Bruce Willis struck a goofy pose with his daughter Tallulah amid his battle with aphasia.
The pair posted the light-hearted snaps on their respective Instagram accounts, with Tallulah captioning hers, “”high drama club ~~ life skills ~~ fingers crossed I eat a veggie this week LMAO.”
In the pics, the father-daughter duo share an embrace while pulling funny faces.
Tallulah’s post featured several other pictures, including an image of an Alcoholics Anonymous book and a 1990s pic of a short-haired Winona Ryder.
In March, Bruce, 67, announced he was retiring from acting after being diagnosed with aphasia, a brain disorder that affects his ability to communicate.
He shares Tallulah, 28, along with daughters Rumer, 34, and Scout, 31, with his ex-wife, actress Demi Moore. He has two other children with wife Emma Heming-Willis.
The “Die Hard” actor has been mostly staying out of the spotlight since he revealed his medical condition.
Bruce Willis was diagnosed with aphasia in March.Instagram: buuski
In the months since his shocking announcement, Bruce has mostly stuck to posting on Instagram, where he occasionally allows his followers to peek into his slowed-down life.
In December, he shared several images of his blended family with wife Emma Heming Willis and Moore celebrating Christmas.
Despite the scary diagnosis, the Golden Globe and two-time Emmy winner has plenty to look forward to.
Rumer announced she was expecting her first child with boyfriend Derek Richard Thomas.
Behold the Monty Python workout. It’s silly! It’s walky! It works, according to an important — or, at least, actual — study published today in the annual holiday edition of the BMJ, a British medical journal.
Employing high-tech science and a tittering adolescent’s sensibility, the study’s researchers filmed volunteers perambulating like the ungainly bureaucrats in the Monty Python comedy troupe’s Ministry of Silly Walks sketch, while wearing metabolic monitors.
Their aim was to determine the physiological effects of ambling around a track in the manner of the actor John Cleese, playing the apparently boneless Mr. Teabag, the head of the Ministry of Silly Walks, or Michael Palin’s Mr. Putey, a wannabe silly walker whose screwball stroll needs work.
The scientists soberly wondered whether silly-fying people’s walking form would up the intensity and caloric expenditure of their exercise and make an otherwise simple stroll into a serious workout. The study is part of the BMJ’s annual holiday lineup of legitimate but offbeat research.
“What we wanted to know was, how would deliberately inefficient walking affect energy costs?” said Glenn Gaesser, a professor of exercise physiology at Arizona State University in Phoenix, who led the new study.
Or, to quote Mr. Teabag, if your walking becomes “rather sillier,” could that change be beneficial for your body or just a threat to your dignity?
To find out, Gaesser and his colleagues gathered 13 healthy adults, ages 22 to 71, and had them watch the Ministry of Silly Walks sketch several times.
For those unfamiliar with the skit, Mr. Teabag leads his ministry by example, moving like an unhinged heron, high-kicking, low-bobbing and randomly whisking up and jiggling his knees with abandon. The more-sedate Mr. Putey merely hitches his left leg out a bit with every other step, a motion the disapproving Mr. Teabag finds “not particularly silly.”
After absorbing the basics of silly walking, the study volunteers donned a facial apparatus to measure their oxygen uptake and started walking around a short track in Gaesser’s lab. First, they walked as themselves, at their preferred pace, for five minutes. Then, they copied Mr. Putey, hooking out their left leg sometimes, for another five minutes. Finally, they went full-on silly, imitating Mr. Teabag’s demented eggbeater strides, for the concluding five minutes, generally giggling throughout, Gaesser said.
Afterward, the scientists calculated the walkers’ speed and metabolic costs during each form.
Silly walking like Mr. Teabag proved to be much harder than un-silly walking, requiring about 2.5 times as much energy. Putey-style strolling, meanwhile, was comparable to normal walking in terms of energy expenditure, but slower.
In practical terms, these findings suggest super-silly walking can be strenuous enough to qualify as “vigorous exercise,” Gaesser said. If someone adopts a silly walk for at least 11 minutes a day, he continued, they will meet the standard recommendation of at least 75 minutes of vigorous exercise every week, which should meaningfully improve health and aerobic fitness.
Surprisingly, these findings turn out to have unexpected confirmation in human evolution, said David Raichlen, a professor of human and evolutionary biology at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, who studies mobility and evolution but was not involved with this study.
