VESTA - the Lover of Laundry
This is an auspicious cycle for you when it comes to postage stamps, bacon, and hair care products. You hit the post office version of the jackpot on the 3rd when you buy a book of stamps and two books fall out of the slot! Could life get any better? It can, on the 15th when you order a side of bacon at the local diner and a little broken shard of a fourth slice lands on your plate along with the usual three. Your luck is clearly changing! Finally on the 26th you walk into the Shop Rite and they're offering two-for-one on your favorite shampoo! You're riding high now, but prepare for a slight setback when the rate on your adjustable rate mortgage explodes and you have to move out of your house. Look on the bright side: you have plenty of stamps for those change-of-address cards.
Thursday, January 1, 2015
Thursday, April 24, 2014
I Don't Understand Why We're Saying Goodbye To Glaciers, Rain Forests, and Lots of Cute Animals
Have you noticed as I have the spate of recent articles with the phrase "vanished" in the title, along with "disappearing", "dying", and "perishing" (simply I suppose because writers are just getting tired of the word "vanishing")? Here's a small sample:
"Honeybees Vanish, Leaving Keepers in Peril"
"Chinook Salmon Vanish Without a Trace"
"Saving the World's Vanishing Shark Species"
"Brokaw Explores the Vanishing Chilean Sea Bass"
"On Emptying Seas, A Vanishing Way of Life"
"Vanishing in the Wild, Mountain Gorillas"
"Louisiana's Vanishing Wetlands"
"Coral Reefs Vanishing Faster Than Rain Forests" (they're winning!)
"Vanishing of Frogs, Toads Tied to Global Warming"
and of course,
"The Vanishing Middle Class" (whose relation to Global Warming is the fact that those who control and blindly support big industry are out-sourcing and down-sizing at such a rate that your kids will be the only thing not vanishing, because they'll be living with you, never having found a job.)
More recently I've read about:
"Northeastern Bats Are Perishing and No One Knows Why"
and an update on the frog situation:
"Link to Global Warming in Frogs' Disappearance is Challenged"
The frog article makes the case that perhaps global warming plays a part but in fact it's a fungus that's killing off the frogs. Yes, Virginia, in many cases of these "vanishings" it is true, a mysterious fungus, or a mysterious cancer or a mysterious virus is what is killing off these species. But that's like saying it's not global warming that is flooding the low-lying parts of the world, it's water! Or it's not global warming that's shrinking glaciers, but excessive heat! It's part of the game that has even purportedly "intelligent" people dodging the issue entirely. "Having lost the argument about whether in fact life forms are disappearing, let's debate about what's making them disappear and make absolutely sure that we don't get blamed for this!" (they cry). "Whatever it is, it's not us!" (they cry) "...and who gives a shit really whatever it is, as long as we don't have to change our lifestyles or admit we were wrong!!"
I know a few people who have, on principle (the same principle that guides those who believe it is impossible for man to have walked on the moon and the principle of "someone else will pick it up"), refused to see the Gore documentary "An Inconvenient Truth". These people believe it to be full of political propaganda and hysteria, and perhaps also, the truth, which, once commonly accepted, won't help any of those who still want to buy a Hummer. And insisting that they will never view the film, they have missed out on the indescribable fascination of watching as, systematically, almost all the catastrophes that Gore predicted 5 years ago when he first started to give his presentation, have come to pass. (If only he could predict the moves of the stock market as accurately!)
I don't know a better argument against the idiocy of denying that global warming is going to cause us some big hurt (and by us, I mean the world, and even rich people who are in another part of the world but whom we still bump into at Starbucks), than the fact that scientists on the side of the deniers never even heard of Global Warming until Gore and the world's environmentalists started yelling about it, and when their predictions started coming true, well, the naysayers (generally the political right) had to get some guys from the same think tank they hired to keep the tobacco companies in the black ("smoking is GOOD for you!") to start saying that Global Warming is natural, periodic, inevitable and has nothing to do with Greenhouse gases, and man-made pollution.
But if that's the case, and now, even these GW deniers say that GW is going to cause problems in the future, then why didn't these scientist (or "scientists") start warning us about it long before Gore? You've noticed that now even Bush is conceding to the fact of GW. What he won't admit is that it's man-made. But why, if it's a natural occurence, did not one scientist on the conservative side ever warn us about rising seas, and more severe hurricanes, and decimating heat waves? Wouldn't that have been helpful? Why didn't they notice or predict, as Gore et al has and did, that there would be disastrous economic consequences of GW, along with preventable loss of life, and suggest that perhaps we ought to worry about neighborhoods in low lying areas? Doesn't that seem odd? Why were environmentalists who believe GW is man-made able to predict and warn about the problems that we face today 40 years ago, but those who believe it's a natural cycle, were totally silent, and caught off guard?
I'll tell you why - it's because GW (to the extent that it's happening) isn't part of a natural cycle, and these anti-GW "experts" are inventing a theory purely to protect conservatives' investments in big industry. It was the environmentalists who noticed that shit was happening to the world, and I don't just mean their basements were flooding. The average environmentalist has been predicting issues of disappearing rainforests and GW for about 40 years. And in the last few years, the only brakes on this environmental juggernaut have been applied by those crazy liberals and their insistence on truth. Those nuts!
So what can you do with naive ignoramuses who continue to ignore and downplay this issue ? Same thing you have always done - argue as much as you can stand, and then when they start getting all emotional and start attacking your virtue, your patriotism and your hairstyle, walk away. Unfortunately sometimes you're sitting across a dinner table from them and although you may have the impulse to pass the mashed potatoes - to their heads! - you must not, because that's rude and not worth the loss of perhaps a very good side dish.
