Helen H. Moore's Blog, page 687
August 16, 2016
Amy Schumer reveals disturbing extent of abuse in new memoir: “I was sure he was going to kill me”
Amy Schumer (Credit: Reuters/Danny Moloshok)
Comedian Amy Schumer’s new quasi-memoir, “The Girl with the Lower Back Tattoo,” was released Tuesday, and in it she revealed details about a past relationship in which she was sometimes in fear for her life.
According to “People,” in one of the book’s vignettes — it’s not a chronological memoir so much as a series of analyzed moments — in her early twenties, Schumer found herself in a relationship in which arguments escalated into threats of violence, then actual violence, and in one instance, an actual death threat.
On one particularly aggressive evening, the unnamed boyfriend banged her head on the hood of a car. As the night progressed, so too did the abuse. When she tried to escape, he broke a mug over his head began pounding himself on a light fixture before turning to her.
“He grabbed a huge butcher knife from a drawer,” she wrote, “and that’s when I was sure he was going to kill me.” She relived these harrowing moments, Schumer argued, for the benefit of her fans.
“It can happen to anyone. You’re not alone if it’s happening to you, and you’re not exempt if it hasn’t happened to you yet.”
August 15, 2016
No compromises, no regrets — Larry Wilmore and the price of “Keeping it 100″
Larry Wilmore (Credit: Reuters/David McNew)
Though the two series could not differ more in tone, news of Comedy Central’s cancellation of “The Nightly Show with Larry Wilmore” brought to mind one of my favorite moments from “Key & Peele.” During one of its freewheeling opening segments, when hosts Keegan-Michael Key and Jordan Peele would lightly riff on whatever they pleased, they discussed the differences between their young viewers and their older fans.
Sixty-something black viewers, according to Key, sounded something like this: “I’m enjoying the program, young man…. But just remember: you ain’t on thin ice, brother, but you on ice.”
What “Key & Peele”’s hypothetical older fan referred to was the show’s sly commentary on racism, achieved without specifically making the sketch series about race. “Chappelle’s Show” did the same thing years ago for its first two seasons, making it a pop culture phenomenon and Dave Chappelle into a legend among comedians.
But “Key & Peele” and “Chappelle’s Show” were based on specific entertainment industry personalities, with the purpose of spinning comedy out of universally-relatable scenarios. Not only that, the stars of both shows ended them on their own terms.
“The Nightly Show,” in contrast, had a different mandate from the start, evident in the fact that it was originally titled “The Minority Report.” It was created by Jon Stewart to filter distinct and frequently intersectional viewpoints informed by race, class and gender into a late night talk show format.
Knowing this, African American viewers of a certain age, and with a long memory, may have guessed that Comedy Central’s latest unblackening would come around sooner or later. Perhaps not 12 weeks before the Presidential election — that’s particularly surprising, given the precarious status of the rest of network’s faux-news block right now. But anyone who watched “The Nightly Show” had to know that Wilmore couldn’t maintain the show’s socio-politically fearless viewpoint indefinitely.
In fairness, “The Nightly Show”’s cancellation had far less to do with the show’s high melanin quotient than colorblind Nielsen ratings data. Wilmore inherited the timeslot from “The Colbert Report,” which enjoyed an average audience of 1.7 million viewers before Stephen Colbert departed to take over for David Letterman at CBS.
After that, viewership for the first year of “The Nightly Show” fell to an average of 922,000 viewers. In 2016, the year-to-date average has hovered somewhere around 776,000 viewers per night.
One can easily list the reasons for this, starting with the fact that “The Nightly Show”’s ratings were never quite as robust following Stewart’s departure from “The Daily Show,” which gave the show a strong lead-in when it launched in January 2016, but has been experiencing its own set of ratings woes since Trevor Noah took over as host.
Both Noah and Wilmore had to contend with withering in the shadows of giants. But Wilmore’s unique challenge was to follow Colbert’s larger-than-life, right-skewering trickster — the goofball counterbalance to Stewart, the liberal viewer’s deeply rankled, brutally honest best friend.
If Comedy Central had conducted a chemistry test with Stewart and Colbert’s dynamic in mind, Colbert’s successor would have similarly offset Noah’s weaknesses. What they got in Wilmore, however, was a modern version of Ellis Haizlip with a bit of Tavis Smiley mixed in — an affable, well-informed figure doing his ablest to find punchlines within a never ending parade of stories about the police shootings of unarmed black men, the erosion of civil rights on a federal level and, among other items on the lighter menu of the world’s horrors, the unforgettable sliminess of Bill Cosby.
