"... with their two cats, Ted and Sylvia, watching Katharine Hepburn movies, or knitting, decorating cakes, and hanging pet-themed ornaments on the Christmas trees, as in his five-star 2007 review of Pet Pawprint Hanging DIY Keepsake Ornament. But Kevin Killian in the review section was not the real Kevin Killian, at least not exactly. Did Killian have children, as he claimed in several reviews? No. Did he enjoy fine foods? No. (According to friends, he lived on a diet of only microwave meals and Tab.)... Did that twelve-color set of ballpoint pens really trigger a memory of attending school as an American boy in rural France, where his classmates had 'beautiful pens that were almost family heirlooms?'..."
That's in The New Yorker, where they are not too careful about whether to put a question mark inside a quotation mark, and the answer to the question is no.
Killian was writing Amazon reviews as a sort of art project. Here's an Amazon Associates link to a book that collects his reviews — "Selected Amazon Reviews."
... when it was asked "Why should I vote for Donald Trump," but, when asked "Why should I vote for Kamala Harris," said...
"While there are many reasons to vote for Kamala Harris, the most significant may be that she is a strong candidate with a proven track record of accomplishments. As the first female vice president, Harris has already broken down major gender barriers and her career in politics has been characterized by a commitment to progressive ideals and a focus on helping disenchanted communities."
I made that a gift link so you can double check my skepticism. Excerpt:
Artificial intelligence software added late last year to improve Alexa’s accuracy instead helped land Amazon at the center of an embarrassing political dust-up, with Trump spokesman Steven Cheung accusing the company in a post on X of “BIG TECH ELECTION INTERFERENCE!”
It's just an "embarrassing" "dust-up." Nothing big, deep, and nefarious.
Amazon said Alexa’s behavior was “an error that was quickly fixed.”
Oh, well then. Just "an error." And "quickly fixed." Yes, I believe it was a mistake to make it so obvious and easily demonstrated and shared and that, on notice, Amazon quickly fixed it. But I remain suspicious that Alexa contains bias in favor of the Democratic Party.
Meade intended to say: Please add that to our Audible account. But by hitting a share button, Amazon added the seemingly friendly generic message, "I think you might like this book." The book is "How to Die"! I think you might like How to Die....
Actually, I think the "Seneca" tag originated as a commenter name, here. Back in 2009, someone with the pen name Seneca helped me distinguish a butterfly from a moth (and another commenter made a comic animation out of my photograph of a rather moth-y butterfly).
"The psychologist Joshua Klapow told Time magazine that online shopping is 'psychologically so powerful.' It can temporarily lift one’s mood, providing a special type of retail therapy purified by a total lack of effort. E-buyers can bypass the schlep, the dreaded walk-around inside a store, the money handling or grueling Apple Pay tap. The human interaction...."
[Gen Z] is increasingly posting on social media in the manner of professional influencers: sharing daily routines, pitching or unboxing products, modeling clothing and advertising personal Amazon storefronts. These videos are often viewed as cool and entrepreneurial by peers (and sometimes by bemused parents)....
It's "viewed as cool" — that it, it's not delusional and embarrassing to behave, in social media, as if you're already an influencer. This is a strange issue, because what is it to be a "real" influencer? What are/were "influencers"? We used to critique them as fake celebrities, fake stars, so why be "bemused" that younger people are faking the fakery? If it was fake to begin with, then faking the fake should be cool. It's savvy and meta.
We're repainting the rooms in the 100-year-old part of our house, and — instead of, once again, painting around the brass hardware on the windows and in the closets — for the first time, these various pieces got removed. Every time the trim had been repainted, the painter had slopped some paint onto the metal, and each painter, it seems, felt as though they were only following the paint-slopping tradition. On the window handles, I myself had recently chosen to close up the gaps and paint the entire surface.
But all those hooks in the coat closet looked like a lot of trouble to paint around, and we got the idea to unscrew everything. Was this going to involve paint stripper? No! I looked it up on the internet, and it turns out what you need is a crockpot. So we did unscrew all the window and closet hardware — 30 items, plus over 100 screws — and cook them overnight in water and Dawn detergent.
"Corporate partners come and go, but James Bond endures. He endures precisely because he is being protected by people who love him.
The current deal with Amazon gives Barbara Broccoli and Michael Wilson, who own 50 percent of the Bond empire, ironclad assurances of continued artistic control. But will this always be the case?... The Bond movies are truly the most bespoke and handmade films I’ve ever worked on. That’s why they are original, thorny, eccentric and special. They were never created with lawyers and accountants and e-commerce mass marketing pollsters hovering in the background.
