posted 2007/05/31 at 16:53
Late last night as I was working here on my computer I had on Soundscapes, Music Choice's new age radio station, which has lately been my choice of background music for while I'm working. All of a sudden, though, the channel completely died out on me, and I began to fear that the cable/Internet problems of the previous week were returning. However, my Internet connection still appeared as strong as ever, and a quick flip over to CNN revealed that other channels were still coming in okay. I didn't think too much about this just because I was about to go to bed anyway, so I just shut everything down and hit the hay.
Well, about a couple of hours ago I went to turn Soundscapes back on, only to find that Latin music was playing in its place and the on-screen graphics were a whole lot different than I remember them being. It turned out that our cable company had replaced Music Choice with Urge Radio overnight, without giving us any warning. (Although they were nice enough to send us a message on our cable boxes after the fact.) As a result, as I've been working here today I've been scanning up and down the dial of the new channel lineup here, learning where all the good stations are. Although there are a few good stations on here, though, there isn't a real new age station; there's a smooth jazz station, and there's a "Zen" station that plays mostly meditative music, but it's perhaps a bit too mellow for my taste in terms of background music. (I need something just a tad more active than what the Zen station is playing.) I can't say that I'm too happy with all the Viacom-branded stations they're offering (do we really need more MTV channels on cable?), but the non-branded stations seem decent enough for their genres.
I don't think it substantively matters that our cable company swapped out Music Choice with Urge; I can never say that I was that big of a fan of Music Choice, and I don't think I can say that I like Urge any less at this point. I guess what bothers me is that back when we had DirecTV here we got the Music Choice stations through there, and that's where I first got into digital radio. I can still remember back when there was literally no visual feed being broadcast on the stations, and the track data was handled through the on-screen menus on the DirecTV boxes. (I still miss how the menus on our DirecTV boxes were translucent so you could still kind of see the channel you were watching as you searched for a new one.) I suppose this is another one of those silly attachments that I've picked up for no reason whatsoever, but I still can't help but feel a little sad that I don't have Music Choice anymore, particularly as I'm guessing that with Urge's branding and Sirius and XM dominating the satellite radio market (and having footholds in the satellite TV markets), Music Choice is either going to be acquired and phased out or just outright killed soon.
posted at 13:55
Especially when you're an English MA ...
posted 2007/05/29 at 16:12
It's been over five months now since I graduated from the University of Toledo, and you know, you wouldn't know it from the flood of junk mail I continue to get. Right after I started attending UT, I started getting a whole lot of junk mail on a regular basis that I wasn't getting before, mostly from Chase Bank and Disney. I won't say how I know that I'm getting this mail because of my enrollment at UT, but I will say that this junk mail shares a certain identifying factor with most of the correspondence I received from UT over the years, a factor that just reminds me all the more of the difficulties I faced as a student (and an employee) there.
I had held out some naïve hope that this mail would at least go down slightly in volume once I had graduated, but that hasn't been the case. I'm still getting all the same offers I had been getting before, leaving me with a huge pile of junk mail accumulating on one of my bookshelves which I occasionally whittle down while watching something on television. (I personally fine-cut all the identifying information out of those pieces of junk mail, then shred that information finer than any electric shredder would before pitching it out in a separate bag of garbage from what I use for the main pieces of mail.) If anything, things are now getting worse because there's this one student loan consolidation company that keeps sending me all these pieces of mail trying to get me to consolidate my loans with them, and apart from the sheer volume of it all, the fact that they keep trying to disguise their junk mail as official correspondence from my lenders is really starting to annoy me.
This alone would be bad enough, but in addition to sending me all this junk mail, the same company is also sending me at least two or three e-mails a week, none of which get blocked by my spam filters for some reason, plus I usually get at least one call a week on my cell phone from them. I don't know the exact laws on what constitutes harassment, but I'm pretty sure that this company has mastered the fine line between legitimate marketing and harassment. I'd contact them and ask them to knock it the hell out, but as with spammers and stuff I'm just worried that if I do contact them, they'll actually get worse about that sort of stuff, or sell my information out there to other companies. You know, I'm glad that UT was able to provide me with my education at such a low cost, but I have to wonder just whether or not it was actually worth it to save a few bucks per year at the cost of all this headache later on.
posted 2007/05/28 at 19:39
For all that the phrase "paperless office" has been driven into the ground over the past fifteen years or so, and as much as it is nice to avoid having to use paper whenever possible, I'm still a big believer in paper writing. As Julia Cameron notes in The Artist's Way, there is something natural and organic about the process of putting pencil or pen to paper that simply can't be duplicated by typing something out on a computer keyboard. The daily journaling I've done since I first read The Artist's Way nearly seven years ago -- the infamous "Morning Pages" -- is a prime example of writing that pretty much needs to be done by hand, because writing by hand forces to slow down and really think about what you're saying, and if journaling is supposed to accomplish anything, it's to let you work out your thoughts and get them down somewhere so you don't worry so much about them later.
That being said, there is a time for writing by hand, and there is a time for opening up your word processor of choice and going to town on something. I don't even want to think about how much harder writing my graduate papers would have been if I'd only had pen-and-paper to work on, or for that matter even a typewriter. When I write fiction, I use a computer simply because it's much easier for me to cut-and-paste parts and move them around, plus when it comes to fiction I tend to think and develop my ideas so quickly that I need the added speed that typing affords me. However, I just can't write poetry by typing it out here; for some reason I simply must write poetry by hand. Even after I've got poetry typed up and I want to edit it, I simply have to print out a copy to really look at it; trying to do so on a computer screen doesn't work for me.
I make a point, however, of making the most of what paper I do use. Whenever I have a computer printout that goes bad, whether because I notice an error in something I've typed after I print it out or the ink cartridge runs low or what have you, instead of simply throwing the paper out I stick it into the envelope compartment of my printer stand. While this curls the paper up too much to feed it through my computer again, I can still write on the other side, and thus I don't have to use other paper or sticky notes for such purposes. I've probably saved a fair bit of money this way, and more importantly I've used up a little less paper than I would have otherwise. Even if it's a fairly small amount compared to how much paper is out there, it helps me to feel a little better.
