posted 2010/01/31 at 14:29
There have certainly been more pressing things to be concerned with than the late-night situation that's been unfolding at NBC, but I can't deny having my own thoughts and feelings about it. All things being equal, perhaps a bit of this silliness is needed after all the other heavy stuff going on, and as great as some of the humour that has come from this situation has been, at its core there's still some stuff going on that is far from funny and which, as insignificant as it may be compared to things like the crisis in Haiti, deserves a bit of attention.
For those of us who are old enough to have watched Johnny Carson on The Tonight Show on a regular basis, I don't think it controversial to say that most of us likely consider everyone who has come after him a pale imitation. If I were to pick a favourite of the people who have followed in the Carson mold, it would be David Letterman, but I thought Letterman was a lot funnier when he was at NBC. Somewhere in his transition to CBS, I think Letterman lost a fair bit of what made his run at Late Night so entertaining, the feeling that instead of his show being a "Big Show," it was just a bunch of dumb guys getting together and letting you in on all their dumb jokes. There was a subtlety to Letterman's NBC work that mirrored Carson's, and as the years have gone by on his CBS show, Letterman seems to be straying further and further from that.
That being said, I've hardly been a fan of Jay Leno's, at least apart from his stint as substitute host for Carson back in the day. When Leno took over The Tonight Show, it went from being The Tonight Show -- as brilliant as Carson was, he downplayed himself perfectly and let his guests shine -- into The Jay Leno Show. In addition to relying to heavily on overly staged gags and heavy production, Leno's interviews were often marked by Leno using the guest to get his own jokes over. This is not a criticism of Jay Leno the person, but Jay Leno the talk show host, but for someone who grew up watching Carson as often as possible, the change was dramatic and altogether uneasy. Leno might be a possible choice for my least favourite post-Carson late night host, had CBS not inexplicably given one of the least funny people on the face of the planet, Craig Kilborn, his own show for five years.
I watched Conan O'Brien's first couple of weeks in Letterman's old time slot, and I wasn't impressed, although I think even Conan himself will admit he was finding his legs then. I didn't catch his show much after that, and from what I watched it did look like he grew into the role. However, I never cared much for Conan because, honestly, it felt like his comedy was almost entirely shtick and gimmick, flaccid characters and stale bits that, once stripped away, didn't reveal much of an actual person, let alone comedian, underneath. Even with Leno, as much as his show bothered me, I still got the sense of Jay Leno the person underneath it all, and even though I may not have cared for his show, Leno as a person still seemed likable enough. I watched Conan's first shows as Tonight host, and it felt like he'd improved a bit, but nearly every show's first few episodes have a surplus of A-level material.
To be honest, I've always identified NBC as my favourite of the big networks; apart from my childhood love of The Cosby Show, I guess NBC has a way of marketing its shows that make them more appealing to me than other networks. That being said, I thought NBC made an unforgivable error by not consulting Carson when it came time to replace him, and giving his show to Leno instead of Carson's own choice, Letterman. It's hard not to have sympathy for NBC for trying to avoid that situation by negotiating a smooth hand-off between Leno and Conan several years ago, but at the same time, after the dust has cleared, it's obvious that Conan got supremely shafted by NBC in this whole deal, and my criticisms of his work aside, I feel incredibly sorry for him. I'm trying to be understanding of Leno's role in this whole situation as well, but at the same time, there's a very large part of me that wishes he'd just go away and leave late night to others.
If I were a regular late-night television watcher, I don't know what I'd do now. Letterman's okay, but that's about it for me. Jimmy Kimmel has his moments, but a lot of his material offends me. I've tried watching Jimmy Fallon a few times, but his show is literally too painful for me to watch; I worry that my television might short-circuit from all of his flop-sweat. Craig Ferguson and Carson Daly just don't do anything for me, and I associate Daly too much with the late-90's crapification of MTV when they went from Daria and Lilith Fair to TRL and Britney Spears.
Honestly, I think the only way I could watch a late night talk show again is if someone resurrected Johnny Carson, and I mean resurrected in the literal sense of the word. Carson had a unique gift that I'm not sure anyone else will ever have, becoming a legend of American comedy and television so sublimely. I'm not even sure his show would work today, though. There's clearly no big market for the alternative kinds of shows Tom Snyder and Whoopi Goldberg and Bob Costas have tried out, and these days when Jon Stewart so perfectly imitates Carson's phrases and mannerisms whenever a joke fails, all I hear young people say is, "What is he doing, that's so stupid and unfunny." I wasn't even eighteen when Carson ended his run on The Tonight Show; this whole sordid affair is making me feel way too old.
Labels: television
posted 2010/01/22 at 15:53
Longtime readers know that I have almost always been a fan on Keith Olbermann, dating far back to the pre-.org days when Olbermann was on ESPN, when he and Dan Patrick truly revolutionized the art of the sports recap. The two of them could make watching highlights of any sport, no matter what sport or who was playing, an enjoyable experience, and their reunification on Football Night in America made the show must-see viewing for me. I must admit, though, that I have to ask of them the same question I ask of the Beastie Boys: Does the high quality of their original, pioneering work make up for the wave of poor imitators that followed in their stead? I have been a fan of Olbermann's work on MSNBC as well, even though my politics are firmly to the left of his, and I think Countdown does a good job of balancing serious journalism with opinion and comedy. Even when I get tired of Olbermann shilling for Democrats instead of standing up for the liberal positions he espouses, I still feel compelled to watch his show, for both its informative and entertainment values.
His Special Comment last night on the Supreme Court decision allowing corporations to spend freely on elections, however, went far beyond the pale. I certainly agree with him that Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission was not only poor jurisprudence, but sets a dangerous standard for the future of this country. The notion of equating the spending of money with free speech is inherently ludicrous, particularly given our country's notion of corporate personhood. Money, like speech, is a tool that can be used for great good or great evil, but find me one person in this economic downturn who lost his or her house not due to lack of money, but due to lack of words. The only people who could look at our current political system and think that the cure for ails it is more corporate money are people who stand to benefit from the infusion of nearly unlimited amounts of corporate cash into our elections. Unfortunately for we Americans, five of those people are on the Supreme Court right now.
That the court decision paves the way for corporations to tighten their strangleholds on American politics and American people should go without saying. However, for Olbermann to claim on his show last night that the decision was worse than Dred Scott v. Sandford was so hyperbolic as to be just as ludicrous as the decision he was deriding. That Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission has the potential to do great, irreparable harm to this country cannot be denied, but to compare it to the most discriminatory decision in the court's history, one that led to this country's bloodiest war and the deaths of over 600,000 Americans, is at best highly paranoid, and at worst an insult to all those in this country whose ancestors toiled in the most inhumane institution this country even enacted, slavery. Olbermann was on the money when he said that American news outlets needed to spend much more time covering this decision and its ramifications, but his rhetoric in his Special Comment last night actually did our common cause a disservice.