“Across human evolution, one of our key adaptive advantages was the development of a very economical, bipedal walking gait,” he said, “where we spend more than 50 percent less energy than our closest living relatives, chimpanzees.”
As a result, normal walking barely challenges our hearts and lungs or burns many calories. (Gaesser said he understands walking is an enormous challenge for people with some disabilities, and the study was not meant, in any way, to exclude or mock them.)
But we can upset this walking ease “through biomechanical tweaks like those seen in the silly walks,” Raichlen said, increasing the energy expenditure of getting from place to place.
Gaesser, in fact, believes the utility of silly walking may lie in using it to replace our most quotidian strolls. Heading to the bus stop? Lift your knees, he said. Dip your rump. You’ll burn extra calories and improve your fitness.
If you worry about drawing uncomfortable stares, you can silly walk in the indoor comfort of your home or closed office, Gaesser said.
But why? Maybe, we should consider silly walking not as an exercise in humiliation, but an exercise in exercise and a chance, briefly, for goofy, unbridled joy. Wiggle. Skip. Hopscotch. Flail. Freestyle and smile back at confused onlookers. Exhort them to join, and begin a conga line of unconventional walks, ushering in, together, a healthier, sillier 2023.
Do you have a fitness question? Email YourMove@washpost.com and we may answer your question in a future column.
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Walking like John Cleese’s character, Mr. Teabag, in Monty Python’s famous “Ministry of Silly Walks” skit requires considerably more energy expenditure than a normal walking gait because the movement is so inefficient, according to a new paper published in the annual Christmas issue of the British Medical Journal. In fact, just 11 minutes a day of walking like Mr. Teabag was equivalent to 75 minutes of vigorously intense physical activity per week, presenting a novel means of boosting cardiovascular fitness.
“Half a century ago, the [Ministry of Silly Walks] skit might have unwittingly touched on a powerful way to enhance cardiovascular fitness in adults,” the authors wrote. “Had an initiative to promote inefficient movement been adopted in the early 1970s, we might now be living among a healthier society.”
The BMJ’s Christmas issue is typically more lighthearted, though the journal maintains that the papers published therein still “adhere to the same high standards of novelty, methodological rigor, reporting transparency, and readability as apply in the regular issue.” Past years have included papers on such topics as why 27 is not a dangerous age for musicians, the side effects of sword swallowing, and measuring the toxicity of the concoction brewed in Roald Dahl’s 1981 book George’s Marvelous Medicine. (It’s very toxic indeed.) The most widely read was 1999’s infamous “Magnetic resonance imaging of male and female genitals during coitus and female sexual arousal.” (We wrote about the paper in 2019 to mark the 20th anniversary of its publication.)
Monty Python‘s classic “Ministry of Silly Walks” skit.
As we’ve reported previously, the “Ministry of Silly Walks” sketch first aired on September 15, 1970, on BBC One. It opens with Mr. Teabag buying a newspaper on his way to work—which takes him a bit longer than usual since his walk “has become rather sillier recently.” Waiting for him in his office is a gentleman named Mr. Putey (Michael Palin), who is seeking a grant from the Ministry to develop his own silly walk. Putey demonstrates his silly walk-in-progress, but Teabag isn’t immediately impressed. “It’s not particularly silly, is it?” he says. “I mean, the right leg isn’t silly at all, and the left leg merely does a forward aerial half-turn every alternate step.” Putey insists that a government grant would allow him to make the walk very silly indeed. Teabag eventually offers him a research fellowship on the Anglo-French silly walk. The sketch cuts to a pair of Frenchmen demonstrating this “La Marche Futile.”
In 2020, two scientists at Dartmouth College performed a gait analysis of the various silly walks on display, publishing their findings in the journal Gait and Posture. They studied both Putey’s and Teabag’s gait cycles in the video of the original 1970 televised sketch, as well as Teabag’s gaits from a 1980 live stage performance in Los Angeles. They found that Teabag’s silly walk is much more variable than a normal human walk—6.7 times as much—while Putey’s walk-in-progress is only 3.3 times more variable.
But according to the authors of this latest paper, the 2020 study didn’t measure the caloric expenditure of those silly gaits. So Glenn Gaesser of Arizona State University and his co-authors decided “to fill this vital research gap.” The authors note that humans have evolved to “move in increasingly efficient ways,” but when it comes to cardiovascular fitness, “inefficiency of movement might be a desired trait.” They thought it might be possible to decrease the energy efficiency by adopting a more inefficient gait, thereby boosting cardiovascular fitness without having to exercise for a longer period of time. They dubbed their approach PEMPA: practice of effort maximization in physical activity.
