Monthly Archives: May 2012

Exploding Rocks, Atomic Bombs, People Shooting Each Other

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The name of the game is mayhem, today, folks!

Not Getting Away With Murder

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Swimming Platypus (Photographer Peter Scheunis)

Swimming Platypus (Photographer Peter Scheunis)

Nicotine is well-known for being the addictive ingredient in cigarettes, which will kill you, but it’s also a very potent poison on its own, with a long and lethal history.

Wired magazine’s Elemental blog tells the tale of the 1850 high-society murder that prompted an enterprising chemist to learn how to detect the signs of nicotine poisoning in a murdered victim.

Lest you think the notes on nicotine are a mere historical footnote, this is not the case. There have been a few recent incidents.

Elemental’s nicotine post is part of a series in which bloggers write about their favorite toxic chemicals. Here’s BoingBoing’s list of them, in case they drop off the front page of ScienceGeist, the blog that lists them.

Yes, some people have favorite toxic chemicals. My personal favorite happens to be whatever’s in the moth-murdering homicidal death spray that’s keeping the moths from taking over my house.

Incidentally, people are complaining about the way people use the word “poisonous” again, and are pointing out that they usually mean venomous.

I’m a little on the fence about this. Although allowing the words to continue to have two separate meanings might be useful–for greater specificity and clarity of meaning–do we really want to give preference to dictionaries to determine a word’s meaning over the word’s actual common usage? When does misuse become legitimate use?

There are still people complaining that “ain’t” isn’t a legitimate word, when it’s been around for more than two hundred years.

And does anyone really think “Well I’d better not eat that platypus, then” when they hear the critters are “poisonous” rather than being correctly described as “venomous”?

Fever: Variations on a Theme

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So, in all the Peggy Lee-related hubbub around her hometown of Jamestown, N.D., I learned that she actually wrote two verses of “Fever,” which she never received any royalties from.

I love that song, and it’s really stood the test of time, too–everybody who’s anybody seems to have done a cover version of it at one point or another. Here’s a bit of a sampler, for all you fellow Fever-lovers.

Keep in mind: I haven’t seen any of these videos, I just listened to part of each one.

1. Peggy Lee. Not the original version, just the definitive one! A classic for a good reason.

2. Elvis Presley. He’s the King for a reason. It doesn’t take a lot of liberties with the material, but if you didn’t think a man could be sultry, you were wrong.

3. Madonna. A disco version of Fever, featuring Madonna wearing weirdly hypnotic pants.

4. Beyonce. A pretty faithful version, with some additions, including some harmonies and some more lyrics. Hey, Lee added lyrics too, nothin’ wrong with that!

5. Link Wray. A punk cover of Fever. It’s a very different, but fun, take on the song, done by one of the guitar greats. (A cuss-word is shown in the video.)

6. La Lupe. A bouncy salsa beat and an incredibly thick Cuban(?) accent, with some lyrics in Spanish. It works, surprisingly, although it takes a turn for the weird partway through.

7. Michael Buble. Smooth! Another one in the grand tradition of men being sultry.

8. Superpitcher. With an electronic flavor, this version by a German producer still retains the sultry feel of the Peggy Lee “Fever.” It reminds me a little bit of “Tainted Love.”

9. Ella Fitzgerald. Sorry, boys, the girls can outsultry you.

10. Little Willie John. The original “Fever,” which doesn’t have Peggy Lee’s verses, but does include the snapping and harmonizing.

11. The Doors. Yes, really! This isn’t just “Fever,” though, it’s a mashup of “Fever” and “Summertime,” so it’s pretty hot. (Ahahah. Sorry.)

And a few more Fevers for the road!

Supercalifragi… However You Spell That, and Other Historical Ephemera

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Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious is apparently a very controversial word, and there’s some questions as to where it really came from. (via Brainiac)

And here’s some more:

I Live in Absolute Terror

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My neighbors have been hearing all sorts of screaming, screeching, yelping and thudding around my apartment lately, as I have attempted to stem the tide of the moth invasion with spray poison and phone books.

