Category Archives: Entertainment

Comparing aliens, asteroids, and ghosts destroying cities

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Mass destruction of cities is a common feature of action films but what creatures bring about the most destruction?

Anyway, this all got us wondering why aliens hate Earth architecture so much, and then we realized that it’s not just aliens—Earth architecture is also hated by asteroids and ghosts. Let us review the evidence…

Verdict: Asteroids

It’s got to be asteroids. Asteroids are such jerks.

Not exactly a scientific review of the available evidence (how hard would it be to analyze all the movies with such urban destruction) but still an interesting question to ponder. Nature, in the form of asteroids, does not care about what exactly is destroyed. Asteroids of large size rarely hit earth and what are the odds that they would regularly hit major cities as opposed to falling in the ocean. At the same time, asteroids are faceless villains whereas you can fight or negotiate with aliens and ghosts.

We could also ask whether it is best for other worldly villains to take out key architectural landmarks versus other strategic targets. The first has symbolic value but key infrastructure would be much more crippling. Perhaps this is the equivalent of the bad guys always having bad aim as they try to shoot; these villains always go for visible targets, giving responders time to come up with a plan.

Mr. Selfridge got his start in Chicago’s department stores

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Henry Gordon Selfridge hit it big in London (and on PBS) but got his start in Chicago’s burgeoning department store scene:

“Within a short time after he entered the employ of the Field store he met the first Marshall Field and made a favorable impression by asking for a job as manager of his department,” the Tribune recalled upon Selfridge’s death in 1947. “He won the job and from then on his rise was rapid.”He proved to have a knack for advertising, then a rare business skill. He was the first to promote holiday sales with the reminder: “Only ___ shopping days until Christmas.” Some credit Selfridge with the department store’s celebrated motto: “The customer is always right.”

In 1890, he became a partner in Marshall Field’s and married Rose Buckingham, a member of a prominent Chicago family. One of Rose’s bridesmaids, Kate Buckingham, donated Buckingham Fountain in Grant Park. An entrepreneur in her own right, Rose bought property on Harper Avenue between 57th and 59th streets, where she built and sold 42 homes. She also was an accomplished horticulturist. The Tribune reported she had a collection of 2,000 orchids…

The girls got a shot at marrying into the nobility because their father transferred the family’s fortunes to England, almost on a whim. In 1904, Harry Selfridge sold his interest in Marshall Field’s for $1.5 million and bought another Chicago department store, a few blocks south on State Street…

Yes, there was a Selfridge’s in Chicago before there was one in London. But not for long. Having bought it in May, he sold it in June — and the new owners renamed it Carson Pirie Scott & Co. Selfridge then went for a visit to London, where he discovered two differences between doing business there and in Chicago.

Chicago contributed much to the development of department stores which helped transform American retailing. Perhaps London makes for a more attractive place to tell the department store story but Chicago would be a pretty interesting setting in itself with department stores around the turn of the century. Why continue the Dick Wolf Chicago Fire/Med/PD/Justice system when you could go back into an even quicker changing era. Additionally, it would be interesting to see someone tie together several strands of American stores: from general stores and department stores to the big box companies and ubiquitous chain pharmacies of today.

One TV show had a higher rating – so change the ratings

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Nielsen will change how they measure TV viewing as ratings continue to drop:

Despite the May axing of 19 first-year series and such surprise dumpings as ABC’s Castle and Nashville, cancellations are proving rarer, even as linear ratings shrink. That’s because, of the 60 returning scripted series to air on the five main broadcast networks this season, only one finished with improved ratings from the previous year. And that show premiered in the ’90s. Law & Order: SVU‘s modest gain, up an incremental 4 percent during its 17th cycle, is a case study in how the industry standard week of DVR and on-demand views doesn’t provide the most complete narrative any longer — or at least not one that the networks are eager to tell.

“We have found that audiences continue to grow beyond seven days in every instance, some by 58 percent among adults 18-to-49,” says Nielsen audience insights senior vp Glenn Enoch. “Growth after seven days is consistent, but the rate of growth varies by genre. Some programs need to be viewed in the week they air, while consumers use on-demand libraries to view others over time, like animated comedies and episodic dramas.”

