You Make A Good Point...But...

Ok, I just saw something on the news that (as usual) pissed me off.

Here’s the thing. ‘Scientists’ did a study where they gave people enough alcohol to get them to half the legal limit, and told them to watch a video of people throwing basketballs to each other. They had to count how many times the basketball was passed.

During the video, a man in a gorilla suit appears and waves at the camera before leaving the shot. Something like 80% of people failed to see the gorilla.

The ‘scientists’ are calling this ‘blind drunk’ and are using it to illuminate how even a little booze seriously effects you.

Now this is all well and good, apart from one thing.

I’ve previously seen a study were people were shown exactly the same video, while stone cold sober and even then around 80% of them failed to see the gorilla.

This was originally a psychology experiment showing that we don’t actually see everything we think we do. We’re aware of what we need to be aware of, and our brain just fills in the blanks for the things we don’t need.

Think of it this way, if we were consciously aware of everything our senses are telling us, we’d be so overwhelmed by the onslaught of stimuli, we wouldn’t be able to function. The feel of the clothes on our bodies, every little sound, smell and taste…we wouldn’t be able to handle it. So our minds have a sort of filter that blocks out anything we don’t need to know.

As an example of this filter in action, have you ever been at a party or in a crowded room, and been completely unaware of someone else’s conversation until you hear your name mentioned?

If you want an example of an experiment to prove this, get three or four people to stand in a line and just start talking about different subjects. If you don’t focus on a single person, you can’t understand what anyone is saying, but as soon as you focus on one voice, you understand them perfectly, and filter out the others.

Another experiment on the above study proved this also. They had a man, wearing distinctive glasses, a yellow hard hat, clipboard and pen to approach people on the street and ask for directions. Halfway through the conversation, they had actors, posing as construction workers, pass between them carrying a large board. As the board passed, the original guy left and was replaced with a completely different person, but still wearing the glasses, hard hat and carrying a clipboard and pen.

Again, around 80% of people didn’t notice that they talked to two different people.

So how does this explain the guy in the gorilla suit? Simple. The test subjects were in a situation were they were required to focus on a single element. Anything else would distract them from the task at hand and the gorilla suit guy was only on the screen for a matter of seconds.

As a final example, if you’re a regular reader you’ll have seen this page a hundred times. Without looking, what color is this page’s title, and is my cartoon avatar guy next to my profile wearing glasses or not?

A lot of you will have had difficulty answering those questions, despite the fact they were on your screen minutes ago, and you’ve seen them a good few times before.

The simple truth is that it’s not necessary for you to notice those facts, so you don’t until you have to.

So what’s my point?

My point is that this whole ‘Blind Drunk’ study is absolutely and totally meaningless. It’s just a psychological principle that’s been hijacked to ‘prove’ something different.

Now, I’m willing to cut these guys some slack, because they’re fighting against drunk driving, but how about in future you just do a study that actually proves your point?

It all comes back to junk science. They attempted to use this study to ‘prove’ that drinking until your blood alcohol is half the legal limit makes you miss important details. This study could also be said to prove that people who breathe air become ‘gorilla blind’ or that ‘Taking part in scientific studies lowers your ability to see guys in gorilla suits by 80%’.

Hell, if this study is true, I’m waiting until Christmas time, waiting for Christmas night when everyone gets good and drunk, and breaking into their houses dressed as a gorilla.

I’d clean up. I’d be practically invisible.

Be Wary

Considering it’s been a week for scams on ‘Life, What the Hell Is Going On’, I thought I’d take the opportunity to warn my readers of the more common, and fairly convincing ones that you may fall prey to.

The first of these is the ‘Check Mule Scam’.

This scam has many variants, from being disguised as a job, to the more common way it’s used through private sales and Ebay.

Here’s the basic rundown.

You have something for sale, so you put it in the newspaper, list it on Ebay, or some other private sales method.

A few days later you get an email or call from a buyer.