It has been painful this past year to see Olbermann descend to a form of self-parody. His repeated setting aside of his principles to defend Democrats started in the aftermath of the 2006 elections, but became legion following Obama's inauguration. Even on those occasions when he does go after Democrats for abandoning progressive beliefs, he does so in a withering tone, giving the camera puppy-dog eyes as if to say, "Please don't stop your party officials from appearing on my show." Perhaps the most galling example of this was the unabashed name-calling he engaged in leading up to Scott Brown's election this past Tuesday, which Jon Stewart pointed out on last night's Daily Show. Again, Olbermann was correct in principle to address many of the concerns he brought up about Brown, but he did so in a manner which was, in a word, juvenile. The worst part is that Olbermann should know better; he has pointed out in the past that Bill O'Reilly is wise to ignore Olbermann's barbs because you never want to be seen as "punching down," trying to hit those underneath you, as Olbermann so clearly is in television ratings and national stature. Olbermann has been punching down at Republicans for some time now, and while this can be effective for right-wing pundits and talking heads -- we all need to laugh at their pompousness, and Olbermann can still be very funny -- when he does it to Republicans, he only reinforces the ludicrous Republican notion that they are the dominant political party in America right now.
I will admit to being very distressed by Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission and the potential it has, but for Olbermann to act like Chicken Little because of it was unintentionally hilarious, and requires me to do something I never thought I would do: Go to Olbermann's right and defend capitalism. As much as the spectre of complete corporate domination was made substantive by the decision, the idea that it will lead to a One World Nation is remote at best. Despite its many disadvantages and how they've been repeatedly demonstrated in my adult lifetime, American capitalism has shown that it does have a capacity, perhaps even a natural instinct, to make sure that people of different tastes are catered to. If that were not the case, then right now there would be either Coke or Pepsi on my local grocer's shelves, but not both. There would be no Big Three automakers because one of them would have bought out the other two ages ago. Even if liberals are, sadly, a minority in this country, the idea that corporations would homogenize everything and squelch liberalism, or even criminalize it, is unlikely. That this country's laws will become more favourable to big business as a result of this court decision is inevitable, but to declare it the death of the country is absurd.
That it is a possibility is without question, and if there is a company that could rise to become this nation's Shinra, it is certainly Walmart. They already have a record of using their money to curry lawmakers into helping them become more dominant in America, and that is likely to get even worse in the months and years ahead. However, even Walmart's resources are not always enough to counteract the ability of the American people to realize a bad deal when they see one. I teach in a county where, despite Walmart's best efforts, the people there resoundingly voted against the ability for Walmart to build one of its big box stores there, right next to the very building in which I teach. As much as I worry about how ill-informed Americans are about the forces at work to manipulate them into doing things against their own interest, they have shown that sometimes they can still recognize when to take a stand against corporations and the blight they would inflict upon the land.
That Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission could, potentially, turn America into a country uninhabitable by free-thinking liberals and progressives is, sad to say, real, and it is something that I will be guarding against, and I hope that others will join me in seeking whatever legal means are possible to overturn this unfortunate, uninformed, and undemocratic decision. To declare it worse than a decision sanctifying and legalizing the enslavement of a race of people, however, is not only incorrect, but it is insulting, and Keith Olbermann should know better.
Labels: politics, rhetoric, television
posted 2010/01/17 at 15:15
I know not many of you follow one of my favourite authors, Poppy Z. Brite, but I subscribe to both her LiveJournal and Twitter feeds. Brite has lived in New Orleans for most of her adult life, and was among those who lost their homes when the gulf coast levees failed in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. She's quick to point out that the levee failures, not the storm itself, was what caused most of the destruction, and it's hard not to agree with that assessment. She also points out, quite frequently, that that part of the country has yet to really recover from the destruction of four and a half years ago. If you remember back to last August, when President Obama visited the stricken areas, the news networks covered him as he visited areas and gave speeches and pledged support.
Therein lies the problem. When the cameras shut off and the news went back to tea party protests and the like, nearly everyone, once again, forgot how the people of Louisiana still need help. I will shamefully admit to being one of those people; reading Brite's posts and tweets about the damage and need for help does remind me, but within minutes I forget about it and go on with the rest of my life. I have my own needs to meet, and it isn't always easy to balance that with being aware of those who are less fortunate than I am. It's a problem that many of you deal with as well, I'm sure; we can't all be Mother Teresa, but at the same time we wish we could do a better job of taking care of others.
However, I think our culture deserves a lot of the blame for this. It should go without saying that most American news outlets spend too much time talking about the latest celebrity gossip, particularly from reality television shows, and too little time talking about the rest of the world and what's going on outside of our borders. If it's out of sight, then it's out of mind, and certainly there are those out there who like it that way, because it enables them to put so much more focus on "real problems" like stopping same-sex marriages and reducing taxes on millionaires. Most people in this country probably hadn't given more than a passing thought about Haiti since the United States' military presence in the 1990s departed, and it's only now, in the wake of the loss of hundreds of thousands of lives, that we're drawn to Haiti again.
As the news reports coming out of Haiti this past week have made clear, the economic and infrastructure problems in Haiti were legion well before the earthquake hit, and Haiti's impoverishment in comparison to other Western countries was so enormous that it demanded much more attention than it got. Given how little attention was paid to how disaster-stricken Haiti was even before this earthquake, it's no wonder that this news comes as such a shock to so many people; quite honestly, I should have known better. As with Hurricane Katrina, there was no way to prevent every death, but if money had been spent on making the region as disaster-proof as reasonably possible, maybe we wouldn't have so many piles of corpses on our screens and in our heads.
The question now is whether we'll remember the problems in Haiti after the news cameras leave and the nightly news goes back to covering the latest celebrity sex scandal, or we'll just go back to not thinking about those less fortunate than us because we're not confronted with the images of them like we are right now. I'm going to try to remember the people of Haiti long after the wall-to-wall news coverage ends, but I know that I'll probably get caught up in the vagaries of my own life at some point and won't keep them, or the people of Louisiana, in mind as much I should. I just wish the American news media would do the role they're supposed to do and spend more time covering the injustice in this world, and less time on the trivia of celebrity drama. It shouldn't have taken this earthquake to get them, or us, to pay close attention to the problems in Haiti. Those problems don't go away when the news cameras shut off.
Labels: politics, television
posted 2010/01/08 at 16:04
I had thought that nothing could happen that would make me blog about, or even give much conscious thought to, the whole Tiger Woods brouhaha. Once again, I underestimated the ability of Fox News to take any situation and turn it into an opportunity to force their beliefs and morals down our throats. If I were to post a picture of the fingernail I broke earlier today and how I clipped it off, someone at Fox News could find some way to turn it into an example of how Obama's socialist policies are destroying America, or write some paean about how the religious right's version of Christianity means I'd never have to deal with another broken nail for the rest of my life.
I've come to expect Fox News personalities to say things so out of place with both reality and rational thought that more civilized countries would institutionalize them. I'm still a staunch believer in the First Amendment, and I still believe that the best defence against lunatic ideas is to allow the lunatics who espouse them to state them loudly, and at every possible opportunity, so people can judge for themselves how crazy they are. Granted, I think this would work a lot better if we could take a pair of scissors to this country and cut off the Deep South (they sound like they'd like that right now, anyway), but all Americans, now matter how misguided or misinformed, deserve a right to have their voices heard and votes counted.
That being said, the presence of Fox News in our culture, particularly when it is so dominant in some areas, complicates this matter a great deal. Fox News has always been a partisan tool for the right-wingers of this country to use to influence public discourse, obfuscating opinion and cherry-picked facts with actual journalism, and anyone in denial of this fact is in need of an intensive course of deprogramming. In the past, though, Fox News would at least put on a thicker veneer of objectivity with its Alan Colmeses and oh-so-rare shows that were actually "fair and balanced," although those shows usually came on weeknights at three in the morning. They still pull good ratings, though, because Fox News' demographic skews so old that at any time in this country, there are probably hundreds of thousands of televisions tuned into Fox News because their owners just died of old age.
