Weekly Geekly Rundown for September 8, 2023

From Measurement Systems to Demon Nuns

Barley and Lasers: An Aside on Imperial vs. Metric and Why I Love Both

This week my opening miscellanea section is about how I like both the Metric and Imperial measurement systems and how I think everyone should learn and use both. Let’s just say that when you have a wife who teaches middle school math, and when you try to reinforce statistical learning in your political science classes, when you find a way to make decimals (metric system) and fractions (imperial system) easier to visualize and understand it’s something you want to leverage. Learning both these systems does exactly that and learning to convert from one to the other provides so many additional benefits. Besides…both systems are arbitrary, because any system of measurement starts with an arbitrary starting point.

I almost decided against it though, because I couldn’t find the right video discussing the two systems. There were plenty of videos highlighting the connection between the imperial system and grains of barley, which is a fun road to travel, but none that talked about how based on the stickiness of institutions it was still beneficial to know it. After all, none of those medieval buildings that are still in use throughout Europe were build using the metric system, so you’re having to covert anyway. Additionally, too few mentioned that though the metric system was supposed to be based on 1/40,000,000 of the circumference of the Earth (actually 1/10,000,000 of 1/4 the circumference but who’s picking nits?). The exact intended size? “One ten millionth part of the meridian quarter from the north pole to the equator.”

I’m not saying that’s not useful, but I am saying that’s an arbitrary place to start. Oh, and they got the distance wrong and in reaction to that we’ve kept the measure but have been looking for some unchanging basis to use as the foundation of the meter. For a while, this was “length equal to 1,650,763.73 wavelengths in vacuum of the radiation corresponding to the transition between the levels 2p¹⁰ and 5d⁵ of the krypton-86 atom.” You know, because using 1,650,763.73 wavelengths of krypton radiation in a vacuum is way better than barley. That standard didn’t remain long and now a meter is “length of the path traveled by light in a vacuum in 1/299,792,458 of a second” because that adheres nicely to decimals…right?

That’s a lot of work to find something that matches the length of a measurement bar that was wrong in the first place. It’s a huge case of finding a post hoc standard in order to maintain the use of a decimal based system. Why a decimal based system? Because it’s easier? Okay. That’s true, but so what? Decimals are easier than fractions, but fractions are very useful. You cannot accurately divide by 3 in a decimal system. You can “almost” divide by three using decimals, but if you shift to fractions you are 100% accurate. Fractions have their utility too and learning them can be a challenge.

Since I like computers, science, and math I appreciate how scientific notation (a fancy use of decimals) allows for floating numbers in computers and has amazing utility, I’m glad we use metric in computer stuff. However, given how often we use fractions in real life (like you know cutting a pie into thirds etc.), I think the imperial system has value too and I’m sure we could find a particular barley corn that is exactly 1/3 of the inch on the “official foot” stick and that would be no less arbitrary than using the speed of light. Given how non-decimal, and in fact fraction based, the current light measure is we could totally do something like that for the inch. Oh, no! We might have to divide by 12? Now you sound like an anti-THACO gamer. Complaining about simple arithmetical functions is just a way of infantilizing the populous. I’m doing the opposite. I’m asking them not only to be able to divide by 12, but to be able to take 9/5 of a number and add 32 to it. In case you are wondering, that’s converting Celsius to Fahrenheit. Interesting thing about Fahrenheit, while it happens to be the name of the person who created the scale a translation of the word might be something like “driving-ness” or “movement-ness” which is exactly what it describes, the movement of molecules as temperature changes and Celsius is just derived from the Latin “Celsus” or mound.

So the TL;DR of this whole bizarre screed is that I like using both because learning to convert between them provides an interesting way to make mathematical concepts make sense to students. Besides, since a lot of the world was built before metric, scientists, architects, and engineers have to do a lot of converting anyway. Why leave all that conversion fun to the “professionals?” Let’s make conversion democratic! It also provides an interesting discussion, or at least one I enjoyed and I did so without using the ad hominem attacks of associating metric with Robespierre or Napoleon (both of whom were big advocates). You, on the other hand, might have skipped onward and who can blame you?