Anyway, I've been using these old papers a lot lately for general note-taking, both for the work that's kept me so busy these past few weeks as well as for other small things. This kind of brings up a couple of interesting things. First of all, I can't help but look at the printed sides of the paper before I use the other sides, and a lot of the papers I've been pulling out of my little scrap compartment lately have been from my undergraduate creative writing classes, fragments of old stories and poems. It's interesting to look at them and chart my development as a writer, to be sure. Secondly, though, my desk is now looking absolutely ridiculous with how much paper is on it. Back when I first got this desk I thought it was too big, and that I'd never use all the space there was on it. Now I'm going to have to look into getting a card table or something just to give me more space on which to lay all of my notes and stuff.
posted 2007/05/26 at 22:25
About a week or so ago some of the channels on our cable boxes would not longer load for us. There didn't seem to be any rhyme or reason to which channels wouldn't come up, but it was only on the digital boxes; my sister still has an analog hookup in her room, so she got the channels just fine. Still, MSNBC was one of the channels that wasn't coming up for me, so I missed a few episodes of Countdown there. Worse yet, Versus and CBC were unaffected, so I did catch the demise of the Red Wings. Then our cable modem started going out sporadically, until the early part of this week when things got so bad that we were losing all cable television and Internet access for hours at a time. It took forever, but the cable company finally came over to fix things, but not before a whole lot of self-hair-pulling on the part of everyone in this house.
Now, were this just a matter of us losing cable television, I can kind of understand why the cable company wouldn't see restoring our connection as a big deal, even if I'm a big Red Wings fan and their season was about to come to an end. I could even understand them not seeing us losing Internet access as a big deal if we were just using it for residential purposes. However, even though the Internet isn't the primary tool my father uses for his job, it is a vital tool for him in terms of e-mailing his clients and uploading the things he's working on for his clients. For my part, all the work I've been swamped with these past few weeks kind of necessitates I be able to go up on the Internet to do stuff, even if I did have enough at the time to keep myself busy without Internet access, knock on wood. This may be a house, but this is still a house where a lot of business is conducted, and us losing our Internet access was a real problem, and I don't feel like the cable company was treating our outage with the seriousness it deserved.
Perhaps I wouldn't be harping on this so much if the cable company weren't already on my shit list. As I've mentioned before, our local cable company also owns the local paper, The Blade, and they've been locking out some of their unionized newspaper workers for an ungodly long period of time now, and then swamping the local commercial buys on their cable channels with propaganda pieces trying to argue their side of the story. These spots had really gotten bad for a while there, with the company's spokesperson -- a former local news anchor of some (by Toledo standards) prestige -- basically arguing that unions are responsible for every bad economic period for the past hundred years. For a while there the company toned things down, replacing the spots with interviews with replacement workers who talked about how great the company is and all, but now they've gotten worse than ever. The spokesperson is now openly name-dropping communism in the spots, and while I have no problem seeing this for the scare tactic that it is, I have to wonder what effect this new spot might have on people who don't know better. Needless to say, I really wish we could get DSL out here (and I don't know why because this is hardly a remote area) and just tell the cable company to go screw themselves, but unfortunately, as I mentioned above, high-speed Internet access is a necessity around here, and the cable company is providing the only affordable solution to that problem.
I feel like I need to mention here that my beef with this company is only with the management. I've seen how overworked (and underpaid) their cable repairpeople are, and there are a number of fine writers at their newspaper. I just have a real problem with the management there, and as much as I favour local ownership and companies over national conglomerates, times like these almost make me wish that the newspaper and cable company were part of a huge corporation, because they might actually be better for both our family and the community as a whole than what we have right now.
posted 2007/05/25 at 20:12
First of all, the answers to last week's movie meme/quiz have been posted to the original entry, and I'm kind of shocked that none of you got any of those. I figured I was going with movies that at least a significant portion of my readers would be familiar with. I have to say, quizzing my family and Jeff with these in the flesh was tremendous fun, although I think they all had the advantage of working together on it.
Anyway, I kind of like the idea of doing memes on Friday, at least for the next little while (read: while I'm still so busy with stuff I have problems thinking clearly), so let me go grab one of those "Friday Five" things and see how much fun I have with it ...
1. What was the last item you returned to a store?
A Lords of Acid CD that skipped in my CD player right out of the case. Actually, I did this twice with the same CD, as the replacement I got after the first exchange had the exact same problem. (Yes, it was a different CD, it was shrink-wrapped and had that impossible-to-open strip on the top.)
2. What do you currently have in your possession that you need to return to its owner?
If you don't count my student loans, nothing.
3. What’s something you lent to someone that you’d really like back now?
My copy of the NES version of Final Fantasy, which I lent to someone early on in high school and then never got back. Of all the games for me to lose ...
4. Where’s a place you hope never to see again?
The private school I went to. A few years back I actually did go back there as one of the volunteers for a group of Japanese folk musicians who were touring various elementary schools, and all the old memories of the crap I endured back in the day came back to haunt me.
5. What’s your explanation for those wild stories about dogs and cats who get separated from their owners for years and finally make their way home, even at times finding their owners when the families have moved a long way away?
One, the power of love. Two, animals are far more intelligent than most people give them credit for.
posted 2007/05/23 at 14:30
As much as I tried to steady myself for the Wings not winning the Cup this year, last night still kind of hurt. Even though I was angry enough with the Wings for signing Bertuzzi that I was approaching near-2002 levels of apathy for the team, I still wanted them to win, if only to hear Bob Cole and Harry Neale call a few Wings games on CBC. Once again my Red Wings shirts are all packed away for the summer, and as much as I'd like to Ottawa win (if only because it's been too long since a Canadian team had the Cup), my gut tells me that Anaheim's going to win it all just to really tick me off.
