voluntaryXchange

No Sympathy from YouTube

A couple of weeks ago I attempted to post a video clip of Monty Python, in memoriam for Terry Jones.

I made the clip from DVD’s I own.

The underlying service for videos on this platform (Typepad) is YouTube. So I had to upload the clip to YouTube to post it here.

It was blocked as a copyright violation. Their algorithms blocked the video in less time than it would take to view once through.

I protested in writing that it was fair use. I was not attempting to profit from the clip, I had justifiable motivation, it was quite short, and I owned the source material.

During the period after which I made my appeal, they kept my video blocked.

After 13 days, they responded by declining my appeal.

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All of this is perfectly legal, and above board, and I’m OK with that.

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But, let’s think this through.

We now live in a world with an internet where:

• Content can be blocked immediately.
• Content can be blocked while it is under appeal.
• (And obviously) content can be blocked after you lose the appeal.

The key point here is that the content was always blocked.

This is not the internet we grew up with.

And remember Belk’s Third Law of the Internet:

If you think The Internet is terrible now, just wait a while.

Terry Jones, RIP

I don’t even know what to say. Just such a huge influence on my life since I first started watching in the 6th grade.

I do wish someone in the legacy media would show some clip other than Brian’s mother or Mr. Creosote … perhaps Clodagh Rodgers or something.

P.S. Also saddened by the passing of quasi-Python Neil Innes a few weeks ago.

I Snickered

BTW: I loved this episode, and I still think the music is great.

BTW2: The blonde woman recorded an album entitled Painting Pictures in the late 60’s that supposedly was good. It contains some reworkings of songs from this episode. But no one bought the first run of the album, and it has disappeared. It’s an internet curiosity that no one has been able to find it.

I Keep Returning to the “Brutally Honest Emmy Ballot …”

It’s been a month, but I have found the Hollywood Reporter piece entitled “Brutally Honest Emmy Ballot: "Detested" 'Sharp Objects,' 'Pose' Is "Pretentious," "Too Much Trump" on 'SNL'” to be something that has stuck in my head.

I did not watch Pose. I find Ryan [Murphy’s] stuff to be the same over and over again — pretentious — and it held no appeal to me; I’d rather watch RuPaul, to be honest, than have Ryan lecture me about drag.

I haven’t heard a single thing about Pose since the night of the awards. To me it seems like Modern Family: I don’t watch it, I don’t know anyone who watches it, and I don’t know anyone who knows anyone who watches it.

… Ozark jumped the shark in season two. … Better Call Saul is great and Jonathan Banks is the best actor on TV — I don’t understand how he hasn’t won yet. I have voted for Game of Thrones in the past, but it went the bro-iest it’s ever been — it was frat-boy central — and even though I didn’t mind the ending that everybody else did, I do think they lost their way when they didn’t have a book. I loved Bodyguard — [Richard] Madden was amazing and I binged it in a weekend. Succession is brilliant, and its second season, so far, is even better than its first — but the truth is, its brilliance is mostly in the writing. Killing Eve is the best drama on television

Agree on Ozark.

Mostly agree on Jonathan Banks, although we’ve yet to binge the last season.

Agree on Game of Thrones, although heck, George R.R. Martin lost his way with a book. I watched the whole thing twice, and it’s merely very good, and deeply overrated.

I am seeing bits of Succession while getting ready for bed. Very intrigued.

I can’t wait to watch either of Waller-Bridge’s shows. And I loved Sandra Oh since … wait for it … Arliss.

I was hugely disappointed by Russian Doll — it’s Groundhog Day, but without a point. Schitt’s Creek is lovely, but I don’t know how it got nominated. I’m happy to see a network show, with The Good Place, but it’s not of the caliber of network shows of yesteryear — you can’t put that in the same universe as Cheers. I didn’t love this season of Maisel, although I could watch Tony Shalhoub read the phone book. Veep is great, but I’m not voting for it again — there should be a mercy rule where you can’t win something more than three or four times. So it came down to Fleabag and Barry. You cannot imagine how much I’d love to vote for Phoebe, but she’s up against Barry, which is the best show on TV.

Natasha Leone is always a disappoint for me; which is weird because I do think she has some sort of charisma that appeals to me. And then it doesn’t work.

Groundhog Day had a point? I’ve tried harder with that movie than any other … I think you’re all nuts.

I like The Good Place. I would not go out of my way to watch it though.