And you know what eventually happens? As much as these deniers argue and huff and puff and make fun, they quietly come around. They come over to our side of the argument so serrupticiously that we who have been warning and doomsaying never get to gloat (darn!). But that's OK, because even better than gloating is to have people convinced that this is a real issue and has to be addressed. And people who were once in denial, once they "get it" become really passionate! People who convert (to anything) are typically even more devout than those who were raised with a certain set of beliefs. You know how people who quit smoking are absolute vigilantes when it comes to smokers? And become much more hardline than people who never smoked? Well that's how converts to environmentalism are. Guilt is good!
So I welcome naysayers. I have to. I know they will eventually see the light (one more violent hurricane or drought or devastating flood in the red states ought to do it). Now we just have to work on the ones who don't believe in evolution. Forget about the ones who don't believe we walked on the moon. Let them hold onto something!
"Honeybees Vanish, Leaving Keepers in Peril"
"Chinook Salmon Vanish Without a Trace"
"Saving the World's Vanishing Shark Species"
"Brokaw Explores the Vanishing Chilean Sea Bass"
"On Emptying Seas, A Vanishing Way of Life"
"Vanishing in the Wild, Mountain Gorillas"
"Louisiana's Vanishing Wetlands"
"Coral Reefs Vanishing Faster Than Rain Forests" (they're winning!)
"Vanishing of Frogs, Toads Tied to Global Warming"
and of course,
"The Vanishing Middle Class" (whose relation to Global Warming is the fact that those who control and blindly support big industry are out-sourcing and down-sizing at such a rate that your kids will be the only thing not vanishing, because they'll be living with you, never having found a job.)
More recently I've read about:
"Northeastern Bats Are Perishing and No One Knows Why"
and an update on the frog situation:
"Link to Global Warming in Frogs' Disappearance is Challenged"
The frog article makes the case that perhaps global warming plays a part but in fact it's a fungus that's killing off the frogs. Yes, Virginia, in many cases of these "vanishings" it is true, a mysterious fungus, or a mysterious cancer or a mysterious virus is what is killing off these species. But that's like saying it's not global warming that is flooding the low-lying parts of the world, it's water! Or it's not global warming that's shrinking glaciers, but excessive heat! It's part of the game that has even purportedly "intelligent" people dodging the issue entirely. "Having lost the argument about whether in fact life forms are disappearing, let's debate about what's making them disappear and make absolutely sure that we don't get blamed for this!" (they cry). "Whatever it is, it's not us!" (they cry) "...and who gives a shit really whatever it is, as long as we don't have to change our lifestyles or admit we were wrong!!"
I know a few people who have, on principle (the same principle that guides those who believe it is impossible for man to have walked on the moon and the principle of "someone else will pick it up"), refused to see the Gore documentary "An Inconvenient Truth". These people believe it to be full of political propaganda and hysteria, and perhaps also, the truth, which, once commonly accepted, won't help any of those who still want to buy a Hummer. And insisting that they will never view the film, they have missed out on the indescribable fascination of watching as, systematically, almost all the catastrophes that Gore predicted 5 years ago when he first started to give his presentation, have come to pass. (If only he could predict the moves of the stock market as accurately!)
I don't know a better argument against the idiocy of denying that global warming is going to cause us some big hurt (and by us, I mean the world, and even rich people who are in another part of the world but whom we still bump into at Starbucks), than the fact that scientists on the side of the deniers never even heard of Global Warming until Gore and the world's environmentalists started yelling about it, and when their predictions started coming true, well, the naysayers (generally the political right) had to get some guys from the same think tank they hired to keep the tobacco companies in the black ("smoking is GOOD for you!") to start saying that Global Warming is natural, periodic, inevitable and has nothing to do with Greenhouse gases, and man-made pollution.
But if that's the case, and now, even these GW deniers say that GW is going to cause problems in the future, then why didn't these scientist (or "scientists") start warning us about it long before Gore? You've noticed that now even Bush is conceding to the fact of GW. What he won't admit is that it's man-made. But why, if it's a natural occurence, did not one scientist on the conservative side ever warn us about rising seas, and more severe hurricanes, and decimating heat waves? Wouldn't that have been helpful? Why didn't they notice or predict, as Gore et al has and did, that there would be disastrous economic consequences of GW, along with preventable loss of life, and suggest that perhaps we ought to worry about neighborhoods in low lying areas? Doesn't that seem odd? Why were environmentalists who believe GW is man-made able to predict and warn about the problems that we face today 40 years ago, but those who believe it's a natural cycle, were totally silent, and caught off guard?
I'll tell you why - it's because GW (to the extent that it's happening) isn't part of a natural cycle, and these anti-GW "experts" are inventing a theory purely to protect conservatives' investments in big industry. It was the environmentalists who noticed that shit was happening to the world, and I don't just mean their basements were flooding. The average environmentalist has been predicting issues of disappearing rainforests and GW for about 40 years. And in the last few years, the only brakes on this environmental juggernaut have been applied by those crazy liberals and their insistence on truth. Those nuts!
So what can you do with naive ignoramuses who continue to ignore and downplay this issue ? Same thing you have always done - argue as much as you can stand, and then when they start getting all emotional and start attacking your virtue, your patriotism and your hairstyle, walk away. Unfortunately sometimes you're sitting across a dinner table from them and although you may have the impulse to pass the mashed potatoes - to their heads! - you must not, because that's rude and not worth the loss of perhaps a very good side dish.
