"But who knew (other than paleontologists) that there was a time in Earth’s history when it rained for a million years?"

"Or about the forty million years when moss dominated the planet? Or about how plankton, by inventing photosynthesis and thereby giving off oxygen in the course of some two billion years, transformed Earth’s yellow methane-filled atmosphere into blue skies, and the lifeless landscape into forests of green? In William Steig’s book 'Rotten Island,' illustrations show erupting volcanoes and creepy sea creatures and thorny plants and vicious land animals. One day, a jealous battle starts over a new life-form: a flower. Violence, destruction, giant insects, and ice and fire ensue, and lead to a mass extinction. I used to think that 'Rotten Island' was about the disastrous pettiness of human wants and behaviors, and about how much better life might be without us. Now I see it as a reasonably accurate visual history of our planet, with extra polka dots and stripes, in watercolor...."

From "Reinventing the Dinosaur 'Life on Our Planet,' a new Netflix nature documentary, renews our fascination with our most feared and loved precursors" (The New Yorker).

We watched the first episode of this series last night. I wasn't going to continue, but now that I know that moss and plankton will get their due — that it won't be all lumbering CGI dinosaurs and Morgan Freeman speaking ponderously about who's fighting and winning dominion over Earth — I might give another episode a chance.

"I mention a television interview with Freeman in 2005, in which he said the only way to get rid of racism was to stop talking about it."

"'I’m going to stop calling you a white man,' he told the white host, 'and I’m going to ask you to stop calling me a black man.' I ask if he still feels the same." 

I'm reading "Morgan Freeman: it’s an insult to be called African-American/In a rare interview, the Hollywood legend hits out at Black History Month, and talks about Sidney Poitier and why he’s envious of Denzel Washington’s career" (London Times).

Morgan doesn't answer the question asked. He offers "Two things I can say publicly that I do not like," suggesting there are other things he thinks but will not say.

"Instead of receiving applause and purple hearts for the resurgence of a school, you find yourself maligned by a few feebleminded creeps."

Said Joe Clark, quoted in "Joe Clark, Tough Principal at New Jersey High School, Dies at 82/Bullhorn in hand, he roamed the hallways as he imposed discipline, expelling 'miscreants' and restoring order. Morgan Freeman portrayed him in the film 'Lean on Me'" (NYT). 

When Mr. Clark, a former Army drill sergeant, arrived at Eastside High School in Paterson in 1982, he declared it a “caldron of violence.” He expelled 300 students for disciplinary problems in his first week.  When he tossed out — “expurgated,” as he put it — about 60 more students five years later, he called them “leeches, miscreants and hoodlums.”...

Mr. Clark, who oversaw a poor, largely Black and Hispanic student body, denounced affirmative action and welfare policies and “hocus-pocus liberals.” When “60 Minutes” profiled him in 1988, he told the correspondent Harry Reasoner: “Because we were slaves does not mean that you’ve got to be hoodlums and thugs and knock people in the head and rob people and rape people. No, I cannot accept that. And I make no more alibis for Blacks. I simply say work hard for what you want.”

I'm surprised that the NYT allows comments. Comments on an obituary? I don't think that's the norm. But I can see why they wanted comments here, and I appreciate it. The film — which I've never seen — is remembered fondly by many people, and of course, the love for Morgan Freeman is lavish. But everything I'm reading in the obituary strikes me today as so archaic. Anyone talking like that today... it's hard to picture!

Here's the top-rated comment: 

The worst movie I've ever seen links the newly accused Morgan Freeman with the key Harvey Weinstein accuser Ashley Judd.

Last fall, when the stories about Harvey Weinstein were breaking, I blogged about him repeatedly and got pushback from commenters who thought my blogging was out of proportion to his importance and to the significance of his alleged misdeeds. Sample comment on a post titled "Not even one 'Weekend Update' joke about Harvey Weinstein on last night's 'SNL'":

We talked about Benghazi for months and months despite the lower death toll and lack of new information.

But Ann buries [the Las Vegas massacre] under a flood of Weinstein topics. Not even our pussy grabber in chief got such attention about his harrassing ways.

This is the kind of comment that caused me to abandon comments when I tried them in the first few months of the blog, this insinuation that I'm doing something devious by blogging about one thing when something else is more important and that this imbalance reveals that I favor one political side over another. When I restarted comments, later that year, I worked on not taking that bait. I write about what I find bloggable, following my various instincts. You can analyze what's happening in my head, but I don't need to wreck my momentum to examine and articulate why I'm writing about this and not that.

But on the Weinstein topic, I see that I did react, perhaps because that post is premised on the idea that the Weinstein story is so important that failing to address it on "SNL" means something. That is (I can see now), I was doing to "SNL" what commenters have done to me. Anyway, I wrote this in the comments:

The idea that people don't know Weinstein is ridiculous. The movie business is one of the businesses that Americans are most interested in. We consume the product in mass quantities.

