Alan Greenspan is dead. The cult of Ayn Rand has lost one more adherent.

I’m about to attempt a trek from my house to the grocery store and back again, because I want to get back into the habit of regular walks. It’s going to be a little bit of a challenge — I’ve been doing short walks around the house, but I think I can handle a whole kilometer and a half, because maybe I’m getting overconfident.

If I’m not back by noon, call out the helicopters and the search parties. (I also have an ace in the hole: Morris has an informal bus service where you just call and they eventually deliver you right to your door. Don’t worry.)

---

I’m back, call off the emergency search teams. It took an hour and a half to walk there and back? I’m getting so slow.

And I did. And I regret it.

Steven Spielberg can make some great movies, but he also has this solid wad of gullibility in his brain that emerges whenever he makes a movie about aliens. It happened when he directed Close Encounters of the Third Kind, ET the Extraterrestrial, Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, and it also leaked out a bit with A.I. Artificial Intelligence. They all made lots of money, though, so I fear there’s no way we can ever stop him.

[Read more…]

I’m beginning my weekly duties as a volunteer projectionist at the Morris theater, which I will try to do once a week. It was not a great experience — it involves a lot of standing and some walking around, and my knee is not quite ready for it. After two hours, I was getting some unpleasant spasms, and was seriously concerned that it might buckle under me, so I had to go home early (no worries, there were 3 of us training or in training.)

It’s all good exercise, though, so maybe in another week or two I’ll be a bit more robust. I think next time I’ll wear a knee brace.

This is the time to come to Morris to watch Masters of the Universe or Mortal Kombat under my supervision. Sorry, we don’t have something better. We do have Disclosure Day starting this weekend, and we have Kung Fu Panda as a free matinee. We also have the classic Jurassic Park on the 22nd, as part of a special deal with the Met Lounge if you think you’ll need beer to survive it.

Masters of the Universe is playing at the Morris Theatre right now, and I was lured in. It’s terrible. It’s two hours of pointless reiteration of an intellectual property that was contrived in the 1980s as a tool to sell toys — it had a poorly animated cartoon show, a glorified advertisement, that played every afternoon in that sweet spot when kids were getting home from school. It was repetitive noise. Every episode had roughly the same structure: a squad of freakishly weird characters, led by a bad guy with a skull for a face, would try to take over a castle guarded by a squad of mostly human, muscle-bound leaders, and be inevitably defeated. The same characters fought each other over and over again, and each one was for sale at Toys’R’Us as an action figure. Mattel cleaned up. Every 8-12 year old boy wanted a set of action figures they could play with as they watched the cartoon, and they would bring them to the playground to battle with their friends’ toys.

I know because my kids grew up in the 1980s, and we had to buy all the toys. On their demands, we had He-Man and Beast Man and Moss Man and Man-At-Arms and Skeletor and Orko and others, and we also had the Castle Grayskull play set and various vehicles. This was also the time in my career when we were frequently moving to various places around the country, and one of the sadder things about that was frequently packing up everything we owned into a truck and driving to a different state, a different apartment. One of my memories was the final step in moving out, and that was going through the rooms and sweeping up the detritus and throwing it into one last box. It was always an assortment of He-Man figures and accessories that I had to rescue lest the kids yell at me.

So I had to go see this movie. It was my mental equivalent of tidying up the garbage in the corners of my brain.

It is a competently made movie. It’s got some good actors, Idris Elba and Alison Brie, and some new (to me) players, who did a good job, although I wish all of them were acting in good movies. I normally detest Jared Leto, but in this movie he’s unrecognizable behind a skull face and a comically affected accent, which is the only way to see Leto in anything. The plot is familiar: Skeletor and his weird pack of freaks take over the world of Eternia, He-Man shows up with a magic sword and beats everyone up (there is a lot more killing of bit players in the movie than in the old TV series), and the status quo is restored. Ho hum.

I kept wondering why this movie was made. It wasn’t for Art, because it’s entirely derivative and lacking in novelty. It wasn’t to tell a story that would resonate with viewers, because it could have been a cheap 20 minute cartoon rather than an expensive 2 hour movie. It wasn’t to provide moral instruction, although it did include an appearance by Orko at the end to briefly summarize the lesson taught by the show, just like the old cartoon. I don’t even recall what the message was, it was so perfunctory and so irrelevant to the movie I’d just watched. No, this was clearly the product of a thought by a marketing executive at Mattel. Let’s take another pass at the wallets of the 1980s generation that we successfully bilked 40 years ago! It’s a naked attempt to milk nostalgia.

