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.

Food Rules

Michael Pollan author of The Botany of Desire, The Omnivore's Dilemma and In Defense of Food announced on his website recently that he has a new book forthcoming. It will be called Food Rules. Pollan in his own words explains the premise,

"The idea for this book came from a doctor—a couple of them, as a matter of fact. They had read In Defense of Food, which ended with a handful of tips for eating well: simple ways to navigate the treacherous landscape of modern food and the often-confusing science of nutrition. “What I would love is a pamphlet I could hand to my patients with some rules for eating wisely,” they would say. “I don’t have time for the big nutrition lecture and, anyway, they really don’t need to know what an antioxidant is in order to eat wisely.” Another doctor, a transplant cardiologist, wrote to say “you can’t imagine what I see on the insides of people these days wrecked by eating food products instead of food.” So rather than leaving his heart patients with yet another prescription or lecture on cholesterol, he gives them a simple recipe for roasting a chicken, and getting three wholesome meals out of it – a very different way of thinking about health.

Make no mistake: our health care crisis is in large part a crisis of the American diet-- roughly three quarters of the two-trillion plus we spend on health care in this country goes to treat chronic diseases, most of which can be prevented by a change in lifestyle, especially diet. And a healthy diet is a whole lot simpler than the food industry and many nutritional scientists –what I call the Nutritional Industrial Complex—would have us believe. After spending several years trying to answer the supposedly incredibly complicated question of how we should eat in order to be maximally healthy, I discovered the answer was shockingly simple: eat real food, not too much of it, and more plants than meat. Or, put another way, get off the modern western diet, with its abundance of processed food, refine grains and sugars, and its sore lack of vegetables, whole grains and fruit.

So I decided to take the doctors up on the challenge. I set out to collect and formulate some straightforward, memorable, everyday rules for eating, a set of personal policies that would, taken together or even separately, nudge people onto a healthier and happier path. I solicited rules from doctors, scientist, chefs, and readers, and then wrote a bunch myself, trying to boil down into everyday language what we really know about healthy eating. And while most of the rules are backed by science, they are not framed in the vocabulary of science but rather culture—a source of wisdom about eating that turns out to have as much, if not more, to teach us than nutritional science does.

Pollan says that his is a simple and unconventional diet book. It consists of sixty-four basic rules, each with a paragraph of explanation. It sounds like a powerful tool to the Clarion Content.

Check out Pollan's website here.