Whether you recognize the name of one of the most prominent executives or not, his misdeeds are important news, especially since he was making decisions on what went into a product that we ingested into our brain and our culture.

Even if you yourself don't watch movies, you should care about what's going into the head of your fellow citizen.

Those who are trying to tell me I'm giving to much importance to this story could try addressing these reasons, not just emptily complaining that I'm giving this too much attention. I suspect that you are agitated by how damaging this story might be to something you care about.

By the way, I saw the movie Ashley Judd made at the time she had her encounter with HW. It was called "Kiss the Girls," and it came out in the 90s, when I consumed a lot of movies. I saw it because it was touted as "neo-noir" and supposed to be excellent. But afterward, somebody just reminded me, I said it was the wors[t] movie I'd ever seen. I'd forgotten that, but the person I saw the movie with remembered and said: "you thought it was sexualizing female victims and trying to titillate the audience when the women are crime victims, while acting like it’s taking a perspective that is against crime."

Ashley Judd was important. Three days before that SNL-didn't-talk-about-it post of mine, the NYT wrote about Judd in "Harvey Weinstein Paid Off Sexual Harassment Accusers for Decades."

When Mr. Weinstein invited Ms. Judd to breakfast in Beverly Hills, she had been shooting the thriller “Kiss the Girls” all night, but the meeting seemed too important to miss. After arriving at the hotel lobby, she was surprised to learn that they would be talking in his suite; she decided to order cereal, she said, so the food would come quickly and she could leave.

Mr. Weinstein soon issued invitation after invitation, she said. Could he give her a massage? When she refused, he suggested a shoulder rub. She rejected that too, she recalled. He steered her toward a closet, asking her to help pick out his clothing for the day, and then toward the bathroom. Would she watch him take a shower? she remembered him saying.

“I said no, a lot of ways, a lot of times, and he always came back at me with some new ask,” Ms. Judd said. “It was all this bargaining, this coercive bargaining.”...

"Kiss the Girls" triggered me when I saw it in 1997.  I thought, as my movie companion vividly remembered, "it was sexualizing female victims and trying to titillate the audience when the women are crime victims, while acting like it’s taking a perspective that is against crime."

The reason I'm talking about all of this now is that Judd's co-star in "Kiss the Girls" was Morgan Freeman, and this week, the big news is "Women accuse Morgan Freeman of inappropriate behavior, harassment" (CNN). (And here's a NYT article about the CNN reporter, "She Went to Interview Morgan Freeman. Her Story Became Much Bigger.")

I just wanted to note the Judd connection and to restate my hatred of that terrible movie, the one I called the worst movie I'd ever seen.

Idols.

Hi everyone, I know your idols are falling, I know it hurts to be disappointed, but imagine if that person you thought you knew from his image sexually harassed you. Stay the course, we will be better for this societally. The conversation must be had. #MorganFreeman

— rose mcgowan (@rosemcgowan) May 24, 2018

Background: "Women accuse Morgan Freeman of inappropriate behavior, harassment" (CNN).

"Why does the devil in 'The Bible' look exactly like President Obama?"

This is actually an easy question to answer.

1. Mainstream video productions are not going to cast a black man as Satan. Everyone knows better than to do that. If you want to have an actor in the role of God, that's a great time to cast a black actor, e.g. Morgan Freeman. That's something that makes Americans feel good about racial progress. That's what we do here.

2. Needing an actor to play the role of Satan, the casting people working on the History Channel's "The Bible" picked Mehdi Ouzaani, a Moroccan actor. He was chosen because he's a fine actor and he looks like a person who would have lived in the region during Biblical times. Of course, he's not black. They wouldn't cast a black man as Satan!

3. Since Ouzaani isn't black, they didn't think about his resemblance to President Obama. People tend not to see cross-racial resemblance. If you were putting together a "Separated at Birth"-type book, can you think offhand of any black and white celebrities you'd pair?

4. They didn't notice, but when the film went up on television, with millions of viewers, and with particular shots showing Ouzaani's face in the shadows, some of them said "Hey, Satan looks like Obama!" That seemed funny/outrageous. It got tweeted. Soon everyone's talking about casting an Obama lookalike as Satan.

5. And that's how it happened. Or... maybe the Devil made them do it.

Does this Wisconsin recall ad sound like it's narrated by Morgan Freeman?

There's a big controversy about whether this is a deceptive ad.

Morgan Freeman's representative confirmed to The Huffington Post that the narrator of the ad is not Freeman: "While the ad in Wisconsin attempts to sound like Morgan Freeman, it clearly is an attempt to deceive. Morgan Freeman did not narrate that ad."

This is a deliberate Morgan Freeman imitation:



And here's the real Morgan Freeman, talking like Morgan Freeman:

Is the recall ad deceptive?
	No. It doesn't sound that much like Freeman.
	Yes. It sounds like Freeman and it was deliberate.
	No. It sounds a little like Freeman, but I don't think it was intentional.
	Yes. Even if they weren't trying to sound like Freeman, it will fool some people and that's wrong.
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