Might as well start the "save our show" petition now

Y'all should really check out the new TV series The Black Donnellys, because I don't expect it to be around for too long. I wasn't too excited about it from the commercials, which just left me wondering what, precisely the show was supposed to be, but my interest was piqued when I heard it was created by Paul Haggis, the genius behind television series Due South and the tragically short-lived EZ Streets who is probably best known as the writer and director of the oscar-winning Crash.

After seeing the first episode I can understand why the commercials were vague about the show; the show itself doesn't really tell you where the series is headed until the last five minutes.

It's a sharply written, intelligent, complex story. In other words, it's going to be canceled. Like EZ Streets, it has the feel of movie, or even a novel. It is aiming to tell a fairly epic story, and the pilot had just enough characters to make it just slightly difficult to keep track of who was who, which is usually an unpopular trait for a TV series.

Hopefully I'm wrong, and Black Donnelys will be that rarest of things, an intelligent, adult, creative show of great artistry that isn't canceled within the first 3 months, but just in case, don't wait for the reruns. The show is on Mondays at 10, and the premiere episode is being re-shown Thursday at 9. Enjoy it while it lasts.

if technology can't create paradise, what can?

A facetious title, but it is interesting how, even in a virtual world that would seem to offer greater freedom from the constraints of society, that world seems to fall into the same traps as the real one. Or so I gather from an article in the LA Times, pointed to at
gamepolitics.com, on virtual terrorists going after virtual corporations screwing up their utopia.

I visited Second Life around the time it first started and couldn't get into it (I'm not big on virtual worlds; typing the command to dance or kiss or smile just isn't as good as going out into the real physical universe and dancing, kissing and smiling), but I do hear fascinating things about it, with protests, politicians, concerts, all sorts of stuff. I think about checking it out now and again, but I don't know, it sounds like it's going from cool to corporate, and I've already been through that from living in the East Village for the last 20-odd years.

America: The world power that no one in the world takes seriously

Oh look, U.S. intelligence has been sending worthless intelligence about Iran to the U.N. since 2002. Now there's a surprise.

the only thing I'm going to say about Britney

Okay, I'll admit it, I've been somewhat interested in watching Britney Spear's remarkable public meltdown. But honestly, it's just too much. I am not one of those people who slows down on the freeway to see a traffic accident or tries to see what's going on when there's an ambulance on the street, and Spears is the same sort of thing, something so sad and disturbing that I think it's best to just leave it alone. I'm just increasingly conscious that what you've got is some dumb, desperate young woman without a clue how to function acting out for an audience of vultures.

 Everyone should really just stop looking. Just let her fall apart, go through rehab and hopefully pull her life together without an audience. After she's cleaned up her life if she wants to get back in the public spotlight she can always go on The Surreal Life, but really, wouldn't it be great if everyone just stopped following her, photographing her, mocking her? Wouldn't it just make the world a better place if for once people could see, this is going too far and stop?

Alas for Britney, the world is not going to become a better place anytime soon.

wow

Seriously, I can't even think of anything to say about this article in the Times about a sorority that kicked out its overweight and/or minority members in a bizarre attempt to change their image.

my crystal ball

I see in the Times that there is a rapidly hedge fund industry and that the Bush administration feels that industry doesn't really need much more to keep it on the straight and narrow than a "set of nonbinding principals."

Which leads to the question: is there a way to invest in future economic scandals? Because if we've got a fast-growing, poorly-regulated industry devoted to playing with money, well, we are going to see people make more and more money until suddenly it turns out there is all sorts of corruptions and things totally fall apart and a bunch of people go to jail.

I don't even know what the hell a hedge fund is, and I only skimmed the article in the Times, but I would bet money on it. It's going to be a mess, but by the time it happens Bush will be out of office and will probably have made a fortune in hedge funds.

And yet, polls show people consider atheists untrustworthy.

Reading an article on bible-nut science students who write papers using science they don't believe in, I am just horrified by the intellectual dishonesty. It seems clear that these are people who are doing whatever they have to to get a degree so they have credentials and can then say, I have a degree in science and I say the earth was created 10,000 years ago. It would be like me going to a religious college and getting some sort of degree in religious studies, and I write all the papers and say there is a god and her is the proof, and then after I graduate I start writing papers about how my study of god has convinced me there is no god. When in fact, I never believed in god.

It's just wrong, and it suggests good reason to be suspicious of those few "scientists" who replace biblical explanations for scientific ones. If you don't believe in science, don't get a degree in it.

honey versus vinegar

Interesting article on the difference between real-life interrogation and Hollywood interrogation, i.e. torture. It once again reiterates that torture doesn't yield much useful data and that real-life interrogators are never faced with getting information out of someone or a building will blow up in an hour.

What I found interesting was the idea that the real way to get information out of prisoners is to connect with them, to use psychology. I have to say, I think that would be a lot more interesting to watch; the careful cultivation of data through the creation of a complex personal relationship between enemies. Unfortunately, it seems Hollywood producers prefer the easy route of showing people getting beat up to the more difficult task of portraying a complex, realistic approach.

Lost: too good to last

I was surprised to read that in a poll, 22% of viewers ranked "Lost" as the most disappointing returning series. But I also understand the feeling.

I love Lost. It's a great show. And part of me wishes it would go on forever. But part of me wants it to end now, this second. Because I want to know how it all turns out. It's that same feeling you get when you're reading a suspense novel and want to look in the back of the book and see how it all turns out. But while you can fight that feeling for a few days while you finish that book, Lost is making viewers wait years.

This is the inherent problem in creating a series built around a central mystery. It was a problem Twin Peaks had, and Twin Peaks put off resolving the mystery it started with until people were screaming for a finale. But at least Twin Peaks could continue after that point. When Lost explains what's going on, the show is over. But it has to end, because the longer it goes on, the more aggravating wondering how it will end will get.

They should also try to wrap it up because let's face it, shows run out of steam, and it would be great if Lost ended before it starts to suck.

If Obama ain't black, then I ain't white

There's a rather odd article in Salon expressing Debra J. Dickerson's opinion that
Barack Obama isn't black. This isn't totally crazy when you read the article, which basically says that since he isn't a descendant of black slaves he doesn't share in the American black experience and thus isn't black as black people in the U.S. think of it, or something like that.

What that really means and whether it matters is dealt with wonderfully by Gary Kamiya in an article published in Salon the next day on the difference between black and "black," so I won't discuss too much of this. But I do have to comment on part of Dickerson's piece, in which she comments, "Whites, on the other hand, are engaged in a paroxysm of self-congratulation; he's the equivalent of Stephen Colbert's "black friend." Swooning over nice, safe Obama means you aren't a racist."

Actually, voting for Obama does pretty much mean you're not racist. It means that you accept that a man with black skin is as qualified to run the country as a man with white skin. Racism is not bigotry against people of a particular cultural background, it is racism against people perceived to be of a particular race (I say perceived because race is pretty much an artificial construct in which people from certain areas with certain features are lumped together in an ultimately meaningless fashion). American blacks are not a separate race in the way the term is generally used any more than one would say white Italians and white Germans are a separate race.

I think what Dickerson is really talking about is not racism but classism. She means that white people will vote for Obama but wouldn't vote for Chuck D because white people find Obama friendly and charming and white people figure Chuck D. hates them. On the other hand, white people would probabably vote for Denzel Washington or Will Smith. Are Washington and Smith "black," as Dickerson defines it? I have no idea. And I don't really care.

Dickerson is right in saying Obama is a relatively comfortable choice for whites. Jackson had that old style preacher thing which is very much a part of American black culture but not so much a part of white culture. Sharpton was a grandstander whose history would not make white people feel he'd really care about any of his non-black constituents (fairly or not). Carol Mosely Braun was actually a terrific candidate, but she was in the same camp as Kucinich - a great candidate, smart, right on the issues, but quixotic because she had no national political infrastructure.

Yes, liking Obama better than Jesse Jackson is classist, but it isn't racist. Because while Dickerson may make divisions between one sort of black and another, most white people don't. They are not looking at the candidates and saying, oh, this one isn't really black because his dad wasn't a descendent of slaves. I don't think this would occur to many white people, although I suppose Rush Limbaugh's description of Obama as "halfrican" is sort of getting at the same thing. But Limbaugh makes his living using words to twist reality, so we can ignore him.

I can't speak to whether Obama is really "black" as Dickerson defines it; that's something for the people who define themselves as "black" to debate about. But while Dickerson certainly understands the black experience in a way I can't, what does she know about looking at the world from a white American's perspective? If I were to say, "black people like this politician because of this dubious rationale," I think Dickerson would object. And she'd have a right to.

