General Lee Speaking, This Meme Is Awful

You know, because of idiotic memes, I cannot even look at Willy Wonka’s grinning mug without wanting to punch something.  Now they’re trying to ruin Kermit the Frog for me too.  Bastards.

We’ll talk more about Bill Cosby and Subway in a moment, but let’s start with The Dukes of Hazzard, a television series that originally aired on CBS from 1979 to 1985.  The show followed the adventures of Bo and Luke Duke, cousins on probation for transporting moonshine.   Their trademark vehicle, which they used to commit shenanigans and to jump over stuff, was an orange 1969 Dodge Charger called General Lee.  The General Lee, as you might expect from the name, featured a large Confederate battle flag on its roof.

The cable channel TV Land started broadcasting TDoH reruns on June 10, 2015, but pulled the program just three weeks later in the wake of the Charleston shootings.  Although TV Land gave no public explanation for their decision, the show was yanked in the midst of increased public scrutiny regarding the modern display of the Confederate battle flag.  Confederate flag supporters and Civil War revisionists (but I repeat myself) cried foul, arguing that the flag didn’t stand for racism and besides, them Duke boys never meant no harm.  People who know how to use Google responded with crushing evidence that the Confederate battle flag was very much a racist symbol at the time of its creation, and that it had been resurrected by an organization with racist goals.  Granted, nobody is claiming that The Dukes of Hazzard itself was a racist show, but it did prominently and proudly feature a racist symbol.  Unwilling to admit defeat even in the face of overwhelming evidence, flaggers launched an immediate tu quoque campaign.  Their goal: to find unsavory slobs whose related franchises were nevertheless still available for consumption, and to hold them up as shining examples of liberal hypocrisy.

If you were looking for unsavory, you could hardly do better than Bill Cosby.  Bill Cosby, once America’s beloved father-figure, lived a second life as a serial rapist.  According to the allegations of more than fifty women, Bill Cosby harassed, threatened, and drugged women to make them have sex with him.  That’s rape, ladies and gentlemen.  It doesn’t get any more clear-cut than that.

Like the Confederate-flag-festooned General Lee, Bill Cosby was featured in a popular television show from the 1980s.  The Cosby Show originally aired on NBC from 1984 to 1992, and it literally made NBC’s Thursday night lineup.  The Cosby Show was in the top ten Nielsen ratings for all but its final season; still, when one thinks of the show now, one must consider the fact that even while Cosby was filming it, he committed multiple acts of sexual assault, including rape.  Clearly the man is scum.

So TV Land should be ashamed – ashamed – to continue airing a television show featuring a man who, by all accounts, is a monstrous rapist, when they pulled The Dukes of Hazzard for nothing more offensive than a decoration on the roof of a garish car.

Except…TV Land is not airing The Cosby Show anymore.  That’s right, TV Land pulled The Cosby Show in November of 2014, again, without an official explanation.  One assumes that TV Land wishes to avoid controversy – and they aren’t alone.  In fact, many media outlets pulled programming featuring Bill Cosby, and some canceled planned projects.  You would be hard-pressed to find Bill Cosby’s face on any TV channel, unless you’re watching a news story about another one of his victims shedding light on his terrible, terrible past.

Interestingly, both The Dukes of Hazzard and The Cosby Show are still available on several digital services, including Amazon, Netflix DVD, and Hulu, none of whom have announced their intentions to drop either program; ergo, the double standard that the meme tries to suggest simply doesn’t exist.  The most-talked-about network that gave the axe to the goose, gave it to the gander as well.  If other, smaller networks decided to keep one show while ditching the other…well, that is for them to explain.

Now then, let’s talk about Subway, shall we?  Subway also found itself at the center of controversy recently when its long-time spokesperson, Jared Fogle, became embroiled in a sex scandal of disgusting proportions.  Fogle, apparently not content to let Bill Cosby be the ickiest person in the world, was arrested on charges of possession of child pornography and paying for sex with a minor.  Subway severed ties with Fogle before the proverbial excrement hit the cooling device, but now the question becomes: How much did Subway know about Fogle’s actions before letting him go?

At least two people claim to have alerted Subway that something was wrong with Fogle prior to the FBI investigation that exposed his sick deeds and officially ended his career as Subway’s pitchman.  One of the whistle-blowers was a Subway franchise owner.  She says she met with upper management to alert them that Fogle had asked her about the possibility of having sex with her underage cousin, and that he had admitted to paying a 16-year-old for sex.  She suggested – very reasonably, I think – that Jared’s image and merchandise should not be displayed in Subway stores, nor should he be allowed to interact with children.  Despite her conversation with the higher-ups, Subway made no immediate move to distance itself from Jared Fogle.

Rochelle Herman-Walrond, a Florida radio host, says she spent four years recording conversations with Fogle, who allegedly confided in her about his deviant interests.  She says the information she provided to the FBI was crucial in its investigation of Fogle.  She claims to have warned Subway about Fogle’s creepy behavior via an online form, but she never received a response.  Subway denies knowledge of either woman’s allegations.

Assuming that both women are telling the truth, then somebody at Subway knew about Fogle’s problematic behavior long before it became public, yet Subway failed to act.  That is a very big problem.  In that case, we must shift the question: To what extent is Subway culpable in this tragedy?  And what should we, the conscientious consumers, do about it?