That veneer has been steadily thinning since the election of Obama, though. Openly promoting Tea Party protests this past year was a textbook crossing of the line between journalism and advocacy, and although some on the left called Fox News out on this, such protests were nowhere near as vociferous as they should have been. Brit Hume's comments about Buddhism and Christianity were equally outrageous, and in the past even Fox News knew when to apologize when its personalities said something so out of line to defy description. Instead, Fox News has stood behind Hume's comments, even going so far as to have him basically reiterate them word-for-word on Bill O'Reilly's show.
Now, I will admit to not being as well-informed about the intricacies of Christianity as I'd like, but I think it reasonably safe to say that I know more about Buddhism than Brit Hume does. Setting aside the sheer offenciveness of Hume's comments for the moment, the notion that Christianity is somehow "better" at dealing with forgiveness than Buddhism is just patently and demonstrably false. Hume was speaking of what Tiger Woods would have to do to be forgived not by any actual higher power, but by the "higher power" of the religious right. Nothing short of beocming a card-carrying dittohead would redeem Tiger in their eyes, and for many of us, that would be a far greater sin than his affairs.
Worse yet, right-wingers continue to use the co-opt the language of victimization -- something which, in all seriousness, makes me physically ill -- and claim that criticism of Hume's comments are what are intolerant and misinformed, not Hume's comments themselves. Pretending for a moment that I held any actual cultural or political sway (a huge stretch, I know), imagine what would have happened if I'd written about any of the Republican politicians who got caught in affairs and sex scandals these past two years (I've lost count too), and said that what that politician needed to do was embrace Wicca, because Christianity was inadequate when it came to polyamory. My piece would probably be the lead story on The O'Reilly Factor, Hannity, and Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck's radio shows for at least five days. Ann Coulter and Michele Malkin would be writing columns calling for my assassination. Brent Bozell would be shouting that my claim showed exactly how Christians are discriminated against in America. This controversy isn't about Tiger Woods or Buddhism or anything like that; it's about the religious right and their continuing efforts to make their warped religion the norm against which everything else should be compared.
I've come to accept Fox News and the Bill O'Reillys and Sean Hannitys and Brit Humes of this world the same way I've come to accept the scar I have on my right calf from when I sliced it open trying to climb a chain-link fence when I was younger: A reminder that stupidity exists in this world, and that it usually leads to painful, lifelong consequences. Even in the context of Fox News' laughable definition of "fair and balanced," though, Brit Hume's comments went way over the line, and not just liberals, but moderates and journalists as well should be screaming bloody murder until Hume apologizes and retracts his ill-informed statements about Buddhism and Christianity. If we don't, then we can expect similar comments from other right-wingers every time anyone not of their ilk gets in the news for anything.
Labels: politics, rhetoric, sports, television
posted 2010/01/04 at 13:36
I've written before about how I went to private school with children of the family that runs Toledo's local cable company, Buckeye Cablesystem. (The same family also owns our local paper, the Toledo Blade.) I've made no secret of the fact that I'm hardly a fan of Buckeye, particularly when they were slow to add new channels I really wanted in the 1990s (Food Network, ZDTV, MuchMusic, Bravo), which was why I had DirecTV for a few years there. After the fire I didn't bother renewing DirecTV, though, mostly because I didn't have much interest in television once I went back to college, and by that point I was tired of trying to catch every single televised performance of every musician I liked. (Now that other people have put those performances up on YouTube, I feel fairly vindicated in my decision.) Buckeye does have the best local cable and high-speed Internet access in town, yes, but given how Toledo is, that's kind of like being valedictorian at summer school. There wasn't even any serious competition in town until recently, when AT&T started making offerings, and so far their introduction into Toledo has been a huge disappointment. (I don't even think they've gotten their service out here to my suburb yet.)
That being said, Buckeye still puts up a lot of its own commercials during various broadcasts advertising their various services, and apart from the gratingly smug tone many of these commercials take, some of them are just so bad I can't stand to watch them. One of their recent commercial lines has been to show "humourous" things you can do with your old satellite dish after getting Buckeye Cable, like use it as a frisbee or an outdoor grill. Now, they're not that funny to me, but I'm willing to accept that my sense of humour is significantly different from most people's, so maybe that's just me. However, in each of these commercials, when they're advertising their special offers at the end, those offers include cash and/or credit for selling them your old satellite equipment. In other worse, they're showing you what you can do with your old satellite dish, and then basically saying you won't have the dish after you use this special deal. This is the kind of elementary logic failure that makes me want to go down to Buckeye Cable's offices and start yelling at no one in particular about how ridiculous they make themselves out to be.
In another of these "alternate use for your old satellite dish" ads, they show a guy turning his old dish into a replica of a Star Trek starship that he then hangs from the ceiling of his bedroom. They even have a crappy synthesizer playing a rip-off of the first four notes of the old Star Trek theme, and they only refer to it in the commercial as a "starship model." However, the man's bedroom is full of licensed Star Trek merchandise, including bedsheets with the Next Generation logo on them and a life-size cardboard cutout of Data. It's like they're trying to have it both ways, referring obliquely to Star Trek like they're trying to avoid a lawsuit, but then having all this official merchandise in the background. There's no disclaimer about Paramount licensing the use of Star Trek stuff for the commercial, either, so I have to assume that Paramount could shoot a cease-and-desist order to Buckeye Cable here to get that commercial taken off the air, which would do wonders for my nerves.
The other big line of commercials Buckeye has introduced lately has been for their home phone service, trying to show why it's a good idea to have a landline even in this age of cheap cellular service. I have to admit that the first of these commercials, about a grown-up daughter bonding with her mother over the phone, was actually quite touching and well done; it's probably the best commercial I've ever seen Buckeye put out. However, after that they started trying to be funny, and as before, the commercials became ludicrous. One commercial shows a guy having to lean out of a window of his house, with an active beehive right above him, trying to get good reception on his cell phone. (They couldn't even afford to get fake bees for him to swat at, so he just looks like he's having an episode.) After the Buckeye guy comes in and does his thing and hands the guy a wireless landline phone, though, the guy goes back into his house, but only closes his window part of the way. If the bees there were as bad as he made them out to be, his home would be uninhabitable within about five minutes. It's like that commercial the soda industry put out trying to get Congress not to put a national tax on sodas where the woman takes groceries out of her car's trunk and then leaves the trunk wide open as she goes into her house and closes the door behind her. I'd meant to blog about that commercial a while ago, but then Jon Stewart beat me to it.
The worst of these Buckeye phone commercials, though, makes me want to pull my hair out, so of course it's in heavy rotation. It's about this guy who tries to order a pizza at 2101 (9:01 PM, if you insist) since he doesn't want to use up any of his weekday minutes, only to be told that the pizza place he called stopped delivering a minute ago. First of all, nearly every cell phone company I know starts offering reduced/free minutes at 1900, not 2100. Secondly, no pizza place I know of stops delivering that early. Pizza places, like fast food (especially Taco Bell), make a killing on the late night just-got-stoned-and-need-munchies crowd, so it's in their best interest to stay open as late as possible. Those logical flaws alone would be bad enough, but then the Buckeye guy comes in and gives the caller a landline phone, the caller smiles, and then places a call on the landline phone. Uh, excuse me, but why the Toot is he calling again! The pizza place will still be closed! He's still going to spend the night hungry and miserable! Couldn't you have gotten the phone to him fifteen minutes earlier?