It’s not as if Wilmore wasn’t doing the job for which he was hired. In tapping Wilmore, previously known to Comedy Central viewers the Senior Black Correspondent for “The Daily Show with Jon Stewart,” Stewart was sending a message to the industry.
Under Stewart’s regime, “The Daily Show” achieved new ratings heights and became a go-to destination for politically-inclined news junkies. But it was also overwhelmingly Caucasian and male in its writers room, even if it gave us a cast of alums that included the fabulous Samantha Bee (who has gone on to carry on Stewart’s legacy as the host of TBS’s “Full Frontal with Samantha Bee”), Aasif Mandvi, Wyatt Cenac and Jessica Williams (who is developing her own show at Comedy Central), as well as Wilmore.
Building “The Nightly Show” around Wilmore, then, was Stewart’s way of highlighting viewpoints that aren’t typically represented in mainstream media. Wilmore didn’t shoulder that task alone: He made Robin Thede, an African American woman, the show’s head writer for 159 episodes. He elevated the profiles of brash, intellectual stand-up comedians Mike Yard and Rory Albanese, introduced audiences to Ricky Velez, and gave ample screen time to a variety of women of color, notably Holly Walker, Franchesca Ramsey and Grace Parra.
All of these contributors helped Wilmore deeply mine uncomfortable topics that other late night talk show hosts would gingerly touch upon — if they did so at all — before moving on to easy comedy veins. It’s simple for comedians to feast upon the ever-increasing number of gaffes committed by Donald Trump; he’s an orange Julius Caesar who gives all comers ample opportunity to punch up.
It is much, much more difficult to utilize the late night comedy format to call attention to absurdist acts of institutional bigotry and discrimination, police brutality, voter disenfranchisement and a wide array of other civil rights issues concerning not only African Americans, but the LGBTQ community, women, immigrants and refugees.
Wilmore used “The Nightly Show” forum to taking longer looks at relevant social topics, such a s“The Nightly Show” episodes focusing on black fatherhood, or the systematic barriers black women face in the arenas of dating, employment and education. He also followed the Black Lives Matter movement closely as it developed and expanded, doing so consistently and without apology. The show’s catchphrase, “Keeping it 100,” became its credo — and possibly its downfall.
“The Nightly Show”’s laser focus on these topics likely led to its inability to attract and maintain audience levels on par with “The Daily Show” and “The Colbert Report.” The typical viewer doesn’t enthusiastically gravitate toward discussions about racism, sexism and homophobia. Certainly most late-night watchers aren’t comfortable absorbing those topics right before nodding off, even when they’re treated with a lighter touch.
Other structural aspects of “The Nightly Show” also got in the way of its success. The roundtable format, patterned after Bill Maher’s series, didn’t effectively gel until quite recently. Though some guests spun topics into rich conversation around that table, the segment was just as likely just to be a multicar pile-up of opinions that didn’t form into a cohesive discussion.
Nor did Wilmore’s political analysis effectively serve as a counterbalance to the largely centric and safe Trevor Noah. Instead, his takes on larger issue often felt like a retread – a smarter retread, delivered with a note of hard poignancy where a punchline should have been before throwing to commercial, but a retread nevertheless.
Television needs “The Nightly Show”’s courageousness at this moment in history, but far more late night viewers are flocking to watch “The Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon.” Younger viewers, too, are gravitating in higher numbers to “The Daily Show” and Chris Hardwick’s “@midnight.” Ultimately the whims and tastes of the 18-to-34-year-old demographic are what drive Comedy Central’s business decisions, and that’s why “@midnight” will slide into “The Nightly Show’s” timeslot after August 18.
Even accounting for its weaknesses, there is no doubt that viewers and Comedy Central will be losing an important voice when “The Nightly Show” airs its final episode Thursday night. But this is far from the last we’ll be seeing of Wilmore, who co-created and serves as an executive producer on Issa Rae’s upcoming HBO comedy “Insecure.” Wilmore’s work on “The Nightly Show” also meant putting his role as executive producer of ABC’s Emmy-nominated “Black-ish” on the backburner after helping to usher it into existence. It would be wonderful to see him contribute directly to upcoming episodes.