For their study, Gaesser et al. recruited 13 healthy adults (six women and seven men) between the ages of 22 and 71 years old. The subjects completed three walking trials on an indoor track: one walking with their usual gait and chosen pace, one walking (to the best of their ability) in the manner of Teabag, and a third attempting to walk like Putey. All the subjects wore portable metabolic measurement systems to measure oxygen uptake (ml/kg/min), energy expenditure (kcal/kg/min), and exercise intensity (METs). And it sounds like most of the subjects enjoyed the experience.
Enlarge / Graph showing the measured energy expenditure (kcal/kg/min; 1 kcal=4.18 kj) during participants’ usual walking and inefficient walking in men and women.
G.A. Gaesser et al., 2022
“We did not measure minutes spent laughing or number of smiles as secondary outcomes while walking inefficiently,” the authors wrote. “Smiling during the inefficient walking trials could not be observed due to participants’ mouths being obscured by the facemask worn during data collection. However, all participants were noticeably smiling upon removal of the facemask. Moreover, bursts of laughter from the participants were frequently noted by the supervising investigator, almost always when participants were engaging in the Teabag walk.”
The results: For both men and women, walking like Teabag resulted in significantly greater energy expenditure—about 2.5 times more than regular walking or walking like Putey. In fact, the Teabag walk showed an energy intensity of eight METs, which amounts to vigorously intense exercise. Plus, it’s fun, though one must be willing to look a bit silly.
“At present, we cannot advocate generalizing the findings of this research and general suggestion to decrease efficiency in movement to other forms of exercise such as mountaineering, water sports (except aquatic aerobics), or urban cycling,” the authors concluded. “Inefficient dancing has been around for generations but, too often, that lone innovator at your local nightclub or on your cruise ship has been the subject of derision rather than justifiable admiration (with the notable exception of break dancing).”
Summary: Having fun with co-workers can help to reduce stress at work, a new study reports.
Source: TCD
Positive interventions that distract us from difficult tasks actually help to reduce our stress levels, according to new research from WHU – Otto Beisheim School of Management and Trinity Business School.
The research, conducted by an international team of researchers, shows that short positive interventions, such as watching a funny YouTube video, can help you to overcome daily demands like dealing with annoying emails or the tasks you dread.
In turn, this allows you to be more engaged, creative, and helpful toward your coworkers.
The research was led by Vera Schweitzer from WHU – Otto Beisheim School of Management with co-authors Wladislaw Rivkin (Trinity), Fabiola Gerpott (WHU – Otto Beisheim School of Management), Stefan Diestel (University of Wuppertal), Jana Kühnel (University of Vienna), Roman Prem (University of Graz), and Mo Wang (University of Florida).
So, according to this research, next time you find yourself secretly laughing at a hilarious video your colleague sent to you during the lunch break, you should embrace it. This will help you to recover from a stressful morning and prepare you to make the rest of the day a success.
Professor Vera Schweitzer, researcher at WHU – Otto Beisheim School of Management, explained: “Our study shows that experiencing feelings of positivity throughout your workday can help you to remain effective particularly when daily work demands require you to invest a lot of self-control, that is, regulatory resources to control your temper.
“Trying to stay calm after reading an annoying email, for example, is typically quite depleting for employees. Consequently, they might struggle to demonstrate self-control throughout the rest of their workday, which, in turn, would hamper their engagement, creativity, and behavior toward their colleagues.
So, according to this research, next time you find yourself secretly laughing at a hilarious video your colleague sent to you during the lunch break, you should embrace it. Image is in the public domain
“This is where positivity comes into play: Watching a funny video increases feelings of positivity. Such positive emotions allow employees to protect their regulatory resources even after dealing with resource-consuming self-control demands. In turn, this positively affects their effectiveness at work.”
Dr Wladislaw Rivkin, Associate Professor in Organisational Behaviour, Trinity Business School, added:“Today’s work environments are increasingly demanding, but we have limited understanding of what organisations and employees can do to prevent the stressful effects of self-control demands such as negative emails or unloved tasks.