I know that looking for logic in television commercials is kind of foolish to start with, and I admit I probably view Buckeye more harshly than I do other companies, so I'm probably looking for this stuff to point out. Still, though, stuff like this makes me batty. If your commercials are going to be smug and self-righteous, at least have them make some sense.
Labels: commercials, television, toledo
posted 2009/06/09 at 14:52
Although I don't live in Monroe County, I make an effort to stay up-to-date on news from the area since I work there, and I try to integrate my students' immediate environment and news into my classroom teachings as best I can. Most of them hate writing -- and after hearing about their high school experiences, I can hardly blame them -- so if they have to write, I try to at least steer them towards topics that they care about, to help them with the difficult task of writing.
This past month, the biggest news story to come from Monroe County was the disappearance of a five-year-old girl by the name of Nevaeh Buchanan. Within the past week the body of a little girl matching Nevaeh's description was found in a shallow grave near the River Raisin. Although autopsy results are still pending to determine whether or not it is Nevaeh's body, the press and others are talking about the matter as if it's already been determined that it is Nevaeh's body. Monroe County is already a tight-knit community as it is, and the recent economic downturn has hit the region very hard. Under ordinary circumstances, Nevaeh's murder would be a county-wide tragedy. With the region devastated in so many other ways already, her death has been nothing short of crippling.
All of this would have been bad enough in and of itself. I can't even begin to imagine how Nevaeh's parents have felt these past few weeks, questioning every little thing they said and did before Nevaeh's disappearance, and trying to come to terms with the possibility that their daughter was dead, a possibility that grew as each horrible day passed and they heard no word on their daughter's whereabouts. The loss of any family member is devastating, but when the family member is so young, it is all the more painful. It is hard to believe that anyone would ever want to compound a grieving family's death by heaping abuse and scorn on them, especially when the loss is still so fresh, the wounds still open.
Unfortunately, it appears that no one told the Buchanans about Nancy Grace, because they went on her show last night, and Nancy Grace ripped them a new one for what she perceived as their "mistakes" that led to Nevaeh's disappearance and presumptive death. That Grace has done this before is not news; in fact, in 2006, shortly after Grace pilloried her on national television for supposedly not being open enough about the recent disappearance of her two-year-old son, Melinda Duckett committed suicide. I don't watch Grace's show, but I heard of the Duckett incident on other news broadcasts, and I can remember thinking back then that Grace's conduct was, to say the least, reprehensible. Now it's hitting home in a way that it didn't back then, and I can't recall being this angry at a public figure in years.
That the parents were already second-guessing their actions goes without saying; in the face of any great tragedy, nearly all of us can't help but question if the tragedy could have been avoided if we'd done even the smallest thing just a little bit differently. It should also go without saying whenever a little boy or girl disappears, the police have to treat the parents as suspects and interrogate them, as best as the circumstances allow, to rule them out as potentially being involved in the disappearance; we have seen it happen enough in the media in the past two decades, and while we recognize that it is a necessary part of police work, that doesn't mean that we have to be comfortable about it happening. That the Nevaeh Buchanan tragedy serves as a lesson to parents of young children to be more careful about monitoring their children and teaching them to be vigilant about strangers also, quite literally, goes without saying; in all the news stories about Nevaeh's disappearance, parents and children have been quick to say that they would be a lot more careful about these things from now on.
I do not know what possesses Nancy Grace to think that she should use these tragedies to shout out the lessons to be learned from them that are so obvious, let alone to do so in a way that abuses and humiliates parents who are just coming off of the worst possible tragedy one can imagine young parents could go through. As much as I desire to understand the human mind and all of its facets, there are simply some aspects of it that are too dark, too sadistic for me to want to understand. What Nancy Grace's motivations for her actions are, I won't dare to guess and won't comment on. What I can say beyond any doubt, however, is that her actions themselves are, to put it mildly, monstrous and inhuman. That Nancy Grace was allowed to continue hosting her television show after Melinda Duckett's suicide is incomprehensible. Now that she has repeated the same actions that led to Duckett's suicide on another grieving family, I think it is the obligation of every American who has even half a heart to demand that CNN pull Nancy Grace off of its airwaves immediately and permanently. Nancy Grace has the right to say whatever she wants to say about the Buchanan tragedy, but that doesn't mean CNN, or any other television network, has an obligation to televise such abusive, disgusting behaviour towards grieving parents.
Labels: politics, television
posted 2009/05/05 at 14:57
When the first trailers of the new Star Trek movie came out, I noted to myself that I wanted to say something about them. I guess that I was kind of nonplussed by the trailers themselves, except for at the end when it began to play the four-note sequence that started the classic Trek theme songs, played over a modern reenvisioning of the logo of the original television series. For a long time, that part of the trailer sent a chill down my spine. Watching episodes of the oriignal television series with Mom is something I recall quite vividly from childhood, and my parents took me to the openings of the second, third, and fourth movies. I suppose I identify more with Next Generation since it was one of the few good series I could get back before I had cable in my bedroom, but I guess I was a bit of a "trekkie" back in the day. (I use trekkie as opposed to the more "serious" term "trekker" because I wasn't that into Star Trek.) I remember the audio/visual lounge at Antioch being filled for the premiere of Voyager, which was around when my love for all things Trek began to decline. I was in college, I had cable in my bedroom at home, and there was this new thing called the Internet that was giving me access to all sorts of new worlds that I could explore on my own.
Anyway, I did my best to remain cautiously optimistic that the new movie was going to be something that I could be happy about, and perhaps something that Mom and I could bond over. As we've drawn closer to the release date, though, and as I've seen more of the movie and its promotion, I've already reached a deep level of disappointment. I've read all the news stories about how trekkies and trekkers feel about how closely the movie will follow Trek canon, but to me, looking at what I've seen so far, there really isn't anything Star Trek about Star Trek. It feels to me like you could take out the names of Kirk and Spock, and the names of the various races and planets and organizations, and no one would be the wiser for it. It feels like the generic, prototypical 21st-century science fiction blockbuster movie, just with a few names added to give it a false sense of historicity.
I realize that new generations reinvent series like Star Trek, and that Star Trek itself has gone through a good deal of this; no one can deny the gulf of difference between the original television series and the films, let alone the later television series. At least with those early films and Next Generation, though, Gene Roddenberry was at the helm, and you had the feeling that Roddenberry still conveyed that Trek essence in the newer material. (Roddenberry came from a time when an artist's vision still meant something in big commercial productions.) It seemed like the later series, like Voyager and Enterprise, not to mention the later films featuring the Next Generation cast, seemed to stray away from that vision, and now it feels like the only vision J.J. Abrams had in this new movie is the vision of his bank account increasing by tens of millions of dollars.
What gets me is that I'm beginning to have more and more of an emotional response to this, when I haven't really cared that much for anything Trek for over a decade or so. (I'd like to get some of the Next Generation DVD sets eventually, but I've been horrible lately when it comes to buying DVDs and then never watching them.) I suppose that because this touches on what to me was a touchstone of family bonding, and it's coming not that long after Dad's death, that it's provoking a very emotional and irrational response from me. I mean, yes, wincing at a car chase in a Star Trek movie makes sense, but I shouldn't be jumping to the conclusions I am based solely on the trailers I've watched and stories I've read about the movie. I really should watch the movie all the way through before I have this kind of visceral hatred of it. The thing is, I've never been one to watch films in the theatre (the last time I did that was eight years ago when the Final Fantasy movie came out), and, well, it doesn't feel like there's much of a point in getting the DVD when it comes out, given how many other DVDs I need to watch here.