Totally agree on Tony Shaloub.

I have not watched much of Veep. But I love the idea of a mercy rule.

We have not done Barry yet. Honestly, I’m tired of mobster stuff. I’ve experimented with watching little bits of Lilyhammer again, and I just can’t commit to for a second go round.

Escape at Dannemora was good — I loved the directing more than the writing, and I wasn’t crazy about the casting, apart from Patricia Arquette. …Chernobyl is the best thing that’s been on TV in the last 10 years.

I did not have a lot of interest in Escape from Dannemora; it’s such a f***ed up story. But I have heard good things about it.

Chernobyl. No. It was good. Leave it at that.

… Documentary Now has had better seasons. I liked Who Is America?, and I love Drunk History, but both are sort of one-joke. This season of Saturday Night Live was very hit and miss — they did way too much Trump, and, like a lot of people, I’m feeling Trump fatigue.

Couldn’t agree more on these.

… Last year I voted for Oliver, and I was going to vote for him again — but I thought about it, and Colbert has to do it five nights a week! He’s funny, smart and, when he needs to be, poignant. He can sing. He speaks truth to power … There’s really nothing he can’t do. For me, since Carson, he’s the best.

I am not a late night talk show person, although like most Americans I’ve watched quite a bit over the years. And yeah … Colbert is special.

This may be the only time I can ever put this in writing, but I miss Craig Ferguson like you would not believe. I hope, somehow, that show becomes available through streaming.

Navel Gazing: What Was that Guy’s Name?

For almost no reason, I’ve been trying to think of the name of a TV variety/talk show host from maybe 50 years ago.

For a long time … like maybe 3 years … I’ve had this picture in my head of this guy — but no name.

I’m not even sure why I wanted to know. It’s just one of my oldest memories, from somewhere back in the 1966-1970 range. My mother watching this daytime variety show during the summer, in black and white, hosted by a formally dressed older man I was comfortable with back then (probably because she watched it many times).

When I had that thought, I tried to recall the name, and I could not. I was quite certain that I had known it, and that a memory would eventually return. It didn’t.

I called my mom, in her late 80’s at the time. She had no recollection. She did note, correctly, that she didn’t watch that sort of thing much. And I agreed: maybe that’s why I remember it at all, because it was out of character for her. She pushed old hosts of The Today Show  on me, but I kinda’ know she didn’t watch that until she was sending me to elementary school at 8:30 five days a week … plus it was in color. So it wasn’t Hugh Downs or Frank McGee or even Joe Garagiola.

I went through the names I did remember. Merv Griffin, Mike Douglas … no … older than that. Art Linkletter, Ed Sullivan … no … but that was more like the era … just not that famous. We got more obscure (at least for me) … Jack Benny … George Gobel … Danny Kaye … Danny Thomas … Alan Funt … but no, the names and faces paired up nicely in my memory for all of them.

Of course, I ran off to the internet. Surprisingly, that got me nowhere. I guess no one has curated the right sort of list for what I was looking for. (In retrospect, I probably ran across the name in some of the bigger lists, but it didn’t ring a bell).

I more or less gave up. But, you know how this sort of thing goes. It nagged at me.

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This morning I saw the headline that Diahann Carroll had passed away. I know who she is, but I was not a fan. But I clicked the article open … you know … something to read while drinking coffee. And there it was:

And then she won several times on Arthur Godfrey's Talent Scouts program, where she first billed herself as Diahann Carroll.

The memory I’ve had is this guy:

Arthur Godfrey.

No wonder my mother didn’t remember: he didn’t have a variety/talk show of his own in that era: he was already past his prime.

He hosted Your All-American College Show in 1968. (Never heard of it). That doesn’t seem like something my mother would have watched anyway. Plus, it was also in color for at least part of its run.

He was also in the rotation as host of The Hollywood Palace in 1966. Wikipedia says that was mostly scheduled on Saturday night, so that doesn’t seem right. But it was in black and white at the time.

He also was a guest host on The David Frost Show several times from 1969-71. This show was in black and white at the start of its run. And back then, David Frost was a really big deal.

This show was daily, so that points to a scheduled time during the day. And it premiered about 2 months before I started kindergarten.

So I think that’s it. One of my oldest memories, from when I was 5, is my mother puttering in my parents bedroom, with Arthur Godfrey on the TV. And now the internet homes in very tightly … he guest-hosted The David Frost Show, in black and white, on July 22, 1970.

