bookofjoe

KAZAKHSTAN. VERY NICE!

Long story short: Where once Kazakhstan ran from Borat's catchphrase, it's done a full 180° and now embraces it.

From the New York Times:

In 2005, Dennis Keen, a high school junior in Los Angeles, was applying for a summer exchange program.

After not much deliberation, he decided it would be punky and funny to forgo France and Spain and go to Kazakhstan.

"People didn't know where it was," Mr. Keen said. "In Kazakhstan, there's pre-Borat and post-Borat."

He was referring, of course, to "Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan," the Sacha Baron Cohen comedy that hit theaters a year later, in 2006.

In the movie, Mr. Cohen pretends to be a television reporter visiting America from the former Soviet republic, whose people supposedly drink horse urine, consider women property, and celebrate an anti-Semitic version of the running of the bulls. (The bulls are replaced by Jews.)

The authoritarian Kazakh government banned the film, threatened to sue Mr. Cohen, and took out a four-page advertisement in this newspaper defending the country's honor.

And so when Mr. Cohen released a trailer on September 29 for a "Borat" sequel, which he developed in secret and which debuted on Friday on Amazon, the satirist was prepared for another fight with the Kazakh government.

It never came.

"It was like, 'Oh, again?'" said Kairat Sadvakassov, the deputy chairman of Kazakhstan's tourism board, who has a master's degree in tourism management from New York University.

The board was determined to avoid overreacting and letting Mr. Cohen make it look foolish once again.

"The decision was made to let it die its natural death and not respond," Mr. Sadvakassov said.

Then Mr. Keen, the former exchange student, got involved.

After his time abroad, he went on to graduate school at Stanford, where he studied with a professor from Kazakhstan.

Mr. Keen eventually moved to the country, married a local, and started a business giving walking tours of Almaty, the country's largest city.

He now hosts a travel show on a state television channel. ("I'm kind of like the American Borat," Mr. Keen said.)

When Mr. Keen learned about the sequel, he thought that rather than ignore Mr. Cohen, Kazakhstan should embrace the Borat character's catchphrase and turn it into the country’s tourism slogan: "Kazakhstan. Very nice!"

It's the kind of idea you get when you own a tourism company and a pandemic has annihilated global tourism.

"I've had a lot of free time," Mr. Keen said. "Also, I just had a baby. When he grows up, I don't want him to be ashamed of Borat. I want him to say, 'That's when my dad started this whole fun project.'"

Two weeks ago, Mr. Keen and a friend, Yermek Utemissov, who helps foreign film companies arrange shoots in Kazakhstan, pitched the board of tourism.

They got an immediate yes.

The two worked pro bono to make four slickly produced, internet-friendly 12-second spots (top) featuring people walking around Kazakhstan and observing that it's "very nice."

In one, a man at a market drinks traditional fermented horse milk (not horse urine!) and says, "That's actually very nice."

The new movie, "Borat Subsequent Moviefilm: Delivery of Prodigious Bribe to American Regime for Make Benefit Once Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan," doesn't let up on stereotyping the nation.

It starts with Borat doing hard labor in prison, explaining the fictional consequences of the original film in a voice-over: "Kazakhstan become laughing stocks around the world. Our exports of potassium and pubis plummet. Many brokers leapt from our tallest skyscrapers. Since Running of Jew had been canceled, all Kazakhstan had left was Holocaust Remembrance Day, where we commemorate our heroic soldiers who ran the camps."

But Mr. Utemissov said he wasn't worried that his fellow citizens would get mad this time.

"It's a newer generation,” he said. "They've got Twitter, they've got Instagram, they've got Reddit, they know English, they know memes. They get it. They're inside the media world. We're looking at the same comedians, the same Kimmel show. Kazakhstan is globalized."

Mr. Sadvakassov, the deputy chairman of the tourism board, hadn't seen the movie before its premiere, but he said he wasn't concerned, either.

"In Covid times, when tourism spending is on hold, it was good to see the country mentioned in the media," he said. "Not in the nicest way, but it's good to be out there. We would love to work with Cohen, or maybe even have him film here."