To that end, on Aug. 29, Nielsen will up the turnaround on live-plus-7-day reporting (no more 15-day wait time), offering daily rolling on time-shifting, and it will start extending the tail past the long-established extra week of views. The measurement giant announced in March that the window for regularly reported on-demand and DVR data now will extend to 35 days after the original airdate.

The extra draw between weeks two and five is not minor for many scripted series. Grey’s Anatomy, again ABC’s highest-rated drama in its 12th season, saw its live-plus-7 average in the key demographic drop 3 percent from the previous season. But the 35-day trail of VOD (with online streams) adds another 1.5 rating points among 18-to-49, making for a 6 percent improvement from the show’s 11th season. (Of note: 1.5 is the complete live-plus-7-day rating for Thursday neighbor and surprise renewal The Catch.)

Certainly viewing habits have changed in recent years as viewing options proliferate. But, it is hard also not to see this as an attempt to chase numbers to provide advertisers (which leads to more money). If only one show showed an improvement from the past season (and a Law & Order in its 17th season), change the system of measurement. Perhaps this is the true acknowledgment that television will never be the same: the best solution to declining ratings is not to put together better content or to put together a new consolidated model but rather to chase viewers to all ends of the earth.

The unreality of coffee cups on TV

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A communications professor provides a reminder of the physical unreality of television:

There are moments when the “realism” of television breaks down: when framed photographs are poorly photoshopped, when video chats are unrealistically high-quality, and when driving scenes are staged using some very obvious rear projection. But for me the biggest threat to realism on television is something you may never have considered: the way that coffee cups that are supposedly full of coffee are plainly empty.

This video attempts to better understand both why this happens and why it bothers me as much as it does. My hope is it can help solve my problem, whether we define that problem as the emptiness of the cups (please support this cause on social media by using #EmptyCupAwards hashtag) or my own obsession with them.

This is just a small example of how television can warp our sense of reality. Even if we watch with a critical eye, television and film provides a complete universe that looks realistic (unless the presentation is emphasizing the lack of realism) but contains all sorts of weird phenomenon. In addition to the empty coffee cups, let me provide a few other examples from my own life:

  1. For a long time, I had a hard time believing that shootings and murders could happen in broad daylight. On the screen, they tend to happen when it is dark or stormy, situations that might be befitting of violent action.
  2. The full geographic scope of communities on television is often skewed – much sitcom actions takes place in a single house or in just a few locations. A show like The Simpsons set in Springfield tends to add parts to the city to suit its needs; Springfield includes these areas: “The city is divided into a number of districts, including Skid Row, the Lower East Side (a Jewish neighborhood), Springfield Heights, Bum Town, East Springfield, Recluse Ranch Estates, Junkieville, Pressboard Estates, South Street Squidport, Little Newark, Crackton, a Russian District, West Springfield, Tibet Town, Waverly Hills, Sprooklyn, Little Italy, and a gay district.”
  3. I have toured several sets in Hollywood and now I can spot them in various places. For example, the Warner Brothers lot has a city setup that is in all sorts of commercials and television shows. Or, we saw Wisteria Lane which could pop up in an Ace Hardware commercial (with some modifications).

The real issue here isn’t the missing coffee; it is that most of the time it is clear whether TV is presenting a more real or less real depiction yet almost all the time it is in small ways defying embodied life.

One thing McMansions can do? Play host to Smash Bros. tournaments

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McMansions are often derided for their size but imagine them as a fun site for a weekend of Smash Bros.:

Some tournaments take place in massive convention centers. Some grand finals even go down in giant arenas. While these events can be truly impressive, they don’t have the spark of early tournaments that captured the imagination and hearts of Smash players. Friends crowded around TVs, laughing, jeering, and, while the competition was fierce, they were still having the time of their lives. This is the atmosphere players will find at McMansion 7, a tournament that’s like a vacation with live music and a whole lot of Smash.

