Technology posts

It's been tough quitting Twitter. Several times a day, I have to quell the itch to put aside what I'm doing, particularly if it's difficult or boring or both, to see what's going on elsewhere, anywhere. To see what's going down. That's what Twitter did for me. It temporarily sated that insatiable emptiness—the thing that keeps saying “Feed me, feed me,” all of our inner Audrey IIs. Last week I described this to my older brother and he said it was classic addict behavior. Yep.

So it's been a little tough. But I feel better about quitting Twitter learning Jelani Cobb has done the same. He cites many of the same reasons I laid out: How it was fun for a while watching Elon Musk screw over his $44 billion investment, as he made one boneheaded decision after another; but reinstating Trump was just beyond the pale.

I like this line:

The singular virtue of the fiasco over which Musk has presided is the possibility that the outcome will sever, at least temporarily, the American conflation of wealth with intellect.

I've thought about that, too, and certainly hoped it might nudge us in that directon. At the same time, our capacity to buy into the strong man/rich man bullshit seems neverending. Gabbo? He'll tell us what to do.

I left Twitter last night. I deactivated my account. I'll have to find something else to fill my fidgety soul.

I was enjoying it, how much Elon Musk was screwing over the site he paid $44 billion for, our daily reminder of what an idiot this supposed genius is; but when he put out a poll about reinstating Donald Trump, and then took the results of that poll as gospel, tweeting pompously, “Vox Populi, Vox Dei,” or the voice of the people is the voice of God, I don't know, it just wasn't funny anymore. People who chide Musk can get booted off the platform. But the man who attempted to violently overthrow American democracy? Who shattered our shaky democratic norms? Who has made it OK for racism and anti-Semitism to creep back into the town square? And is trying to do it all over again? Sure, let's welcome him back.

That's how Musk came in, as a self-professed “free-speech absolutist” and card. He thought he was forthright and he thought he was funny. This was one of his first tweets as owner of the site:

One assumes he was alluding to “political correctness” and “wokeness.” But to give you an idea of his comedy chops, he also posted a video of himself bringing a sink into Twitter headquarters so he could tweet “Let that sink in.” I think he thought he was the cool teacher coming into the classroom whom all the kids would dig; instead he was pelted with spitballs and erasers from day one. It was glorious to watch.

Every move was wrong. Twitter has long used blue checkmarks to verify famous people are who they say they are. I.e., That's really Stephen King, not someone pretending to be Stephen King. Well, Musk thought this smacked of elitism and he wanted to charge for the service: $20 a month. When the real Stephen King balked, Musk responded, “How about $8?” I have to give Musk credit here. He's not funny, but that's the funniest thing he's ever tweeted. It's inept negotation in real time from the World's Richest Man. My favorite take on the fiasco came from Michael Schur, who said that Musk already had a platform in which the Taylor Swifts and Stephen Kings of the world gave him content for free ... and now he thought he could charge them for giving him content for free.

Worse, nothing was being verified. You just paid $8 for the blue checkmark but you could by anybody pretending to be anybody. Which, of course, is exactly what happened. Someone pretending to be George W. Bush tweeted how he missed killing Iraqis. Someone pretending to be a drug company said insulin was now free. Someone pretending to be Pepsi Co. said Coke was better. 

And tens of thousands pretended to be Elon Musk. 

And what did this self-professed free-speech abolutist do with all this? He reversed course without saying he was reversing course. He said anybody pretending to be anybody would be permanently kicked off his site. He also fired top executives, particularly those who had objected to him taking over the company, fired half the staff, then sent out SOSes for some of them to return since the company could no longer perform certain necessary functions. Meanwhile, according to James Surowiecki (“Why Elon Musk Is Blowing Up Twitter's Business”), he sought to assure big-name advertisers that his platform was a good, safe space in which to advertise.

There was also the less-funny stuff: tweeting conspiracy theories about the attack on Paul Pelosi, the husband of the Speaker of the House; urging people to vote Republican to “balance things out”; blaming advertisers leaving Twitter on left-wing activist groups rather than his own ineptitude.

Then Trump. And that's where I draw the line. This was my last tweet. 

OK, so not exactly Fran Lebowitz. 

I know I'll miss it. I'll miss the real-timeness of it. I'll miss the top-notch lawyers that I followed whose legal opinions were way more straightforward and helpful than the slow, cautious, often confusing reports from the likes of the Times and Post. I'll miss thinking “I should share this” and then immediately sharing it—usually into a void. I'll miss the baseball cards and baseball talk. 

