I have a bad, albeit common, habit of reacting to offers by protesting, taking an opposite point of view of someone in the scene, or otherwise introducing conflict.

Arguing is different from — and maybe more insidious than — straight-up denial, which is usually called out quickly. You can be an arguer for much longer than a denier because arguing doesn’t seem like a violation of “the rules;” because it’s often an honest reaction to an offer; and because conflict can lead to great scenes (given the right context and improvisers).

But I want to stop arguing, or at least learn to argue less. After a bunch of recent arguing scenes and a workshop with Michael McFarland that focused on agreement, I finally get why agreement opens so many more possibilities than argument* — and turns your scene partner’s offer into a gift of an endowment.

Consider a scene I was in this week. My scene partner handed me a putter and a mini golf ball. Told me to go ahead and putt.

Then he put a gun to my head.

My character freaked out — and boy did I commit to freaking out! I even remembered to establish a relationship (“Uncle Tim, this is NOT why I came to visit you!”).

Then not much else happened.

How did we go from such a brilliant offer — the kind of inspired, so-random-he-couldn’t-have-planned-it choice that makes improv scenes so great — to such a not-great (if not-terrible) scene? I didn’t do anything “wrong.” I reacted in an honest way (wouldn’t you freak out at a gun to the head?); I established a relationship; I didn’t deny (no “Uncle Tim, why are you pointing a banana at me?”).

The problem with arguing is it usually represents a normal, average, rational person’s normal, average, rational reaction. But the average person is boring! So taking the average person’s perspective in an improv scene greatly increases the chance that the scene will be boring.

Wouldn’t it be more interesting to explore characters for whom the irrational (to us average folks) is the normal reaction?

The key is to expand our notion of what “reacting honestly” means. In the mini golf scene, I was reacting honestly as someone who would get freaked out when a gun is pointed at them at a mini golf game — i.e., as an average person. But what if I reacted honestly as someone who doesn’t get freaked out by this? Think of the kind of characters that agreement would have opened up:

• Danger-seeking golfer trying out a new motivational strategy
• Dad so bored of suburban life that he gets his kicks from taking life-threatening risks at children’s activities
• Colleagues at some job that holds life-threatening activities at  orientation/retreats

The details would have emerged organically. I could have even accepted reluctantly (golfer whose career is on the skids and will try anything to get back on top, even if he’s wary). But at that point, the details are ancillary — the character is already established and emphatically not-boring, simply by accepting the offer!

In other words, agreeing with an offer that your first instinct is to argue with is like getting an endowment for free.

Meantime, arguing instead of agreeing is like an anti-endowment, an anti-deal. The deal of a character who argues “I oppose a gun to my head”  is simply “I don’t want to die.” But that kind of deal — or common argumentative-reaction deals like “I’m unhappy that you cheated on me,” “I AM good at X,” “I don’t want to be fired,” etc. – is often a dead end because it’s a basic, inherent deal of every rational person on the planet. Common, everyday human deals are boring and don’t define characters.

Arguing also leads to:

• Standoff scenes that are like watching bulls butt heads, as McFarland put it (possibly quoting someone else?).
• Scenes that get stuck on plot details because one character argues against doing something that the other character suggests.
  • I think of these as tip-the-cow scenes: Another recent scene I was in featured a character inviting her grandson’s fiancee to tip a cow as a family initiation, and the grandson and fiancee resisting. To which Mikael Johnson, who was coaching that practice, said: “Just tip the cow!!!” The scene would have been much better if the grandson and fiancee accepted the offer because people who happily participate in cow-tipping family rituals are bound to be more interesting than those who think such rituals are odd.

As with everything in improv, understanding something is much different than successfully and routinely doing it. But I hope I can start to be more of an agree-er and less of an arguer.

I took all four of Shawn Westfall’s excellent classes at the DC Improv. I’ve been in three graduation shows, a DICSC show, and four shows with two troupes.

