Technology posts

Last week, former Bush speechwriter and current senior editor at The Atlantic David Frum tweeted that Congress was unprecedentedly approving more conservative judges during this lame-duck session, and my anger at Mitch McConnell was stoked anew. I dashed off this response before I went for a walk: 

When I returned and logged onto Twitter, I found, instead of the usual feed, a message telling me I'd been suspended from the site for 12 hours for violating its rules against abuse and harassment. “You may not engage in the targeted harassment of someone, or incite other people to do so. This includes wishing or hoping that someone experiences physical harm.”

They had a link where you could argue your case, and I certainly had one: It was obvouosly a joke, or a metaphor, and anyway the harm Mitch McConnell is visiting upon our country is a million times worse than my little tweet. But then I thought: No. I really do mean it. I want Mitch McConnell kicked in the nuts. On some level, it's unfathomable to me that the man is able to walk around D.C. without at least three people a day taking a shot. So I didn't argue my case. I took the punishment. If it was punishment. It was kind of freeing, to be honest. I had to delete the tweet, but I could still scroll through Twitter; I just couldn't tweet, retweet, like, or comment on anything. Sometimes I forgot and tried to like something, but mostly the 12 hours, half of which were sleeping hours, went like that. I spent more time on legit news sites. I spent more time reading.

I'm glad they're policing. I just wish they did it better. Mis/disinformation is the battle and we're losing it every day on all of these social media platforms. 

Bo Derek in “10.”

Yes, it's another KNOWN FOR debacle from IMDb. These are fun. Wish I didn't have to do them. I wish Amazon cared about its film site.

So, according to IMDb, what is Bo Derek known for? Wait. First for the kids: Who is Bo Derek?

In the late 1970s, Bo has a supporting role in the Blake Edwards/Dudley Moore comedy “10” as the titular fantasy fixation. That was the first time I'd ever heard of this rating system, by the way. I was 16 and thought: “Wait, what? We're supposed to do what? Rate women on a scale from one to what?” Don't know if I ever used it much, and I doubt young men use it today, but I guess for a time men rated women in this manner, and Bo was supposed to be the pinnacle: the perfect 10. The movie got good reviews, did great at the box office (it was the seventh-biggest grosser of 1979), piqued interest in Ravel's “Bolero,” and made a star out of Dudley Moore. But it was Bo who became the phenomenon. Everyone was talking about her. She was on the cover of every magazine. I'm sure tons of movie offers rolled in.

But she didn't do any of those. Instead, she made movies written and directed by her husband, John Derek.

Also for the kids: Who is John Derek? He was the reason I was looking at Bo's IMDb page in the first place. The other night I was watching Nicholas Ray's “Run for Cover,” starring James Cagney, and Derek has the secondary role, which ... which was him. In the 1950s, he was the cute, lightweight, second. He played Joshua, for example, in “The Ten Commandments” (his own “10” movie), but apparently he didn't like acting much, and in the mid-1960s he traded it in for a directing career: “Nightmare in the Sun” with Ursulla Andress, and “Childish Things” with Linda Evans, among others. These actresses weren't just his stars, either; they were his wives. He was married to Ursula 1957-1966 and to Linda Evans 1969-1975. In 1976, at age 49, he married Bo. She was 19. It was kind of creepy. It was like he kept trading in the same beautiful, high-cheekboned, Nordic woman for a newer model.

It gets creepier. In 1981, in the aftermath of all the “10” attention, a low-budget, soft-core movie, “Fantasies,” starring Bo, and directed by John, was released. Except it wasn't filmed in the aftermath of “10.” It was filmed in Greece. In 1973. Back when Bo was called Mary Cathleen Collins of Long Beach, Calif. And she was 16. 

In the real aftermath of “10,” instead of making any of the studio pics she was offered, Bo played Jane in John Derek's “Tarzan, the Ape Man.” It did OK box office ($36 mil, the 15th highest-grosser of the year), but the reviews were scathing (10% on Rotten Tomatoes). Three years later, John directed her in “Bolero,” about a 1920s movie fan who travels to Europe to lose her viriginity. It made less money ($9 mil, the 83rd highest-grosser of the year), and the reviews were even more scathing (0% on RT). Five years after that, John directed her in “Ghosts Can't Do It,” which made ... $25k? I guess? It's hard to figure its box-office take because the movie was barely released in theaters. It was certainly never reviewed. By then, no one cared. By then, the national “Bo” was somebody else.

And that was that. There went her career. She was in “10,” did crap for her husband, disappeared.