I also know I'll be better for being away from it. When I feel that need—“Is there anything now? Is there anything now? Feed me feed me feed me”—I'll just have to deal.

FURTHER READING:

• Elon Musk Reinstates Trump's Twitter Account, The New York Times
• Trump's Terrifically Stupid Return to Twitter, by Quinta Jurecic, on the Atlantic site
• I Was the Head of Trust and Safety at Twitter. This Is What Could Become of It, The New York Times
• The Fradulent King, Ed Zitron, Substack
• I Studied Trump's Twitter Use for Six Years. Prepare for the Worst., by Brian L. Ott, The New York Times

I met some friends at a Wallingford bar the other night and we wanted food with our drinks. And they served food; they had a kitchen. The problem was ordering it.

The bartender told me I couldn't order through him, that I had to scan the QR code on the bar and do it that way. I looked at the thing. “What if somebody doesn't have a phone?” I asked. “Doesn't have a phone?” he said, then made a face. I told him, “Last week I went to the Chris Rock concert where they made you put your phone into one of those locked bags, so I just didn't bring it. But at the restaurant beforehand, it was a QR code for the menu so I was SOL.” The bartender told me some girl recently claimed she didn't have her phone, but she did; he saw her using it later.

Anyway, that's where we are now. Menus have apparently been around since 1100 A.D. but in less than 15 years the smartphone has all but wiped them away. At the pre-Chris Rock dinner, when I said I had no phone, they didn't bring me a menu; they brought me an iPad.

Still a few bugs in the system, too. QR stands for Quick Response but sometimes it's not quick nor a response. At the Wallingford bar, my friend tried to order for our table via the QR code but after he inputted all the orders it kept asking for our table. He would respond and it would ask again. He's the calmest person in the world but after 10 minutes he began to curse a blue streak. One of the people who worked there owned up: “Yeah, it's not you. It doesn't work right sometimes.”

In the end, we downed our drinks and walked over to Chutneys Bistro, which still has physical menus, and where I had some of the best Indian food I've had in years.

I had moved into the new modern highrise where Patricia was living. It may or may not have been a senior living facility—that might have come later—but it was totally teched up. Patricia was able to come and go because of a chip they'd placed inside her, while I still had to sign in at security checkpoints and use a keycard at specific locales that she could just breeze past. There were also helpful roomba-like robots gliding around, being helpful, answering questions. 

One night we were returning to her/our place, and there was a key in the door. “Did you leave this in here when you left this afternoon?” I said, annoyed. “I must have,” she said, guiltily. (I know: key, high-tech. Anyway.) The door was unlocked but inside we could hear some voices, and in another room, a spare bedroom, my sister Karen and her husband Eric were setting things up. That's right, they were staying for a week or whatever, and we'd sent them the key. “You know, the key was still in the door,” I said. I was addressing Eric more than Karen, but his reaction was more of a shrug than a mea culpa. I tried to make them understand the import. “Patricia has all her stuff here, you know,” I said. “You can't ... It's just ... It could be dangerous ...” but I was getting nowhere. Blank stares. So I gave up. I thought about going to a neighborhood bar for a drink but remembered I was trying to drink less.

For a high-tech highrise, the place had a lot of byzantine hallways, and I was on the first floor, I guess near the kitchen, and was trying to get up to our room. An elevator door opened and I went inside and one of the roombas followed me in. But it was tiny, and as I turned to punch in our floor I saw there was only one floor you could go to. Like floor 28. I figured it was a service elevator. “Sorry, wrong one,” I said and tried to get off. But the roomba got in my way, and said, “No, this is the right one,” and the doors closed. And the roomba suddenly grew in size and grabbed me and told me all of these things I was going to do. It was in the middle of this list when it realized: “It doesn't have the chip in it.” And that's when I realized I didn't have to do all the stuff it was telling me, I had free will. So I began to punch it and punch it to let me go. It was tough, because it was metal, but I damaged it. Then I tried to figure out how not to go to floor 28. The roomba, damaged, could still be helpful. “Press the down arrow,” it said. 

