Quote of the day:

There’s an old saying, “Life begins at forty.” That’s silly. Life begins every morning you wake up.
—George Burns

I learned a long time ago that people generally don’t click on links. Years ago I was trying to promote one of my videos, so I asked someone who had tens of thousands of followers to include it in his Twitter feed. To my surprise he did. To my disappointment, it only ended up getting perhaps two or maybe three views from all of his nearly hundred thousand followers.

People just don’t click on links.

It’s not as if that was an anomaly either. A few years later I saw a well-followed blogger talk about an article of his that had received a boost in a national publication, and he put a little quiz in his post. How many additional hits did he receive from that article? I selected the lowest of his possible multiple choice answers (2) and that was the correct answer.

People don’t click on links.

So I don’t know why I go to the trouble of looking up links to add to some of my posts when I know damned well that (practically) nobody is going to click on them. It usually adds quite a bit of time to the writing of the post, but I guess I feel it helps to add a little bit of authenticity to my writing.

I wonder how anything ever goes viral?

Anyway, that’s just a prologue to letting you know that this is a post filled with links that I’ve been saving up. 

There’s the Bulwark Goes to Hollywood podcast episode about the Haunted Hotel series, which tells you just about everything involved in bringing an animated show to the screen.

There’s 19th Century NoHo: Glamour, Greed, Money, and Murder from the Bowery Boys podcast, which is about the colorful history of the area north of Houston Street in NYC.

Then there’s Dave Farina: The Scumbags I’ve Debunked where science communicator Dave Farina talks about charlatans and idiots.

And then there’s Shaun’s latest video on The War on Science where he tears into Christian Ott, Richard Dawkins, Steven Pinker, Jerry Coyne, among others. Richard Dawkins used to be one of the good guys, but ever since he declared war on Rebecca Watson because Rebecca had the gall to contradict one of Dawkins’s mistresses, Dawkins has become a raving right wing lunatic. Oh, that video is four hours long and even I haven’t yet watched the whole thing.

Now I have gotten the impression that people are a bit more likely to to watch an embedded video, so I’ll end this post with a very short video of the few seconds of the Jimmy Kimmel broadcast that got Disney CEO Bob Iger’s panties in a twist that he decided to suspend Kimmel.

 

As you probably know the suspension has been lifted, probably because so many people were canceling their Disney subscriptions. I hope they stay cancelled. I hope people stop going to Disney amusement parks. I hope Disney really feels it in the only place that they care about, their bottom line. Such cowards!

Anyway here is what Jimmy Kimmel said that caused all the brouhaha.