Author Archives: Scott Bowles

The Species of Origins

 

I can barely microwave a Pop Tart. Yet Anthony Bourdain’s suicide this weekend really threw me for a loop.

Not for my love of food, obviously. But I discovered him during a hospital stay a couple years ago in which the TV remote control broke. One afternoon, I was force-fed  his Parts Unknown series on CNN. Then I watched another. And another. By the end of the stay, I had watched him criss-cross the world in a sort of international potluck dinner prep.

Like I said, boiling water and I are not on speaking terms. But his show, I later discovered, was never really about food. If anything, it was about journalism: meeting strangers, collecting anecdotal histories, asking open questions. Like the comedians of late-night TV, who have used parody to become the nation’s most influential political reporters, Bourdain connected with us by using food as verbs, spices as nouns, sauces as adjectives.

My fandom was confirmed with a tiny bit of research on him, when I discovered he was the son of a New York Times copy editor and routinely wandered newsroom halls. It cemented when I saw an interview in which he waxed philosophical that most of our introductions to new cultures are through the taste bud. More importantly, he said, we seal our relationships over meals, where anecdotes flow like wine. That’s Journalism 101.

Now he’s gone. Like Kate Spade, Robin Williams, Chris Cornell and endlessly on. And these were people at the top of humanity’s evolutionary chain: rich, creative, free to travel and purchase much of the world. It’s enough to draw you to an unnerving realization: We have over-evolved.

While Charles Darwin has no chapter on overevolution in his seminal book on natural selection, he has plenty on underevoltion, instances when a species could not adapt quickly enough to changes in their environment and perished. Roughly 99.5% of every species that ever existed on this planet have joined the cloud circuit, scientists estimate.

But if there are so many examples on that extreme of the continuum, what about the other? The Humane Society estimates an overpopulation of dozens of creatures, from Australia’s kangaroo baby boom to England’s badger surplus to Central America’s coyote explosion to Africa’s python epidemic. America is overrun by white-tailed deer.

And, of course, there’s us, 7.62 billion strong and growing, making us the world leader in overevolution.

Consider our other symptoms of evolving a bridge too far:

  • Suicide There are about 16,000 homicides a year in the U.S. But there are 40,000 annual suicides, a number that has increased 30% since 1999. When a species is three times more likely to kill itself than other members of the species, it’s overevolved.
  • where can i buy disulfiram online Brain size We’ve gotten too smart for our own good. Our brains have evolved into such large organs that, without medical advancements, more than 20% of the world’s births would end in maternal or infant mortality. When a noggin is a deadly threat during childbirth, it’s overevolved.
  • Host threat When a species is capable of ending all life on its host planet, it’s overevolved.
  • Oxygen bars

I know Darwin died in 1882, but maybe the president could ask him to revise the book. After all, Trump keeps in contact with Frederick Douglass.

And now, less combustible factslaps:

  • About 20% of the world’s tech founders are immigrants, even though immigrants only make up about 4 percent of the world’s population.
  • Richard Nixon was an accomplished musician who could play the piano, accordion, violin, saxophone and clarinet.
  • The Moon gets hit by over 6,000 pounds of meteor material per day.
  • A study found that orcas can learn to speak dolphin.
  • Canada’s national parks are free for children.
  • Researchers have found that muscle soreness after a workout doesn’t necessarily mean you’re growing more muscle.
  • Vicodin’s name is based on it being approximately six (VI in roman numerals) times stronger than codeine.
  • In 1494, Michelangelo, at the age of 19, was commissioned by the ruler of Florence to sculpt a snowman in his mansion’s courtyard.

    Piero de Medici ordered Michelangelo to build a snowman.

    And finally, a neighborly word from Mr. Rogers, who gave the U.S. Senate its most elegant description of what should be mankind’s evolutionary plateau, and would have been such a beautiful message for Tony Bordain to have taken within:

 

 

 

Muffing the Punt

 

Donald Trump is to football what, well, Donald Trump is: out of his depth.

He put that on display this week when he un-invited the Super Bowl champion Philadelphia Eagles to the White House, a once-annual tradition for champions in professional football, basketball and baseball.

In depositions from NFL owners obtained by the Wall Street Journal last week, as part of a grievance case filed by former San Francisco 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick, Dallas Cowboys owner Jerry Jones testified the president told him in regard to the issue: “You can’t win this one.”