And you know what eventually happens? As much as these deniers argue and huff and puff and make fun, they quietly come around. They come over to our side of the argument so serrupticiously that we who have been warning and doomsaying never get to gloat (darn!). But that's OK, because even better than gloating is to have people convinced that this is a real issue and has to be addressed. And people who were once in denial, once they "get it" become really passionate! People who convert (to anything) are typically even more devout than those who were raised with a certain set of beliefs. You know how people who quit smoking are absolute vigilantes when it comes to smokers? And become much more hardline than people who never smoked? Well that's how converts to environmentalism are. Guilt is good!
So I welcome naysayers. I have to. I know they will eventually see the light (one more violent hurricane or drought or devastating flood in the red states ought to do it). Now we just have to work on the ones who don't believe in evolution. Forget about the ones who don't believe we walked on the moon. Let them hold onto something!
Tuesday, October 8, 2013
Saturday, November 19, 2011
They Don't Understand: That Font is a Movie Killer.
You know what's interesting? At least to me to whom almost everything is interesting or sometimes "interesting"? It's the way you can so easily tell from the font and style of a movie advertsiement in your local paper just how bad it is. As soon as I saw the ad for "Get Smart" I knew it was going to suck. I was so disappointed! The old TV show was one of my favorites - one of the few shows on television that would make me laugh outloud - hysterical, side-splitting (also by the way, a bad-news descriptor in an ad) guffaws. But as soon as I saw the bad, generic, uninteresting photo that they were using for the ad (trying to make it convey Smart's trademark incompetence by having each of the characters hiding the face of the other - a decent idea badly realized), and then the cheap, unremarkable, standard font they were using, I knew the movie was going to be one of those ones that breaks your heart because you really, really wanted it to be good.
It was one of those that you wait for with excitement and anticipation, hoping that the filmmakers were clever, that corners were not cut, that the writer was not a hack, that the female lead was not a full-lipped piece of cardboard. Hoping against hope that the director didn't listen to the notes that the Executive Producers from the studio handed out ("It would be funny if he fell down! Can he fall down on page 22 and also page 30?" "We want to see Smart learn a lesson here!" "His leading lady should have a backstory - can she have a degree in something? Something not too smart, but smart enough so that we know she's smart but she can still act dumb? Like a teacher? Or a nuclear physicist?"). But no, you can tell from the font that the director was powerless, the actors thought someone must know what they're doing (you just imagine them saying to one another over craft service tea: "I don't know about you but it seems to me that none of these lines or situations are the least bit funny."), and that the studio was also coasting on the casting of Steve Carrell. Listen, Execs: it's not enough! It has to be funny to be funny!!!
But the font says it all. That straight lettering - it just looks like they got it at half price from Staples. You can just hear the Publicity Department arguing: "Listen, we can mix a few different fonts or we can even use Bank Gothic or Harrington, to make the ad look kind of cool, but since we cast Steve Carrell, and therefore everyone is going to go to the movie anyway, we at the Pub Dept think we can save a couple grand and just use Bauhaus 93 which is very, very readable and doesn't put off kids and illiterates!"
But even more than the cheap font: once the reviews start coming in and you see those kiss-of-death initials: FOX-TV, CBS, NBC, KTV, next to the reviews, you know all is lost: you are not going to have a movie to go to this weekend, and you might as well line up now to rent it on NetFlix, or wait for it to be on pay per view, because it's going to be a big, big disappointment.
It was one of those that you wait for with excitement and anticipation, hoping that the filmmakers were clever, that corners were not cut, that the writer was not a hack, that the female lead was not a full-lipped piece of cardboard. Hoping against hope that the director didn't listen to the notes that the Executive Producers from the studio handed out ("It would be funny if he fell down! Can he fall down on page 22 and also page 30?" "We want to see Smart learn a lesson here!" "His leading lady should have a backstory - can she have a degree in something? Something not too smart, but smart enough so that we know she's smart but she can still act dumb? Like a teacher? Or a nuclear physicist?"). But no, you can tell from the font that the director was powerless, the actors thought someone must know what they're doing (you just imagine them saying to one another over craft service tea: "I don't know about you but it seems to me that none of these lines or situations are the least bit funny."), and that the studio was also coasting on the casting of Steve Carrell. Listen, Execs: it's not enough! It has to be funny to be funny!!!
But the font says it all. That straight lettering - it just looks like they got it at half price from Staples. You can just hear the Publicity Department arguing: "Listen, we can mix a few different fonts or we can even use Bank Gothic or Harrington, to make the ad look kind of cool, but since we cast Steve Carrell, and therefore everyone is going to go to the movie anyway, we at the Pub Dept think we can save a couple grand and just use Bauhaus 93 which is very, very readable and doesn't put off kids and illiterates!"
But even more than the cheap font: once the reviews start coming in and you see those kiss-of-death initials: FOX-TV, CBS, NBC, KTV, next to the reviews, you know all is lost: you are not going to have a movie to go to this weekend, and you might as well line up now to rent it on NetFlix, or wait for it to be on pay per view, because it's going to be a big, big disappointment.
Saturday, December 12, 2009
I Don't Understand This Show. Neither Do You. The Unbearable Stupidity of 'Lost'.
Well I watched the premiere Episode of “Lost” the other night and I am so glad: not only did they explain what's been going on but they’ve given us a taste of what's to come.
In the next few episodes this is what will happen:
The whole island will turn out to be in a great big glass snow globe that is owned by some giants on a planet in the “Battlestar Galactica” galaxy, and every once in a while the giants shake it, which is what the white-outs are about, and why the island periodically disappears. The giants will be revealed to be the characters on the island, played by the actors playing the people on the island (for which they will demand and get raises).
The snow globe itself will be found in the backpack that comes floating off the steamship that blew up killing everyone on board except for like, forty or fifty of them who will show up later, to help rebuild the village which has disappeared because it was never built, or perhaps because the snow globe hadn't been unwrapped from under a Christmas tree somewhere in San Francisco because the parents bought it on a trip to Hawaii and then wrapped it in, like, September and then forgot about it in the bottom of the boot box (where they usually hide their Christmas gifts).