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This home in Pensacola Beach, Florida (according to the comments) is a modest home by McMansion standards. I can only imagine the kind of fun and mayhem that might occur in a larger and more opulent McMansion, say 8,000 square feet in a ritzy neighborhood. Still, a massive video game tournament may help fill out those great rooms, bonus rooms, and expansive spaces of the McMansion. But, what would the neighbors think about the kind of people who play video games, the noise, the cars, and the property values related to being near the video game heaven McMansion…

New data on (a lack of) diversity in Hollywood and on TV

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A new report on diversity in Hollywood and television was released yesterday:

The study, titled the Comprehensive Annenberg Report on Diversity, examined the 109 films released by major studios (including art-house divisions) in 2014 and 305 scripted, first-run TV and digital series across 31 networks and streaming services that aired from September 2014 to August 2015. More than 11,000 speaking characters were analyzed for gender, racial and ethnic representation and LGBT status. Some 10,000 directors, writers and show creators were examined, as was the gender of more than 1,500 executives.

The portrait is one of pervasive underrepresentation, no matter the media platform, from CEOs to minor characters. “Overall, the landscape of media content is still largely whitewashed,” the study concludes.

In the 414 studied films and series, only a third of speaking characters were female, and only 28.3 percent were from minority groups — about 10 percent less than the makeup of the U.S. population. Characters 40 years or older skew heavily male across film and TV: 74.3 percent male to 25.7 percent female.

Just 2 percent of speaking characters were LGBT-identified. Among the 11,306 speaking characters studied, only seven were transgendered (and four were from the same series).

These appear to be pretty consistent patterns. Given the racialized and gendered history of the United States, is it more surprising that white men still dominate in certain categories or that little has changed even with the discussions of recent decades?

One other thought: in No Logo, activist Naomi Klein recounts her own efforts to push for more diversity in advertisements. In a chapter titled “Patriarchy Gets Funky,” Klein says:

We thought we would find salvation in the reformation of MTV, CNN, and Calvin Klein. And why not? Since media seemed to be the source of so many of our problems, surely if we could only “subvert” them to better represent us, they could save us instead. With better collective mirrors, self-esteem would rise and prejudices would magically fall away, as society became suddenly inspired to live up to the beautiful and worthy reflection we had retouched in its image. (p.108-109)

And corporations bought into it:

That’s when we found out that our sworn enemies in the “mainstream” – to us a giant monolithic blob outside of our known university-affiliated enclaves – didn’t fear and loathe us but actually thought we were sort of interesting. Once we’d embarked on a search for new wells of cutting-edge imagery, our insistence on extreme sexual and racial identities made for great brand-content and niche-marketing strategies. If diversity is what we wanted, the brands seemed to be saying, then diversity was exactly what we would get. And with that, the marketers and media makers swooped down, airbrushes in hand, to touch up the colors and images in our culture. (p.111)

The real issue lay elsewhere:

But our criticism was focused on the representation of women and minorities within the structures of power, not on the economics behind those power structures…

The prospect of having to change a few pronouns and getting a handful of women and minorities on the board and on television posed no real threat to the guiding profit-making principles of Wall Street.

Maybe the issue is less one of representation on the screen and more about who controls the industry and resources.

Sociologist Robert Merton featured in Final Jeopardy!

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Sociology rarely makes an appearance on Jeopardy! but the discipline was featured in the Final Jeopardy! question on January 8:

Final Jeopardy! clue: Often applied to athletes, this 2-word term popularized by Robert K. Merton refers to an example we aspire to.

I was not aware that this term was popularized by Merton. If anybody popularized this term in recent decades, it was Charles Barkley who several decades ago said:

“I’m not paid to be a role model. I’m paid to wreak havoc on the basketball court.”

Read a quick overview of the concept of role model as well as a summary of Merton’s wide-ranging career (which included popularizing other terms such as “self-fulfilling prophecy”).

Will Beatles songs eventually become as well known as nursery rhymes?

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Scientist and musician Daniel Levitin wrote about the ubiquity of Beatles songs a while back:

One hundred years from now Beatles songs may be so well known that every child will learn them as nursery rhymes, and most people will have forgotten who wrote them. They will have become sufficiently entrenched in popular culture that it will seem as if they’ve always existed, like Oh Susannah, This Land Is Your Land, and Frère Jacques.