Better yet, perhaps Wilmore will get a gig on a channel better suited to his unflinching sensibilities, much in the way former FXX host W. Kamau Bell has done with the excellent “United Shades of America.” Both he and Wilmore have proven themselves to be vital facilitators in the tough conversations that need to be had. They were also rarities on the late night landscape, the only African American talk show hosts in a game overwhelmingly stocked with white guys.
For the time being, though, we wouldn’t blame Wilmore for stepping behind the camera to take a creative breather. To quote another observation made by “Key & Peele”: one of the worst places to be a black man is at a party where there’s only white people. “It’s just way too much pressure to provide all of the fun,” said Key.
Can Mr. Angry Birds make Nokia take flight again?
(Credit: AP/Eric Charbonneau/Reuters/Mikko Stig/Photo montage by Salon)
Can the executive who tried (and failed) to make the Angry Birds game franchise into a global powerhouse bring Nokia back from the brink? The Finnish mobile phone company is hoping that former Rovio Entertainment CEO Pekka Rantala can do more to help their once-storied brand take flight than he did for those furious flying cartoons.
On Monday, HMD Global, the company founded in May to sell Nokia-branded mobile phones and tablets, named Rantala to spearhead a massive re-entry into the global mobile phone market. Rantala, who was named HMD’s chief marketing officer, had stepped down as CEO of Rovio last December after the gaming company failed to capitalize on the immense popularity of one of the earliest and biggest smartphone game successes.
Since its debut in 2009, Rovio’s Angry Birds has been one of the most downloaded game apps. Under Rantala, the company tried to leverage their signature brand, expanding into board games, clothing, toys, TV and film adaptations, and even theme parks. But the brand that Rantala once said had the potential to become a modern-day Walt Disney Co. flew out of a slingshot fast — then took a nosedive. Under Rantala, Rovio cut more than a third of its workforce last year, and it recently announced a restructuring to focus on its core gaming, media and consumer products businesses.
But Rantala, a former Nokia executive, says he’s optimistic that his homecoming will help Nokia return to past glory. “Nokia is a globally recognized brand, and we have a chance to rejuvenate it like never before,” Rantala told Cnet News about his return to the company.
If you’re old enough to days before smartphones, there’s a good chance you owned at least one Nokia handset. Once the world’s dominant mobile-phone maker, Nokia was known for making sturdy, low-priced handsets, but it failed to keep up and was steamrolled in the late 2000s by Apple’s iPhone and Android-based smartphones.
An ill-fated 2011 deal with Microsoft nearly bankrupted Nokia company, as it put all its egg in the Windows Phone operating system basket. That arrangement ended in 2014 when Microsoft sold its phone business it purchased from Nokia to FIH Mobile (a subsidiary of Taiwan’s Foxconn, the world’s largest contract electronics manufacturer) and a new Finnish company called HMD Global.
Now HMD Global will design, produce and sell a new line of Nokia-branded tablets and smartphones under a deal with Nokia Technologies, whose main business is selling high-speed broadband hardware to telecom companies. In June, Nokia Technologies announced an agreement with China Mobile, the world’s largest telecommunications company by market share, to expand the state-owned company’s network and cloud computing infrastructure.
Since selling its mobile business to Microsoft, Nokia Technologies has made only one mobile device, the Android-based N1 tablet. The N1, which is manufactured by Foxconn, has been well received in the Chinese market and provides a glimpse of what HMD has planned for Nokia brand: build a line of Android-based devices in a bid to take on Apple and Samsung. HMD hasn’t announced when its first Nokia-branded Android-based smartphones will hit the market. But Rantala, for one, can’t wait to get back in the game. As he told CNet News: “I love Nokia, I love what it stands for, and I’d love to see it rise again.”
“Sausage Party”’s race problem: This “equal opportunity offender” is just plain offensive
(Credit: Columbia Pictures)
“Sausage Party” is the kind of movie that dares you to get offended.
Directed by Conrad Vernon (“Shrek 2”) and Greg Tiernan (“Thomas and Friends”), the film is gleefully, proudly ribald. The film exists in a “Toy Story”-like universe in which anthropomorphic food items dream of being selected by human shoppers to journey to what they call “The Great Beyond.” Their interest in crossing over, however, is not purely religious. A hot dog, voiced by Seth Rogen (“The Interview”), hopes to get raptured along with his girlfriend, a voluptuous bun brought to life by Kristen Wiig (“Bridesmaids”). In so doing, the two plan to get Biblical. This quest will end in a pansexual food orgy.
