A movie I’d like to see

This looks like a relevant and interesting documentary: The Last Picture Shows. It’s about all those small town movie houses that still exist, even as Hollywood tries to strangle us all.

Filmmaker Rustin Thompson journeys into the American West on a search for traces of what was once a center of small-town life: the movie theater. On the trip, he finds long abandoned and forgotten cinemas; movie houses that have fallen into disrepair; theaters recently closed, theaters struggling to hold on, and theaters that—thanks to their thoughtful caretakers—are not only surviving but thriving. Between the stops along the way, Rustin poetically intersperses excerpts from Peter Bogdanovich’s 1971 classic film The Last Picture Show, as well as reflections on past and present hardships facing the film exhibition industry. The Last Picture Shows is not only a timely portrait of an industry in crisis, one facing the headwinds of consolidation, streaming, and the diminishing theatrical experience, but it also reminds viewers that even in vast cinema deserts, there are oases of community and gathering that remain, where the movie house continues to be a place of wonder, contemplation, and connection.

There were actually two centers of small-town life in Morris, the railroad station and the theater. The railroad station is a wreck right now, with no passenger rail service to our town. The theater probably fits into the category of “struggling to hold on,” but we are currently in the black, just barely. We’ve got costly plans to revitalize the theater right now, mostly mundane stuff like a $30,000 expense to repair the roof, and further down the road we plan to remodel the run-down restrooms, and update the marquee. These are daunting costs, especially for an institution only this year boasted a net profit of about $5000. We figure if we keep plugging away, pennies at a time, we’ll eventually get there.

Meanwhile, the next closest theater in the small town of Benson, the DeMarce Theater, has a “For Sale” sign posted. I don’t know if they’re failing, or if the owners are just aware of how much work it takes to keep these businesses afloat.

Double-feature at the bijou

My wife, Mary, is from a family with two sisters, and they taught me the meaning of sisterhood. Back in the 80s and 90s when we’d occasionally have family get-togethers that I dreaded: three sisters in one place with their mother, and they’d talk nonstop from the instant they walked through the door. Imagine four women chattering non-stop — I was shocked to discover that they didn’t take turns talking, they over-talked one another incessantly, and all I could hear was a high-pitched excited babble that never ended or resolved into actual comprehensible conversation. To me. They seemed to know exactly what everyone was saying.

I was not alone. Mary’s father, who was a veteran US Marine who’d fought in all the major Pacific battles in WWII, would sit quietly, slowly sinking into our chairs as the sonic assault continued. He had the advantage of years of training and intense combat experience, and also more years with these four women than I ever had. Me, I was the fresh meat, the raw recruit who could only learn by suffering through the engagement. We came out of it alive, together.

I bring this up as background because I did a double-shift at theater last night, and the first movie I saw was Practical Magic 2, a movie I’d never heard of, nor had I heard of Practical Magic 1, but it must have been popular, since it featured A-list stars, Sandra Bullock, Nicole Kidman, Dianne Wiest, etc. It’s all about sisterhood among a family of cursed witches, cursed to never fall in love. The waves of estrogen were gushing off the screen, but my training at family gatherings helped me persevere. The cast was almost exclusively women.

There was one earnest, caring boy at the beginning, but the daughter he was dating made the mistake of saying “I love you” to him, triggering the family curse and sending him out on a bicycle to be run over by a truck, so that he spent the rest of the movie in a coma, conveniently. I was thinking that they’d never have this problem if they lived in the Midwest, rather than New England, because here we’re all emotionally repressed and never communicate our feelings.

The rest of the movie is a trio of family witches stumbling about crumbling ruins in the English countryside, looking for a cure for the curse. There is magic involved, and many whispered conversations where they overtalk one another. They do find one possibly helpful man, but they take him out with a frying pan to the back of the head and a sleeping potion, so he’s not cluttering up the climax of the movie. There is a third man, but he’s the villain, naturally.

There’s a battle where the three witches join psychic hands and use the power of love and sisterhood against a screaming, ranting man. I’ll let you guess how it ends up.

Was the movie any good? I don’t know. The magic was nonsense and was only conjured up when the plot needed it, the story was pure schmaltz, but from the outside looking in, I can empathize and comprehend how a story of sisters working together could appeal. My wife wants to go see it now, so I might be seeing it again.