Why can we listen to certain songs across a lifetime and still find pleasure in them? Great songs activate deep-rooted neural networks in our brains that encode the rules and syntax of our culture’s music. Through a lifetime of listening, we have learned what is essentially a complex calculation of statistical probabilities of what chord is likely to follow what, and how melodies are formed. Skilful composers play with these expectations, meeting and violating them in interesting ways. In my laboratory we’ve found that listening to a familiar song that you like activates the same parts of the brain as sex or opiates do. But there is no one song that does this for everyone; musical taste is both variable and subjective…

On the bus to my office, the radio played And I Love Her and a Portuguese immigrant my grandmother’s age sang along. How many people can hum even two bars of Beethoven’s Fourth, or Mozart’s 30th? I recently played one minute of these to an audience of 700 people – professional musicians included – but not one recognised these pieces. Then I played a half-second of two Beatles songs – a fraction of the first “aah” of Eleanor Rigby and the guitar chord that opens A Hard Day’s Night – and virtually everyone shouted out the song names, more than could recognise the Mona Lisa.

To a neuroscientist, the Beatles’ longevity can be explained by the fact that their music creates subtle and rewarding schematic violations of popular musical forms, causing a symphony of neural firings from the cerebellum to the prefrontal cortex. To a musician, each listening showcases subtle nuances not heard before, details of arrangement and intricacy that slowly reveal themselves across hundreds or thousands of listenings. I have to admit, they’re getting better all the time.

While the neuroscience piece is interesting in its own right, a sociologist might be more interested in thinking about what songs make it to this level of common knowledge or become part of cultural narratives across societies. How many times does a song have to be played? Does it matter in what venues the song is performed? I could imagine a mega radio hit vs. a lesser known song that gets licensed dozens of times in the coming decades in commercials. Does the relative importance of the musical artist matter? Some of this has to do with diffusion and the various gatekeepers at play. The Beatles likely have all these factors (except the commercials) in their favor as they were a cultural phenomenon, produced numerous #1 singles around the world, changed the music industry (from recording to stopping touring), and were generally liked by critics.

Just thinking back, I feel like I only tend to hear this argument about what songs will last into the future when people are worried about their idea of bad music (maybe boy bands of the late 1990s, Brittany Spears, Lady Gaga, etc.) becoming the equivalent nursery rhymes.

Are the Kardashian/Wests selling a mansion or a McMansion?

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Save up all your Black Friday funds to purchase this large home – which may be a mansion or McMansion.

By now, Kim Kardashian and Kanye West have surely settled in at their tasteful Hidden Hills mansion, not far from Kris Jenner’s place, so it makes sense that they’re moving toward unloading the tacky Bel Air Crest estate that they’ve been renovating since they purchased it in 2013 (hopefully to make it less tacky). TMZ hears that the couple are readying to put the Tuscan-inspired McMansion on the market within the next few days, and that the house will be asking “more than $20 million.” Kim and Kanye paid $9 million, and reportedly dropped $2 million on renovations.

Shortly after buying the house, the British press reported that the couple’s deep renovations included things like a fridge covered in Swarovski crystals, a million-dollar security system, and four gold-plated toilets. We’ll have to wait for the listing photos to see whether those items ever made it into the house. Last September, perhaps fed up with trying to turn the estate into their dream home, Kim and Kanye reportedly whisper-listed the half-finished house for $11 million.

Lots of pictures follow.

I’ve discussed a number of these mansion/McMansion claims over the years. This particular house provides another strong example. On the mansion side, you have a large home, a wealthy location, numerous luxury goods inside, and famous owners (average people might live in McMansions but not famous people). On the McMansion side, it features the Mediterranean style common in many McMansions, it was a fixer-upper (if an expensive one), and using this term provides permission to criticize the home (it is tacky compared to their real mansion).

Although I presented two sides above, this isn’t much of an argument: given the size and expense of this house, it is clearly a mansion.

“Charles McMansion” is a band name

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A new musical duo, Charles McMansion, has arrived with their first single. And it lives up to the typical critiques of McMansions: garish, poor construction, meant to impress but lacking in substance. If I had to guess, the group name is playing with “Charles Manson” but with a wealthy, big house flair. I couldn’t find any info on why they chose McMansion as part of their name but I did find info on how this relates to the reality TV show of one of the members…