7 @ 9: Pulp fictions

1. Gasp! my birth-year word is an interjection! Find out what words you share a birth-year with here.

2. So my question regarding this story is why did the billionaire Koch brothers try to bully Rachel Maddow into retracting a true and accurate story that portrayed them in a truthfully bad light? Why did they think this would work?

Was it because other journalists had previously backed down due to such threats? I hope not. I hope that Charles and David Koch were just trying to bully and bluster Maddow into doing whatever they asked because, as billionaires, they’ve come to think that always works everywhere and not specifically because that always works with the press.

In any case, it was nice to see someone tell billionaire bullies they’re wrong when they’re wrong, and that they can’t have whatever they want just because money.

3. Things you won’t see in 2014: the Formosan clouded leopard, the Cape Verde giant skink, the Sri Lanka spiny eel, the eskimo curlew, the western black rhinoceros …

4. Alexis Madrigal explains “How Neflix Reverse-Engineered Hollywood.” The strangest aspect of Netflix’s secret formula for recommendations is the Perry Mason factor — wherein the classic TV series and its stars play a surprisingly large and central role, even though “no one … is quite sure why there are so many altgenres that feature Raymond Burr and Barbara Hale.”

Doctor Science has a theory, suggesting that apparently one of the most popular, yet rarest of sub-genres is what he calls, in Netflix-speak, “Understated Cerebral Mysteries with Ironclad Plots, Good Dialogue, Not Much Action or Romance, and on the Side of the Defense.” Other theories may explain the Perry Mason “ghost in the machine,” as Madrigal calls it, but I think Dr. S. may be on to something, at least with those last six words: “On the Side of the Defense.” TV already offers us way too much Law and Order. A bit of exoneration and vindication might be a popular alternative.

5. Miranda Blue reports on anti-immigrant activist William Geen, who “explained to an Idaho radio host last month that he’s not a racist, he’s just opposed to the people who are trying to change America’s  history of being ‘predominately governed by people of European descendancy.'”

The important thing to realize is that Gheen is serious. He really thinks it’s unfair that he gets called a racist merely for fighting to preserve white “predominance.”

6. From Christian Nightmares, this is even creepier than most Sunday school puppets, and that’s saying something:

7. We’ve had the 1970s Muzak channel running at the store lately, so I’ve been hearing Neil Young’s “After the Gold Rush” twice a night at work.

And I’m increasingly convinced that’s really not Neil Young, but actually Larry Norman. Yes, I know, Norman’s falsetto was a tribute/imitation of Young’s and not the other way around, but still, look at that final verse:

Well, I dreamed I saw the silver
Space ships flying
In the yellow haze of the sun,
There were children crying
And colors flying
All around the chosen ones.
All in a dream, all in a dream
The loading had begun.

Does that sound more like an acclaimed Canadian songwriter or like the rambling of an addled Jesus Freak who made a career out of UFO/Rapture analogies?