Welcome to TheBlot Boomerang, where we bring the biggest and best of this week’s news back around every Saturday.
LINK: Who keeps your social media safe for cat photos, online quizzes and “FarmVille?”
Wired finds out, paying a visit to the beat cops of the information highway: The content moderators. Their job is to play Spot the Porn and ISIS Executions, ensuring that none of it ends up on Facebook or YouTube. Unsurprisingly, tech companies have farmed out a lot of this work to the Philippines, where they can pay workers less money. Some employees become hardened to the online depravity. Others find it soul-crushing. This is a job where a contractor once said, “Oh, fuck! I’ve got a beheading!” and his co-worker asked, “Which one?”
LINK: Office politics — literally
Slate reports that “Employee political education” is the new, politically correct term for when a company tells its employees how to vote on Election Day. This bit of branding comes from BIPAC, a political action committee affiliated with corporations such as Wal-Mart, Campbell’s Soup and Exxon Mobile Corp. BIPAC is pro-big business (read: pro-Republican). It helps its clients to educate (read: pressure) employees on their voting behavior. And the Supreme Court’s ruling in Citizens United has made this electoral arm-twisting easier for corporations. Just ask the Alaskan construction workers who were summoned to a “safety stand-down meeting” and then told to vote against a Democratic ballot measure.
LINK: Without a dead wife, you have no movie
Such is the premise of BuzzFeed’s tribute to 14 screen wives who are all dead before the movie begins. These women are postmortem plot devices. They provide motivation and angst for the bereaved hero. They might remind him of his humanity. Despite their importance to him, their camera time is limited to a smattering of flashbacks. (BuzzFeed even includes a gauziness rating, because you can’t have a flashback without several layers of gauze). So when will we see movies where dead husbands motivate their wives to do anything?
LINK: Rolling Stone remembers
Rolling Stone’s David Fricke salutes Cream bassist Jack Bruce, who passed away Oct. 25. Cream was the first great power trio and a cornerstone of 1960s classic rock. Bruce himself was a hero to musicians like Flea and Black Sabbath, but as Fricke points out, Bruce “spent a microscopic part of his life” in the band. For most of his five-decade career, he was a journeyman bassist, singer and composer. In the pre-Cream 1960s, he cut his teeth on r&b. From the 1970s onward, he explored jazz. Fricke compiles a Spotify playlist heavy on Bruce’s work before and after Cream. Listeners used to hearing “White Room” and “Sunshine of Your Love” will be in for a surprise.
LINK: Google’s uber-timely Doodle
MSNBC offers a reality check in response to current hysteria over vaccination and Ebola. Oct. 28 was the 100th birthday of Jonas Salk, who discovered the polio vaccine. Google honored him with a Doodle, and his legacy should be remembered, especially in light of the dangerous anti-vaccination movement. Meanwhile, the media and government are fixated on the handful of people diagnosed with Ebola in the U.S. while the disease ravages Africa. Cooler heads should prevail in a health care crisis. Preferably cooler heads with medical knowledge.
Robin Cook is a contributing journalist for TheBlot Magazine.
