Tiny Money Land

WHO HAD APRIL 28TH ON THE DEAD POOL?: For those who are wondering what happened to our tidy li'l online community (as seen in the sidebar), Delphi Forums choked today. Last weekend, there was just a minor freakout, but last night, the Hosts forum told us two of the primary disks in their server array went out. We were told the plan was that a few forums at a time would be taken down, have their file integrity checked, and transferred over to the new disks. Apparently, they decided they had to take the whole thing down and do all of the above.

We'll just see what happens next. I'm sure there's a plan B in our future, and we may even figure out what the hell it is if this goes past 24 hours...

(Edit on the 29th: It came back in the early hours of the morning. Dangit...I mean HOORAY...)  

BACK ON TRACK (SORT OF): Okay, I didn't do much getting out and discovering the world on my TV-free week. I listened to music and started reading from my stack of books. Should've done more writing, but like the guy says, if you can't find time to read, you won't find time to write. I'm reading right now, and hopefully some more writing will result. And what am I reading at this exact second? You'll be sorry you asked, but it's "Cat 'n' Mouse" by Steven Millhauser, an interesting short story that overthinks a Cartoon Network favorite. Have fun.  

THE TURNOFF: Monday was the official start of the tenth annual TV Turnoff Week. I actually started on Sunday, for reasons I can't even begin to explain, but the blank screen is staring into space at the moment. Considering all the unbelievable media-related junk we've been through in the past several months, I like the idea better and better.

The point isn't to be a culture snob, to wear a no-TV-watching sneer as a badge of superiority, but to make people actually think about what goes into their eyes and ears. The materials are geared especially for kids and their parents, but a guy like me who spends too much time with the video needs to go on a TV fast every once in awhile.

So, what to do? For me, it means going back to my reading, and looking at the stacks of books on my shelves, I'd have to go TV-free until fall to take them all out. I also spent a bit of time on Monday checking out the open-mike night at the local Borders book store, but not nearly as much as I did last year. The guy who was on was a vocal dead-ringer for the guy who sang "Like A Virgin" on last year's American Idol auditions, his hair looking like it was styled with an electric eggbeater. He introduced his songs in a baritone voice, but sang in a weak reach for something way above his range to his own electric guitar accompaniment. I couldn't help but think about Tiny Tim, who claimed he sang in that famous falsetto because God told him to. As his performance reached all the corners of the store, all heads turned to the cafe, all jaws falling open.

Of course I applauded; it was a remarkable performance, although not in the way he would've preferred. He was no Wesley Willis, but a guy takes what he can get, especially when there's no cover charge.

Last year, the most bizarre thing happened when I finally turned the set back on...the screen appeared brighter and clearer than I remember it being the week before. That wasn't a side effect I was expecting, and it was a bit creepy, like the serpent in the Garden of Eden saying "Watch of this, and you shall never die. Eat of the fruit, and you shall have the knowlege of God." One problem with that analogy: since I had started a day early (because of family commitments this time), that meant the Tree of Knowledge was represented by Saturday Night Live. Eat of Jimmy Fallon and Tina Fey and never die? Stupid, stupid snake.

Well, I might have a bite of Tina, but send Fallon back to the kitchen. He looks a bit underdone.

Anyway, as you can tell by the time stamp, none of this has helped me get to bed any earlier.  

THE ANTI-NIKE: You might have heard of AdBusters, and wonder to yourself "Well, sure, they make a lot of noise, but are they doing anything practical?" Well, they're going into production with blackSpot Sneakers, or the "un-swoosher". While there's apparently a bit of a holdup in getting started, that's because they're going in for a "clean" shop (read: no 12 year olds running machines for 16 hours a day, preferably unionized). Nothing utterly insane in the actual shoe either, just a simple, low-top canvas shoe with a black dot in the center of a white circle where the logo would be.

A lot of people see this as a curious angle, an anti-branding organization making its own brand, but Adbusters founder Kalle Lasn doesn't see it that way. ''There are a lot of people now who want to jump over the dead body of the old left,'' he recently told a reporter. ''We've decided to stop whining about Nike. Why not make $10 million and use it to run a media-literacy campaign instead? I'm really sick of the whiners.'' Well, if you're gonna dream, dream big. Coming from a region that was traditionally neck deep in textile workers until the outsource mentality took the industry over, it's kind of rough that they can't share some business on the continent (Adbusters is based in Canada), but they are looking for people to sell them in "alternative venues".