When Mr. Cohen learned that Kazakhstan had reversed itself and embraced his franchise, he offered a statement by email.

"This is a comedy, and the Kazakhstan in the film has nothing to do with the real country," he wrote. "I chose Kazakhstan because it was a place that almost nobody in the U.S. knew anything about, which allowed us to create a wild, comedic, fake world. The real Kazakhstan is a beautiful country with a modern, proud society — the opposite of Borat's version."

That's as close as Borat gets to being very nice.

I ❤️ YouTube in Dark Mode

Res ipsa loquitur.

Footprints mark a toddler's perilous prehistoric journey

[The human footprint sequence from the Pleistocene era extends more than a mile and includes at least 427 human prints. The out-and-back journey was probably completed in no more than a few hours, the researchers suggested.]

From the New York Times:

Several thousand years ago, a young adult moved barefoot across a muddy landscape.

A toddler was balanced on the adult's hip.

There were large animals — mammoths and ground sloths — just over the horizon.

It was a perilous journey, and scientists reconstructed it by closely studying an exceptional set of human and animal footprints found recently in the southwestern United States.

"This is an amazing trackway,” said Neil Thomas Roach, an anthropologist at Harvard University, who was not involved in the research, which was published online this month in Quaternary Science Reviews. "We rarely get tracks as well preserved as these are."

It is one of the most extensive Pleistocene-age trackways found to date, and studying it highlights how ancient sets of fossilized footprints can reveal more than even fossilized bones.

[The Pleistocene (often colloquially referred to as the Ice Age) is the geological epoch that lasted from about 2,580,000 to 11,700 years ago.]

It's rare for bones to reveal behaviors, but tracks can shed a lot of light on animal interactions, said Sally C. Reynolds, a paleoecologist at Bournemouth University in England and an author of the study.

The journey of the prehistoric young adult and the toddler was spotted in 2017 in White Sands National Park in southern New Mexico.

The sequence extends more than a mile and includes at least 427 human prints.

The out-and-back journey was probably completed in no more than a few hours, the researchers suggest. (The gypsum sand that records the prints doesn't hold water well, so the muddy conditions that captured the prints would have been short-lived.)

Most of the human footprints were made by a barefoot adolescent of either sex, or a young adult female with roughly size 6 feet, the team determined.

But about every 100 yards or so, a few much smaller human prints suddenly appear within the northbound set of tracks.

"We have many adult tracks, and then every now and again we have these tiny baby tracks," Dr. Reynolds said.

A toddler-aged child was being carried and periodically placed on the muddy ground as the caregiver readjusted his or her human load, the researchers surmised, based on the three-dimensional digital models they had assembled.

There are no toddler footprints within the southbound set of tracks, so the child probably wasn't carried on that journey.

It's likely that the child rode on the young person’s left hip.

There's a slight asymmetry between the left and right tracks on the northbound set of tracks.

That's consistent with someone carrying extra weight on that side, Dr. Reynolds said.

She and her collaborators estimated that the young person was moving at just shy of four miles per hour.

That's a good clip: "Imagine running for a bus," Dr. Reynolds said. "It’s not a stroll."

The urgency of the journey might have had something to do with the toddler, Dr. Reynolds suggests. "Why else would you travel so fast but encumber yourself with a child?"

There was another reason, however, for making haste over the landscape — the presence of large and potentially dangerous animals.

Both a giant sloth and a mammoth ambled across the humans' path, the trackway reveals.

Their prints appear on top of the northbound footsteps but below the southbound ones, meaning that the animals walked by sometime in between the humans' passage.

[A human footprint found inside that of a giant sloth track at White Sands.]

The mammoth — most likely a bull, based on the size of its tracks — was apparently uninterested in the humans who had walked by just hours before; its tracks do not indicate any reaction.

The giant sloth, on the other hand, stopped and shuffled in a circle when it encountered the human trackway, its prints indicate.

The sloth's response suggests that humans had positioned themselves at the top of the food chain, Dr. Reynolds said.

In the future, Dr. Reynolds and her colleagues hope to better understand the people that inhabited this region.

For instance, it's an open question whether they had migrated seasonally or stayed put in one area throughout the year, Dr. Reynolds said. "We're trying to assemble these little snapshots of what life was like in the past."