Now, that being said, there's something I've been wanting to say all season about the Red Wings that I held off on talking about until after the season was over, but now I kind of feel compelled to say something about it. Namely, I am tremendously upset at Red Wings fans -- at least those in Detroit -- for how poorly they've been treating the team. It was bad enough when the fans forced Red Wings management into so many bad personnel decisions in between the 1998 and 2002 Cups, but if you tuned in to any Red Wings games this season you undoubtedly saw the huge patches of empty seats at the Joe for each and every game. Even the night where they hoisted Stevie Y's number 19 up to the rafters for all eternity, there were empty seats there.
Here's the thing, though: technically, Joe Louis Arena was sold out every game this season, as it has been for several years. What is happening is that season ticket holders are continuing to buy their tickets, but they're just not going to the games. Don Cherry attributes this to the lack of physical players and enforcer figures on the Red Wings, and it's kind of hard to argue with that. Losing Darren McCarty to the post-lockout salary restrictions was a huge blow to the face of the team, and then losing Brendan Shanahan after that just left the Wings without that real grinding figure that I think Detroiters are genetically drawn to loving. I honestly think that's the main reason why the Wings took a chance on Bertuzzi at the trade deadline, even though his injuries made him a real question mark and there are still lots of people, myself included, who don't believe that he has any business wearing any NHL jersey at this point let alone the Wing Wheel.
Someone on CBC reported that over 2,500 Red Wings season ticket holders just never bothered to pick up their playoff tickets, which is as good a sign as any to the apathy that a great number of Red Wings fans have towards the team at this point. I'm not saying I don't understand why people would be less interested in the team now that we haven't had an enforcer in a while, but the number one rule about being a fan of a team is that your loyalty to the team does not waver. Even when I got pissed off at the Wings for buying into the fans' incorrect perception that Chris Osgood was the reason they didn't win more Cups in the late 1990s, they were still my team and I still supported them, even if it was with much less fervor than I'd shown in years past.
I've always said that Detroit deserves the label of "Hockeytown USA" not only for their support of the Red Wings, but because of the long and strong history of both minor league hockey and junior hockey, both in the Detroit area and the state as a whole. (How much free publicity did Stephen Colbert give the Saginaw Spirit this past season?) Still, for people to buy up all those Red Wings season tickets and then leave the Joe looking half-empty most of the time -- for them to not fill up the arena when Steve Yzerman was receiving the greatest tribute that any sports team can give one of its former players -- really pissed me off this past season. I want the Red Wings to get a good enforcer-type player as much as anyone else -- the NHL is one notable exception to my "violence never solves anything" philosophy -- but I can think of a lot of so-called Red Wings fans in the Detroit area who should be ashamed of themselves for the image they've given to Red Wings fans, both here in the Great Lakes area and elsewhere.
posted 2007/05/21 at 19:24
I really, really don't like the fact that I've been tied here to my bedroom so much lately with everything I've been working on. May is probably the best month weather-wise here, because the temperatures get warm enough that it feels warm but not unbearably hot like it starts to get in June. Certainly there are still the odd days where the temperatures hit extremes -- we've been as high as 90 degrees and as low as 40 in just the past two weeks alone -- but on the whole the days are, for lack of a more descriptive word, nice. During the day you should probably be wearing a long-sleeve shirt or a light coat, but your body is still so used to winter weather that it still feels like short-sleeve weather, when the sun shines on you it's a gentle warmth, and the breezes only send the slightest chills through your body.
Unfortunately, I've been sitting in front of my computer most all the time recently working on things, which means that I get to see the trees outside my window grow their leaves as Toledo turns towards summer, but I hardly ever seem to get out of here, let alone out to enjoy this weather. I definitely want to go out and take some photos of the late spring here, not just for posting on the .org but for my own sake as well, but I don't see myself having the time to do that any time soon. The closest thing I get to enjoying this weather is opening my window and letting some fresh air in, or sometimes when I'm downstairs waiting for a meal to cook I'll head out onto the back porch and scratch Skooter for a little bit. (She still hasn't lost her winter coat and I'm worried that come the dog days of summer she'll be sweltering under all that fur.)
I don't want to sound like a luddite here, but there are times when I really wonder what all of this technology is doing to us, the spirits inside of us. When I go on my political polemics I can list all kinds of reasons as to why we as a people seem to be becoming less and less satisfied with our lives and our communities, and most of them have to do with capitalistic society and imbalances of power and all of that. At times like this, though, I have to wonder just how much better we would all be if we could just switch off these blasted computers for just the tiniest while and get back out there with the trees and the flowers. I wouldn't give up my computer and my Internet connection for anything, but I need to get better at giving them up for short whiles so I can start being in nature instead of just looking at it up here in my bedroom.
posted 2007/05/20 at 22:16
Today's been another one of those days where I've been fighting massive sleep deprivation to try to get much of anything accomplished. Saturdays are kind of my days to kick back and take things easy, but what happens is that I get so wrapped up in doing fun stuff that I lose track of time, and before I know it I've stayed up way later than I should have. (In yesterday's case, teasing my family and Jeff with the movie meme from my last post provided literally hours of fun as I watched them try to put together the pieces for each movie.) The way my body works these days, though, it can't help but wake up by a certain hour, and if I haven't fallen asleep long before then, well, I wake up and I have a day like today where I have this strange sensation like there's this warm breeze blowing just above my eyes, and everything seems just a little bit more surreal than usual. This can actually be advantageous for me -- my creativity seems to peak at times like this -- but at the same time it makes it tremendously hard to focus on anything, and I've got a lot to focus on.
This kind of takes me back to the last time I was this sleep deprived, because I remember having what I thought was this tremendous idea for this line of products that I thought was absolutely brilliant. I can even remember blogging about it, but I'm too sleep-deprived (okay, lazy) to go link to the old post right now. Anyway, I thought it was brilliant, but from past experiences I knew not to put a whole lot of trust in my judgment when I'm like this. I decided to write down all the ideas for the product that I had, and then a few days later, when I'd gotten caught back up on my sleep, I went back and looked at the notes I typed up. (Believe me, my handwriting is atrocious enough without sleep deprivation to make it worse.)
