Orlando Cruz is an openly gay boxer who just won his second fight as an out figure, wearing a rainbow-adjusted Puerto-Rican flag on his pants, smacking his opponent on the ass, and then punching him out. Money quote from Andres Duque:
That’s not the way a gay boxer is supposed to act: The first key moment happened during the second round and it is one of those things that people in gender study classes love to deconstruct in 300-page analytical books.
Today on the Dish, Andrew continued to work through Washington’s (and his own) failures leading up to the Iraq War, unpacked the latest polling data on marriage equality, and liked Francis as we filled in the details on his past. In home news, he dove into the details on our first month behind the meter and dissected the similarities and differences between the Dish and Veronica Mars.
In political coverage, Bill Clinton drastically underestimated the scope of the Iraq War, a Republican pot prohibitionist was forced out of the cannabis closet, and favorability for the death penalty declined in the face of bad PR. As Hillary voiced her support for equality, some readers saw an empathic deficit in Portman’s sudden reversal on same-sex marriage, while others cheered his progress. Overseas, the Cypriot financial sector struggled through the weekend, with potentially dire consequences for the rest of Europe.
Elsewhere, Bjørn Lomborg pointed out the irony of Earth Hour and we debated resurrecting recently extinct species. Technological advancements graduated from the Defense Department to your kitchen and banished UFOs. Rebecca Davis O’Brien brought us along on her morning commute, Greg Beato employed big data in hiring and firing, while Chris Albon felt tied down by the digital record. Christine Haughney showed us that quality still matters in journalism, Google Reader’s coming death opened up an opportunity for Twitter, and authors tried to game the Amazon rankings,
In arts and leisure coverage, Scott Tobias had his fill of formulaic documentaries, Steven Sodergbergh’s latest film twisted us around, and while sound engineers spun audio gold from everyday noises, we were left with unanswered questions about the explosion of the Death Star. Amanda Nazario walked us through a day in the life of a dog-walker-for-hire, diet soda may be to blame for ballooning waistlines, and whiskey makers stretched their boundaries. We crossbred a horse and a naked mole rat in the FOTD, framed a frost-covered tree in the VFYW, and Ze Frank instructed us on the finer points of fecal flirting in the MHB.
– D.A.
Dinosaurs are out of the question now, but Stewart Brand pushes to revive more recent extinctions:
Close examination of the genomes of extinct species can tell us much about what made them vulnerable in the first place. Were they in a bottleneck with too little genetic variability? How were they different from close relatives that survived? Living specimens will reveal even more.
Stuart Pimm disagrees:
In every case, without an answer to “where do we put them?”—and to the further question, “what changed in their original habitat that may have contributed to their extinction in the first place?”—efforts to bring back species are a colossal waste.
Bourbon distillers, long bound to the traditional barrels of American oak, are beginning to experiment:
[Distiller Chris] Morris put standard six- to seven-year-old Woodford Reserve in a maple wood barrel as well as former sweet wine casks to lend more chocolate, nutty and dark cherry flavors not usually found in bourbon. Much like the original Woodford Reserve mingled with the new charred American oak barrel, the “Four Wood” chemically reacted with its barrel wood to produce a particular set of flavors. The former fortified wine barrels had wine soaked into the wood and are larger than standard whiskey barrels, giving the Woodford Reserve a larger surface-to-whiskey ratio as well as the small-scale fruity flavors that remained from the barrel’s former alcohol. …
Aging has even gone beyond stationary warehouses.
For its Ocean-Aged Bourbon, Jefferson’s Reserve placed several barrels on a 126-foot ship and let the casks cruise at sea for nearly four years. The increased oceanic air pressure (compared with its warehouse), along with the Panama Canal’s extreme heat pushed the whiskey deeper inside the wood, causing the wood sugars to caramelize and add a rumlike black hue. The whiskey breathed a little easier, too, says Trey Zoeller, who co-founded Jefferson’s Reserve. “The porous nature of the barrel not only allows for evaporation of bourbon out of the barrel, but also [for] the barrel to breathe in the salt air, giving it a briny taste,” Zoeller notes.
Update from a reader:
Larger barrels will have a smaller surface-to-volume ratio than smaller barrels. This applies to other objects as well – it’s why small animals lose heat faster than large animals in cold environments.
College student Lucas Waldron shares his own struggle to afford $8,400 top-surgery:
There is little hope that private insurance companies will start covering transgender surgeries because of their consistent argument that the procedures are “cosmetic” or “unnecessary.” The Affordable Care Act has been falsely identified as a progressive and inclusive program for transgender individuals when, in reality, the act only limits discrimination by medical providers. Under ObamaCare, an insurance company cannot consider my transgender identity a “pre-existing condition,” but they sure as hell can refuse to cover my surgery.
A pink horse rests ahead of its appearance in a cavalry event in honour of the Prince of Wales and Duchess’s of Cornwall’s visit on the eighth day of a tour of the Middle East in Muscat, Oman on March 18, 2013. The Royal couple are on the fourth and final leg of a tour, taking in Jordan, Qatar, Saudia Arabia and Oman. By Chris Jackson/Getty Images.
