Sunday, October 10, 2004

Christopher Reeve, R.I.P.

When you think about it, it's like a really bad, contrived soap opera storyline twist: A guy who was so physically fit he could play Superman suffering an injury that left him almost paralyzed for life. If a writer came up with that, you'd say, "That kind of thing never happens in real life." But it happened to Christopher Reeve when he tried to jump a horse over a fence...and after it did, he looked more like a hero than he had when he was flying around in the blue tights. Even unable to move — when he presented at the Tony Awards, he couldn't even open the envelope — he just radiated courage and strength and a determination to fight his near-total disability.

I met him a grand total of Once, and that was before the accident. He struck me as very nice, very serious and somewhat deficient in the Sense of Humor Department. People were saying funny things and he laughed the kind of laugh you emit when others think something's funny, you don't know why, and you don't want to seem out of the loop. But like I said, he was nice...and gentle. Very gentle, very polite...and very handsome. Oh — and strong. He was 6'4" but it wasn't the absolute height that made him tall. It was how he moved. Easy to see why they cast him as Superman. Above and beyond the physical stuff, he had the necessary purity and purpose. I was never a fan of those movies. In fact, the only thing I really liked about them was just how perfect Christopher Reeve was for the role.

It was an odd caprice of fate that an actor who would have preferred doing classical texts made his fame and fortune in something based on a comic book. It was another strange turn of events that later put him in the wheelchair. And yet another bizarre, melodramatic plot point took him from us at a time when he was fighting for Stem Cell Research and it was an issue in a presidential election. (Kerry mentioned him in the debate Friday night.) It's really sad that he's gone; that we won't get the part of the story where he overcomes it all...because despite the hopelessness in his neurological state, I still believe it could have happened. A few years ago, he was on with Leno and they made some sort of deal: I think it was that Jay would buy Reeve's motorized wheelchair and put it in a museum, just as soon as Christopher could walk out onto the stage and give it to him. I know some folks from The Tonight Show read this site and I'd like to ask them to please dig out that clip and show it Monday night. The way Reeve promised that would someday happen was one of the most "real" examples of guts I've ever seen on television.

True, they're never going to be able to make that exchange. But that's not because he gave up.

• Posted at 10:08 PM · LINK

Pseudo-Surveys

Friday night, CNN asked folks to vote in their online poll as to who they believe won the contest and said they'd report the results later. They then proceeded to ignore those results and never report them because, as you can see, Kerry won by an incredible margin. Obviously, someone decided that it represented well-organized voting and probably some software-fiddling from folks who know how to vote multiple times and/or configure a "bot" (robot) to vote repeatedly. And that someone was probably right.

So what I want to ask is: When are we going to get rid of these stupid, easy-to-rig online polls? Okay, pro-Kerry folks managed to stuff this ballot box until it was obvious...but doesn't this kind of stuffing go on to some degree in any online poll that deals with any topic anyone cares about? If the people who ran Kerry up to 94% in this poll had stopped at 62%, CNN would have reported this poll as if it meant something. More to the point, aren't they well aware that most polls are "stuffed" this way by advocates of all sorts of views? Isn't what happened here that the phony poll came out a little too phony to report? The disclaimer on all votes reads...

This QuickVote is not scientific and reflects the opinions of only those Internet users who have chosen to participate. The results cannot be assumed to represent the opinions of Internet users in general, nor the public as a whole. The QuickVote sponsor is not responsible for content, functionality or the opinions expressed therein.

Okay, it doesn't represent the opinion of the public. It doesn't even represent the opinions of Internet users. What are we pretending this does represent? If the results of this one weren't worth reporting because they were obviously phony, why report the results of the ones that are only a bit less phony?

I know why they run these. They like the idea of drawing people, even vote-stuffers, to their site and tallying all those clicks. But a news organization (and almost all of them do this) shouldn't be presenting a poll that looks like news when they know it really isn't. They already have enough of that kind of reporting when they do the headlines.

• Posted at 5:10 PM · LINK

Recommended Reading

Fred Kaplan reveals how an awful lot of the fictional movie, Dr. Strangelove or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb, wasn't fictional.

I found this article via the website of my friend, radio master Paul Harris. If you don't live in or around St. Louis, you can't listen to him but you can at least check out his site.

• Posted at 10:06 AM · LINK