The little child who finds the snow globe will shake it, and be transported to the island where he finds he’s Claire’s child and that he’s not going to get to have a love interest on the show because he’s too young and also happens to be the surrogate child (in fact the “lost” twin) of Jin and Sun who had a baby they didn’t know about when they had sex in the Green Room before they were appearing on “The View”. The fact that she (the child) is white is explained by the fact that she has some DNA from one of the polar bears who used to be Locke when Locke was a white polar bear, very early in his career.
Huh? And we’re supposed to follow this?
The whole thing reminds me of how I used to love "The X Files" and then grew to actively hate it because there was absolutely no care taken to anchor the world of the show with rules of the road, so to speak. Like, here's a rule: people may only walk on the ground, head up, feet down. Now let's say you're watching a show and everyone starts walking sideways, up walls. That's a broken rule, because there have to be things that you can accept, things that are a given (like: "this is a world that has gravity"), so you can build your expectations off the truth. (This particular breach didn't happen, or at least not while I was watching it, but other equally grievous breaches did occur and I stopped watching “The X-Files” because there was absolutely nothing at stake at a certain point. No death was permanent; therefore there was no point in feeling anything at all when someone faced it).
I assume the writers would use as their excuse the fact that it (“X Files”) was a show about the supernatural. And that's all well and good, but even when you’re dealing in a supernatural world, you've got to play by the rules that you must also establish at the beginning. And near the last few seasons of the X-Files, the protagonists, Scully and Mulder would sometimes get infected with an incurable black dripping eye disease, that was 100% fatal. The show used to have the B actors or the guest stars get infected with this thing and they would die or simply disappear (i.e., get better parts on “Law and Order”) and that was wonderful – I couldn't get enough of that dripping black eye disease!
But then, the writers started giving it to Scully and Mulder even though it was THE DEADLIEST THING IN THE UNIVERSE. And I think once or twice they actually died, or were shown in one of the last scenes in a given episode dying (or “dripping", which implied they were going to die), and then the next episode, they'd be back, having a hot dog at the Diary Queen, with nothing to show for having died a horrible death the previous week except for maybe a pair of progressive lenses.
Well, this is where “Lost” is headed. It will always be popular solely because of the characters and the small issues they face and the relationships between them. But the writers seem to have no respect for the rules of their world; in fact those rules are completely flexible and pliable and it seems in terms of constructing the "Lost" world, that any element that a writer found cool or scary at any point in his life is welcomed with open arms.
I imagine this dialogue in the writers' room:
Writer 1: Ok, I think I've got something here. What if we had, like, black smoke that just poured out of the jungle like a genie from a lamp only no genie?
Writer 2: Genius! That sounds great! What would it do?
Writer 1: Um, nothing! it would just pour out and we’d have scary music and then it would, oh my God, it would go backwards!
Writer 2: Oh my God, I'm in love with you! Backwards!
Writer 1: (modest) Don't forget, I went to Harvard.
Writer 4: (annoyed) How can we forget?? You bring it up, like every two minutes…
Writer 2: But what about white mist? Things with mist are scary and the word "mist" reminds me of that movie called "The Mist" and that movie was scary too.
Writer 1: Well, we can have mist too, can't we? (directing this question toward the show runner)
Show Runner: I have got to tell you guys, it may be a lack of sleep but I think we're breaking new ground here. I've seen shows have black smoke, and I've seen shows have white mist, but to have BOTH in the same show? I see an Emmy.
(the two writers high five)
Writer 1: And they say network TV sucks!
Writer 3: Hey, I used to have a big stuffed bear, only it was a polar bear that my parents gave me cause I liked teddy bears, but they didn't realize that I was scared of it because it was too big to even pick up and had teeth, so I basically locked it in the closet and never played with it once. So I think in addition to human characters who will have backstories and personalities and all that dumb stuff, let's have big white polar bears on this tropical island and if we don't like them later, we can just never have them on again!" [...even though they're like 15 feet high and must leave piles of polar bear shit absolutely everywhere and if this was an honest show, the islanders would constantly be stepping in it and swearing about it.]
I’d say my first experience with a show that left me in the dust (or the sand) because of over-exuberant plotting (or, as we laypeople call it: “throwing everything we can think of into the pot because that’s what we were smoking last night when we should have been discussing plotlines”), was the Gothic soap opera “Dark Shadows”.
Dark Shadows was a weird and cool aberration on afternoon TV: a gothic soap opera, a genre that is long over-due to be resurrected. The basic premise was a community of characters that lived almost exclusively in this mansion (probably somewhere in Long Island now that I’m older and know where mansions are) which turned out to be haunted, or at the very least, filled with actors who couldn’t get work on anything legitimate and so were wandering onto the set for the free craft service table food.
It started out in the present (the present of 1966), with a young governess who comes to the mansion to work (passing time before going to grad school at NYU I assume). All kind of mysteries and ghosts started popping up which were really cool and fascinating (at least to my young mind). Pretty soon there’re all sort of floating bodies, kidnappings, people emerging from portraits on the walls (my favorite effect!).
In later episodes they added time travel to the mix, and characters were traveling back in forth in time and becoming different versions of themselves in the 18th century (as opposed to themselves at an earlier time in their lives), bumping into different versions of other people in their social circle who didn't know those "other versions" existed, having not gotten together the existential airfare to make the trip.
Does this make sense?