He tells you not to worry about shipping, because he has a friend, associate or private shipping firm in the vicinity, who will pick up the item directly from you. Then he tells you that this friend or whatever already has a cashiers check that he made for a previous buy that fell through. It’s always more than you’ve asked for.

Say you’re selling a car for $5000, he’ll offer you a cashier’s check for around $8000. He’ll then tell you to cash the check, take the five grand he owes you and return the rest to him through Western Union. He’ll also tell you to keep about $500 for your trouble in doing all this.

So it seems great. You’ve sold your item for the full asking price, and you’re getting an extra $500 for about an hour of your time. The courier arrives, takes the item and hands you the check.

The problem comes about 7 days later. You’ve deposited the check, sent the guy his $2500, and bought yourself something nice with the other $500…and then the bank calls you to tell you the check is counterfeit.

So now, you’re out the item you ‘sold’, you’re out $8000 for the fake check, and then the police are interested in you as to why you’re passing phony checks.

This is also a lot more common than you think. I personally know two people who this has been attempted with. Luckily, they smelled something fishy and didn’t go through with it. Plenty of other people have been fooled. After all, it’s perfectly plausible. A guy has had a cashiers check made out to buy something, and it fell through. He can either go through the trouble of having the check cancelled, have a new one issued and send it to you…or he can pay you a couple hundred to do it all for him.

It’s even more plausible when the buy is a big one. Someone who is parting with $10,000 for an item he was supposedly willing to pay $15,000 for, losing $500 to save himself some trouble is easily believable.

The other way this scam works, and I’ve seen it on reputable sites like Careerbuilder and Monster, is that you’re offered a job sending payments to companies on behalf of another fake company.

The ‘job’ entails receiving checks, putting them into your bank account, and forwarding payments to other fake companies, keeping a ‘commission’ (usually around 5%) to yourself.

One victim of the above version found himself out by over $80,000 in less than two weeks. He also ended up going through a very tough time with the police for passing over 150 fake checks.

Oh, and if you’re doing the above ‘job’, and the checks are actually genuine and clearing, I suggest you quit anyway. Another reason for this scam is to launder money. Drug dealers set up an account under a fake name, using fake ID, issue checks to you, and have you forward them to fake companies he uses as a front. Again, you’d have a hard time explaining to the police why you where cashing checks for a drug dealer. Especially if you’ve been doing it for some time.

Basically, be careful. If something smells fishy or sounds too good to be true, give it a wide berth.

The second scam is the lottery scam.

This one is another version of the Nigerian 419 advance fee scam.

This one is simple. You get an email telling you that you’ve won the lottery. Don’t remember entering it? Of course you don’t! This lottery it’s part of a special promotion where ‘tickets’ are attached to email addresses. Your email address was picked randomly, and you’ve won the cash.

This is the point where most people would think “Yeah, whatever!” and have difficulty believing anyone would fall for it. The point here is, I wouldn’t fall for it, chances are you wouldn’t….but the question to ask yourself is, would your little old granny believe it?

Again, that’s what scumbags these people are. They tend to target the elderly and naïve. However, some people just don’t have the experience to know that a lot of the internet is just spam and bullshit. For example, when my mum first got started on the internet, she called me into the bedroom to ask if the pop-up saying she’d just won a lot of money was genuine.

Of course, my Mum is intelligent enough to where she wouldn’t actually send them any money. If she fell for this scam, she’d probably go along with it right up to the point they asked for cash. However, I’m just using her as an example that you can be intelligent and as far from naïve as you can be, and still be taken in if you don’t have the experience.

Anyway, back to the scam.

Attached to the email is a link to a very professional looking website and a phone number. You visit the site and put the ‘reference number’ you got in the email to ‘verify’ you’re a winner. It says you’ve won and you’re instructed to call the number in the email.

You call the number, and you’re told you are indeed a winner. You’re about 15 million richer!

Of course, there are a few snags on the way.