Labels: family, television
posted 2008/08/31 at 19:41
Perhaps my memory is faulty, but when I was younger it seemed like there were a lot of hurricanes in the Gulf Coast that people worried would be "The Big One," that wound up diverting just in time to spare New Orleans from a direct hit. That's the reason why, when Hurricane Katrina was headed towards the area three years ago, I really didn't take it as seriously as I otherwise would have as it was nearing landfall; part of me assumed that it would veer off-course at the last moment and New Orleans would be spared total devastation. It was only after Katrina made landfall that I realized that The Big One had struck, and what it meant for the millions of residents along the coast. Then again, I had only started my first teaching assignment less than a week before the hurricane hit, so it wasn't like I didn't have other things on my mind. (The fact that I didn't know how to integrate the hurricane, and news coverage thereof, into my classroom strikes me as one of my earliest mistakes in my teaching career.)
Now it looks as though Gustav will bring the same devastation to the area, long before it has had a chance to rebuild from Katrina. Yes, the political ramifications of this happening just as the Republican National Convention is starting are intriguing, but I'd like to write about those later; I think people need to focus more on the human element of this crisis than the political element right now. This time I'm keeping a close eye on the Weather Channel, keeping tabs on all the latest developments. I've always been a bit of a Weather Channel fan since we first got cable; being a weatherperson on local television was the first "What I wanna be when I grow up" fantasy I can remember having, although when we finally got cable in the mid-80s I think I was more in love with the computer graphics of the Weather Channel than with the human presenters. Even today I wish I could emulate the Weather Channel's graphics on my computer desktop to keep me apprised of the local weather and radar. (The Weather Channel's best desktop gadget is for Microsoft's sidebar, which I loathe because, well, it's Microsoft; do you need another reason?)
I also have to admit to a bit of a morbid fascination with broadcast disaster warnings. Earlier this year I got fixated on disaster notices posted to YouTube, starting with simulations of CONELRAD (our country's Civil Defence radio back in my parents' time, the precursor to today's Emergency Alert System) announcing the Russians were bombing, and then moving on to more modern disasters. EAS was never activated for 09.11 -- all the live news coverage on every channel kind of made activating EAS pointless -- but of course Katrina was something that was anticipated for a long time, providing for lots of spectacle. Weather Channel local forecasts from the coast in the hours before Katrina made landfall, such as this one, fascinate me to no end; there is something that is at once both highly comical and deeply terrifying about the computerized voice calmly pronouncing that "wind gusts could reach over one hundred fifty miles per hour." (I agree with the legions of other Weather Channel fans who say that the channel needs to bring back that music for hurricane season every year.)
To the residents of the areas in Gustav's path: Please be safe. We're all thinking about you.
Labels: television, weather
posted 2008/07/23 at 14:51
Anyone who knows me will tell you that I am not a morning person. As much as I enjoy going out to the parks and botanical gardens this time of year and marveling at the trees and flowers and the way the sun pokes through all the leaves creating wonderful kaleidoscopes of light, there is only so much sun I can take. Back before I went back to college, it seemed as if I could only work on my creative pursuits in the darkest part of night. Then again, maybe that had less to do with light than it did the fact that my backyard abuts Toledo's busiest highway loop. Anyway, although that has changed -- I attribute this to the fact that Dad never bothered to put blinds or drapes on my bedroom window -- I still prefer to be a late riser, and there are still certain activities that I find I can do better at certain times of day.
This is the main reason why this semester has been so hard on me. I have a very small class this term, filled with incredibly brilliant writers who I barely even need to teach; I can just give them a bit of guidance and turn them loose, and shortly thereafter get back a lot of top-quality writing. Combined with the fact that I'm teaching on the satellite campus, and thus saving about $30 a week on gas from when I was teaching on the main campus, and you would think that this would be an absolutely wonderful time for me. Unfortunately this class I'm teaching is also meeting very early in the afternoon. I have no problem getting up before noon -- heck, I'm only getting up about forty-five minutes earlier than my usual wake-up time -- but I'm having to cram an awful lot of activities into a very short span of time every morning before I teach. Combine that with the fact that I still have to stay up late at night to take care of other responsibilities, and I've felt totally out of whack for the past month or so. I can't get as much sleep as I need, it's been impossible to stick to a diet because my energy levels just won't stay stable, and I seem to go from long periods of cramming a million activities in a few minutes to long periods with nothing to do.
I didn't come here to blog about my schedule, though. (Although I do think this explains why my blogging has been so sporadic lately.) No, I came to talk to you about BBC America.
See, my sister and her husband moved out of the house on the first of this year, into their own apartment northeast of here. Less than two months later Dad died, and were it not for the fact that Heather and Mark are tied in to a twelve-month lease at the apartment, they probably would have moved right back in me and Mom. Heather's been over here on weekdays while Mark's at work, though, to help with cleaning and just to keep Mom company. In the fifty or so days Heather was a stay-at-home housewife (er, apartmentwife), she spent a lot of time watching television, and one of the shows she got hooked on was the BBC show How Clean is Your House?, a show where two British ladies go around to the dirtiest homes in all the United Kingdom, document how dirty and filthy and germ-ridden the houses are, and then clean the houses up with the help of the owners and a team of cleaners. It's the kind of reality television you'd expect the British to come up with, and I can see the appeal of the show, although it's definitely not the kind of show I would make a point of watching. Unfortunately I don't have a choice in the matter, as Mom and Heather insist on watching the show every day.
Normally I could avoid this just like I avoid everything else I don't like in this house, by shutting myself up in my room and working on things here at my computer while I blast some tunes to drown out the audio from the downstairs television. Unfortunately, BBC America, sadists that they are, decided to put on How Clean is Your House? starting at noon. On a day when I don't teach (or I teach in the evening), that's about when I'm having breakfast downstairs; this term that's when I have to grab a quick lunch before I dash off to the satellite campus. Our kitchen opens full-on to our living room, and the television faces directly into the kitchen. It's impossible to open the refrigerator or plug in the toaster without getting an eyeful of a refrigerator with more culture in it than a PBS mini-series, or a bathroom so grimy that not even Jigsaw would be cruel enough to chain anyone up in it. Needless to say, catching an eyeful of these images while I'm trying to eat my Cheerios does not make me very cheery-o.
I would like to just blame my sister for this; after all, I think the only reason she watches this show is because it gives her an excuse not to clean our house as thoroughly as it should be because, hey, at least it's not as bad as the ones on television. However, I have to wonder exactly what cleaning fumes the programmers at BBC America had under their noses when they decided to put this show on at noon. Noon being the start of the lunch hour is part of our American DNA; even in this day and age, the plurality of full-time jobs are from eight in the morning to five in the afternoon, with a lunch hour break starting right at noon. I know that the British tend to take their lunches, er, dinners closer to one or two in the PM, but BBC America isn't just BBC programming on an American channel. If they're going to take the time to bleep out all of the curse words our tender American ears just can't stand to hear coming out of the telly, and if they're going to produce a dumbed-down newscast to compete with our American dumbed-down newscasts, you would think that they'd at least take the time to research our culinary habits and take a few minutes to think through the fact that we don't like to see cockroach nests and caked-on human waste when we're trying to eat our bloody lunches!