Well, here's the thing. When I took a look back at my idea with a clear head, I was still convinced it was a great idea. It's funny yet serious, base yet profound, counterculture yet highly marketable. I really latched onto something here. The problem, though, aside from the fact that I really don't have the money to finance the idea through, is that ... I'm not even sure how to put this. I think the best way I can explain it is that I'm not sure that it's something I want to be remembered for. It's not that the idea is patently offencive (though I'm sure it will offend people who, to put it bluntly, need to be offended), and it's not that the idea runs against my own beliefs or morals. It just kind of makes me uncomfortable to think that, when my time on this planet is at an end, that I will end up being remembered for this idea instead of something else. (Even this blog for all its relative smallness.)
I don't think I can explain it any better than that without giving away key details of the idea, and in the event that I decide to pursue it I think it's best that I keep mum on the details. In between all the things I've been working on here, though, I've kept going back to this idea and debating whether or not this is something I want to be associated with. I haven't been able to come to a clear decision about it when I've been able to think clearly, and I seriously doubt I'll be able to do so when I'm feeling this tired and spacy.
posted 2007/05/18 at 19:37
It's been a while since I posted anything even remotely meme-ish here on the .org, and, well, my brain's so fried from working on projects so hard recently that I've been having trouble coming up with stuff to write about. Besides, even though I couldn't participate due to my own lack of movie knowledge, Don seemed to have a lot of fun when he did this on his blog recently, so here goes with the rules ...
- Go to IMDB.com and look up 10 of your favorite movies.
- Post three official IMDB "Plot Keywords" for these 10 picks.
- Have your friends guess the movie titles.
- Your guesses must be posted to the .org entry to count. If you're reading this via syndication, click on the link at the top of this entry to make sure you leave your comments in the right place.
- NO CHEATING by going to IMDB yourself or googling or anything like that.
(Now over -- Don guessed number 2 right, no other correct guesses posted.)
1. Heist, Unsubtitled Foreign Language, Lovers Posing As Siblings. (A Fish Called Wanda)
2. Jive, Inflatable Doll, Hare Krishna. (Airplane)
3. Based On Comic, Magic, Computer Virus. (Oh My Goddess! The Movie)
4. Gay Slur, Racial Slur, Chess. (Blazing Saddles)
5. Taco Bell, Miss America, Urban Renewal. (Roger and Me)
6. Mistaken Identity, Speech Impediment, Police Raid. (Monty Python and the Holy Grail)
7. Chicago Illinois, Sushi, Title Spoken By Character. (The Breakfast Club)
8. Post September 11 2001, Colonic Therapy, McDonald's Restaurant. (Notorious CHO)
9. London England, Piano, Young Boy. (Madame Sousatzka)
10. American Abroad, Gangster, Independent Film. (The Young Americans)
Some of these are probably gimmes, I know, but like I mentioned recently, I'm not particularly that much of a film person. Anyway, post your answers here and I'll keep the post updated with the correct answers as they come in.
posted 2007/05/17 at 16:41
As I've been tremendously busy with various projects for the past couple of weeks, I've become more and more aware of how much easier, in some respects, it would be for me to have a notebook computer than a desktop, or even to have both to use at the same time. This isn't just a matter of Yggdrasil Mark I starting to show her age as it is the fact that being able to work on two computers at the same time can make some things go a lot faster. Heck, my father has three computers in his main work station alone, and has two others he keeps in separate areas for other tasks. This doesn't even get into how having a notebook computer would open up new possibilities for me in terms of where I work, especially since I can get free wireless Internet access at Toledo's main chain of coffeeshops (the one where I get that nice hot tea blend that never fails to open up my sinuses). For that matter, having a laptop to take down with me to the garage would really open up a lot of possibilities for me in terms of playing dance video games.
The problem I have with that, though, is what to do about my e-mail. Ignoring my first few years of Internet access where my e-mail access was either through shell accounts or the crappy AOL account I had about a decade ago, I've stuck with Outlook Express (and then, after building Yggdrasil Mark I, Outlook), and although I throw out all my spam and stuff, I still have a tremendously large archive of e-mail here on my main computer, and even if I've hardly ever found a cause for keeping this archive, I'd still like to have it for historical purposes. If I wind up getting a laptop, though, it will only make sense for me to move that archive over to the laptop and do all my e-mail activities on it, and that in turn makes me worry about having all those archives on something that's much, much easier to steal than Yggdrasil Mark I is.
I do have Webmail access to seanshannon.org e-mail through my lovely Webhost, Laughing Squid, but the Webmail software is kind of simplistic, and any e-mail I keep on my account there would count against my disk quota, which makes me kind of loathe to use that service. For that matter, I don't even know whether or not it would be possible to synchronize my Outlook data on two different computers; the thought of doing so hadn't even crossed my mind until recently. Still, though, given the nature of e-mail, I should imagine it would actually be more likely for my e-mail to get stolen if I were to leave it in a Webmail account than if I were to put it on a laptop. Right now I'm thinking it would just be a whole lot easier for me to keep my e-mail on my desktop, but I've been so overworked lately that my brain is starting to feel like porridge.
posted 2007/05/15 at 15:52
Television evangelist Falwell dies at 73 (AP via Yahoo! News)
Although I don't have any clear memories of the Moral Majority back when it was in its prime, I think it's safe to say that I had to live through its repercussions. Surely the rise of televangelism and overall social conservatism in the 1980s can trace its roots back to the groundwork Falwell and the Moral Majority laid when I was but a wee one. Falwell was undoubtedly a great architect of social change in America in my lifetime, even if right now Pat Robertson seems, at least in my perception, a more visible and current figure in that regard.