Where is this map located?

Answer here this time tomorrow.

Hint: outside the U.S.

Needle in a Haystack

Can you find it?

Poster measures 20" x 28".

Printed in France.

€13.

Edgar Wright's 1,000 favorite films in chronological order since 1920

Above, the trailer for the first movie in this interesting and useful list by English director, screenwriter, and producer Edgar Wright that will certainly unearth something never before seen or even heard of for even the most devoted cineaste.

This list of personal favorites was originally assembled by Edgar Wright and Sam DiSalle in July 2016, and is semi-regularly updated.

The same list in a different format (below) here.

An August, 2016 note from Wright:

This is a personal and subjective list of 1,000 favourite movies from 100 years of cinema.

It's not a set text or intended as any bible of "greatest" films.

I decided to put this together as a fluid list for my own enjoyment, amusement, and reference.

I hope it's fun for you to pore over and dive into some of the films you haven't seen nor heard of.

Don't get all riled up about omissions or which movies you think should be favourites of mine, the truth is I may very well like/not like or not have seen the movies you think are missing.

In fact, I like way more than 1,000 movies, but any longer and this list would be really insane.

Thanks to Sam DiSalle for helping me put it together.

If you feel so inspired, make your own list.

Film watching is a lifetime pursuit and there are many more films out there for me to see.

This list is a good place to start.

Last updated in March 2020.

'You are now experiencing the web at 175 bits per second'

Deal with it.

Viola Smith, 'Fastest girl drummer in the world'

From the Washington Post:

Viola Smith, a swing-era musician who was promoted in the 1930s as the "fastest girl drummer in the world" and who championed greater inclusion of women in the almost completely male preserve of big bands, died October 21 at her home in Costa Mesa, California.

She was 107.

With a kit featuring 12 drums, including two giant tom-toms placed near her shoulders, Ms. Smith was from 1938 to 1941 the centerpiece of the Coquettes, an "all-girl" big band that developed a modest national following.

 

Her showcase was "The Snake Charmer," (top),  a jazzy arabesque with explosions of drumming pyrotechnics.

 

In an era when the dance bands of Benny Goodman, Glenn Miller, and Artie Shaw and dominated the charts, Ms. Smith belonged to a coterie of female bandleaders who struggled to gain respect for their musicianship.

 

One reviewer called her a "pulchritudinous miss who so adeptly maneuvers the drums and cymbals."

 

Ms. Smith had created the Coquettes from the remnants of her Wisconsin family's all-female band in which she was one of eight musical sisters.

 

She favored crisp and swinging arrangements and was, by several accounts, an egalitarian leader who valued the input of her employees in major business and artistic decisions.

More than a pleasant timekeeper, she was a dervish behind the drums and found it difficult to conduct the group while playing.

She turned over baton duties to Frances Carroll, a flame-haired, hip-swiveling singer and dancer whose ravishing looks were accented by decolletage-baring gowns.

The band (above), soon known as Frances Carroll & the Coquettes, played at nightclubs and dance halls and appeared in several short films and on the cover of the entertainment trade magazine Billboard before dissolving.

By that time, Ms. Smith said, she had spent 15 years on the road and had grown exhausted by the demands of travel.

She selected Manhattan as her home base and won a summer scholarship to study timpani at the Juilliard School.

She also sat in with bands at New York’s Paramount Theater as many able-bodied male drummers of the day were drafted into military service for World War II.

She caused a stir with her 1942 essay in the music trade magazine DownBeat titled "Give Girl Musicians a Break!," in which she called on prominent big-band leaders of the day to hire more women.

With men away at war, she wrote, "Instead of replacing them with what may be mediocre talent, why not let some of the great girl musicians of the country take their places?... Girls work right along beside men in the factories, in the offices... So why not in dance bands?"

"In addition, there are some girl musicians who are as much the masters of their instruments as male musicians," she added. "Think it over, boys."

For the most part, they didn't.

Within a year, she was playing under Phil Spitalny, whose all-girl band — heavy on harps and chiffon gowns — offered unadventurous material but a steady income.