“Sausage Party” is so raunchy and foul-mouthed it practically puts “Bad Santa” to shame, fully earning its hard-R rating. In its first half hour, screenwriters Rogen, Evan Goldberg, Ariel Shaffir, and Kyle Hunter unleash a blitzkrieg of expletives on the audience, the hundreds of F-bombs a testament to the filmmakers’ belief that more is more. At one point, a used condom cries out in agony, having seen things no fragile rubber should. Meanwhile, the film’s villain (Nick Kroll) is an actual douche.
If it’s no-holds-barred commitment to tastelessness is impressive, “Sausage Party” is mired by unseemly racial politics, which led to widespread criticism from Twitter users over the weekend.
Wm. Steven Humphrey, the film critic for Portland Mercury, called it “dumb and racist.” “Unrelenting puns are the go-to jokes in this script,” he writes, “and each food or drink product is assigned a personality based on race: A flatbread is given a stereotypical Middle Eastern makeover, while his enemy, a bagel, is a Jew with a heavy, Woody Allen-esque accent. Interestingly, neither actor voicing these characters is Middle Eastern (David Krumholtz) or Jewish (Edward Norton).”
Humphrey also pointed to Firewater, a Native American chief played by Bill Hader, who is distressingly reminiscent of the redface caricatures in “Peter Pan.” Like the Indian Chief in the Disney feature, he speaks in “grunts and uses sign language.”
The fact that the character is named after a brand of liquor adds another layer of distastefulness to the enterprise. Alcoholism is a major epidemic in Native communities, as more than one in 10 of deaths are related to alcohol abuse. As Centers for Disease Control and Prevention report, that’s more than three times the national average. These high rates of dependency, which includes an increased likelihood for drug use, contributes to astronomically high rates of suicide among First Nation youth. Calling the only Native character “Firewater” is, to put it lightly, crossing a line.
To add to the mix, we also have a date-rapist tequila bottle with a Cheech Marin-esque drawl (also Hader), a lesbian taco who lusts after hot lady buns (Salma Hayek), and Mr. Grits (Craig Robinson), who needs little introduction.
Believe it or not, it could have been worse. As Rogen and Goldberg recalled in a BuzzFeed interview, Robinson’s character was originally called “Uncle Tom’s Rice” and spoke in “an unmistakable plantation patois.” The pair changed it following early test screenings with audiences, as well as some harsh feedback from an audience member at SXSW. She asked if the writers, all of whom are white, consulted people of color when creating these overt racial caricatures. “Oh, the movie very much stereotypes every single cultural group,” Rogen explained, a light chuckle underscoring the actor’s clear discomfort with the callout.
There, it seems, is the rub. In the vein of the Trey Parker-Matt Stone efforts “South Park: Bigger, Longer, and Uncut” and “Team America: World Police,” “Sausage Party” positions itself as an equal-opportunity offender. It makes fun of everyone—whether that’s women, black people, Jews, Arabs, Latinos, and even gays. In the film, fruit are, well, you probably guessed already.
For that kind of humor to be effective, equal opportunity offensiveness has to operate in a world where opportunity itself is equal. As Lindy West suggested in a 2012 essay for Jezebel, the problem is that “all people are not in equal positions of power,” which is especially true in Hollywood, an industry where white men remain overrepresented at the expense of everyone else. A 2015 report from the Director’s Guild of America found that 82.4 percent of films were directed by Caucasian males.
It would be tempting to say that little has changed in the film industry since 1953, when “Peter Pan” was released, but a 2014 survey from Columbia University found that things had actually gotten worse over that timespan—at least for Latinos.
In the 1950s, Latinos made up just 2.8 percent of the American population but accounted for 3.9 percent of all leading men (and 1.5 percent of leads overall). Today, Latinos are the most underrepresented group in film. Despite the fact that Latinos are the largest minority group in the U.S.—at 17 percent of the population—they make up just 3.8 percent of all film characters. Relative to the number of Latinos living in the United States, media representation has, thus, shrunk.
It’s telling then that no Latino has won the Best Actor Oscar since 1950, when José Ferrer nabbed the trophy for playing the title character “Cyrano de Bergerac.” To date, a Latina has never taken home a Best Actress award—and only three women have ever been nominated for the honor.
