EPISODE 242: SCHRÖDINGER’S TOOTH
POP CULTURE SPIRIT WOW
I have a dead thing inside me.
Maybe. I had a root canal this week; hopefully that’ll save the tooth from real death. But it’s my first root canal and listening to the dentist talk it does kind of seem like the tooth is dead-adjacent. I guess it will be dead if this doesn’t work and I’m not more careful. The internet tells me if the procedure suceeds the tooth will in fact live again.
(Question: Why are doctors referred to as Doctor but dentists are not referred to as Dentist?
These are the sorts of observations that one ponders when one spends two hours in a dentist’s chair, along with “I had no idea what an effective shelf/tool box storage unit my stomach is”, “Am I wearing a Big Top circus tent on my mouth?” and my personal favorite “Is this about to hurt?”)
I’m definitely freaked out at the idea that there’s some part of me that’s just sitting there dead. But I’m also pretty scared of losing my teeth. I don’t know why; people do fine with implants. It just seems creepy somehow. Like what zombies use for mouth gear, you know?
You have teeth. They grew in you. In fact, they’re bones. You break bones, you don’t lose them. No one says, shoot, broke my leg, guess I’ve just got the one now.
And sitting in the chair, amongst my deep thoughts, it did strike me that teeth, weight and climate are also pretty similar. You get a check up, you hear the warnings. And then most of the time if you don’t have to you don’t do anything. Or if you’re me you do the opposite of what you were requested to do, because your old dentist had this hygienist that was always trying to shame you so you thought oh you don’t like the state of my teeth after six months, let’s see how you respond when I don’t come in for a year, and my teeth are aching because a couple clearly need fillings. Let’s see how you like that action.
It’s hard to be proactive before the bad thing happens, is I think what I was thinking there while what seemed like rubber bands kept popping off my teeth. (I dentist almost entirely with my eyes shut. It’s too confusing wondering if I’m supposed to be keeping eye contact when the other set of eye balls is just inches away and staring into my open and disgusting mouth.) Reactive – that’s the thing for me. Oh I’ve had a root canal which is going to be followed up with some kind of dental surgery to diminish some small part of my gums? Oh, I’m definitely flossing now. ++ Justice League comes out today. The reviews have... not been kind.
I think I’ve laid out my basic theory of sequels here before, but just in case I haven’t: The box office of a sequel is, in most cases, determined by the strength not of itself, but of its predecessor.
Jurassic Park – great movie. Everyone loved it.
The sequel? A piece of trash, and it made enormous money.
The third part? Actually a really excellent movie that made the drama more intimate again. And no one went to see it, because its predecessor was trash.
The modern super hero film franchise is a little harder to judge so far. Every Marvel movie has been a hit. Really, every one. Even the one about the ants did fine; and the one where Cumberbick Bumderpatch puts on a weird American accident somehow made serious bank.
The Chris Nolan Batman films, too, were all pretty much enormous hits (and just good movies, too, which is crazy hard for a trilogy to do).
Man of Steel had a domestic box office of a little less than $300 million, which I guess is good – Spider-Man: Homecoming made $334 million domestic; but it’s not exactly great for a movie about Superman, and the reviews were pretty mixed. The sequel only made about the same amount, about $330 million, and had a lot of fans saying they’d never watch one of those movies again (because it was awful. AWFUL).
But unlike the Marvel movies, all the main DC characters are being brought in through the main line and then being spun off, which means even after the nightmare that was BvS, this movie has the draw of three major heroes appearing in the movies for the first time ever.
And, Wonder Woman was a juggernaut. She made $412 million U.S., and I suspect there’s going to be some serious Oscar push for the film as well.
So it’s possible I guess that Justice League will make a lot of money, even if the reviews remain...uneven. (You know a movie’s in trouble when people are complaining about the poor special effect attempts to hide one of the actors’ mustaches, which they grew for another movie and refused to shave for reshoots even though this character has pretty much made your career Henry Cavill.)
I’m working hard to keep myself from going, because fool me twice, shame on you DC, but fool me three times...? ++ If you, too, are looking for a reasons not to go, here’s a fun fact I learned this week: the first real “super hero” was not Superman or Spider-Man but The Grand Dragon, a character created in 1905 by Thomas Dixon. He was HUGELY popular for the time, and much of his story creates the tropes we’ve come to know and love – the mask; the crime fighting; operating outside the law; the icon.
From Chris Gavaler at Lithub last week:
Ben Cameron, a.k.a the Grand Dragon, represents the earliest 20th-century incarnation of an American vigilante hero who assumes a costumed alias to hide his identity while waging his war for good—the formula adopted by Siegel and Shuster, the creators of Superman.
The twist is, the “crime” Ben Cameron the Grand Dragon fought was black people. Because he was a white supremacist.
Yeah. Superheroes emerged from the stories of the John Grisham of the K.K.K.
