THE MT VOID
Mt. Holz Science Fiction Society
08/16/02 -- Vol. 21, No. 7
El Presidente: Mark Leeper, mleeper@optonline.net
The Power Behind El Pres: Evelyn Leeper, eleeper@optonline.net
Back issues at http://www.geocities.com/evelynleeper
All material copyright by author unless otherwise noted.
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Topics:
Trip Logs
A Brighter Black Bird (comments by Mark R. Leeper)
Of Books and Birds (comments by Mark R. Leeper)
THE KID STAYS IN THE PICTURE (film review by
Mark R. Leeper)
===================================================================
TOPIC: Trip Logs
The trip logs for our recent trip to the north central United
States are available at:
http://www.geocities.com/markleeper/n_cent_usa.htm
http://www.geocities.com/evelynleeper/dakota.htm
("A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds.")
===================================================================
TOPIC: A Brighter Black Bird (comments by Mark R. Leeper)
What must have been one of the great double-takes in science
happened last week to some scientists in a lab at Oxford. They
were doing some experiments in animal intelligence and recognition
of tools.
Ravens are known to be really intelligent birds and crows are
considered their slightly less intelligent cousins. Both use
tools to a limited degree. The paragon of intelligent animals is
thought to be the chimpanzee who really does find objects to use
as tools. But do crows really understand the concept of tools?
Answering that was the object of the experiment. Two crows were
being tested, Abel and Betty. There was food placed in a small
basket inside a vertical tube. The food was too far down for the
crows to get it with beaks alone and without tools. The
scientists put some wires at the base of the tube. One was
twisted into a "J" and could be used as a hook to bring up the
basket. Would the crows recognize the straight wire was useless,
but the J could be used as a hook to bring up the basket? Would
the crows recognize the hook as having a characteristic they could
exploit?
It seems the experiment ran into a small snag. Abel flew off with
the hook. Betty, who was left behind, wanted the food but had no
way to get it. She went for the useless wire, the one that did
not have the hook. With her beak she bent the wire into a hook,
used it to lift the basket out of the tube, and devoured the food.
Uh, well, yeah, that's another solution to the problem.
The scientists were intrigued and repeated the experiment over and
over leaving Betty with straight wires and food she could not
reach. Betty made her own hooks when she wanted to get at the
food. In ten tries Betty made nine hooks. It was no fluke.
So what was learned? Chimpanzees are smart enough to understand
and use tools. And ravens are pretty smart. But now it may be
that their more intelligent cousins are crows who actually
understand tools and FORGE THEM THEMSELVES. Tool forging is not
all there is to animal intelligence, it is only one measure. It
does not prove that crows are the smartest animals by any measure,
but it proves they are by at least one.
Actually it had been known for a while that crows cut and rip
shapes out of leaves to make them more effective as tools. Crows
use leaves to extract insects from places their beaks will not go.
There is a fine line of distinction between taking a leaf and
turning it into a more effective tool and turning a wire into a
tool. Tearing parts off the leaf to make it effective is very
near tool-forging. I have to admit that even as I write this, I
am not clear why one is counted as tool-making and the other only
as tool improving. Perhaps Betty can explain it.
But it seems our observations of chimp intelligence may have been
tainted with prejudice. Our reasoning was that we humans are the
most intelligent animals, the second most intelligent animal will
be the one that is most like us. Still there are rumors of
surprising avian intelligence. Even avian politeness. I am told
that if you are handing out fish to penguins they queue up. No
pushing or cutting in line. And if you give a penguin too small a
piece how does he show it? He quietly walks to the end of the
line and waits for a second turn. This sort of etiquette seems to
come more naturally to penguins than it does to humans. I am not
sure that is really considered to be an intelligent feat. But now
a crow has performed something that has been a standard of
intelligence. In fact, what was one of the old distinctions of
human superiority to other animals has fallen by the wayside.
Yes, humans are tool-making animals, and now we know so are crows.
Chimps still have not joined this select fraternity.
Crows are also smart enough to use human machines, though not
always in ways they were intended. Another article I read talks
about how crows line up with humans at traffic crossings waiting
for the light to change. But they are not trying to cross the
road. When the light changes they walk into the road to drop
walnuts. Then they go back and wait for cars to drive over the
walnuts. When the traffic clears again they pick up the edible
pieces. If the nuts were not hit, they will often reposition the
nuts to where they think they will have a better chance of being
hit by the car. Another technique that has been observed is for a
crow to sit on electrical wires over the road and drop nuts right
into the path of the wheel of a moving car. They know where the
tires are and this one should work the first time.
Back in December it was discovered crows share another interesting
characteristic with intelligent primates and few other animals.
They tend to develop one side more than the other. Humans,
chimps, and gorillas tend to use one side more then the other. In
humans we call this right-handedness or left-handedness. Some
animals like crabs will favor one side due to a natural asymmetry.
But the animals who tend to more develop one side, having one side
that specializes in strength and dexterity, is usually seen in
animals closer to humans. But over the last year it was
discovered that most crows are right-beaked. When they use tools
they tend to use the right side of their beaks. This is one more
characteristic that we share with these birds.