“Our research shows that short positivity interventions can help employees make the best of their day and that employers and employees should consider incorporating more positivity into the workday!
“For example, organisations could provide employees with recommendations about short funny videos via a daily newsletter or post a ‘joke of the day’ on the intranet. By doing so, employers can help mitigate the negative effects of self-control demands.”
The researchers gathered their results by examining 85 employees over 12 workdays, who received a daily text- or video-based positivity micro-intervention.
About this psychology research news
Author: Fiona Tyrrell Source:TCD Contact: Fiona Tyrrell – TCD Image: The image is in the public domain
Original Research: Closed access. “Some positivity per day can protect you a long way: A within-person field experiment to test an affect-resource model of employee effectiveness at work” by Vera Schweitzer et al. Work & Stress
See also
Abstract
Some positivity per day can protect you a long way: A within-person field experiment to test an affect-resource model of employee effectiveness at work
We expand research on the daily dynamics of employee effectiveness at work by integrating the core tenets of the Conservation of Resources Theory with the Broaden-and-Build Theory of positive emotions.
Specifically, we argue that daily work-related self-control demands as a stressor deplete employees’ regulatory resources, which in turn impair work effectiveness because employees try to protect their remaining regulatory resources.
Assuming that positive affect can replenish regulatory resources, we further propose that enhancing positive affect can alleviate employees from entering a resource preservation state on days with high self-control demands at work.
We examined this integrated affect-resource model in a within-person field experiment over 12 workdays with 85 employees who received a daily text- or video-based positivity micro-intervention.
Consistent with our predictions, the adverse effects of noon self-control demands on afternoon measures of employee effectiveness (work engagement, organizational citizenship behaviour, and creativity) via regulatory resource availability were attenuated on days when participants experienced positive affect, which was enhanced through the positivity micro-intervention.
We discuss theoretical implications for the regulatory resource literature, methodological implications for the growing body of research on within-person field experiments in organizational research, and practical implications for introducing short interventions in daily working life.
There is a very convenient way of accurately and succinctly summing up the degree of absurdity to which Goat Simulator 3 aspires: There is no such thing as Goat Simulator 2.
Those familiar with Coffee Stain’s caprine and chaotic antics will likely recognize Goat Simulator as the wildly popular sandbox game from way back when. For those unacquainted with it, the premise is simple: You’re a goat with a penchant for misbehaving, tasked with causing as much of a ruckus as possible. From headbutting civilians to sticking your tongue to everything in sight, it’s a game that largely revolves around complete and utter bedlam.
The sequel — again, Goat Simulator 3, because three comes after one in goatspeak — is founded upon similar principles of chaos. What may strike people as surprising, however, is that it’s a type of chaos that has been filtered through a layer of sophistication. It’s obviously not an Arkane game (imagine if Goat Simulator took place in Dunwall…), but it’s a marked improvement when considered next to the original. So while it’s not necessarily my jam, I can admit that it knows what it wants to be, and puts everything it has into becoming precisely that.
Ironically, Goat Simulator’sgreatest strength was always how roughly hewn its mechanical makeup was. The game, which originated as a joke project designed for a game jam, was riddled with the kinds of bugs that should have made it near-impossible to play — but by virtue of its nature as a literal goat simulator, they just made it even funnier. From Pilgor the goat’s raucous ragdolling to the wild emergent shenanigans that could arise from invisible gaps in the sandbox’s stitching, Goat Simulator quickly established itself as an excellent game to play with friends.
Image: Coffee Stain
This is one of many details that the developers at Coffee Stain have evidently been aware of while working on Goat Simulator 3. While the original game supported couch co-op, the sequel features a dedicated online multiplayer component that allows up to four players to compete in various minigames, which include proprietary versions of golf, treasure hunts, and The Floor Is Lava. If the original game was a jagged rock, Goat Simulator 3 is the product of what happens when you mine that rock for gems and embed them in something nicer to look at. It’s not a diamond necklace, but it’s, like… a smooth panel of granite with a couple of rocks that look like diamonds interspersed throughout. As I said earlier: It knows what it’s aiming for and is very good at staying true to that.
