You Quite Literally Can't Handle The Truth

Recently, I saw a graphic being passed around Facebook, about peppers. It said that you can tell the gender of sweet peppers by the number of lobes on the bottom. (plants can have genders too; you knew that, right? ) Three lobes: male, four : female. And this also has a slight effect on the taste and texture of the pepper.

This sort of claim lands in the shadow of doubt for me. Weirder things are true, but they usually aren't. So I googled "pepper gender," somewhat alarmed at what I might find.

Actually, I just got a link to the misinformation-quashing site snopes.com. They pointed out that it's not true; peppers don't really have gender. They also pointed out that this is an urban legend that's been around for a while, but it's recently received new life on social media.

So now there are going to be thousands of people around the world choosing their peppers based on incorrect information, possibly taking out their romantic frustrations on their vegetables. "Think you can go a week without calling, Mr. Three-Lobes?" That's hardly a concern, but this is of course just an innocent and less emotionally-charged example of a much bigger problem: misinformation being spread - and believed - all over the Internet.

What's troubling is the disregard for the truth. In the above example, I made an assessment of the believability given the unknown source. But I also took advantage of the fact that the Internet can be used to easily look up facts, rather than passively consume them. I also have greater credence to an authority than to an anonymous source. Snopes.com isn't exactly the word of God, but I'm going to believe them long before someone I don't know, and has shown no credentials beyond a modest ability with Photoshop.

But I seem to be the exception rather than the rule. People are quite willing to believe anything they see on the Internet, a fact symbolized by the Oxford English Dictionary giving its word of the year award to the term, "post-truth."

Post-truth will probably be a term to define our era, so it will be hilarious when future historians look back and see that it's predecessor as word of the year was the crying with laughter emoji. So any future research into how this became the post-truth era will be short and sweet.

So how did we get here? We have the greatest information sharing device ever, and it's led to a total lack of consideration for the truth. Coincidentally, that question was recently posed to Brooke Binkowski, Managing Editor of Snopes.com. She said that it was a result of the low quality of mainstream news. I find that hard to believe. I mean, I'm as critical of them as anyone; throughout the election campaign, I kept fantasizing about the eventual downfall of conventional media, picturing Don Lemon on the streets, holding a hand-written sign reading, "will repeat talking-points for food."

But the fact is, the public is abandoning established news services for even lower quality online sources. I don't think anyone is saying, "my newspaper's reporting is too superficial, I'm going to switch to this web site that says Hillary Clinton had Justice Scalia murdered.

Actually, I first saw the post-truth world coming twenty years ago when the Internet was first going mainstream. I remember seeing a political discussion, in which someone referred to how Franklin Roosevelt created the New Deal, and that triggered the Great Depression.

Of course, many have critiqued and questioned the wisdom and success of the New Deal over the years, but everyone remembers it as a response to the Great Depression. Reversing the causality is a brazen attempt to rewrite history. When called on it, the far-right folks in that old newsgroup hedged a bit, saying, yeah well it made the depression worse, and that's what they really meant.

But the incident opened my eyes to the possibilities of a media world where there are so many voices. What we know to be true is really just the consensus of experts. After all, I wasn't around for the Great Depression; my knowledge of it is based on the words of those that have studied it. It could be that I have been deceived, but I think it's unlikely that so many would be so wrong in such an organized way. But what about when the waters are muddied by many people claiming to be experts? Or what if you're just not that choosy about who's expertise you trust?

Really, I don't think there's any explanation for our entering the post-truth world other than, we can. All this time we've held together the concensus of society only because there are so few microphones. Despite all the rhetoric that The Man controls The Message to his own ends, the fact is that people who get to speak are usually more-or-less deserving of authority. Without that bottleneck on information we'll need to develop a new way of attributing authority.

Words For A Loss

One pet peeve I have with the National Hockey League is the way they record team won/loss records. Or, as they put it, won/loss/overtime-loss records. Winning in overtime gets you the full two points, so they're listed with ordinary wins with no distinction. But overtime losses get you a point, so they're listed in a separate column, after the regulation losses, where they used to record the ties.

The problem is, what constitutes a winning record? In sports life baseball and basketball have only wins and losses, so you just look at those two numbers and see which one is bigger. Or in sports like football and soccer, they have ordinary ties that you can just ignore as neutral, and compare the W and L columns.