They got me. I contributed to their $54 million box office on a movie that cost $200 million to make. Be smarter than me and don’t fall for it. The movie is not good enough to outweigh the bad faith premise behind its creation.

We’ve found the hottest cartoon woman on the internet.

It gets a bit gross in subsequent panels.

A few days ago, I got sucked into a weird vortex of a YouTube category. I watched ONE (1) video about climbing Mt Everest, and then of course the algorithm started feeding me more and more Everest videos, specifically Everest Disaster videos, and wouldn’t stop. I’m currently going cold turkey on anything about mountain climbing, rejecting every video the system offers me, to try and break the cycle. I’ll probably be offered videos about Everest until I’m 900 years old.

But I did learn a few things, and one of the reasons I kept watching them was a sense of horror. Sure, there were skilled mountaineers who trained and trained and brought deep physical and mental abilities to the mountain, and I have to respect that. Everest has become a carnival attraction for “influencers” and business people who just want the glory of being able to say they climbed the tallest mountain. They spend hundreds of thousands of dollars to book sherpas to lead them on a grueling march, and to probably carry them to the top and back down again, all so they can gloat on Instagram.

And many of them die for this dubious distinction.

Three out of every 10 expeditions to Annapurna result in a casualty. That rate is slightly lower for Kangchenjunga (29.1%) and lower still for K2 (22.9%). Everest only comes in at sixth place, with a casualty rate of 14.1%.

Of course, that rate is so much lower because so many more people are tempted to climb Everest. Each one, no doubt, a highly motivated individual.

They’re dying, and for what? There are lines, as if this is a Disneyland ride. They stack up on guide ropes, planted by the long-suffering sherpas, and may have to stand and shuffle for hours as the mob is led up, one by one, to the summit. It’s insane.

The whole thing is an extreme test of physiological endurance…and money. They climb above the “death zone,” so called because no human being can survive at such low oxygen concentrations for long. You enter the “death zone,” and you start inevitably dying slowly (or quickly), and what you have to do is get to the summit and down as rapidly as you can, so you can get back down to the altitude where the atmospheric pressure is high enough that your body can repair itself after its exposure to lethal deficiencies of air. Did I already say it’s insane? It’s madness.

People die in this vain endeavor, and their bodies get left on the mountain.

Some of the frozen, dessicated bodies are used as landmarks.

Green Boots, arguably the most famous body on Everest, has been identified as Tsewang Paljor, Head Constable of the Indo-Tibetan Border Police (ITBP), though some think it might be his colleague, Lance Naik (i.e. Lance Corporal) Dorje Morup. Both were members of a three-man ITBP climbing party that perished in the infamous blizzard of May 1996, which also took the lives of five other mountaineers.
…
Some bodies are known landmarks, as Green Boots used to be: “The German” on the second step of the north face route, the “Saluting Man” near the south summit, the “Icefall Body”, in the Khumbu glacier field, and “Sleeping Beauty” on the southeast ridge, until she too was removed from view in 2007.

What a fate. And it’s all in service to a lethal tourism industry, where people are killing themselves to expose themselves to a physical challenge. I’m sorry, but if you tell me you climbed Everest, I’m not going to be impressed — I might just feel pity for your deluded ambitions.

One of the consequences of this wasteful enterprise is a mountain littered with dead bodies, ropes, colorful nylon tents, and stacks of empty oxygen bottles. More people are willing to risk their lives for a photo op than are willing to risk their lives to clean up the horrible mess of debris they leave behind.

That did get me wondering, though. Ötzi was a wonderful discovery of a 5,000 year old corpse of a Copper Age man, with artifacts of his time, that has stirred up a lot of curiosity about what he was doing in the Alps, how he died, how was all his gear used. Why was he climbing those mountains? I’m wondering how future anthropologists in 7000 CE would feel on discovering this treasure trove of a 21st century high-altitude garbage dump/graveyard, and what questions they might ask. Why were all these people in bright nylon clothing up there at 6-8000 meters anyway?

I’d just say they were glory-seeking idiots.

Every time he brags about passing a basic cognitive test — as he does so painfully often — this is how I feel.

The man whose brain barely functions is in charge of all the science enterprises in this country, and he is fucking it up so bad.