Rose Knows

Q: Is the Large Hadron Collider going to whip up a black hole that eats the planet? — Felix

A: Highly doubtful. But if it does, and we’re all suddenly converted into disconnected atoms, at least no one will be able to whine, “Told you so”. That would just be annoying.

Q: What’s up with the vice presidential nominee picks? — Joseph (and a whole bunch of other people)

A: The recent announcement of major party running mates shows how two teams can face the same issue and come up with very different results.

In this case, both campaigns wanted to fill gaps in their candidate’s public perception.

The Obama campaign conducted a classic job search: They held interviews, conducted background checks, and in the end picked the best match for the position out of the pool of submissions.

The McCain campaign came up with a list of demographic groups in which they weren’t doing as well as they thought they should, figured out what would appeal to those groups, and fed the criteria into Karl Rove’s old Select-O-Matic. Out popped Sarah Palin.

Right away, Gov. Palin gave a speech in which she strongly implied that disaffected female Hillary voters should vote the McCain/Palin ticket because Palin’s a woman. For why I find this insulting, see my other blog, here or here. (It’s a sidebar to the question at hand, and I already went through the trouble of posting it anyway. And by “the trouble of posting” I mean “the effort to hit some keys and buttons”.)

Now, the question is, did the McCain team pick her in good faith, or is it another Harriet Miers thing? As you may recall, a couple years back, one of the President’s Supreme Court nominees was someone whose primary real-world qualification was that she would appeal to the evangelical voters that Bush needed to have on his side for the 2006 elections. She stayed in the running exactly long enough to get noticed, then pulled out. Evangelicals cheered anyway.

There’s a rather interesting side discussion over whether McCain’s campaign properly vetted Palin: The campaign says they did, but they didn’t seem to contact anyone in politics or the business community. And there’s something very curious about a campaign waiting until the day before the VP announcement to send a team of investigators to the candidate’s home state. This lends credence to the theory — bolstered by people close to the candidacy speaking on terms of anonymity — that McCain wanted to pick Joe Lieberman or Tom Ridge, but had to concede that neither of them were conservative enough to please the voters he was in danger of losing. Specifically, neither of them was sufficiently anti-abortion.

As I write this, word comes out that Palin’s 17-year-old daughter is pregnant, and that young Bristol plans to keep the baby. From what I hear, mood on the convention floor — from the delegates who think it’s more important to preen than to volunteer — is jubilant: She’s going to have the baby! That’s the only thing that matters! That proves that her mom is totally pro-life! Which means McCain isn’t just pandering and social conservatives should vote for him! Let’s raise $10 million this weekend! …Never mind that whole hurricane thing, or that if a Democrat candidate’s kid was going to have a baby the delegates would probably view it as a parental failing, or how Bristol shows even less sign of being pregnant now than she did at the time when, according to some theories, she was pregnant with the kid who is being called her little brother. There is a very cynical part of me that wonders if Bristol’s being forced into pregnancy padding as punishment for some private misdeed.

(As for the aforementioned theories: I’m really not sure what to make of them. Though I do think it’s interesting that Gov. Palin showed no outward signs of pregnancy during her seventh month; flew after her water broke; and was back at work three days after delivering a baby with special needs. O… kay. I don’t know, maybe she’s just Superwoman.)

So: Is Sarah Palin going to hang with the ticket for the long haul, or is she going to drop out after she’s shored up evangelical support but before she gets thoroughly raked over the coals? We’ll know soon enough. It’s been less than a week, and there are already allegations of serious impropriety in the dismissal of the state’s Public Safety Comisioner. There’s that past membership in the Alaska Independence Party to deal with. And who knows what else might come to light now that Palin is under scrutiny? Visit intrade.net for the latest odds on whether Palin with withdraw, and pass the popcorn.

As for Joe Biden: He perfectly complements Obama. He’s more experienced, particularly on foreign policy; perceived as more working-class; and generally the sort of guy you’d want to sit next to on the train. He’s been running for President off and on for over 20 years now, so he knows the drill. He has, apparently, been properly vetted. What’s not to like?

Oh, right: He’s not Hillary Clinton.

Okay, disaffected Hillary Clinton supporters, gather ’round. Let’s have a talk. I know you love her, and that some of you are really disappointed. Fine; it’s your right to feel however you want. But there was no political reason to pick Hillary, and a whole lot of reasons not to. That’s just reality. The McCain campaign thinks your hurt feelings will push you to vote for the Republican ticket, even though their platform directly contradicts so many of Hillary’s position. You’re the only one who can decide whether it’s more important to vote with your heart or your head.

Sorry for the recent lack of posts.  I’ll be back on track soon. In the meantime, please keep those questions coming.

Thanks.  Totally sincere air smooches!

Q: What does a “5.8″ (or “5.6,” or “5.4″) really mean? And why did the number assigned to the July 29 Los Angeles-area earthquake keep changing? — A bunch of people

A: 5.8 (or 5.4) is either an individual judge’s score for a mediocre dive in international competition or a number describing the magnitude of an earthquake as measured by the Richter scale. As these questions were asked over a month after the U.S. Olympic Trials for diving, I’m going to assume people are asking about the quake.

