Author Archives: Scott Bowles

There She Is, Miss Concussive Trauma

 

Two American TV institutions checked into hospice last month.

Of course, no one is going to officially pronounce dead the Miss America Pageant and the National Football League. Nostalgia and straggling sponsors alone would never permit it.

But both near-century-old organizations (Miss America was founded in 1921, the NFL in 1920) entered the autumn of their TV lives with a single rule change and a call for another. And make no mistake: To die on American television (and hence forfeit social relevance) is to die in America. Just ask Roseanne Barr or Jon Stewart.

Miss America and the NFL’s  hospice stays may be indefinite, like Broadway plays. And they may enjoy brief public remissions — also like Broadway plays. They may even produce the occasional Hamilton: something you haven’t seen, but you’ve heard good things.

Still, it was hard not to hear the buzzard caws with the latest headlines (or lack thereof). The first came on June 5, when Miss America officials announced they were ditching the bathing suit and evening gown competitions in favor of “a more interactive experience with judges to showcase the beauty inside,” one press release peacocked.

The news was greeted with uniform praise. ‘It’s a Start,’ the website Vox proclaimed.

I think you may be looking through the wrong end of the binoculars, Vox. A start of what? A better way to parade show ponies? It’s hard enough to grasp how any pageants still exist in the #Metoo landscape. These are the actual opening lyrics to the Miss America theme song, as written by Bernie Wayne (you weren’t expecting a female composer, were you?):

“There she is, Miss America
There she is, your ideal
The dreams of a million girls”

Barbie couldn’t have said it better herself.

Miss America, in particular, has a rich history of not reading the room. Consider past pageants; Which stand out more: the dresses/bikinis on display or the imbecilic questions/answers in the interview session? It was Old Faithful humor for late night comedians and smarmy news anchors.

Also, how is judging internal beauty any less absurd than judging the external? Is it less offensive to say, ‘Sorry, you’re not as  pretty on the inside as Miss Idaho’? How the fuck do you know? Isn’t it more insulting? And will we see 300-pound Miss Americas? I’d love it, but I doubt it.

Just be honest, pageant organizers. As TV entertainment, you’re on life support because you’re ignoring your core drives, conveniently tucked in the Seven Deadly: lust and envy. In 1921, Miss America began as a “bathing beauty revue,” as that was about as much skin as you could publicly flaunt back then. Today’s Internet has already nullified the sexuality to the show. And if viewers want an actual and entertaining measure of internal beauty, there’s lots of choices, including the National Spelling Bee and Jeopardy!

The second group’s demise is a little more subtle, and a helluva lot more nefarious.

On June 20, Brett Favre — the former Green Bay Packers star quarterback, current Wisconsin god and future Hall of Famer,  granted an interview to England’s The Daily Mail. In it, Favre, the poster boy of NFL toughness, made the startling admission that not only did he fear he suffered from Chronic traumatic encephalopathy, but that children should not be allowed to play tackle football until kids are at least 12.

“The body, the brain, the skull is not developed in your teens and single digits,” he told the paper. “I cringe. I see these little kids get tackled and the helmet is bigger than everything else on the kid combined. They look like they’re going to break in half.”

He said he came to the conclusion after seeing his own kids express an interest in playing.

“Maybe that’s selfish, but what are the odds of him becoming the next Brett Favre? What if he plays one year, gets a major concussion, and is never the same,” Favre said. “I would feel horrible.”

This is tantamount to Babe Ruth renouncing fast-pitch baseball. If American mothers gain wind of the Favre interview, the sport is done. Mothers decide what games we play. How many are going to allow Junior to suit up when a legend of the sport tells won’t let his own kid play because of the deadly risk?

Even more damning: the way news outlets covered the interview, which was barely. ESPN had a 30-second spot in the middle of its nightly sports newscast. But the network owns multi-million dollar  rights to future NFL broadcasts. They will inevitably lose a fortune if America quits tossing the pigskin. Ulterior motive, anyone?

You could be a little more honest too, Gipper. The NFL also exists in two of the Seven Deadly realms: Greed and wrath. You know your existence comes courtesy of the primal urge to watch human beings bludgeon one another into retardation. We loved it with the Greeks, we love it with the Cowboys.

