Friday, August 06, 2021
On Language: I Really Like a Good Turning of The Phrase 'Bite Me'
‘I’d let you bite me!’ Shark Beach With Chris Hemsworth is dangerously flirty TV
Never mind that the Hollywood star has never encountered a great white – this documentary has Thor, his perfect jawline … and flirting so full-on it could crack the camera lens
Broadcast during National Geographic’s annual Shark Fest, this is ostensibly a show about the animals – although it takes eight minutes before we get our first proper look at one. Sure, we learn how many people were killed by sharks in Australia last year. And we see champion surfer Mick Fanning describe the time a shark had a go at him in the water. But mainly we spend those eight minutes with Hemsworth. Hemsworth taking his top off. Hemsworth stroking his surfboard. Hemsworth surfing in slow motion, the salty water caressing his perfect jawline like the touch of an angel.
However, despite this clear devotion to surfing, Hemsworth has never actually encountered a shark. But that doesn’t matter, because he claims to “feel their presence”. While some might query whether this is enough of a justification for a documentary – I think I felt the presence of a bat in a beer garden once, but nobody is clamouring for an hour-long show called Bat Pub With Stuart Heritage – it doesn’t really matter. You’re watching this because it’s got Thor in it.
If you do happen to be watching for sharks, though, you may well come away disappointed. There isn’t a huge amount of new information here. You don’t have to be an expert to know that the climate crisis is altering shark migration patterns, or that shark nets erected at beaches kill plenty of non-shark marine life, or that the shark population has massively decreased. You could get all of that from any boilerplate shark documentary. You could get it from a YouTube video.
To his credit, though, Hemsworth is a bright and engaging host, letting his evident enthusiasm buoy up his lack of expertise. Plus, there’s a short sequence here that I would have happily watched much more of, featuring Valerie Taylor, one of the world’s most qualified shark experts. Now 85, Taylor was the first person ever to photograph a great white without the aid of a cage. She has made documentaries about sharks, campaigned tirelessly for the protection of the animals and shot the real-life shark footage used in Jaws. She is a magnificent, accomplished professional. However, put her near Hemsworth and she flirts harder than any human being on Earth.
Hemsworth and Taylor only have a couple of chats, but every second they are onscreen together is magical. She bats her eyelashes and stumbles over her words, grabs his biceps and strokes his back. The onslaught is so full-on that Hemsworth can’t help but fall under her spell. “I’d let you bite me,” he blushes at one point. It’s fantastic. . .
Giving a Bad Name to 'Citizen Journalist': What was probably supposed to look organic looked fake as fuck.
Citizen Is Paying Users To Run The App And Their Mouths At Crime Scenes And Medical Emergencies
from the patron-of-the-arts-I-guess dept
That’s the pitch from Citizen, a controversial neighborhood watch app that’s quietly hiring New Yorkers to livestream crime scenes and other public emergencies in an apparent effort to encourage more ordinary citizens to do the same, The Post has learned.
This seems like a bad idea.
> It's one thing for people to happen upon one of these incidents and start livestreaming.
> It's quite another to pay people to put themselves at risk in service of an app hoping to increase its user base and repair its reputation.
> And it's yet another thing to be dishonest about what's happening, as both Citizen and its paid contributors are doing.
In June, the Daily Dot uncovered a Los Angeles Citizen app user who appeared to be a paid content contributor. The user known as Landon1129 just happened to be at the scene of eight separate incidents spanning 30 miles in a single day -- a day that also featured "Landon1129" being interviewed twice by Citizen's own live show. Eight incidents covered by the same user -- a user who frequently reminded viewers that he was "live on the Citizen app." What was probably supposed to look organic looked fake as fuck.
Now, there's some confirmation, albeit obliquely. Citizen claims it has always used "street teams" to expand coverage, generate content, and, I assume, increase brand awareness. But it has never made this explicit and its ads seeking contributors make no mention of the app.
Citizen says that it doesn’t hide its use of paid field team members.
But:
The company also doesn’t post the jobs on its own Web site. And Citizen’s name was not included in a since-deleted job posting Thursday on career board JournalismJobs.com seeking “field team members” to work for an unnamed “tech company with user-generated content.”
It's probably not a good idea for a company with both a literal and figurative background in vigilantism to pay people to head to crime scenes and other emergencies. There are plenty of people who get paid to do that already, and they're better at doing their jobs and not getting in the way of others trying to do theirs than the average respondent to a vague Craigslist ad. Stringers may be interlopers seeking sellable content but at least they have some idea of what to expect when they arrive on the scene and (usually) have cultivated good relationships with the public servants they'll be working with (and around).
> To be sure, journalistic efforts shouldn't be restricted by gatekeepers who only believe certain people can perform journalism.
But Citizen's history, along with its blatant desire to capitalize on people's fears, makes it a particularly questionable patron of the journalistic arts. If Citizen really wanted to put its resources behind expanding journalistic coverage of newsworthy incidents, it would do it without the use of a third-party contractor bound by an NDA that forbids telling journalists, who hired the contractor to place ads looking for journalists, who may ultimately not be pleased they're now working for an app with a terrible reputation.
Filed Under: citizen journalist, crime scenes, private security, vigilante
Companies: citizen
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