Behaving badly in theaters

Actor Andrew Scott revealed that while performing as Hamlet, he stopped midway through the play’s famous soliloquy because a member of the audience was using his laptop.

Speaking to the Happy Sad Confused film podcast, Scott said there was “no way” he could continue with the speech, and refused to resume until the man put his laptop away.

“When I was playing Hamlet, a guy took out his laptop – not his phone, his laptop – while I was in the middle of ‘To be or not to fucking be’,” said the actor, who said he thought the offending audience member was sending emails.

“I was pausing and [the stage team] were like, ‘Get on with it’ and I was like, ‘There’s no way.’ I stopped for ages.”

A woman next to the laptop user appeared to alert him to the situation and he finally stopped.

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The curious psychology of getting free stuff

As some of you may have noticed, posting has been light recently. This is because I am fond of the card game bridge and there has been a big annual bridge tournament right here in Monterey where a lot of people come from all over to play. It is held in a large hotel and I have been playing in it all day for several days, which is not just time consuming but mentally exhausting, since you have to concentrate for about six hours.

The tournament is organized and run by the national bridge body but as the local club, we are assigned the hospitality desk, where volunteers from our club sit and tell people about things to do and places to eat in the region, and generally be as helpful and as welcoming as we can. One feature of our desk is that there is a large bowl where we keep a mix of various types of candy. The candy was purchased by our club and passersby are welcome to take one or two for free.
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Looking forward to the end of lists

The end of an old year and the beginning of a new one is the occasion for the generation of lists of all manner of things and I for one find most of them unenlightening and tend to give them a miss. Fortunately these kinds of lists disappear after the first few days of the new year.

The most useless lists are those that try to predict what will happen in the coming year. They are just guesses based on the whims of the list creator. Retrospective tabulations of the major events of the past year are also not particularly enlightening, since I most likely knew about them anyway.

The only lists that I look at factual ones like those of people who died during the year, to see if there are some familiar names whose demise did not make big news when it happened.

The only non-factual lists that I look at are those of film critics whose views I respect that give the best films of the year, just in case I missed reading about some less-publicized but good film. If I find one, I add it to my ‘must see’ list.

Beware of electronic cards, invitations, links, and attachments

It is the season where we get electronic cards and invitations that sometimes consist of just a link or an attachment. I also get emails from friends that contain just a link or attachment. I never click on any of them, not only at this time of year, but always. This is because malicious people use those as vehicles to send malware. If somebody hacks into the computer of someone you know, they can then send virus-embedded stuff to everyone in their address book. People think it is safe to click the link or open the attachment because it appears to come from someone they know.

A person I know got an electronic invitation from a neighbor for a party but when she clicked the link, it turned out to be fake and instead was a vehicle for a ransomware attack. It shut down her computer and demanded that she pay a ransom in cryptocurrency if she wanted to get the key to unlock her computer. She had a hell of a time trying to fix all the damage that it caused, needing to enlist the help of computer professionals to fix her computer as well as change all her banking, credit card, and other information.

In general, I never open any links or attachments that arrive without an accompanying message by the sender that could not have been generated by a spam bot but instead has some content that tells me definitely that the sender is real. I always look for a message in the text that requires some specialized knowledge that a bot would not know. If it has no message or is just generic like, “Hi, I thought this would interest you”, I ignore it. If I am not sure, I email the sender to confirm that they sent it and also warn them not to click on such links.

This is tedious and does not completely eliminate all threats but I think it is worth the effort.

What surprises me is that even after I warn people of the dangers and tell people not to send me unsupported links and attachments, after some time some of them revert to the practice. It is as if my warning never registered. I suspect that they continue to click on those things. People tend to ignore danger signs until something bad happens to them.

Inventing philosophers and their works

[I posted this yesterday and then soon after seem to have inadvertently overwritten it with the Tuberville post, so I am reposting it. Apologies to ahcuah who commented on this post before it got over-ridden and thus his comment became irrelevant to the Tuberville post. Also apologies to Steve who responded to ahcuah’s comment and that also became irrelevant through no fault of his own.]

I was intrigued by this article by Jonathan Egid titled Forging philosophy about questions that have been raised as to whether a 17th century Ethiopian philosopher who was credited with writing an influential work really existed or whether he and his work were invented in the 19th century by an Italian monk.