You can read all about the Richter scale on the Wikipedia page or the US Geological Service page, if you’re so inclined. For our purposes, just remember that the Richter scale number describes the amount of energy released by a given earthquake. It’s a logarithmic scale. Yeah, my eyes glazed over at “logarithmic,” too, but it’s not that scary: It means that a 1.0 difference in magnitude on the scale is equivalent to 10 times the amount of energy released. So a 5.4 quake is 10 times stronger than a 4.4 quake, and 100 times stronger than a 3.4 quake. Not terribly intuitive for those of us who don’t care to dredge up memories of high school math, but it’s the scale that caught on. (Those of you who don’t mind so much are welcome to correct and/or clarify in the comments section.)

Right, so what do those numbers actually mean? The USGS categorizes anything from 5.0 to 5.9 as a moderate quake. To put that in context: You don’t usually feel anything under a 3.0. The 1989 SF Bay Area quake (which was actually centered in Santa Cruz County – downtown still looked like a war zone when I started college there a year later) was a 6.9. The 1994 L.A. quake was a 6.7.

A “moderate” quake doesn’t cause much damage here in earthquake country. Last Tuesday, every television station with a helicopter had aerial shots, and the only damage they could find was a busted water pipe. News web sites were plastered with photos of stuff that fell off store shelves. There were some shattered windows here and there, but the main consequence was that cell phone service was overloaded. Many residents have noted that this was likely due to out-of-state friends and relatives calling because they saw “Earthquake in California!!” in bright red letters on a web site.

Everything built here (legally, anyway) is designed to withstand a good-sized quake. We don’t have unreinforced brick buildings, for example. The building codes don’t guarantee that all buildings and roads will be safe, but they’re constantly revised as the people who study this sort of thing learn more. However, in areas of the world that don’t expect earthquakes, a relative low-magnitude temblor can cause significant damage. For example, a December, 2003 magnitude 6.6 quake in San Simeon, CA resulted in two fatalities, about 40 injuries, and serious damage to about 40 buildings. A few days later, the December 2003 earthquake near Bam, Iran, also magnitude 6.6, all but leveled the city and resulted in about 30,000 casualties.

The July 29 quake magnitude number bounced around from 5.6 to 5.8 to 5.4 because the number is computed from data coming in from various seismographs in the region. The seismographs are all reporting their experiences of the earthquake — what it felt like where each individual machine is located — and the final number for a given quake tends to jump around while the USGS is crunching the data.

No post on Southern California earthquakes would be complete without shout-outs to Drs. Kate Hutton and Lucy Jones, the seismologists who give the official word from the USGS lab at Caltech. They’re like folk heroes around here. Dr. Kate is widely known as “The Earthquake Lady”. She’s like your friend’s super-cool grandma who knows everything and doesn’t mind explaining it to you over and over again.. You can watch most of her July 29 press conference on YouTube. Dr. Lucy is the aunt who assures you that whatever Mommy and Daddy are fighting about, it’s not your fault. She’s the one more likely to show up on national newscasts. Locals remember the time in 1992 when she held a press conference while holding her sleeping kid. Earthquakes are serious business, but so is trying to keep a kid asleep.

Q: Who actually sang and played the instruments on “That Thing You Do”? — Katy

A: The singing I can tell you: Lead vocals were by Mike Viola of The Candy Butchers and, more recently, the fine collection of writers who worked on Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story. (Also a major contributor: Dan Bern. He has nothing else to do with this answer, but I will always link to Dan Bern when I have an excuse.) Adam Schlesinger, who wrote the song right around the time Fountains of Wayne was forming, sang backup. (Incidentally, he also wrote a bunch of the faux-80s songs for Music and Lyrics and was nominated for a Tony for the music for Cry-Baby. Which also has nothing else to do with this answer, but that’s obviously no deterrent to me.)

The instruments… there, I keep running into dead ends. The best I can come up with is, “session musicians”. The actors in the movie were well-schooled in playing their instruments on camera, but there’s no indication that they also performed on the released soundtrack.

I’ve trying to hunt down a used copy of the soundtrack CD so I can take a peek at the liner notes, but I haven’t had any luck so far. If anyone reading this owns a copy and can glean anything about the musicians from the packaging, shoot me the info and I’ll post a follow-up.

Q: What’s the difference between “modern art” and “contemporary art”? — Coco

A: The answer to this depends on why, exactly, you’re asking.

If you’re taking an art history class, then it should be pretty safe to say that “modern art” started in the late 19th century, when the Impressionists hit the scene. “Contemporary art” is usually given a starting point somewhere in the 1960’s, give or take a decade — probably because that’s when the people writing up the guidelines realized that trends really were changing. When in doubt, figure that if the art was produced in your lifetime (or the lifetime of the person drawing up the test you’re supposed to be studying for), it’s contemporary. This especially goes for new work for sale at galleries.

