Fleshy Human to Fleshy Human

Of course the video title is a tease, and I fell for it.

Rainman Ray. I've been watching his channel for years. And it's odd, because I'm not a mechanic. I'm not even all that interested in cars. I mean, I know how to check fluids, I know what kinds of warning signs to listen for, but when it comes to actual repairs, it's either our mechanic way out in Woodville or our youngest, who has taken on brake work and other such stuff.

So why I've followed Rainman Ray comes down to this: He tells a good story with each video. He shares his failures as well as his successes. He's another human being using the Internet for what the Internet was intended for: Communication with other fleshy human beings.

And I love the celebratory tone of this video. Not only is he moving to a new place to expand his business, he just happens to be moving into a building he was employed at near the beginning of his career, and a business he was fired from. They apparently went out of business and now he's there, horning in on their racket.

He notes it, but doesn't rub it in. Too much.

Anyway, enjoy. I know I do.

No Dog in the Cracker Barrel Fight

I love it when the Internet hands me a controversey/kerfuffle in which I have absolutely no dog in that particular fight.

The latest one is the noise about Cracker Barrel's logo change and aesthetic redesign.

I *think* I've been near a Cracker Barrel, maybe once or twice. It's certainly possible I've eaten at one, though it's antique/junk store aesthetic that a lot of people are upset about disappearing in the redesign is something that's been in restaurants since Neanderthal times. I seem to recall the Frontier Pies restaurant in Rexburg, Idaho, having such an aesthetic.

So really, it doesn't affect me one bit, this mess. Now, I'm perfectly fine with other people being upset. Cracker Barrel clearly means something to them, so it's logical they be upset about the changes.

But as for me and mine, we don't care. This is probably the biggest reason:

It's hard to get upset about something you'd have to drive 2 1/2 hours to be upset about.

Where Am I the One?

I continue reading Kai-Fu Lee's AI Superpowers, and continue to find questionable things.

Today's reading included this bit about Enrico Fermi:

Fermi and the Manhattan Project embodied an age of discovery that rewarded quality over quantity in expertise. In nuclear physics, the 1930s and 1940s were an age of fundamental breakthroughs, and when it came to making those breakthroughs, one Enrico Fermi was worth thousands of less brilliant physicists. American leadership in this era was built in large part on attracting geniuses like Fermi: men and women who could singlehandedly tip the scales of scientific power.

At this point, a former reader of this book, who has scrawled copious notes in the margins, poses this question to himself:

My answer to him is the same answer I'd give myself: Probably nowhere, dude. Because the idea of the lone genius is just that, an idea that doesn't really exist.

Particularly on the part of Enrico Fermi.

The following is from an article by David Schwartz:

His student and colleague from his days in Rome, Edoardo Amaldi, described it this way: “I would say that his ability to drag others into work, with great intensity, for many hours, was one of his characteristics. He did it with us in Rome, then he went to Columbia University in New York and created a new group in Columbia; he went to Chicago and created another group for the simple reason that his role was that of general counsel; back in Chicago he created yet another group. Wherever he went he had this great influence on the people around him.”

Later on in the same article, this:

Fermi started collaborating early in life. As a child, he began to develop a passion for science working alongside his brother Giulio, who died unexpectedly when Enrico was just 13 years old. Together they pursued boyhood enthusiasms like making model airplanes and building electric motors. After Giulio’s tragic death, Enrico turned to his friend, Enrico Persico, and continued his exploration of the scientific world.

Fermi may have been the one to have ideas come together, but it was through long exploration which involved flashes of insight amid a lot of cooperation and collaboration.

The idea of the lone genius is something that Silicon Valley loves, and it seems to have infected other silicon areas worldwide. I'm confident that even in places where we suspect there was a lone genius at work, there were others there behind the curtains helping, many in significant ways. The lone genius makes for good storytelling and marketing, but is a lie.

I Should Have Known Better

A week or so ago, I sought out a way to put together a power of attorney so my wife could sign an auto title for me if we sold the vehicle on her trip to North Dakota. (My name and our youngest son's name are on the title in an OR situation).

Because we live in the Internet age, I figured there'd be a way to put together such a document without too much fuss.

I found a website called Rocket Lawyer, and figured, eh, I'll give them a shot.

