Movies, hate, and hoaxes
The coffee is strong and tasty as I blog from Grounds to Go, my second office. Nothing like a Friday to dredge from the deep recesses. To whit:
Central Nebraska forgot to put its free admission where its votes were. “Forrest Gump” won the Independent’s Movie Madness tournament, but of the three shows than ran for free at the Grand last weekend, the Gumpster attracted the fewest folks. Don’t look a gift movie in the mouth.
We reversed out fortunes, actually. The Grand’s three choices were “Gump," “The Shawshank Redemption,” which was second, and “Raiders of the Lost Ark,” which came in third. But at the box office (it was free!) “Raiders” nearly doubled “Gump” and was well ahead of a runner-up “Shawshank.”
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Pete Letheby’s Friday column cut to the chase about those using the immigration issue to traffic in hate. His reference to Woody Guthrie’s music reminded me of the haunting beauty of Nancy Griffith’s rendition of Guthrie and Martin Hoffman’s “Deportee (Plane Wreck at Los Gatos)” Read the piece. Listen to the music. I wrote a few weeks ago about keeping the debate in the reasonable range the president called the “rational middle.” Pete’s column reminds us that some of loudest voices will be neither.
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In my Friday column I recommended some summer reading including “Hippo Eats Dwarf,” which details the hoaxes and other crap floating in cyberspace that often take on not only lives of their own but a patina of truth. Readers often send me stories they have found or have been sent to them. These tales are often spectacular, gruesome, or exceedingly graphic. And completely false. Those of us who use the Internet extensively (or anyone for that matter) need to develop what the book calls “Reality Rules,” guides to sanity and the truth. Maybe we should even throw in some principles of logic along the way. Alex Boese, who wrote “Hippo,” reminds us that just because it is on the Internet does not make it the truth. To which I would add the 1,000 Person Rule: If 1,000 people say a stupid thing, it’s still a stupid thing. Yes, I know. This is on the Internet.
I’ll be blogging from Scooter’s next Tuesday afternoon.