In Which I Compare Myself To Crazy Russian Cat Lady

Burt Likko 21 Comments

This video from Russia depicts a sad sight, that of a lady who has allowed her house to be taken over by over 130 cats.

Metaphorically, I am Crazy Russian Cat Lady. And each of the cats is one of my clients.

The cat food she throws about is my ability to render competent legal advice to my clients. Notice how the cats all respond in a panic when they see her. “Feed me!” They all say. They jump over each other, and cry and whine, leaping at the food. That is how my clients act towards me.

Pushing the metaphor further, the combined smell of the urine of 130 cats, which must surely be present in Crazy Russian Cat Lady’s house, is the stress which adheres to me. Because a real cat, when unfed, will miaow and maybe scratch while begging for food from its human. An unattended client will sue his lawyer.

The presence of 130 cats, all simultaneously jumping and mewling for attention and food, makes Crazy Russian Cat Lady happy on some level. She can feel like she is being generous and kind to the cute creatures. She cannot see the ultimate cruelty of keeping so many pets in such close proximity that no single animal can possibly receive adequate care.

But I can see the analogy. And the analogy to me of being Crazy Russian Cat Lady and the cats being my clients and the food being my ability to pay attention to them and the risk and stress of the situation being emotional equivalent of the smell of the combined urine of one hundred and thirty cats makes me want to consume unhealthy amounts of gin and Scotch and then curl up in the fetal position, the better to whimper pathetically.

Depicting Christians

Burt Likko 1 Comment

Over at the Atlantic, Eleanor Barkhorn complains that the closeted young Christian characters of Blue Like Jazz depict rather than shatter stereotypes about evangelical Christians in the movies. For her, the promise of the movie was to present a positive, nuanced, and lifelike view of Christians in the real world and instead resorts to many of the cheap shots and tropes that so irritate Christians about the movies.

As a threshold matter, I’m sticking with the theory that one can be Preachy or one can by Funny but it’s very difficult to be both at the same time. Yes, there are exceptions. But I’m willing to bet that this movie isn’t one of them and that strikes me as a strong candidate for a primary source of Ms. Barkhorn’s dissatisfaction. But there’s more to it than that. I think Christians have a legitimate gripe with how they are depicted in the media, although I don’t know what sort of solution to offer them. I do have some observations, though.

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Green Lights & Toilets

Will Truman 32 Comments

{In light of Russell’s recent Tuesday Question post, I thought I would reproduce a Hit Coffee post on environmental correctness}

Tim Noah suggests that Romney’s attack on the light bulb regulation that will retire the incandescents is misguided, and that he should instead focus on toilets:

A much more vulnerable target for anti-regulatory ire is the low-flow toilet, bequeathed by a law–passed in 1992 under President George H.W. “Poppy” Bush, so you can’t blame this on Democrats either–that mandates a very stingy 1.6 gallons per flush, as compared to the traditional three to five gallons. For at least the first generation of post-regulatory toilets, one of which I have the misfortune to own, 1.6 gallons is not sufficient. (Thank God I don’t live in California, where you get only 1.28 gallons.) This problem doesn’t get discussed much, even by conservatives, because the details are disgusting.

As someone who deals with toilet overflows on a regular basis, I am rather sympathetic to this. I have before recommended that we embrace two-flush mode toilets. As long as most trips to the restroom are urinary in nature, it does make sense to limit the amount of water being used (they do save water, extra flushes notwithstanding). However, a lack of water can fail to force large deposits through. And I tend to leave large deposits.

Really, though, bigger than toilets and lights (the new ones don’t bother me at all, though Clancy doesn’t like them) are low-flow showers. I have recommended in the past that we go with two-mode showers as well. You basically have a limit to the flow except when you’re pushing a particular button, which would send a rush that would slow back down (not unlike public sinks use to prevent people from leaving the water on. That way, less water when you don’t need it, but more water when you’re washing your hair. I don’t know how easy or difficult this is to do technically, however.

Bigger pains to me than that, though, is the phosphate ban. This does have some negative environmental repercussions, because it means more time is spent hand-cleaning everything before putting it in the dishwasher (and hand-cleaning uses a lot more water than dishwashes do).