But it’s also ambitious in other ways. Rather than being a pure sandbox that’s exclusively designed to facilitate mayhem, Goat Simulator 3 has a story mode. It’s not exactly aiming for prestige storytelling (I’m not joking when I say it’s literally about the Goat Illuminati), but it’s there to serve as a sort of general guide to weave all of the individual instances of absurdity together. To progress the story, you essentially visit Ubisoft open world-style towers that are sporadically dotted across the map, each of which will aid you in unlocking an imposing and mysterious door that leads the way to Goat Castle. What lies behind it is anyone’s guess — but odds are it’s probably pretty wild.
The main story obviously isn’t overly demanding — an enormous part of Goat Simulator 3’sappeal is the fact it generally asks very little of you, leaving you to your own devices more often than not. But the scale of this style of play has also been expanded and iterated upon.
For example, there’s a house somewhere on the map owned by an old lady with a rocket launcher. When you approach her, she’ll start shooting at you, but if you hit her with your firework launcher or headbutt her, you’ll unlock a secret passage to her cellar that leads to… a retro Doom-style corridor shooter populated by a dozen other bazooka grannies. Once you defeat them all, you can actually unlock this character as an attachment — and given that as well as a goat, you can play as a shark, a giraffe, and more, the challenge of “How bizarre can we make this game?” was obviously a regular topic of discussion during development.
You can quite literally play Goat Simulator 3 as a shark on a skateboard being ridden by an old lady with a rocket launcher.
Image: Coffee Stain
Ultimately, Goat Simulator 3 is probably exactly what you think it is. It’s a more polished version of the first game with tons of new features, most of which have clearly come from carefully observing the elements of the original that resonated with people. The mobility is a little tighter, the sandbox is a little more responsive, and the random achievements have a little more rhyme and reason to them. But ultimately, it’s still a silly game about being a really annoying goat — there’s a pretty low ceiling for how serious that can be.
More so than anything else, Goat Simulator 3 feels like a great party game to play with friends. Everyone at my demo session at Gamescom, including the people I wasn’t in a lobby with, was laughing for pretty much 100% of the time I was there. It’s not deserving of special reverence for its work in innovation, systems design, or just about anything else. But it’s difficult to criticize something that has a very clear design ethos and manages to adhere to it with almost perfect accuracy.
If you reckon you might be interested in Goat Simulator 3, you will be — and that’s the most truthful thing anyone can say about it.
Goat Simulator 3 heads to PlayStation 5, Windows PC, and Xbox Series X on Nov. 17.
A prominent French physicist has been forced to apologise for a photograph that he said was from NASA’s new space telescope but which was in fact a piece of chorizo.
Etienne Klein, a renowned philosopher and research director at the French Atomic Energy Commission, informed his followers that ‘no object belonging to Spanish charcuterie exists anywhere but on Earth.’
He had posted a tweet last Sunday that he claimed was the latest astonishing photograph from the cutting edge James Webb Space Telescope of the star Proxima Centauri.
The photograph purports to show a furious red ball of cosmic energy, pockmarked with glowing solar storms roiling across the neighbouring star’s surface.
‘Photo of Proxima Centauri, the closest star to the Sun, located 4.2 light years from us,’ Klein tweeted.
‘She was taken by the JWST. This level of detail… A new world is revealed day after day.’
This is the picture which Etienne Klein, a renowned physicist, philosopher and research director at the French Atomic Energy Commission, posted to Twitter claiming – as a joke – that it was the latest astonishing photograph from the cutting edge James Webb Space Telescope of the star Proxima Centauri
NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory took this photo of our sun on January 8 2022
Etienne Klein, a renowned philosopher and research director at the French Atomic Energy Commission
The photograph resembled famous portraits of the sun taken by the European Space Agency’s Extreme Ultraviolet Imager (EUI), which captures detailed solar storms on our home star’s surface at a distance of 75 million miles.
Proxima Centauri, the star closest to the earth, is 5.9 trillion miles away.
While most Twitter users were able to recognise that the photo posted by the preeminent physicist was in fact a slice of Spanish sausage, others were more gullible.
‘The last photo of Proxima Centauri was this,’ said one user, posting a photo of a distant star. ‘This is a huge step forward.’
‘I can’t tell if it’s a prank or really proxima that looks like a chorizo,’ wrote another.
However, Twitter user Ned Boeuf wasn’t fooled. ‘Fake, it’s a slice of chorizo.’
Then the Twitter backlash began.
‘Coming from a scientific research director, it’s quite inappropriate to share this type of thing without specifying from the 1st tweet that it is false information when you know the speed at which a false information spreads,’ came one indignant reply.
