emptying my brain onto the internet since 1998…
While skimming through the Fantasy & Science Fiction section at my local Books-A-Million one day, searching for new stuff to read, I stumbled across and interesting series of books. At least insteresting in their cover are and book jacket description, and by an author I hadn’t heard of, so I thought I’d give it a shot. That book was Something from the Nightside
They make good short reads, and I definately recommend them. Now, stop reading unless you want spoilers…
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I stumbled on this article over at CNN. Okay, I didn’t really stumble on it, I read the Entertainment section over there a couple times a day and the picture of Emily Deschanel drew me in. First off, she’s cute. Second, she plays the lead on the TV show “Bones” that I happen to enjoy a great deal.
Anyway, the article points out that during the last week in September, if you watched all the shows broadcast by the six major networks in primetime, you would have seen 63 dead bodies, which is an increase over the 27 dead bodies in the same week in 2004. Frankly… so what?
I really don’t know alot of true couch potatoes, people who will watch anything that’s on TV with no regard to its quality. Most people I know watch a handful of shows or more, but if a show is sub-par they’ll stop. They may give it a few extra weeks hoping it gets better, as I often do myself, but can only take being slapped in the face so long before they walk away. That said, if people watch a show, it must be what they want to see… as long as its not grossly inappropriate (showing snuff films and real rapes to five year olds) why should anyone care what people watch?
Don’t get me wrong. I’m all for making “good, quality” television for the whole family, but I’m also very strongly for parental responsibility. Any kid who watches a TV show that his parents aren’t aware of or haven’t viewed themselves needs more parenting. If I had a kid, he probably wouldn’t be allowed to watch some of the shows I do, or at the least he’d have to watch them with me and I’d make sure we talked about any subjects that come up.
Here is a nice little quote from the article:
“Yet the PTC, which frequently files complaints with the Federal Communications Commission about network fare, admits that its focus has primarily been on sex, not gore. One reason is that there’s no government agency concerned with these issues, said Melissa Caldwell, the PTC’s research director.”
And it makes me ask, “Do we need a government agency concerned with these issues?” If there is something I don’t want to watch on TV, I won’t watch it. If there is something I don’t want my kid to watch on TV, I won’t let my kid watch it. The one thing I really don’t want is some tax funded agency that I pay for and have little to no control over deciding that I or my kids shouldn’t be allowed to watch a show. I think the government has gone about as far as it needs to in mandating that all TVs had to have V-chips in them to allow the blocking of TV broadcasts based on TV ratings. One the other side, I think the TV networks need to expand the ratings, make more levels and divide them up. Don’t just rate a show TV-MA because its violent or because it has other adult themes, rate the show TV-MA-Violence or TV-MA-AdultThemes, and then have the monitor software allow me to say, “You know, my kids can deal with all the sex on TV that can be thrown at them, but I don’t want them watching TV-14 or higher level violence.” or even “You know, guns and sex are okay, but no bad language in this house.” Basically, give me the tools to be as arbitrary as *I* want to be, but don’t try to force someone else’s arbitrary ideas on me.
TV to some extent, and movies to a large extent, need to take a look at the computer game industry ratings and head that direction, and all of them need to keep going, providing more tools for parents and other people. Then we just need to courts to come in and start legislating personal responsibility by throwing out any case where someone watched TV or a movie or played a game and accidentally saw something they didn’t want to see because they forgot to use the tools provided to them.
Yeah, it sounds nice… but I won’t be holding my breath…
A couple weeks back ‘Night Stalker’, one of the TV shows I was watching this fall season, got cancelled. I really liked the show, but I could also tell why it wasn’t doing so well… it was a dark, slow show that was more mystery than action. What made it worse, however, was that the last episode they aired was the first part of a two part story. Son of a …
Today, word came down that ‘Threshold’ has been cancelled. If you look back a couple of posts here you’ll understand why I’m not surprised. I mean, the show had potential and I really wanted it to be great, but it was just so boring. As usual, the most recent episode was pretty good, and it ended with a good opening for stuff to finally happen, but it won’t… you can’t build a show anymore, you either are a winner out of the gate or they cancel you before you finish the first turn.