Well, it apparently didn't either to the writers of Dark Shadows who admitted years later that they had completely lost the thread of the stories they'd constructed and didn't know who was stuck in what era or really what was going on anywhere (since on top of everything, they permitted people to travel forward in time as well, like those side-by-side escalators in an action movie where if you're a cop, you can jump from the "UP" onto the "DOWN" escalator if the bad guy is getting away, or if you just left your wallet in the airport bar).
To make things worse (or "better"), they added a vampire thread, and the lead vampire Barnabus was constantly biting people on the neck having them join him in the land of the dead, sometimes in the 20th century and sometimes in the 18th. After a while, you couldn't remember who was a vampire and who wasn't, since everybody was biting everybody (the STDs of gothic literature) and of course since people were kind of ashamed of being a vampire, it was all a big secret who was and who wasn't and then, sometimes, just to totally screw with your head it would turn out to be "just a dream".
So I Wikipedia’d “Dark Shadows” just to see if I could recall some of these details, and guess what? The entire first episode began, as “a dream”! So the whole show was, like, a hallucination. Brilliant! Relieves everybody of the responsibility to have any connection to reality.
So if you’re trying to follow “Lost” (what a great title now that I think of it), you’d better be prepared for the big reveal at the series finale, which I have a sneaking suspicion is going to be very much like “Dark Shadows”, if you know what I’m sayin’.
In the next few episodes this is what will happen:
The whole island will turn out to be in a great big glass snow globe that is owned by some giants on a planet in the “Battlestar Galactica” galaxy, and every once in a while the giants shake it, which is what the white-outs are about, and why the island periodically disappears. The giants will be revealed to be the characters on the island, played by the actors playing the people on the island (for which they will demand and get raises).
The snow globe itself will be found in the backpack that comes floating off the steamship that blew up killing everyone on board except for like, forty or fifty of them who will show up later, to help rebuild the village which has disappeared because it was never built, or perhaps because the snow globe hadn't been unwrapped from under a Christmas tree somewhere in San Francisco because the parents bought it on a trip to Hawaii and then wrapped it in, like, September and then forgot about it in the bottom of the boot box (where they usually hide their Christmas gifts).
The little child who finds the snow globe will shake it, and be transported to the island where he finds he’s Claire’s child and that he’s not going to get to have a love interest on the show because he’s too young and also happens to be the surrogate child (in fact the “lost” twin) of Jin and Sun who had a baby they didn’t know about when they had sex in the Green Room before they were appearing on “The View”. The fact that she (the child) is white is explained by the fact that she has some DNA from one of the polar bears who used to be Locke when Locke was a white polar bear, very early in his career.
Huh? And we’re supposed to follow this?
The whole thing reminds me of how I used to love "The X Files" and then grew to actively hate it because there was absolutely no care taken to anchor the world of the show with rules of the road, so to speak. Like, here's a rule: people may only walk on the ground, head up, feet down. Now let's say you're watching a show and everyone starts walking sideways, up walls. That's a broken rule, because there have to be things that you can accept, things that are a given (like: "this is a world that has gravity"), so you can build your expectations off the truth. (This particular breach didn't happen, or at least not while I was watching it, but other equally grievous breaches did occur and I stopped watching “The X-Files” because there was absolutely nothing at stake at a certain point. No death was permanent; therefore there was no point in feeling anything at all when someone faced it).
I assume the writers would use as their excuse the fact that it (“X Files”) was a show about the supernatural. And that's all well and good, but even when you’re dealing in a supernatural world, you've got to play by the rules that you must also establish at the beginning. And near the last few seasons of the X-Files, the protagonists, Scully and Mulder would sometimes get infected with an incurable black dripping eye disease, that was 100% fatal. The show used to have the B actors or the guest stars get infected with this thing and they would die or simply disappear (i.e., get better parts on “Law and Order”) and that was wonderful – I couldn't get enough of that dripping black eye disease!
But then, the writers started giving it to Scully and Mulder even though it was THE DEADLIEST THING IN THE UNIVERSE. And I think once or twice they actually died, or were shown in one of the last scenes in a given episode dying (or “dripping", which implied they were going to die), and then the next episode, they'd be back, having a hot dog at the Diary Queen, with nothing to show for having died a horrible death the previous week except for maybe a pair of progressive lenses.
Well, this is where “Lost” is headed. It will always be popular solely because of the characters and the small issues they face and the relationships between them. But the writers seem to have no respect for the rules of their world; in fact those rules are completely flexible and pliable and it seems in terms of constructing the "Lost" world, that any element that a writer found cool or scary at any point in his life is welcomed with open arms.
I imagine this dialogue in the writers' room:
Writer 1: Ok, I think I've got something here. What if we had, like, black smoke that just poured out of the jungle like a genie from a lamp only no genie?
Writer 2: Genius! That sounds great! What would it do?
Writer 1: Um, nothing! it would just pour out and we’d have scary music and then it would, oh my God, it would go backwards!
Writer 2: Oh my God, I'm in love with you! Backwards!
Writer 1: (modest) Don't forget, I went to Harvard.
Writer 4: (annoyed) How can we forget?? You bring it up, like every two minutes…
Writer 2: But what about white mist? Things with mist are scary and the word "mist" reminds me of that movie called "The Mist" and that movie was scary too.
Writer 1: Well, we can have mist too, can't we? (directing this question toward the show runner)
Show Runner: I have got to tell you guys, it may be a lack of sleep but I think we're breaking new ground here. I've seen shows have black smoke, and I've seen shows have white mist, but to have BOTH in the same show? I see an Emmy.
(the two writers high five)
Writer 1: And they say network TV sucks!