They’re sending ‘representatives’ to your house. They’ll be there in two weeks. However, before they can release the cash to you, you have to get an ‘insurance certificate’ before they’ll give you anything. If you don’t have the insurance certificate in two weeks, you’ll lose out on the cash. They don’t mention anything about money from you yet. They give you the number of their bank to contact about the certificate.

You call the bank, and the certificate is going to cost you anywhere between $1000 and $50,000.

You call the ‘Lottery’ people again, and tell them you don’t have the cash. They tell you, essentially ‘tough shit’. Four other people have already claimed their winnings (there are even pictures of them on the site holding a big check!). They push home the idea “What’s $50,000 when you’re about to get $15,000,000?” Just get a bank loan or something!

So you get a loan, you beg, borrow and steal from friends. You send the cash to the bank and…

And that’s it. You never hear from them again. Either that or another ‘problem’ pops up. Taxes, fees, you name it. You need to send them more money to get your ‘winnings’.

I can’t stress how evil these people are. They’re scum, the lowest of the low.

As a perfect example, I’m baiting two scammers right now. (I won’t publish any details as the bait is ongoing, and the scammers know how to google).

One believes he’s currently scamming a church, a church that has a large fund for donations to charity…and the other thinks he’s scamming a 70 year old widow out of the money her dead husband left her. A previously baited a scammer who thought he was scamming money out of a struggling private orphanage!

In conclusion, be wary of scammers or anything that seems too good to be true. If you’re interested in baiting scammers, please contact me and I’ll give you the details on how to do it safely.

HAPPY UPPITY COLONIAL DAY!

Country theivin' barstewards.

X-Men 3 "Meet The B Team"

Well, I finally got around to watching X-Men 3.

I, like most X-Men fans, had severe misgivings about X3. They started filming without a complete script, and made Brett Ratner the director.

Now Brett Ratner isn’t exactly a bad director, and I’ve enjoyed some of his other films, with Rush Hour being a good example. The problem is he’s a journeyman director at best, and a film like X3 needed better.

X3 needed a director like Spielberg or Singer, not someone from the B-list.

So X3 falls into an all too familiar category. It’s not a bad film and it’s certainly not a great film…it’s what I like to call a ‘chewing gum for the eyes’ film. The kind of film you watch and say “Yeah, it was good. Not as good as I expected, though.”

You don’t feel cheated and want your money back, but you don’t really want to see it again either.

The films biggest problem is that they’ve gone for far too much shock value. I know it’s a little late in the day to worry about spoilers, but for those who haven’t seen the film, I won’t give anything specific away. Let’s just say that three of the main characters die…and I don’t mean fake-out dead either.

This means that for much of the film you’re left with two of the main characters, and a bunch of minor characters that you don’t really care about. Even the main characters have changed so much that they bear so little resemblance to the characters we’ve grown to know and love, that you don’t really care about them either.

I’ve just watched two of my favorite characters get killed off…do I really care what happens to this person I got introduced to 15 seconds ago?

Some of the minor characters, such as Ice Man, have been present since the first film, but never really had a big part to play, others are brand new introductions.

Now, if you’re an X-Men fan, the new characters should be well known to you anyway, but in a movie, you can’t suddenly drop a new character into the mix, no matter how well established the franchise is

For example, Night Crawler was introduced perfectly in X2. He had a pivotal role, and you got a lot of his back story. We were re-introduced to him, and it was like meeting an old friend. There was a reason for him to be in the story, and even if you’d never heard of X-Men before, you got to know the character.

In X3, Shadowcat just drops in from nowhere. The film starts, and she’s a fully fledged part of the X-Men team. No explanation, no back story, no nothing. You realize instantly that she’s there because with the main characters getting killed off, they need to fill out the numbers…not for any valid narrative reason.

You get the feeling X3 should have been called “X-Men 3 : Meet the B-Team”

As for the writing, I couldn’t shake the feeling that they never watched the first two movies, or had any experience of X-Men up until they started shooting. The characters look the same, but they don’t act the same. It’s like being dropped in some sort of parallel universe, where everyone seems the same, but they’re slightly different.

