The live-streaming menace

I did not know anything about the person known as Perez Hilton but his name occupied the periphery of my consciousness because of its occasional appearance on the splash pages of the news sites I frequent. His real name was Mario Armando Lavandeira Jr. but he adopted his pseudonym deliberately because of its similarity to the better known Paris Hilton, so that it would be catchy.

He suddenly vaulted into the mainstream news when a few days ago he live-streamed harming himself in what looked like a suicide attempt, that resulted in a rescue team being called in and him being taken to hospital.

So what was his claim to fame before this? Brady Brickner-Wood gives some background into what seems like an odious person who achieved celebrity status by viciously gossiping about other celebrities.

Before “troll” became commonplace in the internet lexicon, Hilton embodied the definition: a prurient, prolific shitposter who drew dicks and semen on paparazzi photos, called Adam Sandler’s two-year-old daughter “ugly,” and, after Heath Ledger’s accidental overdose, sold T-shirts with the slogan “Why couldn’t it be Britney?” On his website, which at its peak, around 2007, received as many as eight million hits a day, he outed celebrities, picked apart stars’ appearances, and mocked their addictions. He cloaked his cruelty in camp, suffusing his blog posts with exclamation points and cheap puns.

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Trump’s list of enemies gets even weirder

The TV channel C-Span is watched mainly by a small audience of wonky types who are interested in the details of government and public affairs.

Cable-Satellite Public Affairs Network (C-SPAN /ˈsiːˌspæn/ SEE-span) is an American cable and satellite television network, created in 1979 by the cable television industry as a nonprofit public service. It televises proceedings of the United States federal government and other public affairs programming. C-SPAN is a private, nonprofit organization funded by its cable and satellite affiliates. It does not have advertisements on any of its television networks or radio stations. However their official website has banner advertisements, and streamed videos also have advertisements. The network operates independently; the cable industry and the U.S. Congress have no control over its programming content.

Since it mainly passively shows public events, it rarely creates any controversy. But at 9:25 a.m. ET Monday on its program Washington Journal, it had a representative from the Center for American Progress (an organization that supports Democrats) discuss an analysis that found that Trump’s deployment of National Guard troops to American cities, a move that was widely criticized, had no effect on crime rates in those cities.
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Film review: Nomadland (2020)

Back in 2014, I had a blog post about a community of migrant workers that are not what you first think of when you use the term. I will not repeat what I said there but it is about elderly people who have reached retirement age without sufficient resources to retire. Following the recession of 207-2009, they used what little money they had to buy a van and convert it into a home and then drive around the country doing low-level temporary jobs such as stocking retailer warehouses and cleaning workplaces and parks and the like. They park in campgrounds that are often provided by the companies who are happy to obtain the services of older people who will accept temporary, minimum-wage jobs under poor conditions without complaining. There is even a name for them: workampers. (Someone who had been a workamper commented on my post.)

The post was based on a long article The end of retirement: When you can’t afford to stop working by Jessica Bruder that appeared in Harper’s magazine , which was later expanded into a 2017 book Nomadland: Surviving America in the Twenty-First Century. In 2020, this was made into a film Nomadland that won three Academy Awards, for best picture, best director and best actor.
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The rightwing snit over the The Odyssey (2026)

It takes very little to set the rightwing nut jobs off into starting a new front in the culture wars, usually over things that are either non-existent or highly unlikely, such as fears that immigrants are eating their pets or that a drug cartels are taking over American city streets or that it was forbidden to say “Merry Christmas” any more.

I find it particularly amusing when right wingers get up in arms when some recounting of stories in films and TV do not conform to their weird ideas of authenticity. It becomes even more ludicrous when the stories are purely fictional so that appeals to history make no sense. Remember the insistence that Santa Claus is white? Or the flap over the live action remake of the Little Mermaid because the title character was a person of color?

The latest silliness involves Christopher Nolan’s film The Odyssey that has opened to rave reviews and massive box office sales. It is the latest retelling of the Homeric poem and it features actors of color in key roles such as Helen of Troy and a transgender actor in another role. Of course, the whole epic is an obvious myth (the fact that Helen was hatched from an egg that was the product of Zeus transforming himself into a swan and mating with Leda, the queen of Sparta, should have been a clue) but that did not deter these loonies.
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The skill of headline writers

I scan a lot of news sites and in the process come across items that are not newsworthy in the sense of being important but are amusing and quirky. But there are some items that keep appearing in the headlines so frequently and so prominently that they signify something important but that I never click on.

One of these is the dispute involving Harry and Megan Windsor and his family. Such intrafamily conflicts can be very unpleasant and I do not wish them on anyone but I do not really need breathless commentary on that particular soap opera. The other is the impending wedding of Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce. While I am pleased for any happy couple taking such a decisive step, the details of this event have zero interest for me.

