Prediction

Way back in 1990, Calvin describes pretty much the exact reason that most political coverage and discourse today is not only awful, it makes no sense.

This Will End Well

The customer-review social media platform Yelp will now allow people to call out businesses that display racist behavior. If you have questions, that's because you have more neurons than does the Yelp "User Operations Team" that decided on this new feature.

Sure, if you read the company's post at its blog you see language that says the warning will go up in order to let people know that an accusation has been made and so there might be an influx of bad reviews by people who just want to run the business down but who have never been a customer. And you see them saying that if an alert -- helpfully colored scarlet, doncha know -- is added to the page then there will be a link to a "credible news source" that reports on it.

As Kyle Smith notes at National Review, the world of social media reviewing platforms is often less than worthless. It's not just restaurants; I listen to a dozen or so podcasts regularly and they all ask you to give them five-star reviews because anything less than a 4.8 gets overlooked.

The problem is that it's not hard to create a sensational enough claim of racist treatment that it makes headlines in "credible news sources" even though it will later turn out to be false. And the removal of Yelp's scarlet R will draw a tenth of the attention that its placement did, perhaps permanently harming the business. That might be an acceptable risk if the placement of a racism warning via Yelp did anything real to advance the cause of racial equality, but no one who doesn't work for Yelp thinks that it does.

If they're going to go through with it, though, they might need a sweeping of their own house for starters.

Hmmm...

Writing at First Things, Leah Libresco outlines why bad art may not be the best thing for us. It's an interesting piece and one item stood out because it's an opinion I already held: The CGI Yoda from the Star Wars prequels, despite its ability to hop all over the place in a lightsaber duel, is not as good as the simple puppet voiced by Frank Oz in the original trilogy.

The rest of the article is good, too, and Libresco fortunately doesn't mention bad blogs.

Color!

Some more fun with the past, as artist Stuart Humphryes takes some rare old photos -- shot in color via a process called autochrome -- and tidies them up to look modern. As you can see in the pics displayed on his Twitter feed, Humphryes doesn't colorize black and white pictures, he restores color in the faded autochromes. By making them look like modern shots, he highlights how we tend to see the past as fuzzy, faded or a wash of grays when it was really just as bright and colorful as today is.

Just One

A few years ago I found and noted a story that noted how the earliest-serving president with living grandchildren was Prexy #10, John Tyler. Because both he and his son had the habit of begetting children late in life, there were two living grandsons for Tyler, even though they had obviously never met him .

Late last month Lyon Gardiner Tyler, Jr., passed away at the age of 95, leaving his brother Harrison, 93, as the last surviving grandchild of John Tyler. The three generations of Tyler men stretch across four separate centuries, with John being born in the 18th century (1790), his son in 1853 and his grandsons in 1925 and 1928 and surviving into the 21st century.

Unless of course they're members of the long-lived Howard Families, in which case there's no telling how long they may last.

So What?

This item at Inside Higher Ed highlights how 1,500 alums of Rhodes College -- the alma mater of Supreme Court nominee Judge Amy Coney Barrett -- have signed a joint letter opposing her nomination. The letter's authors also refer to the way that the current Rhodes president said the nomination reflected well on the school:

“We are likewise firmly and passionately opposed to Rhodes administrators’ attempts to embrace Amy Coney Barrett as an alumna of our beloved alma mater. We oppose this embrace because we believe both her record and the process that has produced her nomination are diametrically opposed to the values of truth, loyalty, and service that we learned at Rhodes.”

Now, anyone can have any opinion they like about Judge Barrett or her nomination. The letter is amusing in the way it opposes the college president's "attempts to embrace Amy Coney Barrett as an alumna of our beloved alma mater." The letter's authors seem to have overlooked that if she is in possession of a valid diploma and transcript, then Judge Barrett is in fact an alumna of their beloved alma mater no matter what the president -- or they -- say about it.

What the letter fails to do is to tell me why I should care what the authors and signatories think. Their opinion is supposed to carry more weight because they too went to Rhodes College, some of them at the same time as Judge Barrett did? That argument makes no sense. I have a number of classmates who would cast doubt on my qualifications for my current line of work, given that my goals and behavior as an undergraduate do not match it in the slightest. None of the people who supervised my candidacy and ordination process would have cared if my classmates had submitted a public letter opposing my ordination if they evaluated me as fit for the role.

Things like this seem to be more and more common these days -- the many times direct descendant of some Confederate general or another is quoted as not opposing the removal of the statue of their ancestor as though their particular opinion carried any more weight than anyone else's. I have yet to read a one of these stories where the interviewer asks the one question that matters more than any other: So what? And since no interviewer asks it for me, I do it for myself and ignore their opinions as swiftly as I can unless they offer some other and much better reason that I shouldn't.

Gibby

Friday night's passing of St. Louis Cardinals' great and Hall-of-Fame pitcher Bob Gibson brought forth many stories and memories, as often happens when a top-tier figure in a sport dies.

An apocryphal story suggests that, after Gibson surrendered a grand slam home run to journeyman Pete LaCock, he said it was time to retire. Another claims that when Gibson faced LaCock many years later in an oldtimer's game, he plunked him with the first pitch. There's no hard evidence for either story, but listening to the way the competitive fire drove Gibson they sure sound like they could have happened.