This is also why they can afford to be daring."
So... keep James Bond James Bond, right? Think again! Here's Logan's favorite thing that happened in the making of "Skyfall":
Sam Mendes, the director, and I
marched into Barbara and Michael’s office, sat at the family table and
pitched the first scene between Bond and the villain, Raoul Silva. Now,
the moment 007 first encounters his archnemesis is often the iconic
moment in a Bond movie, the scene around which you build a lot of the
narrative and cinematic rhythms.... Well, Sam and I boldly announced we
wanted to do this pivotal scene as a homoerotic seduction. Barbara and
Michael didn’t need to poll a focus group. They didn’t need to vet this
radical idea with any studio or corporation — they loved it instantly.
They knew it was fresh and new, provocative in a way that keeps the
franchise contemporary. They weren’t afraid of controversy. In my
experience, not many big movies can work with such freedom and risky
joy.
"'The real financial value behind this deal is the treasure trove of IP in the deep catalog that we plan to reimagine and develop together with MGM’s talented team,' said Mike Hopkins, senior vice president of Prime Video and Amazon Studios... The deal emphasizes Amazon’s willingness to spend deeply to remain competitive in the crowded streaming market... [MGM] owns the James Bond catalog and has made several hit shows including 'The Handmaid’s Tale' and 'Fargo.' It also owns premium cable network Epix and owns several popular reality TV shows, including 'Shark Tank,' 'Survivor' and 'The Real Housewives.'"
That list of what MGM owns seems ludicrously wan. The only movies mentioned in that article are "the James Bond catalog." At Variety, the story names a few more movies, the ones that Hopkins himself listed: “12 Angry Men,” “Basic Instinct,” “Creed” and “Rocky,” “Legally Blonde,” “Moonstruck,” “Poltergeist,” “Raging Bull,” “Robocop,” “Silence of the Lambs,” “Stargate,” “Thelma & Louise,” “Tomb Raider,” “The Magnificent Seven,” “The Pink Panther,” “The Thomas Crown Affair.”
Meanwhile, MGM has been around since the 1920s, and there are so many great movies from all those decades — nearly a century. But all that grandeur amounts to just about nothing in our stupid little world of TV streaming. Here they are touting the "treasure trove of IP in the deep catalog" and they don't name one thing from the Golden Age of Hollywood. Does anyone even use that term anymore?
IN THE COMMENTS: I knew some of old MGM movies had changed hands — specifically, "The Wizard of Oz," but readers emailed me to say MGM unloaded all the "golden age" material.
I didn’t write the loopholes you exploit, @amazon – your armies of lawyers and lobbyists did. But you bet I’ll fight to make you pay your fair share. And fight your union-busting. And fight to break up Big Tech so you’re not powerful enough to heckle senators with snotty tweets. https://t.co/3vCAI93MST
How much do powerful people enjoy their power? Ah! I have crushed my enemies!! How much of that sort of thing goes on in their head?
I feel rather certain that they must get emotional thrills, because — unless they came into their power by birth — they have to go through so much struggle to get their power. I would never do it, and I know I don't get pleasure from exerting power. I have a distaste for it. I know these people who pursue it are emotionally different from me, and I wonder how does it feel? I'm saying this on the occasion of Elizabeth Warren's tweet because I'm certain that if I were a U.S. Senator — if somehow that awful role were foisted on me — and I thought of that wisecrack, I would never write it out and publish.
But Warren thought it was good — openly triumphing at power. I think of this:
"But the decision by Amazon to push Parler off its dominant cloud-computing service illustrates just how powerful its content-moderation capabilities are as well.... [T]he companies that provide the technical infrastructure that powers websites and services where people express opinions have vast power as well, though they rarely use it. They include little-known companies that register website domains for customers; so-called content delivery networks, which can boost the speed at which webpages load; and Internet service providers, which connect homes and businesses to the Web.... [Amazon's] Amazon Web Services is the dominant provider of cloud infrastructure services, which let customers rent data storage and processing capabilities over the Web instead of running their own data centers.... [AWS's] Trust & Safety team, which has fewer than 100 workers, acts only on complaints received.
In its reply to Parler’s suit, Amazon said it received reports in mid-November that the social network was 'hosting content threatening violence.'... It accused Amazon of conspiring with Twitter to take the smaller competitor offline just as it was significantly gaining users in the wake of Twitter permanently banning Trump.... 'Without AWS, Parler is finished as it has no way to get online.'"