The group, where she remained for a dozen years, was featured on Spitalny's "Hour of Charm" radio show and in two movies, "When Johnny Comes Marching Home" (1942) and the Abbott & Costello comedy "Here Come the Co-Eds" (1945).

Ms. Smith later drew attention as a member of the Kit Kat Band jazz quartet featured in the musical "Cabaret," which ran on Broadway from 1966 to 1969 and then toured nationally.

Ms. Smith retired a few years later but occasionally picked up her drumsticks to play with a California ensemble called the Forever Young Band, which (unlike a Neil Young tribute band of the same name) billed itself as "America’s Oldest Act of Professional Entertainers."

Viola Clara Schmitz was born in Mount Calvary, Wisconsin, on November 29, 1912.

Her father, a cornetist, operated a tavern and concert hall in nearby Fond du Lac that boasted of having the first revolving crystal ball north of Chicago.

He insisted on piano training for each of his 10 children.

Viola said she began drumming for the family orchestra because — with her being the sixth child — all the other instruments she liked were taken.

She was highly motivated to learn.

"So long as we practiced, we barely had to do work around the house," she told the Women of Rock Oral History Project.

By the 1920s, the enterprising patriarch had formed an all-girl dance band with the Schmitz daughters, billed as the Schmitz Sisters Orchestra (later the Smith Sisters Orchestra).

She described her parents in glowing terms, recalling a tight knit Catholic family that traveled by luxurious Pierce-Arrow.

They were in demand for weddings and state fairs and played on the radio as far away as Chicago, once engaging in a musical battle over the airwaves with an all-male band; the weapon of choice was George Gershwin’s "Rhapsody in Blue."

Starting in 1936, they toured for a year as part of an all-girl revue sponsored by the Major Bowes radio talent contest.

The band dwindled as some of the sisters left to marry or enter other occupations; one sister died.

 

Besides Viola, the only remaining sister by 1938 was Mildred, who played sax, clarinet, and violin.

 

They rechristened themselves the Coquettes and gathered other musicians to form a new group.

Ms. Smith said the popular orchestra leader Woody Herman tried to recruit her, but only as a novelty act pitted against another drummer.

Yet in her later DownBeat essay, she spoke of Herman as a rare "progressive" in the field whose 1941 hiring of trumpeter Billie Rogers was a milestone.

Over the years, Ms. Smith recalled that her professional circle included as many mischief-makers as music-makers.

She recounted that before her audition for Spitalny, a Coquette named Rose Gilmartin, a prankster who could play two clarinets at the same time, loosened the legs of Ms. Smith's snare drum so that it would collapse on impact.

"I was playing, and my snare drum went way down, my drum started to turn to the side, and it was all chaos! All chaos! And I knew immediately who it was," she told Sherrie Tucker for the book "Swing Shift: 'All-Girl' Bands of the 1940s."

Ms. Smith maintained her composure, which impressed Spitalny.

"It was so bad, with everything going wrong, that he knew that it couldn't possibly be that I didn't set it up right," she said.

Spitalny's group was one of many all-girl big bands — such as the International Sweethearts of Rhythm — that peaked in the early 1940s and rapidly faded from the scene as men returned from war.

The demand for jazz was eclipsed by rock within a decade.

Ms. Smith, who said she was always well paid and lived frugally, traveled in retirement and eventually settled in Costa Mesa to be near her cousin.

She leaves no immediate survivors but often spoke of ardent male admirers — including an obscure young crooner named Frank Sinatra, who propositioned her at a Manhattan ribs joint where musicians gathered.

Her subsequent engagement to another man was called off when he was drafted in World War II.

In a 2013 video interview with Tom Tom, a magazine about female drummers, she described a career of few obstacles other than her sex. "One thing always led to another," she said. "It was all very easy, the transitions, there was no big deal I had to worry about ever.... I really had a charmed life. Unless people call drumming work. Then I worked hard in my life."

The greatest Formula 1 driver of all time

From the Economist:

"I always thought records were there to be broken," Michael Schumacher, a star Formula 1 driver, said in 2013.

At the time, his record of 91 career F1 victories looked safe: the closest active racer had just 32.