My strongest memories of Falwell actually come from the frequent appearances he made on Politically Incorrect back in the show's nascence on Comedy Central. This was back when my hatred of right-wing figureheads was at its peak, so I was always a bit discomforted when Falwell came on. However, looking back, even if I disagree vehemently with the ideas and notions that Falwell espoused, I have to admit that he was a rather genial person. He wouldn't be afraid to voice his opinion on Politically Incorrect -- likely one of the main reason Bill Maher kept inviting him back on -- but at the same time, when someone from the left said something mean or nasty, Falwell didn't start into the whole fire-and-brimstone thing. If he didn't actually respect people opposed to his worldview, at the very least he did an exceptional job of hiding that fact. Heck, when Falwell wanted to he could crack some secular jokes that were, I have to admit, kind of funny. I certainly wouldn't have wanted to have been friends with the man, but I think we could have had a nice and civil dinner together if we'd wanted to.
I guess I'm thinking back on this aspect of Falwell because I'm still concerned with the seeming inability of many Democrats to stop taking themselves so seriously. In the past couple of weeks I've seen John McCain go on The Daily Show and Mike Huckabee go on The Colbert Report, and in both cases I think they made tremendous showings for themselves. Even knowing that they were going into what could be considered hostile territory given the general viewership of both shows, and especially given the huge act that Stephen Colbert puts on his show, both McCain and Huckabee were able to go on, do some playful jousting with the hosts that drew genuine laughter from the studio audience (and in Huckabee's case made it clear that he was "in on the act" with Colbert), have a respectful conversation with the host, and most importantly they were able to articulate political, social, and religious views that were in opposition to the general demographic of both shows, but still do so in a way that elicited few boos and catcalls from the audience, and made it hard not to respect them for having both the courage to go on these shows and the sense of humour to joke around about themselves with the hosts.
For all that The Daily Show and The Colbert Report are supposed to be these big left-wing bastions, it often seems like Republicans like McCain and Huckabee and others are the ones who "get" how to act on these shows, while big-name Democrats never seem to appear on them and some of them, like Nancy Pelosi, are actively discouraging other Democrats from appearing at least on Colbert's show. In some ways I think that Falwell really showed his fellow conservatives how to "play the game" with his appearances on Politically Incorrect back in the day. This isn't to excuse all the abhorrent things he said and did in his public career, but at this moment I'd rather not think about that aspect of Falwell. Right now, as odd as it feels, I'd like to remember the Reverend Falwell who could sit across from some twenty-something popular culture star spewing out a long line of obscenities and invective at him, and somehow manage to keep a warm smile on his face.
posted 2007/05/14 at 16:35
Law & Order shows get reprieve (AP via CNN.com)
After we moved back into the house following the fire, we didn't bother to get our cable hooked back up for a long while there, and really only got it hooked up so we could get cable modem access here once my father moved his office into the house. I'd started going back to college during this time, so of course I didn't have that much time to watch television, but I still wasn't too happy about being forced to rely on rabbit ears for a while. I started watching Monday Night Football on ABC for no other reason than there wasn't much else I could think of to watch, and that was the season in which ABC was promoting the hell of Dick Wolf's remake of Dragnet for midseason replacement. I checked that out and loved it, which in turn led to me checking out the various Law and Order shows for the first time ever.
To this day I'm a huge fan of SVU, although I haven't been catching the most recent episodes due to a combination of being busy with various projects as well as wanting to catch as much of the Stanley Cup playoffs as I possibly can. I have to admit that I really didn't catch that much of the original franchise after Jerry Orbach left, which doesn't make much sense because I love Sam Waterston and (the acting career of) Fred Thompson, but I'll always stop by repeats of the original series if I happen to be flipping by them on TNT. I've never liked Criminal Intent simply because Vincent D'Onofrio's character leads to some of the most implausible resolutions I've ever seen in crime dramas, and I loved Trial by Jury but of course no one else did, probably because American culture frowns upon women being strong and assertive, and Bebe Neuwirth's character likely threatened most of the viewing audience.
Anyway, although I can understand the franchise losing some of its shine in recent years, I don't get why NBC continues to treat it so poorly, particularly when it's brought them so much money over the years. (Were it not for TNT holding the cable rights to the original franchise, NBC Universal could probably create a Law and Order channel showing nothing but repeats of all the various shows.) Yes, I realize that CSI is the big ratings draw right now and CBS is aggressively marketing that franchise against the Law and Order franchise, but, well, Scott Ramsoomair pretty much captures my feelings about CSI perfectly in this cartoon. (Yes, I know linking to Internet cartoons isn't my usual modus operandi, but VG Cats is the only Internet cartoon I check out on a regular basis, and you should check it out if you don't already.) Television executives have always been bad about pulling the plug on shows that get respectable-but-not-great ratings in an attempt to clear more airtime to try out more new shoes -- the old "throw everything on the wall and see what sticks" approach -- and they've certainly gotten a whole lot worse about that in just the past decade -- but there is no reason why NBC should even be thinking about pulling the plug on the Law and Order franchise, even if you don't take into account how much the franchise has done for NBC in years past.
posted 2007/05/12 at 21:48
Returning to the subject of animation again, there's something I've wanted to say here for a while about modern animation. Back when I was getting ready to start teaching composition a couple of years ago, one of the things I did was to try to make myself at least somewhat conversant in the television shows that I knew people my students' age liked to watch. (I didn't exactly have the money, or the willpower, to try to immerse myself in their music or movies.) This meant watching a whole lot of Comedy Central, and my thoughts on Dave Chappelle and Ned Mencia will probably be kind of long, but they'll have to wait for a non-animation entry.
Anyway, this was the first time since its first season that I really watched South Park on a regular basis, and as much as I'd like to enjoy Matt and Trey's work, I just can't. I can appreciate that Matt and Trey try to tackle relevant social themes in their work every once in a while, and even if I disagree with their opinions sometimes I can still respect their opinions. My problem with their handling of social themes is that they're far too heavy-handed, and too often their "commentary" just becomes too mean, and whatever "humour" there is in the show is from cartoon kids cursing up a storm, and I'm sorry, but even when I watched the first season of South Park the novelty of that kind of wore off quickly. Matt and Trey's hatred of the people and phenomena they skewer too often overrides whatever comedy they try to put into the show.