In the hallways again I realized what was going on. The implants allowed them to take control of the residents, who would then sign over their wealth; and then they'd be killed or commit suicide and more rooms would open up. Did it begin as a way of dealing with a growing, aging population? And then it became this money-making enterprise? I was running through the hallways trying to find Patricia, who had a chip in her and was in danger. And now I was in danger. They knew that I didn't have the chip. And that I knew. 

I like how cinematic this dream is. That clues are mentioned early—me not having a chip—but in a way that made it seem like “Get with it, Erik,” rather than “This could be dangerous.” The most vivid part was the elevator scene, so cramped, and with the floor buttons, or button, around the left corner of the elevator, where it never is in real life, but where I expected it to be in this dream. I also liked how the movie went from horror (the roomba growing) to a kind of Will Smith action-adventure (me running through the hallways trying to find Patricia). Plus the grand lesson: I thought I was going to have to do all the things the roomba was telling me, but I didn't, because I still had free will. 

This was a middle-of-the-night dream—I think I woke up about 2:30, then went back to sleep—but still remembered it later. It didn't fade, as middle-of-the-night dreams often do. Possibly because, in subsequent dreams, I think I was telling people about this one. I think I was dreaming telling people about my dream.

I did a quick search on IMDb the other day and got this:

Where was my guy? Where was my movie? I took personal umbrage.

I'll give them the rap band, particularly since I left off the definite article. It's the titles below I wonder over. How can a search for the 1931 James Cagney classic lead to: 1) a 1996 straight-to-video “Ma Barker” biopic; 2) a Belgian TV show; 3) a Korean movie.

Just crunch the numbers:

Even better is an area of IMDb called “Connections,” where users have tabulated which other movies or TV shows you might've seen a reference to this movie (or TV show). It indicates both cultural cachet and user engagement. The 1931 Cagney movie, for example, has been referenced in 85 other movies, featured in 44, spoofed in 14. The Ma Barker? Zero, zero, and zero. Same with the others. Goose eggs. Because they don't matter.

So is it all about the definite article? Does IMDb do this if you leave off the “The” in other titles? I tried “Godfather” instead of “The Godfather,” and the first result was for the '72 Coppola movie, thank god; and I tried “Exorcist” rather than “The Exorcist” and the first result was for the '73 Friedkin movie, thank god. So sometimes it works. Particularly if your title is the definite article plus one noun.

But if there's more than one word following the definite article, IMDb can't seem to fathom what you're talking about.

This is what you get with “Dark Knight” (which, not for nothing, is No. 3 on the IMDb Top 250 Movies list):

And here's my absolute favorite:

Imagine that's a conversation you're having with an actual person:

You: So the other day Jim and I were talking about that the scene in “Wizard of Oz” when the flying monkeys—
Actual Person: “Wizard of Oz”? You mean the 1985 video game? Or maybe the episode of “30-Second Bunny Theater” from 2004?
You: What?
Actual Person: How about that episode of the 1990s news program “Time & Again” with Jane Pauley?
You: Dude, I'm talking about the movie. With Judy Garland? Scarecrow, Tin Man, Cowardly Lion? “Over the Rainbow”? 
Actual Person: Sorry. Nothing.
You: You don't know “The Wizard of Oz.”
Actual Person: Ohhhhh, “THE Wizard of Oz.” Well, that's completely different then. I gotcha now. Please continue.

It's a conversation with a crazy person. And you'd think that a website as important as IMDb wouldn't want its search results to seem like a conversation with a crazy person.

From IMDb's page on Brad Pitt:

Me: Um ... So what is it with you guys and producers anyway?

IMDb: What do you mean?

Me: Brad Pitt is one of the biggest movie stars on the planet, yet your website, the biggest, most important movie website in the world, says he's best known for producing “Ad Astra” in 2019.

IMDb: Yes.

Me: How do you figure?

IMDb: We don't. It does.

Me: The algorithm.

IMDb: Yes. You see, the “Known For” titles are automatically chosen through a complex weighting system. Some of the factors of this complex weighting system include what the job is—a credit as director will have more weight, for example, than a credit as production assistant—as well as the frequency of the credit in the context of the person's filmography.

Me: But ... Brad Pitt has 84 acting credits and 65 producing credits. He's more frequently an actor.

IMDb: Yes.

Me: And you have producing first.

IMDb: Yes.

Me: So ... [shakes head] ... does that mean a credit as a producer is given more weight than a credit as an actor?

IMDb: That's proprietary information.