The biggest pain on the horizon are the potential for plastic bag bans. For the most part, movement is towards a tax. I can actually live with a tax. I’ll pay five cents or ten cents for each bag. I’ll pay even more if they would make the bags just a little bit sturdier and larger. But bringing my own bags to shop with is rather problematic. Maybe I can get in the habit of it and I’ll wonder why I ever hated it, but until I started putting it on my phone, I was lucky if I made it out the door with my shopping list.

The Clan vs SCU

Will Truman 5 Comments

I recently wrote about the lawsuits involving the MPAA, DGA, ClearPlay, and CleanFlicks. Now I am going to write why the whole thing was eye-opening to me.

In the late 90’s and early aughts, some friends and I (the core group being Clint, Kyle, Hubert, and me, for those who keep track of such things) were a part of an amateur production company. We took Japanese animation, spliced it, and changed the story into something funny. As it happens, three of the four productions we took the initial animation from came from a single studio (in the US). And as it happens, they knew what we were doing and could not have cared less. If they had objected, though, we would have objected to their objection. We weren’t selling them. We weren’t impeding the sale of the original item. Our only compensation was having fun and some comp passes to area anime conventions.

Beyond all that, we were also of our generation and had rather… liberal… views of fair use and copyright. I was a Republican, Hugh was a Democrat, Kyle was a Libertarian, and Clint was rather apolitical, but we all agreed on that.

When the ClearPlay thing came up, I looked at it very much the same way that I looked at our productions. There were some key differences, to be sure: ClearPlay was a business and we were not. People using ClearPlay had purchased the original productions, people who got copies of our work did not. Though we never asked for permission, the content-owners were okay with what we were doing. With them, they were not. On the balance, I thought that if anything, ClearPlay had a stronger case than we would if the producers of the fourth production we used ever came after us.

So I was a bit shocked when almost uniformly, everyone else took the opposite perspective. Not just the other three, but non-core contributors as well. Everyone but me agreed: ClearPlay was wrong here. I tried to liken it to what we were doing, but they argued that it was different. Interestingly, they didn’t argue on the profit side, but on the creative side. It was their view that we were creating something new while they were watering down something existing. I asked about The Phantom Edit. They thought that was fine because they weren’t selling it. Okay, but what if they essentially did what ClearPlay was doing and offered a way to skip past Jar-Jar. This stammered them a bit, but they rebounded by arguing that what The Phantom Editors were doing was art while ClearPlay was destroying art.

Destroying art. Those were the words that one of them used. That, apparently, was what it came down to for them. I asked “What about the person that wants to skip past the scene” and the response I got was that people shouldn’t want to skip past violent or sex-filled scenes and there was something wrong with parents that wanted to shield entertainment from their kids like that. They weren’t exactly advocating showing Nightmare on Elm Street to grade-schoolers, but they did not think it was right to get to choose what to show from a particular movie and what not to. They should either show them the movie, or not show them the movie.

As an aside, we did a lot of our editing in the town of a very conservative university, Southern Cross University, that one of our core members attended. They had “movie night” and mercilessly edited movies, replacing words with rather silly stand-ins. We attended one of the features and heard about a lot of the others. They cut The Matrix down to 90 minutes for content. At that point… what’s the point, exactly? I’d actually suggested, for one of our productions, we should do the a Ridiculous Edit version.

Anyhow, it occurred to me that what a lot of this came down to wasn’t the issues at stake. It wasn’t copyright or fair use. It was the sheer animosity towards the people that showed the sorts of movies that they showed at SCU. It was, in a way, a desire to deprive them of the ability to easily massacre movies the way that they did. It wasn’t about the law, it was about culture. And to an extent, it was about us-and-them. Siding with the likes of Utahns and SCU was simply out of the question.

Which brings me, momentarily, back to the Ridiculous Edit version I proposed. I had suggested that we should do it because we could make it funny. I stand by that. But I did have another motive. I wanted the ability to introduce the movie to people who would be offended by the coarse language of the original. A lot of the cursing was unnecessary. Popular with the fans we had, but likely irritating to potential fans.

