Quick Hitts

In the UK parents who smoke are being banned from seeing their kids in hospitals.  The signs are not “No Smoking,” which is perfectly reasonable in a hospital, but “No Smokers.

We warned about the Third Hand Smoke scam back in January, and this video shows the real life consequences of this hateful nonsense.

Today is Blasphemy Day because, well, just because.  The religious have a plethora of holidays to choose from, so why shouldn’t atheists, apostates and blasphemers have their own day as well?

The Capital Region Atheists & Agnostics meetup group will be celebrating, of course.  Our dinner table will be decorated with butter sculptures of Christopher Hitchens, Richard Dawkins and Eddie Izzard.  The meal will be baby-back ribs, made from real babies.  (Contrary to popular belief, humans do not taste like chicken.  They taste like pork.)  We’ll wash it down with the blood of Christians and Muslims.  (Believers’ blood is available at any good Jewish deli, if you know who to ask.)  Once we’re stuffed (we’re all gluttons, of course) we’ll start the orgy, which will consist of sex with goats and ducks.  (I’ll only have sex with female goats because I’m not gay.  (Not that there’s anything wrong with that)).

Because this was put together with short notice, we may have trouble getting the blood and the babies and the butter sculptures.  We are, however, planning on a debaptism ceremony, conducted by whoever happens to be wearing the best atheist t-shirt at the moment.  It’s a simple procedure: ceremoniously removing the last remnants of any long-evaporated baptismal water with a hair drier.  (Hey, it makes just as much sense as any other religious ceremony.)

One of our members pointed out that Christians who use blow dryers may inadvertently be debaptizing themselves every time they get out of the shower.  Watch out, believers.  Your God sends people to hell for the most trivial reasons and it would be a shame to live a good and virtuous life only to end up next to us for eternity just because you overdid it with a Conair.

Just for fun let’s take a brief break from snarky rants.

Jem Moore is the best hammered dulcimer player in the US, which is about a profitable as you might imagine.  (He makes his living as a pilot.)   If you search his name on You Tube you’ll find lots of people playing his compositions – badly, in many cases – but until last week you wouldn’t find any videos of him playing.

He’s finally rectified that.  Enjoy.

This week we’ve seen some fine examples of media bias in action.

The left wing insists that liberal bias in the mainstream media is a myth, cooked up by those horrible people at Fox.  The right wing insists that Fox is as fair and balanced as talk radio.  Both opinions are idiotic.

Bias, like pornography, can be hard to define, but smartenized people know it when they see it.  It can be the subtle selection of adverbs and adjectives.  It can be the placement of the story in a newspaper.  It can be how often the story is reported.  Or it can be something as obvious as completely ignoring a story that casts your side in a bad light.

The mainstream media has very strong lefty bias which is invisible to lefties.  Fox and talk radio have a strong right wing bias.  Anyone who gets all their information from either the left or the right is going to be ill informed.  Not only will they be getting their news from skewed angles, they’ll completely miss some stories.

We saw two great examples of bias this week.

Both factions covered the Tea Party march on Washington very differently.  Fox celebrated it and gave it wall to wall coverage.   They, along with other right wing news outlets, featured lots of bird’s eye view pictures which showed the size of the crowd.  The official estimate was 70,000 people, but some conservative news organizations put the number as high as 1.2 million.  (Most made corrections later.)

The lefty media used very different tactics.  Virtually every picture  was from a low angle, concentrating on specific sign or two.  I didn’t see any that showed the size of the crowd.

In any crowd of that size there are going to be some tasteless, trashy signs, and that’s what they showed.  About a dozen really sick ones were featured over and over in various media outlets.  And of course, the whining cry of “Racism!” was spewed at every opportunity.

BTW, Lefties, the phrase “teabagging” is not only an indication of your bias and childishness, but it’s such an obvious pun it was an overused cliché within a day of it first being uttered.  I don’t mind juvenile humor (in fact, sometimes I rather enjoy it) but I hate clichés.  If you’d like to get a little more respect, grow up.

I saw several reports that described the crowd as “thousands of people.”  Technically, that’s correct.  But when that phrase is used to describe tens of thousands of people, it’s pretty hard to deny bias.

My local rag, the Times Union, didn’t even put it on the front page.