Why Christopher Hitchens isn't a competent writer

In writing, it is a good idea, particularly if you are going to suggest something bound to be controversial, to start with a compelling example of what you are talking about. It's something comics are very good at. They will begin with something simple, say, "do you ever eat sausage and bite into something realy hard?" and everyone who's not a vegetarian will nod and the comedian has made a connection and can then go on to suggest anything he likes, having won the audience to his side.

This wouldn't work if the comedian says something that no one can relate to, like, "have you ever put your hand on a glass window and it felt like it was made out of tapioca?" Then the audience would just think the comedian was crazy.

In his article in Vanity Fair, Why Women Aren't Funny, Christopher Hitchens effortlessly separates himself from all normal people in the first paragraph with a "glass feels like tapioca kind of statement." He says that while women, when talking about a guy, will mention how funny he is, but men, when talking about a girlfriend, will never mention how funny she is.

Huh? I always tell people that my girlfriend Debbie has a quick, somewhat caustic wit, and that my ex-wife Jessica told hilarious stories. I've known other guys who talked about how funny their girlfriends were. In fact, I avoid humorless women, and that is easy to do, because the world is filled with witty females.

So what Hitchens has done is to paint a picture of his friends. They are, one imagines, dense guys who think of themselves as macho and consider women to be pretty ornaments. They probably tend to date frivolous women half their age and are scared of any woman who is intelligent and witty and clever. Hitchens indicates very clearly in one paragraph that he has surrounded himself with men just as out of touch with the real world as he is, and basically seems to be going out of his way to say, "don't bother reading the rest of this, anything I have to say is completely irrelevant."

I only read the first of the three pages. Further down he admits there are funny women comedians (obviously none of his friends date them), but then insists that Dorothy Parker isn't all that funny, which suggests that he has never read any of her brilliant, hilarious theater reviews (seriously, don't knock Parker if all you know her for is "men never make passes at girls who wear glasses").

Also, as pointed out by Gene Weingarten in the Washington Post, Hitchens wants his article to be amusing but he fails abysmally.

Of course, the advantage of putting a controversial article in a major magazine like Vanity Fair is it stirs people up. But I think Vanity Fair's editor made a major blunder, because I, for one, can't take a magazine seriously that would publish such drivel. Vanity Fair has gone from being a magazine I am neutral towards and uninformed about to a magazine I consider a joke. It's the sort of crap article that got me years ago to stop reading the New York Press (which would have articles on things like why female circumcision is a fine thing and we should quit criticizing its practice).

Anyway, I wouldn't bother reading the Hitchens piece, but Weingarten's piece is quite amusing (he got a bunch of funny women to write it for him.)

Breaking story: Bush stops acting like an asshole for five minutes

Isn't it creepy that it's major news when Bush makes a speech in which he says
he's not questioning the patriotism of people who disagree with him on Iraq?

Of course, we all know at some point in the future, probably quite soon, he will once again question his opponents patriotism. It's what he does, and it's one of about a hundred reasons why I despise him and can't respect anyone who considers him in any way acceptable as a president.

the exploitation of cute girls by other cute girls

Sure, other bloggers give you the latest news, but sometimes I just give what's news to me, even if it's a controversy that's a couple of years old. For example, I just heard about the accusations of racism regarding Gwen Stefani and her Harajuku girls.

I learned of the controversy after my girlfriend and I watched Gwen's latest video, "The Sweet Escape. It's a very cute video with Gwen and two adorable dancing Japanese girls in a gold-plated jail cell. My girlfriend said the Japanese girls were Harajuku girls, and I wound up looking up Gwen on wikipedia.

Basically, a couple of years back Gwen got four Japanese girls to appear in her videos and follow her around to press events. They never speak and they dress after a style of dress popular in the Harajuku district of Tokyo. From pictures I found on google, it's a sort of colorful version of goth. They actually dress a lot like anime characters, with school girl uniforms and pink wigs and stuff like that. While this sort of thing generally looks pretty hot in anime, in real life it tends to make the girls look rather dumpy, but they're having fun and I imagine they liven up the neighborhood.

Anyway, people are mad at Gwen. The best expression of this is a thoughtful and witty blog post by Margaret Cho, who describes Gwen's Harajuku girls as a minstrel show. Gwen is also mentioned in a very interesting article on "Asiaphiles" and there's even a blog called "Free the Gwenihana Four". Gwen's response was rather silly, accusing Cho of not "do[ing] her research," whatever that means, and saying that her Harajuku Girls are an art project.

This is an interesting controversy, because from a non-Asian perspective it all seems like an overreaction. And in some ways it is. Someone complained that if Gwen had four guys in black face following her around people would raise an objection, and of course they would, but it's not like she is dressing these girls in a western-created artificial stereotypical style. Girls in Japan do dress like this. It's more as if she hired four black people to dress up in hip-hop style, which I doubt would cause that much of a stir. So comparisons with Amos 'n Andy are not really fair.

But Cho's post explains pretty clearly what the real problem is; that this is one of the few portrayals of Asians she sees. And that's what makes this a problem. Think back to the 30s and 40s, when movies had tons of black actors playing characters that were stupid and lazy. The problem wasn't actually that there were black characters on screen who were stupid and lazy, because there were also white characters who were stupid and lazy, like The Three Stooges. The problem was a lack of balance; Lou Costello was counterbalanced by Humphrey Bogart and Cary Grant, but outside of Paul Robeson, who managed to get some intelligent roles, mainly in England, every black character you saw was a caricature.

So basically, Gwen is right in thinking the Harajuku girls are harmless, and Cho is right in finding them upsetting. If television and movies were full of Asian doctors and lawyers and private detectives and pop singers and circus clowns, four silly girls following Gwen around wouldn't bother anyone. And it's really not Gwen's fault that Asians are underrepresented (shockingly so, considering how many people of Asian decent there are in New York); Gwen's just some pop star enamored of certain cool aspects of Japanese culture, and she thought it would be fun to have giggly Asian girls follow her around, and yes, it objectifies women and objectifies Asians, but Gwen also objectifies herself in her videos so it may not some like that big a deal to her.

One more interesting aspect of this is simply that people look to entertainment for validation. Asians feel invisible because they're not proportionally portrayed on TV and in movies and in music videos. Of course if you're white you take it for granted that almost everyone on TV is like you so you don't really ever think about it as important, and I really don't know what I'd be feeling if there were only a handful of white celebrities. It probably would make me feel marginalized, but I'm just guessing.

the future of pizza

The ACLU has an absolutely brilliant little flash animation portraying the possible future of our privacy through a phone exchange with a pizza parlor. For me, this is exactly how to make a point. There's no preaching, it's very funny and it is seems possible. It's sort of like a sci-fi mini short story. Whether it will make people rise up and demand change or just shrug and say, sure, it'll happen, what can you do? is the question.

webstalking that guy who pissed you off thirty years ago

UPDATE: Turns out the site was a hoax created be Weiner himself. Silly me.

When I first started reading the National Lampoon in the mid or late 70s, my favorite writer there was Ellis Weiner. It wasn't because he was the funniest writer; he was one of the funniest writers, but they were all pretty funny.

No, I liked Ellis because he was the only writer who had a real sense for people. I think the first thing I read from him was the Shear Hype Report, a take off of the Shere Hite Report, a book in which a woman simply asked hundreds of women about sex and printed what they said. Just as in the original book, there's a lot of talk about how women wish guys would cuddle more and be nicer, but at the end of the Shear Hype Report, the author admits that she just made up all the answers to get her boyfriend to cuddle with her. And even though this is only a paragraph or two, you actually feel for the author; it's just kind of sad.

Weiner's characters seemed to actually have feelings, unlike other writers like P.J. O'Rourke, who was brilliantly funny but whose articles were always just rather callous jokes strung together. It is interesting to note that P.J. O'Rourke, who as a writer had no sense of humanity, later became a right-wing writer, whereas Ellis, who always seemed to have real feeling for people, now blogs for the liberal Huffington Post.

I didn't actually know this until yesterday, when Weiner popped into my head and I wondered what he'd been doing. I haven't read anything by him since his novelization of Howard the Duck, a book every bit as funny as Douglas Adam's Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy that had the misfortune to be based on a movie that is considered one of the all-time film turkeys.

Turns out he's been busy, writing books and articles, and I should probably track down one of his books and read it. But what really got my attention in my search was The Unofficial Website of Ellis Weiner (UPDATE: at some point after I wrote this Weiner apparently got control of the site), because it is run by someone who seems to have a sick hatred and fascination for the guy.