They walked me through the process to put together a power of attorney, making me answer questions that really didn't apply all that much to our situation, but what the heck, if it works, it works.

It didn't work.

I should have known at the end that I would have to sign up for a "free" trial of their other services, which I could of course cancel as necessary. I had to sign up to the trial to get my document, however. So I bailed.

I ended up taking care of the title another way, without the risk of forgetting about the "free" trial and ending up getting charged for something. Or, worse yet, having Rocket Laywer lose my information in a data breach and end up with me having to first cancel unauthorized charges and then cancelling the card in the bargain.

But they have my email address, of course, and keep reminding me about my document. And their other services. I need to remember to unsubscribe . . . (this is why I didn't sign up for the "free" trial, yanno.)

Good Omens I Should Have Known GIFfrom Good Omens GIFs

Things As They Really Are in my Brain

So this is why it's important to cram your head full of information, and to record it when new information crosses with old information.

I'm currently reading "The Outrage Machine" by Tobias Rose-Stockwell. It's been enlightening. He promises solutions to curbing or understanding or eliminating the outrage we feel on social media (I'm not exactly sure what'll happen, as I'm still doing the reading).

"Our agency is being manipulated and scaled back, app by app, notification by notification. The recognition of this collective interference, and our part in it, is something akin to a mass existential crisis. This kind of manipulation challenges our basic understanding of human choice. It shows how these predictive systems are just one step away from being systems of control "

~Tobias Rose-Stockwell, "The Outrage Machine"

What he said reminded me of something from Elder David A. Bednar's "Things as They Really Are 2.0" speech, which he gave back in November.

"The ease of use, perceived accuracy, and rapid response time that characterize artificial intelligence can create a potentially beguiling, addictive, and suffocating influence on the exercise of our moral agency. Because AI is cloaked in the credibility and promises of scientific progress, we might naively be seduced into surrendering our precious moral agency to a technology that can only think telestial. By so doing, we may gradually be transformed from agents who can act into objects that are only acted upon."

~Elder David A. Bednar, "Things as They Really Are 2.0"

Tie what you know with what you're learning. That helps you develop a bigger picture of things.

[Facebook Removes Post as if it Were Suspended on Wires]

Rest easy, friends. Today Facebook protected you from . . .

. . . my lament that a particular gravity simulator is no longer available on the internet.

They saved you from SPAM, folks. From spam.

Not from the obvious scams they allow to run rampant on their platfrom, not from the random idiot who is using my work email address to impersonate me on their platform (they won't even tell me, nor the IT department at work, who that is, by the way), but from a link that no longer goes where it was supposed to, as I pointed out in the removed post.

This is all I can say:

This arose because Facebook showed me the gravity simulator in my Facebook memories. Aww, I thought, when I saw it. That's a fun website. I 'll go play with it for awhile. But, alas, it's gone:

So, I thought I'd post about it and allow my friends to join in my lament. Alas, spam.

And seeing as about half of my memories are links to sites that are no longer there, you'd think Facebook would look and say, aw, the oldie is having trouble dealing with the internet's impermanence and the ongoing outage at the Wayback Machine, let's cut him some slack. But no.

I *Fully* Expected the Option to Be Able to Live on the Moon as an Adult . . .

The United States space program, 1962:

"We choose to go to the Moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard; because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one we intend to win, and the others, too."

John F. Kennedy.

The United States space program, 2024:

In Defense of January

I see a lot of griping online about January being the longest month.

Mostly, drivel like this:

I get it, I guess. The holidays are over. Here in the Northern Hemisphere we're full into winter, with the grey skies and whatnot. And I know a lot of people -- myself included -- are affected mentally by the grey days that make January what it is.

But there's plenty to like about January, if you're me.

It's my birthday month. Also, my daughter's birthday month. That's well and good, I suppose.

It can be cold here in January. But the sun still shines and the sky is still blue when the clouds roll out.

January is full of hope when I open the front door and startle a squirrel on the fence and I get to watch it scramble along and then leap into the pine tree.

January is full of hope when I see the sparrows bouncing around looking for and finding things to eat.

And though the holiday decorations come down, the house suddenly feels bigger without two fake trees taking up some of the landscape.

And we're that much closer to spring.