Me: Because you also suggest that Tom Hanks is mostly known as a producer (of “Cast Away”) and Steven Spielberg is mostly known as a producer (of “Schindler's List”).

IMDb: Yes.

Me: Tom Hanks. The most popular actor of his generation. And Steven Spielberg. The most successful director in movie history. They're “known for” producing. 

IMDb: Yes. 

Me: How?

IMDb: It says.

Me: Where?

IMDb: On their page.

Me: That's your page.

IMDb: But users create the results.

Me: Via your algorithm!!!!

[Long pause]

[Longer pause]

Me: [Heavy sigh] So let's get at “Ad Astra” then. Why is Brad Pitt's role producing “Ad Astra” at No. 1 rather than some other movie he produced? Like “Moonlight” or “World War Z” or “12 Years a Slave”?

IMDb: Several other factors in our complex weighting system include the popularity of the title, the average user rating, and any awards won by the title.

Me: So how does that explain “Ad Astra”? Among Brad Pitt's credits, on your own website, “Ad Astra” ranks 68th by IMDb user rating, 29th by IMDb number of votes, and 19th by IMDb “popularity.” And it won no Oscars. So how do 68, 29, 19 and zero add up to 1? 

IMDb: We rely on other indicators.

Me: Which are?

IMDb: Proprietary.

[Long pause]

[Longer pause]

Me: I know this is a small thing, given all the problems in the world, but IMDb is such a trove of information about the history of cinema. It's important. You're important. But the stuff you're churning out, this stuff, is less information than misinformation. And right now we have way too much misinformation. Don't you want to try to fix it?

IMDb: That's up to yooooooouuuuuuu.

[And with that, IMDb, the biggest, most important movie website in the world, retreats back into a realm where Brad Pitt, Tom Hanks and Steven Spielberg are best known as producers, Peter Bogdanovich is best known as an actor, and Bo Derek, the original “10,” isn't known for “10” at all.]

“Our social media feeds are full of unbidden and fringe content, thanks to social media's embrace of two key technological developments: personalization, spurred by mass collection of user data through web cookies and Big Data systems, and algorithmic amplification, the use of powerful artificial intelligence to select the content shown to users. ...

”When data scientists and software engineers blend content personalization and algorithmic amplification — as they do to produce Facebook's News Feed, TikTok's For You tab and YouTube's recommendation engine — they create uncontrollable, attention-sucking beasts. ... They perpetuate biases and affect society in ways that are barely understood by their creators, much less users or regulators. ... Social media platforms [also] have a fundamental economic incentive to keep users engaged. This ensures that these feeds will continue promoting the most titillating, inflammatory content.

“The solution is straightforward: Companies that deploy personalized algorithmic amplification should be liable for the content these algorithms promote. This can be done through a narrow change to Section 230, the 1996 law that lets social media companies host user-generated content without fear of lawsuits for libelous speech and illegal content posted by those users.

”As [Facebook whistleblower Frances] Haugen testified, 'If we reformed 230 to make Facebook responsible for the consequences of their intentional ranking decisions, I think they would get rid of engagement-based ranking.'“

-- Roddy Lindsay, ”I Designed Algorithms at Facebook. Here's How to Regulate Them," a guest editorial in The New York Times 

My research on screenwriters Robert Lord and Wilson Mizner for “The Mind Reader” made me want to see more of their work, so I was checking out the 1933 Edward G. Robinson movie “The Little Giant” on Amazon Prime. (Review here.) First I noticed the description had a bit of wit for a change, though it's a little sloppy: “...don't let the door smack your backside on way out.” Then I noticed the three credited actors and thought, “Huh, there was an actor named Ewan McGregor back then?”

No. It's the same Ewan McGregor. Amazon Prime just has him listed in a 1933 Edward G. Robinson movie. Because Amazon.

I noticed this last week, told them about it via Twitter, it still hasn't been fixed. And yes, they, or IMDb (the same parent company), still haven't fixed the “Monster” and “Millionaire” glitches from earlier this year and last year. 

I know there are way worse problems in the world. But to paraphrase Hal Holbrook in “All the President's Men,” I hate inexactitude.

“When I did bump into people from Silicon Valley at Hollywood parties—because, yeah, billionaires want to go to Hollywood parties and meet celebrities—I would try to get them in a corner and say, 'Listen, this is going on, and it's going to lead to the end of democracy.' I'd give them my whole schpiel, and they were ultimately, 'Oh, I thought you were going to be a bit funnier.'