The webmaster is an assistant professor at some college I've never heard of, but from the F.A.Q. and the bio of Ellis it seems that at one point he was an aspiring satirist who had some sort of dealings with Weiner, who was a submissions editor at the National Lampoon.

And so he has created a website, that on the front has a note from Weiner saying that his lawyers tell him he can't do anything about the site but that he isn't happy with it. He lists some of Weiner's books, which he puts down and in at least one case chops up reviews to make them sound more negative (i.e. “Breezy, often funny…there’s some…writing…”).

The question is, does the professor realize how nuts this is. He's going after a guy who I guess (there are no specifics on the site) rejected his stuff or criticized it too much 30 years ago. The site might as well be called, "I am a bitter, possibly insane guy convinced that a single editor somehow managed to destroy my writing career." I mean come on, even if Weiner was, as suggested by the professor, a mean bastard, he was just one guy at one magazine. No editor owes a writer a boost up, you're actually supposed to go after what you want and prove yourself.

You'd think the guy would at least try and prove that he's funny; you know, mock Weiner in a clever way that proves to everyone that yes, this guy would have made a great satirist and it's a shame he was struck down by Weiner's cruelty. But nope, there's no indication this guy is funny.

It all reminds me of a biography of David Bowie I read once by some guy with a peripheral connection to the singer who clearly hated him with a passion and spent the whole book trashing him. It just makes you look pathetic to attack and whine about people who have accomplished much more in life than you have.

Still, I love seeing people nakedly and unconsciously expose themselves, so I wanted to share the site with others who would appreciate its pathetic nature. And make sure to read Howard the Duck and Weiner's Dune parody Doon. Hilarious stuff.

pretty girls making life hard for prettier girls, a tragic situation indeed.

Yeah, I know it seems stupid to watch Beauty and the Geek, a show in which ditzy sex bombs are teemed with brilliant nerds to win prizes, and god knows I cringe everytime they describe the show as a social experiment, but it always has these moments that illuminate society for me in some tiny way. This season, the ditzy sex bombs were primarily blondes, and they all came together, while the two brunettes found themselves outside the clique. The brunettes actually seemed to be the smartest of the lot, and, in my brunette-centric opinion, the hottest, but in the context of the show they were the outcasts, the kids sitting at the loser table.

What I found interesting was when one of the brunettes said, "it's like high school all over again." And that was just such a fascinating comment from a woman who was pretty much a walking goddess. You would think someone like that would have been popular in high school; isn't looking perfect how you get popular in high school? Was she worse looking then? Maybe, who knows how much plastic surgery any of these woman have had. Or was she just just as pretty but undone by being poor and badly dressed or falling in with an unpopular crowd; maybe she was a troublemaker, maybe she was in the chess club: who knows? But I think it's important to remember that often the people who you assume were the popular cheerleaders everyone loved may actually have had as crappy a time in high school as the rest of us.

Of course, I had a crappy time in high school and I'm also not young and great looking, so I can't feel too sorry for the pretty brunettes, but I do have a little sympathy.

Let's see that horrible, inexcusable footage one more time, shall we?

It's a shame Countdown with Keith Olbermann insists on covering entertainment news, because while the rest of the show makes Keith look like a brave crusader ready to take on the powers that be and fight the good fight, when it comes to entertainment he often just seems as much the pretentious panderer and Jerry Springer once was. Case in point, a recent piece on the new season of American Idol in which he complained that the judges have ramped up the meanness and that it is witless, unnecessary cruelty. Perhaps so, and I think there's something to be said for asking even our cheesiest shows to show a little humanity. But to illustrate his point, Olbermann showed a ton of horrible singing followed by cruel comments. And this did not appear to be for the sake of showing how awful it was, but rather because people find that crap entertaining and Olbermann or his producers thought it would be entertaining to Countdown's audience. I feel just as I did the couple of times I saw Jerry Springer's show; if you want to show sleaze fine, but don't then get up on a soapbox and talk about how creepy it is.

It's interesting that Best Week Ever, which is pretty much my only source for entertainment news (I usually turn off Keith when he gets to that crap), used less footage of the show, seeming to make no real attempt to use the cruelty of the judges to entertain the audience. Instead, they shows clips of judge Paula Abdul in some interview acting insane (or drunk) and making fun of her. That, Keith, is what you do when you think a show is being too cruel; don't help to make fun of its victims, make fun of its stars.

Bill O'Reilly, creepiest commentator of the year?

I know, it's only January and idiots are already saying stupendously moronic things, but I don't know if anyone can top Bill O'Reilly's comments
blaming a young boy for his kidnapping and possible molestation, apparently because the kid has piercings' a sure sign that's he's a dangerous delinquent who would rather live with a pedophile than go home to his parents.

You can read the worst parts,, but to get the full impact you really have to listen to the moron speak to really feel your flesh creep.

Perhaps the right wing has just given up. With Bush funneling troops into Iraq in what will probably be a successful attempt to destroy any chance for the Republicans to win in even the red states, perhaps nutjobs like O'Reilly have just decided they are on a sinking ship and they might as well just say every evil thing that pops into their corroded skull and enjoy their evil nature as much as possible.

Will anyone be able to top O'Reilly? Well, maybe, I'm sure Anne Coulter will take a shot at it sometime this year, but the competition is stiff.

boring technical stuff: how to get rid of the nasty npdl adware plugin

It's a shame I hadn't read Pogue's Blog on the npdlplug Firefox plugin that started popping up ads on my PC. There really isn't a lot of useful info on this one, which is why I'm going to post my solution, to help any poor suckers googling for help. Pogue's Blog says you can go the their website to see how to uninstall it, but it said there should be things in add/remove that weren't there. Some company called Sophis mentions it and says they can remove it. I tried to download an evaluation version of their anti-virus software - first it was a bitch to find, second they send you an email with a link to download it that didn't work.



Something called panda software had a free scan - they actually bill a free scan and cleaning but that's untrue. But they do scan for everything they consider a threat. They actually consider every add-in for Firefox a threat! but I did save the report and searched it and found some useful information that looked like this:



C:\Program Files\Download Plugin\DlPlugin-Moz\npdlplug.dll

C:\Program Files\Download Plugin\DlPlugin-Moz\setup2.exe

C:\Program Files\Mozilla Firefox\plugins\npdlplug.dll

C:\Program Files\Mozilla Firefox 2.0\plugins\npdlplug.dll



I deleted those, but found I could not delete the Download Plugin folder, which Windows said was in use. So I rebooted into safe mode and deleted that.



Of course I knew it wasn't that easy, so then I used the program StartupRun which tells you all the programs that load up when your computer boots up, looking for mysterious stuff. I found two very mysterious entries. It doesn't matter what they were called, because they were obviously random generated strings. One was something like "bird cake run" and the other was something equally nonsensical. So I deleted both entries from StartupRun (if you're less confident you've got the culprits you can just disable them. Then I went to the folders that StartupRun indicated they were running from and deleted those folders.



I also noticed when I was in c:\program files that there was a folder with one of those same nonsense names, so I deleted that too. There was not a folder with the other nonsense name.



Then I rebooted my PC. I started up Firefox, and there were no ad pop ups. I started up IE, and there were no ad popups. So it appears that this worked.



Hope all that helps someone.

more news on the who-the-hell-are-you front

Just came across an interesting article on face blindness (a.k.a. Prosopagnosia), a subject that interests me because of my own difficulties recognizing people. It's very good, you should read it if you like Oliver Sacks-style articles about the nutty things our brains are up to, or if you're bad with faces. Oddly enough, they now say perhaps as much as 2% of the population has some degree of prosopagnosia. Which is strange because I almost never meet people who say they're bad with faces. But it sounds like a lot of people just fake it and don't even tell people. I have met two people who say they can't recognize people, though, so there are a few.

stupid people should not be allowed to produce television

Perhaps it's because I never watched, and thus never got sick of, American Idol, I'm semi-enjoying "Grease: You're the One That I Want," a new talent show that has gotten rather poor reviews. What appeals to me is that the judges have a real decision to make and that they are the people to make it. They are casting a Broadway show and their goal in the first episodes is to make sure all the finalists will do a decent job, because they know that once the American public gets to vote on who should win they will certainly vote for one of the lesser talents, as is always the case in talent shows (like Dance With the Stars) that allow the public to decide who is better at something.

So I think there is something inherently interesting in the show, but apparently the people making it disagree, because they are gimmicking the hell out of it. It's not just the standard gimmicks of showing you the deluded no-talents or building auditions into little stories or having meaningless cliffhangers before commercials in which we are left in suspense and something absurdly trivial; they also use the movie Grease as a crutch, pulling out scenes from it to remind the presumably dim-witted audience what Grease is and interviewing Olivia Newton John.