Plagiarism, AI, and Effort

 

Posting this video not necessarily to tut about these particular accusations (though it's sad to see the Internet Historian is involved; I've enjoyed his content), but for one of the quotes from Jonathan Bailey, the plagiarism expert and author at Plagiarismtoday.com.

He hits on a particularly good point concerning plagiarism reducing writing quality:

"The plagiarism wasn’t just copy and paste plagiarism. [The author] went through and attempted to edit a lot of the words and rewrite things to make it more his own, supposedly. And the result of that type of editing is always just poor-quality writing."

He then takes it a step further, comparing the poor-quality writing to that produced by AI:

"And interestingly, this is a lot of what generative AI does, because generative AI does not necessarily understand what it’s writing, it’s just taking what it reads and gathers from the Internet and then tries to rewrite it cobbled together in a way that’s cohesive and understandable to people. So if you’re wondering why AI writing is not the best in the world, it’s the same reason this type of plagiarism produces very bad writing."

These bits come in at about 10 minutes into the video.

None of this, of course, will stop my students from plagiarizing. The utility, the reward without the work, is still very tempting. Not that I have a lot of students plagiarize -- what I see mostly is inadvertent, not on purpose, and once I point it out, they're quick to self-regulate and make things better. AI just adds another wrinkle in the writing utility train that's going to have to make us work harder.

And it all causes me to think about my own writing.

I don't want it to be boring. So I've got to try harder.

Harry Brewis, who produced the video Bailey discusses, has this to say in an interview at Vulture.com (emphasis mine):

"Now that people are aware that you can just make a computer write something, I think they’re going to raise their standards. As soon as I started asking myself, “Am I just watching trash a computer spat out?” a lot of YouTubers I used to watch became boring to me. I thought, This is interchangeable. Even if a person wrote it, I hate this. Ninety percent of everything has always been bad. And the fact that we now have to think about what we’re watching and if it’s bad in this very active way, people will be more discerning about what they enjoy. We used to live in a time when there were three channels. If you wanted to watch something, you had to buy it on DVD or you had to go through the effort of stealing it from a torrent site and finding one that wasn’t a virus. But now, it’s convenient to just keep watching anything forever. We hit that stage seamlessly without having a moment of stopping to assess the quality of what we do with that time. It used to be, you’d watch an entire anime, and then you’d have to do work to find what you’d follow it up with. Now, if you have Crunchyroll, there’s 500 million episodes and you can just keep going forever. It’s much harder to stop and reassess. In a way, the badness is so omnipresent now, people will have to actually rethink their practices in a way that is maybe better than what we had before."

There is a lot of bad stuff out there, professinally edited, mainstream published bad stuff. I don't want what I write to be bad. That's going to take effort, and that's not what most content creators want to hear these days. Effort is hard. It's long. It doesn't pay off in a span of days or weeks, but often months and years. I need to get back on the writing track and make my stuff stand out, in a good way.

Stop Claiming, Start Explaining

Help me understand something here.

I've seen a few posts similar to this one, with random people who are spiritualists or spiritualist-adjacent promising people financial blessings, or a new house, or a new car, or a new whatever, simply by "Claim[ing] it now."

They contain the typical "Get-rich-by-wishing-it" tropes of photoshooped piles of money, bros with watches, even more photoshooped money, and the like.

Here's what I don't understand: Many of them, like this one, features ramen noodles, specifically this chicken ramen packet.

Why, I ask.

I've asked that on a few of the posts (do not recommend; your feed becomes flooded with similar posts) and no one has answered the question. They're too busy "claiming it," or so it seems.

I'm used to culture leaving me behind, but there are times the culture needs to pause for a moment and explain itself.

Danger, Will YouTuber! Danger!

I've fallen into an odd YouTube rabbit hole lately, listening to videos of random YouTubers "reporting" on the sins of other random YouTubers, with sins ranging from maybe or maybe not publishing autopsy photos without family permission on true crime stations, to ill-treatment and gaslighting of fellow YouTubers and associated staff.

Part of me appreciates the "Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?" (Who watches the watchers?) vibe of the whole thing, as I believe any media outlet, or anyone acting as a media outlet, ought to be called on the carpet when they've legitimately screwed up.

But there's a darker undertone here, expressed widely in the comments, that many watching and listening don't really care if the alleged sins were committed or not, but they're there for the drama and to watch the "mighty" fall and flail and flounder. They actively hope they fail and that their kids fail and that they lose everything they cherish in a barn fire, and hope someone records the barn fire and posts it online for them to see.