Here's the top-rated comment at WaPo: "If you support a baker choosing to not selling a wedding cake to a same-sex couple, then it follows you must support a company choosing not to do business with a customer that behaves in a manner contrary to the company's known parameters. As the same-sex couple was told, go find someone else to bake your cake. Parler should do the same. If they can't, perhaps it's the 'cake' they are trying to bake."
IN THE COMMENTS: MayBee takes on the cake analogy:
Parler was already on AWS.
So the baker (aside from scale, monopoly considerations, and anti trust issues) situation would have to be more like:
The gay couple hired the baker, paid the baker, and then on the day of the wedding the baker refused to deliver the cake. The baker, however, delivered a lot of cakes to your ex-boyfriends wedding on the same day. And then the baker announced you were dangerous.
"... and asking for a temporary restraining order to prevent the tech giant from blocking access to cloud computing services.
Amazon told Parler over the weekend that it would shut off service because 'a steady increase in violent content' on the site showed that the company did not have a reliable process to prevent it from violating Amazon’s terms of service. Amazon said it would ensure Parler’s data was preserved so that it could migrate to a new hosting provider.
Millions of people turned to Parler after Twitter and Facebook barred President Trump following the riot at the Capitol last week. Apple and Google both kicked Parler out of their app stores at the end of the week, though users who already had downloaded the app could still use it. But the app relied on Amazon’s cloud computing technology to work.... Parler did not provide direct evidence showing Amazon and Twitter coordinated the response. Instead, it pointed to a December news release announcing a multiyear strategic partnership between Amazon and Twitter, and it made references to Twitter’s own challenges policing its content."
"... by having people categorize voice recordings. The company held internal trials and says it tried to address any biases that might arise from varying ethnicity, gender, or age.
In our experience, the Halo could detect ups and downs in our voice, but seemed to misinterpret situations regularly. And some of the feedback feels, ironically, a bit tone-deaf — especially when judging a woman’s voice.
Our sample size of two isn’t sufficient to conclude whether Amazon’s AI has gender bias. But when we both analyzed our weeks of tone data, some patterns emerged. The three most-used terms to describe each of us were the same: 'focused,' 'interested' and 'knowledgeable.' The terms diverged when we filtered just for ones with negative connotations. In declining order of frequency, the Halo described Geoffrey’s tone as 'sad,' 'opinionated,' 'stern' and 'hesitant.' Heather, on the other hand, got 'dismissive,' 'stubborn,' 'stern' and 'condescending.'... The very existence of a tone-policing AI that makes judgment calls in those terms feels sexist. Amazon has created an automated system that essentially says, 'Hey, sweetie, why don’t you smile more?'"
I think it would be cool to have a wristband that informed me what my tone was... and even cooler to have a conversation with a trusted companion while we both had these tone-police wristbands on and could see each other's display. But wait... why do we need wristbands? Why can't I have this AI in my iPhone and monitor the tone of anybody I happen to be talking to, and why shouldn't I assume that anyone listening to me can be generating this information? Is this alarming?
If it's alarming, is it because we're going to be off-loading our human judgment that makes us so brilliantly sensitive to the infinite tones of the human voice? Is it because a machine will seem objective, so that you won't just wonder whether someone is being condescending to you, you'll have a scientific/"scientific" verification of condescension or whatever? Is it because you'll figure out how to train your voice to get words you like to appear on the screen and you won't quite be you anymore? Is it because you won't know the extent to which others have trained their voice to disguise their real intentions and the value of our gift for the understanding of speech will crash?
Oh, by the way, I'm an Amazon Associate, so when — if — you buy a Halo wristband, I'd appreciate it if you'd use this link.
I needed to buy some 3M High Strength Small Hole Repair, and I got sidetracked into reading the question and answer section at Amazon. This is the most up-voted exchange:
Question: How many calories does this have? I am looking for an alternative to cream cheese?
Answer: 1 tbsp of 3M patch plus has about 30 calories. This is slightly less than 1 tbsp of whipped cream cheese which has about 35 calories. The textures are very similar and it makes great substitute, though there is a slight grittiness from the "nanotechnology". This nanotechnology, a secret ingredient not listed on 3 M's label, a is claimed by competitor company Red Devil to be "little balls of glass". While glass itself is not toxic, it can create a mild constipation such as you might have experienced when eating mud pies or sand cookies.
It's always nice to stumble into a backwater of weird Amazon.