But in the NHL, it's not as clear. Say a team has a record of 6-5-3. Do they have a winning record? They have more wins than regulation losses. But they have more total losses than wins. But they have 15 points from 14 games, so they have more than a point a game in a league where they give two points for a win. But that's not really true when they sometimes give out more than two points in a game.

The problem is, it can really warp people's expectations. Last week, I checked the standings, and there were only four teams out of thirty that had losing records, with only five more at even records. And I've heard players brush off bad seasons by saying the team is at .500 when they're really having losing seasons. No, I don't know how you fix it. Or maybe we want it this way. After all, this is the league that once had 16 of 21 teams make the playoffs; if we can't give every team hope to make the playoffs, at least let them mask how bad they really are.

The NeverEnding Story

They're now bringing back Gilmore Girls for a short run on Netflix. Yes, it's been off the air for a decade; this new series is going to take place years later, rather than pick up where the old show left off.  I was a fan of the original show, so this is something I'll probably watch if I ever subscribe to Netflix.  Hopefully that will be before they're ready to do a series with Lorelai and Rory in the Stars Hollow rest home.

Bringing back a show is an interesting concept, continuing a show in a different period in the characters' lives. On the one hand, it sounds like an intriguing premise: you can really explore characters in great depth if you examine how they change in the long run.

And it’s an interesting format that we don’t normally get to see in storytelling media: looking at characters over a long period of time. An epic book (or a long series of books) is the only place we’re likely to see it. Sure, there are movies that try to encompass an entire life, but there usually isn’t enough time to look in depth at the characters in a couple of hours.

But the problem is, we are used to the idea that once a story is over, the characters are free to our imagination. For instance, JK Rowling’s elaborations and extensions to the Harry Potter stories have often been resented by fans. It shouldn’t really matter: she dreamt the whole thing up, so there shouldn’t be anything wrong with telling us more about the world she envisioned when writing. But still, if you’ve imagined that world in a certain way, it feels like interference to be told you’re wrong, even if it’s the author that’s telling you. And even if you aren’t a fan-fiction-writing fanboy, you’ve still probably got some sort of unconscious vision of the story. Imagine that the creators of Cheers suddenly announced that somewhere out there, Sam Malone is having heart bypass surgery right now, that would be strangely disorienting, even if it has no impact on you.

So perhaps there’s something to be said for creating something and leaving it at that. Though I suspect that’s just because we’re accustomed to stories having a finite lifespan. Between reboots, spinoffs, and sporadic streaming programming, we may have to start getting used to open-ended narratives. Perhaps we should start getting used to the idea that characters keep coming back. And hopefully, the lure of unending profitability will urge creators to make deeper characters that have staying power.

Chill 'Em All

It's about time for my annual complaint about ubiquitous Chirstmas music. Once again, I'm trying not to sound too curmugenly. I'm trying to find a reasonable middle ground between people like myself who only enjoy a little Christmas music, and the folks who want their Christmas cheer pounded into their head non-stop, Clockwork Orange style.

First up, while I do appreciate a reprive from Christmas music in stores, playing "What Are You Doing New Years Eve" in November is not an improvement. I'm just thankful there aren't any Valentine's Day songs, or they'd be staring later this week.

I also just heard a re-write of "Mr. Sandman" altered into a Christmas song - "Mr. Santa, bring me some toys." I'm not sure if this is a good thing or not. On the one hand, I've always figured that a way we could improve the Christmas music season would be to write more songs, so we would at least have a greater variety to play over the eight-weeks of Christmas. But rewriting existing songs to become Chirstmas-related? That's an awfully big can of worms to get into.

For a start, you might have already started by trying to think of other songs with "sandman" in the title that could be just as easily changed. And if you're similar in age to me, you immediately thought of Metallica's "Enter Sandman." There's some promise in the corus:

Silent Night
Holy Light
Take my Hand
We're off to Winter Wonderland

Of course, I knew someone would already have come up with lyrics along these lines. And in fact, someone has recorded an actual song. It's not quite the Christmas music diversity I'd hoped for, but at least now rock fans don't have to keep playing Trans-Siberian Orchestra. You occassionally hear their music in stores in the lead-up to Christmas, and it gives the experience an apocalyptic overtone that already-stressed shoppers just don't need. I don't think Merry Metallica will be much better in that respect. I think I'm going to do a search for Enya Christmas albums.