Fox has also cancelled ‘Reunion’ which was an odd little show… a murder mystery told over the span of 20 years, each episode being the events of one year that promised to eventually lead you to the 20 year high school reunion of six friends where one of them gets killed. It took them five episodes just to reveal to the viewers which of the six was the dead one, and that was my only complaint on the show… I think the story would have told better if we knew who the dead one was from the start because only now does the show become really interesting as lives unfold to show motive as to why one or more of the remaining five would want to bump one of their friends off. Only, we may never know. Fox hasn’t announced if the show is being pulled, only that it is cancelled. They might finish out the season, or they might do a couple episodes to quickly tie it up… or they might shut down production and never reveal the murder plot, which would completely suck.
Television Network executives probably wonder why sales of TV shows on DVD are so high, even for shows that didn’t do so well when they aired, but this is the reason… its almost not worth it to watch broadcast TV anymore, because no matter how good you think a show is, a focus group or the Nielson ratings might think its crap and it gets cancelled. So why bother? Why not just wait for it to come out of DVD in a complete set and then? At least you know what you are getting into.
Well, I guess on the bright side, I’ve got three more hours a week to do something else…
Intelligent Design isn’t the stupidest idea to ever be put forward, but its got unique issues of its own. See, the Theory of Evolution that is taught in schools today is not the original theory proposed by Charles Darwin. It bears similarities, but over the year as science has been able to find evidence the theory has been tweaked. Evolution doesn’t deny God. It’s still quite possible that the series of events, of mutations, that we perceive as Evolution is actually a brilliantly designed plan of God that is unfolding over millions of years. There is plenty of room for God in Evolution.
Intelligent Design, on the other hand, holds that some facets of living creatures, like the eye for example, are so complex that they could not have evolved through the course of millions of years of mutation, but had to have been created “as is” by some force outside or greater than the Universe. While Evolution can prove that small mutations occur and can trace genetics through many generations of an animal, Intelligent Design can’t prove that “stuff just happens”… unfortunately, it can’t be disproven either until someone builds a time machine and goes back to see if eyes evolved or if they just showed up.
That is my problem with Intelligent Design… it wants to be science, but because its core theory cannot be in any way proven by the scientific method, its supporters strive to redefine science to allow Intelligent Design to fit. That’s exactly was Kansas did… their school board redefined science to allow for more than just natural and observable phenomenon to be included. The caveat here is that by doing so they have technically opened the door for ghosts, and leviathan elder gods, and more to be considered perfectly good science. Essentially, what they have done is allowed non-falsifiable (things that are impossible to be shown as being false) theories to stand. Part of the scientific method is that your theory has to be either true or false, it has to be defined such that if a given condition arrises, the theory will fail. Intelligent Design doesn’t have that, at least without time machines… If, one day, a new organ appears in an animal that cannot be linked to mutation, then ID is correct. However, if no new organ ever shows up from now until the end of time, ID might still be correct. There is no event that can occur under which the result is that ID is false.
Over at the University of Kansas, a few teachers have decided that enough is enough, and are putting together a new class to study the mythology of Intelligent Design. And its were it belongs… One day Zeus might show up proving that the old Greek myths were correct, but if Zeus never shows up it doesn’t prove them false. That’s what myths are, things believed to be true but utterly unfalsifiable. Intelligent Design belongs in religious study, it belongs at church, until such time as they revise their “theory” to allow for the possibility that its wrong.
Just about every Tuesday I can be found down at the North River Tavern (formerly Taco Mac By The River) matching wits with the trivia gods… or at least having some food and drink and conversation while playing trivia for house cash. We do fairly well, our team, winning one of the three cash prize places every couple of weeks. Winning third place nets you $20, and its almost worse than winning nothing… splitting the money five or six ways barely takes a bite out of the bill. Second place at $40 is better, but first place at $60 is where its really worthwhile. Food and a soda will run you $10 at the tavern, so a five or six man split on the winnings means you eat for free and only pay for alcohol. It works out well for the waitress too, with $10 to $15 less to have to spend it means each person will be tossing in an extra couple bucks into the tip pile, quickly pushing a 20% tip into the realm of 40% or better.