Which isn't good, but isn't horrible. But Grease manages to stick in a really grating, moronic gimmick, which is to bring its co-hosts in as some sort of audience surrogates. They actually have these hosts standing on the wings, making faces of horror or approval as the contestants sing. It's horrible. It's embarrassingly bad. The hosts will whisper to the camera things like, "who, I hope he gets through, I really like him." To which I would say, who the fuck cares. Do I really need a host to tell me whether a performer is bad or is cute?

And that's the problem with the series. It doesn't trust the audience at all. It thinks they're brain dead idiots. And I'm sure many of them are. But the fact is, the reality shows that show the most respect for their audiences, like Survivor or, in the first couple of years at least, The Apprentice (which seems to be getting stupider and more gimmicky each year) are usually the most successful. The most pathetic, desperate reality shows, the ones that throw a constant barrage of cutesy tricks at the audience, usually die early deaths. Unfortunately a lot of television producers don't get that.

I'm feeling borderline on this show right now precisely because of all the stupid stuff. I am generally inclined to keep watching, but if they keep having the hosts mugging the camera and being "personalities" then I will probably give up on it. Watching this show is going to be a week by week decision.

everything you thought was hilariously improbably is now true

Let's take a moment to admire cynical, pessimistic humorists, because they see the future so clearly. Or so it seems to me after reading a piece in the Times on the way advertisers are using every available space for advertising, including subway turnstiles and the actual eggs you buy in the supermarket.

I've seen this before, and it was in Mad Magazine perhaps 30 years ago. I can't remember what the title of the piece was, or the author, but it was talking about the next step beyond billboards, and there was an illustration in which everything had an add on it. The ads were probably more clever than the ones in the real world; I remember one company name was elegantly built into the metal grillwork of a bridge. But the idea is the same, and it is always fascinating when things that seem so extreme that it's funny suddenly become the norm.

For me the greatest example of that is still an ad in the first year of Saturday Night Live for what I think was called the "Track 3" razer. This was after the first two-bladed razer cartridges had come out, so SNL just made an ad similar to those for the two-blade cartridges but with 3 blades. Then, years later, 3-bladed razors came out, and now I think there are 4-bladed ones and for all I know 5-bladed ones. And before the were even invented, SNL perfectly summed up these future razors with their slogan for their fictional product. "The Track 3 - because you'll believe anything."

All praise humorists, because they see things so clearly in a world in which everyone else swallows bullshit whole and asks for more.

I allow myself a bit of optimism, fully realizing that I am bound to be let down

Our new New York governor Eliot Spitzer's
plans for New York are a great example of the difference between Republicans and Democrats. I mean, can you imagine a Republican coming in and saying, the first thing I'm going to do is get health insurance for all children and move towards publicly financed elections? It's really pretty cool. I don't really think he'll get much of any of this, because government seems designed to impede social progress, but if he's as effective as he is ambitious Spitzer could turn out to be a real winner.

Or maybe I'm just woozy headed from the rush of Democrats coming into office.

The magic of DVRs

I have my DVR set up to tape tons of series, and as while I watch the ones I really like pretty quickly (Scrubs, Desperate Housewives), some shows just sit there a long time, sometimes until they are automatically erased but often just until there's nothing better to watch. 30 Rock falls in the latter category; it's usually boring for the first half then gets funny so every time I watch it I start thinking, I'm going to stop recording this and then by the end say, well, one more week.



This is the reason why I just saw an episode in which a character says, "maybe we'll be pre-empted by a big national story. How's Gerald Ford's health." Fascinating timing.



So that makes the show prescient. Sort of. Most notably it was the first episode that was quite funny all the way through, so maybe it turned a corner, or maybe when I watch the next episode I have recorded it will be back to hit and miss.

Kate Beckinsale's breasts; now there's a title that will drive some traffic to my blog

Recently I saw the awful, awful movie Click (very funny for the first half hour or so, just to trick you to keep watching). Kate Beckinsale, who has been very good in much better movies, had an uninteresting part in this one, and as I was looking at her I thought, she's so perfect looking, I wonder if she's had plastic surgery. Because so many people have their faces rebuilt that you really never know nowadays.

Googling on the topic, the first thing I check out was Beckinsale's nomination for The Ugliest Breasts In Hollywood at awfulplasticsurgery.com, a site whose purpose is pretty clear from the name. They do look oddly high and they do have stretch marks, although I read elsewhere that Beckinsale denies it, saying the stretch marks are from pregnancy and the change in breast size is from gaining weight, which she said she was asked to do by movie producers (I've always heard movie producers ask actresses to lose weight, but that's her story). Other articles say she later had the implants removed.

But I wasn't wondering about her breasts, I was just wondering about her face, and there's less about that. I did find something on Beckinsale's face at savingfaceforum.com, another plastic surgery site (there are tons of places devoted to celebrities and plastic surgery; I have a friend obsessed with her perceived bad nose job who scours these sites). There someone posted a bunch of pictures throughout Beckinsale's career and then everyone comments about how much plastic surgery they think she's had. Pretty much everyone says she's had a nose job, some say her lips were shrunk and one or two said her chin was elongated. But I don't really see it. Her face has narrowed a bit, as generally happens with age, but the nose looks basically the same to me in all the pictures, and the lips don't vary enough to be any more than you could get by differing lipstick application. I'm not saying she hasn't had plastic surgery, but I do wonder if people obsessed with celebrity plastic surgery are actually a good source for information.

Anyway, it does look like she was always extraordinary looking, although I think in all cases celebrities aren't going to look as good in real life as in movies, where professional makeup and lighting people can create the illusion of perfection.

Beckinsale says she doesn't want to be thought of as the sort of person who would get plastic surgery, saying "That implies a kind of insecurity, shallowness and thoughtlessness that I don't feel applies to me very much." If she has had plastic surgery, well, then it's a dumb thing to say, but could be taken the way one takes closeted homosexuals decrying gay marriage; as a panicky attempt to distance herself from something she's embarrassed by.

But if she hasn't had plastic surgery then the quote bothers me, because I think it's incredibly judgmental for someone who is drop dead gorgeous to look down on people who want to be but weren't born that lucky. I used to be very down on plastic surgery (and I'm still down on breast surgery, because I have never seen breasts I didn't like so see no reason to shove silicone in a pair), but there are people I wouldn't date because I don't find them attractive, and there are people (many many people) who wouldn't date me because they don't consider me attractive, and really, why shouldn't we all get to be gorgeous and sought after like Beckinsale? (On the other hand, plastic surgery can only do so much; Paris Hilton has apparently had tons of it but she's still not in the same league as Kate).

What I find interesting is the reason there is all this discussion; actresses generally won't admit to having plastic surgery. I don't know if it's embarrassment at being perceived as vain, or actual vanity, or a perception that this will effect their career, but I think a lot more celebrities have plastic surgery than admit to it. Plastic surgery is often treated as a crime and celebrities will put on a defense; Tara Banks actually brought a doctor on her talk show to feel her up and pronounce them real (perhaps she should have other celebrities come on the show and do the same; it would probably be a popular segment).

Because this is such a moronic subject, I feel I have to point out that I don't spend all my time googling celebrity breast jobs. Just yesterday after watching some of Leonard Bernstein's Candide on PBS I went on a wikipedia hunt that took me from Candide to Gottfried Leibniz, whose theodicy was being attacked, possibly somewhat unjustly, in Candide, to an article on how various philosophers reconcile the existence of God with the existence of evil (evil is necessary, God isn't all powerful or he/she isn't all good, etc.), to a little reading on Taoism (which I love; my favorite Tao Te Ching translations are here and here). But none of that seemed as worth writing about as Kate Beckinsale's breasts.

Addendum: Unsurprisingly, this has been the single most popular blog post I have ever written, so I am just, apropos of nothing, going to put a link here to my Wii games site, because I get paid by the page view and have to drive traffic somehow. Please go there now. There are just as many pictures of Kate's breasts on that site as there are in this blog, so what the hell.

being fat, another thing that you can no longer be judgmental about

Apparently how fat you are isn't just a matter of eating too many donuts and sitting too long on the couch. Scientists have found obese people have a different bacteria in the intestines than the rest of us. They're not sure why, but apparently switching bacteria in mice affects their weight. So have another twinkie and tell folks, it's not the twinkie, it's just my bacteria. Because that might actually be the case.

Wii Wii Wii, Me Me Me

There's a very good article in the Times by David Pogue on the health benefits of the Wii, but for me the main reason to read it is the first sentence:

I don’t ordinarily review games or game consoles; The Times has an excellent game reviewer in Charles Herold.