And in case that just sounds like a factoid turned into some kind of gibberish clickbait, consider this:
Although the Klan, when directly portrayed, is invariably an organization of villains, the superhero still operates from the same reactionary, paternalistic ethics of vigilantism. The superhero does not simply save the world—he restores a moral, nationalistic status quo by superseding the powers of a democratic government incapable of combating or often even recognizing alien threats.
Even when superheroes are depicted as battling for liberal, anti-discriminatory values, the mass appeal of the character is found in its ability to reduce complex social anxieties into terms of absolute good and evil. Whatever the specific story content, the formula remains centered on romanticized vigilantism, still one of the most defining traits of contemporary superhero comics.
It’s disturbing, right? ++ This week in technology is scary: Youtube has tons of videos targeted for children like nursery rhymes or cartoons (like this “Hop Little Bunny” cartoon which is a parent’s catchy nightmare).
But more and more such cartoons are being created out of other cartoons by bots and humans with weird and disturbing content folded in. (Check out this, for instance, in which a Peppa Pig cartoon is mashed up with Doritos references and aggressive cutaway images).
This piece from Medium walks through it all in some detail. It’s a lot to take in, but it’s worth letting it wash over you, if only to learn about why so many YouTube videos now have titles like “Wrong Heads Disney Wrong Ears Wrong Legs Kids Learn Colors Finger Family 2017 Nursery Rhymes” – which, bizarrely, was actually my nickname in middle school.
Meanwhile, everyone seems to agree that Facebook is listening in all our cell phone conversations. Reply All did a great and funny story of trying to convince people this is not the case, their algorithms are just crazy magic (spoiler: no one believes him).
Then there’s this article about the people Facebook suggests as friends which seems to indicate Facebook has access to other parts of your life (like your email – sweet!), which it turns out is really again just a story about bots and algorithms, but teaches you some crazy things. Like for instance: did you know, wen Facebook asks to access your contacts so you can find friends, it keeps all the information, not just the details of people who have Facebook accounts. (And if you use Instagram, WhatsApp or Messenger, all that information also goes into the Facebook profile.)
Which means, if someone you had one date with has had your contact info in their phone since they started on Facebook, any information they have on you Facebook also has (like your phone number or even just the fact you two know each other).
Or, if you and someone else both have a third person’s contact information, the Facebook algorithm knows it’s very likely you know each other. And that’s why you have situations like a sperm donor being invited to friend the child he’s never met.
That accumulation of contact data from hundreds of people means that Facebook probably knows every address you’ve ever lived at, every email address you’ve ever used, every landline and cell phone number you’ve ever been associated with, all of your nicknames, any social network profiles associated with you, all your former instant message accounts, and anything else someone might have added about you to their phone book.
As far as Facebook is concerned, none of that even counts as your own information. It belongs to the users who’ve uploaded it, and they’re the only ones with any control over it.
If any of this creeps you out, there are a couple things you can do:
You can go to your Facebook preferences (here) and “Remove all contacts”. It does absolutely nothing to who you’re friends with, or your contact list on your computer. It just wipes the information from Facebook’s memory.
You can go here and learn exactly what topics, businesses the ads that Facebook has targeted specifically for you based on the information it has, and you can delete and/or shut them all off.
You can tell your friends to do the same.
Lastly, I learned this week about the online idea of “griefing”, aka messing with technology so as to disrupt people’s lives – you know, hilarious stuff like adding flashing images to an epilepsy support website. Which, of course, because online everyone becomes horrible.
Some people wonder why we can’t have nice things. I wonder why we don’t want them. ++ LINKS ++ Todd van der Werff over at Vox did a great piece about past situations he’s been in where really inappropriate behavior and treatment of others has just been shrugged off; it’s a very concrete way of describing the crazy awful assumptions of the world before, like, yesterday.
(As much as we chafe against the inability of culture to change at times, it’s equally extraordinary to me how quickly a culture’s self-understanding can change. And once it does, it becomes nearly impossible for anyone to understand the prior understanding any more.)
And in happier news: a 89-year-old grandma in Japan decided to start taking photos. The results are pretty much the best:
I’m headed home for Thanksgiving next week. It’s been a while since I was there for that holiday. And the last time I had this crazy thing happened where my flight got cancelled – actually first someone stole my cab, then my flight got cancelled. I ended up driving from New York to I don’t even remember where in a rental car with this other guy – who literally would not stop talking day or night.
We eventually had to get a motel room, but neither of us had much moeny so we had to share. And a bunch of other crazy stuff happened – the car caught fire at one point, I kid you not. I got so mad at the guy I pretty much abandoned him on the L track.
But then, I don’t know, I just had this feeling I was missing something. And I went back and the guy was still there, just sitting at the L-station on Thanksgiving Day. It turned out his wife had died and he really had no one. I ended up taking him home with me. It was kind of the best Thanksgiving ever, in the end.
All of which is a long way of saying I hope you have a great holiday, filled with surprises and generosity. The world and its nonsense can wait. Turn off the computer and tuck into those candied yams.
(Or really treat yourself and put some marshmallows on top of your sweet potatoes before you cook them. It will change your life.)