I consider this about as far from coincidental as possible: Looking back, I had far more animosity towards the MPAA than SCU. They were raised on good on southern religion while I was an Episcopalian. They (at the time, today they run the spectrum of Born Again to staunch atheism) have a history that I don’t. And for my own part, I had been shifting to the right politically and trying to make peace with the same people. I didn’t then, and don’t now agree with them in regard to movie censorship (nor would they have exactly signed on to the MPAA’s agenda), but at least a part of me was trying to find common ground.

As much as we liked to dress it up as arguments for and against – and there are letigimate arguments for and against – a lot of it came down to that visceral reaction and our deeper minds shifting gears mostly to support the original reaction (it took me years to realize that the MPAA did actually sort of have a point here).

Which is something I can’t help but notice occurring… everywhere else. Here at The League, we take pride in our thoughtfulness and some here take pride in their independence. But we’re human, and I think it is rather impossible to separate what is being said from who is saying it.

I will, at some point, write a more complete post on this. The origins of our ideology. My views aren’t actually this reductive. But I think this is an under-investigated phenomenon. Especially among those of us that pride ourselves on such things. It goes beyond enrolling with a team and taking their views wholesale. It’s something that pervades, I think, our response to virtually everything. Not just Republican or Democrat, but the positions we take and values we adopt that push us in one direction or the other.

Turnabout

Burt Likko 3 Comments

So I spent a couple of hours equipping Soffit House with a special cats-only access tube between the converted closet in one bedroom to the lower cabinet in the hallway which I also spent an astonishingly long amount of time and great amount of effort fitting with simple-looking plastic child safety levers, so as to allow the litterbox to be moved to a location inaccessible by the dog. Covered with plaster dust and with freshly-sore knees, I took a late night shower and then found The Wife in the living room watching a DVD of one of those vampornography movies. Which is fine, because I’ve been playing Skyrim enough recently while she’s been doing productive things that she’s more than earned the right to enjoy herself while I worked.

“Why did you shower, babe?” she asked me.

“Because after spending an hour on the floor cutting holes in the drywall, I was covered with plaster dust. I felt dirty. Like you should after watching this movie.”

Well, she thought it was funny, anyway.

Monday Trivia #54

Will Truman 32 Comments

Alaska, Arizona, Arkansas, California, Colorado, DC, Georgia, Hawaii, Idaho, Kansas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Nebraska, Nevada, New Mexico, North Dakota, Oklahoma, South Dakota, Texas, Utah, and Wyoming have more of these per-capita than the nation as a whole. The six states with the fewest are all connected to one another.

DGA & MPAA vs. ClearPlay & CleanFlicks

Will Truman 21 Comments

It’s a bit weird to be writing a post about lawsuits that occurred and were resolved years ago, especially since I am not the lawyer that Burt is. But the cases I am writing about had a lasting effect on my view of politics and its followers. And rather than try to stuff everything into a single post, I am going to write about the cases here, and then later why these cases were significant to me.

Conflict:

Around the turn of the century, there was a push towards cleaning up movies. The push did not come from studios in Hollywood, but rather entrepreneurs in (mostly) Utah (one of which, I should add, was named Huntsman). The two highest profile companies were ClearPlay and CleanFlicks. Both of these companies, as well as a third and fourth, were based out of the Beehive State, so I will occasionally refer to them as “the Utah companies.”

ClearPlay sold DVD players that would (with programming) skip over the more unsavory parts of movies. They would have editors go through, clean up the dirty parts, while being sure not to interfere with the telling of the story. They originally boasted 150 movies with a couple dozen being added each month. Concerned parents would buy the DVD through a regular outlet, download the filters, and then be able to watch movies with their kids (or just by themselves) without fear of seeing something they would rather not see. CleanFlicks was slightly different, having opened up VHS/DVD stores and sold the clean versions directly. There was a third company, whose name I cannot find but will call ATC, wherein you would send in the VHS or DVD you bought, which they would destroy, and send you back a clean version.