FWIW: that makes it not really one of my oldest memories. It’s just foggier. By then I’d finished kindergarten, and I do have a few dozen memories from that point or earlier. I don’t know about you, but the volume of my clear memories starts to really ramp up from second grade onwards.

Best Paragraph I Read Today

Tyler, of course, discussing the college admissions scandal:

In this case, those charged are mostly wealthy Americans of high social status, not gangsters. They probably thought of themselves as law-abiding Americans, with exceptions so minor as to be negligible. In other words, this case illustrates what a low opinion America has of its system of higher education. As a university professor, I would feel much better if it had been mobsters charged with these alleged crimes.

I would add that, here in flyover country, a lot of the rich bicoastal population is already regarded as mobsters. Thus, Trump: a rich, bicoastal, who probably is a mobster.

Felicity Huffman and Lori Loughlin (and Others)

The system isn’t rigged.

But there are bad people out there.

Each of you should understand that you’re one of them.

P.S. Lori Loughlin: you could be less ignorant of the actual value of a college experience. You were ripped off. And, if anything, that piece of work daughter of yours is proof positive that not everyone needs to go to college to be successful at something.

P.P.S. Felicity Huffman: do you know your husband’s origin story? Do you understand that our kids origin story will never, ever, be like that again?

Thanksgiving Travel Celebrity Amusements

Kinda’ sure we saw Roseanne Barr at Cheesecake Factory in Salt Lake City on Wednesday night.

The vXyoungman was in line at Starbucks with Dawg the Bounty Hunter at the Salt Lake Airport on Sunday.

We’ve Been Probed. Maybe.

This time last year a weird object entered and left the solar system. It was dubbed Oumuamua.

It’s trajectory was not consistent with something orbiting the sun. Also, the solar system is roughly disk shaped, and it came in almost perpendicular to the disk.

There was no question this was the first object of interstellar origin to every be sighted by humans.

Most oddly, it was estimated to be several hundred feet long, but only one fifth as wide. In short, it was roughly the size and shape of the Titanic.

This is odd, because gravity makes things rounder at smaller sizes.

Research came out last spring arguing that it was a comet, albeit one thrown off from another star, because the wiggles in its trajectory were consistent with little besides cometary outgassing. Rafikov et al. counterargued that this seemed unlikely, since such outgassing would also lead to a change in the length of Oumuamua’s “day” that they did not observe.

Now, research by Bialy and Loeb shows that the movement attributed to outgassing could have been caused by our own solar wind, if Oumuamua has a big surface area relative to volume. In short, if it was a flat plane, bowed surface, or even a cone.

Considering an artificial origin, one possibility is a lightsail floating in interstellar space as debris from an advanced technological equipment (Loeb 2018). Lightsails with similar dimensions have been designed and constructed by our own civilization … dynamical ejection from a planetary system could result in space debris of equipment that is not operational any more (Loeb 2018) and is floating at the characteristic speed of stars relative to each other in the Solar neighborhood.

Other new research by Mamajek argues that Oumuamua appears to be both moving with the solar system and its neighbors through space, but without moving from any of them.  By analogy, if the solar system is a school of fish moving in the Gulf Stream, Oumuamua acts like a predator that follows the school, but then darts into its heart. Indeed, informal discussions suggest that this is just the place you’d want to park a probe if you were watching a solar system develop and were waiting for the right time to investigate. Further, Trilling argues that the suite of observable characteristics of Oumuamua are unlike anything naturally occurring without our solar system.

Keep in mind that our ability to observe Oumuamua was limited, and that it is no longer visible.

But, in short, it’s looking more and more like an interstellar probe of some kind.

N.B. Oh, and this isn’t science fictiony research. The authors of the papers cited above are at Harvard, Cambridge, Rochester, ESA, INAF, Hawaii, EDO, Tel Aviv University, PSI, Johns Hopkins, ESTEC, Munich, and the JPL.

P.S. But, just for shits and giggles, it was estimated to be about the size of the hypothetical dimensions of the Starship Enterprise.

I Shouldn’t Laugh

Is it OK to fat shame a cat? (I know … first world problems).

We’ve had our share of overweight pets (no obese ones though). And honestly, I’ve gotten pretty good at how I feed my pets over the last 10-15 years. I think having kids gave me the nudge I needed to be more responsible.

Anyway, I laugh every time I see the cat in the box at the 0:16 mark of this commercial.

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