I've never been called excellent in the New York Times before; it's kind of cool. I probably get more excited about it than the game designers I've called excellent.

It's so funny when someone is dying of anorexia

I was pretty disturbed watching Countdown and seeing Keith Olbermann and some guy from In Touch giggling hysterically about Nicole Ritchie weighing 85 pounds. My vague impression of Ritchie is she's some dumb, shallow pseudo celebrity, and normally I'm all for making fun of such people. But clearly she's suffering from anorexia, which suggests she's very ill, needs help, is self-destructive and could very well wind up hospitalized or even dead. I know Olbermann likes to make fun of celebrities, but I do think there's something distasteful about laughing so hard at someone, no matter how ridiculous she may seem, who is so psychologically damaged and such a danger to herself.

Celebrities are just people with too much fame and money, and hating and ridiculing them really isn't any better than obsessing over and worshiping them.

The difference between retarded and stupid

I just love

this story. A guy has been pretending to be retarded for years to defraud the government, insisting he couldn't read or drive a car. Then he goes to traffic court to challenge a ticket. Clearly the guy is not as retarded as he's been claiming, but he's sure no rocket scientist.

FOX News: Believing their own lies

The Huffington post has an interesting internal Fox News memo from the VP of news in which he encourages reporters to keep an eye out for indications that the terrorists are thrilled that the Dems have congress.

It's not surprising that people at FOX are sending out memos on how to slant the news - that's their job - but what surprised me is the memo's sincerity. I always assumed this talk of how the terrorists wanted the Democrats to win was just cynical posturing, that the Republicans knew perfectly well that was bullshit, that the Bush administration has been crucial for terrorist recruitment.

So apparently the folks at FOX aren't really just cynical hacks; they are clueless, but sincere, morons.

Good to know.

Ding dong, the witch has had her power to screw up the country severely curtailed

I was scared.  The Republicans have used voter fraud, scare tactics and flat-out lies to stay in power, and I thought in spite of all the polls they might have a few rabbits to pull out of their hats.  And Bush and Rove’s inexplicable confidence made me fear the fix was in.  But nope, turns out Bush and Rove were just as dumb about the election as they were about Iraq, Katrina and pretty much everything else.  Now if the Democrats can just play their cards right they could get back the White House and begin to repair the insane amount of damage Bush has done to this country and the rest of the world.  In the meanwhile, at least he should be fairly impotent.  I mean, Democrats are into working together in a non-partisan way so if Bush met them even a third of the way he could probably still get some stuff done, but Little Lord Bush didn’t even work well with his own party if they didn’t tow the line so I doubt he’s capable of playing well with others.

The horrifying thing is, though, that most of these racers were really close in spite of incomprehensible incompetence by the Bush administration and an amazing run of scandals that could prove if you believe in him that God himself thought it was time the Democrats took charge.

Torn between gladness and pity

When I first heard right wing, anti-gay Republican adviser and preacher Ted Haggard had been accused of, and finally admitted, having gay sex with a prostitute, I felt delight in seeing yet another right wing hypocrite unmasked. But as it's dragged on, I've begun to feel sorry for Haggard. Basically you've got a closeted gay guy who hates himself who has pretty much had his life ripped to shreds over this. And like a lot of right wingers, he's just dealing with his demons in the worse way possible.

So I'm tending towards the more nuanced attitude of the surprisingly reasonable-sounding evangelical Christian and author David Kuo, who seems to feel Haggard's failing is less his gayness, which Kuo says is, biblically speaking, a minor sin like gossiping, and more the harm he has done to the reputation of Christianity and to his disillusioned followers.

On the other hand, considering these hypocritical Christians and their oblivious followers have blindly assisted George Bush to wreak havoc on this country and the entire world, it does seem like they're all getting what they deserve. So I guess I'll describe myself as at least a little pleased. Perhaps soon every right winger will have their sins revealed and they'll all finally have to shut the fuck up.

Letterman, hero or just a reformed idiot?

A lot of attention has gone to David Letterman taking on Bill O'Reilly on Letterman's show. The initial reaction is, like my reaction to anytime the Republicans are on the defensive, is hurrah. But an
interesting article by Matt Taibi in Rolling Stone does a good job talking about how people like Letterman were once complicit in this disaster by supporting it, and even goes so far as to say that the middle-ground flip floppers who were for the war and then against it show less real conviction than Bush's gang of idiots - they may have fucked up abominably, he suggests, but at least they're sticking to their guns. I'm not sure I agree the Lettermans of the world are worse than the Bushes, but I would agree you can't congratulate people to much for figuring out years after the fact that something was utterly moronic, and saying so when it is politically safe to do so. The Dixie Chicks or Susan Sarandon slamming Bush years ago is a lot more impressive than Letterman doing it now.

On the other hand, it's great to see Republicans on the ropes at last, even if they're being pounded by a bunch of hypocrites.

Time for a new slogan

Doesn't the Bush administration seem to be nothing more than a big advertising agency coming up with pith slogans? Now Bush has
dropped "stay the course" because, well, because it made him sound like a clueless idiot who couldn't comprehend that the course is totally fucked up. Who knows, they may even have to drop the slogan "cut and run," because I think at this point a lot of people are inclined to say, yes, cut and run, that sounds good.

But you know Bush will soon have some new slogan just as meaningless as "stay the course."

Getting beat up at school? Blame a video game!

The videogame Bully has been generating controversy since it was first announced. Just the idea of a videogame about bullying in school gives some people apoplexy and now that demands that they game be scuttled have failed there are many saying
don't buy it.

Now, I happen to know a lot about bullying because I was one of the kids everyone picked on. And I don't think Bully is the problem. Sure, it's a game in which you have to make your way through a school full of delinquents, and there is fighting in the game, and from what little I played there's an unpleasantness about it all (and I did not see any of the "hilarious" humor many reviewers are describing).

But in my experience, bullying happens because teachers and parents and school administrators let it happen. I was teased constantly in school, because it made me cry and of course making people cry is tremendously fun for a certain segment of the population. What did my school do about the kids who bullied and taunted me? Nothing. The basic idea everyone had was that I was the problem. I was sent to a shrink, I was put on ritalin, I was basically encouraged to calm down and chill out. And yes, if I had been less prone to hysterics the situation probably would have calmed down. But then, if bullies had been consistently punished, I think the situation also might have calmed down.

Near the beginning of the movie Dazed and Confused there's talk of a yearly tradition in which the high school seniors pretty much hunt down and torture freshmen, or something like that. And it's just accepted. Bullying is always accepted, it's see as just part of growing up and the kids that don't handle it well are despised as weak even by those who claim they're trying to help them.

Of course I've been out of school for a long time, but recently I was talking to a high school teacher. And I asked her, is it any different now? After all the concerns raised about bullying after Columbine and all the talk about how a videogame is going to encourage bullying, are teachers and counselors and administrators actually really doing any more about bullying than they were 30 years ago? And she said no, she thinks it's just the same.

So all those people spending all this energy whining about a videogame should, IMO, spend a little more time worrying about actual bullies and their victims. You don't stop bullying by stopping representations of bullying in media; you stop bullying by stopping bullies.

Bush, is he overconfident or does he just know something we don't

It's going around that Bush and Rove
seem oblivious to the possibility the Republicans may lose the House and possibly the Senate. People are suggesting that this could be another example of the Bush administration's cluelessness or that they're just showing a brave face to keep morale up, but while I hate to sound like some nutty conspiracy theorist, I'm kind of worried that they simply have a plan in effect for nationwide election theft. They've got Diebold machines all over the place and they've been pretty good at stealing election in the past, both through outright fraud and through playing games with voting places to discourage voting in certain neighborhoods, and I'm worried that no matter how many scandals hit the Republicans and no matter how low their poll ratings that they will miraculously squeak by in victories where they need to. I mean, this is a president who has made it legal for him to throw people in jail forever with no right of appeal if he feels like it, so we know there is nothing that is beneath him, and certainly he would steal the election if he could. The only question would be whether Republicans could get away with that sort of massive fraud. And since we seem to be turning into some sort of third world dictatorship, where that sort of fraud is common, I wouldn't be that surprised.

Am I just being cynical?

So Senator John Warner has suggested the possibility that we should consider changing course in Iraq, considering all options, and a couple of other
unnamed Republicans agree. That's what they say.

The pundits seem to accept this at face value - Warner went to Iraq and saw how bad the situation was and is now having second thoughts about the "stay the course" policy. They're saying this is bad for the president, weakening him. But Warner was also one of three senators who stood up demanding that we protect the Geneva Conventions and then rolled over, giving Bush almost everything he wanted.

