Super Bowl ratings

The last time the Nielsen's were updated this was a cutting edge color TV

A savvy, local, Durham painter made an interesting comment to the Clarion Content's editor the other day. He said that he thought this might be the highest rated Super Bowl ever. The analysis behind his argument was tight. The mid-Atlantic Snowmageddon snowstorm guaranteed a huge chunk of the country is a captive audience. It also means that in that region far fewer folks will be watching collectively at sports bars and other peoples' houses.

Long time readers of the Clarion Content know that we have been highly critical of the Nielsen ratings for ages for just this reason. The Nielsen's are a monopoly and have not been pressed to get better. This flaw has existed for ages and they have ignored it. The biggest television spectacles and especially sporting events tend to be watched collectively, the Oscars and the Super Bowl are the classic examples. The Nielsen's in no way account for this. They continually underrate the viewing audiences for these events by counting television sets, not eyeballs. They do not account for sports bars. The Nielsen's are wildly wrong during the NCAA tournament and every Sunday of the NFL season.

We agree with our local painter, this Super Bowl could be the highest rated Super Bowl ever by Nielsen. But will that really mean more people watched it?

Calvin and Hobbes creator

Bill Watterson the creator of the legendary comic strip Calvin and Hobbes broke a twenty-year silence this week. He had not given an interview since 1989. A proud Clevelander, Watterson sill lives in the greater Cleveland area. He answered a few questions for his hometown paper, The Cleveland Plain Dealer. The Clarion Content cannot help but wonder if he was influenced by the recent passing of one of the other all-time famous recluses, J.D. Salinger. Both men were brilliant thinkers in their own mediums. We can't help but believe that the explosion of media attention surrounding Salinger's death, and the subsequent speculation into the vacuum that Salinger left, had to influence Watterson's decision to air some of his positions now. Less is more up to a point, but leave the masses too blank a slate and they will make use of it. Read the whole Plain Dealer article here.

Toenails

Perhaps you already know this, dear readers. Or perhaps you don't suffer from ingrown toenails. However, if you do or know someone who does, maybe you will appreciate this tidbit.

Ingrown Toenails
Cutting tiny v-shaped notches in the center of the toenail (while not pretty) prevents ingrown nails very effectively. The nail is urged to grow toward the center of itself, rather than outward into the toe and cuticle area.

It all depends on who's counting

The story has been everywhere. Avatar is a $1 billion dollar movie. It is the highest grossing movie of all time. But as we have long heard, "There are three ways to not tell the truth: lies, damned lies, and statistics." Is Avatar's claim to be the biggest movie ever subject to this cliche? An interesting article in the Los Angeles Times makes the case.

The issue in question as the LA Times frames it, is Avatar the largest box office movie ever? As is so often the situation, the answer depends on how one frames the question. Avatar is indeed the biggest grossing moving of all-time when analyzing gross revenues, i.e. total dollars. However, when the metric is changed to adjust for inflation, the Avatar is nowhere to be found.

The biggest movie of all-time for individual ticket sales, i.e. fannies in the seats, and the biggest movie of all-time when considering inflation adjusted gross revenues are the same flick, "Gone With Wind." It garnered what would be in today's dollars nearly $1.5 billion in ticket sales. To give you an idea, dear readers, of just how different the two lists are, check this out from the Times: the all-time not adjusted for inflation gross revenue top 50 list includes only five films from before 1997, but check the adjusted for inflation gross revenue top 10 list, there's only one film, "Titanic," that was released in the last 30 years.

This phenomenon is part of longer term trend in American cultural history where folks conflate the most recent and the best. America wants everything that is new to be improved, new and improved are as linked as peanut butter and jelly in the American psyche. It is not good enough to simply be the best home run hitter or the best sprinter of one's era, one must be the best ever. The Clarion Content worries that this kind of thinking provokes a vicious cycle that labels far too many tremendous efforts failures. The movies are apparently not exempt. The LA Times writer, Patrick Goldstein sums it up well, "I don't know about you, but when I think of how much cultural heft a film has, I'm more interested in how many people enjoyed the communal delight of being in front of the big screen, not simply how much money they had to pay to see it."

Lies, damned lies, and statistics.

Airline Travel

The Clarion Content is not a big believer in interdiction. If the War on Drugs has taught us anything, it should be that one has to win on the level of motive. If one can't erode the motivation, one can't interdict everything. We think that this cross-applies. Hence, we were not too stressed by a couple of anecdotal reports we received recently about airline security after the near disaster in Detroit.