Yet on October 11th Lewis Hamilton of Britain equalled the mark.

Mr. Hamilton is also on pace to tie Mr. Schumacher's record of seven F1 championships later this year.

Mr. Hamilton's ascent has ignited debate over whether he is F1's best driver ever.

Comparing athletes across eras is always hard — especially in motor sports, where a racer depends on his car.

Moreover, F1 has regularly changed its scoring system and its number of races, drivers, and teams.

However, statistical analysis can address many of these nuances.

We have built a mathematical model, based on a study by Andrew Bell of the University of Sheffield, to measure the impact of all 745 drivers in F1 history.

It finds that Mr. Hamilton's best years fall just short of those of the all-time greats — but so do Mr. Schumacher's.

The model first converts orders of finish into points, using the 1991-2002 system of ten points for a win and six for second place.

It adjusts these scores for structural effects, such as the number and past performances of other drivers in the race.

Then, it splits credit between drivers and their vehicles. (Today, F1 has ten teams, each using two drivers and one type of car.)

Disentangling these factors is tricky.

Mr. Schumacher spent most of his peak at Ferrari, as Mr. Hamilton has at Mercedes, leaving scant data on their work in other cars.

However, their teammates varied.

And drivers who raced alongside Mr. Hamilton or Mr. Schumacher tended to fare far better in those stints than they did elsewhere.

If Ferrari's and Mercedes' engineers boosted lesser racers this much, they probably aided their stars to a similar degree.

Because most drivers switch teams a few times, this method can be applied throughout history.

Between the two racers with 91 wins, the model prefers Mr. Schumacher.

He won 1.9 more points per race than an average driver would have done in the same events and cars, edging out Mr. Hamilton's mark of 1.8.

Limited to their five best consecutive years, the gap widens, to 2.7 points per race for Mr. Schumacher and 2.0 for Mr. Hamilton.

This difference stems mostly from the impact of their cars.

Both stars raced in the finest vehicles of their day.

But 20 years ago, cars from Williams and McLaren were nearly as strong as Ferrari's.

In contrast, Mercedes now towers over its rivals, enabling Mr. Hamilton and Valtteri Bottas, his teammate, to coast past lesser cars.

Before joining Mercedes, Mr. Bottas had never won a F1 race.

He now has nine victories.

Yet on a per-race basis, the greats of yesteryear beat both modern stars.

Three of the model's top four drivers stopped racing by 1973; the leader, the Argentine Juan Manuel Fangio [video up top], won five titles in the 1950s.

These pioneers had short careers.

Fangio started just 51 races, to Mr. Schumacher’s 306.

However, the model is impressed by them, because the impact of cars relative to drivers has grown over time.

On average, it assigns drivers in the 1950s 58% of their teams' points; today, that share is 19%.

Fangio, who was a mechanic by training and won titles using cars from four different firms, was known as "the master."

The masters of modern F1 are engineers who sit behind laptops, not steering wheels.

Sources: Ergast.com; F1-Facts.com; "Formula for success: multilevel modelling of Formula 1 driver and constructor performance, 1950-2014," by Andrew Bell et al., Journal of Quantitative Analysis in Sports, 2016; The Economist

Razer Kishi

It's a device that grips your phone and features buttons and clickable analog thumbsticks

to transform it into a hand-held gaming machine

with ultra-low latency akin to a Nintendo Switch.

$99.99.

Perfect, you say... if only they made it for my Xbox-level controller.

Your ship just came in: The Nimbus+

has a familiar configuration that lets you play retro-style games like "Crossy Road Castle" on Apple Arcade.

$69.99.

'Hold Fast' — Moxie Marlinspike and friends

I really, really liked this movie.

YouTube caption: 

"Hold Fast": Stories of maniac sailors, anarchist castaways, and the voyage of the S/V Pestilence....

Over the course of two winters, four members of the Anarchist Yacht Clubb [sic] rescued a derelict boat from the inhospitable waters of Ft. Lauderdale, named it the S/V Pestilence, and sailed south to Haiti.

"Hold Fast" describes what drew these friends to the ocean, and tells the story of what they discovered in the sea.