All the pundits believed Warner that time too, but in retrospect it looks more like a way to make Republicans look like something other than Lemmings following Bush off a cliff, even as they are in the act of following him off that cliff.

So here's what I think. After the November elections, Warner will say we need to consider some options, they'll have some sort of hearing, and the Republicans will conclude that hey, the president's right after all and we should stay the course.

Yes, it's probably a bit too cynical to say the way to tell if a Republican is lying is that his or her lips are moving, but considering what I've seen these last few years, it doesn't seem far off from the truth.

Wandering Republican minds

Does the Republican party collectively suffer from Attention Deficit Disorder? It would explain a lot. Condoleeza Rice can't recall a meeting in which terrorist threats are starkly outlined, a nice follow up to her non-response to a memo titled "Bin Laden Determined to Attack Inside the United States." Hastert can't for the life of him recall hearing that Foley might be a child molester. And of course no one in the current administration seemed to have realized, in spite of warnings, that Hurricane Katrina was the sort of big disaster one should plan for.

Which leads one to wonder if Republicans actually listen when people talk to them. Perhaps they are constantly distracted, riveted by a beam of sunlight or a shiny medal or just sitting there so focused on what they're going to say next that they sort of blank out on what they're being told.

I'll admit it's a somewhat unlikely idea, but then, when you see so many utterly bizarre and inexplicable actions you can't help but try and put the pieces together into some sort of coherent picture.

Foley handling: a study in Republican tactics

Recently Bill O'Reilly showed some footage of pedophile Republican Mark Foley that described him as
a Democrat. Innocent mistake? Well, since we're talking about FOX News, I kind of doubt it. The Republicans have been doing everything they can to turn their scandal around and make it a Democrat scandal, whether it's Katherine Harris stating that Republicans didn't know about Foley's predilection but Democrats and the media might have or Sean Hannity claiming the Democrats were hypocrites because Clinton had done the same thing when he had sex with 19-year-old Monica Lewinsky (the problem with that statement? She was 22 at the time).

Of course, anyone who takes Fox News seriously would vote Republican even if Bush and Cheney were caught eviscerating babies and making necklaces out of their fingernails, but it is fascinating to see just how far FOX will go. A cute little piece on newshounds.us mockingly compares FOX's initial Foley report with what would have happened if Foley had been the Democrat FOX so fervently wishes the public to believe he is.

Impressive bullshit or awesome cluelessness?

Say what you like about Republicans, they sure have balls. Newt Gingrich appeared on Fox News talking about why
the Republican leadership did nothing for months after discovering Mark Foley had sent inappropriate email to a congressional page.

Gingrich's explanation: "... I think had they overly aggressively reacted to the initial round, they would also have been accused of gay bashing." This is a fascinating statement, because it relies on two absurd premises; that "gay" is the same thing as "pedophile" and that Republicans are concerned about offending gay people.

No arguably premise one might not, in Newt's eyes, be a lie. Perhaps Republicans are so utterly moronic that they really do consider all gay people to be homosexuals. Certainly we are knocked over the head by new proofs of the idiocy of the Republican party pretty much every day. On the other hand, I think Gingrich isn't so obtuse that he wouldn't have realized that no one in the country has missed the Republican's "screw the gays" platform. And I'm going to guess that he probably actually does understand the difference between gays and chicken hawks. And that with a straight face he told a lie of such impressive grandeur that one has to admire, at least a little, his ability to do so without blushing.

Another thought: I just realized that I hadn't even taken in the whole scope of Gingrich's grand lie. It occurred to me when I heard that on his show, Bill O'Reilly said that "there have been rumors about Foley's homosexuality for years." And a light went off in my head. The Republicans are actually using the revelation that one of their own is a pedophile to gay bash by attempting to link pedophilia and homosexuality. This is a perfect example of Republicans getting lemons and making lemonade. The evil genius of these people is truly remarkable. For them, everything is an opportunity to further their agenda, and even in the midst of crisis they are thinking of new ways to attack their enemies.

They're all like linguistic supervillains, twisting the truth in impossible ways.

A big apology waiting to happen

In the early 1940s, the U.S. government decided to toss all the Japanese in internment camps (what we call a concentration camp when someone else does it). Didn't matter how long they had lived in this country or how much they had contributed to it, they were all considered untrustworthy saboteurs ready to sell us out to the enemy. Some people knew it was wrong - J. Edgar Hoover said it was unnecessary and that the FBI was perfectly able to track the small number of actual suspects - but it happened anyway.

Now this is a terrible blot on American history, and 50 years later, the government apologized and paid out $20,000 per detainee, which isn't much considering many of them not only were imprisoned for years but lost homes and businesses.

Now that congress has basically rolled over and said the president can
do anything he damn pleases to anyone he wants to, a lot of people are screwed. Something horrible has once again happened, the people and the government of this country are panicky and insane, and all sorts of innocent people are going to be imprisoned for years, tortured, their lives destroyed, and it's not going to do a damn thing to fight terrorism. And 50 years from now, everyone will know that. This will be a dark mark on our history, like the internment camps, like McCarthyism.

But the horrible thing is, even though I know that for a certainty, it can't be stopped any more than the imprisonment of innocent Japanese could be stopped during WWII. And while 50 years from now we'll be paying out reparations to unlucky Muslims caught up in this insanity, in 60 years we'll be throwing some other innocent group in jail for some other stupid reason.

Which all goes back to one of my favorite quotes: We learn from history that we never learn anything from history.

Back in the old days

Like most people my age, I watched tons of cartoons as a kid every Saturday morning. I only really stopped because by the time I was a teen in the 70s, Saturday morning cartoons totally sucked. But some time in the early 90s I discovered Saturday morning cartoons were good again, and I've been watching the best of them since then, particularly the various superhero series like Batman Beyond, Static Shock and Justice League Unlimited.

So with fall upon us, I thought I'd see what new cartoons had arrived. Looking at the TV schedule, it looked like there weren't many, but I still googled for reviews of cartoons in 2006. What I found instead was an article in Animation World Magazine telling me that Saturday Morning Cartoons are dead. Except, that is, for a couple of the network that recently became CW.

This is one of those disconcerting moments where you realize that stuff that seemed like a normal and permanent part of life was transitory and that your childhood experiences are fundamentally different than those of the current crop of kids. There are no Saturday morning cartoons. Candy bars are no longer 10 cents. I think there's still trick-or-treating on Halloween, but I'm not sure; it sounds like paranoia is killing it off (from what I've heard, kids really don't find razors in apples on Halloween, but the perception is terrifying parents anyway).

Damn whippersnappers.

more on the pope-a-dope

Interesting editorial by Uri Avnery on the pope's quoting of that anti-Islamic emperor. It discusses points in time when Muslims were letting other religions live in peace, and times when Christians forced conversions, to suggest that it is not as simple as, Muslims violent, Christians sweet. Unfortunately, a lot of people don't much care about history. On one forum someone wrote "All I need to know about Islam I learned on 9/11/01," and that's about as stupid a comment as you can make, like saying "all I need to know about Christianity I learned during the Inquisition" or "all I need to know about African Americans I learned during the Watts riots." You can't take a religion or a culture that has lasted thousands of years and take one hour, or one day or one week or one month or even one year and say, this period defines this religion or culture. It's a moronic thing to do.

All I know about morons I have, unfortunately, learned during a lifetime of listening to them blather on self importantly.

Bill O'Reilly - a real life Ted Baxter?

Right wing pundit Bill O'Reilly has made news claiming he's been told he's on an Al Qaeda deathlist, but according to Radar Online there
doesn't seem to be any coraboration of that. When asked to comment, a spokesman at FOX replied ""We shouldn't be shouldering the burden of something he said on someone else's network," she said." So it looks like it's just O'Reilly being nutty and self-aggrandizing.

Anyway, it suddenly popped into my head that O'Reilly is, perhaps, a real-life sitcom character, like Ted Baxter on the Mary Tyler Moore Show or the boss in The Office. And it's interesting because it's visible. I mean, I suspect a huge chunk of the world's celebrities are utter morons, but the trick is to keep that known only to a small circle of acquaintances. But with O'Reilly's sexual harrasment suit and this nutty death list thing, it's like his wacky-sitcom-character qualities are oozing out.

But then, I guess there's not much need to hide that. It's not like people who watch FOX news have standards.

The Pope and the Muslim rioters, a story of idiocy and insanity

The pope's a fool. When he made his infamous speech quoting an emperor who described Islam as "evil and inhuman," he was really asking for trouble. He was making a point about the wrongness of violent conversions, but I'm sure it wouldn't be too difficult finding a quote decrying violent conversions to Christianity, of which there have been many over the centuries.