I'd really appreciate it if someone could present me some other reason why BBC America would schedule this show during lunchtime, other than that they're deliberately trying to make us nauseous. Until then, I may need How Clean is Your House? to come across the pond and come to my house, to clean up all the vomit in and around my toilet caused by watching their show.
Labels: personal, teaching, television, work
posted 2008/06/25 at 20:28
From my previous experience going to school with the children of the owners of our local cable provider (and the local paper as well), I know that the people in charge of my cable are not exactly the sharpest knives in the drawer. This is a cable system, after all, that thinks that there are enough sports in Toledo for us to have our own 24-hour all-local sports channel. (They actually broadcast some of the gym games from my old private school.) This is a cable system where each of the big three local television networks have their own 24-hour local weather channels, none of which are any good. (I'm hoping that NBC buys up The Weather Channel so we can get a proper Weatherscan channel in here.) It's not like I have much time to watch television right now -- I only watch to keep up on news and the pop culture of the students I teach -- but I don't exactly have that many good options available to me here in Toledo.
Our cable company's latest brainchild is a 24-hour local real estate listings channel. I'm not particularly sure if it's a good thing or a bad thing that this channel bowed right in the middle of the sub-prime mortgage crisis, but it doesn't strike me as a good omen. That being said, the idea of having a real estate channel strikes me on some levels as novel; television offers a lot of ways for real estate agents to market their properties that aren't available through traditional channels, such as walk-through tours of properties. The thing is, the only actual motion video on the channel, apart from the commercials, are "handy how-tos" segments from the too-perky, too-plastic "host" of the channel. When they actually show a house on the channel, they only show the same static photos you'd find in a listings magazine, or a Website from ten years ago. Some of the photos even look like they were taken using a disposable camera with a lens that someone sneezed over before using it.
The idea of having a television channel without moving images is silly enough, but at least they have audio on there. Unfortunately, in addition to featuring the same kind of low-grade muzak you'd expect on a channel like this, the audio consists of different people reading the fill-in-the-blanks advertising copy the realtors come up with to try to sell the house. That stuff is bad enough to read, but when people are saying it aloud, and the same key bullshit phrases get repeated every fifteen minutes ("cozy" means you'll feel like a sardine packed in there, "needs TLC" means that the walls are falling apart, etc.), you can literally feel people's opinions of real estate agents drop. I'd laugh at how poorly put together this channel is if it wasn't so sad.
Labels: television
posted 2008/06/09 at 21:31
I can't say that I've been all that pleased with all the airplay that Bill O'Reilly's meltdown on Inside Edition has gotten these past few weeks. Granted, I don't care for O'Reilly much at all, and I won't deny feeling a touch of the old schadenfreude when I saw the video the first few times. The video got really old in a hurry for me, though, and the more I see other people harp on it over and over -- Keith Olbermann is the most famous of these people, but I'm even thinking about liberal bloggers here -- the more I lose my taste for it. You can only tell a joke so many times in a given time frame before people stop laughing and start rolling their eyes whenever someone starts to tell the setup, and in a similar fashion you can only show that video so many times before O'Reilly dropping those f-bombs and blowing his stack gets banal and blasé.
Those of you who remember the pre-.org days doubtlessly remember me doing similar stuff online back in the day. Yes, I'm actually empathisizing with Bill O'Reilly here; it isn't the first time I've done so, and it likely won't be the last. We all have episodes like that, but some of us happen to do it in a more public, amusing, and downright stupid fashion. Doing it on the Internet is the worst of all because it's so easy for someone to make a permanent record of it; it's only been in the past few years that I've really come to understand how everything I do online can and will come back to haunt me. I'm assuming that people in front of television cameras should similarly run under the assumption that anything they do in front of the camera, whether or not the little red light is on, could find its way out into the world later. At least I would assume so today in our satellite and digital recording era; back in 1989, though, I have to assume that not as much was being recorded due to the costs of professional videotape and archiving and all of that. Regardless, I think Bill O'Reilly had an expectation of privacy there that kind of got screwed over, and regardless of how amusing or vulgar or just plain wrong his Inside Edition meltdown was, to be making such a big deal out of it nearly two decades later strikes me as, well, kind of missing the point. Shouldn't people who dislike O'Reilly be spending their time constructing solid arguments against his positions, not laughing over him shouting at his camera crew from nineteen years ago?
Episodes like this really make you double back on your own steps to make sure that you're not doing anything that could come back to haunt you later. I mean, I like to think that I blog openly, but there's lots of stuff I want to say on here that I don't say because I'm worried it could be used against me later. (Hence my relative silence about Dad's death, at least for now.) I've been using Twitter for several weeks now, though, and that's just adding another layer of coverage about me, by me, that is part of a permanent record about my life and the things I'm doing. Now that Apple's incorporating GPS into the next generation of iPhone (and I have to admit, between the new features and the lower price, Apple's actually impressed me), soon we'll even be creating records of the places we've been on a minute-to-minute, metre-to-metre basis. Orwell wrote about the perils of Big Brother watching over us all, but now we're doing Big Brother's work for him. I don't think I've wanted to go on a vacation into the wilderness of Michigan more than I do at this exact moment.
Labels: personal, television
posted 2008/02/09 at 15:32
It says something about this election campaign that the candidate I'm most appreciative of right now is Mitt Romney, as his withdrawl from the Republican nomination means I'll only have about half as many candidate spots on my television to deal with leading up to Ohio's primary next month. Ohio doesn't look to be in play for Huckabee, and by the time Ohio rolls around I think Huckabee's momentum will be completely drained so McCain won't have any real need to buy more but a sprinkling of ad time locally. The Democratic nomination will still definitely be in play by the time of the primary, though, and although part of me feels like I should be excited that there's finally an Ohio primary that might matter, I am not looking forward to a month of dueling Clinton and Obama spots on every show on the dial. I got sick enough of those spots leading up to the Michigan primary (even though only Republicans bought ad time on Fox Sports Net Detroit), and I'm tired of watching the Obama and McCain spots that air on Countdown. Given how tight the Democratic race is right now, and given how close Ohio was in the 2004 election, I'm guessing that any moment now I won't be able to watch a half-hour of any commercial network on cable without seeing a Clinton or Obama ad buy.
I'll be skipping the primary vote, because there won't be anything else on the ballot that day and because I can't vote in the "official" state primaries because doing so automatically registers me as a member of whatever party's primary I vote in. I would much rather see Obama as the Democratic nominee than Clinton, but I'm probably not going to vote for him in the general election anyway. More to the point, I still remember several registered Democrats in my first-semester MA classes who got hassled by Ohio Republicans that year as the Republican Party challenged the voter registration of several people I knew, holding off on submitting the challenges until the legal deadline so that the students couldn't call off of work on such short notice to attend the hearings about their registrations. I can't help but wonder if Ohio Democrats might not try something similar with we Greens this year, given how ridiculous they were last time around in making sure that not even Nader's write-in votes would get counted. (Seriously, if they'd put that kind of effort into promoting their own candidate then Kerry might be in the White House now.)