Writer 3: Hey, I used to have a big stuffed bear, only it was a polar bear that my parents gave me cause I liked teddy bears, but they didn't realize that I was scared of it because it was too big to even pick up and had teeth, so I basically locked it in the closet and never played with it once. So I think in addition to human characters who will have backstories and personalities and all that dumb stuff, let's have big white polar bears on this tropical island and if we don't like them later, we can just never have them on again!" [...even though they're like 15 feet high and must leave piles of polar bear shit absolutely everywhere and if this was an honest show, the islanders would constantly be stepping in it and swearing about it.]
I’d say my first experience with a show that left me in the dust (or the sand) because of over-exuberant plotting (or, as we laypeople call it: “throwing everything we can think of into the pot because that’s what we were smoking last night when we should have been discussing plotlines”), was the Gothic soap opera “Dark Shadows”.
Dark Shadows was a weird and cool aberration on afternoon TV: a gothic soap opera, a genre that is long over-due to be resurrected. The basic premise was a community of characters that lived almost exclusively in this mansion (probably somewhere in Long Island now that I’m older and know where mansions are) which turned out to be haunted, or at the very least, filled with actors who couldn’t get work on anything legitimate and so were wandering onto the set for the free craft service table food.
It started out in the present (the present of 1966), with a young governess who comes to the mansion to work (passing time before going to grad school at NYU I assume). All kind of mysteries and ghosts started popping up which were really cool and fascinating (at least to my young mind). Pretty soon there’re all sort of floating bodies, kidnappings, people emerging from portraits on the walls (my favorite effect!).
In later episodes they added time travel to the mix, and characters were traveling back in forth in time and becoming different versions of themselves in the 18th century (as opposed to themselves at an earlier time in their lives), bumping into different versions of other people in their social circle who didn't know those "other versions" existed, having not gotten together the existential airfare to make the trip.
Does this make sense?
Well, it apparently didn't either to the writers of Dark Shadows who admitted years later that they had completely lost the thread of the stories they'd constructed and didn't know who was stuck in what era or really what was going on anywhere (since on top of everything, they permitted people to travel forward in time as well, like those side-by-side escalators in an action movie where if you're a cop, you can jump from the "UP" onto the "DOWN" escalator if the bad guy is getting away, or if you just left your wallet in the airport bar).
To make things worse (or "better"), they added a vampire thread, and the lead vampire Barnabus was constantly biting people on the neck having them join him in the land of the dead, sometimes in the 20th century and sometimes in the 18th. After a while, you couldn't remember who was a vampire and who wasn't, since everybody was biting everybody (the STDs of gothic literature) and of course since people were kind of ashamed of being a vampire, it was all a big secret who was and who wasn't and then, sometimes, just to totally screw with your head it would turn out to be "just a dream".
So I Wikipedia’d “Dark Shadows” just to see if I could recall some of these details, and guess what? The entire first episode began, as “a dream”! So the whole show was, like, a hallucination. Brilliant! Relieves everybody of the responsibility to have any connection to reality.
So if you’re trying to follow “Lost” (what a great title now that I think of it), you’d better be prepared for the big reveal at the series finale, which I have a sneaking suspicion is going to be very much like “Dark Shadows”, if you know what I’m sayin’.
Wednesday, February 18, 2009
Woman in Minnesota Said to Give Birth to 167 Infants
FOX news was first on the scene early this morning to report that a woman in northern Minnesota has given birth to 167 babies, or more accurately, is still actually "in childbirth" with 54 little infants left to recover from her distended uterus.
Apparently (it has not been confirmed) the mother had been ingesting Clomid and injecting progesterone for several months in an attempt to steal the recent record of 96 live births set by Kelly Davis at the Wisconsin State Fair last spring. Ms. Davis herself was the only entry in the widely promoted competition, being the only contestant who fulfilled the minimum qualifications of at least 12 simultaneously delivered children prior to the event. (Apparently this will not be the case next year as several women are in training now for the event and the reported $500 first prize; second prize being a brand new humidifier). Ms. Davis sheepishly told the judges that she originally had wanted to compete in the Apple Pie baking competition but her oven broke down last year and she hadn't had the money to have it repaired so she figured she might as well enter the Live Birth competition.
The as yet unidentified mother of the 167… oh wait, we're getting news that it's not 167… looks like there was a chamber in the cavernous uterus which has just recently been discovered and there are apparently between 20 and 25 additional babies in there, playing jump rope with the mother's lower intestine (along with a treasure chest filled with gold dubloons). This will make the delivery tricky as there were only 116 doctors on call for this event and experts say in a delivery of this size, it would take between 120 and 125 ob/gyns to assure the safety of the mother and her newborns.
Fox News reports however that Mrs. Helene Johnson from the Millstein Middle School has offered her third grade class who were coincidentally visiting the hospital on a field trip, to help catch the babies as they pop out and carry them to the giant Bouncy House where they are being stored until someone can figure out what to do with them.
It's reported that the new mother's other 45 children are healthy and happy at home with her husband who has converted their garage into something resembling an egg-laying factory, with six stacked rows of box-like structures, each child having their own 3x5 enclosure and watered and fed with a series of hamster water bottles.
The mother, who is in excellent health and enjoying the attention of the press even while she squeezes out her 15th set of triplets, is granting interviews on a selected basis, with Larry King in line just behind Katie Couric and Barbara Walters, each of whom have come bearing gifts; in Katie's case, 175 stuffed yellow bears presently stored in an Allied van parked in the hospital loading dock. (The 72 scrub nurses standing by apparently asked Couric if she’d lend a hand changing 41 of the babies who need clean diapers, but Couric demurred, citing journalistic objectivity.)
There were earlier reports this morning of a small group of protesters standing outside the hospital calling the competition despicable, arguing that no one family could possibly handle more than 85 infants at one time, but these naysayers were quickly shouted down by hundreds of fans of the young mother, smiling and waving even more stuffed yellow bears.