His reasons for picking on Islam are indicated in an article suggesting Pope Benedict considers Islam unreformable. He appears to just think it's a religion built on a rotten foundation. Which is moronic. If you read the bible literally it's full of encouragements to do terrible things, but people take from it what they will. Is it impossible for the same thing to happen with the Quran? No, because people are people, they are effected by outside forces. Religions aren't pure, and while some Muslims are desperately trying to keep theirs pure and backward, the winds of change blow everything over sooner or later. Not that I'm a great religious scholar, but neither is someone who calls a competing religion "evil and inhuman." And a scholarly fellow named Juan Cole says the emperor's contention that the Quran encourages violent conversion is actually wrong and finds other factual errors in the speech.

So the pope makes a speech of questionable scholarliness and uses an inflammatory quote. True, he didn't say, "and I agree," but when using an inflammatory quote it's a good idea to give your take on it, as was pointed out in a thoughtful editorial in the Times of India (I found a number of links to interesting editorials on the matter on npr.org). For example, if someone gave a speech in which they described the musings of a Nazi architect on how to kill thousands of people a day efficiently, it would be a good idea to say, "of course, killing Jews is a bad thing," even if all you're talking about is architecture.

But of course, no matter how moronic the pope is and regardless of whether he was being obtuse or purposely provocative, that in no way excuses a violent response or death threats, nor does it excuse any Muslim leader who doesn't immediately come out and denounce the violence. I mean get a grip. He's the pope, he's the leader of a competing religion. Of course he doesn't like Islam. If Walmart says their store is better than Target, Target shoppers don't go on a rampage. A whole bunch of Muslims believe wholeheartedly that no one is allowed to insult Islam. But they don't see anything wrong with insulting other religions. These are bad people.

Muslims going on a rampage to protest the pope calling Islam violent is just utter madness. Of course, everyone with a bit of sense knows this, but since only a minority of people in the world have even a little sense, madness tends to rule. There have been riots of bad calls at soccer matches, and these were not instigated by Muslims, so really, a lot of people just like to riot and throw stuff and set things on fire and these people should be given their own planet so they quite screwing up this one.

This sort of insanity means that a lot of people are just saying, hey, that emperor was right. And if he had simply said, religion in general is evil and inhuman I might agree, at least to some extent. I don't know how many religions actually don't have any blood on their hands, but I think it's a small number (at least in the west; as far as I know Buddhists and Taoists aren't beating people to death with their holy scriptures, but perhaps they are).

So it's all pretty disgusting. The pope did something stupid that was bound to cause trouble, a bunch of Muslims overreacted like crazy, and I expect that within a year some other celebrity will insult Islam and we'll have some more riots.

I am sick of living in a world of idiots and crazies.

Won't get fooled again? Not if Cheney can help it.

Remember how Bush told us Iraq was an imminent threat, most people bought it and then it turned out people like me who didn't buy it were right? Well, the Bush administration is up to its old tricks,

pulling the same intelligence scam with Iran as the target, and all I can hope is a year from now I'm not saying "I told you so," all over again.

Stand up comics make TV sitcoms? How extraordinary.

Recently I stumbled across Blogcritics, a site where bloggers can submit reviews of whatever they like.  In theory doing this will actually get a few readers and perhaps steer some traffic to one’s blog, so I signed up.  This is the first review I put up there, and now I’m putting it up here as well.  Will more people read it on Blogcritics?  Unfortunately I don’t see a counter telling me how many people have read my review, so no idea, but I’ll keep doing it for a while and see if I get any response or anything.

Lucky Louie

Premise: Roseanne, but starring a low-key blue-collar guy instead of a shrewish blue-collar gal.

Lucky Louie, an HBO sitcom starring the oddly named comic Louis C.K., lets you know what it's all about in the beginning of the first episode, when Louie's daughter, Lucy, plays the "why" game, a game my sister used to torture me with in which every answer leads to another question.

Lucy starts with generic kid questions, "Why is the sky blue?" and “Why do we eat cereal for breakfast?" As she keeps asking why with each answer, Louis' replies become more introspective. He begins to tell his ten-year-old kid that he failed to achieve a better life because he did too many drugs in college. It's a very human, real scene, and also quite funny. At its best, this is what Lucky Louie gives you.

Louis is a screw up but he knows he is and feels guilty about it. But not guilty enough to stop being a screw up: that's what makes him just like us. His wife Kim (played by Pamela Adlon, who also does the voice of Bobby on King of the Hill) functions both as Louis' emotional support and inquisitor, keeping things together, but constantly berating Louie for his shortcomings. Adlon is terrific, funny, and, like Louie, very human.

The standout of the show is Kelly Gould as the mercurial Lucy who will run out to Kim to excitedly show her something and then, when Louis enthusiastically asks to see it, rage, "I'm not talking to you, I'm talking to mom!" Children are, by objective standards insane, but also cute, and Lucy effortlessly shifts from one pole to the other.

The rest of the cast varies. Kim has a mooching, half-witted brother who seems to be the show's attempt to create a Kramer. Louis has a co-worker who is rather like that sleazy guy who was on Becker and they seem to be on a different, wackier show than the one the nuclear family inhabits.

Louis' boss and his wife are pretty good in the middle ground, but the family across the hall is the only other one who completely avoids the cartooniness of the show's bit players.
Lucky Louie focuses primarily on two things: child raising and sex (my understanding is the latter leads to the former which leads to the end of the latter). Some of the sex stuff seems designed to make the show edgy enough for HBO (as do stunts like having one of the minor male characters appear completely naked with everything showing), but even then it tends to feel pretty honest and it's nice to see a show that has a semi-adult attitude towards masturbation.

Final analysis: It's funny, the characters are likeable, and it's got the funniest and most insightful portrayal of a child I've ever seen on TV. Well worth watching.

The Minor Accomplishments of Jackie Woodman

Premise: People in Hollywood are nuts. Nuts I tell you!

One of the minor players in Lucky Louie is the brilliant standup comic Laura Kightlinger as a sexy woman inexplicably married to Louie's overweight boss. Kightlinger also has her own series, an eight-part miniseries that makes up for its short length with a long title: The Minor Accomplishments of Jackie Woodman. It's playing on the Independent Film Channel. 

In Accomplishments, Kightlinger plays a magazine writer and aspiring scriptwriter trying to make it in Hollywood. According to the New York Times review of the show, the first episode was hysterically funny. I didn't see the first episode, and honestly, I find it hard to believe it was that funny. 

Accomplishments doesn't really seem to be about being funny. It's about showing how horrible people are and how all of Jackie's shots at success are undone by the idiocy of the Hollywood system — although Jackie's own cynicism and apathy could have something to do with it. 

There are very funny moments in Accomplishments, as when two security guards in an office building discuss a man they see masturbating at his cubicle or when Jackie interviews a crazy artist who insists the interview be done without words, leading to a series of weird stares and incomprehensible motions. 

Mainly the show is just sort of depressing. It's got that "everything-sucks-and-people-who-don't-know-that-are-fools" vibe (making it a good companion piece for the similarly dark, but not especially funny, animated British series Monkey Dust). 

Lucky Louie also portrays life as rather hopeless and full of difficulties that may well be impossible to overcome, but it is likeably human where Accomplishments is archly cynical. But that's not the problem; I myself am archly cynical as often as not. The problem is the series isn't all that funny and the characters aren't likable enough to balance that out. 

I appreciate that the show is trying to be something more than a standard sitcom, but if you don't have strong jokes or relatable characters or a compelling storyline and your only target is the painfully easy one of Hollywood, well, you've got problems. 

Final Analysis: This one's keeping me watching, but just barely; it's got just enough sense of potential that I keep thinking the next episode will be really good. I do like Kightlinger, and I do think she could do something great one day, but I don't think this is it.

Tony Snow to Colin Powell: Are you Stupid or What?

For those who aren't clear on exactly how arrogant the administration is, press secretary Tony Snow's comments on Colin Powell should help you out.

Colin Powell, a respected general and former Secretary of State to George W. Bush, has come out against Bush's plans for watering down the Geneva conventions so he can run roughshod over the civil liberties of detainees in the "war on terror." He is joined by, among others, John McCain.

Bush has held fast to the view that those who oppose him are confused or stupid or just plan fans of terrorism, so a reporter asked Snow if Powell was just confused about what the administration was trying to do. And Tony Snow, using his great wisdom as an ex TV news pundit, said yes, former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, just didn't get it.

It doesn't matter how much experience you have. It doesn't matter how smart you are, it doesn't matter how much authority you have. If you disagree with Bush, you're just slow in the head.

