Month: December 2021

The only person wearing a mask

Unpopular opinion;

Unity MaskA segment on NY1 highlighted the return of in-person networking events.

Neil Gordon was quite possibly the only person wearing a mask there, which is why he was chosen to be interviewed. As Gordon posed in his newsletter:

“Was the segment about my area of expertise? No.
Was my contribution in any way related to my area of expertise? No.
Did they identify me as a ‘messaging expert’ when I was on-screen? No…
Please remember that, sometimes, having a media presence can be the result of simply showing up in the world.”

I guess there is a benefit in wearing the mask. Besides fighting a deadly virus, I mean.

Back in September, Mark Evanier paraphrased a New York Times article. “Let’s say you’re in a roomful of people who are not wearing masks during The Pandemic. Are you any safer if you wear one?… You’re better off not to be in such a room but if you are, Masked is better than Not Masked.”

And while I would never have purchased an N95 at the beginning of the pandemic, I’ve bought a handful of them recently, which I find more comfortable than most of the others I’ve used.

No problem

Kelly has an unpopular opinion about masks. “Here’s the thing: I’m fine with wearing a mask. As in, I’m genuinely fine with it. Not only does wearing one not bother me, but…I honestly kind of like it…

Like it? Well, I’m not in THAT group. I’m one of those people who he described thusly. “Hey, I hate wearing this thing, too! It sucks! I hate breathing through it…but I grit my teeth and do it because I’m a part of society!”

He’s in another category. “In truth, I get to the point now where I forget the thing is even on my face to begin with. There have been moments when I lift my coffee mug to my mouth only to forget that I have to lower the mask to sip the stuff.”

I’m not there. Instead, I’ve become That Guy who wears the mask on the chin, so it can be pulled up when I go onto the bus, enter the grocery store, or feel as though there are too many people around me at a street corner.

Also, I don’t understand what some people who wear masks are saying. And some don’t suss me out either unless I over-enunciate my consonants. This is particularly remedied if I speak with a bad British accent. 

Controversy

Le Messor has a Controversial Opinion: Masks Don’t Work. It’s a bit of a ruse, and that’s all I will say about it.

I have started keeping about five unused masks in a bag inside my backpack for those folks who forget that particular accessory. And I’ll be thrilled to give them up, but I don’t foresee that happening until 2023.

Movie review: Belfast [Branaugh]

a breakthrough performance

In the summer of 1969, the stable life in the capital of Northern Ireland was suddenly disrupted by the Troubles. The father of one family has to go out of town to find work. Will the folks get caught up in the sectarian violence?

All of this is shown in the movie Belfast. And yet, the description misses the utter joy one feels after watching the film. It’s also about familial love in the face of adversity, a first crush, and the joy of cinema. One detail I read explains that the actors who sit in the movie theater are actually seeing that flick segment for the first as they are being recorded.

Kenneth Branaugh, the writer and director, was born on December 10, 1960, in that city. Check out this video. Much of the narrative of the film is seen in the eyes of Buddy, who is clearly Branaugh’s stand-in. Jude Hill, in his film debut, was very relatable. I believe the film works as well as it does because, in a child’s mind, the little things in life are just as important as the big issues.

The critics weigh in

In fact, the British Independent Film Awards for 2021 dubbed the youth’s work the Breakthrough Performance of the year. Other awards were presented to Caitriona Balfe, who played Ma, as Best Actress; Ciarán Hinds (Pa) as Best Supporting Actor; and Judi Dench (Granny) Best Supporting Actress. Also, the Best Editing went to Úna Ní Dhonghaíle.

Among the other nominees was Van Morrison, who was born in Belfast in 1945. His songs almost always fit the movie perfectly. My FAVORITE song in the movie was not his, however, but in the best scene, near the end of the film.

The Rotten Tomatoes score was 87% positive from the critics, 92% positive from the audiences. The negative reviews use terms such as inert, inorganic, cloying, over-directed, and contrived. I would disagree. Branaugh, I think, found the right balance between tension and joy.

The film won the People’s Choice Award at the Toronto Film Festival. Even the critical takes acknowledge that the film is beautifully shot in black and white.

My wife and I saw it at the Spectrum 8, a Landmark Theatre, in late November, the first we’d seen in the cinema in four months. And after the film, much of the audience milled around the aisles, clearly greeting old friends they had not seen in a while.

The Christmas compilation, part 1

Hello

Soul ChristmasBack in the day, in the late 1990s and earliest parts of this century, I used to burn compilation CDs – think of mixed tapes. Presently, I don’t even have a computer with a drive, so I’m not doing that right now.

But I used to do it a LOT, primarily in 2005-2007, when I was involved in a blogger CD exchange with Lefty Brown, Gordon Dymowski, Eddie Mitchell, and Greg Burgas, among others, almost all of whom who were linked on the then-blog of Fred G. Hembeck.

I’d also make CDs for my Bible group and for my co-workers. I THINK this Christmas compilation, created in 2006, might have been made for my officemates. Or not. This will be in two parts.

The first track, which I can’t find on YouTube, is a spoken word Holiday Greetings from Hello Records. I used to buy these CDs, usually with four or five songs on them.