I can hold my own on stage, but I still don’t know what I’m doing. I’m not good. And I want to work hard on my own (in between practices and performances) to try to get good.

But here’s the thing: I don’t know how to do that. I don’t know if there’s such a thing as “work hard on your own to get good at improv.”

Solo artistic endeavors, like solo sports, generally have clear paths to go from having potential to being good. A marathoner can create specific training programs and follow the right diet. A painter can study and practice different techniques. Stand-up comedians and other comedy writers can write and watch and write and listen and write.

In a team sport or art, individuals obviously have to practice and perform with the team to reach their full potential. But a basketball player can get good in the meantime by studying the playbook, shooting 200 free throws a day, and working out. A violinist can get good between concerts by memorizing the score, playing for four hours a day, and doing violin-specific strengthening exercises.

What can improvisers do to get good on their own?

I’ll read Truth in Comedy and Mick Napier’s book. I’ll watch Asssscat videos and go to shows. I’ll continue practicing and performing with troupes.

But will that only go so far toward becoming a better improviser? When it comes to improving as a troupe — when we’re all trying to figure it out at the same time — it seems hard to make the kind of progress that comes in other team activities when everyone is also improving on their own.

Hopefully I’m just being impatient. With enough time — enough practices and performances — I hope I’ll reach the equivalent experience of a quarterback who sees the game slow down, as Mikael Johnson puts it.

In the meantime — help me out, improvisers: Are there things I can do outside of a group context to get there faster?

First, as a civilian who lacks salary-supported info-consumption time, I struggle to get through the never-ending queue of smart/worthwhile/interesting news. And it feels like news soldiers, who do have that time and are otherwise consumed by info consumption, don’t understand that people outside the industry might be like me.

Second, there is also a never-ending queue of pointless/time-suck news, but many news organizations and journalists don’t distinguish worthwhile news from pointless news. (Or industry economics don’t allow them to distinguish the two.)

I’m not talking about TMZ and celebrity gossip. I’m talking about the extremely high percentage of “news” — from the AP, NPR’s daily news shows, tech news orgs, almost every news org that covers politics, etc. — that to the average person is literally trivia, as useful (and useless) to their everyday lives and thoughts as a game of Trivial Pursuit. As a news civilian, I don’t know why I’m supposed to care.

Because news orgs continue to shovel this trivia toward me without explaining why it’s important or rethinking whether they should be producing it, I grow to suspect and resent them and feel less bad about my lack of info-consumption time. Or I continue to waste time on this news  and grow to resent myself. Down that road lies some combination of info-numbness, self-hatred, and a (further) tuned-out citizenry.

Three recent blog posts illustrate my second struggle.

Here’s Brian Lam, in his awesome post about reducing “the overage of technology and noise” in our lives to increase happiness:

I stopped reading the stupid hyped up news stories that are press releases or rants about things that will get fixed in a week. I stopped reading the junk and about the junk that was new, but not good. I stopped reading blogs that write stories like “top 17 photos of awesome clouds by iphone” and “EXCLUSIVE ANGRY BIRDS COMING TO FACEBOOK ON VALENTINES DAY.” And corporate news that only affects the 1%. Most days, I feel like most internet writers and editors are engaging in the kind of vapid conversation you find at parties that is neither enlightening or entertaining, and where everyone is shouting and no one is saying anything. I don’t have time for this.

Ezra Klein, on the “tornado of idiocy that is American politics“:

“Most people don’t care about politics,” [UCLA political scientist Lynn Vavreck] said. “They’re not running around with these preformed opinions in their head. They worry about what they’ll make for dinner and how to get their kids to bed. And that hasn’t changed. For us, that’s an alien world. We think about politics all the time. But we’re not normal. The 24-hour news cycle has not really affected the average American who isn’t into politics. And that’s really important to remember.”