"... were on a sacred list of places where we could sit and talk without being scolded, a list that also included dingier spots: the sticky vinyl booths of diners, coffee shops with armchairs, and the carpeted aisles of chain bookstores. Today all those places where we lingered might as well be from another world, they seem so inefficient and wonderful.... Department stores were the slick behemoths of their time, replacing tailors and specialty shops. Now we look back at them as homey and personal — and remember the way they enabled a lost American ideal of middle-class consumerism. A similar fate befell the country’s bookstores: Outcry met the giant Barnes & Noble stores in the 1990s, when they were seen as threatening smaller local rivals. But then those same megastores were displaced and undercut by Amazon, and their disappearance hurt for the same reason Lord & Taylor’s does: no more open bathrooms and cafes. No more freedom to browse for hours. No more indifference that felt like welcome. The pandemic has only underscored this loss. There is no such thing, in 2020, as a place to spend the kind of intimate hours department stores facilitated. We can’t gather spontaneously, certainly not inside, and certainly not for an entire day. Today, I purchase my family’s clothing with a click on my phone in a minute-long break between work, child care and worrying about the news.... The internet enables people from all backgrounds, especially Black shoppers, gender nonconforming and trans shoppers and those with different body types, to find clothes that make them feel great without worrying about the judgment or the profiling they might encounter at retail stores. This is no small benefit: It’s a huge step forward. So yes, the era of department stores has passed...."
"... they’re being unfairly endangered by working in warehouses filled with other workers. It’s unclear how deliveries could continue if the workers who sort, pack, and ship Americans’ goods start getting sick in droves.... [T]his is the first confirmed case of the disease among the company’s hourly warehouse employees in the United States. These workers make up the majority of Amazon’s 600,000-strong workforce.... The incident rattled some of the warehouse workers, who already feel they are being underpaid for a risky job.... On Monday, Amazon announced plans to hire 100,000 more warehouse workers to meet the growing demand, and the company added $2 to American warehouse workers’ hourly pay.... One worker told me that she wished she could just stay at home with pay, like so many white-collar Americans are doing now.... 'We’re putting our lives in danger.'"
I wonder how many people will walk away from jobs like that (especially if they get enough money and protection from eviction from the government). At the same time, there are people who have lost jobs — notably, servers in restaurants and bars. Amazon is hiring. Will those jobs go unfilled or will newly out of work people snap them up?
Keeping Amazon going is enormously important to the millions of Americans who are sheltering in place. I have not set foot in any store since March 2d, but we have received orders from Amazon (including an order from Whole Foods Prime Delivery). If Amazon stopped working, we would look at our dwindling supplies with much more anxiety and alarm.
Note that Amazon owns Ring, and people who buy and install these devices are facilitating Amazon's business, which is hurt by the theft of packages left outside customers' houses. Amazon ought to give us the devices free and given an Amazon Prime discount to people who keep them up and running.
It's interesting to see how we balance security and privacy as we accept these devices. Imagine if the government simply required us to accept the installation of the devices and imposed its app on all cell phones. What if the city added $1,000 a year to the property tax on any home that did not maintain a Ring-type surveillance doorbell? Of course, we would scream.
But here we are accepting the thing, because it seems cool, and it's low-priced. (If you want one, please buy it here, so that I get a percentage, since I am an "Amazon Associate" and have — voluntarily!! — linked my fortunes to Amazon.) Since the device is voluntary, those who accept it onto their property feel they are gaining security.
If you, the person inside the house, are peeping out, then, as the film professor says, you have the sense that whoever approaches your house is "the vulnerable one." The conventions of cinematography say, you are in control, you have the power. That's important... at least some of the time.
Or maybe all of the time if the world has already changed to the point where children don't come up to doors to ask if a child who lives there can come out to play and neighbors stop by to chat.
ADDED: The second part of the quote in the post title is confusing: "The peephole makes the person looking through the peephole into the vulnerable one." I assume Zimmer didn't mean to say 2 different things, and that "the person looking through the peephole" means the person outside of the house who is being watched from inside the house. But taken literally, it seems more like the one who is looking out through the peephole — the homeowner who wanted to do surveillance — has become vulnerable. We'd need some more clever verbiage to sketch out that theory.
That trope has roots as far back as Greek Mythology, where a quite literal hunter, Actaeon, is transformed into a deer by Artemis and eventually torn apart by his own dogs.
The Hunter of Monsters in general lives by this trope in a supernatural context, since monsters, in general, are often portrayed as predators of human beings, and human beings tend not to like being prey....
Zimmer is a film scholar, and this trope appears in many movies — "M... Dr. Mabuse... North by Northwest... To Catch a Thief..." — and we all know the cartoons with the hunter-becomes-the-hunted plot. Here's the classic:
IN THE COMMENTS: Roger Sweeny said:
I think she means that if you are looking through the peephole worrying that someone may be trying to do you wrong, you are feeling vulnerable. You are worrying that something bad could happen to you, caused by the person on the other side of the peephole.