One of those three was Salma Hayek, who was nominated in 2002 for playing the Mexican artist Frida Kahlo in Julie Taymor’s “Frida.” Hayek, who got her start in telenovelas, has spoken at length about her struggles in the film industry as a woman of color. In a 2016 interview with U.K.’s The Telegraph, she joked that she couldn’t even get hired to play the “lead prostitute” in a major film. Hayek might, however, be considered for a supporting role, as one of the background members of the brothel.
“I had things said to me that you would not believe,” the 49-year-old actress recalled. A studio executive once informed Hayek, who is the daughter of a Mexican opera singer and an oilman, that she would be a much bigger star had she been born in the United States. He allegedly told her, “The moment you open your mouth, you remind everyone of their maid.”
If the executive explained that she’d be relegated to playing housekeepers and sex objects her entire career, Hayek found that out the hard way when she was tapped by an unnamed director to be the lead in his science-fiction film. The studio forced him to drop Hayek, arguing that the concept wouldn’t sell. “A Mexican in space?” he was allegedly asked by execs. The actress, though, has had a hard time getting any role—even the thankless task of playing Adam Sandler’s hapless wife. When the comedian wanted her for “Grown Ups,” Sandler reportedly had to fight to get her cast.
It’s depressing that “Sausage Party” will be one of the few chances mainstream audiences have to see Hayek onscreen, and she’s playing a taco—basically a walking vagina. A report from the USC Annenberg School found that despite the underrepresentation of Latinas in film, they were the most likely group to be sexualized onscreen.
“Sausage Party”—which is, at its best, a potent parable about belief—appears to have been made with good intentions. Throughout the film’s decade-long process of getting made, Rogen and Goldberg consulted friends to make sure that their equal-opportunity offensiveness wasn’t just plain offensive. Jerrod Carmichael, who appeared in “Neighbors,” told BuzzFeed that Goldberg would come to him to vet the movie’s more problematic content. “Is this racist?” Goldberg inquired on more than one occasion.
In an industry where people of color continue to be stereotyped and shut out, it seems that if Goldberg had to ask, he already knew the answer.
Peter Thiel takes one last swing Nick Denton on day of Gawker auction
Entrepreneur Peter Thiel speaks during the final day of the Republican National Convention in Cleveland, Thursday, July 21, 2016. (AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite) (Credit: AP)
Peter Thiel, last seen at the Republican National Convention singing the praises of Donald Trump, penned an op-ed in The New York Times Monday explaining why he provided financial backing for another Trump supporter, Hulk Hogan, in his case against Gawker.
Thiel admitted that as one of the founders of Pay Pal, he feels “partly responsible for a world in which private information can be instantly broadcast to the whole planet.”
After recounting his outing by Gawker in 2007, and explaining why most of those who had their privacy violated by Gawker were incapable of fighting Nick Denton’s online media empire, he discussed the circumstances that led Hogan to successfully sue the company for what would, in the end, be $140 million — the unauthorized publication of a sex tape.
As for Denton’s claim that Gawker was simply exercising its First Amendment rights, Thiel argued that “[i]t is ridiculous to claim that journalism requires indiscriminate access to private people’s sex lives.”
He noted that there would be times when “sensitive information can sometimes be publicly relevant, exercising judgment is always part of the journalist’s profession,” and that while he doesn’t believe it’s his responsibility to “draw the line…journalists should condemn those who willfully cross it.”
Gawker filed for bankruptcy in June and is slated to be auctioned off later today, with Ziff Davis considered the favorite to acquire what remains of Denton’s media empire. As for the man himself, Denton filed for bankruptcy earlier this month, and considers Thiel’s funding of Hogan’s lawsuit just more evidence that the tech investor harbors at hatred against that is, in his words, sadistic.”
“Priebus is Latin for d*****bag”: RNC’s mutual disdain for Trump camp plays out on Roger Stone’s Twitter account
Roger Stone (Credit: AP/Mary Altaffer)
The Republican party establishment’s mutual disdain for nominee Donald Trump’s campaign has manifested itself in the especially juvenile Twitter harassment against RNC chairman Reince Priebus, by Roger Stone, Trump’s cartoonish conservative adviser.
According to a recent Politico report, Priebus “has warned that if Trump does not better heed this persistent advice to avoid dustups driven by his rhetoric, the RNC might not be able to help him as much — suggesting that money and ground resources might be diverted.
In response, Stone tweeted the following on Sunday:
This is what peace with Reince and the RINOS get you. https://t.co/nvsOp1YCCf
— Roger Stone (@RogerJStoneJr) August 14, 2016
But “RINO” — or Republican in Name Only — is perhaps the nicest thing Stone has ever called Priebus, whom he’s historically referred to as “Reince Penis.”