Weekly Luke Y Thompson and Courtney Howard Film Article Cavalcade

The Nun 2 (Luke Y. Thompson at A.V. Club)

I’m a sucker for the Conjuring-verse. The combination of seventies psychic warrior stories with misunderstood Catholicism is hard for me to resist. Never mind the the fact that the film series inspired a court case worthy of its own movie. Even though the films are often uneven, they do tend to be entertaining and never once have they given me a Stigmata-esque “How is your faith now?” moment. For the record, if I saw a possessed person floating in the air asking me this question while surrounded by fire, my answer would be “well…it’s not faith anymore, it’s knowledge, so pretty good.” The Conjuring series tends to be better than that, but as I said it also tends to be a little uneven. Luke touches on that a bit in his review of The Nun 2, which he argues doesn’t know if it is an art-film or a slasher film. I think this is an issue with the franchise itself and I agree with Luke’s assessment of what it is (read his article to find out). I will say though, that this confusion is also a part of what I like about the franchise, so I’m torn.

I am Groot Season 2 (Luke Y. Thompson at SuperHeroHype)

Luke gives an unreserved positive review to I am Groot’s second season and given my overall fandom of the character and the show, I’m glad to read it. I do have one little comment to make though. Luke’s a long time fan of Wrestling, so I wasn’t surprised to see him obliquely (or not so obliquely) mention the underlying cause of the beef between Dwayne Johnson and Vin Diesel. Luke references it by writing, “As the star of the Fast and Furious franchise, he’s lost sight of the skills that brought him to the dance, relying on brawn and an extremely protected image to ensure he appears to be the toughest man onscreen at all times” (emphasis mine).

I think that’s how Dwayne Johnson views the fact that Vin Diesel has worked hard to ensure that Dom never gets “beat up” in the movies, and I’m sure fans of The Rock see it that way too. I can understand it. Johnson comes from the world of Wrestling where in order to succeed you have to not only be charismatic and a good (or at least very entertaining) actor, you also have to be tough as fuck. I mean, have you read the list of Mick Foley’s injuries? Mick Foley was never the “buff badass” of Wrestling, but he is one fucking tough human being. Oh, and everyone who succeeds in that business is a worker. They put in the grind.

Vin Diesel’s a worker too, he’s been grinding away making projects big and small, since he made his short film Multi-Facial. I first saw the film as an undergrad, just before my wife applied to USC’s film school, and I was really impressed. I was much more impressed by it than Sofia Coppola’s Lick the Star, which played as a very typical student film that channeled Heathers and other edgy teen films. I like Coppola in general, and no one really makes a great student film (except for Jon Chu who somehow manages to make a great musical as a student).

We all know that Johnson and Diesel have had a feud and that this is the result of what Johnson has called a disagreement in philosophies, as he’s decided a consistent paycheck in a major franchise is more important that a beef. That disagreement seems to in part stem from the fact that Johnson’s character Hobbs wasn’t allowed to beat up Dom and that we all know that Johnson is way tougher than “actor tough” Diesel. As true as this is, it also completely misses the point. No one in “The Family” wins a fight against Dom, and Dom doesn’t win any fights against anyone in “The Family.” Why? Because they are a Family.

The movie franchise’s winning formula is that it is a family story. And you know who wins a fight in a family? No one. Because when you do win a family fight, you lose too because the family is no longer a family. Imagine for a minute that Hobbs trashes Dom. He pounds him to the ground and leaves him bloody and imprisoned, or whatever. Then imagine him trying to connect with the family. He couldn’t and once he later discovers, because the focus of the series is on family, that he is a part of that extended family it would destroy his character emotionally. That’s not what the franchise is about. Johnson doesn’t get that and I think he’s right that it’s due to a philosophy, even if he was just saying that, he comes from a world were real toughness matters and where Heels can turn Face at any moment. Old slights are forgotten because you actually love everyone you work with and the conflict is Kayfabe (except when it really isn’t, but that’s rare). Wrestling fans can accept this because Wrestling is Greek Tragedy. The Fast and Furious movies aren’t tragedy, they are about coming together so Dom can never lose to Family even if he would lose to reality.

My Big Fat Greek Wedding 3 (Courtney Howard for Variety)

You can feel the sense of loss and sadness Courtney Howard feels in her review of My Big Fat Greek Wedding 3. The first film is one of the great romantic comedies from the end of the last apex era of the genre. Fans of the romantic comedy, like me, will see high points again, but we are in a down cycle for the genre. There are still good entries, but we have yet to find the new Nora Ephron. By creating a sequel that is a shadow of the original, Nia Vardalos simultaneously reminds viewers of the magic she is capable of creating while giving them something new that doesn’t quite live up to it.