I am afraid of moths.

Given that fact, I apparently chose the wrong year to move to North Dakota. Because of our wonderfully mild winter, the moths are coming out in droves, fuzzy-winged, fluttery and frightening.

They are also coming in in droves.

They can apparently get through my screen windows, so I have to close those. They can apparently survive being doused with enough poison to kill, for example, me. Or at least send me out of the room, coughing, wheezing, and brandishing the spray-bottle of Raid as if it were a club, or maybe my last hope of salvation from the evil moth menace.

The problem is, once you spray the darn things,  their mothy navigational system goes haywire and their wings stop working right, so they dive-bomb the room, swerving around like a B-52 with a drunken pilot. Unfortunately, what this means to someone afraid of moths is: They fly directly at you slightly faster than the speed of light.

To my neighbors: Sorry about all the screaming. Once moth season is over, it’ll quiet down… at least until spider season starts.

The Good, the Bad and the Abysmally, Painfully Awful

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Apparently, the movie Battleship is about as bad as you would have expected it to be. I have a hard time believing any movie could be as bad as Transformers was, but apparently this hits that low mark, at least according to one reviewer. (Warning: Some mild profanity!) (via BoingBoing)

“So yeah, if the trailers weren’t your first sign, rather than have the movie revolve around naval combat like the board game, and might have actually made a decent film, they chose to have it be Transformers 4, and yet achieves a level of stupidity in terms of plot and script that makes Transformers (any of them) look like Inception, Independence Day look like 2001: A Space Odyssey and Pearl Harbor look like Saving Private Ryan.”

Ouch.

The review’s probably a lot more enjoyable than watching the movie, though.

Then again, it is possible, with a movie as bad as Transformers, that having nails pounded into one’s eyeballs is more enjoyable than watching the movie.

Let’s talk happier links!

  • We are living in a golden age of proverbs. And before you laugh, think about it: “If you build it, they will come.” (via the Boston Globe’s wonderful Brainiac blog)
  • There is a blog out there devoted to posting pictures of people eating on Law & Order. No, I don’t know why. No, I don’t get it either. (via BoingBoing)
  • Have you ever wanted to kill someone using poisoned clothing? I can’t honestly say that I have, but I’d consider it as a writer of murder mysteries. Has it happened before? Snopes examined the question. There was much discussion on Livejournal. And there were also questions about whether it would work to poison someone’s hair. (I don’t know how you could do this without poisoning the person whose hair you’re… poisoning.)
  • Sad news: A white buffalo was killed in Texas. Sad and very awful.
  • Some highly entertaining and informative audio journalism from the Oil Patch, well worth listening to, that originally aired on Prairie Public Radio in North Dakota.

Movie Review: The Avengers

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Action movies only work when you care whether the protagonists live or die. If you don’t care, all the pretty explosions in the world won’t be enough to be entertaining. (See: Transformers.)

The superhero flick “The Avengers” works.

It might work especially well because Joss Whedon, beloved of nerds everywhere for creating Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Firefly, knows ensembles, as a friend of mine said.

He avoided so many pitfalls in “The Avengers” it was pretty amazing, actually.

  • Perfunctory Love Interest. You know how when there’s an ensemble, there’s always one chick, and she’s always pretty much there to be in love with somebody?

That doesn’t happen here. The Black Widow may not have superpowers, but she also does a lot of buttkicking, serves critical, spoilery plot functions more than once and she is a lot more than eye candy. She has a deep, personal connection with one of the men on the team, but it is never portrayed as love.

  • Overshadowing. You remember “League of Extraordinary Gentlemen”? I try not to, honestly, but one of its admittedly many issues was that its plot was more or less constructed around Sean Connery’s character. Yes, he’s Sean Connery, but that’s not a reason to take what is meant to be an ensemble of strong characters and make one person “the hero.” Not cool, movie.

