Year: 2013

A reader writes:

You can’t make mention of Huell Howser and not put a video! He must be seen and HEARD to be believed.  As it so happens, my father, who passed away last May, led Huell on a tour of the Los Angeles Wholesale Flower Market, whose board my dad presided over for decades. Huell was an easily mockable personality, but everyone who ever watched his show was saddened by the news of his death.  It was hyper-local programming in a global world, old world glee, enthusiasm, and curiosity in a modern environment of cynicism and desentization.

Another writes:

Well, pace Sally Ride, here is an example of how some of us are still in the closet even in our obituaries.  

I'm not sure if you are familiar with Huell Howser – he was a TV journalist who did a documentary series for PBS stations called "California's Gold."  It was very cornpone, but people loved him.  I think it is not a secret in Southern California (where he lived and worked) that he was gay.  Yet there is nary a reference to his sexuality in the HuffPo obituary – or, in fact, any mention of his family or anything about his private life.  And this is the Huffington Post??

According to The Advocate, "In the past, some media reports have alluded to Howser being gay, but that has never been confirmed."

Norm MacDonald discusses his New Year's resolution to begin gambling again:

I haven't made a single bet in the last couple of years. But that's about to change.

It came to me on New Year’s Eve, when I was sitting around with my friend Adam Eget, who manages The World Famous Comedy Store. We were trying to come up with New Year’s resolutions. Adam, sober now for over a year but nonetheless still somewhat interesting, said, "Hey, do New Year’s resolutions always have to be good for you?" The thought had never occurred to me. It’d be a helluva lot easier to stick with a New Year's resolution if your resolution was to become a big fat guy, right? And I had just watched Week 17 and picked all the relevant games correctly. Was Adam on to something? Within minutes, my decision was made.

Goldblog defends conceal carry:

The population of concealed-carry permit holders in the U.S. now exceeds 9 million, and this group is responsible for very little crime — they commit crime at a rate lower than the general population, and lower than police officers, and they certainly, as a rule, don't open fire on anyone who looks threatening. They are not the problem, and concealed-carry generally is not the problem. It may even be part of a solution, until such time as a giant magnet appears over the continental U.S. and sucks into the sky America's civilian-owned weapons, or until the gun control movement convinces the majority of Americans who believe in private weapons ownership to open a debate about the 2nd Amendment.

Waldman wonders if Obama will ever have a legitimate scandal:

If it is going to happen, history tells us we should be on the lookout starting about a year from now, since Year Six of a two-term presidency has been a fruitful time for scandal. Bill Clinton's affair with Monica Lewinsky came to light in January 1998, at the start of Clinton's sixth year in office. Iran-Contra was revealed in November 1986, in the sixth year of Reagan's presidency. The Watergate break-in occurred in 1972 while Richard Nixon was running for re-election, but the revelations played out slowly enough that he didn't resign until his sixth year in office, in August 1974.

Gary Marcus critiques the notion "that you can’t do certain things—like learn a language, or learn an instrument—unless you start early in life." A medical example:

Amblyopia is a visual disorder in which the two eyes don’t properly align; sometimes it’s called “lazy eye.” The standard medical advice is to treat your child early, by getting them to wear an eye patch over the good eye (in order to strengthen the weak one). If you don’t treat the problem early, you can just forget about ever fixing it. Just after my book went to press, however, Dennis Levi, the dean of the School of Optometry at Berkeley, conducted a brilliantly simple study that was easy to conduct, yet would have seemed like a waste of time to anybody steeped in critical-period dogma. Levi and his collaborator stuck eye patches on the good eye of adult amblyopics, aged fifteen to sixty-one, whom everyone else had written off on the presumption that they could not learn anything new. He then set his subjects down at a video game—a first person shooter called Medal of Honor: Pacific Assault, to be exact—and told them to have fun. Levi found that his subjects got better at virtually every aspect of visual perception he could measure. It wasn’t that it was too late for adults to overcome amblyopia, it was that the myth of critical periods had kept people from trying.

Bruce McCall rounds them up:

There are actually funny Canadians alive today, but all nine of them moved to the U.S.A., and once they got here they renounced their Canadian cultural heritage, the way Mick Jagger renounced his English accent. Mike Myers never makes Mountie jokes. Jim Carrey declines to send up the toonie, Canada’s hilarious two-dollar coin. You have to scour Wikipedia to confirm the Canadianness of Mort Sahl, David Steinberg, Michael J. Fox, Catherine O’Hara, Seth Rogen, the late John Candy and Phil Hartman, and that guy from that sitcom, you know the one. America absorbed Canadian comedians, or, Canadians would say, Canadian comedians absorbed America.* Lorne Michaels, the Darth Vader of American comedy, harvests all the comedic talent in his native land as ruthlessly as Major League Baseball loots the Dominican Republic of shortstops.

Max Fisher flags the Jim Carrey bit seen above:

Note that it’s only self-mocking on the surface: It’s actually a fairly cutting portrayal of American ignorance toward Canada. "You Americans might like to tease us," he seems to be saying, "but we’re laughing right back."

Bird watching has convinced Doctor Science of the necessity of hunting:

[B]irders notice problems of wild animal overpopulation, as well as rarity. In many parts of the U.S., including New Jersey, there are serious overpopulation problems with Canada Geese and especially with White-Tailed Deer[pdf]. Deer don't just strip gardens of almost everything except daffodils[3] and peonies[4], they can devastate all the natural undergrowth in an area, with terrible effects on native plants and animals.

This is in addition to the direct risk to humans of deer-car collisions and of Lyme Disease. Every experienced driver I know in my area has hit a deer at one point or another[5], and everyone who spends a lot of time outdoors has had Lyme Disease.

Jada Yuan covers Buzkashi Boys (trailer above), which is on the Oscar short-list for short films. It features "the Afghan national sport of buzkashi, which is kind of like polo, played atop horses, but with a headless, disemboweled goat carcass as the ball." On the dangers of shooting the film in Afghanistan:

The most significant precaution was the decision to make it a short film. A feature would have required them to stay at certain locations for weeks at a time, whereas with a short, they could be in and out of locations in a single day. They streamlined the script to 29 minutes and shot the two buzkashi matches in the film in bits and pieces over sixteen days of filming. To keep their crew of 45 to 50 safe, it was imperative to keep the production a moving target. “We kept our ear very closely to what was going on, and we didn’t tell anybody where we were shooting or when we were shooting,” said [director Sam] French. “If we were going to shoot in Murad Khane [Kabul’s Old City, where the blacksmith shop was located] on Thursday, then Tuesday night we’d call the crew and say, ‘Actually, we have to shoot tomorrow,’ so the timing was varied. We were aware of those issues.”