Thsi created a lot of consternation in Hollywood, and before long, lawsuits were filed by both the Directors Guild Association (DGA) and a little bit later the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA). Both rested their initial claim on Freedom of Speech. They were being censored. Their artistic vision was being tampered with. There were various op-eds suggesting that there was a danger in allowing people to automatically avoid exposure to things they found unsettling because there is artistic power in being unsettled.

The counterargument to this was rather simple: People should be allowed not to watch movies that they don’t want to watch. Third parties should be allowed to assist them in circumventing this process. To suggest that people should not have the right to skip over parts of a movie they dislike is to argue that a FFW button is a censorious device. That they skip over a scene because it contains elements that they do not prefer to watch rather than that it is a portion of the movie that they find boring is immaterial. In addition, ClearPlay and ATC could argue that there was no likelihood of confusion of the edited product with the original product since both mechanisms had to be affirmatively sought. This was a bit more difficult an argument for CleanFlicks, because somebody could walk in to one of their stores without realizing that they were being sold a different product.

It became apparent rather early on that the latter argument was winning. Whatever this was, directors were not being silenced. The MPAA and DGA arguments then shifted towards copyright infringement. Namely, these companies were making a profit off the studios’ product, without the studios’ permission. The MPAA argued that these companies would make it unfairly difficult for the studios, who actually created the material, to offer any like service.

Resolution:

It was primarily on the copyright argument that they made some headway and won their suit against CleanFlicks. Because CleanFlicks had pre-emptively sued, their case was further along. However, before a decision could ultimately be made with ClearPlay, congress clarified the copyright rules expressly to allow what ClearPlay was doing. ClearPlay is still around. CleanFlicks lost their business model and went under. Trilogy Studios, who had initially tried to sell their ClearPlay-like product directly to the studios, never tried to sell their product directly to consumers. If I recall correctly, ATC folded early under the pressure of the lawsuits and never got a ruling one way or another.

My Thoughts

In the abstract, I actually sided with the Utah companies on this. Which is to say, I believe that they were providing a service and a separate product from the studios (namely, a player). The only one I hesitated to that about is CleanFlicks (which I will get to in a minute). While it was the case that ClearPlay was making money around the studios’ works, the same can be said for the makers of DVD players in general. DVD player producers have to pay all sorts of patents to make their product, but as far as I know they do not have to pay the studios themselves. It is considered mutually beneficial. I doubt that there is even a contract involved. There is, however, an argument that they waived any right to money when they produced a product specifically to be played in a DVD player. I am not sure why that waver would not also apply to a ClearPlay DVD player, however.

With CleanFlicks it is a bit different. They were selling a product with someone else’s trademark on it, that was mostly full of someone else’s material. And they were making a profit by doing so without any sort of contract with the studio. What I don’t fully know is the extent to which you have to have a contract with a studio in order to sell their product, so long as you paid full retail price for the original. I know this applies to individuals (they can’t prevent me from selling my old DVDs) and I’m not sure how it is different for corporations.

CleanFlicks’s major liability, however, should be the original artistic integrity argument. Since ClearPlay and ATC both required an affirmative step and both involve possessing or having possessed the original product, it can be safely assumed that the person who purchases CP’s or ATC’s services are aware that they are not getting the original product. Meanwhile, someone can stumble into CleanFlicks without really knowing what they’re getting. I’m not sure the degree of disclosure required, but that we even have to talk about it makes me understand where the studios are coming from. So I could go either way on this one.

I would support, I suppose, a disclosure requirement for ClearPlay and (if they still existed) ATC, not only to remind people that they are getting an altered product but also so that the clean-up editor gets appropriate credit for his work. As that is an artistic enterprise, I do believe such disclosure should be appropriate. But, as they often do, I felt that the studios simply went too far. Not only failing to offer a service that people clearly wanted, but preventing anyone else from doing so. And as far as the copyright argument goes, while yes ClearPlay gets money off the deal, not a penny is denied to the studios that is owed to the studios for the product they provided. Their argument, to me, has the stench of their common argument that they have a right to control what someone does with a product after they purchase it. I believe this is true insofar as preventing people from copying-and-distributing, but that’s about the extent of it.