(Edit on 4/21: After a little extra reading, I found out they were considering a plant in America bought by ex-Nike workers after the mother ship called it home, and while Lasn digs the idea of taking over a Nike shop, he's a globalist at heart and doesn't feel it's necessary to keep these types of jobs in North America. This was all from the press archive on the blackDot site, which is preserving all points of view on the new venture.)  

I THINK I'VE FIGURED OUT what bugs me about Mad TV, and I can sum it up in a short phrase: six Chris Farleys in search of a Phil Hartman. I still haven't made it through a full episode yet, but the urge to overplay is strong in these people, and Saturday Night Live at its best knew how to vary the tone and volume of the comedy. Mad TV is the neighbor that plays his music wide-open all night and doesn't understand why you're always knocking on the wall of the apartment.

What? You thought there was going to be more? I hardly think about Fox at all these days! Give me a break!  

SURGERY PORN: "This show epitomizes what's wrong with America. Of course, it's on Fox."--Some Guy

As you can see from previous entries, the FCC is whipping itself into a froth over various bits of indecency. I'm sure it's just a conincidence that all of this is happening in an election year during a jobless recovery, but that's beside the point. For all the talk of keeping the airwaves safe, they probably won't be touching what may be the most obscene production of the current season, Fox's The Swan, which debuted Wednesday night. The setup is that plain women are set up with extensive cosmetic surgery and an aggressive two month program of exercise, diet, and psychotherapy. All of this time, they're not allowed to see their own reflections. The big reveal is done in a mansion-like hall Of the two women on each of the set-up shows, the one that cleans up the nicest will move on to a pageant, and thousands of dollars of fabulous prizes.

The first two victims were named Kelly and Rachel, and the implications were that Kelly was one bad day away from killing herself and Rachel was ruining her marriage by pursuing Swanship. The phone conversation Rachel had at one point with her husband was telling: he wanted her to come back and take care of him again. "I go to work, I go to bed, I go to work, I go to bed," he whined to her, while she kept shaking her head and snapping "Don't go quiet on me again!"

I'm not calling the show "surgery porn" because of anything directly sexual that goes on, but for the emotional masturbation of a segment of the audience, stroking their vulnerabilities until they cry out. Although part of the regimen in the build-up months is extensive psychological counselling, they showed a grand total of five seconds from that footage, and a lightning fast montage of the "grunt work" that goes into a physically fit body. However, we do spend a large amount of time watching the prep for the surgery, the doctors being given a free hand to do whatever the hell they think is necessary, so we jump almost directly from the operating table to the revelation of the new look several months later. If you remember, one of our victims is shown almost constantly in tears because of how ugly she feels she is. The reveal (or money shot, since I'm pursuing the porn analogy to the bitter end) shows her bursting into tears of a different sort, whimpering about how beautiful she is.

What's our message here? That there's no personal problem that can't be solved by being pretty? That by changing the most superficial things about yourself, you can fix it all? That's what I got from it, and it's very dangerous thinking. I can tell you from personal experience that if you're fat with all sorts of deep-rooted personal issues, then you lose the weight without addressing your mental baggage, not only are you STILL going to be miserable, but you won't have the weight crutch to keep the ugly truth hidden. Certainly there are well-adjustded weight-challenged people, but we're not talking about them at the moment. Kelly was an overly emotional, intensely depressed person before going into the competition; we're given no reason to believe she won't be just as dismal once she adjusts to the new reality of her adjusted face and figure. Of course, since she wasn't picked to move to the next round, she's not "our" problem any more, but I hope she keeps her soul together. At least, as much as I can wish that on a total stranger.

I'm told for every crime The Swan commits against humanity, MTV's Famous Face does it all in spades. The only prize there is the dubious distinction of having a face that allegedly looks like a celebrity. I've often said I'll watch anything once, but I don't know if I'm up for that one.  

AS THE COUNTRY BOY SAID ABOUT HIS DAD'S CHEWING TOBACCO, "I THINK THIS IS A PLUG." Just installed the trial version of CleanMyPC Registry Cleaner, a program designed to clean junk items out of your Windows system registry. Like a beach innundated with medical waste, programs leave a lot of things behind for your system to step in, and CleanMyPC does a capable job taking care of the bricabrac. MSIE loaded significangly faster after the registry sweep, which makes me wonder if this might solve my BitTorrent problem, too. You can back up your registry keys from inside the program (in case you screw up royally at some point) and also has an option to lock your home page and search page against unauthorized changes. However, if a hijack lockdown is all you want to do, you should use Spybot Search & Destroy, which is an excellent program in its own area.