While there are many who are caught who continue to lie or gaslight or whatever, there are those who appear, at least in my eyes, to offer sincere apologies and work to fix what they're done wrong. That doesn't seem to matter to the sharks swirling in the comments, who seem to consider that once a person has sinned, there's no amount of apology or explanation of whatever from the sinner than can atone for the crime -- and it certainly doesn't seem to matter if the crime was committed or not.

It's just a really weird vibe, is all I'm sayin'.

I guess if you're a creator putting stuff out there, maybe take a journalism class or two (not that the same thing doesn't go on in the journalism world) or have people to advise you on whether you're about to screw up or not.

Yeah, that costs money. But maybe money is less precious than reputation.

And to the sharks: lighten up, man.

Hey Scammers, Do Better

I used to sincerely worry that if I kept pointing out that a tell-tale sign of a scam is poor sentence structure and grammar on the website that the scammers would get smarter, brush up their English, and thus slip, undetected, into the continued maelstrom that is social media scam-baiting.

But I guess I needn't worry; even with "About Us" pages this bad, the scammers keep finding enough willing dupes to make their efforts worthwhile, and probably profitable.

Behold:

In case your eyes are like mine and can't make out the small print, I'll transcribe:

Welcome to our online shopping store!

We're devoted to giving you the leading and a assortment of the items with most elevated quality of items, that are ensured to meet your needs and keep you fulfilled! We have committed staffs and key accomplices who help us investigate and make the items that bring the foremost esteem to our clients. We continuously keep an eye on the most recent patterns for such kind of our items and ceaselessly improve our items and out our customer's wishes first.

Our mission is to bring clients the leading involvement when utilizing our items in both item quality and benefit quality. The interface of our clients are continuously the best priority for us, so we trust you may appreciate our items as much as we appreciate making them accessible to you.

Follow us for the latest products, news, and updates.

Store owner.

I'll go over this a few times to make sure I don't introduce any errors; they've got enough on their own. Oh, the spelling is on point. But this sounds like what 99% of scammy websites sound like: Something that's been poured into a translator and spat back out, a la Jimmy James:

Of course, no one is going to see this, because they're all too focused on the up-from-obscurity and by-his-bootstraps story of the inevitable genius college youngster who saw a need and filled it but is being pushed around by Big whatever -- in this case, Big Bug Zapper -- and is struggling to bring his product to market. Nevermind that the same product can be found advertized by a dozen different names, some of which end up linked to nifty little web pages like this:

Every site you find live mentions there are only X number in stock, with X,XXX number of people hovering on the page which has one of those handly little clocks counting down in MINUTES from when the deal will end, only for the clock to either reset or start counting in negative numbers. The number of items available never changes, but the number of people watching soars toward the end, likely to present the idea of scarcity.

And the comments are no better; filled with bots and accounts of people that've been taken over as if they were San Franciscans and Donald Sutherland had spotted them.

It's fun because sometimes the bots talk to each other in their cute little babble-speak and you get a nice warm, atificicial feeling, the same you get when two bits of electrical equipment are interfering with each other.

But they must sell enough product to make the pages worthwhile, and the customers get what they paid for: A shiny bomb casing filled with used pinball machine parts.

"The Incredible Value of Lying"

 

I thought this was pretty interesting in part for the discussion of how to make YouTube activity pay legally and ethically and how to avoid the slimeballs out there trying to make a lot more money out of what creaters create than they want to give the creators.

I appreciate even more his conclusion that the best benefit that can come from sharing content online is not the money-chasing, but the ability sharing has to help creators connect with fellow creators.

Caution: Language warning.

YOU BLOATED PINK THING! BUY THIS DOUCHEY WALLET!

I have gently mocked a "modern" wallet that's a binder clip masquerading as something you'd pay $99 for to hold your cash and credit cards, as advertised on Facebook.

Facebook, then, has flooded my feed with ads for this and other idiot wallets to the point I've just now spent five minutes deleting their ads from my feed.

So I fully expect the number of wallet ads in my feed to double, then triple, because, you know, Facebook has absolutely no willingness to read the room.

My favorite ad for these wallets, however, features some tool flexing over his wallet with the steering wheel of his BMW in the background and a Rolex on his wrist.