Ohio's Green Party will handle its primary at their convention in April, although people who won't be attending can mail or e-mail a ballot before then. I think I may actually go to the convention, though, even though it's all the way across the state and there's no way I could reasonably make a daytrip of it. I'm still hoping that Nader gets in the race again, because I don't like the prospect of Cynthia McKinney winning the nomination; I'm still not getting a good vibe off of her. If Nader doesn't come in then I'll probably vote in the primary for Kent Mesplay, but I think the Greens need Nader more than ever now. Particularly if Clinton gets the Democratic nomination, people are going to need an alternative to the spectre of four or eight years of DLC neoliberalism, and even if there isn't a realistic chance of winning the presidency, at the very least we might stand a chance of getting that magical 5% of the popular vote that would give the Greens tens of millions of dollars of federal matching funds in 2012. I haven't been too directly involved with the Green Party itself since I first registered to vote, but more than ever now I feel compelled to do what I can to help the party along.
Labels: commercials, greenparty, politics, television
posted 2008/01/14 at 21:11
Judge grants Kucinich entry to NV debate (AP via Yahoo! News)
If you were watching Countdown tonight, then Keith Olbermann did, in fact, inform you of this decision, as well as the fact that NBC was going to appeal it. However, in the resulting discussion Olbermann had with Chuck Todd, Kucinich's presence at the debate was never mentioned again. Todd even went so far as to ludicrously claim that tomorrow's MSNBC debate would be the first debate where the "Big Three" of Hillary Clinton, John Edwards, and Barack Obama would be "seated down" and talking about the issues, when the most recent debate on ABC -- the one from which Kucinich and Mike Gravel were excluded -- featured the Big Three and a fourth candidate who wasn't polling as well, in this case Bill Richardson, sitting and discussing the issues. MSNBC wouldn't even change their graphic advertising the debate during Countdown, either by adding Kucinich's photo to those of the Big Three or by simply scrapping the photos altogether.
Given how much big corporations, big media, and conservatives have tried to dumb down our political and social discourse over the past thirty years, given how they have tried to make everyone lower their expectations about the behaviour of anyone else but themselves, it is all too ironic that, when faced with a court order to actually make their debate fully informative and to let people know that there are still more than three Democrats actively campaigning for their party's presidential nomination, NBC would act like a petulant child. MSNBC not only continued to ignore Kucinich's campaign by failing to make any mention of him on tonight's Countdown except for the parenthetical about the court order, it not only continued to abandon its role as a journalistic organization by arbitrarily deciding which of the candidates deserve to be mentioned on its broadcast, but it went so far, even after the court order, to still talk about and promote its upcoming debate as if Kucinich weren't even there. The closest analogy there is to this situation is to a group of bratty kids, who decide that the best way to not have to deal with the "brain" of the neighbourhood is simply to ignore him or her, treating that child as if he or she were visible and didn't exist.
That there has been no great national dialogue, either in this presidential campaign cycle or the previous one, over the media's role in determining which presidential candidates do or do not get airtime to have their voices heard, is a sad testament to just how thirty years of rule by misanthropic Republicans and Democrats have affected this country. Perhaps Dennis Kucinich doesn't have Mitt Romney's Reaganesque hair or Barack Obama's boyish grin or Hillary Clinton's breasts, but his campaign is trying to provide an alternative for Democratic voters who are tired of a party that has sold its soul for the past sixteen years, abandoning all the social justice issues it stood for in a misguided effort to retain its own power and relevance at any cost. Kucinich not only provides that voice to Democrats and like-minded independents, but polls in which voters are asked to judge candidates based on issues, not names or money, have shown time and time again that, if this primary were to be decided on the issues themselves, Kucinich would not only be a front-runner but he would stand a damn good shot at being the eventual candidate. With money comes power, though, and just as the financial machines of the Clintons and Obamas and Romneys allow them to down out the Kuciniches and Gravels and Pauls, NBC and its team of highly-paid lawyers look set to silence Kucinich from tomorrow's debate, all for the ratings the "first debate between the Big Three" might provide.
That's what this is all really about, is ratings. Keith Olbermann has often said that television news got it all wrong a long time ago, back before even his youth, when it was decided that television news would be commercial, that the companies of this nation would so easily be able to exert control over the newscasts with the threat of pulling advertising and cutting the newscasts from the funds they needed to survive. On this point I could not be in fuller agreement with Olbermann, but perhaps now Olbermann needs to reexamine his own adherence to this statement. For years now Olbermann has profited quite handsomely as being the alleged voice of the left in the mainstream media, as the one who would not only stand up to the wrongs perpetrated by Republicans in all branches of office, but who would stay true to his principles no matter what. If Olbermann truly believes that the influence of corporate interests in television news is one of the great ills of our society, then he needs to look at NBC's actions in trying to silence the one candidate who most embodies the positions Olbermann posits in his "Special Comments," and at his own role in that silencing. Until then, all of Olbermann's talk about the evils of corporate media will ring distinctly hollow.
Labels: kucinich, politics, television
posted 2008/01/13 at 19:31
Last month when I was so sick, I really didn't pay attention to politics as much as I normally would, since I didn't feel up to taxing my mind so much. On the plus side, this did get me to stop reading the Huffington Post, which I had basically just come to "accept" as a site to keep me marginally informed on certain issues but I'd always openly loathed for caving in to the political centre time and again. Doubtless I'm missing all number of anti-Ralph Nader blog entries right now as everyone there at once bemoans the Democrats potentially nominating Hillary Clinton for President while simultaneously warning readers that a vote for the Green Party is a vote for the Republican candidate. I've since tried to make due with other Websites to get the pulse of the American left (as well as those who continue to falsely claim to be liberals), but apart from the Green Party's own Website, I'm not having much luck.
Countdown with Keith Olbermann is another of those outlets that I think is portrayed as being far more left-leaning than it really is, but I continue to catch it on a regular basis. Not only does it help keep me informed on certain aspects of the political scene, but I've been a fan of Keith's from his days with Dan Patrick on ESPN, and I like his wit. That being said, I was somewhat shocked late last week when Olbermann announced that this Tuesday's Democratic presidential debate on MSNBC would be the first debate that was between just Clinton, Barack Obama, and John Edwards. Dennis Kucinich and Mike Gravel are both still in the race, of course, and a quick trip to Kucinich's Website reveals that both had been invited earlier, but that NBC News, specifically Chuck Todd, recinded that invitation last week, presumably for the sake of being able to market this upcoming debate as the first between the "Big Three" Democratic candidates.
My anger at Kucinich (and to a lesser extent Gravel) being excluded from yet another debate should go without saying. However, after Olbermann has campaigned so hard against keeping our troops in harm's way in Iraq, after not only ripping the current administration's Iraq policies but also lambasting the Democrats for caving in to last year's Iraq funding bill -- going so far as to compare Harry Reid's explanation for his vote to Neville Chamberlain's "peace in our time" proclamation -- the question begs to be asked of just where Olbermann's voice is now, now that his own network is excluding from their debate the only two Democrats who are promising to pull our troops out of Iraq in their first term of presidency. For all of Olbermann's legendary personality clashes with his places of employment, he has always prided himself on showing backbone, and not just because he was born with an extra lumbar vertebra; in one famous instance he wrote a one-thousand word memo to his employers to complain about the poor treatment of lower-paid workers at that network. If Olbermann does not now take his own network to task for excluding the two demonstrably consistent anti-war candidates from their debate for the sake of marketing, then my viewing of Countdown may well go the same way as my reading of the Huffington Post.