Thursday nights, the North River Tavern runs trivia again, and sometimes we go. While Tuesdays is sort of a ‘General Knowledge’ type trivia with all sorts of categories, Thursdays is theme night. Well, this week’s theme was ‘Beverly Hills 90210’. Some of our team didn’t make it, not being thrilled about the topic, but I’ll admit I watched the show… 6 of the 7 seasons anyway, I got bored of it at the end. The show was fun to laugh at.. the plots were ridiculous, and the only person worth rooting for was David Silver. For some reason Brian Austin Green’s character just had this underdog quality that made you want to see him overcome his hardships and win a little bit… everyone else on the show you wanted to see tortured and burning in hell because 99 times out of 100 their problems were their own damn fault and never should have happened to begin with.
Anyway, our team, three members strong, managed to get first place. Woohoo! Go us! Of course, we aren’t complete 90210 geeks or anything, out of a possible 1120 points, we snagged first place with a whopping 220. So no, we aren’t the biggest geeks in the world, but we were the biggest geeks to show up Thursday for trivia at the North River Tavern.
This Fall TV season saw the premier of three shows about aliens: Surface, Threshold and Invasion. Let me give you a quick rundown on them…
Surface is about a female marine biologist (or something like that) who runs afoul of an unknown invertabrate while in a mini-sub, deep in the ocean; a man goes spear gun fishing with his brother who accidentally spears a huge underwater beast and is dragged really deep after losing his oxygen tank; and a boy finds a weird egg in the water. It turns out the government already knows about the beasts and is quick to start shutting people down… but they don’t want to be shutdown.
Threshold is about a weird 4th dimensional object that appears to a bunch of buys on a Navy ship and messes with their DNA. A woman who consults for the government on contingency plans is called to action as her plan, called ‘Threshold’, that details first contact with aliens is put into play. She assembles a team and starts looking for the missing crewmen while trying to stop them from using the alien signal to bioform and terraform our people and planet.
Invasion takes place in Florida, and during a big hurricane, a bunch of lights fly up out of the sea and it appears that in a bodysnatcher-like way lots of people have been infected or replaced by aliens. As the town recovers from the devastating storm, weird stuff beings to happen.
Okay… from the initial descriptions, I put my money on Threshold for the win. For one, it had no kids. Invasion is practically about families, and one of the three main people in Surface is a kid raising an alien which is just all too ‘E.T.’ for me. Threshold sounded like a solid story about a government organization assembled to face an alien threat. That’s why I’m so disappointed that it has sucked so far. I mean, this week, which is the 7th or 8th episode of the season, finally revealed that the alien signal is terraforming as well as bioforming, something I assumed from the get-go since it was manipulating people on a genetic level and plants aren’t so different. Plus, it had all the actors… Charles S. Dutton, Carla Gugino, Brent Spiner, Peter Dinklage and even William Mapother who did a great job as Ethan on the first season of ‘Lost’, and Brian Van Holt who I just saw on DVD in ‘House of Wax’ where he did an excellent job. It’s these people that keep me watching the show at all… the plot is moving forward so slowly though. Ugh.
I also had good hopes for Invasion. I love a good bodysnatchers movie, and this one had a cool twist in that the people who’ve been ‘snatched’ aren’t really sure what’s going on themselves. Then there is the lynchpin of the story, that the town sheriff is also one of the snatched, but he got snatched years ago, so he’s kinda sheparding the newly snatched into dealing with what has happened. To top it off, the show is created by Shaun Cassidy, whom I gained massive amounts of respect for back in 1995 when a little known show called ‘American Gothic’ hit the air, about a sheriff who might be the devil, a boy who might be his son and the product of a rape, and all the ways in which the sheriff controls the town. I loved that show, so I just knew this one would be good, even if it ended up getting cancelled after one season like ‘American Gothic’. But again, I was let down… again this past week was the 7th episode or so, and finally the story started actually going somewhere. Maybe it’ll get better. In the meantime though I think I’ll go buy ‘American Gothic’ the complete series on DVD.
This brings us to Surface. I would have bet hard earned dollars that this show was going to blow. Dinosaurs in the ocean? Come on, we can do better than that! The whole plot just seems so… silly. And yet, by their 7th episode they are in full swing. We’ve seen the baby alien, we’ve learned some of its abilities, we’ve seen glimpses of the big ones and the wreckage of what they can do, we’ve got a full blown government conspiracy to cover up their existance and even the government turning on their own leading scientist when he begins to feel they need to start going public. We’ve got families being broken apart and the whole thing is spiralling on a collision course with something… I’m not sure what yet exactly, but this show is definately going somewhere.