I wonder if the ad would have the same cachet if I'd filmed it in our Dodge Grand Caravan with nothing on my wrist at all?

Facebook, trying to sell me wallets.

The Most Interesting Ensemble in the Room

Day 1. Wear a stupid hat and cape.

Day 2. The Power of Love, and other Huey Lewis tunes.

Day 3. Is *that* your body?

Day 4. Rich Dad, Poor Dad, Beggar Dad, Thief.

Day 5. The Hawaii 5-0 Habit.

Day 6. The Power of Love and other Huey Lewis tunes, Part 2.

Day 7. Really, you Have to Update Your Wardrobe So You Look Like a Clean Chimney Sweep,Tiny Tim All Growed Up, or an Extra in a Nicholas Cage Film.

Day 8. Wicker.

Day 9. Super Man and other Topics to Drone on About.

Day 10. Limitless Within the Context of Your Vast Limitations.

Day 11. Think and Grow Fungus.

Day 12. QUIET! Communicating the Animal Way.

Day 13. Elon Musk and other Rich Tools.

Day 14. The WD-40 Principle.

Day 15. 31 Baskin Robbins.

Day 16. Only Idiots Get Up at 5 am.

Day 17. Leaning In: The Joe Fusco Jr. Story.

Day 18. Never Eat an Entire Little Caesar's Pizza on your own.

How Do You Do, Fellow Gen Z Searchers?

So earlier today I read this Business Insider article, and it set me to thinking.

Wondering, of course, if the youths really were using Instagram and Tik Tok for their searches. And whether what I was reading was even being reported accurately. Because "searches" seems an awfully broad category. What, exactly, are they searching for? I joked on Facebook that if Gen Z is using Tik Tok and Instagram for their searches -- read, research -- it might explain why I'm getting some of the odd results I'm seeing in my online English class.

But "searches" doesn't necessarily mean "research," so I thought I'd better keep reading. And asking questions.

I'm asking my students this question: Where are you finding the information you use in class? Are you using social media for your searches? And these are probably not even the right questions at this point, but I'm intrigued, particularly after I read this TechCrunch article to which Business Insider linked, and one phrase used in a KSL Radio report on the information as well: visual searches. That right there made me reconsider the Boomer "the sky is falling because the youths don't know how to research anymore" knee-jerk the news first inspired in me.

I suspect the divergence or disconnect isn't as broad as I initially thought.

I shared the following with my online students today:

Students, I stumbled across this article (Links to an external site.) today and wanted to ask you about it.

I am trying to come into this potential conversation without judgment, yet at 50 years old I'll admit this is how it feels on the outset:

I'm curious. Do you use any form of social media in your research? What are you finding there?

I'm not old school enough to believe that encyclopedias are the be-all and end-all of research; I didn't much like using them as a kid in those dinosaur-riding, pre-internet days. But since we had a set at home and they meant I could at least start on things without a trip to the library, I used them a lot.

But the Internet, clearly, has opened up countless avenues where information -- both good and bad -- can be presented for consumption. And that's a great and wonderful blessing.

So, help an old guy out, and without any judgment from me at all because I'm curious to know what's out there: Where are you going to find what you need? And don't respond like you think you should in an English class. I don't care about getting "correct and proper" responses that a snooty old English teacher wants to hear. I want to hear what you're doing, so I can find a pry-bar to open my mind again and see the possibilities.

People of my age and older (and maybe some younger) seem to think a lot of what's presented on the Internet is a joke or inaccurate or in no way relevant to anything "serious." Prove that wrong. I'm sure there are wonderfully intelligent people out there showing marvelous things on social media. Help me see it.

I'll share something:

I consider myself to be handy around the house, but there are some realms I don't care to wander into very much. One of them is auto repair or general tinkering. Earlier this summer, my 2015 Honda Pilot wouldn't start. I surmised I had a bad starter, but was intimidated by replacing the unit. The car sat in our driveway for three weeks until I finally . . . called a tow truck and had them take it to the mechanic to fix. Best $89 I spent so far this year, and that was just for the tow.

But then my air conditioning started making an odd "whump" sound and was not producing enough cool air for my liking. I turned to the Internet and discovered the symptoms described could be attributed to a dirty cabin air filter. I also discovered that while the filter only costs about $24, getting one professionally installed would cost another hundred dollars.