When asked what she planned to do once she healed from the grueling ordeal of delivering now what seems at last count, to be 182 premature infants, the young mother smiled and said, "There are a lot of people out there who want children to love and I plan on finding them, either through Craig's list or Ebay."
Apparently (it has not been confirmed) the mother had been ingesting Clomid and injecting progesterone for several months in an attempt to steal the recent record of 96 live births set by Kelly Davis at the Wisconsin State Fair last spring. Ms. Davis herself was the only entry in the widely promoted competition, being the only contestant who fulfilled the minimum qualifications of at least 12 simultaneously delivered children prior to the event. (Apparently this will not be the case next year as several women are in training now for the event and the reported $500 first prize; second prize being a brand new humidifier). Ms. Davis sheepishly told the judges that she originally had wanted to compete in the Apple Pie baking competition but her oven broke down last year and she hadn't had the money to have it repaired so she figured she might as well enter the Live Birth competition.
The as yet unidentified mother of the 167… oh wait, we're getting news that it's not 167… looks like there was a chamber in the cavernous uterus which has just recently been discovered and there are apparently between 20 and 25 additional babies in there, playing jump rope with the mother's lower intestine (along with a treasure chest filled with gold dubloons). This will make the delivery tricky as there were only 116 doctors on call for this event and experts say in a delivery of this size, it would take between 120 and 125 ob/gyns to assure the safety of the mother and her newborns.
Fox News reports however that Mrs. Helene Johnson from the Millstein Middle School has offered her third grade class who were coincidentally visiting the hospital on a field trip, to help catch the babies as they pop out and carry them to the giant Bouncy House where they are being stored until someone can figure out what to do with them.
It's reported that the new mother's other 45 children are healthy and happy at home with her husband who has converted their garage into something resembling an egg-laying factory, with six stacked rows of box-like structures, each child having their own 3x5 enclosure and watered and fed with a series of hamster water bottles.
The mother, who is in excellent health and enjoying the attention of the press even while she squeezes out her 15th set of triplets, is granting interviews on a selected basis, with Larry King in line just behind Katie Couric and Barbara Walters, each of whom have come bearing gifts; in Katie's case, 175 stuffed yellow bears presently stored in an Allied van parked in the hospital loading dock. (The 72 scrub nurses standing by apparently asked Couric if she’d lend a hand changing 41 of the babies who need clean diapers, but Couric demurred, citing journalistic objectivity.)
There were earlier reports this morning of a small group of protesters standing outside the hospital calling the competition despicable, arguing that no one family could possibly handle more than 85 infants at one time, but these naysayers were quickly shouted down by hundreds of fans of the young mother, smiling and waving even more stuffed yellow bears.
When asked what she planned to do once she healed from the grueling ordeal of delivering now what seems at last count, to be 182 premature infants, the young mother smiled and said, "There are a lot of people out there who want children to love and I plan on finding them, either through Craig's list or Ebay."
Tuesday, November 11, 2008
Sarah Palin's Hurt Feelings
"I consider it cowardly. It's not true. That's cruel, it's mean-spirited, it's immature, it's unprofessional and those guys are jerks if they came away taking things out of context and then tried to spread something on national news that's not fair and not right."
(Sarah Palin, responding to attacks by McCain Aides, NYT 11/8/2008)
I always marvel at conservatives who get hurt feelings when someone says something untrue or outrageous about them even after months of their doing the very same thing against someone else.
Palin’s hurt and surprised reaction to the barbs being cast toward her by her own party, in fact the crew of her own campaign partner, would be pathetic and disingenuous if they weren’t also so funny.
Why should she be surprised, when the campaign that she and McCain ran was dishonest and vicious, accusing Obama of “paling around with terrorists” (when he didn’t), inciting cries of “kill him” at her rallies without comment or criticism of those cries, and ridiculing Obama’s community organizing efforts (see Giuliani’s notorious snickering disdain: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HahW5Qd_-7o&feature=related).
(I love the irony that Obama’s skills at community organizing were the very things that buried Palin and McCain in the national election!)
The Republicans have for the last 8 years at least, been extremely skillful at creating moods, atmospheres, climates wherein a certain psychological playing field is encouraged within which the rules for engagement are carefully established.
Cheney created a climate of fear, so that anything that seemed to challenge his definition of what constituted a terrorist threat, including any kind of negotiation or peace-seeking round-tables, could be labeled un-patriotic or dangerous to national security.
Bush created a culture of acceptance and excuses for blatant stupidity, and by that I mean actual stupidity, not just bad decision-making, encouraging suspicion against intellectuals and in fact, any sign of intelligent thoughtful consideration. Over time, Republicans managed to re-create a new America in which intellectuals were to be distrusted and ridiculed.
Since America exports nothing more than services, entertainment and money, we have fallen behind China and Japan (which we also spent many years making fun of). When was the last time you bought anything – I mean anything! - that was “Made In the U.S.?
Our last actual exportable product was cars, but our cars couldn’t compete with Japanese imports, which were pursuing fuel efficiency for 10 years before American carmakers stopped to think about it. The only things American cars had to offer was brawn, sort of the image of America itself, and since ‘”brawn” has become the last thing a consumer (other than someone who hauls or farms for a living) wants in their vehicle, our car companies are failing. Executives of these companies had all the same information available to them as the rest of the world (news of global warming, knowledge of increasing fuel prices, the fact that we are dependant on unfriendly countries for oil) and yet they ignored the handwriting on the wall, and, because our Republican administration encouraged a climate of American distrust of innovation and a blithe ignorance of the concept of “the Future” (as well as “The Past”: see 1970), they kept building the same big cars, consumer desire for which was soon to be obsolete.