Every Valley Shall Be Exalted · Lizz Lee, Chris Willis, and Mike E. This is from Handel’s Messiah: A Soulful Celebration, which came out in 1992.

Mary’s Boy Child  · Harry Belafonte. I believe this was released in 1957.

White Christmas – The Drifters. The cartoon for this 1954 track was created by Joshua Held. The song features Bill Pinkney on lead bass and Clyde McPhatter on tenor.

All I Want For Christmas Is You – Carla Thomas. One of those great Stax artists from c. 1966.

Geography

Louisiana Christmas Day · Aaron Neville. From his 1993 album Soulful Christmas. There are other good songs but this may be the best.

Christmas On The Bayou · Michael McDonald. This was from an album of his I found surprisingly bland. This is the best song, co-written by the singer.

Carolina Christmas  · Squirrel Nut Zippers. Actually, the track I have, from some compilation, is attributed to Maxwell/Mosher. I can’t find that exact cut. But since Tom Maxwell and Ken Mosher, the composers, have been in iterations of the band, this is the closest approximation. I think the other version is slightly better.

Every Day Will Be Like A Holiday  · William Bell. Another excellent Stax track on the Soul Christmas album, written by Bell and Booker T Jones.

Give Me a Second Chance for Christmas – Mike Viola and The Candy Butchers. A version of this is on the Hello Christmas album.

Comfort and Joy – Simon and Garfunkel. This version of God Rest Ye Merry, Gentlemen appears on the duo’s box set.

Radio.garden – stations worldwide

radio, radio

radio.garden

Radio.garden has been around for five years. But I had never heard of it until I saw this post from Mark Evanier, appropriately titled Another Reason the Internet is Amazing. Here it is, in its entirety.

“At this link, you’ll find a map of the world covered with little green dots. Every green dot represents a radio station at that location and if you click on the dot, you can hear that radio station. In some cases, you’ll have your choice of many in the same city. That’s enough radio to last you for the rest of your life…and several lives after that.”

What IS this? From December 2016: “The new website Radio Garden is as tangible a representation of this global community as you can get. The site, which launched this week, lets users to tune in to thousands of online radio streams from all over the world… by hovering over a location on a map.

“The site is a collaboration between the researchers on the Transnational Radio Encounters project in Germany, and the Amsterdam-based design firms Moniker and Studio Puckey.”

This is amazing. I started in my local area but wandered off all over the world. Europe is heavily represented. African stations are primarily coastal, but I found quite a few from Kenya. Places with deserts or mountains don’t have tons of radio stations. China is underrepresented, but there are 15 stations in Beijing, including CNR Classical Music Radio. Music from Pirque, Chile sounded like regional folk instrumentals.

As close as I’ll probably get to Tahiti

I probably spent the most time with Pape’ete, Tahiti, Hiti FM. It’s pop music but none I had ever heard. Your experiences will be different. Try the Search bar. And yes, there is an app for this.

The other thing I learned is that .garden is in fact a Top-Level Domain. It seems like an oddly appropriate choice for the site, seeding the planet with different voices, different sounds.

Maybe it IS a small world, after all.

 

If not for the camera…

Does it exist?

This person does not exist
from Thispersondoesnotexist. com

The murder of George Floyd pointed out one stark fact. If not for the camera, or in most of these cases, cellphone video, it would be difficult if not impossible, to believe that another person could be so devoid of humanity.

And if not for the phone footage taken by now-convicted murderer William Bryan, there wouldn’t have been an arrest of him, Travis, and Gregory McMichael. Travis shot and killed Ahmaud Arbury on February 23, 2020. But the McMichaels and Bryan weren’t arrested on state charges of felony murder until May after Bryan’s video was “leaked.”

So when Evanier posts a brief list of some of the folks convicted of murder but then exonerated, it makes one pause.

This reminded me of some passing comment a blogger buddy made. “If there’s no picture, it didn’t happen.” I don’t believe that, but clearly, many do. Certainly, in these cases, and many others, you have to go to the videotape, as it were. Also, I often muse on how what we see informs in a manner different from what we read.

There was one moment in the McMichaels/Bryan trial that, if I had read about it in the paper, I would have assumed it must have been mistranscribed. Laura Hogue, Greg McMichael’s attorney, blamed the victim. “Turning Ahmaud Arbery into a victim after the choices that he made, does not reflect the reality of what brought Ahmaud Arbery to Satilla Shores in his khaki shorts, with no socks to cover his long, dirty toenails.”

Is it real?

“His long, dirty toenails.” My wife and I always watch the news after it is recorded on the DVR. I stopped the broadcast and had to play it again. This seemed to want to portray Ahmaud as “less than”, a common tactic and one, I suspect, did not go well with the mostly-white jury.

Googling for this piece, I came across an article from 2019. This Website Generates AI Portraits of People Who Don’t Exist. “NVIDIA got the world talking in December 2018 after showing off a new AI that can create ultra-realistic photos of people who don’t actually exist. Now there’s a website that lets you generate these imaginary portraits yourself. It’s called  thispersondoesnotexist.com” In fact, I purloined the picture on this page from the site.

It would be easy to go down a wormhole about deepfakes and how it is getting harder to spot. Maybe some other time.

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