So I found this video:

The idea of doing all of this work was intimidating. But when I was at the auto parts store getting an engine air filter, I also picked up a cabin air filter. And then . . . I followed the video instructions and replaced the filter myself. And the symptoms went away and I have to wear a coat in my car now when the AC is running.

So pry open my mind a bit: How are you using social media (and YouTube counts) for research?

Sofar, one response, not outside the realm of what I expected:

While I don't actually have Instagram or Tik-Tok (it is definitely a choice not to use those), I do have and use YouTube a lot. I don't use it in the way the article suggests though and I could never see myself looking up places to eat on it or anything like that. However, I do frequently use Pinterest to find recipes and other inspiration instead of searching on Google. Like you, I will look up tutorials on social media sites and they are often helpful. However, I will just as often google tutorials as well. I also use YouTube both in and out of school settings. There are tons of channels that are helpful for research and I have had several courses here at BYU-I that use YouTube links to teach me as well. The other cool thing about these channels is that many have started using YouTube shorts. Like it sounds, they're short videos similar to Tik-Tok. I can see people searching the way the article describes, however, by choice, I do not act like most kids in my generation. Google is still the go-to place for me.

There are definite times when a visual result is highly valued. The filter I used in my example came with installation instructions, but they paled in comparison to the YouTube video I found that inspired me to actually do the work (I looked at the instructions only after the work was done).

So this may not be as revelatory as I initially thought, but it's still an interesting avenue of exploration. It all goes back to something David Hailey taught when I was working on my masters degree: We can't anticipate from where internet users will find the information we present on the internet, nor should we assume that they'll use the information we present in the way we intend. I'm going to keep asking these questions and refining them to see what I can come up with, and maybe use the knowledge to help me become a better English teacher.

Big Brother, Watching Your Social Distancing

So far this week, it looks like Coronavirus is taking aim at three things:

1. The British royal family, with Prince Charles announcing a positive diagnosis
2. Easter, with egg prices in the United States soaring and hoarders gobbling up the surplus egg supply that was being built up for Donald Trump’s Easter.
3. Local news.
4. Your privacy.

And maybe that last one is a bit overblown.

But here’s this company, Unacast, using GPS data from cell phones to grade us, county by county, on whether we’re doing the social distancing we should.

I say company, but I’m not sure who these dudebros from Norway are.

Here’s their privacy statement:

The Social Distancing Scoreboard and other tools being developed for the Covid-19 Toolkit do not identify any individual person, device, or household. However to calculate the actual underlying social indexing score we combine tens of millions of anonymous mobile phones and their interactions with each other each day - and then extrapolate the results to the population level. As a company that originated in Norway we put privacy front and center and believe it to be an individual right, and since we operate on both sides of the Atlantic, we have been operating within the GDPR guidelines since May 2018 and this year also adopted the CCPA guidelines for the whole of the US (not only California).

But [enter the wormy med student from “Young Frankenstein”] isn’t it true they could they identify individuals via cellphone? Probably, given the technology available. We’re seeing such tracking in China, Taiwan, and Hong Kong, and probably other places too.

Temporary measures, you say.

Maybe.

But we are in the era of paranoid/populist governments, where such temporary measures could become the norm, you know.

I know this sounds paranoid. And I would have to say if someone official wanted to use my phone GPS to track my whereabouts and movements, my inherent Dutch stubbornness would be to tell them to pound sand. And I’d leave my phone home.

Also, part of me looks at their county-by-county data and things, well, this is kinda like a heat map for distance as well as population. Out west, where I live, things are further apart than in other areas of the country. And looking at Alaska, where they’re being praised for little movements in their boroughs or census areas, I’ll wager population is sparse for the most part (or concentrated, such as in Anchorage) so the data from this month might not look all that different from the data from this time last year.

There are just a lot of questions here, even setting privacy aside.

I do not confess to be a genius. My analysis here is totally by the seat of my pants. But I’d like to ask these dudebros some questions.

[Cue Panic Music]

The world, or at least the world as framed through national media in the United States, is gripped by panic.

Mad maybe panic isn’t the right word. Others come to mind: Hysteria. Opportunism. Whataboutism and Itoldyousoitis.