I think most people in Washington believe voters would make better decisions if they spent more time following politics. But I spend a lot of time following politics, and quite often, I couldn’t be happier that voters are tuning out the inanities that obsess this town.

And Om Malik, reflecting on recent news about tech executives changing jobs (via Alexis Madrigal’s awesome essay on app/tech stagnation):

Sure, these are some great people and everyone including me is happy for their new gigs and future success. But when I read these posts and often wonder to myself that have we run out of things to say and write that actually are about technology and the companies behind them? Or do we feel compelled to fill the white space between what matters? Sort of like talk radio?

Something’s percolating here. Can anything be done about it on more than an individual level?

By day, I read dozens of news stories for my job as an editor. By night, I read dozens more for my then-current or assumed-future writing gigs, and for my perpetual gig as deputy assistant knowledge dilettante.

I read 90 percent of the Atlantic, New Republic, and New Yorker issues (front- and middle-of-the-book sections, at least) from 2002 to 2009. I religiously followed Talking Points Memo during the Bush years. Slate, video game blogs, why-am-I-still-reading-this runs of Rolling Stone — anything to fill my professionally and dopaminically mandated info quotas.

But I’m out of the game now. Been out for a couple of years¹. I’m a news civilian. And I am lost.

I don’t know how I’m supposed to behave, news-and-information-wise. I don’t know what my news-consumption obligations are as a civilian, as a citizen, as a typical 2010s creative-classer with moderately long work days and a moderately long daily commute.

I don’t know which kinds of news and information I should be consuming, in which quantities, and at which frequencies. I don’t know what constitutes an appropriate amount of news-consumption time, and when that turns into dawdling and procrastination time. I don’t know what I’m allowed to ignore, and what I should feel bad about ignoring.

So I feel bad when I spend a Saturday morning lost in Techmeme, Twitter, and the remnants of my Google Reader. I feel bad on the many more Saturdays when I don’t do this. I feel bad when I neglect local daily news. I feel bad when I tritely let New Yorkers pile up². I feel bad when my wife (an editor at CQ Roll Call) mentions some congressional to-do I know nothing about. I feel bad when I admit that reading one article does not make me knowledgeable about arc-plasma waste incinerating technology.

Then there are the days when I pick up a Washington Post Express on the Metro or listen to Morning Edition, and I wonder why I’m supposed to care about an apartment explosion in Mexico City or the 179th report of the year from Tahrir Square. The existential chorus chimes in: What’s the point of all this?

Does anyone else feel this way?

Does this stress out other recently civilianed info-people? Do lifelong news civilians think about this stuff?

I can’t believe I’m the only one. The news business’s grinding relentlessness – an unfathomably full Economist and New Yorker every single week;  a multi-sectioned newspaper on your doorstep every single day; a mix-metaphored river of news flowing thru yr interntz every single second — sends a pretty definitive message regarding info-consumption expectations. We’re supposed to be information hoarders.

The industry’s recent product innovations have done nothing to change this expectation. Zite, Flipboard, Trove — so many products ostensibly meant to help us manage the river of news. The pitch: Wouldn’t it be great if your news river contained only info-flotsam that interests you?³ Wouldn’t it be great if your news river was clean and picturesque?

Sure — go for it, news-river-management product creators. But frankly, those aren’t my biggest news-consumption problems. I have zero problem finding news that interests me. I bet most moderately web-savvy people younger than 60 can easily find news that interests them.

And while it’s nice to see shared links displayed in an aesthetically pleasing manner, you know what kind of news product I really want? One that adds two hours to my day so I can read all of that perfectly targeted news.

I don’t know if the news business intentionally conditions civilians to be info hoarders. Online news economics certainly call for the “Have all the donuts in the world!” approach to news delivery, in order to garner the requisite page views and time on site. But it may be simpler than that.

News soldiers are information hoarders living and working among other information hoarders. They see info hoarding as the ideal and indeed only appropriate level of news consumption. So they expect the rest of us to consume news in the same way — if they ever stop to consider that there is a “rest of us” in the first place.

