Find a way to avoid the distractions, at least for a little while (H/T Presentation Zen).
John Cleese on Creativity
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Category Archives: Culture
A Film Unfinished
The film’s website is here.
Answering the Obesity Paradox
On one hand, drinking even diet soft drinks causes higher risk of heart disease?:
A new US study has found that drinking more than one soft drink a day, whether regular or diet, may be linked to an increased risk of developing heart disease, via an increase in metabolic syndrome, a group of characteristics like excess girth, high blood pressure, and other factors that increase the chances of getting diabetes and cardiovascular problems.
But on the other hand, even though overweight people are at higher risk of heart attacks, patients with heart failure have lower mortality rates if they are obese:
[T]he “obesity paradox” among patients with heart failure. The paradox refers to the repeated finding that while overweight people are more prone to heart failure, patients with heart failure have lower mortality rates if they are obese. The reason for this paradox is far from clear, though Dr. Lavie suggested that one explanation could be that once people become ill, having more bodily “reserve” could be to their advantage.
My sense is that the obesity paradox is more the result of overweight people having more muscle mass. It’s not the excess fat that helps them recover from heart failure. It’s the muscle mass and strength.
As Art DeVany has been saying for years: “Muscle is medicine. Strength carries us effortlessly through life.” As we age, our workout routines should be tailored toward maintaining or increasing strength.
McMurtry’s Hollywood
One of the wonderful things about owning a Kindle is that it is easy to download and read a book that you might have put off for awhile until the stack of books on the nightstand receded a bit.
One such book is Larry McMurtry‘s latest, Hollywood: A Third Memoir (Simon & Schuster 2010). McMurtry has been writing screenplays for Hollywood now for the better part of 50 years, so he has a wealth of anecdotes to pass along about the movie industry.
And somewhat surprisingly, McMurtry passes along keen insight into the business of how movies are conceived, made and sometimes not made.
For example, after the success of the 1971 film Last Picture Show, which was based on McMurtry’s novel of the same name, McMurtry observed the following about the Academy Award-winning stars of that movie, Cloris Leachman and Ben Johnson:
Ironically, but not surprisingly, when Ben Johnson and Cloris Leachman won Oscars for their performances, they decided that, by God, they were stars, and acted like stars from then on.
The first thing they did, as stars in their own heads, was price themselves out of the market, which, Oscars or not, assessed them rather more modestly than they assessed themselves.
Refreshingly, despite his obvious affection for Tinseltown, McMurtry candidly admits that he was drawn to it by the money. As he observes:
Money trumped talent, and, in the movie business, that is usually the case.
He even learned how to be a cost-effective screenwriter:
[T]he fact that I came from a generation of cattlemen gave me a slight edge – I learned not to have scenes in my Westerns that would be prohibitively expensive.
One way to achieve that was to reduce the number of animals to the lowest possible figure. Animals are well protected on movie sets, and are very expensive to use. I think they used three sets of the famous pigs in Lonesome Dove, pigs who in the narrative walk all the way from Texas to Montana only to get eaten.
Finally, on the age-old issue of whether a movie is art or a profit center:
[B]ut any thinking based on the conviction that one movie is art and another not is purely speculative. Only time will answer that question.
If you enjoy good writing, insightful observations and Hollywood, then pick up Hollywood: A Third Memoir. You will not be disappointed.
The Commerce Clause — A conduit for state power
Inside Job
Hospitalist v. Cardiologist
The primary care doctors are having a nice chuckle over this one.
Riding a solid rocket booster
The camera that shot this video is mounted on one of the solid rocket boosters for the Space Shuttle. The launch clock is in the upper left corner. The first couple of minutes is uneventful, but the rest of the seven minute video certainly is not. Enjoy!
A misfired missile shot at the Rocket
So, the seemingly inevitable indictment of Roger Clemens finally was issued yesterday.
Perjury is serious business and it remains to be seen how well Clemens will deal with the charges. Clemen’s legal strategy so far has certainly been at least questionable, if not downright bizarre.