If you’re talking about the real world, then the difference is the 3000 miles between MoMA in New York and MOCA in Los Angeles. MoMA’s collection is broader than MOCA’s, but it’s also been around a lot longer. When it comes to recent acquisitions and exhibitions, there’s significant overlap — so, really? Unless you’re talking to an art history snob, just pick a label and go with it.

(Note to any art history snobs reading this: There’s nothing wrong with being an art history snob. But in my experience, getting hung up on labels takes away from actually viewing and considering works of art on their own terms. And that’s just plain unfortunate.)

Q: Where can i find a copy of Jerry Lewis’ unreleased 1972 movie, The Day the Clown Cried? He plays a clown in a concentration camp. Thank you. — Bean

A: At Jerry Lewis’s house.

A quick explanation for everyone who’s not Bean: The Day the Clown Cried was going to be Jerry Lewis’s Big Serious Film: The story of a circus clown in Nazi Germany who winds up a political prisoner (because he mocked Hitler, not because he was a clown), starts performing for Jewish kids in the camp, and is eventually tasked with leading children to the gas chamber.

I’m not making this up. Check out the Wikipedia page or IMDB entry if you don’t believe me.

Thanks to ongoing financial disputes, no finished copies of this film exist in the wild. There are some scripts floating around; there are some photos; there are even some behind-the-scenes clips. And according to everyone who’s seen it — except for Jerry Lewis — it’s best to keep it that way.

According to various sources, Jerry Lewis has the only known videotape copy of The Day the Clown Cried. It’s said that he keeps it locked away in his office, occasionally bringing it out to reflect on what might have been. Legend has it that the original negative is out there somewhere, but is too ashamed to show itself. (That, or it’s still in the possession of a production company which claims they’re owed money on the film. Which is pretty much the same thing.)

Still don’t believe in the inherent awfulness of this film? Check out the script. Read the articles collected at Subterranean Cinema, where they’ve collected everything there is to collect. (Warning: By clicking on that link, you are exposing yourself to pictures of Jerry Lewis in clown makeup.)

See, everyone who’s not Bean? I told you I wasn’t making this up.

Back to the question. I’ve answered it in the literal sense, but I get the feeling that despite all warnings, you actually want to view this piece of cinematic…uh, cinema. According to his web site, “Jerry hopes to someday complete the film, which remains to this day, a significant expression of cinematic art, suspended in the abyss of international litigation.” So all you have to do is track down Jerry Lewis, convince him that you’re the person to untangle the legal mess (which seems untangleable by design, but never mind), and ask him to show you his copy so that you can testify as to the film’s cinematic merit. View it, thank him, and run like hell. Yes, it’s a mean thing to do, but this is the guy who still thinks it was a good idea to play a complicit clown in a concentration camp. I think you’d be about even.

Q: Why does my six-year-old daughter ask so many questions – and in such a rapid-fire way? — Vanilla Cokehead

A: Because until she learns how to type more quickly, you’re more convenient than Google. Once she’s up to 40 wpm, you’ll be able to return to your beverage.

Q: Is it true that boys are stupid? — Jade Paris

A: Yes. Yes, they are. Nearly uniformly so. So uniformly that I suspect a genetic basis.

Please note that not all guys are stupid, and not all stupid people are guys. And we’re talking about a specific type of stupidity here: If you know someone who, say, thinks that ignoring a problem will make it go away, or expects that reality will conform to their plans rather than vice versa, or insists on having the latest GPS navigator in their dashboard but never uses it, or comes across you seething and punching a pillow and honestly thinks you’ve taken up boxing — I’ll give 97% odds that it’s a guy.

As this type of stupidity is not entirely confined to guys, I’ll conjecture that it’s due to a genetic defect on the X chromosome. In women, it can be overridden by a dominant gene on their other X chromosome. Men, however, have nothing on the Y chromosome to cancel it out. (Actually, they don’t have much of anything on the Y chromosome: The Y has about a third the base pairs as the X chromosome, contains around 86 genes — compared to nearly 1000 for the X chromosome — and 95% of it is incapable of recombining with genes from the X chromosome — i.e., changing. Which is great for genetic research, but not so great for producing guys who do things differently than their fathers). Add testosterone and stir. Watch the inability to leave a plumbing job to the professionals disappear.

Now, I’m not a geneticist, which I’m sure will come as no surprise to any geneticists reading this. But it’s a place to start. And the notion of a genetic basis is more appealing than the alternative: That boy-type stupidity has been allowed to exist for so long because boys afflicted with that particular kind of stupidity are the ones in charge, and they go with what they know.

I welcome other theories and opinions, of course. That’s what the “comments” section is for. But, boys, if you have a knee-jerk need to tell me I’m wrong, and that it’s the girls who are stupid, ask yourself: Do I have a whole bunch of gadgets that I absolutely had to have, only to be either used once and stowed in a drawer because it was too much trouble, or to be used diligently until the moment the next micro-upgrade came out — an upgrade that I had to have as soon as it came out, even if I secretly suspected it wasn’t really an improvement? If the answer is in any part “yes,” or even “yes, but…” then you should probably sit this one out.

Thanks for your Q’s. I’m just about ready to start posting A’s.

Alert the media.

Wait, we are the media.