This didn’t happen in “The Avengers.” Yeah, Tony Stark got a lot of lines, but given his personality is all style (concealing substance), that makes sense. Captain America said as much with his frowns. Bruce Banner said as much with a diffident shrug and a self-deprecating smile, and when he was the Hulk, his punches were eloquent too. (It makes more sense if you see the movie.)

  • Relentless action. Yeah, this can be a problem. If there’s too much unrelieved action it loses its impact. “The Avengers” could just as easily be called a comedy as an action flick, really–there are many great lines and great moments that keep the action from being dull. Don’t forget, there was a reason that “Macbeth” had comedic bits in it.
  • Indulgent filming. I’m sorry, Harry Potter fans. That epilogue in the final book was a total waste. It was indulgent, as if its author was trying to stomp down fanfiction about what happened after the book was over. The action was already over, the book should have been done.

The Avengers doesn’t do that. It doesn’t linger for stupidly long periods of time on backstory either, even if fans want to see it. (Yes, I’m looking at you, Half-Blood Prince.) If you want a bit of hilarity, wait until the credits are completely over. That’s a parody of what Rowling did, and it was funny as all get-out.

Lawyers, but No Guns or Money

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Jack McDonald, the counsel for the North Dakota Newspaper Association, provided everyone in the room with a packet, entitled All Things Legal, with the subtitle: A brief look at ND open meetings and open records laws & other sticky and damnable media legal issues.

McDonald’s session at the NDNA Annual Convention last week was extremely helpful, especially to someone who hasn’t been in North Dakota all that long.

As it turns out, it’s a lot harder to close a meeting in North Dakota than it is in Minnesota. In Minnesota, when you discuss personnel issues, you can generally close the meeting. So if you’re speaking about the performance of a county administrator, for example, you close the meeting first.

In North Dakota you can’t do that.

You can also bring cameras into the courtroom in North Dakota, and last I checked, Minnesota was examining doing that but hadn’t quite got there yet.

There are some restrictions, though–you can’t take pictures before the judge enters the courtroom, or after the judge leaves the courtroom. You can’t be disruptive–you can’t have a flash on, and you certainly can’t use a camera that makes a bunch of noise.

You also have to ask the judge in advance to allow you to bring a camera into the courtroom.

News from–and in–the Oil Patch

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The oil boom is affecting newspapers in western North Dakota just as much as it is every other industry, it seems.

Three people in the newspaper business had a roundtable discussion Friday morning at the North Dakota Newspaper Association conference, which I attended, and all three of them and the moderator had a lot to say about how their businesses had been affected.

Forum Communications Company Reporter Amy Dalrymple, whose work we often run in the Jamestown Sun, covered the discussion. Her story’s great, check it out!

There are a couple of other things I’d like to add:

  • At least one paper has so many ad purchases coming in that it’s having a hard time keeping the ad content down to 75% of its pages. If it doesn’t do that, it’ll lose its favorable mail rate, which is bad.

The obvious solution is to hire another reporter to write for them so they have more content to fill pages with. Unfortunately, hiring reporters to work in the Oil Patch, like hiring anyone else to work there, is hard.

They hire people, who then can’t find a place to live, and go work somewhere else. Or they hire someone, who decides they don’t like the job, and then just literally wanders off because they can get ten other jobs in ten minutes.

This means the newspapers sometimes hire people right off the street, because if they leave, they might not get another shot at that person.

That’s how scarce workers are. And of course they have to pay them more, too.

  • Staff members are so short that when the three joked about poaching each other’s people, I had the uneasy feeling that there was a little bit of truth to the jokes. They needed people badly, in other words.

I was surprised no one tried to recruit me on the spot, or lure me into a parking garage to make me an offer I couldn’t refuse. But nobody did.

The Oil Patch: It’s Not What You Think

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I visited North Dakota’s Oil Patch last week and discovered the truth about the area, often compared to the Wild West and considered frightening, dangerous and filled with men who would shoot you just to watch you die.