That being said, I absolutely and completely fell in love with Drawn Together. In addition to appreciating how much effort they put into drawing each of the main characters in the style of the eras they represent (another thing I picked up from my father), the show is laugh-out-loud funny, reminding me a lot of Mystery Science Theatre 3000 in the way that they're able to land new cultural references every few seconds, ranging the gamut from high-brow humour to the lowest of potty humour, and doing it in such a rapid-fire matter that even if you don't get the reference of one joke, there'll be a joke that you do get in just a short while. More than that, Drawn Together often manages to be more crude and more vulgar and more explicit than South Park (or anything else on Comedy Central), and they never come off as mean, both because of the incredibly over-the-top atmosphere they create and because the writers really know how to do insult comedy without coming off as being genuinely hateful of the topics they discuss. (I have to admit that being a long-time fan of both Betty Boop and Tara Strong probably influences my opinion of the show as well.)
Of course, once I really started getting into the show, Comedy Central had to go and shelve the second half of the third series, introducing a never-ending litany of bad shows in Drawn Together's old timeslot and killing them off just as quickly as they put them up. That would be bad enough, but Comedy Central already airs far too many repeats of their shows, and every time I check the TV listings and see a repeat of Ned Mencia's show airing in prime time it makes me want to scream. Now watch Comedy Central cancel Drawn Together outright just to spite me.
posted 2007/05/11 at 20:16
For Joe: The Red Wings won't win this round for a number of reasons, the biggest of which is that Anaheim's had a much easier go of it in the playoffs thus far and just had more than a week off. Once they shake off the small bit of layoff-related rust they've got, they'll just wear the Red Wings down and tire them out. The Ducks will probably steal one of the first two games here, and there's no way I see them losing at home under any circumstances. Also, the Ducks will be motivated to eliminate Babcock after he left them following the lockout. Oh, and Anaheim just generally irks me because of that "Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim" bullcrap (I know, it's another sport but it's the same city), and teams that annoy me like that usually end up biting me in the butt when it counts the most.
Anyway, I have the Ducks/Red Wings game on now, and Versus actually sent a reporter to interview Babcock on the bench in the middle of a period. Like I said before, I can understand doing these kinds of gimmicks during the regular season, but given the intensity of playoff hockey -- particularly now that we're into the conference finals -- is just stupid. There is a time to try to get hockey fans (and the non-fans who might be tuning in) a chance to get closer to the action, and that time is not during the playoffs. Right now the players and coaches all need to keep their focus on the ice and the game, not on microphone packs attached to their backs or a reporter from a third-rate wannabe ESPN walking behind them to interview their coach in the middle of a period.
I will at least give Versus credit for bringing in Dave Strader to do play-by-play for one of the Red Wings games in the last series, though. Strader was originally the play-by-play voice of the Red Wings, before the untimely death of Tom Mees forced ESPN to hire Strader away to cover the games Mees would have covered. He became the voice of the Florida Panthers after Versus got the NHL broadcast rights, and this irks me to no end, mainly because the primary play-by-play announcer for Versus has this nasally tone that is hard for me to listen to for long periods of time.
posted 2007/05/09 at 17:10
After writing my last entry about the Hamas version of Mickey Mouse and how cartoons can influence children's development, I thought of something else I've kind of wanted to talk about here for a while, but never gotten around to. This entry won't make much sense to you if you don't have at least some knowledge of Oh My Goddess! (or Ah! My Goddess or Aa! Megamisamaa! or what have you), but if you don't, well, buy this now and thank me later.
About six years ago, back before the house fire and my resultant return to college, I had started to really get into drawing manga. Those of you who've seen my drawings know that I never really got that good at it, but I did a lot better at it than I thought I ever could. I was actually working on drawing a couple of my friends at the time (and had some ideas for starting a manga loosely based on their lives) when I first realized the house was on fire, although it was a lack of time for drawing, more than any ties in my mind between drawing and the fire, that resulted in me not developing my drawing skills any more than I did.
Anyway, one of the things that I thought about doing, back when I was drawing on a regular basis, was an Oh My Goddess! doujinshi that retold the story, except with Megumi making the fateful call to the Goddess Relief Office instead of Keiichi. Before anyone gets any ideas, this wasn't just going to be an exercise in coming up with excuses for me to draw Megumi-Belldandy sex scenes or come up with a new incestuous relationship for Urd and Skuld. One of the reasons I love Oh My Goddess! so much is that it's able to tackle sexual themes in such a mature and responsible way, and I was going to maintain Fujishima Kosuke's standards -- nothing overtly sexual (except for Urd's teasing and prodding, and even that's PG-13 level at most), stories that focus much more on love than sex, maintaining a basic innocence in the main protagonists -- in my own work.
I suppose the reason why I thought about this so much was because it raised a lot of interesting questions for me. How would Fujishima's other characters react to a relationship between Megumi and Belldandy? Would Keiichi still be the lovable little klutz he is in the original series, or might he become jealous of his little sister? Given their hypermasculine characterization, would Tamiya and Ootaki be supportive of Megumi and Belldandy, or might they feel threatened by their relationship, or would they just become totally ecchi and try to catch the two of them being intimate with one another? How would an established villain like Marller or Aoshima change if I added a homophobic streak to their character?