Twitter user impressed with the huge step forward in space telescopy that the JWST represented
This user was more sceptical but still on the fence about whether it was a joke or serious
However, not everyone was fooled
The backlash began with users accusing Klein of spreading misinformation
‘Indeed, there has been a loss of resolution which makes the joke more believable and therefore more toxic!’ wrote another.
Klein acknowledged that many users had not understood his joke which he said was simply aimed at encouraging people to question and not automatically accept ‘eloquent images’ from people in positions of authority.
On Wednesday he wrote his apology.
‘In view of some comments, I feel compelled to clarify that this tweet showing an alleged snapshot of Proxima Centauri was a form of amusement,’ he tweeted to his 89,200 followers.
‘Let us learn to be wary of arguments from authority as much as of the spontaneous eloquence of certain images….’
‘Well, when it’s time for the aperitif, cognitive biases seem to have a field day…
Elon Musk posted this meme last month making light-hearted fun of the JWST’s astronomy photos
‘Beware, then, of them. According to contemporary cosmology, no object belonging to Spanish charcuterie exists anywhere but on Earth.’
‘I come to present my apologies to those who may have been shocked by my prank, which had nothing original about it,’ he said, describing the post as a ‘scientist’s joke’.
Prior to that he posted the James Webb Space Telescope’s capture of the Chariot Wheel galaxy and its companion galaxies, (‘REAL this time’).
‘Located 500 million light-years away, it was undoubtedly spiral in its past, but took on this strange appearance following a furious galactic pile-up.’
Last month Elon Musk posted a meme making fun of the JWST, comparing the granite slab of a kitchen with a visual of the space, in a light-hearted joke targeting the NASA.
Philip Baker Hall, a jowly actor whose air of ruefulness and scowling impatience elevated even the briefest of appearances into masterful portrayals of gravity and silliness, best captured best in an unforgettable role on “Seinfeld” as a hardcore library cop, died June 12 at his home in Glendale, Calif. He was 90.
His daughter Anna Ruth Hall said the cause was complications from emphysema. In some of his later screen work, he used a portable oxygen tank.
With his raspy delivery, grizzled hair and doleful face, Mr. Hall excelled as government and military officials with urgent agendas as well as Hollywood and business executives with ulterior motives. He played enough judges to form a bar association, but the hint of menace in his voice also made him effective as old-school hoods and others on the fringes of society.
When choosing roles, he once told the A.V. Club, he was drawn to “really off-center parts that are so ludicrous that you almost can’t believe them. It’s always fun to take those kinds of parts and play them with as much serious passion as you can muster.”
One of his most indelible characters was the aptly named library investigations officer Lieutenant Bookman on the sitcom “Seinfeld.”
Larry David, who created the show with comedian Jerry Seinfeld, once told The Washington Post that Mr. Hall never played his scenes for laughs, which only intensified the bonkers absurdity of punchlines such as, “I’ve got a flash for you, joy boy!”
David recalled that Mr. Hall was so effective playing the library cop inspired by “Dragnet,” a Detective Joe Friday of the stacks, that “Jerry had problems getting through the scene.”
Philip Baker Hall could probably be one of your favorite actors
Although his television and film appearances were often too fleeting to merit mention in reviews, Mr. Hall became one of the most reliable and welcome character actors of his era. Film scholar David Thomson described him as having a “wonderfully sour presence.” Thomson added, “He looks like a guy on the subway, at the end of the diner counter, a face that knows its place is in the crowd and several rows back.” Yet that veneer of anonymity propelled one of the busiest late-blooming careers in show business.
Mr. Hall, who came from a blue-collar Ohio family, did not start acting professionally until he was 30 but made up for lost time with hundreds of roles, from the works of Shakespeare to those of Arthur Miller and Philip Barry, with regional theaters across the country.
He came to greater prominence in 1983 as the star of the off-Broadway drama “Secret Honor,” a one-man show focused on the brooding post-presidential life of Richard M. Nixon. It was mostly a Faustian story with a political spin, Mr. Hall told the Boston Globe, “really about anybody who comes to a crisis, anybody whose ambitions have been high and who has had to compromise to reach those ambitions.”
Mr. Hall copied neither Nixon’s voice nor his mannerisms but, by all accounts, he succeeded in portraying a wounded soul. New York Times cultural critic Mel Gussow wrote that Mr. Hall “seems to capture a full measure of the man — his edginess, suspicion, resentment and unconscious humor — as he wills himself into failure.”