So that’s my review of the alien shows this season…
See that picture? And yes, you are reading it right. The company I’m currently contracting for prints out a calendar for its employees every year. Its one of those things where they put pictures of some people who work there along with quotes about how great the company is, and generally looks like it was designed by a man who thinks that advertising graphics peaked somewhere in the mid to late 1970’s. One of my coworkers didn’t want his calender and I didn’t have one, so I took it. It’s been fairly reliable all year, days of the week in the right order, Saturday and Sunday next to each other making the weekend and Wednesday smack in the middle, all the holidays on the right days, the 4th of July actually on July 4th and so on.
At least until today…
I got curious and checked a few other people’s calendars, all are the same as mine. So you have to wonder, how exactly something like this makes it past the quality assurance, past the test print, and all the way through the several thousand odd print run without anyone seeing it. Or maybe they did. Perhaps the calendar is correct, perhaps today isn’t November 3rd and instead is Thursday, November 35th, 2005.
I can already tell this image will be stuck in my head forever, and every November I’m going to snicker and giggle and laugh and then embarrassingly have to try to explain it, and no one else will think its funny at all.
The Halloweens of my childhood are dead.
This may not seem like a great revelation considering that I’m 31, but it is sad to me to think it, to realize that it is really gone. First off, lets begin with the costumes. As a child, it was rare for a kid to have a 100% store bought packaged costume. You never did that. You bought pieces and parts, then you took some old clothes and made the rest. A vampire costume was some fake plastic teeth, some fake blood, maybe some white face paint and a cape… the rest of the outfit was made of dressy church clothes with hidden holes or that were a half size too small and were going to be tossed out or donated anyway. My personal favorite year was a pair of jeans, a white t-shirt, and a pair of scissors… some fake blood, a little black face paint around the eyes and I was a pretty kickass zombie. Too many kids these days just go to the store and pick up a costume. Then one by one they come to door looking exactly alike, the same couple dozen or so popular costumes over and over.
Second… it’s 5pm right now, the sun is still shining quite brightly, and already I’ve seen kids out in costume. Its still daylight… trick-or-treating is supposed to happen after dark! As a kid, we never started until the sun had set. Not that there are many kids out, because most of them are going to be doing their trick-or-treating at the local mall, where its completely safe. Of course, to a degree I can’t argue… when I was young, my parents taught me pretty well about avoiding strangers and I was required to know all the local streets, how to get home, to trusted neighbor’s houses, and even to the nearest police or fire department should an emergency arrise. It was called parenting, and my parents did it. Most kids I’ve bothered to speak to these days can hardly find their front door from a half block away, let alone be trusted to actually think too much for themselves and reason out how to handle an unexpected situation. In my day, if a sicko tried to snatch a kid from a group, the other kids would run screaming, parents would be swarming the street in seconds… now, I suspect most kids would stand there and wonder if it was going to be on the news later, and it might dawn on one of them to tell a grown-up what happened if they knew they were going to be rewarded for it. Not that many of today’s parents would ask, or care, or even realize their child was gone until it came time to send them to school the next day… maybe.
Third, no one decorates anymore. I do, we put up monsters and spiderwebs and all that stuff in the front window. (Hey, I’d decorate my lawn but I live in an apartment and I don’t have one.) But one window out of a few hundred just ends up looking silly. The neighborhoods I grew up in, they had style. Frontyards became graveyards. Eerie music would poor out ever time a door opened. You actually approached each house with apprehension because you didn’t know if it was just going to be a person with a bowl of candy, or a monster to jump out at you and toss candy in your bag if you could manage not to run away. One year, when I started feeling a bit old to actually go out for candy, I worked the door at our house. I dressed up in some jeans and an old flannel shirt, I put on a mask and stuffed pine straw into my clothes so that it poked out at the ankles, wrists, neck and waist… then I sat on the front step with the bowl of candy in my lap and a little sign that said “Take One”. I stayed as motionless as I could, and some kids were scared to approach, but if they did I stayed still for them… but the ones who walked right up and tried to take a handful of candy instead of just one, them I grabbed, by the wrist, and held on as they tried to run away screaming. Once they’d wrench free and I’d get back up, these teens would stop crying and compose themselves and start laughing about who just got scared, and they’d resolved to find someone else and send them this way, and I’d assure them I’d be there.