“This is a very winning, strong issue for me,” Jones recalled Trump saying. “Tell everybody, you can’t win this one. This one lifts me.” Like a Super Bowl-winning coach, I suppose.

But is this the hoist he expects? Certainly, Trump has managed to turn the national anthem into a political atom-splitter. While kneeling for the anthem is actually a  protest of police conduct, the administration has Frankensteined it into a protest of patriotism.

Consider the wording from the bone-spurs-in-chief: “The Philadelphia Eagles Football Team was invited to the White House. Unfortunately, only a small number of players decided to come, and we canceled the event. Staying in the Locker Room for the playing of our National Anthem is as disrespectful to our country as kneeling. Sorry!”

To Trump’s credit, he spelled ‘canceled’ correctly (though I would pay money to learn his capitalization code: Locker Room?). And his followers, as fervent as holy rollers, will amen the ‘I dumped him, he didn’t dump me’ stratagem.

But, as with all Trump’s words, a few need parsing and correcting. First, not a single Eagle took a knee or stood in the lOCKER rOOM for the anthem last year. Zero.

Also, Pennsylvania was a critical swing state for Trump, who beat Clinton by about 44,000 votes in ’16. Clearly, the state was split over Hillary’s viability.

One thing Pennsylvanians are not split on, however, are the Eagles. They love ’em the way Trump loves bronzer. When the city won the Super Bowl, its first, Eagles fans nearly burned down the city in victorious fervor. They tipped over police cars. They punched patrol horses. They broke off and carried traffic signs, for some reason.

And you’re going to un-invite them to their first White House recognition?

This deserves the math refresher. You won PA by 44,000 votes. Lincoln Financial Field, which hosts the Eagles, holds 69,176 spectators. And you want to piss off that many people?

Even Jerry Jones would think twice. And he’s Republican.

 

 

America’s Irritable Vowel Syndrome

 

There are two questions that continue to ember in the wake of Roseanne Barr’s sudden disappearance from prime time TV.

One is the speed of her firing. Within hours of  her tweet describing a black woman as a cross between the Muslim brotherhood and Planet of the Apes, ABC ruled she was done. Gone.

We have seen this warp-drive character melt before. Surely there is an island where people like Charlie Rose, Matt Lauer, Kevin Spacey and others must be gathered to commiserate their fates sans trials. It might even be an entertaining Survivor-esque show.

But don’t expect networks to line up for a bidding war. The assumption of guilt on matters of conduct is that latest byproduct of the steroid issue facing the U.S. economy, which has become so powerful on the Darwinian scale it has surpassed politics. That the U.S. government does not believe in global warming would be more ominous if U.S. businesses agreed. But they don’t.  Donald Trump may not believe in the benefits of solar power. But Apple does. Which do you think will have a greater impact on your life?

Same with social diplomacy. American businesses have decided that it’s not affordable to offend customers. So they have contorted themselves into the least-offensive costume possible, one made of Nerf as to prevent bruising. Jemele Hill was suspended and later left ESPN for tweeting that Trump was a white supremacist. Laura Ingraham was forced to take a week’s vacation and issue an apology for a tweet offending a Parkland high school student. Alec Baldwin issued an apology and deleted his Twitter account after he publicly eviscerated a flight attendant who asked him to turn off his Words with Friends game for takeoff.

The upside is that an economy can’t afford to see race — unless that race is Mint Green. The downside is finding any nuance in that hue. For all the Sturm and Drang that followed Roseanne‘s cancellation — including a valid argument of the double standard afforded Samantha Bee  — not a single major network swooped in to pick up the series. Including Fox, the most vocal critic of the cancellation. Perhaps morality extends only as far as a purse string.

Secondly, why does Twitter seemingly exist solely within the confines of complaint? You never hear of a sage tweet sent by a public personality. Or a pearl of wisdom tweeted from a politician. Instead, anger trends. Perhaps that, too, simply reflects a nation that has so much wealth but still feels swindled. Despite its P.R.-guided mission statement to give voice to the masses, Twitter is like any other media: driven by celebrity.

Which makes the recent phenomenon so befuddling. The very people taking the most heat for dumbass tweets are the people who already have a platform. The internet’s societal explosion in 2008 made the prima facie case that Americans, as a people, are dying to be heard.

And it turns out tweeting celebrities are people, too. Petty, aggravated, attention-starved people.