Robert Altman directed a screen version of the play in 1984, and film critic Roger Ebert praised Mr. Hall for giving “one of the great performances in American movies.” But it tanked commercially, relegating Mr. Hall to another decade of minor parts on both side of the law, among them, a mob boss fixer in “Midnight Run” (1988) and an IRS agent in “Say Anything” (1989).
In the early 1990s, he was working on a television production when Paul Thomas Anderson, then a gofer on the set, offered Mr. Hall the lead role of a gambler in a short film he was planning. The project, “Cigarettes & Coffee” (1993), featuring an interconnected series of stories set in a diner, became a hit at the Sundance Film Festival and launched Anderson’s feature career.
For years, Mr. Hall remained part of Anderson’s unofficial stock company of actors, and the writer-director gave him some of his most memorable dramatic opportunities: a rare leading role as a mysterious professional gambler with a guilty past and a deep sense of honor in “Hard Eight” (1996), a commercially-minded theater magnate who foresees the future of videotape in the pornographic film industry in “Boogie Nights” (1997), and a quiz show presenter who faces his mortality in “Magnolia” (1999).
Mr. Hall’s trio of high-profile roles for Anderson, along with his “Seinfeld” appearance, were his windfall. He began appearing in so many movies and television shows in any given year, with a dozen credits in 1998 alone, that he sometimes forgot in interviews which characters he played and what the projects were called.
He was the harried police captain in “Rush Hour” (1998) and its action-comedy sequels and the embattled “60 Minutes” producer Don Hewitt in the tobacco whistleblowing drama “The Insider” (1999). He was as much at home in Lars von Trier’s scathing minimalist avant-garde drama “Dogville” (2003) as he was in his prolific supporting parts in major studio releases of the 1990s, 2000s and 2010s, among them “The Rock,” “Air Force One,” “The Contender,” “The Truman Show,” “The Talented Mr. Ripley,” “The Sum of All Fears” and “Argo.”
In a testament to his omnipresence, Mr. Hall appeared as a handwriting expert in director David Fincher’s acclaimed “Zodiac” (2007) and as a police department chief in the lower-profile film “The Zodiac” (2005), both about the hunt for a San Francisco serial killer.
Philip Baker Hall was born in Toledo on Sept. 10, 1931. His father, a factory laborer, had difficulty finding work during the Great Depression, and the family scraped by in what Mr. Hall later called “the slums of the north end” of the city.
At a young age, Mr. Hall developed an interest in entertainment and began performing magic shows at lodge meetings and banquet functions, aided by a resonant baritone that came into full pitch by the time he was 12.
He was active in his high school drama club and majored in speech and drama at the University of Toledo, where he worked as a ditchdigger to pay for his education. After graduating in 1953 and completing Army service, he supported himself and a growing family as a high school teacher in Ohio before tiring of the “hypocrisy and bureaucracy” of academic life.
He uprooted his wife and children to New York and was quickly exposed to the vagaries of professional show business. He toured South America with a cultural exchange program sponsored by the Kennedy administration, performing small parts opposite Helen Hayes. He also did a stint in Boston with an offshoot of the Second City improv group, amid a hectic schedule of roadshow productions and off-Broadway work.
His marriages to Maryella Holst and Dianne Lewis ended in divorce. In 1987, he married Holly Wolfle. In addition to his wife, survivors include two daughters from his first marriage, Trisha Infante and Darcy Hall, two daughters from his third marriage, Anna Ruth Hall and Adella Violet Hall, a brother and four grandchildren.
Mr. Hall periodically returned to the stage, notably in a 2000 London and off-Broadway revival of David Mamet’s “American Buffalo” opposite William Macy. But he mostly stayed close to Hollywood, remaining in seemingly constant demand for guest appearances on shows such as “3rd Rock From the Sun,” “Boston Legal,” “Modern Family,” “The Loop,” “Messiah” and “Curb Your Enthusiasm,” reuniting in the last with Larry David as his crotchety doctor.
By Mr. Hall’s telling, he was bemused to find that his years of compelling dramatic work onstage, as Prospero or Willy Loman, had been almost entirely overshadowed by a few minutes as a flinty library detective.