Absolute certainty is so scary. I know it's a low blow to compare people with the Nazis, but really, they also had that sort of certainty. But the really frightening thing about certainty is people find it very alluring. It is Bush's certainty that has kept his fan base. He says the most nonsensical and fictional things with a blinding certainty that mesmerizes his base.

Bush and his crew are dazzling in their stupidity.

Light bulbs that burn - feature or bug?

I just feel I need to warn the world about this. Recently, my flourescent ceiling light bulb started flickering, went out, came back on, and then burst into flames. Yes, actual flames started shooting out of it. The manufacturer name on it was Telstar, so I used the internet to find them. It's Telstar Products Inc. in Brooklyn. I called up and told them they're light bulb had burst into flames and they didn't seem at all concerned. I asked if they were concerned, they said I'd have to speak to the manager, I said I'd like to do that and then the line went dead.

I don't know where I bought this, but just check the manufacturer and if you see any bulbs by Telstar, I'd advise against buying them.

Determining the leanings of Path to 9/11 without actually watching it

I've been skimming the Internet Movie Database's reviews of "Path to 9/11," and if you believe that the truth is generally somewhere between the two extremes, then the truth is, Path to 9/11 had a conservative bias.  
It's very simple.  A lot of people give the movie either 1 or 2 stars or, on the other hand, 9 or 10 stars.  It's unlikely some TV movie written by some TV writer who did shows like Pacific Blue and Falcon Crest is going to write a 10-star movie.  Not impossible, but unlikely.  At the same time, it appears an awful lot of people who gave the movie 1 star didn't actually watch it.  They just read about it and wrote to complain.  Which I think goes against the spirit of user reviews.
Anyway, reviews are pretty much divided into, "this movie is a pack of lies trying to blame terrorism on Clinton" or "this is an even handed portrayal of the events leading up to 9/11."
So right wingers are saying, hey, the movie was critical of Bush too, so it was fair.  But let's be realistic.  When television is harsh on conservatives, even when it's fair, well-documented criticism, they throw a hissy fit.  And I can't seem to find any conservatives throwing hissy fits about Path to 9/11.  No one's complaining about a single thing in the movie regarding the Bush administrations handling of terrorism.
Of course, you could argue that even conservatives realize how badly Bush has botched things and thus would consider any criticism to be reasonable, but that seems highly unlikely to me.
Therefore, the only logical conclusion is the movie has a strong conservative bias.  If not a single conservative is bitching that the movie is unfair to Bush, it's because it is bending over backwards to be fair to Bush.  And I don't think anyone is claiming the movie is bending over backwards to be fair Clinton.
One last note about inaccuracies in the script. I learned on What's Next that the show confused American Airlines with US Airways, and AA is really pissed about it.  Apparently ABC didn't feel a 4-hour docudrama about one of the most significant events in American history required any sort of fact checking at all.    

A mailbox of muck

My mail box is filling up with ads for candidates for the New York Democratic primary.  I sort of scan through them and toss them, and with a couple of exceptions I haven’t even decided who I’ll vote for (I have to talk to my politically knowledgeable friend Cheryl, whose advice on such matters I trust).

But there were two pieces of mail that caught my eye, both of them ads against Ken Diamondstone.  I had received mail from him that I hadn’t looked at, and had no idea what he was running for, but this ad I noticed because it said, in big letters, “Ken Diamonstone: SLUM LORD.”

When I see harsh attack ads I always check to see who put them out.  So what struck me about these ads was, there was no indication of who paid for the ad.  Nothing that said “paid by so-and-so.”

So that made me curious.  There was an address – 61 Pierrepont Street Suite 71 in Brooklyn, so I googled for that and found one document that listed that address on a list of contributors to the Democratic Party, and it was from The Connor Committee.  I googled around some more to find out what Diamondstone was running for, and found he was running for State Senate against Martin Connor.

I don’t like attack ads, although since both sides do them it’s hard to vote against either candidate based on that alone.  But putting out attack ads that don’t say who’s putting them out – that’s too sleazy for me.  I’m going to vote for Diamondstone simply because Connor did something so disgusting that I couldn’t possibly vote for him.  The Times is supporting Diamonstone, which hopefully means he’s not that bad, and Connor does not, from what little I’ve read, sound like much of a prize anyway.

One of the ads actually had a url for a government housing agency and listed three addresses and said something like, go ahead, see for yourself.  It said some of the addresses were in Manhattan and some were in Brooklyn but didn’t say which were which, and since on the website you have to specify the borough I searched two of the addresses in both boroughs but didn’t actually find anything that told me anything at all.  It may be there’s a better way to search, but it looks like the mail just wanted to look legitimate by listing some addresses and a url but wasn’t really designed to let you actually find out anything, at least not with a lot of work.  So that’s also pretty sleazy.

Diamondstone, by the way, has put out some negative ads about Connor, saying he’s not in politics for his constituency but just for himself, but since I do check attack ads to see who put them out, I’m going on the assumption that the ads did not hide who put them out.  But I will check my mailbox and if I see any anti-Connor ads that don’t have an attribution from Diamondstone I may give up entirely (or if someone else is running from the Green Party or someone I might vote for them).

Some people would argue you should vote for the candidate who is best on the issues, but I am so sick of sleazeballs that I think perhaps we should vote for the politician who appears to be the slightly less sleazy one.  Maybe if we all vote for the least morally reprehensible candidate each time, someday we’ll actually get the chance to see two candidates discussing the issues instead of flinging mud.    

‘The Path to 9/11’ - Makes sense to those without a clue

The progressive activist group Act For Change has sent out a call to bombard ABC for a docudrama they saylays too much blame for 9/11 on Clinton. They hope they can keep it off the air the way conservatives kept the tv movie "The Reagans" off network TV with claims of a liberal bias.

The New York Times' Alessandra Stanley, on the other hand, claims it's
it's not all that bad.

She may be right, I haven't seen it and don't know, but there is one paragraph in her review that makes me think she is oblivious to political realities:

The Sept. 11 commission concluded that the sex scandal distracted the Clinton administration from the terrorist threat. But in hindsight, surely the right-wing groups who drove for impeachment must look back at their partisan obsession with shame, like widows sickened by the memory of spats about dirty dishes and gambling debts.

Wanna bet? To this day, right wingers are obsessed with bringing Clinton down. Ms. Stanley may believe there are conservatives going around saying, "oh, we wasted all that time going after Clinton for sexual indiscretions when we should have been fighting terrorism," but I think she would be hard pressed to locate many of them. I think they're all very proud of themselves, and if Ms. Stanley can't see that, how can I trust her ability to judge a politically charged TV movie?

Update: Apparently Ms. Stanley went beyond foolishness in her article. According to Countdown with Keith Olbermann, the 9/11 commission did not, in fact, say Clinton was distracted by Monica-gate. They actually said the opposite. Which, if true, would suggest that Ms. Stanley might have a bit of a bias, although she could just be sloppy.

I mean, that's really pretty bad. I'll admit I've let errors slip into my column. I might, for example, saying such and such a game is the first ever in which you can use a paperclip as a weapon, and then have someone email me to tell me that there was a game in 1988 that did that. It can be hard to catch little stuff like that. But how do you manage to get something as big as a 9/11 report exactly wrong?

Singing my political rage with his words

If only the Democrats spoke as intelligently, passionately, elegantly and furiously as MSNBC host Keith Olbermann. Listen to him shred Bush and Rumsfeld for trying to compare dissent in this country with
Nazismand
terrorism.

I never heard of him until my friend Cheryl sent me the above links, but I've got to check out his show Countdown on MSNBC now. This guy is amazing.

Katie Couric: a bubbly fountain of joy or the end of civilization? You decide

My friend Cheryl called me up and left a message on my answering machine.

"I know you don't watch the evening news, but Katie Couric is destroying it."

I do not, in fact, watch the evening news, which I always think of as news quickies and heartwarming crap, but Cheryl tells me it is actually pretty good. Until now, at least, when Couric has, according to her, turned the evening news into something soft and unnewsy that includes the showing of baby pictures.

I was curious what others though, and it's interesting to see the contrast. Reuters and Capitol Hill Blue hated her as much as Cheryl did, but the folks at the Los Angeles Times and some local news channel loved her for her bright, sunny disposition and even for the baby pictures.

Perhaps Cheryl was right that I was unjustly ignoring the network national news, but if Couric is a hit I imagine it will be exactly as I always imagined it to be before you know it. If you missed the show, a blogger at The Political Pit Bull has created a four-minute video of the highlights. Although we don't see as much of her legs as columnists tell me were shown during the broadcast.