In Other News: Vintage Super Mario Bros. video game sells for $114,000; Facebook’s voting labels on candidate posts sow confusion

Published 5:42 pm Tuesday, July 21, 2020

Going in the water again: ‘Jaws’ boat clone supports sharks

The Orca is headed back to the waters of New England, but this time, its mission isn’t to hunt sharks. It’s to help save them. A group of ocean advocates and movie buffs is turning an old lobster fishing vessel into a replica of the Orca, the boat captained by the grizzled shark hunter Quint in “Jaws.” The work is taking place on Martha’s Vineyard, where Steven Spielberg shot the blockbuster movie in the 1970s. The occasion doesn’t call for a bigger boat so much as one with a different purpose, said Vineyard native David Bigelow, who acquired the craft and is heading up the project. When finished, he said, Orca III will be used as an educational tool to help the public understand sharks and as a research vessel for scientists. The project is dear to the heart of Bigelow, who appeared as an extra in “Jaws.” His drama teacher Lee Fierro, who died in April, also played the mother of a shark attack victim in the film. Reports of shark sightings on some New England beaches in recent years moved Bigelow to take on the project.

Vintage Super Mario Bros. video game sells for $114,000

An unopened copy of a vintage Super Mario Bros. video game has been sold for $114,000 in an auction that underscored the enduring popularity of entertainment created decades ago. A bidder who wished to remain anonymous snapped up an early version of the pioneering Super Mario Bros. game released in 1985 for Nintendo’s NES console during an auction conducted Friday by Dallas-based Heritage Auctions. The $114,000 price eclipsed Heritage Auctions’ previous record amount for a video game, which was a $100,150 bid made early last year for an unopened copy of the same game. The Super Mario Bros. copy that sold for a new record was part of a collection of video games from the 1980s and 1990s that sold to various buyers for nearly $700,000, which was well above Heritage Auction’s initial target of about $500,000.

Facebook’s voting labels on candidate posts sow confusion

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OAKLAND, Calif. — Facebook has started adding informational labels to all posts about voting by federal elected officials and candidates in the U.S., as it said it would do. But the move appears to be sowing confusion rather than dispelling it. This week, the social network applied labels to posts by President Donald Trump and by Joe Biden, the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, among others. The simple labels read “get official voting info” and direct people to a hub with information from authoritative election sources such as state and local officials. The intention, as Facebook laid it out in late June, was to provide links to unbiased information about when and how to vote on election-related posts. Instead, though, they’re being misinterpreted — in some cases as an endorsement of misleading or false claims.