The Ḥatäta [Zera Yacob], or ‘enquiry’ (the root of which, ሐ-ተ-ተ, in the ancient Ethiopian language of Geʽez literally means ‘to investigate, examine, search’ ) is an unusual work of philosophy for a number of reasons. It is not only a philosophical treatise but also an autobiography, a religious meditation and a witness of the religious wars that plagued Ethiopia in the early 17th century; it presents a theodicy and cosmological argument apparently independent of other traditions of Christian thought; it employs a subtle philosophical vocabulary that is virtually without precursors. Finally, and most perplexingly, the progenitor of these ideas, the Zera Yacob who is the subject of the autobiography and gives his name to the title, may never have existed.

Why might we think this? The text is composed in the voice of one Zera Yacob, a man born to poor parents in ‘the lands of the priests of Aksum’ in northern Ethiopia around the turn of the 17th century.
…

The troubled afterlife of the text begins when the work is ‘discovered’ in 1852 by a lonely Capuchin monk named Giusto da Urbino in the highlands of Ethiopia. Before this date, there is no mention of the text in the historical record. The work was sent off to da Urbino’s patron back in Paris, the Irish-Basque explorer, linguist and astronomer Antoine d’Abbadie, and placed in the Ethiopian collections of the Bibliothèque Nationale de France. Over the next couple of decades, scholars flocked to consult this fascinating, seemingly unprecedented text. The Ḥatäta was edited and translated into Russian and Latin, and began to gain a wider readership among European intellectuals.

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For some, doing well is not enough

Some of you may remember the college admissions scandal of a few years ago in which many famous actors and other well-to-people were caught finding ways to game the college admissions process so that their children could be admitted to the schools of their choice. One of those people was actor Felicity Huffman who paid an exam proctor $15,000 to correct some of the incorrect answers on her daughter’s SAT exam so that she would get a better score. I was struck by something she said recently as to why she did what she did.

Huffman, 60, ultimately pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit mail fraud as well as honest services mail fraud. She spent 11 days in prison in October 2019 and completed 250 hours of community service after becoming the first of 34 parents to be sentenced in the scandal’s fallout.

Huffman on Thursday said: “I know hindsight is 20/20, but it felt like I would be a bad mother if I didn’t do it. So – I did it.”

Elaborating, she said: “I felt like I had to give my daughter a chance at a future. And so it was sort of like my daughter’s future, which meant I had to break the law.”

Huffman described enduring pangs of anxiety and regret as she drove an unwitting Sophia to the exam.

“She was going, ‘Can we get ice-cream afterwards? I’m scared about the test. What can we do that’s fun?’” Huffman recounted to KABC. “And I kept thinking, ‘Turn around, just turn around.’ To my undying shame, I didn’t.”

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Great moments in parenting

Nancy Wilson is described as an expert in ‘Christian parenting’ and in this clip she describes how she spanked her four-year old child so that she would learn to look happy when her mother came to pick her up from a play date.

Apart from the awful practice of spanking children, it is disturbing that she is forcing her children to express feelings of happiness at seeing her that they may not feel. She is training her children to lie to her, presumably to make the mother feel good and impress any observers present.

I read some comments to the clip that say that the clip is quite old and that the child is now an adult and supports the idea of spankings to achieve goals such as this.

Serious injuries in rugby

I have been railing about the serious dangers to participants in American football, especially with the rise in evidence of CTE, the long-term brain injury that results from repeated collisions that can cause concussions. It is thought that the repeated accumulation of concussions, even small ones during practices, is what leads to later serious cognitive decline in players. I feel the evidence is already compelling enough that I no longer watch games and also think that schools and colleges should no longer offer this as a sports option to their students. It is an activity that should be left for adults to choose to participate in, though they should be made aware of the risks.

Americans tend to view rugby as pretty much the same as American football, except without the protective helmets and body padding and hence think that it must be much more dangerous. I used to tell them that it was not so, that there were differences that made rugby safer. One is that there is evidence that the protective gear actually gives players a false sense of safety and encourages them to do dangerous things that they would not do without it. Another is that in rugby, it is only the player who has the ball that can be tackled, thus any given player faces far fewer collisions per game. A third is that any collision that results in contact with a player’s head results in an immediate yellow card that requires the offender to be off the field for ten minutes, to sit in a chair that is quaintly called a ‘sin bin’. If, during that time, an off-field review shows no mitigating factors, it is upgraded to a red card and the player cannot return to the game.
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