Perhaps American institutions simply have a century-old expiration date in an ever-changing zeitgeist. It’s fitting that both of these institutions once represented the height of femininity and masculinity. Miss America and the winning Super Bowl quarterback were once America’s prom king and queen.  But the years have morphed them into measures of the toxicity of gender identity.

But fear not, ogle junkies. Pornhub gets nearly as many queries as Google, so your prurient needs aren’t aren’t at risk.

As for brain-bruising-free competition, ESPN has ramped up coverage of non-concussive sports, including championship darts and drone racing. They even began national coverage of the picnic sport of the masses, in which you toss a beanbag at a target with a hole in the center.

It’s called cornhole. Seriously. If ESPN has its way, you’ll soon ask your soulmate, “Let’s skip the movie. Can we go cornholing?”

Who says you can’t mix sport with sexiness?

 

 

 

 

 

A Murder of Factslaps

This week’s Factslap edition comes inspired by an amazing documentary I caught on my favorite bird (besides Larry), crows:

Ajodhya 1. They can solve puzzles: For a study, researchers once assigned a crow a simple puzzle involving eight tasks—picking up objects, moving them, and other complex steps. The crow had never seen them in sequence before. Yet, the crow finished it easily—the first bird to ever accomplish anything like it.

2. Crows can use tools: That earlier study also revealed that crows are capable of using tools. To further test this, researchers at Oxford dropped a small bucket of crow food at the bottom of a long tube and gave a hungry crow a wire. The crow bent the wire to hook the bucket handle and retrieve it.

3. Crows have street smarts: Forget puzzles and tools—crows have real-world skills. The one here, for instance, dropped an unbreakable nut onto the road so a car would run it over. Then he was free to chomp on the edible interior.

4. Some crows can be pricks: Crows will sometimes play cruel pranks. A zookeeper once reported that one repeatedly mimicked the voice of the human who fed the nearby chickens. The chickens would get excited thinking dinner was coming, but that wasn’t the case. Chumps.

5. Crows aren’t limited to bird noises; they’re impressive mimics: Though they typically communicate with each other through squawks and knocking, ravens at the Tower of London have been heard telling tourists to “keep the path.”

6. Crows know how to have fun: Pranks and impressions aren’t the only ways crows have a good time. Videos have emerged from Russia showing crows using cup lids as sleds. Elsewhere, dogs and cats have been known to play games with crows. One time, cameras even caught a crow playing with a ball on ice.

7. A German researcher concluded that crows can recognize themselves in the mirror: This puts the impressive birds in elite company with humans, apes, dolphins, and elephants. But their recognition skills don’t stop there…

8. They can recognize human faces: Researchers at the University of Washington spent months with the birds and, in one test, marked crows like normal. Later, they returned in cavemen masks, attempted an approach, and the crows attacked them. Without the masks, though, the crows didn’t lift a beak.

9. Crows remember their enemies: That study also showed crows remembered their enemies and acted accordingly… with Alfred Hitchcock-style horror beatdowns. It turns out that crows of a feather not only flock together, but they discuss their enemies and then attack them in coordinated dive-bomb assaults.

10. They don’t put their memories to use for just death and destruction, though: Some people have witnessed crows giving gifts to humans they respect. One such occasion saw a murder of crows leaving a little girl these trinkets every time she fed them from her garden.

Daily Mail

11. They have big brains: Studies have illuminated how crows and crows have such killer memories. For starters, these birds have big ol’ hippocampi, the part of the brain responsible for memory. And for good reason…

12. They’re pretty highly evolved: Seed-eating birds like nutcrackers historically needed to remember where they buried seeds or they didn’t eat. It’s an evolutionary trait, which helped explain why another study revealed that crows raised in captivity didn’t have as many hippocampal neurons as wild crows.

13. Some jays have human-like memories: Evidence suggested scrub jays can have episodic memories, the human trait of remembering specific events and when they occurred. These jays remembered all the food they’d hidden, where they’d hidden it, and how long it could last there without spoiling.

14. They’re as smart as apes: Though crows may be smaller in stature, they have similar, if not greater, brain power to primates. Thanks to dense collections of neurons in their forebrains, these birds can carry out some complex, ape-like thinking.

15. Crows are all about family: Mama crows don’t push their young from the nest as soon as they can fly. Grown-up crows actually stick around for awhile and help raise and protect younger birds and newborns.

16. Crows will adopt: Cornell researchers witnessed something both heartbreaking and heartwarming: after an adult crow known simply as RV died of West Nile virus, his children were orphaned. Amazingly, his neighbor and crow friend adopted and cared for the baby crows.