A look back, courtesy of MediaMatters:
Ff the Karl Rove/Wall Street/Beltway /@Reince Penis RINOS who screwed #RonPaul continue to run the GOP they will continue to lose
— Roger Stone (@RogerJStoneJr) February 5, 2013
Rove congratulates @Reince Penis on re-election as chairman of crumbling Party #gonifs #losers #done
— Roger Stone (@RogerJStoneJr) January 26, 2013
The Fleisher Report ? Biggest cover up in GOP since Watergate ! @Reince should be prosecuted
— Roger Stone (@RogerJStoneJr) December 27, 2012
GONIF ALERT # 3–Rove and @Reince Penis loot RNC–http://t.co/1OJE3Yss
— Roger Stone (@RogerJStoneJr) December 12, 2012
#Romney's entire election day operation melted Down–@Reince Penis f*ck-up- http://t.co/nyukhMuw
— Roger Stone (@RogerJStoneJr) November 14, 2012
@BenReilly01 Priebus is Latin for douchebag
— Roger Stone (@RogerJStoneJr) October 8, 2012
RNC Chairman and hopeless midget @Reince Penis says @GovGaryJohnson an "non-factor" in election http://t.co/g9rLAq7N We'll see
— Roger Stone (@RogerJStoneJr) October 7, 2012
RNC Chairman Rancid Penis kicks off the #CNNDebate
— Roger Stone (@RogerJStoneJr) December 16, 2015
Twilight of the gods: Jimmy Page’s testimony shows just how misguided music plagiarism cases can get
Jimmy Page (Credit: Reuters/Stefan Wermuth)
Even if you’re not a hardcore classic-rock fan, the idea of Led Zeppelin defending its most famous song in a Los Angeles courthouse may’ve made you wonder what went on there. It may’ve even have made you wish you were there to see the fight — to catch a glimpse of some of the most celebrated and notorious musicians of the Peak Rock era. Sure, it might not be as loud or exciting as the blaring of Marshall stacks, but it might offer a glimpse into the creative process, and maybe even some flashes of rockstar charisma.
But the testimony by Zeppelin guitarist Jimmy Page, which was just released by Rolling Stone, is something else entirely: It’s a conversation so mind-bendingly dull it could be excerpted in “This is Spinal Tap” as showing what can happen to a rock band when its best days are over. It also makes a pretty good case that courtrooms aren’t really the best case to decide these kinds of questions.
The “Stairway” case, of course, was over whether Zeppelin had stolen a significant part of the song from the California band Spirit, whose song “Taurus” included a chord progression with some similarities. Because the question issue of whether Page and singer Robert Plant heard the Spirit song before they wrote “Stairway” is important, the court needed to figure this out. But the process is so tortured and at times irrelevant, it may make you lose faith in the American justice system. Here’s an excerpt of a much longer exchange in which the prosecuting attorney, Francis Malofiy, digs into Page’s familiarity with another Spirit song, which Zeppelin played part of in early concerts.
Here’s an example:
Q. How long did that go on for, do you know?
A. I didn’t really — I didn’t have a stopwatch. I didn’t check it, no. It was — but, if you don’t mind me saying, it was part of another number called “As Long As I Have You” and it was part of a segue in the middle, like a medley.
Q. It was a —
A. Yeah. So you can tell we’re just jamming on that riff. That’s all we’re doing.
Q. Right. So this is a riff that you were playing and you’d agree that it wasn’t just a small little piece, it was a few minutes long, correct?
MR. ANDERSON: Objection again. Argumentative.
THE COURT: Well, sustained. The jury makes that determination.
THE WITNESS: Yeah. Yeah.
BY MR. MALOFIY:
Q. How many times did you repeat that riff over and over again?
A. Do you know if you had asked me to start counting when you played it, I might have tried to hazard a guess, but as it is, I don’t know.
THE COURT: But many times, right?
THE WITNESS: Well, that night, that riff, or — yeah, we’ve already — yeah, yeah. It’s repetitive, so I don’t know. I didn’t count. But the “Fresh Garbage” was played a number of times.
THE COURT: No question pending right now. Next question.
BY MR. MALOFIY:
Q. When you say it was played a number of times, did you — it wasn’t just the bass riff that was being — playing that piece of music; isn’t that correct?
MR. ANDERSON: Objection. Vague and ambiguous.