I found that hard to coordinate with the first sentence: "The traditional voyeuristic peephole in film suggests the person being watched is under threat." But Zimmer did say "traditional," so it may be that in the cinematic tradition — such as "Psycho" — the peephole is in a secretive pace, used for spying on someone who thinks no one's watching and gets naked, but with the Ring, the thing is out and proud and the person approaching is outside and expecting to be seen. The person who is in private, inside the house is not seen via the peephole, but that person's sense of vulnerability is manifested by the device. The obvious Ring device isn't a way to sneak a look at someone but to let them know in advance that you're suspicious of them.
For a complete reversal of the peephole, see the "Reverse Peephole" episode of "Seinfeld":
"Newman and I are reversing the peepholes on our door. So you can see in..."/"To prevent an ambush"/"But then anyone can just look in and see you"/"Our policy is, we're comfortable with our bodies. You know, if someone wants to help themselves to an eyeful, well, we say, 'Enjoy the show.'"
AND: Don't forget the great 60s slogan, "Power to the Peephole!"
"... and costs as little as $800. While the domes look simple, installing them, which requires hours of manual labor involving about 400 pieces, is tough, said Mark Briskin, the general manager of the Park Terrace Hotel, which has two fake igloos on its roof.... 'You are enclosed in this little bubble,' said Hannah Jentz, 28, who recently spent an evening during the holidays there. 'You can see the tree, you can people-watch, but you get to escape from the cold, and you don’t have people bumping into you.' In the first two weeks of the month, City Winery had more than 1,000 reservations for the domes."
It's worth clicking through to see the photographs. It's pretty obvious that the NYT and the photographer think these contraptions and the decor within are laughably shoddy.
I'm especially amused by the third photograph, which shows an ordinary-looking couple sitting at a table that has a fake-fur tablecloth, which seems rather gross. On the table is a strange wooden contraption that seems to be a little clothesline — complete with clothespins! — for some sort of dark, dried fish or meat. These people can't be escaping from the cold, because the man is only wearing a thin shirt —so thin his smart phone is weighing the pocket down quite unattractively. Everyone in the photograph, including a lady in the background has a glass tipped up into the same position. It's synchronized sipping.
I looked up "igloo" at Amazon to see if a plastic dome would come up — my idea of an igloo is something made of snow — and it did: Garden Dome Igloo - 12 Ft Stylish Conservatory, Play Area, Greenhouse or Gazebo. It looks much more elegant in the photograph there than in the comical pictures at the New York Times. Note: I am not recommending this thing! 55% of the comments at Amazon are 1-star reviews. I'll collect just those comments — here — for the comedy.
Here's a question for these New York "igloo" users: Are you not committing the political sin of cultural appropriation? You are not Inuit:
The NYT looks at the various solutions NYC people are using to grasp at a chance of living in the modern America enjoyed by nonNYers.
You could luck out and have some saintly older lady in your building who accepts packages for all the residents.
You could pay for the services of businesses that will receive your stuff. Then you go there to pick up it (which could be more trouble than going to retail stores and buying what you need). The going rate seems to be $5 per package!
In a combination of those 2 ideas, there's a startup, sort of like Uber, where residents who are home all the time are matched up with people who need someone to receive your packages. The going rate still seems to be $5 per package, and that opens the way to a worse crime problem as vulnerable stay-at-homes open their door to strangers.
You could have your personal stuff delivered to your work place, mooching off your employer (such a problem companies are banning it).
You could get a much larger (locking) mailbox at your residence. And Amazon has its "Hub Lockers" where you could go pick up your stuff in their big locking boxes (but then you've got to travel to one of their places).
You could get one of those video doorbells and watch the theft. This is a good option if you're wondering what kind of people commit this crime. It can't be that the police will investigate. Maybe someday face identification software will make it easy to catch the thieves based on the doorbell video, but, no, they'll cover their faces, won't they?
Maybe it's sort of like the way it's not worth it to have a car in New York City. There's this modern convenience that people outside of the city love and won't do without, but you can get by without. Walk or take a bus or train or cab. People who don't live in NYC can't live like that. Ordering everything on line? Don't do it. Use the stores. Part of living in NYC is loving the things you can do that the nonNYers can't. Don't taint that good feeling with awkward efforts to do the things people easily do outside of NYC. The NYC tradition is to sneer at people who want to live in that nonNYC way.
(My basis for opining on NYC tradition: I lived in NYC from 1973 to 1984 and 2007 to 2008.)
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