So back to the original question: According to IMDb's algorithms, what is Bo Derek known for? Here you go:

Yes. Not “10.” 

I guess I kind of see it? “Tommy Boy” is there because Farley/Spade are still popular, “Bolero” and “Tarzan” are for the soft-core boys, and “Ghost Can't Do It” because it includes a cameo by Donald Trump. For which he won a Razzie. Back then.

Plus who watches “10” anymore?

But it's still wrong. The chart below is how often her name comes up, historically, on newspapers.com. That peak in 1980 is more than 26,000 mentions. Then the long slog downward. 

The question for IMDb is this: How do you incorporate such historical information into the “Known For” algorithm? Or should they keep the algorithm as it is—about who comes to IMDb—but just change the title? That would be the easy solution. But I expect no solution. Since I doubt they see a problem.

The bigger lesson here is the Hamiltonian one: Don't throw away your shot.

Here's a bonus via newspapers.com: My father's 1984 review of “Bolero.”

(click here for bigger view)

Tacoma News Tribune, April 11, 1953, although it was syndicated all over the place. 

Can't find much on Sullivan. Retired from Pacific Telephone and Telegraph in 1961, was on the board of New York Life, was elected chairman of Allied Properties in 1973, and his wife, Alice, died in 1980 at the age of 85. He survived her. Can't find his obit. 

“The frenzied push-pull [RE: Trump threatening to send the military to the Minnesota protests in late May] was just the latest incident in a five-year struggle by Facebook to accommodate the boundary-busting ways of Trump. The president has not changed his rhetoric since he was a candidate, but the company has continually altered its policies and its products in ways certain to outlast his presidency.

”Facebook has constrained its efforts against false and misleading news, adopted a policy explicitly allowing politicians to lie, and even altered its news feed algorithm to neutralize claims that it was biased against conservative publishers, according to more than a dozen former and current employees and previously unreported documents obtained by The Washington Post. One of the documents shows it began as far back as 2015, when as a candidate Trump posted a video calling for a ban of Muslims entering the United States. Facebook's executives declined to remove it, setting in motion an exception for political discourse.

“The concessions to Trump have led to a transformation of the world's information battlefield. They paved the way for a growing list of digitally savvy politicians to repeatedly push out misinformation and incendiary political language to billions of people. It has complicated the public understanding of major events such as the pandemic and the protest movement, as well as contributed to polarization.

”And as Trump grew in power, the fear of his wrath pushed Facebook into more deferential behavior toward its growing number of right-leaning users, tilting the balance of news people see on the network, according to the current and former employees.“

 — ”Zuckerberg once wanted to sanction Trump. Then Facebook wrote rules that accommodated him," in The Washington Post

When I was clearing out my Facebook account last fall, and I deleted all of my photos, this was what was left on the page:

You see it? That ghostly image under “Create Album” in the upper left? I saw it right away. Maybe because I see it in my nightmares. Maybe because it's been our national nightmare three years running. Apparently it's also the ghost in the Facebook machine. It's so weird and unnecessary. It's not like any of the albums had anything to do with him. So why was it there?

And if it's not Trump, who or what is it? 

I searched online but haven't seen anyone else commenting on this phenomenon. Maybe because no one else deleted all their shit before deleting their account? FB recently changed its design so it's probably not there anymore. But why was it there to begin with? A final “fuck you” from Facebook before I headed out the door? Part of its idiot algorithms? “Hey, you keep writing ”Yankees“ [suck], so why not buy some Yankees memorabilia?” “Hey, you keep posting about Trump, so we‘ll leave you with this ghostly image under your photos. Oh, don’t bother thanking us. We enjoy doing it.”  

I really do wonder about Zuckerberg sometimes. Winklevoss twins, we hardly knew ye.

From last week's Wall Street's Journal article, “Facebook Knows It Encourages Division. Top Executives Nixed Solutions: The social-media giant internally studied how it polarizes users, then largely shelved the research”:

The high number of extremist groups was concerning, the presentation says. Worse was Facebook's realization that its algorithms were responsible for their growth. The 2016 presentation states that “64% of all extremist group joins are dude to our recommendation tools” and that most of the activity came from the platform's “Groupss You Should Join” and “Discover” algorithms: “Our recommendation systems grow the problem.”

No shit. Sadly, the man in charge didn't give a shit:

The debate got kicked up to Mr. Zuckerberg, who heard out both sides in a short meeting, said people briefed on it. His response: Do it, but cut the weighting by 80%. Mr. Zuckerberg also signaled he was losing interesting in the effort to recalibrate the platform in the name of social good, they said, asking that they not bring him something like that again.