For example the film is based around the ‘Mutant Cure’, an injection that ‘turns off’ mutant powers.

When Storm hears about the cure she’s absolutely outraged. She waxes poetic about how mutations are not a disease, and stands absolutely and totally opposed to the cure throughout the entire film.

However, the Storm character I know doesn’t have such a limited viewpoint. Sure, if I had mutant powers like her, or one of the other characters, I wouldn’t want to give them up either. If I could walk through walls, command the weather, or be able to vanish in one spot and instantly re-appear in another, I’d want to hand on to my powers as well…but what about the other mutants who simply don’t want their powers? Take Rogue for example. Her powers stop her from touching anyone and in most respects she’s just a young girl who wants her life back. Why shouldn’t she get the ‘cure’ if she wants it?

If I had a mutation that made my skin blue and I had the power to make my fingernails grow at an amazing rate, I’d be in line for that cure in a second.

It paints Storm as a bad guy. Especially as at that point in the movie, the cure is purely voluntary. They’re not forcing anyone to take the cure, it’s just available if you want it.

So Storm has just as little right to demand that mutants stay mutants as the government has to demand that mutants give up their powers. It’s like coming up with a cure for something like dwarfism in real life. Many little people might be offended that their condition is being called a disease, and point out that just because they’re short, they are just as valid a human being as anyone. This is true, but would it be right for them to demand that no-one be allowed to take the cure?

In simplest possible terms, Storm’s standpoint is anti-choice. She’s fighting against the right for people to decide whether they want to be mutants or not.

Another point is her reaction to Jean. I won’t say anymore, but if you see the movie, you’ll understand.

Magneto is another character that seems to have multiple personality disorder. He goes through the entire movie displaying uncharacteristic compassion, followed by hugely uncharacteristic cruelty.

The whole point of Magneto is that he’s essentially the dark side of Charles Xavier. They both have almost the same goals, and just differ in what they view as acceptable to achieve them. They both work for the good of mutant-kind, only Xavier works by staying within the law and his own ethical model. They’re essentially two friends separated by an ideology.

Without wanting to give anything away, let’s just say that Magneto does and says things in this movie that the character as we know him would never do. Magneto is essentially fighting for mutant rights, but in the movie he sees other mutants as disposable. Magneto’s character is essentially ‘Mutant Rights at All Costs’. In this movie, he’s apparently only out for himself.

His character makes no sense. He uses the very people he’s apparently trying to help as cannon fodder.

As any X-Men fan knows, Magneto is not stereotypically ‘evil’. He just attempts to reach his goals by extreme means. In this movie, he might as well have a curly mustache and tie his enemies to a train-track.

Oh, and did I mention that Juggernaut actually says: “Don’t you know who I am? I’m the Juggernaut, Bitch!”

Mr. Ratner, did you think you’d get points from the fans by referencing that video clip from the web? If you’re going to attempt to destroy a good movie, at least take it seriously. It’s like making a reference to the Yoda ‘hip-hop dancing’ web clip in a Star Wars movie. What’s next? Magneto telling Xavier that “All Your Base Are Belong To Us?”

No we don’t think it’s clever, we think it’s self-indulgent. Don’t use a greatly anticipated movie to show us all how ‘plugged in’ you are to pop-culture.

The whole problem with X3 is that it’s a ‘good’ movie, but it’s a good movie that should have been great. When rumor of the movies production problems reached the internet, the response from the fans all over the world was clear: We’d rather wait another couple years for a great movie than get an ‘ok’ one this year. In fact, fans almost unanimously stated that they’d rather see no X3 than a bad X3.

X3 suffered from Blockbuster syndrome. They knew that no matter how bad the reviews were, the X-Men fan base would go to see the movie anyway. Look at the Batman movies if you want to see how that goes. Things just go from bad to worse, until they essentially have to scrap the whole thing and start over.