Henry Ward Beecher said "If men had wings and bore black feathers
few of them would be clever enough to be crows." In fact it seems
that crows are better adapted to live in a human world than we
would be to live in theirs. [-mrl]
===================================================================
TOPIC: Of Books and Birds (comments by Mark R. Leeper)
I was talking about bird intelligence and, you know, there is
someone who has associated intelligence with birds all along.
That is book publishers. They so frequently seem to choose bird
names for their the names of their publishing houses. There's
Penguin Books, Bluejay Books, Puffin Books, Roc Books, and Bantam
Books. The one that tickles me was the publisher that resulted
when Penguin Books bought Viking Press and for a while they were
calling the resulting publisher "Viking Penguin." I think they
should have used the name for a cartoon series.
And speaking of publishers with weird names, isn't it about time
Random House put their house in order? [-mrl]
===================================================================
TOPIC: THE KID STAYS IN THE PICTURE (film review by Mark R. Leeper)
CAPSULE: The autobiography of Robert Evans gives insights into his
own life and the Hollywood studio film industry in general. In
his tenure as the production head of Paramount Robert J. Evans
undeniably has made no small number of the right decisions about
the film business and no smaller number of wrong decisions about
his personal life. Gossip-magazine-level material but still this
a compelling biographical documentary. Rating: 6 (0 to 10), high
+1 (-4 to +4)
I didn't read Robert Evans's book THE KID STAYS IN THE PICTURE.
Instead, I listened to the audio book on a long drive. I am sure
there was a lot that was cut out from the book to put the material
in the audio book format. There always is. Do I think that I
missed a lot of the story? No. The audio book was "read" by the
author. Actually he didn't so much read the material, he
performed it. This is material that should be performed and not
just delivered in printed format. The film THE KID STAYS IN THE
PICTURE itself is more like the audio book than it is the printed
book. The film is just an abridged version of the audio book with
the same ironic laconic delivery and some visual illustrations.
The visuals use all sorts of clever ways to illustrate Evans's
memories, but they are not Evans himself the way the monologue is.
They are someone else's illustrations. What is important is what
Evans is saying and how he says it. How he says it is how he
feels about it.
Like MY DINNER WITH ANDRE or the Spaulding Grey monologues, the
visual aspect adds less to the film. It is nice to see what some
of the people looked like in the still pictures turned as three-
dimensional as the filmmakers could manage. We even get to see a
little of the Evans mansion, the building which means so much to
the man. But it was the audio book where I think he poured his
heart out, probably even more so than the book, and the film is
just a quick and considerably shorter version of that audio book.
So who is this Robert J. Evans? If you didn't know, don't worry.
All is explained in the film. He started with cinema as the
wholesome-looking young actor who played legendary producer Irving
Thalberg in THE MAN OF A THOUSAND FACES, the (highly Hollywood-
ized) screen biography of Lon Chaney. The film ended but the
Thalberg role has gone on for Evans for a lifetime. Evans decided
that what he wanted to be was Thalberg. He wanted to use his
artistic taste to build films that he thought the public would
like. And for the first half of his career he did just that
surprisingly successfully.
As his entrance to the production world he acquired the rights for
the novel THE DETECTIVE. He parlayed that into a career in film
production. He produced the weepy potboiler LOVE STORY and then
married its star. Other films he put together include ROSEMARY'S
BABY, BAREFOOT IN THE PARK, THE ODD COUPLE, CHINATOWN (as an
independent producer), MARATHON MAN, and BLACK SUNDAY. And the
list goes on. He battled his company executives to get to make
THE GODFATHER, then battled Francis Coppola to make the film more
of an epic. Evans seemed to know what kind of films the public
wanted to see, even before the public knew. Under his control
Paramount went from being the eighth most successful studio to the
number one spot. Then Evans started making mistakes.
The story of his career and his life from the 1950s to the 1980s
is told with surprising candor in the film. Though cut down and
toned down from the source material the film is still very
revealing. There is probably nobody in Hollywood as positive or
as negative on Robert Evans as Robert Evans is himself.
The directors of this film, Brett Morgen and Nanette Burstein,
have found tricks to taking still photographs and making them
visually interesting to go with the dialog. But they remain just
tricks. Frequently they even seem pretentious and it is good the
monologue distracts from them. Curiously the script is credited
to Brett Morgen, though it seems like Evans is telling his own
story in his own (frequently course) words. Perhaps Morgen just
determined what stories would go in the film version.
Evans has a slightly irritating delivery but the authenticity of
having him do the talking more than makes up for it. I rate THE
KID STAYS IN THE PICTURE a 6 on the 0 to 10 scale and a high +1 on
the -4 to +4 scale. Stay for the closing credits. [-mrl]
===================================================================
Mark Leeper
mleeper@optonline.net
A man always blames the woman who fooled him.
In the same way he blames the door he walks into
in the dark.
-- H. L. Mencken
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