Message to Mark:

Follow-up to yesterday's post about deleting my Facebook account: They don't make it easy. 

I'm not talking about what I went through—deleting everying in the account before actually deleting the account. I'm talking about the latter: the hoops FB makes you jump through. 

(Quick aside: They also seemed to send me more friend suggestions the more friends I deleted from my account. I was down to six total friends, and I'd be off the site for, say, two months, and come back to a huge red number (interactions or whatever it was) in the upper right, and they were all friends suggestions from FB's algorithm. And they were all wrong.)

OK, so after deleting everything in the account, I googled to see how you actually deleted the account, then navigate to that spot on the platform. First, FB gave me a choice:

• Deactivate Account
• Permanently Delete Account

The latter came with a big, redundant warning about what this meant: “Deleting your account is permanent.” I clicked that option and then clicked: CONTINUE TO ACCOUNT DELETION. Done and done.

Except the next page reminded me that deleting would mean losing Messenger. Wouldn't I rather simply Deactivate? So as not to lose Messenger? Since it's so great? FB also gave me the option to download my informaton. According to FB, I still had 140 photos and 42 posts somewhere in my account. I was vaguely curious—I thought I'd scrubbed every corner—but I said “screw it” and pressed on: DELETE ACCOUNT. Done. 

Except this time I got a pop-up: password. Right. CONTINUE. 

Another pop-up. Yet another confirmation message. Yet another “Are you sure?” I clicked: DELETE ACCOUNT. 

And that was the click that finally worked. Sort of. FB was giving me 30 days to think it over.

Nothing has made me happier to leave Facebook than the leaving of it. 

“The Millonaire” is a 1931 drama/comedy starring George Arliss, who was taking Hollywood by storm after a hugely successful career on the stage. He played, for example, the title role of “Alexander Hamilton” in the 1910s on Broadway (100 years before LMM's musical version) and reprised it in the movies in the ‘30s. He was often promoted as “America’s First Actor.” But I'm interested in the movie less for him than for a small supporting role played by James Cagney. I‘ve seen every early Cagney (1930-34) but that one. Problem? “The Millionaire” is a tough get. Even Scarecrow Video in Seattle, which has everything, doesn’t have it.

I forget why but last week I was on the movie's IMDb page and saw this: 

Wait. Watch on Prime Video? Wow. Now only could I finally see the movie but I could see it for free. You can't believe how excited I got. Until I clicked on the link. This is where I was taken:

Missed it by that much. 

Via Twitter, I tried to alert both IMDb and Prime (both owned by Amazon) to their mistake but so far nothing's been fixed. It's the same old glitch.

That said, if anyone knows where I can watch a version of the Arliss “Millionaire,” please give a shout. 

A close-up from “Great Guy,” a public domain movie streaming on Amazon.

The other night I bought the streaming version of the 1931 James Cagney movie “Blonde Crazy” from Amazon.com and then held my breath. Film quality from movies on Amazon, particularly early Hollywood pictures, is problematic. Many have been copied and recopied so often they‘re blurry and sludgy—unwatchable on a big TV screen and sometimes even on a computer. With “Big Business Girl,” for example, I had to shrink the browser down to 1/4 size to make it palatable.

That one was a rental. So it goes. But nobody wants to own such a low-quality thing. That’s why I held my breath.

In the last year I‘ve bought about six or so digital movies from Amazon—“The Great Buster,” “Pain and Glory,” some early Cagneys—and they were all fine. “Blonde Crazy” wasn’t. Soft and blurry—like watching a 2005 upload on YouTube. You felt dumber just watching it. I certainly felt dumber paying 11 bucks for it.

Plus side: I was able to get a refund. There's a feedback option on each page, and I clicked it, and went through the hoops until I was able to message with an actual person—or a very responsive bot—and he/she/it was able to refund my order. If not my time. Or my temporary spike in blood pressure.

I made some suggestions, too, which he/she/it promised to kick upstairs. We‘ll see. Here they are. I think they’re good ideas for both Amazon and its customers:

1. Before any purchase or rental, let customers see a 30-to-60 second clip so we can judge the film quality. 
2. Include the film quality on the movie's page—as with used books on Amazon's site.
3. Allow rent-to-own. If you stream a rental, then want to buy it, Amazon should knock off the rental price you just paid from the purchase price. Apple already does this with iTunes. Buy a single, then buy the whole album, it's minus the single price. 

