So I got an inquiry over at Kindle Wizards asking me to submit a quote for a couple of ebooks, with the implied promise of several more to come. Usually, I'd jump at the chance and try to get the gig. Only one problem: they were expressing fraudulent claims, selling bunk products to fix imaginary problems "proven" by pseudoscience. That's right, folks, I got approached by the purveyors of "Proton Patch," another bullshit product designed to protect you from electromagnetic radiation (which it can't) in order to prevent the dangerous health effects that electromagnetism causes (which it doesn't). To be fair, there are some studies which have proposed the possibility of such a link, but none yet which have established it with a high degree of confidence, despite a LOT of looking. It should be a hint that the headlines about the subject ruling out a link have titles such as "Study: There’s no link between cellphones and cancer," while headlines announcing a link go by titles such as "Sheryl Crow Suspects Her Cell Phone Caused Her Benign Brain Tumor."
The effects, if they exist, are going to be very subtle and complicated, and will take a long time to suss out. So far, the weight of the evidence is against any significant danger. So far. Therefore, when someone comes out with a product designed to protect you against it, then distributes literature and launches websites scaring you into buying it, that makes said person a scumbag.
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It's hard to talk about what happened on February 5, 2012. The day feels like a confusing dream, the kind you wake from in happiness and then sadly realize never occurred. The only difference is that it did.
I'm writing this nearly two months later—the first break I've gotten from the crush of work and responsibility that awaited me when I returned from Indianapolis. I didn't have time to adjust after that staggering week, or to savor its taste. Sometimes I doubt it happened. I've had lots of happiness in my life, but it's mostly been the flavor of calm satisfaction. Loss, failure, and grief are the only feelings I've had before with much actual intensity, and so the feelings of Superbowl night, and the recollections of it, take on a strange tinge of sadness, as one might wince when flexing a healthy joint that you remember once injuring as a child.
"It is in our idleness…in our dreams, that the submerged truth sometimes comes to the top." —Virginia Woolf
I'll try to walk you through the day…
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Sorry about the delay, but when I got home I had two major work deadlines I was running late for plus twenty plays to read. It's been over a week and I haven't unpacked from the trip yet.
Superbowl Morning
Now, the part you've been waiting for…
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Saturday night before the Superbowl we were treated to a swank dinner where we met several more Doritos marketing and advertising bigwigs. It was in part to honor us, and in part to honor the team that put together the marketing strategy and the Crash event. Everybody was distributed into five large tables, each marked for one of the commercial finalists.
Check this spread out…
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So last night Jonathan and I went to see Chronicle. The next morning the other guys showed up and I figured I'd hear about all the madness we missed out on. They said they spent the whole night looking for a place to eat because everything was overflowing, and wished they'd gone to the movie. When Frito-Lay isn't giving us something to do we have no idea what to do with ourselves.
Downtown Indy has been transformed into Superbowl Village. There's an NFL Experience expo, concerts, an astroturf field down an entire street, giant decals over everything, skyways connecting all the major buildings, and a zipline where people have been waiting for hours to swoosh down over the heads of thousands of crammed drunks and families. From our hotel we can not only see the stadium, but the highways where cars inch hopelessly slowly into downtown. The average wait for a taxi was an hour.
The city at night…
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During yesterday's TV interviews, one of the TV stations asked two of the finalists (who shall remain nameless) what their favorite Lonely Island song was. The first guy said "Iran From You"—and the second guy nonchalantly said "Jizz in My Pants." Everyone in the green room suddenly started chattering, "Did he just say Jizz in My Pants on live TV?" I bolted into the control room and found out (surely to the great relief of the entire Frito-Lay organization) it was being taped for later editing.
After the exhausting Media Day, where each finalist did somewhere around 15 satellite interviews with stations around the country, we went to a swank bistro for lunch and had the world's best sliders followed by heaping plates of chicken, short rib, and dessert platters. I met some of the representatives from Goodby & Silverstein, the giant ad agency that does Frito-Lay's advertising and helps run this contest, and they seemed just as excited about the contest as everyone else, though they're more laid-back and cool like LA movie producers. Then back to the hotel for naptime.