MR. MALOFIY: Let me clarify my question.
The investigation as to whether Page had a copy of the Spirit album in question, whether he bought it or was given it, and whether he’d ever listened to it, takes up even more time.
So one of the ironies here is that despite the enormous amount of time devoted to things like set lists from shows from nearly 50 years ago, the most relevant historical fact about Led Zeppelin cannot legally be discussed in the case. That is, though this is an intellectual property case, the fact that Zeppelin stole songs from blues and folk players, and did not credit them until forced to, is not admissible.
It’s hard not to wonder if the legal system is really set up to decide this sort of case, which hinges on the musical resemblance between songs. There’s so little of substance here, it argues that a star-chamber of music professors might be a little less tedious. Or maybe not. But there’s gotta be a better way.
Public marriage proposals are awkward: An Olympic medal ceremony — among other events — isn’t the time or the place
He Zi receives a marriage proposal from Olympic diver Qin Kai after her medal ceremony, Rio de Janeiro, August 14, 2016. (Credit: Reuters/Michael Dalder)
He Zi is a world class champion diver. At the 2012 Olympics, the now 25-year-old Chinese diver took a silver and a gold medal. In Rio this weekend, she again excelled, earning a silver women’s 3m springboard diving. But you probably know her as that girl who got proposed to.
On Sunday, Qin Kai, her boyfriend of six years, decided to make an honest woman out of his special and ask her to marry him. And he chose to do it right at what was actually her big moment. As the Olympics reported, he “climbed up to the stage after He Zi received her silver medal, getting down on one knee while holding a red box with the ring and a glass-encased rose.” So I guess you can just deal with sharing the spotlight at your moment of triumphant Olympic honor, right, gold medal winner Shi Tingmao and bronze finisher Tania Canotto? I mean, there’s a man here who has something he wants to say! Let’s all accommodate him, then.
Shi Tingmao, who is He Zi’s teammate, graciously told reporters later that she’d known what was up in advance, and Canotto likewise demurred, “It’s a really great moment to ask her to marry him.” And it was a moment that lent itself easily to headlines about “taking the plunge,” and how Zi had earned a “silver in 3m, gold in love.” But it wasn’t the only romantic gesture of its kind — last week, Brazilian women’s rugby player Isadora Cerullo got a proposal from her girlfriend Marjorie Enya right after the medal ceremony in the first women’s rugby sevens final. As CNN reported, “With microphone in hand and heart-shaped balloons on standby, Enya, 28, asked Cerullo to marry her.” It was, as The Guardian ominously predicted at the time, only the first marriage proposal of the games.
Whenever two people care enough about each other commit the unbelievably optimistic act of agreeing to marry, I am fully supportive of their joy. I also acknowledge that as the BBC notes, in China, “unusual marriage proposals are widely shared and commented on.” It’s just that I just don’t want to be involved. I don’t want to be corralled into strangers’ life choices. I sure as hell wouldn’t want to be enjoying my own hard-earned athletic achievement and have some guy decide to make it about something else.
Besides, hasn’t the overblown, begging-to-go-viral proposal become outdated yet? Isn’t it just so 2010? Why do these would-be brides and grooms still assume that everybody in their vicinity is eager to be their audience, even if they’re there to watch a medal ceremony or a Channing Tatum movie or to buy some lumber? Now we’re all supposed to extras in your rom-com? Must we? There’s now even a company — formed by a couple whose own “epic” proposal went viral — that currently offers “wedding proposal services.”
But what makes bride-to-be He Zi’s happy news a little harder to take than some garden variety Jumbotron question-popping is that is it actively pulled the focus away from what she and the other two women were actually there for — and then that became the story. The Associated Press, for example, reported on the news that “Love is in the air at the Olympic diving pool. He Zi of China settled for silver in women’s 3-meter springboard on Sunday before accepting an even bigger prize: an engagement ring.” Didn’t know the AP was qualified to make those value judgments.
Qin Kai, by the way, last week had to “settle” for the bronze in the men’s synchronized diving. The Irish Independent meanwhile claimed that “While we’re sure that the proposal will remain a highlight of the games for Zi, it won’t outshine her incredible, silver medal-winning performance” — a story that was headlined, without even naming her, “Olympic diver gets proposed to during medal ceremony after winning silver at Rio.” So, okay, if you say so!