But for all of Clemens’ unattractiveness, it’s difficult not to get the sense already that this is yet another colossal misuse use of prosecutorial resources (Bill Anderson agrees). In the glare of the spotlight of this high-profile prosecution, the more troubling issues involving the use of performance-enhancing drugs such as steroids are overlooked.
The mainstream media and much of the public will castigate Clemens — who is an easy target — just as they filleted Barry Bonds and Alex Rodriguez.
The dynamic is the same one that we saw in regard to the downfalls of both Tiger Woods and Ken Lay. We try in any way to avoid confronting our innate vulnerability, so we use myths to distract us. We rationalize that a wealthy athlete such as Clemens did bad things that we would never do if placed in the same position (yeah, right). As a result, Clemens supposedly deserves our scorn and ridicule. That a scapegoat such as Clemens comes across as arrogant and irresponsible makes the lynch mob even more bloodthirsty as it attempts to purge collectively that which is too shameful for us to confront individually.
Of course, much of that same mainstream media and public contribute to the pathologically competitive Major League Baseball culture. The MSM regularly caters to the public’s desire to idolize players who risk career-threatening disability by taking painkilling drugs so that they can play through injuries.
But players who used PED’s in an effort to strengthen their bodies to avoid or minimize the inevitable injuries of the physically-brutal MLB season are widely viewed as pariahs.
How does that make any sense?
Meanwhile, the fact that MLB players have been using PED’s for at least the past two generations to enhance their performance is largely ignored the mind-numbingly superficial analysis of the PED issue that is being trotted out by most media outlets. Sure, Barry Bonds hit quite a few home runs during a time in which he was apparently using PED’s. But should Pete Rose be denied the MLB record for breaking Ty Cobb’s total base hits record because he used performance-enhancing amphetamines throughout his MLB career?
These witch hunts, investigations, criminal indictments, morality plays and public shaming episodes are not advancing a dispassionate and reasoned debate regarding the complex issues that are at the heart of the use of PED’s in baseball and other sports. On a very basic level, it is not even clear that the controlled use of PED’s to enhance athletic performance is as dangerous to health as many of the sports in which the users compete.
Wouldn’t a public discussion on how to construct a reasonable regulatory system for the safe and healthy use of PED’s be a more productive use of resources than criminalizing Roger Clemens?
Here are links to a number of related HCT posts over the years on the issues relating to performance-enhancing drugs in professional sports
- A former drug-tester advocates a different approach to regulating PED’s;
- When you break the law in pursuing the devil, what happens when the devil turns on you?
- Art DeVany challenges conventional wisdom regarding the impact of PED’s n MLB and is interviewed by Russ Roberts here;
- Is Barry Bonds this era’s Jack Johnson?
- MLB’s Mitchell Report on PED’s was a real hatchet job; and
- Let’s have a more productive discussion about PED’s in sports.
Sidewalk Socrates
In several respects, my mentor and dear friend Ross Lence was similar to legendary Columbia philosophy professor Sidney Morgenbesser — a consummate teacher and witty thinker who didn’t care much for academia’s preoccupation with publishing.
So, I enjoyed reading this James Ryerson/NY Times Magazine profile (H/T Al Roberts) of Morgenbesser that reminded me of a funny philosophy story involving Morgenbesser that Professor Lence had passed along to me with relish many years ago:
In the academic world, custom dictates that you may be considered a legend if there is more than one well-known anecdote about you.
Morgenbesser, with his Borscht Belt humor and preternaturally agile mind, was the subject of dozens. In the absence of a written record of his wisdom, this was how people related to him: by knowing the stories and wanting to know more.
The most widely circulated tale — in many renditions it is even presented as a joke, not the true story that it is — was his encounter with the Oxford philosopher J. L. Austin.
During a talk on the philosophy of language at Columbia in the 50’s, Austin noted that while a double negative amounts to a positive, never does a double positive amount to a negative.
From the audience, a familiar nasal voice muttered a dismissive, “Yeah, yeah.”