Unsurprisingly, after a visit to Williston and a general tour of the area, as well as a quick stop in Walmart there and a brief hour or so in a bar, I found it’s really not that bad.

Caveat: I have actually lived in the Cedar-Riverside neighborhood in Minneapolis, which is… well. As a Minnesotan all I can really say is “It’s not a nice neighborhood.” Partly because we’re Nice and partly because I can’t remember how long after I left that guy was shot to death a block from where I lived, or how bad the stabbing in the parking lot was. And yes, I did get held up at gunpoint there. So it’s not a very nice neighborhood.

Williston is going through massive changes. That much is stunningly obvious. There’s construction everywhere, there are man camps everywhere, at Walmart they can’t keep certain items on the shelves.

A few words about Walmart, as it’s been a locus of rumors. They stopped allowing people to park campers in its parking lot, and they staff a 24-hour security guard. My colleague Logan Adams and I visited it at about 9 p.m., and there were about 5 men to every 1 woman shopping. The women were generally not unaccompanied, but whether they were with men or in pairs with other women varied a bit. The lines were very long.

Many of the men there were blue collar guys, either oil field workers or construction guys, or maybe they worked in various other fields. Plenty of tattoos, plenty of people from various ethnicities.

Not one of them seemed the slightest bit interested in making trouble of any kind. They were just shopping. In fact, while we were waiting in line to buy something, one of them politely waved us forward to the checkout counter instead of jumping in front of us when we were slow.

Picture from Logan Adams: https://twitter.com/LoganCAdams

It was very obvious the Walmart in Williston is having trouble keeping certain things on shelves. There were quite a few things on pallets waiting to be shelved, and there were quite a few items that were completely gone. The shelf containing water, for example, was completely empty. Many campers don’t have running water, so people living in them have to buy it.

A lot of other shelves that were empty had contained what I called “dude food,” meaning food an 18-25-year-old guy would buy–ramen noodles, frozen dinners, meat, and frozen pizza. I haven’t ever seen such a large selection of frozen pizza in my life. It took up a little more than half of a very long freezer aisle. The meat section had been decimated, so maybe some of these guys have grills. That would be nice, I thought. Dudes like to grill. It’s a total stereotype, but there’s some truth in it too.

Movies were obviously popular, as a bargain bin of DVDs had been decimated and clearly certain flicks were selling well. You had to wonder about some of them. “The Fox and the Hound”–are these guys nostalgic for their youth? Maybe. I did notice that the stack of Twilight movies was completely untouched.

On a tour of the Williston area, we drove past numerous man camps, some of which looked sort of liveable, and others of which looked like people warehouses, drab, soulless and dormlike beyond belief. I don’t mean nice dorms. I mean icky dorms.

Houses are being built too. This isn’t an area of emphasis for most press coverage, because houses are being built everywhere, but it’s still pretty interesting from my perspective.

No care at all is being taken to stop or even limit erosion at any of these sites, or at least, none that I saw. There’s lots of exposed soil, all of which I’m sure ends up in the waterways every time it rains. I suppose high-turbidity water isn’t first on anyone’s list of concerns over there at this point.

The houses being built in nice suburb-type areas vary quite a bit, but they are being built very, very close together compared to suburbs in, say, Plymouth, Minn. Land values must be at an extreme premium even for people who can afford massive houses.

Not one person made me feel the least bit uncomfortable the entire time I was there. That’s not to say bad things don’t happen in the Oil Patch; I just don’t think it’s quite as bad as people make it out to be.

Sure, if you’re from a really rural area, like the Oil Patch used to be, and you are used to small-town life, it may be a shock to you to suddenly have to lock your door at night. It’s just not what you’re used to, and you may very well not like it. That’s entirely fair. Then again, these days, it’d be a good idea to take that precaution no matter where you live.

But from the perspective of this outsider, it’s really not that bad.