squeezing in some material on spiders, in a lecture series on families? Yes, you would. It’s not all spiders, though. You’ll have to come on out to Western Minnesota to find out.

For now, you can try guessing what “Of Boundaries” is about.

What I’d like my yard to look like

Nice. Let’s normalize what a midwestern lawn ought to look like.

Think of all the interesting spiders that would live in that kind of chaos! Beautiful!

Somehow I don’t think the city planners would let me get away with it. We’re taking little steps, though — Mary’s birthday present this year was a rain garden, which we’ll have to wait until next summer to have put in.