“Before Bookman, my agent would say, ‘Well, they really liked your work, they really love you, but they don’t think you’re right for this,’” he told the A.V. Club. “After Bookman, there was no door closed to me in the industry. My agent would say, ‘Everybody wants to see you. Everybody wants you to be in their movie, everybody wants you to be on their show.’
“It was kind of incredible,” he added. “I’m not putting it down. It’s just that when people say, ‘I loved you as Bookman,’ I can’t help but think, ‘But what about the other 280 roles I’ve done?’ I don’t say it, though. Because with Bookman, I kind of hit the jackpot.”
Most wild Pokémon are incredibly standoffish in Pokémon Legends: Arceus. When trying to catch them, I’m used to having to sneak up to them in the tall grass, or pelt them with food until they look somewhere else. They’ll often run away or attack trainers if provoked. Mr. Mime, on the other hand, wants to give you a little show, and the creature’s memorable antics are making quite an impression on players.
Take a look at this Mr. Mime who poured themselves a cup of tea while settling into an invisible couch:
The most striking thing to me is that this Mr. Mime doesn’t go into alert mode when they spot a trainer. Usually, a Pokémon will either choose to fight or flee when they notice you. This one’s just pretending that the trainer isn’t there. You’ve gotta admire Mr. Mime’s dedication to the craft.
Despite being an artist at heart, however, even Mr. Mime has to abide by battle rules, especially when you engage them in battle. This Alpha Mr. Mime (one of the larger, more aggressive Pokémon) straight-up walked off when a player called out a Snorlax. Though it may look like Mr. Mime is peacing out of this encounter, she’s actually just creating space between herself and her large Snorlax opponent, but the nonchalantly aloof way that she turns around is hilarious. It almost feels like she’s doing it for attention.
One of the fun mechanics in Arceus is that your party members can interact with each other when you let them out of their Pokéballs, in ways that have more life and character than what we saw with the camp feature in Pokémon Sword and Shield. Check out these Pokémon cheering after Mr. Mime performed invisible barriers for them.
Not everyone is a fan of Mr. Mime’s antics, however. During one player’s battle with a wild Mr. Mime, one trainer’s Graveller rolled away after his opponent tried to mimic walls in front of him. While it’s normal for Pokémon to back away a little bit when there’s not enough space, it’s funnier to think that Graveller said “no PDA in public, please.” I have to admit, Mr. Mime has a lot of commitment to the bit. I would have expected her to have at least a little bit of self-preservation when defeat or capture was on the line.
The entirety of Hisui is Mr. Mime’s stage, and everyone is an audience member. Even when they don’t want to be.
It isn’t April first, but nobody told Razer when it announced its gaming “finger sleeves.” Yes, finger sleeves: They are literally little sleeves that cap off your fingers to supposedly enhance their grip, and these particular finger sleeves are pitched at the gamer market.
This isn’t the first time Razer announced a product that sounded too ridiculous to be real. But unlike Razer’s concept for an RGB-enabled Covid face mask, Project Hazel, this gaming finger sleeve is already available for purchase on its website.
These “non-slip” finger gloves are supposedly aimed at folks who play mobile games like Fortnite (or whatever the kids are playing these days) to help keep their phones securely in hand as they earn their latest victory royale. According to the website, the sleeves are made out of a “smooth, high-sensitivity fabric” (35% silver fiber fabric, 60% nylon, 5% spandex), are “lightweight and breathable,” and come in just one size. I have to commend the restraint Razer displayed not making them glow up. Sometimes less is more.
Razer isn’t the first company to come up with the idea to make finger sleeves for gaming, but unlike its new market competitors—fly-by-night Amazon sellers with names like Powstro, Flydigi, and Sameo—Razer already has real estate in gamer’s homes. So, Razer lifestylers: Go buy your little blinged-out finger rubbers. Go ahead, I’ll wait. It’s important to practice safe gaming, after all.
Although the gaming finger sleeve sounds like the punchline to a joke, PC Gamer pointed out that the finger sleeves do enjoy some level of market demand given that the mobile gaming industry is now estimated to be worth $15.1 billion. We might be laughing now, but…ok, we’re still laughing now. Good luck to Razer though.
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While I personally don’t plan on buying a pack of these finger sleeves for my mobile Tetris gaming pleasure, I wouldn’t be mad if Razer or some other org decided to create a new glove for fighting games with the same general approach. Heck, they can even light up for all I care. That one was free Razer, call me!
