“[T]he first detailed observations of swimming chimpanzees and orang-utans suggest that they, like us, tend to swim using a form of breaststroke,”and OMG here’s video of them swimming! THEY THINK THEY’RE PEOPLE!

It’s the Matt Damon mash-up you never knew you needed, and that is true whether you are currently running a Matt Damon mash-up deficit or you have so many Matt Damon mash-ups that you are seriously considering getting rid of some of your Ben Affleck supercuts because you are almost out of space, what with all the Matt Damon mash-ups, and if the latter is the case I apologize, because this is one Matt Damon mash-up you just can’t afford not to have in your Matt Damon mash-up library.

The other day I was listening to NPR and they were talking about the plight of the refugees from the Syrian civil war, many of whom live in cramped conditions that only exacerbate the stress caused by the horror of being forced to leave their homes and the uncertainty of whether or not they will ever be able to return. They were interviewing one of the women who was trying to keep her family together in that awful environment and when they asked her what the worst part was, she immediately — I mean, without even waiting for the translator — replied, “Oh, for sure it’s when they pronounce my name wrong.” I had to run into another room so no one would see me crying.

They — and “they” is two people — are calling it “Social Theater.” It all apparently started with some guy at The Wrap, who called for designating “screenings as either ‘texting’ or ‘non-texting.’” Fine, sure! Let’s have some texting-friendly screenings in our multiplexes, why not. But really it got rolling with former Googler turned V.C. Hunter Walk asking, fairly reasonably if hilariously, for a new kind of movie theater altogether: One where you could talk, text, Google, Skype and online bank as much as you like. Cool! You’re a venture capitalist, make it happen. See you there, sometimes. (He’s clearly thought this out: “Maybe even improve attendance during the day since I could bang out emails with a 50 foot screen in front of me.”) This was pretty classic if harmless Silicon Valley bubble talk. But yeah, start a Palo Alto movie theater for people who actually use iPads! It might be gangbusters.

And then. Someone had to next-level it. Blogger Anil Dash has picked up the call and gone quite a bit further, in a hilarious, if sometimes accurate, diatribe full of goodies. (Dash is incensed, in part, about Drafthouse Cinema’s letter on this topic, which is also fairly over the top in its horror at any disruption to the Fine Art Of Cinema.) Where to begin with Ye Olde Dash! Let’s see:

• “the response from many creative people, who usually otherwise see themselves as progressive and liberal, has been a textbook case of cultural conservatism.” (That conservatism includes not wanting to see a sea of iPads in a darkened theater.)

• “The cinephiles apparently never consume any work without devoting every bit of their essence to honoring its creator. Presumably, they’re reading this in a web browser with only a single tab open.” (I didn’t actually pay to read your blog, nor did your blog run a message prior to reading asking for community norms of not disturbing each other?)

• “Amusingly, American shushers are a rare breed overall.” (Yup! America: not the world. Then he goes on about how in India people talk through everything. That actually sounds quite fun! Yes, different countries do things differently. Try forming a line to get into something in China!)

Anil’s crowning troll-glory is suggesting that everyone check their privilege: “recognize your own privilege or entitlement which makes you feel as if you should be able to decide what’s right for others.” The… fine upstanding American businesses that are movie theaters actually decided that? And then he calls everyone bullies. Hee! It’s inspired stuff. And, you know, it makes some sense — I bet a bunch of people were totally jerk-stupid in response to the original call for “Social Theaters”! This is why we should all devote our energies to ending blog comments, not building new movie theaters.

@rilaws everything I wrote is in response to actual responses people wrote on this topic this week.

— Anil Dash (@anildash) August 8, 2013

But first.

Anil lives in Manhattan, the ever-growing capital of privilege, so while he lives in a fairly diverse place, perhaps he doesn’t get to go to movies with a truly — and economically — diverse audience that often. He lives among the most prude of privileged movie-shushers, which is a shame about his choices.

From the last census, we learned that Manhattan is 57% white; Brooklyn is 42% white. Manhattan is also the home of the idly privileged: only 17% of Manhattan households have children. When you go to the non-kid-targeted movies in Manhattan, it’s somewhat rare to see children. But there are tons of children in R-rated movies in other boroughs. Most drastically in terms of New York’s diversity: Manhattan’s average weekly wage is around $2,464. The average wage in Brooklyn? Under $800.

So those of us in other boroughs would cordially like to invite him over to our theaters, where an actually diverse crowd of people happily engage with the film in many different ways, from silence to… well, good times. It’s great! Sometimes you want to go see a sad movie about killer whales in captivity in a little quiet movie theater. Sometimes you want to go see Final Destination 18: The Redestinationing or Faster, Furiouser, Driftier and throw food at the screen and crack jokes. I certainly do.