Then on to…
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We were on the way to the airport and a semi truck crashed in front of us, about a football field's length from the exit to the airport. We almost missed Crash the Superbowl because of a crash. Fortunately, nobody was injured (I checked) and in spite of blocking all the travel lanes with his sideways trailer, the driver kindly left a shoulder open for us to squeeze by.
We got to Indy and found that everything everywhere is branded Superbowl XLVI. It's on the floors, the walls, in every airport store, plastered 80 feet high on gigantic hotel decals. Even the pilot was talking about it. He apparently didn't know anything about sports, though; on the way in he came over the PA and welcomed everyone to Indy, "especially all you basketball fans."
And then…
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Somebody asked me whether I'd be chronicling my experiences heading to the Superbowl, and the answer is: poorly. I haven't been keeping up with my FilmTraveler blog because I have a backlog of entries about Charles Darwin that I felt honor-bound to post before switching to anything frivolous. It's no wonder honor is so rare; it's bloody inconvenient.
So I'll be resurrecting it a teeny bit in order to post some updates whenever Facebook status updates prove too restrictive. The trouble with Facebook is that it's given a lot of talented people the illusion that by posting an occasional thought they're fulfilling their gifts as writers. Can you imagine if Christopher Nolan had written a status update instead of Inception?
Why I'm Going to the Superbowl
I'm going to assume anyone reading this already knows my brother and I made a Doritos Crash the Superbowl commercial and it got picked as a finalist. So I'll skip to the details. I'm on my way to Indianapolis in three hours to jump on the Superbowl hype-train, and we'll be spending the game in the Frito-Lay skybox with the other finalists, corporate and creative bigwigs, and best of all, Andy Samberg and The Lonely Island (the creators of the famous Saturday Night Live digital shorts). There are several official events and social events planned, and other than an itinerary I don't know what's going to happen or how.
So, now…
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Chapter 1: Variation Under Domestication
Chapter 1 opens with general overview of how animals differ from one another under domestication and yet in many cases come from one source species. He claims this as a promising place to look for explanations of how so many species came to be.
It's interesting what a paltry sample he has to draw from in conducting his analysis; scientists today have a crushing wealth of taxonomies, specimens, numbers, research going back dozens of generations about species Darwin never knew existed. So he is wrong in some of his assumptions about domesticated animals (for example, he guesses that dogs are so varied as to likely come from more than one ancestor), and about the sources of some of the variation (like drooping ears in some domesticated animals arising simply from disuse of the ear muscles).
I do not believe, as we shall presently see, that all our dogs have descended from any one wild species….
That's right: there are many things Darwin was wrong about. (Creationists love to chuckle and point at these places, as if they're the ones who discovered his errors through their own research and the arrogant scientists don't know about it yet.) This is what's so great about science: when science is wrong about something, it gets disproven and is no longer believed to be true.
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In celebration of Darwin in Malibu, which I'm directing at the Generic Theater in March, I am finally reading The Origin of Species and posting chapter-by-chapter summaries and commentary. Part 0 covers the history of the book, plus its title page and introduction.
Part Zero: The Origin of the Origin of Species
Charles Darwin was a naturalist. He was on track to become a doctor, but he proved a rather squeamish medical student, and left medical school for Cambridge to become instead an Anglican priest. His father, a doctor, was disappointed enough by this to say, "You care for nothing but shooting, dogs and rat-catching, and you will be a disgrace to yourself and all your family." While at Cambridge, he found his true calling: that of a naturalist, an all-around scientist of the natural world (and especially the creatures which inhabited it). "Naturalists" were the progenitors of modern biologists, and like so many very early men of science, the best of them became masters of many disciplines. Naturalists combined aspects of what we know today as biology, botany, entomology, taxonomy, chemistry, geology, and more.
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