It paints a picture of the S/V Pestilence in the context of all the sailing maniacs who have come before them, and ultimately attempts to suggest that the secret is always to begin.

From Wikipedia: "In 2004, Marlinspike bought a derelict sailboat and, along with three friends, refurbished it and sailed around the Bahamas while making a documentary about their journey called 'Hold Fast.'"

More here.

Radon: It's back

Back when I bought my first and only house in 1983, radon was a big deal.

Sometimes a sale was contingent on the radon level inside a house.

Like most things, it mattered until it didn't: by the end of the 80s nobody cared.

Now radon levels have returned as an issue.

Last week the Wall Street Journal featured the 2020 edition of the radon problem in an article, excerpts from which appear below.

Testing Your Home for Radon

It doesn't take a super sleuth to detect an invisible hazard possibly lurking in your home: radon.

A variety of tests exist but their effectiveness varies, depending on the type of test and how it is used.

Radon is a naturally occurring radioactive gas released from the ground.

About 1 in 15 homes test high for radon in interior air, and radon is, behind smoking, the second most common cause of lung cancer, according to the Environmental Protection Agency.

Initially, you can buy a long-term radon testing kit, advises Tommy Bowles, a radon expert with the EPA.

A detector remains undisturbed in a lower-level living space for 90 days, then is mailed to a lab for analysis. 

If test results put radon levels at or above 4 picocuries per liter of air, you should have a certified professional perform a test to ensure accuracy.

Professional radon mitigators typically install soil-depressurization systems.

Techniques and costs vary based on the type of foundation the house sits on (basement, concrete slab, or crawl space).

A pipe is inserted into a layer of aggregate or porous material underneath the house.

Many systems have fans that exhaust the air out from under the house into the pipe, which then vents the gas above the home’s roofline.

"The most important message is that we want consumers to test," Mr. Bowles says. "We recommend every two years. Radon can fluctuate year to year."

Also test after major home-improvement projects that disrupt the earth around the house, especially one that converts a basement into living space, he adds.

Many state and local health departments offer residents free radon test kits.

They are also available for purchase online, at home-improvement stores, or through the National Radon Program Services at Kansas State University.

"The D-I-Y tests are great," says EPA's Bowles.

They offer a cost-effective approach for initial screening.

Long-term tests (defined as 90 days or longer) are the most accurate, he notes, because they detect fluctuations in radon levels over time.

When buying or selling a home, contact your state radon program to find a qualified professional to test for radon and/or fix any issues.

In states that don't regulate radon professionals, ask the contractor for proof of proficiency or certification.

WaterShoes

You heard it here first.

The other day I was wondering how long till my right knee, underneath the patella, stops hurting so I can resume my running routine.

It started in early June so it's now coming up on five months.

I stay off my feet for a few days, the soreness is almost gone, and I go running for 2-3 miles: pain at first, then by the time I'm done no pain at all.

The next day it's more sore than before I ran, so I repeat the cycle.

I was walking out to the mailbox pondering this when I thought to myself, "How come there are no shoes with water soles?"

Nike's taken air in every possible direction, but I don't recall ever seeing a shoe with water as its shock absorbing element.

I declare priority: steal the idea if you like but it first appeared here.

I'm gonna noodle around in my attic and closets and cabinets and drawers and workshop and online and see if I can come up with some sort of jury-rigged water soles.

Stay tuned.

Touchdown on Bennu was just the beginning

This last week marked a monumental achievement by NASA: a controlled touchdown on asteroid Bennu some 200 million miles away — with hoped-for sample retrieval to be returned to Earth, the first extraterrestrial material to do so (excepting meteorites) since the final Apollo mission in 1972.

Fast forward to the 2060s, when mining colonies abound in the asteroid belt and on the moons of Jupiter and Saturn.

Can't make it?

No worries: for you (and me) there's "The Expanse," a superb series much of whose action takes place in the asteroid belt, whose residents style themselves "belters."  

Best news of the day?

After four seasons, Amazon renewed the show for a fifth season, which is set to premiere on December 16, 2020.

Post-it Gold

From the website:

A block of sticky notes with gold-plated edges.

3" x 4".

Made in France.

€10.