Now what are the civilians supposed to do?

–

¹Technically I was still part of the news universe through 2010, but my last year-plus at Publish2 revolved around product management and 14-hour startup days rather than around news consumption.

²I still read every Atlantic and Wired, though. Monthly magazines are so much easier to manage.

³I’ve never been sure whether the news in the “river of news” metaphor is the water itself, or the stuff swimming in/floating on the water.

“Now … we see why ‘who’s a journalist?’ is so wrong-headed,” tweets Jay Rosen in response to the news. Clay Shirky chimes in: “Bloggers have no right to speech unless they’re part of the ‘official media establishment’? Ethiopia,Belarus &…Oregon.”

I can’t tell from those tweets if they read the actual ruling, but I did — and it actually doesn’t seem that bad. Rather than representing a luddite judge’s ignorant dismissal of a new medium, the ruling seems to lay the groundwork for a fairly expansive legal definition of journalism.

In the ruling, Judge Marco A. Hernandez upholds a defamation claim against blogger Crystal Cox, rejecting Cox’s seven defense arguments. The initial journosphere reactions have focused on Hernandez’s rejection of two of those arguments: that Cox shouldn’t have to reveal the source of this column because she is protected by Oregon’s media shield law; and that Cox should be protected from damages claims because she is “media.” In both cases, Hernandez rejects the arguments on the grounds that Cox is not “media.”

Hernandez’s rejection of Cox’s shield law defense seems to rest on a literal reading of Oregon’s shield law, which applies to people affiliated with a “newspaper, magazine or other periodical, book, pamphlet, news service, wire service, news or feature syndicate, broadcast station or network, or cable television system.”

Hernandez says, correctly, that Cox is not affiliated with any of the above; therefore she is not “media” according to Oregon’s law. It seems reasonable that the judge applied the law as written rather than expanding the interpretation of the law to include online media. If Oregon had updated its shield law to cover the Internet, as Washington state has done, perhaps Hernandez would have ruled differently.

But it’s Hernandez’s rejection of Cox’s second media defense that, to my mind, actually gives hope for future expanded legal definitions of “media” and “journalist”:

Defendant fails to bring forth any evidence suggestive of her status as a journalist. For example, there is no evidence of (1) any education in journalism; (2) any credentials or proof of any affiliation with any recognized news entity; (3) proof of adherence to journalistic standards such as editing, fact-checking, or disclosures of conflicts of interest; (4) keeping notes of conversations and interviews conducted; (5) mutual understanding or agreement of confidentiality between the defendant and his/her sources; (6) creation of an independent product rather than assembling writings and postings of others; or (7) contacting “the other side” to get both sides of a story.

If Hernandez believed that you need to have a Columbia J-school degree or work at the New York Times to be considered a journalist, he would have stopped at No. 2. But he doesn’t stop there — instead, he offers five additional criteria that could define someone as a journalist. These criteria aren’t based on a credential or business card — or a particular medium — but on practices, values, and standards.

By doing this, the ruling smartly avoids saying “bloggers aren’t journalists.” It merely says “this blogger is not a journalist.” By listing criteria 3-7 and avoiding any mention of specific media, Hernandez is basically saying: “Bloggers may be journalists — but to be considered as such, they have to do something that could fit a standards/practices-based, medium-agnostic definition of journalism.”

It’s easy to quibble with Hernandez’s choice of canonized practices and standards (I can see some in the journosphere taking issue with No. 6 in particular) or say his criteria aren’t expansive enough. But to the extent that “journalist” and “media” need to be defined in the law, Hernandez’s approach seems like the right one. And his criteria seem as hopeful a starting point* as any.

—–

* Note: I’m not up to speed on other definition-of-journalist case law. I’m sure there have been other rulings that offer their own criteria for such definitions.