All linked to coronavirus, of course, that little itty-bitty not-quite-alive thing that, while serious from a health standpoint, has been exploded to Gaussian proporitions

And toilet paper. Lots and lots of toilet paper being bought and hoarded because the general public must be found to be DOING SOMETHING to address the panic.

Cue the music:



Of course, the best way to battle coronavirus – the best way to be found to be DOING SOMETHING – is to wash hands, to stay home if you’re sick, and to watch those in vulnerable populations for any sign of illness or complication. You know, the standard advice for any illness, SCARY CORONAVIRUS or not.

So amid all the calm advice, the panic, and the MOAR TOILET PAPER blips out there, there is, of course, increased ridiculousness.

Slate.com wants you to watch a Hollywoodized version of events, namely 2011’s “Contagion,” which of course will lead into the inevitable politicizing of the virus: Trump can’t handle it while Obama or a boatload of babies could clearly do better.

The Atlantic suggests combating coronavirus with money. Not money for research, or medical equipment. Just money. Free money to everyone.

They also suggest cancelling everything.

Everything?

Everything.

Twitter was ablaze with fury at the Trumps: At Meliana for posing for pictures in a hard had ostensibly supervising the construction of a tennis complex at the White House, because ALL CONTSTRUCTION AND RECREATION BY ANYONE ASSOCIATED WITH THE BAD ORANGE MAN must STOP and all must instead board a helicopter to frown at areas of the nation impacted by coronavirus. And Trump himself must not golf at a time like this, particularly when the Democrats are pulling all of their pet programs out of mothballs and spray-paining CORONAVIRUS FIX on them because, hey, they can’t hoard toilet paper so must be seen as DOING SOMETHING by those who are looking inside the beltway for answers.

Looking inside the beltway for answers is akin to going to the bus terminal at 2 am and expecting to see normal things there.

I’m not even going to look at what Russia Today has to say on the topic, because HAHAHAHAHAHAHA.

At least Buzzfeed, of all places, is offering statistics rather than scaremongering, at least at this link.

Do I have my head in the sand?

Maybe a tiny bit. But I did get my flu shot this year. The CDC says of 6.4 million US residents sick with the flu between October and the end of 2019, about 55,000 were hospitalized and 2,900 died. That’s not in the news. But it’s not new and scary and making people buy MOAR TOILET PAPER, so, you know.

Maybe this coronavirus strain will be as scary as it sounds. But I’m tired of the hype.*

Total US deaths as of today: 26.

What’s the best thing we could do?

Well, wind the clock back 20 or 30 years or so and figure out who thought a demanding 24-hour news cycle was a good thing.

Or turn off the TV and wander away from the Internet.

Not that we need a news blackout. But one small, informative dose daily. Or only when events warrant. The constant yammering is harmful to mental health.

And get that cone off your head.

*This will be ironic in a year if I’m dead of coronavirus, but I’m not counting on it.

Herp and Derp

Over the weekend, I posted the following Facebook memory:

It rang true when I first read the quote in 2018, and it’s as applicable today.

Also as applicable: Journalism professionals, don’t take the easy route.* If you don’t know something, say so. While speculation fills word count and air time, readers and viewers would better be served by a shrug of the shoulders. It’s okay not to know.

Case in point: This story from Quillette.

In brief, Scandinavian Airlines apparently put out a commercial meant to communicate the point that getting to know the world outside of one’s own borders is preferable to blind nationalism. Or something like that. But the message in the ad was so terribly presented and researched, it was picked apart online by critics of just about every stripe.

The company and some media reactions?

The day after the ad was released, the airline wrote in a press statement that it was investigating a suspected “attack” on social media – a theory which was uncritically picked up by leading international outlets. “When analyzing the pattern and volume of reactions we have reason to suspect an online attack and that the campaign has been hijacked,” SAS wrote in its statement.

Some media immediately began speculating on possible Russian involvement, a theory which the company did nothing to deny. Reuters claimed that the ad was simply “ myths about Scandinavia,” yet had nevertheless become “victim of an online hate campaign, particularly form nationalist and right-wing groups.”

Which sounds right, except for one thing: It wasn’t.

[E]xperts have rejected the idea that the company was victim of a coordinated attack, either particularly by “right-wing groups,” or by Russia. And a number of mainstream Scandinavian media outlets and commentators had been among the most vocal critics.