I was reading social media, as one does, the other day and a critic posted that they missed the days when Hollywood was willing to recast stars in new romantic comedies rather than cast them in franchises. The person got some pushback, The Thin Man series was a big counter example, but the point was a solid one in general. Cary Grant made both Notorious and Indiscreet with Ingrid Bergman, but they are very different films. Grant starred opposite Katherine Hepburn in both Philadelphia Story and Bringing Up Baby. More recently Meg Ryan and Tom Hanks starred opposite one another in both Sleepless in Seattle and You’ve Got Mail. These last four films are all romantic comedies. Nia Vardalos may have done better by her audiences to create new romantic comedies where she starred opposite John Corbett. They have a great chemistry and I really like Vardalos as a romantic comedy lead. Sadly, she’s trying to recapture magic rather than create new magic and that’s very hard to do. According to Courtney’s review, she failed to do that here and that makes me sad.

Roleplaying Game Recommendation

This week’s role playing game recommendation is a recommendation I long hoped to be able to make, but which I doubted I would ever be able to do. Back in the early days of the Savage Worlds role playing game, there were two designers who produced a tremendous amount of support material for the game who had similar pop culture sentiments to my own. These were Paul “Wiggy” Wade-Williams and Gareth-Michael Skarka. Wiggy’s ability to rework Beowulf into a glorious introductory adventure called Against the Orcs showed that he and I were on the same wavelength.

Against The Orcs

7.07MB ∙ PDF file

Download

Download

With Gareth-Michael Skarka, it was his Pirate, Pulp, and Mars products on Drive Thru RPG that really caught my eye. When I saw, in 2011, that Gareth-Michael Skarka was creating a role playing game called Far West that combined the Old West and Wuxia films, I knew I had to back it. I’m a big fan of Jet Li’s Once Upon a Time in China and America, though it is flawed, and was looking forward to seeing what Skarka might be able to product. When it comes to Kickstarters, I don’t view them as preorders and find the mentality that they are a bit frustrating. Yes, large corporations and bigger designers have helped to feed this mentality, but from my point of view a Kickstarter is an effort to crowd fund something you’d like to make. To “kickstart” it, if you will. With this in mind, I’ve always thought of my backing of projects as a form of patronage. I’m supporting artists I like to attempt to make more that I’d like. I expect a good faith effort, but I know creativity is hard and it is the artist not the item I’m supporting.

Needless to say, Skarka missed his first deadlines. He’d launched a very ambitious project that was to include music, an anthology of fiction, and the game. It was daunting and he got a little over his head, and a bunch of stuff happened in his private life to increase delay. All of that is understandable to me, but for some that meant Skarka was a fraud. One YouTuber in particular decided to make it his business to do regular updates on haw Skarka was a grifter and no-goodnik. Add to this the hate from $1 backers on Kickstarter and Skarka had the addition of more negative fuel for his struggles. All of this contributed to a delay in the project.

But through it all Skarka kept crawling along. He kept working inch by inch to finish the project. I can only imagine how hard it would be to work on something that your mind associated with toxic attacks and difficult times. Yet that’s what Skarka did. Over the process, he changed the game system that he would use as the foundation and decided to make the game using the Open Source d6 system, the same system West End Games used to fuel their classic Star Wars RPG. Today, that game was released on pdf. It looks fantastic. I have yet to give it a full read through, so take the recommendation with that caveat, but I know the designer’s past work and I know the game engine so I’m confident that this is worth recommending.

Check out FAR WEST. It’s a mashup of Westerns and Kung Fu and it’s a completely independent game.

Music Recommendation

I recently shared Politico’s “Songs that Stir the Candidates’ Souls” list with my students. I’m teaching a class on polarization and it’s nice to be able to make cross-cutting non-political connections in the study of politics. We had fun chatting about the list and making fun of Vivek’s rapping skills. Politico provided Spotify playlists for everyone who answered, so check out the article. As for me? I’m going to recommend 14 or Fight from the Wild in the Streets soundtrack. If I ever get to run a class on politics in film, Wild in the Streets will definitely be on the list. It’s a wonderful combination of fear at generational replacement and genuine social criticism. The cast is bonkers and the movie is a ton of fun. No, I don’t think we should expand the vote to 14 year-olds, but I am an advocate for high levels of voter mobilization. I’m not a fan of elitist critiques of the public and love to highlight that even Schumpeter understood the wisdom of the person who bought groceries when it came to their ability to analyze inflation in comparison to the “experts.”