Brilliant Post, Gone (Update: Found!)

Will Truman 7 Comments

I just wanted everyone to know that I have a brilliant post on the whole Derbyshire thing. Completely brilliant. Apparently, I didn’t save it? My brilliance has been completely undermined by myself. Story of my life…

(Of course, if I do find it, I’ll have to walk back the “brilliance” part. So, I’m brilliant or I get my writing back. Win/win or lose/lose, depending on how you look at it.)

Yeah, okay, I found it and will be walking back the “brilliant” part:

The National Review did not take long in firing John Derbyshire. There is little in the way of congratulations headed their way, though, because they’d kept him on the payroll for as long as they have (as well as perennial criticisms of the right and racism).

I don’t have a strong opinion on whether they should be congratulated or not for what they did, though my reasons pro and con differ from others. So, of course, I thought I would write a post about it.

I do think that it is to their credit not that they fired him, but that they fired him as quickly as they did after this erupted. We can dismiss this as CYA, but I think that oversimplifies the situation. It has long been my experience that the longer you associate with someone, the more forgiving you are. As such, I think the “line” to be crossed was further out for Derbyshire than it would have been for a new writer saying the same things (whether with regards to race or the multitude of other ways he departs from NR norms). The ability to turn around and fire someone that quickly is, I believe, harder than it looks. They’ve known him a long time and I’m sure a number of people there consider him a friend. I knew that Derbyshire would be sacked, but I honestly thought it would take longer than it did (and not because they were okay with what he said).

That being said, I am not going upon the hill that they fired him because it was the “right thing to do.” I think that there was the recognition early on that they needed to fire him for their own interest (so the CYA explanation isn’t wrong). As others have pointed out, their readership is not necessarily happy about their response to the whole thing. However, their readership isn’t actually where they make their money. Especially not their online readership.

Rather, the National Review makes its money on people that will go on their cruises. That will donate money to them. That will advertise with them. The people that probably have better things to do than get into online comment conversations (put that mirror down!). These people are going to fit a different profile than the average commenter. These people are much more likely to be offended by what Derbyshire said, or at least more anxious not to be associated with it. It is these people that the National Review simply cannot afford to lose. (There is a hole in this theory, though: RedState does rely on these people and has not given much indication that it would have behaved differently. Hmmmm. Maybe the desire to become more well-known as the NR is?)

The other thing is this: Whether they get a gold star or not, the bleeding is much more likely to end quickly this way. Minimizing damage isn’t the same thing as being healthy, but it’s better than bleeding out. The people that hate the National Review will continue to hate the NR. They also have a new band of haters among the people that either are racist or would rather act that way than give an inch to the other side. But among the people that matter to them the most, they’ll accept it and move on. (And there is not much in the way of the casual observer here. If you know about the National Review, and/or you are a part of this conversation at all, you already have an opinion of it. Probably a strong one.)

Apologia

Burt Likko 15 Comments

I’m not normally one to apologize for light posting. Rather, for those of you wondering where the hell I’ve been, know that three things have been eating at me:

  1. Pneumonia
  2. Depositions
  3. Skyrim

Pneumonia has kept me down and at home. Where I’ve tried to work, really I have. But when you’re not physically well, it takes a seemingly tremendous amount of energy to concentrate and mentally focus on anything. When your body rebels on you — through your sinuses or, um, other bodily voids — it can be difficult to sustain that concentration. So when I haven’t had to muster focus for travel to attend to depositions, I’ve been trying to stay home and not be a hero at work, because no one there wants my disease and I am fortunate to have the sort of job where I can get work done at home. In theory. And yes, when I’ve permitted myself to do so, I’ve been indulging in about an hour at a time of Skyrim. Which is pretty damn absorbing, not in the least for the astonishing visual beauty of its landscape. I often can’t focus on it for more than an hour at a time, either. This week’s on-the-road depositions — five of which I’m taking rather than defending or observing — is going to be a tremendous challenge.