During an Olympics in which women — who by the way, have been killing it — have been dramatically shortchanged in the reporting of their victories, it would have been cool if the man had waited to express his hopes to pledge his heart, even by about ten minutes. But his action was only one lovestruck bronze medalist’s choice. But the reporting, the media insistence that a ring beats a medal, is the greater problem here. And it relegated a female Olympian, once again, to the role not of a winner but of somebody else’s future wife.
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Researchers fashion self-healing clothing — out of squid teeth
(Credit: JannHuizenga via iStock)
Researchers at the Penn State’s Huck Institutes of the Life Science announced that they have created a fabric capable of mending itself if torn — but more significantly, the textile’s composition can be tailored to the particular environment in which such a tear is likely to occur.
Last September, the team announced they had discovered the genetic code for the self-healing proteins in squid ring teeth, which can phase from liquid to solid in the presence of water. After designing a bacteria capable of producing a similar protein, they tested the results on a rubber-like material which, when split in half, healed itself in the presence of 113 degree Fahrenheit water.
At the time, they imagined the applications of their discovery would be limited to materials either immersed in or composed of water — fiber optic cables on the ocean floor, or wounds in the human body. Soon, however, it became clear that the could design clothing that would “repair” itself, as it were, by tinkering with the temperature of an average washing machine.
They tested “natural fibers made of proteins like wool or silk that are expensive and they are not self-healing,” professor Melik C. Demirel told A’ndrea Elyse Messer. “We were looking for a way to make fabrics self-healing using conventional textiles. So we came up with this coating technology.”
The procedure, he explained, is quite simple: dip a “natural fiber” in a micron-thin layer of the self-healing coating, add a little water, and “at low cost, using simple equipment amenable to scale-up,” it would be possible to mass-produce self-healing garments. It’s highly unlikely that the fashion industry would embrace that proposition, any more than the auto industry fancies building cars that last decades, but in industrial settings, such a fabric could be used to limit workers exposure to toxic chemicals.
“If you need to use enzymes for biological or chemical effects,” Demirel said, “you can have an encapsulated enzyme with self-healing properties degrade the toxin before it reaches the skin.” A suit could be designed that, in the presence of an organophosphate like the insecticide DDT, would not only self-heal when torn, but would release organophosphate hydrolase and protect the wearer from the effect of the nerve agent.
Given the team’s focus on industrial applications and the fashion industry’s unwillingness to alter an economic model predicated on the disposable nature of its products, it seems unlikely that such fabric will reach shelves any time soon, meaning that — for the moment — the dreams of parents who can’t stand to watch their children leave the house dressed in jeans like those pictured above must be put on hold.
Trump walks back claim Obama “founded” ISIS, says its rise “a direct result of policy decisions made by” administration
Speaking with the aide of teleprompters, GOP presidential nominee Donald Trump gave a calculated foreign policy speech in Youngstown, Ohio, on Monday.
Trump, in an atypically slow cadence, began by rattling off a list of ISIS-credited terror attacks in Europe and the United States.
“We cannot let this evil continue,” he added. “Nor can we let the hateful ideology of radical Islam … be allowed to reside or spread within our own countries.”
Trump walked back claims — which he stood by for the better part of last week — that President Obama was “the founder” of ISIS, offering a more diplomatic alternative: “The rise of ISIS is a direct result of policy decisions made by President Obama and Secretary of State Clinton.”
The real estate billionaire re-upped his call to bar Muslims from immigrating to the United States, emphasizing thorougher “screening” measures — what he called “extreme vetting” — like those used during the Cold War.
Here are Trump's stipulations for his proposed "extreme vetting": pic.twitter.com/kR9453ffgP
— Ali Vitali (@alivitali) August 15, 2016
“The common thread linking the major Islamic terrorist attacks that have recently occurred on our soil … is that they have involved immigrants or the children of immigrants,” Trump said. “Clearly new screening procedures are needed.”
“We should only submit into this country those who share our values and respect our people,” he suggested. “The time is overdue to develop a new screening test for the threats we face today.”
Intentionality unknown, Trump contradicted himself in promising “only those who we expect to … embrace a tolerant American society should be issued visas.”
“To put these procedures into place,” Trump said, “we will have to temporarily suspend immigration from some of the most dangerous and volatile regions of the world.”
Watch below:
.@realDonaldTrump proposes "extreme vetting" for immigrants with ideological screening test https://t.co/IS35dxGmaw https://t.co/JSQRsi8XYu
— ABC News Politics (@ABCPolitics) August 15, 2016
