A Bias For Butter

     It was 1968. I was living underground, and after a few close calls with the law, I escaped to my hide-out. It was a cabin in the woods of Northern California, that somebody friendly to the movement had let us use. Aside from furniture, there was nothing in it except an old 1925 World Book Encyclopedia. For entertainment, while we were laying low, my wife, Sue, and I would sit in the glow of the fireplace each evening, reading that old encyclopedia to each other.

 

     We got all the way to “Butter” before I noticed something wrong. The entry for butter was an unfair rant against the newly created margarine industry. We were butter lovers, but the article was an attack masquerading as truth. From my perspective in 1968, that anti-margarine 1925 bias just reached out and slapped me in the face. After that, we went on to find other offending entries.

 

     I was forced to realize the encyclopedia—the ultimate trusted authority—was not the truth I always believed it to be. It was biased. And along with that thought came another; if the 1925 World Book was so biased, but folks back then couldn’t tell, then a new 1968 encyclopedia was probably just as biased, only I might not see it. I was too close, lacking the 50 years perspective I had on that dusty one.

 

     Like a lot of my generation, I had, step-by-step, lost respect for just about every American institution and authority figure. But until that moment, I’d always trusted the encyclopedia. It hurt to have my bubble broken by that butter bias. They say you have to hit bottom before you can claw your way back out of the hole, on the side of revolution. My disappointment in the encyclopedia was just about bottom.

 

     So now fast-forward to today, and we have Wikipedia. Not only can anybody with an internet connection search for anything they want, for free, but what makes it really cool is it’s an encyclopedia with a built-in mechanism to weed out the bias. Now I’m like most folks, I usually just skim the articles for a quick reference, but if you want to go deeper, you can see the arguments, follow the literature, and get down in it.

 

     I’ll never think of any sort of reference material as The Truth again. But I think Wikipedia is on a whole different level from things back in the day. It turns the old-fashioned encyclopedia into a sort of self-correcting and democratic Theory of Everything. So starting a few years back, when those little pop-ups ask for it, I give them money, while I remember hunkering in that hideout, so long ago, reading the World Book.

 

     This year, in addition to my donation, I bought a small bag of Wikipedia buttons to distribute as gifts to family and friends. With each button, I’ve told my story, and why I believe Wikipedia is such an improvement. I know it’s likely that only a knowledge geek will recognize the Wikipedia logo, I didn’t. But wear the button and perhaps it will rank you among the few. And if you’re yearning for something positive, some proof of human progress, something worth wearing a button about, here it is; Wikipedia.

Tarantino's new movie

We went to see Quintin Tarantino's latest, The Hateful Eight the other day. I had high hopes, given how much I liked Django Unchained. If you remember, in that one Tarantino put slavery smack dab in the middle of a cowboy western, where the biggest horror of the movie was slavery itself. (Hello-Texas was a slave state, but how often has that come up in westerns?) What's more, Tarantino carefully refused to apply his characteristic clown-act violence filter to slavery and earned my eternal respect. The Hateful Eight is not quite that cool, but still is a hell of a movie. Set just a few years after the Civil War, not in Texas, but rather in Wyoming or Montana or someplace cold and snowy, it stars Samuel L Jackson. Like Django, it's a hell of a ride, and all about race relations in America. 

It opened in select theaters in 70mm, a format that came and went in the 60s. Now it's in wide release in the more common digital format as well. We went to the 70mm version at the Pacific Place. I was flabbergasted when the ticket price, even with senior rate applied, was almost $15. The box office guy said, "Well, there's a $4 surcharge for the new format." I almost laughed myself off my feet, since 70mm is an atavistic format, hardly new. Once the flick started, I looked carefully to see what I predicted would happen. The screen was, of course, the same size as always. 70mm, which was twice as wide as the more standard 35mm wide-screen film format, had an aspect ratio that was relatively wide compared to the height. Projecting this 70mm film onto a standard modern screen meant they had to letterbox it, sort of like watching a regular "widescreen" movie which wasn't formatted to fit your old square TV. So really the 70mm thing was just hype, and an excuse to up-charge. I can sort of understand when theaters charge extra for 3D. They take 50¢ glasses, charge you $4 for them. OK, I know it's a rip-off, but sometimes I'm willing to pay the extra for the hope of flash-bang effects. But to charge $4 for a letter-boxed 70mm format is something akin to charging extra if the movie was shot in black and white, instead of color.  And the entire second half of the flick was shot indoors, where there was no chance of any sort of panorama anyway, unless you count two guys standing on opposite sides of the screen firing away at each other.

Format carping aside, I really liked The Hateful Eight. The Seattle Times only gave it a 2 star rating. Of course they only gave Django Unchained one star (and that film went on to win an Academy Award!). The Times clearly doesn't get Quinton Tarantino's views on race in America. I'd venture to say that if Hateful had been done by a black director, it would have garnered a better review. Hateful 8 is an excellent movie, Django was truly ground-breaking.

Randy Rowland