These are questions that still fascinate me, and I haven't entirely ruled out exploring these questions in something like a fanfic. (Assuming I'd ever have the time to write something like that, that is.) I suppose the underlying problem, though, is that I feel like I'm approaching this idea with a distinctly Western mindset, trying to apply my knowledge of homosexuality and its public reception by how I've experienced and read about it as an American. I've never really studied how homosexuality is received and portrayed in Japanese culture, even though it seems like one of those things that I naturally would have picked up on given how much I've studied both Japanese culture and people's perceptions of homosexuality. I guess I just wouldn't feel comfortable trying to write something along these lines until I'd done a lot of studying about homosexuality in Japan, both in popular culture and in popular literature over the past 50 to 100 years, and felt like I could create a story that respected those conventions.
posted 2007/05/08 at 16:32
Hamas "Mickey Mouse" wants Islam takeover (AP via Yahoo! News)
I kind of wonder why this is necessarily news. I mean, I certainly don't catch every television broadcast in every country, but the idea of countries using cartoon characters to indoctrinate children into certain ways of thinking is hardly a new one -- just look back to the racist propaganda Bugs Bunny and the gang were spouting back in World War II (as much as Time Warner tries to make everyone forget about that page in Looney Toons history) -- and I doubt that it isn't going on in other countries even as we speak. I find it hard to believe, for instance, that there weren't anti-American cartoons being broadcast in Afghanistan before 09.11, or in Iraq before the US invaded there, or even in modern-day Iran. As far as I can see, the only reason why this particular children's show is generating so much press is that the main character is a fairly close (though hardly perfect) approximation of Mickey Mouse. Even at that, I'm not sure the story is necessarily the rip-off of an American children's character as it is the stealing of that specific character. Disney certainly puts forth a lot of effort to make all their characters as big a part of our cultural legacy as possible, if not synonymous with animation itself.
What's bothering me most right now, though, is how little investigation we do of the messages contained in our own children's programming. Certainly we don't have anything as bad right now as Bugs Bunny affecting a deliberately bad Japanese accent, but given how impressionable children are, you have to be careful about every little thing that happens in a show. I know that looking back on the cartoons and shows I watched when I was younger, a lot of them were portrayed a very heteronormative world, or a world in which heterosexual activity is seen as "normal" and homosexual activity, even if it was portrayed as being "okay," was still portrayed as fundamentally different. It is good that there have been more openly homosexual characters on television in the past twenty years, yes, but there's a world of difference between having a "gay character" and "a character who happens to be gay." The gay male couple in American Beauty is a good example of the latter; yes, they're openly homosexual, but the fact that they are is pretty much irrelevant to the entire story. You could substitute a heterosexual couple in for them and the story would not change in the slightest.
I'm not trying to suggest here that children at the age where they start watching characters like Mickey Mouse should be taught about homosexuality or even sex in general. What I am saying, though, is that in a lot of the cartoons I saw when I was growing up -- and I gather this is still the case today -- all the married parental figures were in opposite-gender couplings, and if young characters ever expressed anything approaching what could be called "love," it was love for someone of the opposite gender. This is something so commonplace, and something that we all grew up with, that I can understand why people take it for granted. Still, if all the television you watch as a child portrays the idea that Snow White and Cinderella and Prince Charming and all of those characters can only fall in love with someone of the opposite gender, that's going to influence you later in life when you are confronted with homosexual people in the real world, because it's going to fall outside of what you've learned to be "normal" activity. (I mean normal in the sense of being acceptable, not the statistical definition.)
posted 2007/05/07 at 19:46
I read the news enough that when a film breaks box office records (as Spiderman 3 did this past weekend), I'm going to hear about it, even though I've never particularly been a film person. Given how so many of my family and friends like films, though, it's been kind of hard to avoid discussion of all the films that are out. (By point of reference, the last time I actually watched a film in a movie theatre was the opening weekend of Final Fantasy: the Spirits Within.) I don't want to say that I'm particularly annoyed or bothered by all the film talk that I always seem to find myself around, but at the same time there is a strong part of me that wishes I could change the conversation to a topic I actually have some knowledge of.
As much as I hate to say it, I think the underlying problem here may simply be that growing up as part of the video game generation basically shattered my attention span, so sitting down for two hours to just watch something can be kind of difficult for me. As much as I enjoy reading, I kind of have to break my reading up into short little "bursts" in order for it to really be effective. When I have to sit down for a long time to do something like that, I can -- one of the classes I excelled at in my graduate career was a course on film adaptations of women's novels -- but unless I'm doing something that's highly interactive like a video game, my attention span really isn't as long as it could be.
There seem to be other factors involved here as well. As an example, I haven't played chess regularly since high school, but every once in a while I try to get back into it. I never seem to do as well as I used to do in high school, though, and I think the reason for that is that when I played chess in high school, I was playing in front of someone, in a quiet library, and the situation kind of forced me to be slow and deliberate with my thinking. Since I don't have any real-life friends to play (serious) chess with now, though, if I want to play chess I either have to go in front of my computer or in front of my Xbox, and no matter what I try, I just can't focus enough to play a long, deliberate game on a computer. I can do speed chess okay, but I kind of prefer to play those long, quiet games I used to play in high school.
posted 2007/05/05 at 21:01
Last fall I finally bought a new computer desk after using the same bargain basement tiny model I'd used since before the house fire. In my old bedroom I managed to fit the desk into my room fairly well, but for some reason, even though I have more space in my new bedroom than my old one, I couldn't find a good spot for my computer desk once I moved in here. The end result of this was that I had my desk so close to my bed that I had to sit on my bed when I used my computer instead of sitting on a chair, which in addition to being uncomfortable (that arrangement caused me no end of back problems), but also made it very hard for me to work at my computer for any appreciable length of time. That arrangement simply had to change once I got around to working on my masters thesis, so I bought a new desk and moved things around in my room so I could actually sit on a chair while I worked. (This meant moving a whole bookcase out into the loft, but the drawbacks of that were far outweighed by the advantages of the new arrangement.)
The other thing that this did was that it changed the standard view I have out of my window while I work here. Under the old arrangement I looked kind of east-northeast out of the window, which wasn't much of a view once we built the addition for my father's office, since that and the neighbours' high fence kind of dominated the view. Now I look out to the northwest, though, and apart from our detached garage (and I-475 behind our property line), I have a wonderful view of the outside. The trees had already lost their leaves by the time I got this desk up in the fall, so this is the first time I really get to see leaves outside in this view, and it's a wonderful sight that's likely only going to get better over the next couple of weeks.