”So at one point I had quite a heated discussion with one of them at an art gallery thing in San Francisco about Holocaust deniers, just asking why they were allowing Holocaust denying, and he said, 'No, we're not, we've sorted all that out.' And I pulled up their website and said 'What about this?' And it was a [link to a] website saying that six million was a lie; it was a Holocaust denial site. And he said, 'No, that just really shows both sides of the argument.' And I said, 'What — what argument??? There's an argument about whether the Holocaust existed?'

“You have this fundamental realization that a lot of these people, they're incredibly smart in a tiny area, but they should not be given the reins of power. I mean, it's so mad that this handful of people has the power of emperors. This period will be looked on as absurd: that government did not intervene earlier; that these people are allowed to profit off of spreading lies that lead to mass death.

”When Mark Zuckerberg says he is a defender of free speech, he is lying. The U.S. Constitution says that Congress—not companies, Congress—shall make no law abridging free speech. So that does not apply to private businesses like Twitter and Facebook. If they want to ban violent rhetoric and harassment, they have every right to do so. And the analogy I made at the ADL [speech in 2019] was that if a neo-Nazi comes goose-stepping into a restaurant and starts threatening customers and says he wants to kill Jews, the resturant owner has every legal right, and actually a moral obligation, to kick that Nazi out. And so do the internet companies. The idea that they were the defenders of free speech is ludicrous. I mean, they make editorial decisions continually. They don't allow nipples but they did allow Nazis.

“It's a lie. It's a lie that they're using to make money.”

-- Sacha Baron Cohen, “Sacha Baron Cohen Has a Message for Mark Zuckerberg,” on The New York Times website. Worth listening to.

REPRO STEPS

1. Go to Lon Chaney's IMDb page
2. Click on The Monster from 1925
3. Near top, there is a blue bar urging you to “Watch on Prime Video”; click on it

RESULTS

• You are taken to Amazon Prime's page for the 1975 movie, “The Monster,” starring Joan Collins

EXPECTED RESULTS

• The Lon Chaney movie

I wrote about this phenomenon last May, when IMDb's page for the 1931 George Arliss movie “The Millionaire” took me to the 2015 Russian TV series “The Millonaire.”

A few months ago, I contacted Amazon's customer service about this, hoping they'd fix it, but it was like customer service most places these days: not very service-oriented. For one thing they kept saying they were sorry “about the trouble you are facing,” when I was just trying to alert them to a bug they have. At one point, the rep wrote “I understand while searching in prime video it shows different movies and you like to correct this bug, Am I right, Erik?” I was like “Sure ... don't you?” 

Of course, neither bug has been fixed. Probably sev 4s. If they still use such designations. If they still fix bugs.

Wait. Oh, shit, it gets worse. That 1975 Joan Collins movie? It's not even called “The Monster” on IMDb. It's called “Sharon's Baby,” or “I Don't Want to Be Born,” or, in the trivia section, “The Devil Within Her,” but never “The Monster.” Prime, meanwhile, has a separate “The Devil Within Her” listing, which at least gets the IMDb rating correct (4.1); Prime's “The Monster” lists the Chaney movie's IMDb rating (6.2). 

Someone should make a movie about a giant tech company that swallows other tech companies, and whose left hand doesn't know what its right hand is doing. They can call it “The Monster.”

When Michael Apted died last week, most headlines referenced two of his acclaimed movies/projects: “Coal Miner's Daughter” from 1980, and the “Up” series, which began in 1964 and continued into 2019. It's what people who care about cinema think of when they think of Apted. It's what I would've thought of.

Meanwhile, over at IMDb, now owned and operated by Amazon, this is what its algorithms say Apted is known for:

“Rome” is a good, truncated HBO series. “The World is Not Enough” is lesser, lesser Bond. Haven't seen the others. 

I remember a time when IMDb felt like it was a place for people who cared about cinema.

Last week, former Bush speechwriter and current senior editor at The Atlantic David Frum tweeted that Congress was approving more conservative judges during this lame-duck session, which was without precedent, and my anger at Mitch McConnell was stoked anew. I dashed off this response, then, whistling a happy tune, 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 believe I had one: It was obviously 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 just thought: Naw, fuck it. Besides, 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