DID YOU KNOW? In the 1970s, seven out of ten kids died horribly because their parents couldn’t “check in with the babysitter” during movies.

— Matthew Dessem (@MatthewDessem) August 8, 2013

And besides, if you think talking v. silence during movies is totally race-based, you really need to go to the movies at MoMA. I haven’t heard so many old white people yelling since Red.

But the problem with having technologists go in hard against this system of movie oppression is not just that their arguments don’t really make sense (are they really in favor of everyone blasting music in their parks too?) but that they are circulating inside their privileged bubble. The system out here in the real world, it turns out, is working pretty well. We already have plenty of screenings where it is just fine to text, talk and carry on.

But we get the impulse. Our nerd friends grew up on “Mystery Science Theater.” You want to crack your jokes. And you want to make sure that you can keep up your brand on Twitter even while you’re locked in a theater for a while. It’s understandable: it’s the only life you know.

History shows us that it’s extremely difficult to get men to shut up for two hours. These fellows should build their chatty iPad-ey dude theaters. We’ll come visit when we’re in the mood! This is America, and you’re well-off entrepreneurs. Put your venture capital where your wide-open mouths are. Lord knows you’ll probably have the last laugh once again.

Here is the only good news out of all this sadness. The natural next step will be the return to America of theaters where men masturbate. This was once a common American pastime! Then we will know where they are and we can avoid them all. Everyone wins. In conclusion: Ban men.

P.S. It’s true what they say about the whites though. We’ll give the last word to NYU journalism school graduate Regina Hall, because she’s wonderful.

“Deformed carrots, knobbly lemons and discolored zucchini are deemed unsellable by German supermarkets, resulting in an enormous amount of food waste each year. Students here recently launched a campaign to help get the ugly specimens back on store shelves.” There are photos, and they are amazing.

I was trying to cross 3rd Street yesterday when some jackass transportation neophyte nearly ran me over due to the fact that he was paying more attention to the way he was pedaling and trying to adjust his seat while riding than to what was in front of his face. In the end we were both fine and the collision was barely worth remarking upon except it got me to thinking, how long before we stop seeing the CitiBikes? I mean, of course the CitiBikes will be with us forever now, but at a certain point — and we won’t even know when it happens, because not knowing when it happens is the whole how of these things coming to be — we will no longer “see” them in the sense of them being something different and distinctive; they will simply be more visual noise to avoid (and to especially avoid if they are being driven by the kind of wheel-wielding idiot who almost knocked me down around 5:15 yesterday) and not something we process as “new blue bikes” or whatever. I have a theory that because of The Fast-Paced World In Which We Live and the Constant Barrage Of Fresh Information To Which We Are Subjected we are all processing new things with considerably more celerity than we used to, so whereas once it would take a really long time before we stopped individually classifying things as, say, cerulean death chariots, nowadays the gap between novelty and invisibility is so slight as to be almost imperceptible. I think this is particularly true of visual material; things that are gimmicky or weird for attention’s sake don’t shock the same way that they used to; most times you don’t even know they’re there. I don’t know where it’s going to lead us a society, but I don’t think it’s anywhere good. Thank God I’ll be dead before the bill comes due. Particularly if that schmuck on two wheels comes back to finish the job. [Via]

“As Ms. Waldman nursed a bourbon with a splash of soda on ice, the nearby tables filled up with girls in their summer dresses and boys in their graphic tees. The growing conversational murmur was punctuated by the loud burst of gunning motorcycles and muffler-free cars from the unseen Atlantic Avenue…. At a neighboring table, a young man was reading a trade paperback, filtering out the surrounding buzz and abandoning it when a friend appeared.”

“Camp directors have discovered that a picture can be worth a thousand words to an anxious mom or dad. ‘I had a parent say that although she spoke to her son and everything sounded fine…the housekeeper felt he didn’t look like himself — he looked sad,’ said Jay Jacobs, owner of Timber Lake Camp in Shandaken, N.Y.”

Rhye, “3 Days”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gkh5Glu-1Yo

Earlier this year we ran a video by Rhye that made me think, “Oh, band to keep an eye on,” and then, as is sadly so often the case these days, I promptly forgot all about it, to the extent that, this morning, when I listened to this one and thought, “Wow, that’s terrific, I want to know more about this group,” and Googled them and found my own website as one of the results, I was like, “Good Lord, it is time to put yourself out to pasture, old man. Why do you even bother anymore? You’re pathetic. People are right to despise you. No one would be upset if you disappeared completely, and, in fact, everyone would probably get the day off from work to celebrate. You suck.” But I was also like, “Oh, band to keep an eye on,” and this time I totally will. It’s a pretty great song. [Via]

“11 Photos of Rappers With Cats”