Gabe Habash tries to calculate how many book sales it takes to become an Amazon bestseller, something Amazon refuses to reveal:
Like everyone else, [we] couldn’t get sales numbers from Amazon, but by studying the print bestseller list for a two-week period, we were able to determine that a title in Amazon’s top five averages 1,094 print copies sold across all channels, including other retailers, on a typical day. And because the general industry thinking is that Amazon accounts for about 30% of print sales, that means it likely takes around 300 copies per day to reach Amazon’s top five, depending on the day of the week and the time of year.
Or you could just hire a company to buy your way to the top (WSJ):
[Author Soren] Kaplan purchased about 2,500 [copies of his own book] through [a marketing firm named] ResultSource, paying about $22 a book, including shipping, for a total of about $55,000. Mr. Kaplan says he also paid ResultSource a fee in the range of $20,000 to $30,000. With 3,000 copies sold in its first week, [Kaplan’s book] hit No. 3 on the Journal’s hardcover business best-seller list. It hit No. 1 on BarnesandNoble.com on Aug. 7. By Nielsen BookScan’s count, about 1,000 print copies have been sold in the six months since.
Gautam Pemmaraju marvels at the work of the foley artist:
If you have ever been set the peculiar task of imagining and creating the sound for ‘Alien Pod Embryo Expulsion’ and found yourself at a loss, not to worry, a quick web search will provide an answer. One of the suggestions on this excellent resource is to use canned dog food, or more precisely, the sound of the food coming out of the can: “The chunky stuff isn’t so good, but the tightly packed all-one-mass makes gushy sucking sounds when the air on the outside of the can is sucked into the can to replace the exiting glob of dog food”. …
Several other helpful solutions are at hand here: ‘pitched up chickens’ can substitute for bat shrieks, the spout of a 70’s coffee percolator can apparently do the trick for a bullet in slow motion, rotten fruit for ‘flesh squishes’, and for depth charges, i.e., anti-submarine explosive weapons, the slowed down by half sound of a toilet flushing with a plate reverb effect on it could possibly be entirely satisfactory.
Some cool examples from Star Wars:
The Imperial Walkers sound was created from a machinist’s punch press and the sounds of bicycle chains; the TIE fighter sound is a modified elephant bellow; the Ewokese language was created by a complex layering of Tibetan, Mongolian and Nepali speech – the range of experimentation for Star Wars was, if anything, groundbreaking (see here).
For more, check out this Youtube entitled, “The 10 Greatest Sounds from Star Wars.” On the other hand, Julie Sedivy wonders if “being made to do some mental work is a vital part of what makes a movie rewarding and pleasurable”:
For instance, in his 2012 Ted talk, filmmaker Andrew Stanton argued that humans have an urgent need to solve puzzles and that “the well-organized absence of information” is what draws us into a story—a theory that he says was amply confirmed by his work on “WALL-E,” a film entirely without dialogue.
In this lovely video clip, Michel Hazanavicius, writer and director of the 2011 silent film The Artist, talks about how something was lost when films acquired sound technology. With sound, he suggests, viewers can “watch” a film while checking their cell phones, because the sound allows them to track the story line. But silent films require them to pay attention.
A reader writes:
What I find particularly brilliant about the Rob Thomas/Veronica Mars Kickstarter project is that the producers of a good have found a way to exploit certain consumers’ higher willingness-to-pay for that good as a means of financing the good’s production. I’m sure most of your readers have at least a vague recollection from Econ 101 of intersecting supply and demand curves, and the notion that customers towards the left of the demand curve were willing to pay more for that good than the market-clearing price. Until now, there hasn’t really been a way to charge $50 a ticket, or $500 a ticket, to the people who really value the movie that much, while only $10 a ticket to the customer whose interest in the movie is only marginal. But then you dangle the carrot that the movie will only exist if the customers with high willingness-to-pay step up … and suddenly you’ve found a way to tap into that enthusiasm.
Another crunches some numbers:
The project currently has about 46,500 backers to a tune of 2.79 million dollars. That means everyone gave on average 60 dollars each, which is far more than a ticket price of 10 dollars. That also means that without a Kickstarter model, if those 46,500 people simply went to see the movie, it would make only 465,000 dollars – a pittance, not worth Warner Brothers’ time.
Similarly, if the Dish had not allowed readers to set their own price, the current subscriber base of 23,644 would be yielding $472,644 in revenue rather than the current total of $641,944 – which translates to an average price of $27.15, or 36% more than the required minimum of $19.99.
Also like the Dish, the creators of the Veronica Mars movie are tapping into a preexisting fan base; the Veronica Mars TV show aired for three seasons under institutions of Warner Brothers and the UPN network, similar to the Dish’s six years under Time, The Atlantic and Newsweek/Daily Beast (though the blog started as an independent entity).
But one big difference between the Dish model and the Kickstarter model is that the latter takes the safer approach of not spending any money on the project until a critical mass of supporters pledge the minimum amount needed to fund the project. The Dish, on the other hand, was leaving the Beast and spending the necessary start-up capital – my savings, if worse came to worse – regardless of whether any readers signed up. Thankfully that wasn’t the case; we jumped off the fiscal cliff and you caught us. But if we had not generated enough subscriptions to fund the Dish for the first year, it would have disappeared. And technically, if enough current subscribers decide not to renew for next year, or the year after that, the Dish could still end.
They’re not as crazy as you think:
Top comment on YouTube:
I’m still not buying it. The Imperials wouldn’t just lie to us.
The Dish 