Things The Teenage Me Would Never Have Believed About Life In The Future, #36

In 2016, Martha Stewart and Snoop Dogg will co-host a cooking show. And that won't even be one of the top 100 craziest things to happen that year.

It's The History Eraser Button, You Fool!

As a fan of the Stargate franchise, I was delighted to see that new trilogy of Stargate movies probably won't happen.

If you're confused, here's how it happened: Stargate was a 1995 science fiction movie from director Roland Emmerich, a poor man's Michael Bay. It was built around Kurt Russell and the premise that the Egyptian god Ra was an alien enslaving humans. It didn't have a lot going for it other than that, except for some impressive (for the time) visuals and action set-pieces.

A few years later, someone thought it would be a good premise for a TV spinoff. The idea got handed to some new people, and they came up with a complex backstory for all the cool looking stuff in the movie, added and rewrote characters, and injected a lot of humour.

The result was a show that was far superior to its inspiration in every way except special effects. On the list of TV spinoffs that exceeded their movie inspirations, it's a solid number two behind Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Okay, Westworld has probably pushed it to number three, but you get the picture. It maintained a cult following, and lasted ten seasons, and spun off a further two series.

But in Hollywood's current attitude that absolutely anything with any name recognition must be made and remade as much as possible, Emmerich arranged to restart the movie series. The catch here is that he was going to ignore the TV shows and start over where the original movie left off.

Of course, in today's media landscape, reboots and rewriting are an accepted hazard of fandom. Different franchises have had their own ways of dealing with it:

• Star Trek - we'll start a new timeline, so we can change everything and pretend we're not changing anything. Your beloved characters are safe and sound and unchanged in their own timeline that we're never going to use again.
• Star Wars - we'll drop all the peripheral stuff that only the hard-core fans know about anyway. But the main story from the movies won't change at all. What about the prequels? Well, you know, it's like...look, is that Baba Fett?
• Batman - just accept that each generation the same story gets retold, but darker.
• Doctor Who - People used to think it was silly to have a show that reboots itself every few years, but you're not laughing now, are you?

But in Stargate's case, it seems a little more severe. Rather than change the actors or the tone, this would have rewritten the story, premise, and style. And I know it doesn't really matter; creating a new story with the same name and a superficial resemblance shouldn't take away from my enjoyment of the franchise as it was.

In today's pop-cultural world fandom is part of the experience. It's expected that there's going to be discussion on the Internet, extra stories in other media, and humourous in-jokes with fellow fans for years to come. Really, that's the most troubling thing about reboots and remakes: the idea that your part of the pop-culturesphere is going to be paved over to make way for someone else's experience.

Let's Get It On

Today I had quite the misadventure with my new phone.  That's unfortunate, since it was in fact, my first day with my new phone.  In trying to transfer my service from one phone to the other, I was left with neither phone working.

That's extra unfortunate, because it had seemed like such a modern process up until that point.  I ordered the phone and the plan online, it was delivered quickly, and I went back online to activate it.  Having to go to the store and ask questions seemed quite archaic.

The illusion of efficiency was further punctured when I got to the store and had to go through a series of have-you-tried-this and what-happened-when-you-did-this. To quote Dark Helmet, "Even in the future nothing works!"

And then the final revelation that we still live in backwards times: the phone started working as soon as it rebooted, with nothing else having changed.  Yes, that remains the number-one way of fixing things.  That, and take it apart and put it back together again.  And occasionally, just hit it.

I'm not sure what paradigm I'd expect would be the universal way of repairing things in the future. In Star Trek, it's to wave a tricorder at it while saying something incomprehensible. But who knows, maybe the only thing the tricorder does is turn things off and on again.

So I'm wondering how many other things can be fixed by turning them off and on.  Could the economy work that way?  Maybe that's why they promote Buy Nothing Day. Or we could fix the U.S. by turning it off.  Maybe that's what Trump has intended all along. But the big test is people who survive being clinically dead.  They've actually been turned off and on, so I'm assuming that all their problems disappear.