But by evoking existing fears of right-wing extremism, online hate campaigns, and real threats to national security, the company was able to deflect basic journalistic scrutiny.

The company cried wolf, as the author says. And international outlets – where the rest of the world would source their news – failed at their job by parroting the company’s line, rather than looking to see if the claims of derpism were true.

Journalists, don’t respond to derpism with herpisms of your own. Readers are still going to get things wrong and fly off the handle and trot out any of their own weird little pet theories. But that is not your job, journalists. Your job is to get it right. Find out what’s going on. Don’t speculate. And if you don’t know, in the end, say that.

Credibility, I know from personal experience, is expensive to buy. And no matter how credible you may be on many an issue, throw your credibility away enough times and you can’t buy it back. And the critics are always circling. Some with their own herp and derp, to be sure. Don’t respond in kind.

*As a reformed journalist, I confess to taking the easy route many times. Trust me, it’s not the way to go.

Recipes for Bantha Pudu

So, here is what you are if you hate having to scroll through a thousand-word essay for each recipe you’re trying to find online:

1. You’re bantha pudu because you don’t want to be part of the “community” that builds audiences and food fandom and are somehow preventing the blogger, who is providing you FREE recipes, dammit, from climbing in search engine algorithms so their content rises to the top of the search like a successful souffle.

2. You’re probably fat and not really a fan of good food because all you want is a quick way to cook up something you can shove into your cavernous gob.

3. You’re lazy because you want that recipe fast, without paying respect to the blogger who brings it to you.

4. You’re too dumb to understand the genre of food/recipe blogging on the Internet.

5. You’re a man who hates women, and want them to be dumb, silent, servile engines of food preparation.

6. You’re a woman who hates women who demonstrate any fealty to domesticity, husbands, dumb stories about the dog, or – gasp – paying the bills by talking about their sponsors’ products.

7. You’re too technologically unsavvy to use recipe filter extensions or to use the search function to look for the keyword “ingredients.”

8. You’re a hack.

Or so this piece in Slate tells me.

The article speaks of “content collapse,” meaning the audiences websites are built for are open to anyone on the Internet, not just that intended audience. Content collapse implies that these non-audience folks are still going to come to your website and very likely be confused about what it is and what it’s for and maybe – if they can find a way – complain about it. Or they’ll just use it for what they think it’s good for, and go about their days.

I’m a writer myself. I get that the Internet provides avenues of unlimited expression that is harder to come by in printed matter, as is pointed out here.

But I also know there are simple things writers can do to deal with content collapse without having to excise a single word.

I spent ten years as a newspaper journalist, where we write using the inverted pyramid. That means the most important information comes first, with the least important information at the end. Meaning if the article had to be cut to length, an easy way to make things fit was just to cut off the bottom until it fit. Now, there were times we did not write using that style. A more expansive style has its payoffs, notably in expression. But it brings with it inherent risks of needing a heavier edit.

Not so needed online, where there’s infinite space for an infinite number of monkeys typing at an infinite number of typewriters. Take this blog, for example. I do no editing or cutting here.

But I also don’t expect anyone – not even my mother, who is dead – to read this. If anyone reads it and finds it annoying, that’s fine by me. This is for me. I’m the author and the audience, shouting into the ether.

You should be glad you’ve got regular readers. And readers who come to you via content collapse. So take advantage of such. Put the recipes first, or figure out a “Recipe Here” button that those fly-by-nighters can use to get to the recipe quickly if they don’t want to read your prose. (And honestly, the misogyny thing. I have looked up many recipes online. I’m far more interested in the recipe than the sex of the person who put it online. Not saying misogyny in this case doesn’t happen. But scratching around for reasons to be mad if someone says they simply want the recipe seems foolish.

My wife is the same way. We want the recipe. And here’s why: We’re short on time. We both work two jobs. We have three teenagers who also cook. We have school and other hobbies that don’t revolve around food. There are times it’s fun to slow down and read a good story about a recipe we want to use. That’s not going to happen every time. On the nights I cook, for example, more often than not it’s after I get home off the bus at 7 pm, and we’ve got kids doing homework and both mom and dad heading to the online classes they teach and We. Do. Not. Have. Time. to read your thousand-word essays. We want good food. But the story time doesn’t always fit into the schedule.