The second movie was more my style: Resident Evil. One man, battling a series of indescribable horrors, alone, with virtually no conversation the entire movie. He’s on a solo mission to deliver a vital component to the Umbrella Corporation in Raccoon City, and that’s absolutely all you need to know about the plot. I just nailed it. Do I need to go on?

OK, a little more explanation. Umbrella Corp has ‘accidentally’ released a horrific virus that has spread through the population. This virus doesn’t exactly zombify everyone (I’m tired of zombie movies), but is instead a kind of infectious body horror disease. People fuse into these disgusting masses of limbs and heads that try to snarl everyone into a gooey corrupted form by biting or spewing bloody filaments or ropes of intestinal glop.

The best part of the movie to me was the protagonist, who was doggedly running this mission while maintaining a constant mumbling running monolog of profanity, consisting of mainly repeated variants of the word “fuck”. It was beautiful. I identified perfectly with his character — that’s exactly what I would do if I had to run through a city full of slimy predatory body parts. I wouldn’t be an action hero, I wouldn’t know how to use the guns he picks up, just like the protagonist, but I would be angrily railing against the situation under my breath.

The bottom line: not a great movie, lacking any depth at all, but just about a perfect capture of a standard video game scenario.

It was an interesting pairing of two movies that are more or less the antithesis of each other. What I’d like to see now is a synthesis — it’s going to take a lot of slime and blood and horrific gore, but if there were a fusion of a sisterhood power movie with that guy constantly snarling “fuck” as he tried to figure out what was going on, I’d watch it.

I’m going to have to give up on modern medicine

I’m a bit of a mess right now. My voice is an ugly croak, and I’m also experiencing some gastrointestinal issues, so like a good boy I made an appointment to see a doctor and get checked out. I went in yesterday.

The doctor didn’t talk about any of my concerns.

But the doctor did talk at length about my psychological survey, which I had filled out under the impression it was confidential. My wife was with me.

So now I’m home with none of my medical issues resolved, but with my wife convinced that I’m utterly nuts.

I should have stayed home, and next time I’m asked to fill out a psych questionnaire I’m going to lie.

Quantificosis

We need a name for this disease, and it may already have one, because it’s been rampant for decades. It is the need to attach a specific number to a phenomenon that is not a single parameter, that encompasses a diversity of causes and consequences, and then treat the phenomenon as something that can be ranked, or min-maxed, or just generally be reduced to one number. And then it gets treated competitively! The most familiar example is IQ, taking a complex multivariate property like intelligence, and reducing it to this one single number, and then regarding the highest score as the best, without even considering the best…what? The best mathematician, the best musician, the best conversationalist, the best humanitarian, the best poet? It’s a sickness. We spend way too much time obsessing over the quantification of our existence.

Another example is sports and athletic performance. How much do you bench? How fast do you run 100 meters? What’s your freethrow percentage, your RBI, your golf handicap? These are all valid contributions to your performance at a game, but they don’t capture the totality of that performance, despite being easy to print on the back of a collectible sports card. In particular, they don’t come close to representing the value of that human being’s life.

It’s disturbing when someone focuses so much on the statistics of their existence that they miss the broader view of what that life is about. Case in point: Bryan Johnson, the weird millionaire who is obsessed with fine tuning every aspect of his physiology to maximize his longevity. His life is a constant whirl of pill-popping, exercise regimes, blood testing, and pointless measurement, all to a goal that he won’t get any closer to with his endless tweaking. Watching Johnson on his ridiculous hamster wheel of a life is entertaining, in a sad kind of way.

The latest news is that Johnson has a girlfriend, and he has immediately started scoring her.

Bryan Johnson, the world’s most dedicated oversharer, is in love. The 48-year-old got famous for documenting his strict diet and elaborate regimen of supplements—many of which he also sells—as well as exotic therapies including an injection of “young Swedish” stem cells, all in the pursuit of not dying, ever. And after he got a girlfriend, he told his public more than they’d ever want to know. “Just gave Kate oral sex. Goodnight everyone,” he tweeted this spring. Alas, there was more: “This is her vaginal microbiome report. 100/100 score. Top 1% of all vaginas.”

What followed was a report from a vaginal microbiome test, confirming the elite status of Kate Tolo’s. This, Johnson claimed, was a critical marker of Tolo’s overall health. (He soon began referring to his girlfriend’s genitals as “Kate’s 1%.”) Tolo then leapt into the comments, reassuring followers that she was totally fine with the world knowing that the bugs in her vagina are the very best bugs.