A better example, though, is the ACORN story.  ACORN is a very lefty advocacy group that receives government funding.  Their long history of voter fraud has been more or less ignored by the mainstream media.

This past week a couple, pretending to be a hooker and her pimp, took hidden cameras to ACORN and asked for advice on buying property to set up a brothel.  The ACORN advisors were eager to help.  They didn’t even flinch when the couple talked about bringing in 13 year old girls from El Salvador to work as hookers, or when asked how to break campaign contribution laws so the pimp could run for office.  Instead they gave them advice on how to cheat the IRS and avoid getting caught by the police.

ACORN insisted it was an anomaly and said they fired the two workers responsible.  The undercover agent’s responded by doing it again, in a different office, and getting the same results.  On their second try the advisor bragged about killing her husband.   They were able to get ACORN advisors in five different offices, all over the country, to provide them with help.

This is a story that has it all – a government funded agency, tax cheats, hookers, pimps and pedophilia.  Did you see the story on ABC, NBC, or CBS?  Nope.  They ignored it completely.  Was it a lead story in the New York Times?  I know, I’m being silly.  (You can find the original videos on biggovernment.com.)

Fox, of course, was on it like a Pit Bull on a Pomeranian.  They played the videos over and over and provided hours of commentary.  Their excessive coverage of the story almost made up for the mainstream media ignoring it.

There was a brief mention of it on NPR, but they closed it with an excuse.  Those poor uneducated women were a product of a nasty environment and so they didn’t know any better.  Boo Hoo.  I’ve known a lot of women who grew up in nasty environments and surprisingly, none of them were eager to help a pimp set up a brothel full of 13 year old prostitutes imported from Central America.

So when each side accuses the other of media bias, they’re both right.  There is no such thing as unbiased media.  It doesn’t exist.  People who get all their news from The New York Times are just as ignorant as people who only watch Fox.  Watching and reading the news presented by both sides, and taking their biases into account, is the only way to be to have any idea of what’s really going on – the only way to be smartenized.

It’s been a busy news weekend.  Kanye West set a new record in his endless series of records for douchbaggery.  Serena Williams had a tantrum and discovered her inner child has a potty mouth.  And the demonstration in DC had the media fighting over who could do a better job of displaying their bias.  The right-wing media estimated a crowd size of approximately a bajillion, while the left-wing media put it closer to twelve.

And lost in all the hoopla was the story that a great man, perhaps the greatest man in all human history, died.

Mass murders and petty thugs become household names while the good guys are ignored.  Norman Borlaug is unknown to the masses, even though he’s saved an estimated billion people from starvation.

He did it through cross breeding grains to increase their yield, calorie content, and resistance to disease and pesticides.  He fought against bureaucracies and stupidity to get his grains to the farmers who needed them, and then to get fair prices for the farmers.  He ignored naysayers and merchants of doom, and worked harder than anyone else to make their predictions look foolish.  He also fought against the political problems that created starvation, fighting to make the greatest amount available via free market principles and practices.

As a direct result of his work countries once full of starving people are now food exporters.  He not only saved a billion lives directly, he saved even more through countries becoming prosperous and avoiding wars over resources.

He died Sunday, at the age of 95, while most of us were discussing trivia that will be forgotten in a month.

I didn’t form my opinions about him on my own.  I adopted them from Penn & Teller a few years ago, when I saw this segment of their show Bullhshit!  (NSFW).  I have to admit that before seeing this I had never heard of him either.

Here’s a short message from Norman:

And here’s an interview with him.

So here’s to you, Norman.  Perhaps future generations will give you the acclaim you deserve.  Until then, Smartenized people the world over will be raising a glass to your memory and celebrating your life and the billion other lives you’ve saved.

Jefferson picked up the intact motorcycle and examined it in the moonlight.  “This is great!  I wonder where that dirtball got a hold of this beauty.  Check this out, Catherine, it’s a 1957 Harley 74 Panhead with a Fat Bob gas tank.  What a great crotch rocket.”

TNT’s show “Leverage” features some great characters and plots so implausible they border on goofy.  I watch it for the characters, but it’s annoying me more and more.  In every recent episode they make obvious mistakes any competent writer should have caught before the script’s second draft.

