@transfaabulous / transfaabulous.tumblr.com
Sooo hilarious but I can completely see this being a real conversation between streaming execs 😏
(original vid: Asif Ali - instagram - https://tinyurl.com/2p8jpkzz)
“they even put an Indian guy in WandaVision”
hang on a second, I gotta look up something
yeah, this is really funny
Look. I have literally no horse in this race when it comes to the WGA/SAG Hollywood strike. I do not watch enough TV or movies to be affected and I’m not a part of the industry. I really haven’t cared.
As a lawyer and orchardist, however, I am now utterly entranced by the fact that some Universal Studios exec thought it was a good idea to cut down city-owned trees in the middle of summer.
There is no way to get around the absolute clusterfuck they have brought down upon themselves.
In a statement to The Post, a spokesperson for NBCUniversal claimed the tree work is simply an annual ritual at this time of year. “We understand that the safety tree trimming of the Ficus trees we did on Barham Blvd. has created unintended challenges for demonstrators, that was not our intention. In partnership with licensed arborists, we have pruned these trees annually at this time of year to ensure that the canopies are light ahead of the high wind season,” they wrote. “We support the WGA and SAG’s right to demonstrate and are working to provide some shade coverage. We continue to openly communicate with the labor leaders on-site to work together during this time.”
If those trees were pollarded annually, the cut areas would NOT look like that. There would be big knobs of old growth at the trimming sites. Not seeing any of that here. The way those trees were topped (not pollarded, which is a very careful process that has to begin when the tree is immature) is excellent way to kill them due to loss of hydration, open sites to infection and parasitism during the best time of year for both, lack of nutrition due to so little greenery and new budding growth being left, sunburn and other exposure damage, and a myriad of other possibilities. Plus, if they were topped annually, they would not have the lovely drooping branches seen in the other picture but would have tons of vertical suckers instead.
This is what an annually pollarded mature tree should look like:
If this was done by the city, the public works arborists should be protesting in front of city hall and screaming their heads off right now. I'm not hearing about that, so... Tree law!
The Studios: *speak*
Botanists and other Tree Experts:
Update and confirmation of Imminent Tree Law:
He mentions later in the thread that not only do they not trim the trees annually, they’re trimmed at best once every 18 years. Supposed to be every five, and only in dormancy, which even my layman’s ass knows about tree trimming.
And yes, Universal can probably eat the fine. But it’s gonna be a whopper even if the trees survive (which is as mentioned kinda unlikely), California is a triple damage state for tree law, and it may increase dramatically if there were nesting birds in the trees.
All this to be a Captain Planet filler villain to some writers. And yes, it’s currently just the writers officially picketing there; SAG-AFTRA recommended against it for petty bullshit like this and the suddenly necessary sidewalk construction.
I asked my dad— a retired arborist—about TREE LAW and he just kinda blinked and said (i paraphrase because Dad Tangents, amirite?):
"Worst and best case I ever saw was a guy who was caught in the act of cutting down a C&C tree by two Department of Urban Forestry supervisors while they were randomly driving around on a Saturday. Not only did he have to deal with the cops showing up and months of paperwork and bureaucracy, but he also had to pay the fines AND cover the cost of the tree removal + stumping + buying a new tree + planting the new tree + wages for the regular crew plus the extra workers they needed to get the jobs done. That tree ended up costing him upwards of $35K, and that was over 20 years ago."
So yeah, respect Tree Law or pay out the bootyhole.
A couple weeks ago, some writers burst into my squalid domicile and started tearing the copper out of the walls. It was very funny to me, mostly because I had sold all that shit a few weeks prior in order to afford another hit of automatic transmission fluid (just one more quart of Dexron, I swear I’m good for it.) They would reach for the drywall, just to find a jagged hole where I had crudely pulled the wiring straight out of the house and into the firepit in my backyard.
My mother didn’t raise me to be impolite to guests, so I made sure to light a candle (Yankee E1085: Shockproof 75W90®) and make sure that they felt at home. Of course, being hunted felons, the television writers recoiled in terror at having been discovered. It took me a couple more minutes to calm the taller one of the two down, so he would stop hanging on my chandelier. Perhaps he still thought it contained copper wiring, instead of a bunch of glowsticks left over from the illegal rave down the street (good poppadoms.)
Once they realized I wasn’t going to turn them over to the hunter-killer content acquisition drones, they settled down a bit. Introducing themselves as Phil and an indecipherable series of Unicode characters that I don’t know how to type into my phone, they told me their story. Of course, I’m the one telling this story, so I didn’t give a shit about theirs. After some niceties were exchanged, we retired to the parlour in order to have some food and talk about how life was in the before-times, prior to when the machines came out of the abyss to create award-winning television shows like Celebrity Byproduct® and What’s That, Jesus? I’m On The Shitter. It was determined, collectively, that things used to be better.
I’m not a heartless type. Rather than charging rent, I told them that I could teach them valuable skills. If they could maintain cars, then they could pretend to be illiterate bottom-tier mechanics, not at all the kind of people capable of writing paragraphs full of human-sounding text in order to fill the insatiable demands of the mumble-mouthed content intelligences. And then they could work off their rent. The nameless one of the pair took right to my proposal, even volunteering to change drum brakes. Phil and I looked at her, then to each other, frowned, and pulled our HERF guns. No human being can change drum brakes, I said, as I pulled the trigger and shocked the shit out of the fourth impersonator cyborg this week.