The Rising is a failure. It purports to document a nation’s rupture and guide us toward salvation—”here the poet, not unlike the priest and community during Mass, opens a window in space and time for communion with the dead themselves: the dead who alone, perhaps, can transform the rage of the living and awaken in us a vision of something more than more of the same,” is how one Catholic critic recently put it. You can almost feel the weight of Springsteen’s duty on the record—these are his people, these firefighters. This is his backyard. A nation turned its weary eyes to the Boss, and he keenly felt the need to answer. But the answer was overwrought, grandiose, bombastic. He went big. We didn’t need anymore big things.

Cook’s right that The Rising is a failure, but he doesn’t quite get at the reasons why. The Rising isn’t just big and overwrought. It’s lyrically vague to the point of being a 9/11 album in name only. Absent the marketing push that announced the album as Springsteen’s big 9/11 statement, The Rising could be interpreted as being about pretty much anything (or nothing at all).

I wrote about the Boss’s 9/11 dodge in a 2003 piece for the Valley News in New Hampshire. (It’s actually a section from a larger essay about that year’s Grammy Awards.) I think it holds up pretty well.

*****

From “Pop Go the Grammy Awards”; the Valley News, Feb. 20, 2003

When Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band released The Rising last summer, it was greeted as the first response to Sept. 11, 2001, by a major artist. Kurt Loder, writing in Rolling Stone, took the lead in praising Springsteen for his approach to the attacks:

“The small miracle of his accomplishment is that at no point does he give vent to the anger felt by so many Americans: the hunger for revenge. The music is often fierce in its execution, but in essence it is a requiem for those who perished in that sudden inferno, and those who died trying to save them.”

But Loder ignores, as did many, that The Rising barely mentions Sept. 11 directly at all. By my count, there are two specific references: “The sky was falling and streaked with blood/I heard you calling me, then you disappeared into dust/Up the stairs, into the fire” (Into the Fire); “I never thought I’d live/To read about myself in my hometown paper/How my brave young life was forever changed/In a misty cloud of pink vapor” (Nothing Man). One song is about a suicide bomber, but doesn’t refer to Sept. 11 itself.

Otherwise, the album is one rousing, generic chorus after another, with alternating images of doom and perseverance — “Blood on the streets/Blood flowin’ down,” “With these hands, with these hands,/I pray for your faith, Lord” — that could apply to just about anything. The lyrics are often so banal that they don’t even support the album’s ostensible theme of hope in the face of unimaginable tragedy: “I’m waitin’, waitin’ on a sunny day/Gonna chase the clouds away/Waitin’ on a sunny day”; “I’m countin’ on a miracle/Baby I’m countin’ on a miracle/Darlin’ I’m countin’ on a miracle/To come through”; “Empty sky, empty sky/I woke up this morning to an empty sky”; “Come on, rise up! (8x)”

Of course, as a friend pointed out, it wouldn’t have worked had Springsteen written songs with lyrics like, “And when those planes crashed into the two towers, I remember how I felt.” That’s the approach Alan Jackson took with Where Were You (When the World Stopped Turning), with predictably syrupy results. But, however clumsy, Jackson at least approached Sept. 11 straight on.

Jim Dwyer, a New York Times reporter, wrote about the aftermath of the attacks by focusing on specific details and letting them speak for themselves. A man finds a photograph in the rubble belonging to someone he knew but hadn’t seen in a decade, who had escaped the falling towers. A woman who walked home through clouds of pulverized-glass dust finds, later that night, “a plastic cup that had been full of water when someone — a stranger, she doesn’t know who — handed it to her as she passed the restaurant supply district along the Bowery.”

Such specificity is nowhere to be found on The Rising. Likewise missing are more general issues of religious fundamentalism, root causes of support for international terrorism or the nature of revenge.