Still, the most amazing tree we have on our property is on the west side of the house. It's not as imposing as the huge tree in our backyard (north), but it has sentimental value because that's the tree my childhood swing was attached to, and in the autumn the leaves turn this amazing kaledioscope of yellow and orange and red that's just completely awe-inspiring. Both of my bedrooms have been on the west side of the house, and in my old bedroom I had a window looking right out on that tree so I could always see it when it started to turn all those amazing colours. When my father redesigned the house after the fire, though, he took away all the windows facing the west and the east. I'm guessing that he did this as a way to help conserve energy -- he's kind of big on that sort of thing (our property has far more trees on it than any other piece of land in our neighbourhood) -- but if I had a west-facing window then I'd be able to see that tree from my position at my computer here as well. I don't know, I think the value of being able to see that tree from inside would far outweigh any potential increases in heating and cooling bills that the windows would result in.
posted 2007/05/03 at 15:41
One of the things I've been doing here lately is refreshing my knowledge of computer programming languages, in preparation for an upcoming project I'll be doing that will involve me doing a bit of Website design. I have no intention of trying to make a career out of Website design again -- the last time I tried it, it didn't work out so well for me -- but I certainly don't have a problem doing Website design as part of a project. (Part of my work during the early part of my graduate assistantship, before I began teaching, was to maintain part of UT's English Department Website.) Given how long it has been since the last time I did anything more than the most basic of programming, I find that I need to refresh myself even on some of the basic concepts of computer prgramming, although I think I'm picking things back up at a decent clip.
This process is reminding me of a problem I used to have back when I was hip-deep in scripting languages and SQL queries, though: after I spend a really long time trying to conceptualize things using computer language, I find myself looking at the non-computer world and trying to apply computer languages and logic statements to it. For example, I keep a whiteboard next to my computer desk to help me keep track of various things, and when I look at the whiteboard after working a long time on programming stuff, I don't see adding and subtracting things from the whiteboard as a simple matter of writing on and erasing it, but as a computerized process of adding and subtracting text from a file. Not only do I see things and processes I'm familiar with in this way, but I also try to find improvements in other things by thinking of them like computer programmes, even if doing so isn't particularly practical.
For a long time now I've heard of people who, in attempting to learn a foreign language, immerse themselves so deep in the language to the point where they naturally, without any conscious thought, begin to think and even dream in the language they're learning. I'm wondering if what I experience after working with computer programming languages might be a similar phenomenon. I never learned enough Japanese in the day to really be able to "think" in Japanese, but then again my knowledge of computer programming has always been somewhat limited by the fact that I've been mostly self-taught in that regard and never took any programming classes beyond simple stuff on Apple IIs back when I was a kid. Perhaps this is a sign of my left brain trying to assert dominance over my thinking, attempting to place logical constraints on a highly illogical world.
posted 2007/05/01 at 19:22
Somehow I have the feeling that the Red Wings are not going to advance past this round, thanks to dropping that first game against the Sharks at the start of the series. In a way I almost think that being the home team in a playoff series is kind of a disadvantage, if only because the pressure is on the home team for those first two games to win both or being forced to start stealing away games. Back when Scotty Bowman was still coaching the Wings, he had a novel idea which I thought made perfect sense: Switch the first four games, so that the higher-ranked team starts on the road for two games, then goes home for the next three, then go back on the road for the sixth game and home for the seventh. The higher-ranked team still gets four of the seven games at home, but they also get to relax for the first two games and put that initial pressure on the lower-ranked team to win at home.
I'm also not happy with the current scheduling and division formats in the NHL, mainly because the way things are right now, teams don't face every other team in the league, which I think is grossly unfair. With an 82-game schedule, you should be able to play every other team in the league once if not twice. Particularly when the NHL is hyping Crosby up as the next Gretzky, you'd think they'd be eager to make sure that he makes it to every NHL city at least once a season, but under the current format he'd only make it to Western Conference cities once every three years. Worse yet, this format dramatically inflates the travel gap between Western Conference and Eastern Conference teams. (For those of you unfamiliar with NHL geography, Detroit is actually in the West.) I remember that last year the Devils had a two-game road trip, and that road trip comprised the only time in their whole season that they left the Eastern time zone. Of course, Eastern Conference teams are eager to block realignment because the current alignment gives them a huge advantage, so I doubt change will happen anytime soon.
Over the All-Star Break, CBC's Ron MacLean suggested a North/South realignment that balanced things out much better (and also happened to add two new Canadian teams). At first I was strongly in favour of this if only because it would put all of the Original Six teams back in the same conference (I hated that the Red Wings never faced the Maple Leafs or the Canadiens in the post-lockout season), but now that I've thought it over some more, I think it would be better to have the Original Six teams split up across the conferences if only to create the possibility of a Stanley Cup final with two Original Six teams. Still, as much I believe in balancing schedules as much as possible, I kind of wish there was a way to tweak the NHL schedules so that the Original Six teams faced each other more often during the regular season.
Finally, one tidbit for those of you who don't pay attention to these kinds of minutia like I do. Recently I've noticed a trend in the Canadian NHL cities where the middle third of "O Canada" is sung in the non-predominant official language (English in Montreal, French everywhere else). I don't know if this is a Canadian government thing or an NHL thing (I'm guessing the former since in American cities they still sing the whole song in English), but it's led to an interesting thing in Vancouver. Instead of singing anything during the middle third of the song, the anthem singer there holds the microphone up in the air, and of course all the Canucks fans sing the English lyrics instead of the French lyrics that are being sung everywhere else in Canada. Part of me wants to say that this is disrespectful to French-Canadians, but there's also a part of me that admires just how subversive this act is. It's interesting to me, anyway.
copyright © 2008 Sean Shannon