Attack of the Hollywood Clichés! is a 2021 Netflix comedy-documentary special hosted by Rob Lowe that roasts cinema’s most overused tropes, the special dedicates a specific segment to mocking how Hollywood lazily establish international locations. In the case of Paris, the special deconstructs the ultimate geographic visual shortcut: always letting the audience know they are in France by showing a shot of the Eiffel Tower, usually accompanied by a character walking around holding a grocery bag with a single, massive baguette sticking awkwardly out of its top. This special was released at the height of covid and was a welcomed diversion from lockdown. Because of this show, when I last spoke with Jane, I asked her for a photo of the Eiffel Tower, and she came through for me. Thank you, Jane!
Last night, our heatwave was broken by a thunderstorm. It wasn’t a violent storm, but it was still spectacular to see, hear and fall asleep to. The heat is gone, but after last night’s rain, the humidity still persists. With this break in the weather, I was able to get out, at least to shop for food. I listened to NPR on my drive to the store and heard an article that introduced the concept of micro dramas, which are ultra-short, vertical format video series with 1-to-3-minute episodes designed for mobile phone binge-watching. This concept is derived from Tik-Tok. Apparently, they are the new-new thing in Hollywood. Though each episode is tiny, a season of about 100 episodes scale in duration to that of a Netflix miniseries. Their viewer cost is an order-of-magnitude greater though. They are marketed much like video games, with opportunities to level up and save money, but fundamentally they are a profit driven vehicle.
Similarly, President Trump in the latest episode of his never-ending serial soap opera this last weekend banned CNN, MSNOW and Politico from the Whitehouse. Trump was upset with these three outlets for their editorial content. Payback is a bitch though. Today, CNN was the designated news agency responsible for hosting all network’s pool reporting. So, there was no network feed today of a photo-op for the new helipad’s ribbon cutting. Unprofessional bloggers tried to fill-in, but lacking the real pro’s skillset, nothing said was heard. How long this solidarity lasts is anyone’s guess, but at least for one day the Whitehouse press corps showed a backbone.
In Michigan there is a certain one-upmanship involved with being up north. People in the northern lower peninsula (LP) look down upon the people of lower LP and people in the upper peninsula (UP) look down upon all the people of the LP. They like to call the LP Troll Land, because like in the fairy tale, they live under a bridge. In this case the Mackinac Bridge. This false sense of superiority is belied by the largest of the Great Lakes—Superior, which in the original French refers not to any moral superiority, but the position of that lake on a map relative of all of the other Great Lakes.
All of this discussion is preamble to an introduction of the new Netflix Canadian comedy series, North of North. This new series debuted last year on CBC, Aboriginal Peoples Television Network (APTN) and Netflix and has been renewed for a second season. Anna Lambe plays Siaja, a young Inuk woman in the small fictional Canadian Arctic community of Ice Cove, on Prince of Wales Island in Nunavut. North of North, while fictional, is heavily inspired by small Inuit communities in the Arctic. I have watched its first two episodes and enjoyed both. This sweet show does not forge new comedy frontiers; its familiar tropes are cast in a new light.
Anne recently read a Facebook post from one of her many, many cousins. In this case the post was from Janet, or rather Dr. Janet. She is not a medical doctor, but rather a PhD. In fact, if she was examining you, you would already be dead. She works as a forensic archeologist for a Defense Department organization called Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency (DPAA). Her job is to recover the remains of U.S. military personnel lost in combat. Based in Hawaii, her job takes her around the world. During the last government shutdown, she found herself trapped on Wake Island and had to “pilot” her own C-130 away.
Janet’s Facebook post announced that DPAA personnel were featured in episodes of the reality TV/documentary show Expedition Unknown. This long running TV show is hosted by Josh Gates, who in addition to narration, provides much of the series’ comic relief. He reminds me of the Netflix movie We Have a Ghost, where a reality TV star, played by Jennifer Coolidge complains, “I have to get out of basic cable, it is so unprofresh.” In these episodes he is first searching for American POWs lost during WW II, in the Pacific. He inconclusively dives to find lost Allied soldiers on the Hofuku Maru, a notorious Japanese Hell-ship. These so-called Hell-ships were floating prison camps used to transport POWs back to Japan.
In the next episode, Josh is allowed to join a DPAA recovery mission. This deep-water dive in Subic Bay, Philippines is investigating another WW II Hell-ship that was sunk during the war by the U.S. carrier Hornet. This episode introduces the salvage vessel U.S. Salvor and fellow forensic archeologist Megan Mumford. By this time though Anne was falling asleep and the neighbors, the Ojibwe and everybody else were launching fireworks. I’ll get back to this later.
Today, the final episode of Widow’s Bay aired. This series has already been picked up for another season, so this episode will hardly be an ending, except as a cliffhanger. So what’s it all about? The show is part horror and part comedy. Set on a fictional New England island that is populated by oddballs and kooks and also home to every horror trope imaginable. This series has been widely hailed as the best show on TV this summer, but what does it mean? I ask this as someone who has watched every episode and also followed along with social media. The season finale occurred in the middle of a nor’easter, as if the horror was not enough. Because of the weather everyone on the island was rounded up and stowed away in a 1950s style bomb/storm shelter. To help keep the restless public under control one of the mayor’s minions was tasked to find games or puzzles to take people’s minds off their situation. What he found instead were 16mm instructional movies that were designed by previous generations to tell their descendants what t do if found in this situation. It wasn’t pretty. What’s worse, how could a community forget that they made these movies in the first place? I dare not say more, for fear of spoiling the show. It was an excellent finale to a superb series and is likely to cleanup come Emmy time.
Dr. Timnit Gebru’s most famous and controversial research paper is entitled On the Dangers of Stochastic Parrots: Can Language Models Be Too Big? Co-authored with Emily M. Bender in 2020. It is widely credited with coining the term “stochastic parrot” to describe modern Artificial Intelligence (AI). A stochastic parrot is a metaphor used to describe Large Language Models, such as ChatGPT or Claude. It suggests that while AI systems are remarkably good at generating fluent, human-like text, they do so purely by predicting word probabilities based on vast amounts of data—meaning they possess no true understanding of what they are actually saying. Gebru was working at Google then and was fired that same year from her position there as an AI ethicist, because she refused to pull her paper. A paper that predicted the problems that have been found with these models. Not a good look for the company whose motto was once don’t be evil.
Anne and I split wood together. Then after she completely finished her new chainmail sweater top, we went out to dinner at the Cozy Inn. This early in the season the place was pretty empty, except for the Piedmonts. Who were there in force. We were too late to join them at their table but got an invite for next week. After dinner, we nerded out with the Scripps Spelling Bee. We rooted for 12-year-old Logan Bailey until he fell with Quincke tube, an acoustic device used to demonstrate the interference of sound waves and calculate the speed of sound. Even throwing in a reference to K-Pop Demon Hunters did not help him. This is our kind of sporting event.
Speaking of Anne and AI, I would like to offer an alternative to artificial intelligence, Anne’s Intelligence. It is all natural, nothing artificial about it. The best thing about it is that it does not require a prompt to activate. It will tell you out-of-the-blue when you are doing something wrong. Like in, “Mark, don’t do that!” or “Polly wants a cracker.” You get the idea.