Springsteen, instead, wants to have it both ways: seeming to respond in a mature, nonjingoistic manner while not actually addressing anything at all. His words, in their lack of detail — and, in the case of several party/love songs, their randomness — ultimately refer to nothing. Meanwhile, the music is unabashedly rousing, catchy and anthemic, like Springstenn’s Born in the U.S.A. — but, Ronald Reagan’s misunderstanding notwithstanding, lacking that song’s sense of anger and despair.

Far from being the clear-eyed Sept. 11 album it’s made out to be, The Rising is just a hummable, feel-good arena-rock record.

The overriding impression I carried away from my … visit was that, although it all comes back to taste at PepsiCo, the physical sensation of tasting has been so thoroughly mediated by advertising and packaging that no one knows anymore where the physiologoical experience ends and the aspirational experience begins. It’s hard to guarantee the “same great taste” in a scientifically advantaged product when no one is sure just what that taste is.

– John Seabrook, on PepsiCo’s attempts to reduce salt and sugar levels in its snacks without changing the taste. (The article is available online for subscribers only.)

Natalie Portman did the Black Swan dancing :: Tom Cruise did his own stunts :: Avril Lavigne wrote her own songs

One of my favorite show-business lies is the “[big star X] did [obviously untrue feat Y]” claim, used to establish a star’s talent, grit, or authenticity.

Via EW, I see that we have a new entry in this storied marketing approach: the “Natalie Portman did basically all the dancing in Black Swan” claim. Apparently Portman’s body double Sarah Lane is causing problems for this strategy, pointing out that Lane — a professional ballet dancer rather than a dilettante actor — did the dancing:

“Of the full body shots, I would say 5 percent are Natalie,” says Sarah Lane, 27, an American Ballet Theatre soloist who performed many of the film’s complicated dance sequences, allowing Portman’s face to be digitally grafted onto her body. “All the other shots are me.” …

“They wanted to create this idea in people’s minds that Natalie was some kind of prodigy or so gifted in dance and really worked so hard to make herself a ballerina in a year and a half for the movie, basically because of the Oscar,” says Lane.

I haven’t seen Black Swan and don’t really care whether Portman did the dancing. But despite Darren Aronofsky’s defense of Portman, I would bet a lot of money that Lane is telling the truth. This is just how the entertainment hype machine works.

My favorite example of the phenomenon was the mid-aughts hyping of then-teenager Avril Lavigne as a totally real pop star who totally wrote her own songs!!! (Even though professional songwriting teams and session musicians clearly wrote the songs and played the music.) Edward Jay Epstein describes another example in The Big Picture, his terrific 2005 book detailing the marketing-and-publicist-driven reality of today’s Hollywood. It’s worth quoting at length:

The studio begins its marketing effort as soon as a project receives a green light. … The principal awareness instrument that the publicists have at their disposal, obviously, is the public reputation of the film’s stars. As part of their arrangement with the studios, the stars effectively allow the studios to use their reputations to publicize their films. To this end, the studios script “back stories” that merge the stars’ activities, real or invented, with those of the characters they play in the films. …

Consider Mission: Impossible II. … A back story was … scripted in which [Tom] Cruise was seen to be indistinguishable from Ethan Hunt, the acrobatic hero he played, via the claim that he, and not a stunt double, had done the free falls, fire walks, motorcycle leaps, and other perilous stunts that Hunt did in the movie.

This back story was keynoted in a publicity short, Mission Incredible, shown on MTV and other cable channels owned by Paramount’s corporate parent. Made in the style of a documentary in which the crew and cast of Mission Impossible are interviewed, it has the director, John Woo, expressing great fear that Tom Cruise would plunge to his death in leaps across mountaintops or be incinerated in fire scenes. Woo states, at one point, “Tom has no fear. I prayed for him.” In another publicity short, Woo says, “Tom Cruise does most of his own stunts, so we did not need a stunt double.”