Labels: kucinich, politics, television
posted 2007/11/26 at 21:17
Bam! Emeril Leaves Food Network (mediabistro.com)
I had heard a while ago that Emeril had planned to leave Food Network, or at least discontinue Emeril Live, and I've been pained to see Food Network begin to transition to Alton Brown as the "face" of the network. I haven't watched Emeril regularly since before the fire, but back when I first got DirecTV in the late 90's Emeril Live was probably the show I watched the most back then. Mom owns several of his cookbooks, and my world-famous brownies are pretty much a slight tweak of one of his recipes. I haven't watched Emeril on a regular basis for several years now, although that's more due to lack of time than lack of interest, but this news kind of saddens me.
It should go without saying that I'm not happy with Alton being promoted to the network's most promoted star. I disliked Good Eats from the very first episode, and I think Alton himself is, pardon my language, a smug jackass. I can't stand how Alton thinks he knows the only "right" way to cook everything, and how he presents himself as the Goddess's own gift to cooking and television. I understand how shows like Mythbusters are hot properties these days (and that's one show I haven't been catching enough of lately), but at least Mythbusters is informative and entertaining. I usually catch at least one absurdly incorrect statement or atrocious recipe on every episode of Good Eats I'm forced to suffer through (it would figure that everyone else in the house is a big fan of the show), and I shudder at how Alton could possibly consider his awful puns to be anything even approaching entertainment. I can't figure out how Food Network could basically build itself on the back of a goofy, fun-loving chef who always reminds his audience that good cooking "isn't rocket science," and has now turned around and made a conceited jerk who turns everything into rocket science its primary star. Don't even ask me what I think of Iron Chef America, seriously.
Funnily enough, though, the one cooking show I have been catching on a regular basis is also from another former Food Network star. I had heard about Ming Tsai getting a PBS cooking show a while back, but it was only in the past couple of months that I found where I could watch it locally. Since it airs here early Saturday afternoons, when I have a bit of free time, I've been watching it regularly. I can't say that I've ever been a big fan of Asian fusion cooking, and no one would ever dare to say that Ming has a larger-than-life personality built for television, but I always liked East Meets West on Food Network back in the day, and I've enjoyed watching Ming's new show. If nothing else, watching Jeff Smith and Mary Ann Esposito on PBS Saturday afternoons when I was younger was what got me into cooking in the first place, so being able to watch a friendly face (and a good chef) on PBS these past few Saturdays has been nice and kind of a trip down memory lane.
Labels: food, television
posted 2007/11/12 at 21:15
Several months ago it was hard not to notice just how many piles of entertainment media I had in my room. These piles had started accumulating a little over a year ago as my time just got completely sapped up with finishing my MA, but even after graduating I noticed that the piles just kept getting bigger and bigger. It wasn't that I didn't have free time, but I lacked the initiative to go through them for some reason. Granted, in some cases I was kind of dreading that I wouldn't like things as much as I was hoping I would -- particularly new CDs by Björk and Tori Amos -- but a lot of this stuff was stuff that I actually wanted to listen to or see or read, and I just couldn't force myself to go through them. Finally this past summer I did force myself to go through these piles, although I never did get through the DVD pile.
I've been trying to go through the DVD pile a bit at a time here, and a few days ago I finally finished going through the boxed set of Chef! which I'd been watching an episode or two at a time before going to bed. Chef! is one of those great British comedies that appeals to my darker, less nice side, and I hadn't been able to watch it for several years since our local PBS station took it down due to viewer complaints about all the cursing in it. However, I can't say that I was too thrilled to watch the final season, which I hadn't watched before and had heard didn't live up to the expectations set from the previous two seasons. Still, it was something of an accomplishment just for me to get all the way through that set, and now I can only hope that I can start going through the rest of my DVD pile in similar fashion.
That being said, all of a sudden I have a book pile starting again, and it looks like it's only going to get bigger over the next several weeks. I've said before that for someone with two degrees in English, I seemed to play video games a lot more than read books when I was growing up. Now that seems to be changing, though. (Let's forget my dancey games for a moment here, since for me they're more exercise than video gaming.) I've got a lot of books that I really want to get through in my pile, not even counting stuff on my shelves that I've either never read or want to re-read. I just can't seem to find enough time in my days to get through all this stuff, and considering my teaching load is being doubled next semester, I'm starting to wonder just how to make the most efficient use of my time. I'm certainly not doing a good job of it right now.
Labels: books, dvds, entertainment, television
posted 2007/11/11 at 20:39
Happy seventh birthday, seanshannon.org. I will have a .journal entry to commemorate the anniversary, but as has been the case so often these past few years, I've got to put off writing it until I get to Thanksgiving break and have some time to write it well (and also finish dealing with some personal stuff that's kind of weighed me down here lately).
On a mostly unrelated note, last night I think I came the closest to throwing up that I've been in several years. I had the late game of Hockey Night in Canada on my television, and this commercial aired where this young woman with a chef's outfit was talking about how great her life was and how she had gotten engaged recently. A somber look overtook her face, though, and she said that she wasn't going to get married to him the following weekend like they'd planned because she was about to have a horrible accident. She started to talk about how she should have cleaned up the grease spill earlier and how she shouldn't have put the deep fryer in the position it was in, and in mid-sentence she turns and slips on the spill, throwing a huge amount of liquid out of the pot she was carrying, covering her face, splashing behind her and causing the stove behind her to catch fire.
Now, up to this point I'm thinking that this is a highly effective commercial. At this point, though, the woman lets out this blood-curdling screen as another chef bends down by her to help her, and then, for about a half-second, the shot snaps to the woman, the skin on her face and hands completely scalded, before snapping to black, finally showing the URL of the Website people are supposed to go to in order to learn about safety. I'd been noshing on Doritos just before the commercial aired, and for about a good twenty seconds I thought I was going to lose it. I ran to the upstairs bathroom and lifted the toilet lid, but nothing came out. Needless to say, I kept my eyes glued to my flat panel here whenever the commercial came back on, as it did several times throughout the rest of the night.
I know that we're living in a post-Saw world and that some people argue that you need these kinds of jarring images in order to attract people's attention these days. I can remember a debate several months ago when Volkswagon started showing car crashes from inside the cars in a line of their commercials, the ones that famously ended with the person driving the Volkswagon saying "Holy shit" at the end (with the -it cut off by a similar snap to a black screen). However, I think there is a world of difference between showing car crashes (which despite all of the twisted steel never had a drop of blood or even the slightest hint of injury) and flashing to a shot of a woman with third degree burns on her face and hands. Even though Poppy Z. Brite is one of my favourite authors and I've written a bit of horror myself, I really have no desire to see horror on television or in films, and it couldn't be more obvious that this commercial was trying to play on horror-film schlock here, particularly given that they cut away from the burnt woman so quickly.
More to the point, this is not a commercial that should be airing when children are so likely to be watching it. The commercial only started airing during the late-night game, but even assuming that it aired only in eastern Canada and they didn't show it in the west, there are still a lot of children watching CBC that late on a Saturday night during hockey season. Hockey brings Canadians of all ages together in a way that the NFL only wishes they could get football to do here in the US, and little kids don't need to be seeing stuff like that. I'm too much of a libertarian on these issues to say that the Canadian government should outlaw the commercial, but given some of the ridiculous things some Canadian bodies (in particular the CRTC) does to regulate Canadian television, I would have thought that they'd never allow this commercial to air, much less during Canada's signature sports broadcast.
Labels: canada, commercials, freespeech, hockey, television
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