[I feel enormous sympathy for those who work for GM and Ford. They trusted their executives to do the right thing; after all weren’t these executives making millions for their good judgment? This year alone, the CEO of GM will make, as base salary, over $1.5 million. But then again weren’t the executives of Enron and World Com and Bear Sterns and Washington Mutual and Tyco and all those other tanked companies doing the same? And didn’t their employees end up on the same unemployment line with nothing to show for their loyalty as car workers will soon be standing?]
Now of course, after years of Republican disdain for negotiating and coming to the table to try to understand America’s problems along with her enemies, the current Administration has finally recognized their folly. They’re finally listening to their generals in the field of war (something Rumsfeld was notorious for refusing to do), as General Patraeus tells them that one of the best strategies for achieving stability in Iraq (and, ostensibly, Afghanistan) is to meet with our enemies and negotiate (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a1FK-JdLEN4).
So perhaps when Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld created and honed a new American sensibility of fear and paranoia, along with the dismissal of the possibility of war fought not only on the ground, but in the hearts and minds of the enemy, maybe they wasted some time. Maybe they wasted 7 and a half years.
When you create a culture of loathing for new ideas, for distain of alternate strategies, for the castigation of whistle-blowers, for hatred of those who ask questions, and an utter disrespect for truth, you reap what you sow.
And so, to Sarah Palin who is shocked, shocked! when her own team turns against her with anonymous attacks that resemble nothing more than schoolyard backstabbing, I say: “Welcome to Your World”. Welcome to the world you and your party created. Deal with it. Or better yet, change it. After all, now is the time for change. Yes, you can.
(Sarah Palin, responding to attacks by McCain Aides, NYT 11/8/2008)
I always marvel at conservatives who get hurt feelings when someone says something untrue or outrageous about them even after months of their doing the very same thing against someone else.
Palin’s hurt and surprised reaction to the barbs being cast toward her by her own party, in fact the crew of her own campaign partner, would be pathetic and disingenuous if they weren’t also so funny.
Why should she be surprised, when the campaign that she and McCain ran was dishonest and vicious, accusing Obama of “paling around with terrorists” (when he didn’t), inciting cries of “kill him” at her rallies without comment or criticism of those cries, and ridiculing Obama’s community organizing efforts (see Giuliani’s notorious snickering disdain: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HahW5Qd_-7o&feature=related).
(I love the irony that Obama’s skills at community organizing were the very things that buried Palin and McCain in the national election!)
The Republicans have for the last 8 years at least, been extremely skillful at creating moods, atmospheres, climates wherein a certain psychological playing field is encouraged within which the rules for engagement are carefully established.
Cheney created a climate of fear, so that anything that seemed to challenge his definition of what constituted a terrorist threat, including any kind of negotiation or peace-seeking round-tables, could be labeled un-patriotic or dangerous to national security.
Bush created a culture of acceptance and excuses for blatant stupidity, and by that I mean actual stupidity, not just bad decision-making, encouraging suspicion against intellectuals and in fact, any sign of intelligent thoughtful consideration. Over time, Republicans managed to re-create a new America in which intellectuals were to be distrusted and ridiculed.
Since America exports nothing more than services, entertainment and money, we have fallen behind China and Japan (which we also spent many years making fun of). When was the last time you bought anything – I mean anything! - that was “Made In the U.S.?
Our last actual exportable product was cars, but our cars couldn’t compete with Japanese imports, which were pursuing fuel efficiency for 10 years before American carmakers stopped to think about it. The only things American cars had to offer was brawn, sort of the image of America itself, and since ‘”brawn” has become the last thing a consumer (other than someone who hauls or farms for a living) wants in their vehicle, our car companies are failing. Executives of these companies had all the same information available to them as the rest of the world (news of global warming, knowledge of increasing fuel prices, the fact that we are dependant on unfriendly countries for oil) and yet they ignored the handwriting on the wall, and, because our Republican administration encouraged a climate of American distrust of innovation and a blithe ignorance of the concept of “the Future” (as well as “The Past”: see 1970), they kept building the same big cars, consumer desire for which was soon to be obsolete.
[I feel enormous sympathy for those who work for GM and Ford. They trusted their executives to do the right thing; after all weren’t these executives making millions for their good judgment? This year alone, the CEO of GM will make, as base salary, over $1.5 million. But then again weren’t the executives of Enron and World Com and Bear Sterns and Washington Mutual and Tyco and all those other tanked companies doing the same? And didn’t their employees end up on the same unemployment line with nothing to show for their loyalty as car workers will soon be standing?]
Now of course, after years of Republican disdain for negotiating and coming to the table to try to understand America’s problems along with her enemies, the current Administration has finally recognized their folly. They’re finally listening to their generals in the field of war (something Rumsfeld was notorious for refusing to do), as General Patraeus tells them that one of the best strategies for achieving stability in Iraq (and, ostensibly, Afghanistan) is to meet with our enemies and negotiate (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a1FK-JdLEN4).
So perhaps when Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld created and honed a new American sensibility of fear and paranoia, along with the dismissal of the possibility of war fought not only on the ground, but in the hearts and minds of the enemy, maybe they wasted some time. Maybe they wasted 7 and a half years.
When you create a culture of loathing for new ideas, for distain of alternate strategies, for the castigation of whistle-blowers, for hatred of those who ask questions, and an utter disrespect for truth, you reap what you sow.
And so, to Sarah Palin who is shocked, shocked! when her own team turns against her with anonymous attacks that resemble nothing more than schoolyard backstabbing, I say: “Welcome to Your World”. Welcome to the world you and your party created. Deal with it. Or better yet, change it. After all, now is the time for change. Yes, you can.
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