Author: jbenton

It’s great fun looking at the weekend’s box office totals — particularly if you focus on the lower end, not the top.
Take this past weekend. Instead of worrying about King Kong’s financial health, look at the film that finished in last place: something called Ellie Parker, starring the pulchritudinous Australian Naomi Watts. (Who, ironically, also stars in “King Kong.”)
It’s apparently not that great a movie, although Ebert seemed to like it. But it certainly didn’t deserve a weekend take as demeaning as what it received: Its total gross box office was $62.
As in, less money than I have in my wallet right now. As in, what, maybe eight people total saw the movie over an entire weekend? Despite cameos by Keanu Reeves and Chevy Chase? Sad.
Although I must say that a key plot point — a man has sex with Naomi Watts and, at that moment, realizes he is gay because he spent the entire act thinking of Johnny Depp — seems to push the bounds of reality. The act of having sex with Naomi Watts, I would imagine, crosses all lines of sexual proclivity and would be enjoyable by all, would it not?
I mean, I remember this guy in college who was a devout heterosexual, but also a devout David Bowie fan. He was such a fan that, if at some future date David Bowie decided he wanted to have sex with him, he’d be fine with it. “I mean, we’re talking David Bowie!” he said. “Of course I’d have sex with him!” I like to think of Naomi Watts as the gay analog.

Three videos of people doing stupid things with their cars:
Stupid.
Stupider.
Stupidest.

A bunch of Magnolia Electric Co. live shows available for download. They’re in the unwieldy FLAC format, but you can easily convert that down to MP3. (My fellow Mac users can use xACT; Windozers would use something from here, I suppose.)
I’ve been finding myself wildly intrigued by Magnolia Electric Co. lately, even though much of their oeuvre is nothing to write home about. I just keep listening to the apocalyptic Youngian (and hell, Jungian) propulsion of “Farewell Transmission.” It’s like Bob Seger after a little whiskey and a kick to the kidneys. Or maybe a grim, paranoid Lynyrd Skynyrd. There’s a lot of power in there for a deceptively simple song.
You’ll want the MP3 here.
(And, if we want to be technical, “Farewell Transmission” is actually by the band Songs: Ohia, on their last album, which was entitled “Magnolia Electric Co.” After that album, they changed the band’s name to Magnolia Electric Co. If you want to be technical.)

I remember, a few days before my college graduation, running across an article in The New Yorker about genetic variability. I thought it was just about the most fascinating thing I’d ever read. For some reason, I felt the urge to track it down: here it is. The best quote, from a Yale researcher: “I would say, without a doubt, that in almost any single African population — a tribe or however you want to define it-there is more genetic variation than in all the rest of the world put together.”
I think this whole subset of issues — particularly the issue of how self-perception impacts achievement, in sports or academics — is really interesting. And really important. (I wrote a column about the academic end of things last year.)
I always find it a little jarring when Malcolm Gladwell (the author of the piece) talks about being the subject of black stereotypes, though. He’s part West Indian, but when he wrote the piece, he looked like this. He’s grown out his ‘fro since then, but I doubt many folks seeing him on the street as a kid would have pegged him as black. But hey, it’s not my life, and what do I know?

To answer that last trivia question:
The five professional team leagues that have average attendance over 30,000 spectators are the National Football League (U.S.), Major League Baseball (U.S./Canada), the Bundesliga (Germany — soccer), the FA Premier League (U.K. — soccer again), and the Australian Football League (which is, duh, Australian rules football).
At least according to here. I used to love watching Aussie rules football on ESPN when I was a kid. ESPN was better back when it couldn’t afford to show the showcase sports and had to rely on things like badminton and Irish hurling.

Trivia question: There are only five professional sports leagues in the world whose average attendance at a game/match/whatever is over 30,000 spectators. Can you name them?

An opening sentence you don’t get to write every day: “The Soviet dictator Josef Stalin ordered the creation of Planet of the Apes-style warriors by crossing humans with apes, according to recently uncovered secret documents.”
Weirdly, this is the second article I’ve run across in the last week on early-20th-century Soviet mad scientist Ilya Ivanov, who was the USSR’s top man when it came to human-animal crossbreeding. There was also this King Kong-themed piece in the NYT. Interesting, the two pieces look at the same chain of events but ascribe totally different motives — either a desire to stamp out religion or to create ape superwarriors.

Two facts needed to understand this post: 1. My employer lets workers submit questions/complaints about the workplace to the top bosses via the internal web site. 2. A lot of people here are out of shape, so the company sponsors various aerobic, weight-loss, and yoga classes for employees on site.
Anyway, here’s a question one of my stupider coworkers apparently submitted: “I find the yoga room offensive. Despite its secular popularity, it is a form of Buddha worship. If it is to remain, will the company consider a Muslim prayer room or Christian chapel?”
Man, those Buddhists are out to destroy Christmas too! It’s not just the Marxists who run Target!
(Buddhists, Hindus…they’re all the same, I guess.)

How elite colleges kept out the Jews. It’s interesting to see how the techniques developed to exclude a certain minority persist — and are now (some folks could argue, at least) used to keep out a different one, Asian Americans. (Related: A bio of Kingman Brewster, the Yale president largely responsible for ending anti-Jewish and anti-working-class bias in college admissions. A great man. Also, he has a hot granddaughter.)
Video of a man skydiving from the edge of space, 1960.
SNL rap on Narnia. It’s good to see the Lonely Island having an impact on the show.
Dancing around the world.

Poor Nauru. First, the source of their fabulous 20th-century wealth, the Pacific island’s massive phosphate deposits. (Those deposits had supported one of the developing world’s highest per-capita incomes. Nauru only has about 12,000 people, one of the smallest countries in the world.) Then corruption and mismanagement pisses away all the island government’s savings, despite efforts to turn the place into a tax haven for the Russia mafia.
Then, on top of all that, they lose their one plane. “The impoverished Pacific island of Nauru will throw itself at the mercy of the U.S. to try to recover its only passenger jet, which was lost in a court case last week. The loss of the Air Nauru 737 to a U.S. government credit agency has forced the struggling airline to charter planes from other Pacific airlines to prevent the island’s 10,000 residents from being cut off from the outside world.”
Read that link from The Australian for a bizarre tale of espionage, hidden terrorists, and North Korean defectors. Poor Nauru.