Wait. My first thought was about how you score a microbiome. Is this a thing? It turns out that it is.

In the simplest terms, a microbiome score is a metric designed to summarize the state of the microbial ecosystem living in your gut. It is a data-reduction tool. Instead of listing the relative proportions of hundreds of different bacterial species, a testing company uses a single number or a small set of numbers to represent the overall health and balance of your gut flora. This is analogous to a Body Mass Index (BMI) score: it condenses complex data into a single, comparable figure.

These scores are not universally standardized across the industry. Each testing company uses its own proprietary algorithm to calculate them. A “score” is meant to be a starting point, a way for you to quickly gauge whether your gut ecosystem appears healthy (often called “high diversity” or “good balance”) or potentially imbalanced (sometimes termed “dysbiosis”). However, you must distinguish between a summary score and the raw data. The raw data—the specific bacteria found and their levels—provides the most detailed and actionable information for a healthcare professional.

So it’s a scheme for reducing hundreds of numbers to one number, and different companies (that’s telling — it’s a profit-making tool) have different schemes, and it’s just as valid as BMI…which we already know is seriously flawed.

How was the sex, Bryan? What do you love about your girlfriend? He replies with a simplistic calculation of the distribution of bacteria on her body. I think you’re missing the point, Bryan.

I hope for Kate’s sake that she can keep her bacteria in tip-top shape. Would Bryan shame her if she were only in the top 5%? A yeast infection would be a devastating crisis in their relationship.

No voice, but a guardian angel

I still can’t talk, and my throat is horribly sore.

But…when I got home yesterday, Mary put me to bed, zipped out to the pharmacy and picked up some medications, went to the grocery store and got Jell-O and chocolate pudding, nagged me to drink lots of fluids, and checked on me every few hours to make sure I was comfortable. Then this morning she yelled at me to stay home and not go to work. I’m feeling coddled.

Unfortunately, I’m going to work in a few minutes. I have to give an exam and run a lab. I can’t spare a day in my schedule.

It’s happened

My voice is totally gone, except as a raspy whisper that frequently cracks and can only make shushing noises. That’s the bad news.

The good news is that none of my students have stopped by to ask questions! I guess I have taught them superbly well, or possibly they are terrified of the old man who keeps pushing more facts and formulas at them.

I’ll hang out in my office a while longer, just in case. I am drinking lots of honey lemon ginseng tea with big spoonfuls of honey. Also, tomorrow I’m just giving this exam and teaching a lab which should give me another day to recover.

A Cambrian chelicerate!

I’ll have to show my spiders this reconstruction of their great-great-many-times-great grandmama. She’s adorable.

Megachelicerax cousteaui

It’s all in the chelicerae.

In a study published in Nature, Research Scientist Rudy Lerosey-Aubril and Associate Professor Javier Ortega-Hernández, Curator of Invertebrate Paleontology in the Museum of Comparative Zoology, describe Megachelicerax cousteaui, a 500-million-year-old sea predator discovered in Utah’s West Desert. It is the oldest known chelicerate, the arthropod group that includes spiders, scorpions, horseshoe crabs, and sea spiders. The discovery pushes the evolutionary history of chelicerates back by 20 million years.

Hey, I’ve visited the West Desert of Utah — but all I found were fossilized trilobites. Lots of trilobites. Megachelicerax food. But I never found a predator like this one.

The key feature identifying it as a chelicerate are those big clawed appendages on the front of its face, which is also a prominent feature of modern spiders, much modified. The appendage is now a crushing/chewing anvil, and the thumb of the claw has evolved into a wicked needle.

Its most extraordinary feature, however, is its unmistakable chelicera — the pincer-like feeding appendages that define the subphylum Chelicerata and distinguish spiders from insects. While insects possess sensory antenna as their foremost appendages, chelicerates have grasping, often venomous tools. Despite a rich Cambrian fossil record, no unambiguous chelicera-bearing arthropod from that time had ever been found – until now.

The thing about modern spiders is that they’re mostly defenseless — no sting, no pointy legs, no claws — except for that one extraordinarily useful weapon, the chelicerae. Well, they also have silk, making them a kind of retiarius of the arthropod world. You’re probably not afraid of their webs, but you worry about their big chompers and the venom they carry.

I don’t think the retiarii would have poisoned their tridents, though.