Classic Film Recommendation

Whew! I watched a number of excellent movies this week and it’s been tough to choose between them. That’s right, I took a little break from playing Baldur’s Gate 3 to make sure I got to watch some classic movies. When you subscribe to The Criterion Channel, you have to justify it somehow and that means watching movies. As I said, I watched a lot of great ones, but I also watched on that I found flawed yet magical and since that seems to match my feelings about a lot of things this week ranging from the Imperial measurement system to Once Upon a Time in China and America, I’m going to go with this one.

I don’t know if there is a figure who has had more movies made about them, especially in the Western genre, than Wyatt Earp. From John Ford’s classic My Darling Clementine and John Sturges’ Hour of the Gun to George P. Cosmatos and Kevin Jarre’s Tombstone and Lawrence Kasdan’s Wyatt Earp, the man has been the subject of numerous masterpieces of the Western genre. In fact, those four excellent films merely scratch the surface. Ever since Stuart N. Lake wrote the “fictional biography” of Wyatt Earp, the man has captured the imagination of audiences and that fascination has lasted generations. We may be seeing an example of how the West “prints the legend” to paraphrase Ford’s The Man Who Shot Liberty Valence, but what a wonderful example it is.

In this week’s film, Allan Dwan’s 1939 film Frontier Marshal, Western legend Randolph Scott stars as Wyatt Earp and Cesar Romero stars as Doc Halliday. Yes, you read that right Halliday. The studio didn’t want to get sued, America has always been litigious, so they changed the name just slightly and changed the character significantly. There are two main conflicts in the film. The conflict between Earp, Clanton, and Curly Bill is the historic conflict, but the love triangle surround Doc and two women (one representing the Frontier and the other Civilization) is the more interesting conflict and the one that ends up driving most of the violence in the film.

Like many Randolph Scott Westerns, Frontier Marshal is filmed in Lone Pine, CA in the shadow of Mount Whitney. It’s one of the most beautiful location in the Eastern Sierra Nevada Mountains. The combination of piles of volcanic debris, large granite boulders, and the looming crags gives a hard edge to the films. That Lone Pine is also close in proximity to Mammoth Lakes, a place of Alpine beauty, means that the location can provide tremendous shifts in appearance from stark to lush depending on the film. In the case of Frontier Marshal, we get all of the jagged starkness and none of the lush beauty and it fits the material perfectly.

Cesar Romero’s Doc is a complex and interesting character, and is often the case in Earp films, he steals the show but not in the way you might imagine. Romero’s performance here is subtle and well crafted. Like his performance in The Thin Man, Romero is down to Earth here. Okay, his cough is less than convincing, but his portrayal of the internal conflict of a doomed man who doesn’t want the rot that is killing him physically or mentally to corrupt the good that he left behind in Civilization is really complex and beautiful.

Scott’s performance as Earp is the most bizarre performance of the character I’ve ever seen. It’s a very good performance, but it’s bizarre. Stuart Lake’s depiction, the real historical Earp, and most films show Earp as a complex character of great darkness. He may be fighting against a bigger evil at the moment, but he’s not a “good guy.” My favorite portrayal of Earp is in Emma Bull’s excellent novel Territory and that Earp is one ruthless S.O.B. He’s in the right, but he’s downright horrifying. Scott’s Earp is a really nice guy. He’s easy going and disarming. He solves problems with the minimum of force necessary. He’s more like Raylan Givens than Wyatt Earp and that’s the perfect comparison, because have no doubt that when push comes to shove this nice guy will kill you just as dead.

Scott is perfect for this combination of rube and ruthless. From the Ranown Westerns to Ride the High Country, Scott has shown that he can bring a real haunting anger to his characters. People often forget that he played opposite Cary Grant in My Favorite Wife as a completely charming character who was disarmingly nice. Gorgeous, fit, charismatic, but nice. He brings that niceness here and adds a bit of Southern charm.

My only critique of the film is that Dwan is too reliant on the use of sets and rear projection on the close up shots. He sets up some magnificent establishment shots, such as the one above, but when the action zooms into the principals the rear projection only serves to show the weaknesses in that technique of backdrop. Black and white films normally minimize this, but Mount Whitney looks so good in black and white that it doesn’t in this case. The sound design is excellent and the transfer currently streaming on Criterion Channel is gorgeous.

The film is such a classic that John Ford remade it as My Darling Clementine, even borrowing some shots directly from the film. If my eyes didn’t deceive me, some of the set design informed Tombstone as well (I’m thinking of the saloon performance here). As I wrote, the film is a little uneven in its cinematography and a bit jarring in the shift in characterization of Earp from expectations, but this is one to see.