It’s a difficult question to answer.  Subway publicly denounced Jared Fogle’s actions.  It’s not like they’re digging in their heels in the immediate wake of public controversy, unlike some fast-food chains I could name.  Still, one suspects they could have acted sooner – they should have paid more attention to the troubling claims brought to them by those two women.  Ultimately, I suppose, the consumers will determine whether Subway escapes from Jaredgate relatively unscathed, but I don’t think it’s unreasonable to insist that Subway face some very close scrutiny regarding its delayed response to the Jared Fogle case.  At the very least, it may be time for an overhaul of Subway’s communication policies and a changing of the guard in the upper echelons of management.

Would it be appropriate to boycott Subway, in the same way that LGBT-supporters boycotted Chic-Fil-A after that corporation’s financial support of notoriously anti-gay organizations became public knowledge?  Again, that is for the consumers to decide.  If you eat at Subway, there’s no reason to expect that your dollars will eventually harm somebody (going forward, anyway).  But your patronage of that restaurant might also send the message to its directors that you agree with, or at least, don’t disagree with – their treatment of the two women and the information they provided.  One could argue that you are implicitly endorsing Subway’s reluctance to put morals above profits.  You’ll have to decide for yourself if you can live with that.

So what’s the final judgement on this meme?  Well, it was TV Land’s decision to take down The Dukes of Hazzard, and although the channel didn’t specifically say why, it’s reasonable to assume that it was related to the Confederate flag controversy.  But the network also responded to the Bill Cosby scandal in a similar fashion, so there is nothing hypocritical about their actions.  And the Subway case is a whole other can of worms.  As troubling as Subway’s early response (or lack thereof) to the allegations about Jared Fogle may be, they did eventually dump him.  Each person will have to decide whether he or she is comfortable eating fresh, but no one should feel that he or she is supporting a child molester for doing so.  The author of this meme seems to think that he is terribly clever for sticking it to the hypocrites who canned his beloved Dukes of Hazzard show, but the barb of this meme is simply too weak to puncture.  This meme aims at too many targets, and misses them all.

Beans, Beans, the Tragical Fruit

This video is not an advertisement for Haynes Baked Beans (which don’t exist) but for Cinesite, a movie effects company based in London and Montréal.  Cinesite has contributed visual effects to many well-known films, including Skyfall, Iron Man 3, World War Z, and the Harry Potter movies.  This short film, entitled Beans, is their first in-house animated feature.  One can easily see the production values that made them a force in the world cinema market.

I don’t have a problem with the first-class visual effects, but  I do have a few quibbles with the scientific details.  You may accuse me of pedantry.  That’s fair, but I wouldn’t be doing my job if I didn’t pick a few nits.

The action in the film appears to take place on Earth’s Moon.  The Moon has no atmosphere (okay, a negligible atmosphere), so there is no medium to transfer the sound of the monster’s roaring and stomping, the astronauts’ screaming^[1], or a fart.  That last part is what bothers me most about this film: the zinger at the end is entirely dependent upon the monster’s ability to hear the astronaut’s flatulence.

Now you might argue that the monster’s feet are sensitive to vibrations traveling through the lunar regolith.  Since the farting astronaut is also in contact with the lunar surface, the vibrations of his unfortunate gas could travel through his spacesuit and then through the lunar soil, eventually being detected by the monster.  That seems unlikely.  First, a fart is generally not very loud (certain exceptions apply).  By the time the vibrations of the fart reached the astronaut’s boots, they would have been greatly attenuated.  The loosely packed regolith would deaden the sound even further (I assume…it’s remarkably hard to find scholarly papers about the acoustic properties of moon soil).  The monster’s feet would have to be incredibly sensitive to detect the astronaut’s flatulence from that distance.  I’m not sure I can buy into that.  Even if the monster could detect low-level soil rumblings, it seems like the noise would be drowned out by the monster’s own footfalls.  No, any way you look at this, it doesn’t work on the Moon.

But maybe the film is not set on the Moon.  You never see Earth in the background.  Perhaps the action is taking place on some other world – a world that resembles the Moon in topography but which bears an atmosphere thick enough to carry sounds.

No, that hypothesis doesn’t fly either.  The Sun is clearly above the horizon, but the sky is black.  Any world with an atmosphere thick enough to transmit sound would have a colorful sky during the day, thanks to Rayleigh scattering.  This may not be happening on the Moon, but it’s definitely an airless body.  The monster could not have heard the farting astronaut.

There are a few other issues.  We see some dust billowing around the monster’s feet, but dust only billows and lingers in an atmosphere.  In a vacuum, any dust kicked up during the monster’s rage would follow a tidy parabolic arc until it hit the ground again.

Also…four astronauts on the lunar surface?  The Moon-landing Apollo missions carried three men each, only two of whom descended aboard the Lunar Module.  Landing four men at a time would require either the simultaneous launch of two Apollo-style missions, or the development of a much larger Lunar Module.  A larger LM would be heavier, which would require a bigger, more expensive rocket to get it to the Moon.  The Apollo program was already enormously expensive.  I can’t imagine NASA springing for the unnecessary expense (or risk) of sending two extra astronauts.

Scientifically, the film doesn’t work.  I know the film was not intended to be a science lesson, but I don’t see why the producers had to thumb their noses at science in the process of making their film.  The special effects are great, but I kind of lose a little respect for the film when I notice a huge and easily fixable plot hole.

---

1. I couldn’t tell if they used the Wilhelm scream sound effect when the monster threw the second astronaut. Anybody else?