In the actual production, there were at least six stunt doubles for Tom Cruise’s part. Even if Cruise had possessed the skills and training to the stunts himself, and even if the studio was not to object to the delays in shooting this conceit might cause, the insurance company, which insured Cruise as an “essential element” of the production, would not have allowed him to risk so much as an ankle sprain, much less his life. As far as this publicity script diverged from reality, however, it served its purpose by providing a plausible story for the entertainment meda — “Tom Cruise is Ethan Hunt,” and a tag line, “Expect the impossible again.”

Arnold Schwarzenegger’s Surefire Comic Book Hit!!!

The Black Swan tale doesn’t reflect on EW as a publication. Alas, their cover-story exclusive on Arnold Schwarzenneger’s post-governor plans is a bit more embarrassing.

The big news is that Schwarzenegger is teaming up with comics legend Stan Lee to develop the Governator, “a sunglasses-wearing superhero with an Austrian accent who’ll be at the center of an ambitious, kid-friendly multimedia comic-book and animated TV series codeveloped by no less a hero maker than Stan Lee.”

If this story were more than a publicist-hatched marketing plan, it might have pointed out that:

• Stan Lee’s main contributions to comics and pop culture came in the 1960s and ’70s. His later career does not inspire breathless fandom.
• The pinup drawing of the Governator — featured on a fold-out cover — is straight out of the Rob Liefeld school of bad ’90s comics art:

• This photo of Schwarzenegger and Lee couldn’t be more staged:

• The idea is terrible! Here’s Stan Lee: “We’re using all the personal elements of Arnold’s life. We’re using his wife [Maria Shriver]. We’re using his kids. We’re using the fact that he used to be governor. Only after he leaves the governor’s office, Arnold decides to become a crime fighter and builds a secret high-tech crimefighting control center under his house in Brentwood.” Um, have they focus-grouped this? Do they really think Maria Shriver and gubernatorial experience resonate with kids?

I’m happy to be proven wrong; kids have made successes out of far worse artwork and concepts. But Schwarzenegger’s publicist deserves a huge bonus for getting an EW cover out of this lame plan.

[David] Miscavige’s official title is chairman of the board of the Religious Technology Center, but he dominates the entire organization. His word is absolute, and he imposes his will even on some of the people closest to him. According to Rinder and Brousseau, in June, 2006, while Miscavige was away from the Gold Base, his wife, Shelly, filled several job vacancies without her husband’s permission. Soon afterward, she disappeared. Her current status is unknown. [Scientology spokesman] Tommy Davis told me, “I definitely know where she is,” but he won’t disclose where that is.

– Lawrence Wright, “The Apostate.” (Emphasis added. See also this previous post on Scientology’s Dear Leader complex.)

I thought of Ironhead last month as well, while standing in the lobby of the InterContinental Hotel, where a special meeting of the league’s Head, Neck, and Spine Injury committee was convening in one of the function rooms. Bert Straus, an industrial designer with a background in bathroom fixtures, dental-office equipment, and light-rail vehicles, was showing off a prototype of a new helmet called the Gladiator, whose primary selling point is that it has a soft exterior.

– Ben McGrath, “Does Football Have a Future?”  Emphasis mine: I love that there are industrial designers who specialize in bathroom fixtures, dental-office equipment, and light-rail vehicles. This guy must be pretty unique to know about all three. (Also — interesting article.)

On February 11, 2004, he made a presentation to the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases, at Fort Detrick, Maryland, the Army’s premier laboratory for biodefense research. Hours later, a researcher at Fort Detrick accidentally stuck herself in the thumb with a needle while injecting mice with the Ebola virus. Ebola has gruesome symptoms that often cause the victim to bleed to death; there is no licensed vaccine or therapeutic drug to stop it.

– David E. Hoffman, “Going Viral” (subscriber-only). Emphasis mine: How can you work with live Ebola virus and not a) wear mithril gloves, or b) be extra careful so you don’t inject yourself with Ebola??? (Another interesting article.)