The other big problem is that the X-Men movie ‘universe’ is now in the position were it’s going to be incredible difficult to make another good X-Men movie, at least without going the ‘Batman Begins’ route. The main and interesting characters are dead, the main villains are either dead or out of the picture…so what’s going to come next?

Trust me, unless they scrap everything and start over…the next movie is going to suck, big time.

To wrap up, I would recommend seeing X3, just don’t get your expectations up too high. It’s a ‘Sunday afternoon with nothing better to do’ movie and that’s about it.

His Eyes Had Opened.

Scratch, the last of the three kittens died this morning. Unlike the other kittens, I’d had enough time to get attached to this one. He’d even begun to develop his own personality.

I’m not talking about the first kitten that died of exposure a few hours after it had been born. I’m not talking about the second kitten that I assumed had been accidentally smothered by its mother.

I’m talking about Scratch, the kitten that liked to curl up on my chest, listen to my heartbeat, and sleep. The same kitten that would cry if left alone, but would calm down instantly if I picked it up. The same kitten that liked to have his head scratched and would actively seek out my finger when I stopped.

I’m talking about Scratch, a pet I loved just as much as any other pet I’ve ever owned.

The manner of Scratch’s death was even more upsetting to me than the fact he died.

His mother wasn’t the most attentive thing in the world. I lost count of the number of times I had to physically put her back in the box with her kitten, because Scratch was crying from hunger. I’d lost count of the number of times I’d found her asleep under the kitchen table, while Scratch was still in the box, freezing because of the air conditioning. I lost count of the number of times I saw her push him away while he was trying to feed.

For the past two days, Princess had been making a concerted effort to take him from his box in the living room and put him in the hallway outside. Sometimes she’d stay with him, other times she’d drop him in the hallway and saunter back into the living room.

I just kept putting them back in the box. The hallway has black carpet and sees far too much foot traffic for a pure black kitten, blind and helpless, to be out there.

Anyway, this morning, while Sunny and I where distracted, Princess picked Scratch up, took him to hallway…and sat on him until he stopped breathing.

Then she went into the kitchen to finish the cat food I had put out.

As I picked up his cold and lifeless body, I saw that his eyes had opened. They were baby-blue, like all newborn kittens are.

Despite the fact I’d cared for that kitten more than his own mother, despite the fact I used to get up at least twice in the night to check on him…he never got to see my face.

He never got to see much of anything.

Instead she chose to kill him because taking care of him was just too much trouble.

Her ‘problem’ was simple. She liked being an inside cat. She liked being fed on demand and having a nice warm place to sleep. Usually, a cat who rejects her litter will simply leave. Princess couldn’t do that, because leaving her kitten meant leaving the house. As long as she was inside, I made sure she took care of Scratch.

Leaving meant going back to sleeping on the porch, and only eating every couple of days when I put food out for the strays. She wouldn’t have that nice warm couch to sleep on, and she’d have to share her food.

She wanted to be an inside cat, but she didn’t want to take care of her kitten.

So she killed it.

I love animals, and even though it would have required feeding Scratch every two hours around the clock, I would have weaned him myself. She never gave me that chance.

Princess and Scratch, even though I talked about putting them back outside when Scratch had been weaned, would’ve ended up as permanent residents in my home. Like I said, I loved that kitten, and there’s no way I could have parted with him. I also wouldn’t have conceived of splitting him from his mother.

However, Princess killed Scratch for one simple reason. She didn’t want to take care of him, and as long as she was living in my house, I’d have made sure she did. Rather than leave, she chose to simply take Scratch out of the equation.

The only comfort I can take from the situation is that in the short two weeks of Scratch’s life, I made sure he was warm, comfortable and well fed. If I’d have left him where I found him, Princess would have left him to die slowly of dehydration in the heat.

His life was short, but I’m sure he enjoyed it.

I want my kitten back.