In one episode they were trying to get into a room protected by a security lock.  They used a thumbprint they’d stolen from someone who had access.  When that didn’t work Alex, the security expert, said something about capacitance checking, and used a Gummy Frog to fool the system.  I have no idea if that would work in the real world, but it worked for them.  But then the system asked for an iris scan.  They left, kidnapped the guy they were impersonating in the silliest way possible, brought him to the lock, got their iris scan and got in.

I’ve worked in secure facilities.  If your access fails the security guys will be there very quickly.  In one case a colleague tried his pass on a server room he wasn’t authorized to access.  He swiped his card once.  Security was there within minutes, and warned him if he tried it again he’d be fired immediately.

The plot of this episode involved a food company who was knowingly selling tainted food.  (A rather dumb premise to begin with.  No large company would do that – it would destroy their business.) The good guys were trying to steal incriminating files at the same time the bad guys were deleting them.  The good guys failed, which is realistic; deleting files takes much less time than finding and downloading them.  But the trick ending was stupid.

Nathan Ford, the head good guy, announced that although they failed to get the incriminating files, they had stolen all the company’s patents, and would release them to the public unless the company came clean.

No! Patents are already public.  Anyone can get all the details of any patent for a small fee.  Food companies don’t patent unique recipes or processes because their competitors would have easy access to them.  The recipes for Coke and KFC, for instance, are protected by keeping them secret.  If Ford had said “I’ve stolen your secret recipes” it would have worked.  For anyone with even the most cursory familiarity with patents, the ending was downright stupid.

I could write another thousand words about the stupid, obvious errors in just the past few episodes, but you get the idea.

Just because you’re writing fiction doesn’t mean you can just make stuff up.  If you don’t get your facts straight you’re going to alienate any readers who spot the error.

Getting It Right

Getting the details right has the opposite effect.  It gives your story credibility among the readers who know the subject and makes it more interesting for those who don’t.

A while back I was reading all the John MacDonald novels I could get my hands on.  In one of them the main character, Travis McGee, visits Utica.  The descriptions of various parts of the city were accurate to the smallest detail.  People who had never been in Utica wouldn’t know that, but I’ve been there and it made the story real.  It not only made that scene more enjoyable, it also made me trust the author.  When he described a place I wasn’t familiar with it rang true.

Even tiny details matter.  In show “Sons of Anarchy” Clay, the leader of the motorcycle gang, smokes cigars.  In the last episode a character hands him a box of cigars and says, “I heard you like Camachos.”  Perfect.  Comanchos are very strong cigars that would appeal to someone like Clay.  If the line had been “I heard you like Macanudos,” it would have been stupid.  Macanudos, America’s best selling brand, are smooth and mild.  A lazy writer who just Googled “popular cigars” could have easily made that mistake and most viewers wouldn’t have noticed it, but it would have ruined the scene for cigar smokers. Instead of being drawn into the intense, dramatic scene they would have been snickering at the mistake.

When I wrote Blood Witness the internet wasn’t available.  I was in a writers group in the online service GEnie.  In one scene two vampires, Catherine and Jefferson, kill three bikers they’d bated into harassing them.  Jefferson was a motorcycle aficionado.  I wasn’t.  I needed a description of a bike that would both excite a collector and be something a gang member would ride.  I asked for help, and the advice resulted in the opening sentence of this article.   If you know motorcycles, it rings true.  If you don’t it still adds to the scene and gives you some insight to Jefferson’s character.

I’m working on my next novel, a detective story.  Some scenes involve gun battles.  I used online references for the first draft, but for the second one I’ll send those scenes to someone who really knows firearms and ask for their input.  On the other hand I won’t need any help describing the cigars one of the characters smokes, or the experience he has in a tobacconist’s lounge.

Getting the facts wrong is easy and lazy.  While most of your readers might not catch the mistake, those who do will be snapped out of the reality you’ve created and will lose respect for your writing ability.  Getting the facts right can take considerably more work, but it makes your fiction sparkle with authenticity.

This video is getting sent all over the place.  It’s already more popular than Sex With Ducks.

This guy isn’t a one hit wonder; he’s done quite a few very funny, well done parodies.

You won’t fully appreciate the next one unless you’ve heard the original.  Not only is Carrie Underwood’s “Jesus Take The Wheel”  filled with every possible cliché, it presents the world’s worst driving advice for getting out of a skid.

Here’s Tim’s improvement:

And one more:

You can find more at his site.