I wouldn't mind seeing Amazon enact all three of these reforms, to be honest, but particularly 1) and 3). Right now, despite the refund, I'm wary of renting/buying old movies from them in the future. I assume that's not how they want their customers to feel.

“Sure, that might lead to a dystopian future or something, but...”

— David Scalzo, an early investor in Clearview, which has created a facial-recognition app that it's shared with more than 600 law-enforcement agencies, according to Kashmir Hill's article, “The Secretive Company That Might End Privacy as We Know It,” in The New York Times. 

According to Hill, “The tool could identify activists at a protest or an attractive stranger on the subway, revealing not just their names but where they lived, what they did and whom they knew.” According to Hill, too, Clearview monitored her as she did research for the article. “At my request,” she writes, “a number of police officers had run my photo through the Clearview app. They soon received phone calls from company representatives asking if they were talking to the media — a sign that Clearview has the ability and, in this case, the appetite to monitor whom law enforcement is searching for.”

We just bought a new TV—our first since ... 2008? The previous one, a Sony, we got just before smart TVs became a thing. It was one of the last of the dumb TVs. To access the menu most TVs now have (Netflix, Amazon Prime, Hulu, YouTube, etc.) we had to go through our Blu-Ray player. I guess that was getting old. No, that wasn't it. The streaming was touch-and-go. It worked fine for a month and then not. It would get chunky, or blurry, sometimes on Prime, more often on Netflix, most often on HBO (via Prime). That's what was getting old. And it just seemed time. 

So we went from a 40“ Sony to a 65” Samsung. Good god, right? It was so big it wouldn't fit in our car so we had it delivered. Think about that: Our TV is too big for our car. Anyway, it finally arrived yesterday—from Sacramento rather than Sodo Seattle. 

I will say this: They made it easy. The directions for the most part were simple and user-friendly. It was easy to take this behemoth out of the box, to screw on the stand, to set up. The toughest thing, oddly, was removing the back of the remote to put in the batteries. Patricia and I worked on that for like a half hour. This video is what helped us finally solve the problem. Thanks, man.

We were excited. New TV! Great, right? Then we began to watch. 

The first thing we watched was the second episode of the third season of David Simon's “The Deuce.” It included the filming of a few porn scenes, which were fairly explicit, and now beaming in 65“ super-crisp format into our neighbors' windows. Sllightly abashed, we closed the blinds. But that wasn't the real problem. 

The real problem was that while it looked good, it looked ... odd. Cheap. Like a 1980s video. Like a soap opera.

”Ech,“ I said.  

”Maybe it's just this show,“ Patricia said. ”You know, because it's ‘80 porno and all.“ 

”Maybe,“ I said. 

So we tried a Blu-Ray we’ve watched often: ”The Insider.“ Same fucking thing. It was distracting. All that work, all that money, for something that looks this cheap?

This morning, when I googled it, I found out that cheapness is something called ”the soap opera effect." It's motion smoothing. Here's an article on it. Basically the tech has moved beyond what we‘re used to, or what has been (24 frames per second), and so to ensure old software keeps up with the new hardware they’ve added this feature. For them, it's a feature. That's why the default is auto rather than off. The nice thing is you can turn it off. Which I did. Immediately. Not all new tech is good tech, boys. If tech is progressing to the point where it makes our products look cheap, maybe it shouldn't be the default. 

I'm curious what internal discussions were like at Sony, Samsung, et al., over making motion smoothing the default. Or did they just go along with it because everyone in the industry was going along with it?

Yes, it's a first-world problem. And yes, at least we can turn it off. For now. But I fear the next iteration. It's Fear #1,682 on the list.

**

ADDENDUM: I just spoke with a colleague, Ross, and he's glad I'm on his side against motion smoothing. As are, he told me, most directors, who can't stand what TV/tech companies are doing to their art form. At the same time, he let me know this issue has been around for six years. So, yes, a bit late to the battle, but ready for the fight. Because god. Ech. 

Longtime readers may notice there is no more comments field on EL.com. Been thinking about removing this for a while, since it was a bit clunky-looking and most people know how to contact me anyway. If you don‘t, check out the bio page or the Twitter feed.  

The deathknell came from a spammer, stephane3constant, who, on Jan. 11, placed 14 comments on 14 posts that were all basically ads. Each of these had to be removed individually, which is a pain, particularly when you add in remembering exactly how to do it. That always takes me a while. So I finally said, “Enough. Tim, let’s just remove it.” Now gone. 

Have to admit: I feel sorry for anyone who felt placing spam on my site would help them in any way.