17. They’ll return the favor: Surprisingly, adopted baby crows expressed gratitude for their adoptive crow dad and mom. When the parents birthed new baby crows, the adopted birds, true to crows’ nature, stuck around the nest to help care for them.

18. Crows will spread the love: When it comes to adoption, crows don’t let things like a difference in species cloud their parental instincts. Once, when an orphaned fledgling blue jay showed up to a crow’s nest, researchers witnessed the mother crow feeding him.

19. Studies showed crows can live to be old geezers: The oldest crow ever found in the wild lived for 17 years. Meanwhile, a crow in New York that had been cared for and watched over by humans lived for a whopping 59 years.

20. Crows respect their elders: A 12-year study of a jackdaw community showed older birds earned more respect and power among populations. But that power came with a risk: high-ranking birds lived shorter lives, implying the jackdaw hierarchy was competitive and cutthroat.

21. Observations showed Crows respect their dead, too: Crows prodded a fallen companion with their beaks before retrieving blades of grass and laying them beside the passed-on bird; others have witnessed services in crow and raven communities.

 

Why Robert Mueller Should Welcome Getting Fired

 

Robert Mueller seems the kind of guy who could recite the rule book of Monopoly chapter and verse.

After all,  his life is punctuated by the rules of conduct. In July 1968, he was sent to South Vietnam, where he served as a rifle platoon leader with the Marines. He was cited for valor for rescuing a wounded Marine during an attack that killed half his men. He was shot himself and returned to service the same year. He’s received the Bronze Star, Purple Heart, two commendation medals and the Gallantry Cross. In 2004, he was inducted into the US Army Ranger Hall of Fame. That hound dog has no quit in him.

So he shouldn’t take it personally if Donald Trump fires him. If anything, he should welcome it.

Certainly, no one would be surprised if Mueller got the pink slip from a boss who is already asking if he can legally forgive his own sins. A new CNN/Pew poll showed only 41% of Americans approve of how Mueller is leading the special counsel. Apparently, 5 guilty pleas and 17 indictments does not demonstrate sufficient prosecutorial proficiency for Trumpkins — as well as many Americans in a TwitFace era where days feel like weeks, weeks like decades. How long before Trump does what he does best: exploit our inner bile?

But a Mueller firing could have an unexpected upside. Several, actually. Here are a few reasons Mueller (and we) should not fret the president prematurely halting the investigation:

  • We already know what the report will allege. Is there anyone who actually believes Trump did not collude with Russians? The nation saved him from bankruptcy? And Trump wasn’t going to genuflect to the thug money that kept him afloat — and put him in the Oval Office? To the cheering throng of thousands, Trump begged, on national TV, the Russians and Wikileaks to continue to hack his opponent’s emails (and perhaps America’s). Would an official allegation of collusion suddenly wake us up with the epiphany: “My goodness gracious, he is Putin’s cock holster.”
  • We already know the GOP/Fox reaction. Ever since Fox News taught him the term “witch hunt,” Trump has been muttering the term like Rain Man. Look at what he did with “propagated,” which he brandished during last week’s fuck you to immigrants and their mothers. As my mother, a former first-grade teacher, put it, “I was surprised he knew a four-syllable word.” Prepare for a new chant as he and Fox & Fiends mount a three-syllable defense to anything Mueller alleges: “Treasonous.”
  • We are more likely to believe the findings. Tease this one out with me: If we know what the report will allege, as well as what the conservative response will be to the allegations, what keeps this from running the news cycle sprint? Mystery. If Mueller were to be fired, his findings would  gain spontaneous credence. And given the administration’s incontinence problem, you know the results would be leaked like cat pee.
  • We can spare Bob a character assassination. One of the most interesting elements of the collusion case is Mueller’s white-hat reputation. While Trump grumbles about attorney-client privilege being dead, I’ve yet to see a single pundit malign Mueller’s character, even on Fox. The biggest strike against Mueller may be his disdain for  public relations stunts. His opponents will honor no similar rule of conduct. Getting unduly fired lets him remain Shane in the sunset.

Mueller likely gives nary a shit about any of this. By nearly every measure, he appears meticulous to the core, and in no rush to give us the American Idol finale we’ve come to expect of our politics.

It’s a notion we’d do well to have propagated.