A Bag of Thoughts

Flash in the Pan

The Flash, DC’s latest attempt at competing with the MCU, is not bad but also not at all good. Every moment with Michael Keaton as Batman rocks, Sasha Calle as Supergirl rolls and it’s fun to play the What If…? game with the return of Michael Shannon as Zod. The problem is Ezra Miller and the stunted sense of humor of most DCU films.

I couldn’t care less that Miller is a complete lunatic and perhaps criminal in his personal life. I do care that his performance was anything but charming. When the title character is so annoying, grating, and trying so hard to be charming, it’s difficult to stomach the entire two plus hours of this thing. Imagine Tony Stark portrayed by Rob Schneider or Steve Rogers played by Andy Dick.

If a Statistic Falls in the Woods…

Jeff Asher, a national expert in criminal justice data, published a piece in the Atlantic revealing that "[m]urder is down about 12 percent year-to-date in more than 90 cities that have released data for 2023, compared with data as of the same date in 2022." Asher described the rapid decrease in the murder rate as "astonishing." In a follow-up piece published in his newsletter, Asher said that, if the trend holds, it will be "the largest decline ever recorded." It would also be the first time ever the murder rate declined by double digits in a single year. (The FBI began keeping statistics in 1961.)

Interesting how this “astonishing” decline is not making the headlines of any of the major news media. I mean, to hear the political class, murder and crime is at an all-time high so do not, under any circumstances, vote for someone soft on crime. Also in that’s just inconvenient news you hear that gun violence is at an all-time high which makes no sense if murders are down 12%.

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Average is Pretty Common

“All day, every day, we are flooded with the truly extraordinary. The best of the best. The worst of the worst. The greatest physical feats. The funniest jokes. The most upsetting news. The scariest threats. Nonstop. Our lives today are filled with information from the extremes of the bell curve of human experience, because in the media business that’s what gets eyeballs, and eyeballs bring dollars. That’s the bottom line. Yet the vast majority of life resides in the humdrum middle. The vast majority of life is unextraordinary, indeed quite average. This flood of extreme information has conditioned us to believe that exceptionalism is the new normal. And because we’re all quite average most of the time, the deluge of exceptional information drives us to feel pretty damn insecure and desperate, because clearly we are somehow not good enough. So more and more we feel the need to compensate through entitlement and addiction. We cope the only way we know how: either through self-aggrandizing or through other-aggrandizing.”

— The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck: A Counterintuitive Approach to Living a Good Life by Mark Manson

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Standing Still Ain’t That Bad

“Be not afraid of growing slowly; be afraid only of standing still.” - Chinese Proverb

As they say in The Shawshank Redemption, "You don't look Irish."

Also "Get busy living, or get busy dying." We're all dying—it's inevitable from minute-one but the idea of getting busy dying sounds like Dabney Coleman in the lesser-known film Short Time doing his level best to get killed in the line of duty. It doesn't seem terribly pragmatic given all you'd really need to do is live in San Francisco or go to a MAGA Rally in a BlackLivesMatter t-shirt.

Getting busy living? That's a totally different program.

Whether your home was destroyed by a natural disaster on either coast, you lost everything in crypto, you got fired for stroking your pud on a Zoom call, or your wife revealed that she had been secretly working as a prostitute for a couple years, starting over—from scratch—is hard. Not as hard as prison or gender detransitioning, but hard enough. The secret is to stop seeing those things preventing you from, you know, living your best life or maybe just any life as unsolvable problems and instead see them as obstacles to overcome.

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Ch-ch-change the Channel

"The boss of the US media company Paramount has said he does not want to remove historic programmes from his new subscription streaming service because they no longer meet current expectations.

"Bob Bakish, Paramount’s CEO, said his company had thousands of shows in its back catalogue. “By definition, you have some things that were made in a different time and reflect different sensibilities,” he said. “I don’t believe in censoring art that was made historically, that’s probably a mistake. It’s all on demand – you don’t have to watch anything you don’t want to.”"

SOURCE

You don't have to watch anything you don't want to.

Who would think that this statement is in someway a surprise or anything less than ludicrously obvious?

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Time to Stockpile

The Writer’s strike in Hollywood ain’t going away so I’m avoiding starting any new streaming series for a while like we all did with toilet paper during the early days of the pandemic.

In the queue but rationed are:

SILO (Apple+)
Black Mirror Season 6 (Netflix)
Star Trek: Strange New Worlds Season 2 (Paramount+)
Smartless: On the Road (Max)
Secret Wars (Disney+)

Also a list of films on Kanopy that I never had the chance to catch.

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Lost at Sea

Sure—the story of the five idiots who went down to the Titanic in a Datsun is fascinating but I can’t help but wonder about the amount of money going into the days of rescue. In Why Are We Doing So Much to Save Rich Morons? I wonder if the search and rescue efforts could be diverted to children taken for sex trafficking or that one sock that you know the dryer ate?

In other thoughts, if anyone wants to hop in my Prius, I can drive into the Arkansas River to look at a submerged 1972 Mercury…

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…and those are all the thoughts in my head this week.