First Looks category archive

Be sure to check the Meetup page. Changes may be pending; I will be spending tomorrow baking (sweet potato pies and sweet potato biscuits, if you must know) and will not attempt to keep up with them. In the meantime, I’m sticking this to the top of the page.

Now unstuck from the top of the page as the time is past.

Moved to Tuesday so as not to interfere with holiday plans.

When: Tuesday, November 22th, 6 p

Where:
The Jewish Mother
600 Nevan Road (Map)

More here.

A reader writes to “Ask Amy”:

I remembered my grandmother’s advice: If I made a funny face or stuck my tongue out, she told me that if I kept it up, my face would freeze that way — forever.

This was decades before the Internet existed. Now, that we have Facebook, it turns out she was right! How prophetic.

Shaun Mullen’s The Bottom of the Fox, which I reviewed here, is now available for your Kindle.

If you Kindle, Kindle that.

Radio Times takes a look at eye witness testimony. From the website:

Eyewitnesses identify roughly 75,000 suspects a year and some studies have shown that as many as one-third of them may be wrong. DNA evidence has exonerated over two hundred people convicted, in part, on false identification. This has raised serious questions about the trustworthiness of our eyes, memories, and police and court procedures. This month the United States Supreme Court heard a case about the reliability of eyewitness testimony and the New Jersey Supreme Court recently concluded that eyewitnesses are mistaken enough to warrant new rules for judges and jurors to follow when examining evidence from police lineups. Today, we look at eyewitness testimony and what science says about its reliability. Our guests are BRANDON GARRETT, a Professor of Law at the University of Virginia and the author of Convicting the Innocent: Where Criminal Prosecutions Go Wrong and RONALD EISENBERG, the Deputy District Attorney for the Law Division of the Philadelphia District Attorney’s Office.

Follow the link to listen or listen here (MP3).

One of my kids hosted a show here.

WMPH, the student-run radio station at Mount Pleasant High School, is back on the air after a one-year hiatus, sporting new equipment, a new signal tower, a new manager and a new role in the school’s curriculum.

The 42-year-old, 100-watt station has joined the school’s television station and music-recording studio to become part of the Broadcast Engineering and Communications Program.

Naming the ship after a Bush may have had more significant consequences than enshrining Republican idolatry of mediocrity.

It may seem like a trivial inconvenience in the scheme of things, but it’s become routine enough that some sailors aboard the Norfolk-based aircraft carrier George H.W. Bush say it’s affecting their morale, their health and their job performance: Since the ship left for its maiden combat deployment in May, its toilet system has suffered outages so frequently that crew members sometimes can’t find a single working commode.

Charlie Booker takes a look at those “blockbuster” video games:

. . . for one thing, games are inherently wussy. The stereotype of the bespectacled dweeby gamer is an inaccurate cliche, but there’s no denying games are far from a beefy pursuit. Which is why shooty-fighty games go out of their way to disguise that. Every pixel of Modern Warfare 3 oozes machismo. It’s all chunky gunmetal, booming explosions and stubbly men blasting each other’s legs off. Yet consider what genteel skills the game itself requires. To succeed, you need to be adept at aiming a notional cursor and timing a series of button-pushes. It’s about precision and nimble fingers. Just like darning a sock in a hurry. Or creating tapestry against the clock.

In other words, Modern Warfare 3 would be nothing but a gigantic needlework simulation were it not for the storyline, which is the most homoerotic tale ever created in any medium, including Frankie Goes to Hollywood videos. Behind the military manoeuvrings, the human story revolves around people backstabbing, bitching, making catty asides, breaking off friendships and betraying one another. Ignore the gunfire and it’s like a soap opera set in a ballet school.

I’ll stick with Pysol and Tetris clones.

Addendum, the Next Day:

Brain gamed:

Brain scans showed a larger ventral striatum, which is the hub of the brain’s reward system, in regular gamers.

For teenagers, parents, and clinicians to make sense of this finding, we need research monitoring brain structure over time”

Dr Simone Kuhn, one of the researchers from Ghent University in Belgium, said the region is “usually activated when people anticipate positive environmental effects or experience pleasure such as winning money, good food, sex”.

The region has been implicated in drug addiction.

The authors said it “cannot be determined” whether this was a “consequence” of gaming or if naturally larger regions led to a “vulnerability for preoccupation with gaming”.

Gasp (emphasis! added!)!

Penn State University, mired in a child sex-abuse scandal on campus, named a trustee to lead an investigation into the events and faces a possible downgrade of its debt rating by Moody’s Investors Service.

When the only measure is “How much?” there can be no greater penalty.

Football, football, uber alles.

Off to drink liberally.

Drinking Liberally is a support group for liberals, where you can realize you are not alone.

We are still considering new venues.

When: 6 p., Wednesday, August 10.

Where:
The Public House
1112 Colley Avenue (map)

Details here.

The gift that keeps on giving.

Terry Eagleton considers the question at the Guardian:

For the moment at least, the custodians of St Paul’s seem to have backed down. In a mildly comic inversion, the dean has carted himself off while the protestors could stay put until 2012. Even so, the cathedral staff can take comfort from the fact that the demonstrators are camped down peacefully outside their sacred building, whereas their own master was far less well behaved. Rather than squat down with a placard outside the Jerusalem temple, he staged his protest within its walls, and it was a violent rather than peaceful one.

The fracas Jesus created in this holiest of places, driving out the money changers and overturning their tables, was probably enough to get him executed. To strike at the temple was to strike at the heart of Judaism. This itinerant upstart with a country-bumpkin background was issuing a direct challenge to the authority of the high priests. Even some of his comrades would probably have seen this astonishing act of defiance as nothing short of sacrilegious.

Don’t swat that fly. It might be packing heat.

Via Raw Story.

Mr. Feastingonroadkill explains how the “circus” part of “bread and circuses” works.

One day about 30 years ago at the Bucks County Courthouse, a young public defender named Clyde W. Waite dropped in on a robbery trial, slipping quietly into the back row just as the victim was recounting the crime.

Yes, she told the jury, the robber was present.

Could she identify him for the courtroom? the prosecutor asked.

Without hesitation, the woman pointed, but not to the man at the defense table. Her finger was aimed at the rear seats, and a very surprised Clyde Waite.

He and the robber were indeed similar in one respect, if one alone: Both were black.

The story goes on to discuss efforts to reduce the incidence of such errors in eye witness identifications.

Bill Bauman ran the Saturday Night grainy black-and-white horror movie show for years. His standard lead in to the movie was invariably

. . . and now for another horrrrrrrrible movie.

H/T to my brother for the link.

Check out this picture from this Chicago Trib slideshow.

Off to drink liberally.