In two different place we heard essentially the same story, nothing has changed. One was a local Durham friend who traveled to Australia for ten days in early January. While there she obtained a European brand kitchen knife made from a ceramic composite. It is neon yellow, and we saw her caught raw chicken with it after her return. It is a sharp pairing knife with a three inch blade. Having purchased it while in Australia and done no cooking there, she somehow forgot that she had it in her handbag. She unthinkingly brought it on the plane on her flight out of Melbourne, unmolested, undiscovered and unaware.

While not as extreme we saw a comment that read much the same from one of our favorite football writers, Peter King in Sports Illustrated. He wrote in last week's column on the divisional playoff round, "Nine flight segments since the aborted terrorist on the plane in Detroit on Christmas. Zero difference in security that I've seen. Have I just missed it? Or is there just not the vigilance we should be seeing? Hard to tell, but I've not seen slower lines with more patdowns or anything I thought we'd see. I hope TSA knows what it's doing."

Things that make you go, hmmmmm. Anyone?

Not a Puma ad

This risque picture was never quite a Puma ad. Apparently a small Eastern European agency affiliated with Saatchi & Saatchi created the ad, trying to win business with a Puma subsidiary. They had no such luck. The ad did go viral anyway.



Of course, on the blog where we found it the robotic Google Ad Sense paired it with ads for Puma products.

A painting

As you may or may not be aware, the Clarion Content changes the banner picture over the header of our sections, Politics, Pop Culture, and Sports, each time we publish a new article. We generally obtain the banner pictures for our "New Posts in the Sections" post by using the Google Image finder to track down a picture for whatever words we find clever or that strike our fancy at the particular moment. We then have an answer post for readers to guess and see the words searched for at Google Image along with the sites resourced for the pictures and the links to click through to them.

This time we ran across such a striking painting when we searched the phrase, "treading water at night," that we thought we would rather publish the whole painting. It was done by Maura H. Kenny. Check it out at the Libia Fine Art Gallery.

“Night Swim” is a 22"x30" watercolor painting.

Facebook makes you jealous

One more reason to ditch Facebook, researchers say it makes people in relationships jealous. Forgive us, if we are not surprised.

One of our Ohio readers recently emailed us this link from CNET News. The article discusses a study from the University of Guelph in Ontario published in the journal CyberPsychology and Behavior. The study says Facebook feeds a vicious cycle of partner snooping and jealousy. Some subjects in the study describe themselves as becoming addicted to such behavior.

"Ambiguous scenes involving a partner and contact with past romantic and sexual partners are among the common triggers of jealousy in romantic relationships, and these ambiguous scenes are a regular occurrence on Facebook... Heightened jealousy leads to increased surveillance of a partner's Facebook page. Persistent surveillance results in further exposure to jealousy-provoking information."

The only way to win is not to play the game.

Canadian student evicted after 18 years in the dorm

The University of Victoria has won the right to evict Alkis Gerd'son who has been living in a school owned dormitory room since 1991. According to the Globe and Mail of Canada, "A court decision made public yesterday upheld the university's right to evict Mr. Gerd'son." Gerd'son has admitted living at the residence for three years without taking courses, the university asserts he hasn't taken a class for credit since 1997. He completed a bachelor of arts degree in 1993 and a bachelor of education in 1997.

Ya gotta love Canada, where he has been on provincial disability benefits since 2003! The first floor room costs Gerd'son $655/month. And he isn't going to leave just cause the court ordered him to, the Globe and Mail reports, "the case is also due to go before a human-rights tribunal in June, and Mr. Gerd'son said if he does receive an eviction notice, he'll [quote] discuss that with my legal counsel."

And you thought they were making that stuff up in Real Genius.

Facebook revenge

One of our California readers sent this one in to the Clarion Content. It is the single most wildly brutal piece of Facebook vengeance that we have seen to-date. Imagine this scenario if you will, older sister finds out younger brother (high school kids both of them) has a twelve pack of beer stashed in his room. For reasons unknown, she decides to rat him out to their parents. The ultra-strict parents ground him for three months.

He is pissed. He decides to rummage though her room seeking an opportunity for revenge. Boy did he find it, in the form of a handwritten list of hers detailing all the guys with whom she has hooked-up. What does he do with the list? Publishes it to Facebook!?! And tags all the guys on the list so they know about it! See his post here.

Wow. Technology.