And that leads into number Four… Haunted Houses. I love them… or I used to. The last few that I’ve been to though, they just sucked. Too crowded, we walked single file through the house, never more than five feet from the person in front or behind, and every scare was anticipated. If they jumped out at someone a few people ahead, they wouldn’t be reset to jump out at you, and if you watched seven people walk past corner or dark spot without a scare you could be pretty sure it was waiting for you. Thanks to the cry babies and sue happy idiots in our litigious world, they can’t touch you. Not that I want people in a haunted house to get man-handled, but part of what is frightening about a guy in a hockey mask coming at you is the idea that he’s going to get you! Of course, if he’s legally not allowed to come into contact with you in any way, it’s not too worrysome anymore. He may be running out you, but he’s going to stop… he has to or he’ll lose his job, and you can sue the haunted house right out of existance.
That about covers it… everything that I loved about Halloween has been eroded and what remains is this bizarre 100% safe commercial holiday that some people still oppose of religious grounds despite the fact that nearly everything one might oppose has been stripped.
Happy Halloween!
Did you like ‘Jumanji’? Then you’ll like ‘Zathura’. It’s basically the same movie, but different enough to make it not feel like a retread of the same story. Two brothers, ages 10 and 6 (almost 7), are having a bit of a rough time dealing with each other and the divorce of their parents. The younger one finds a game, Zathura, in the basement of this house dad has moved them into (mom got their house in the settlement). He turns the keys, and pushes the ‘Go’ button sending them, their sister, and their house on an intergalactic journey.
It was just good, pure family fun. There’s only one dirty word in the whole thing, and the kids in the theater I went to see it at were full of ‘Oooh!’s and ‘Aahh!’s at the special effects. They were excited, they laughed, and so did I.
Yesterday, on my way to work, there was traffic. Lots of it. As usual, I guessed there was an accident, and there was. Normally when I get stuck in traffic, by the time I reach the area of the accident the most I ever see is the last of the tow trucks pulling away. Yesterday was different.
The bus crested the hill and we could see the cop cars, the ones that had been passing by us for the last twenty minutes. The road is five lanes, two each direction with a turn lane in the center, and the cops have three lanes, the two southbound and the turn lane, closed and are routing traffic through the two remaining lanes. As we approach, I notice that there aren’t any tow trucks, no fire engine, no wrecked cars. As we pass, I see trails of blood on the street, and human sized white lump with tennis shoes sticking out of it. The white sheet is stained with red in places, and the shoes are pointing in directions that two feet on the same person shouldn’t be pointing at the same time. There was a truck and a couple of cars pulled over, and there was a man, the truck driver from his dress, sitting on the curb crying. About a dozen cop cars were around, and everyone was waiting for the ambulance or the coroner to show up. And then we passed and continued down the road on our route.
I assumed that the truck had hit a pedestrian, since he was the one who was crying and being consoled by officers, but I wanted to know what happened. So I started to search the web… all the local news channel sites I could find… nothing. It seems that there was another accident earlier that morning in the Atlanta area, a 19 year old kid who was drunk or high was on the wrong side of the road and killed a woman in a head on collision. I found lots of stories on that, but none on the accident I can seen the aftermath of. Finally I did find something, on Scan Gwinnett, a website where they scan police and emergency freqencies and post stories and recordings. It turns out the truck had nothing to do with it… however, the pedestrian had been crossing the street and was hit by three cars. Police are still investigating, and so far no one has been charged, and they don’t know why the man was crossing the street there and not at one of the nearby lighted intersections.
I’d never actually seen a dead body not in a coffin before, technically I guess I still haven’t since I only saw shoes and a white sheet, and the whole thing kinda creeped me out. I felt sad even though I didn’t know the guy or any of the drivers, and I also felt angry because it was his own damn fault for not crossing at the light. And today I feel… differently sad, because this guy died and three people will live with having hit him, and lots of people saw the accident and the aftermath, but it wasn’t important enough to rate coverage by any of the local news stations. I mean, I can understand having to pick and choose what stories get airtime in the limited broadcast, but there is no limit on a website. Did none of their reporters even cover it? Was a story even written?