But given how these things constantly appear on the newsfeeds, clearly a lot of people must be interested in them. And it testifies to the skill of news headline writers that even though I don’t follow up on the links, I still know something about these two things just from the headlines.

What makes a film worth watching again?

There are so many potentially enjoyable films out there that it seems a waste of time to watch a film that one has already seen. And I rarely do. And yet recently I watched two films that I have seen not just once but a few times before. And it got me thinking about what makes a film so good. It is definitely not high production values, a stellar cast, dazzling special effects or frenetic action, the stuff that seems to power the blockbuster films. Instead it is good writing, direction, and strong character portrayals.

One film was The Castle a 1997 low-budget Australian film that I have praised highly before. ‘Low budget’ hardly does it justice. The cast is largely unknown outside Australia and it took less than two weeks to film at a cost A$750,000. To save costs, the name of the family (Kerrigan) was chosen so that the film makers could use trucks that belonged to an actual towing company with that name.
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Stephen Colbert in Only in Monroe

Before Stephen Colbert started his 11-year run on The Late Show, he guest-hosted a public access local TV program in Monroe, MI called Only in Monroe. On his last show on CBS on Thursday of last week, he hinted that he might go back to Monroe.

“Tonight is our final broadcast from the Ed Sullivan Theater,” he said, prompting boos from the audience.

“No, no, we were lucky enough to be here for the last 11 years, all right? Can’t take this for granted,” he added. “Though technically our first show in July of 2015 was from a public access station in Monroe, Michigan, for an audience of 12 people. Show business being what it is these days, that’s probably where you’ll see me next.” and guest-hosted again.

And sure enough, the very next day, there he was back in Monroe.

I started watching the one-hour program just to see what it was like, thinking I would get bored and switch off after a few minutes but I was gripped and watched until the end. It was hilarious. There was something extremely appealing about this extremely low-budget show and we are reminded how Colbert can extract humor from the mundane, probably because he got his start in performing in improv that requires one to be funny while unprepared or backed by an army of writers and support staff.

Initially CBS tried to suppress the airing of the show on YouTube (corporate behemoths being the humorless profiteers they are) but then backed off after an outcry.

AI is making spam moderation harder

Whenever a new person tries to comment on a post here, the WordPress platform that this blog uses has filters to check if they could be spam. A visit to the spam folder shows that each day tens, if not hundreds, of potential comments are summarily dispatched to the spam folder without my ever seeing them. If a comment passes those checks, then it is sent to me for moderation, to enable me to make sure that it is not spam. Once I approve the first comment from a new person, subsequent comments from that same person go through immediately, so spammers have to make the first comment plausible.

It used to be fairly easy to identify spam comments that make it past the filters and get to me. They were usually poorly written with typos and grammatical errors, they would have links to sites that had nothing to do with the post, they would often have effusive but generic compliments on the content of the post and my writing, and they would usually arrive a long time after the post originally appeared.

But in a recent post of mine about the blame game that has begun over the stagnation in the Iran war, I received the following comment for moderation.
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I hope this kills the WHCA dinner for good

As everyone will know, there was a shooting at the annual White House Correspondents Association dinner. This is a loathsome affair where reporters schmooze with the very people they are supposed to be aggressively covering. Self-respecting reporters boycott the event, seeing it as compromising their ability to objectively cover politicians. But most reporters are not like that. They love to have the opportunity to hang out with politicians and celebrities.

Fortunately no one was hurt but I hope that it kills this event for good.

I was not at all surprised to hear about this since shootings are so common in the US. What surprises me is that the media are expressing such shock. Trump especially uses violent rhetoric all the time and gloats when people he dislikes dies. He dismisses the deaths of thousands of innocent people in his and Israel’s wars with Iran and Lebanon and Gaze. People are going to think that this is how one solves problems.

Can we please stop using this film cliche?

During the filming of a new action film, lead actors Jonathan Majors and JC Kilcoyne tumbled backwards through a glass window after one of them was ‘shot’.

The incident was captured on video obtained by Deadline, which is embedded below. Multiple sources confirm to Deadline that the accident occurred after the window was replaced with an unsecured sheet of tempered glass to be purposefully shattered in a later stunt that did not involve any actors.

Since the tempered glass was only sitting loosely in the window, both the actors and the sheet of glass fell about six feet to the ground. Kilcoyne required stitches “all over his hands” after the incident, sources with knowledge of the incident say.

This trope of someone getting shot and falling backwards and breaking through a glass window is a cliche beloved of action film directors. As I have written before, a bullet does not have enough momentum to do more that cause a human to move back more than an inch or so, let alone be flung back and break through a window. In this case, a single bullet did that to two people.
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