The demo is a 15 day trial, the main crippled part being that you can only delete the first two items in each scanned category.  

ALL FOOL'S DAY: To be honest with you, I thought I was done with this in February. I thought that we'd all be done with it by now. It seems that the fallout from the Nipple That Shook The World grows with every passing week, and it's possible that the first wave crested in the Howard Stern radio slot on Thursday, when the general manager of WXRK, Stern's home station, took to the air and read a prepared statement that Viacom had buckled to overwhelming pressure and pulled the plug on America's preeminent shockjock.

What followed in all Stern's markets was a cookie cutter deejay show, with some hapless saps spinning records and indulging in freeze-dried banter ("all of the fun, but without the filth"). People across the nation flooded the switchboards.

And then, an hour later, Stern and Robin Quivers came on to remind everybody it was April the 1st. Sounds like a great hoax. I just wish it wasn't entirely necessary.

The flashpoint of the latest Stern dustup, from what I can tell, was a $27,500 fine levied for a three-year old incident involving a glossary of "deviant practices", and it just keeps getting better from there. For example, Stern was attempting to play a clip of an Oprah show on his March 18th broadcast where a guest was describing deviant sexual practices ("in clinical terms", one commentator is quick to point out) but it was bleeped, in spite of the fact that it not only ran on Oprah's program, but was repeated on the Jimmy Kimmel Show the night before without incident. Stern raised the roof when he wasn't allowed to run the clip uncensored, that there were two rules of law for him and Her O-ness, and that something should be done.

Apparently the National Association of Broadcasters agree, but are expressing it in a way that will make a lot of people miserable: they're considering bringing back a "code of conduct" for broadcasters which would include promises to stay away from programming that includes what they consider "offensive" language, violence or sexual conduct. Who decides what's considered offensive in these areas? Good question. I'm not holding my breath for a good answer.

In case you were wondering, the old NAB code of conduct was dropped in 1982 after the Justice Department challenged it in court. Yep, it was shot down by the Reagan-era drive for deregulation of pretty much everything, but as the Bob Roberts song goes, the times are changing back.

But back to the King of All Media. By trying to turn down the heat on his racier side, the powers that be have turned Howard Stern into something much more dangerous than a man who wants to see your girlfriend's rack. They've politicized a man with a huge fanbase of 18-24 males, the hardest demographic to reach, who hang on his every word. Stern's out to make those bastards who he feels sent the yoke in his direction pay when the presidental election comes around. He's sworn to leave the broadcast air forever if the FCC makes good on its threat to jack up the obscenity fines to $500,000 per incident, taking his act to subscription-based satellite radio, and while I live in a Stern-less radio market, I don't think a Stern-less world would necessarily be a better world.

A nasty chilling effect has settled in during the month I've been trying to ignore this issue, which got through to me during the first day of Air America Radio's Randi Rhodes show, when a caller that let an f-bomb slip like a hiccup was cut off instantly. Cutting callers happens all the time in talk-radio land, except that Rhodes mentioned that under one version of the bill before Congress, if a radio talker doesn't take quick and definitive action when something like that happens, they would pay any resulting fines out of their own pockets. The half a grand would be cut as a personal check.

To put this new Puritanism into perspective, there's also the bizarre case of the manager of a public radio station going bat-guano insane when an engineer who was supposed to bleep the f-word in a prerecorded piece let it slip through, and as a result Sandra Tsing Loh, the writer/performer of the piece, was fired after six years of service at Los Angeles public radio station KCRW. That she was only paid $150 a week for her contributions to the station, and landed on her feet almost immediately at KPCC is beside the point. No complaints had been filed with the station over this incident, and definitely nothing with the FCC, but they decided to overreact by not only dropping Sandra but deleting their entire six-year online archive of her show.

KCRW has chosen to take what I call the "White House vs. Richard Clarke" strategy and go in for character assassination, rather than actually adress the issues at hand. Disgruntled listners have chosen an equally unambiguous course of action: they're sending their pledge envelopes back empty with "NO LOH, NO DOUGH" stickers attached.

I've actually heard Sandra's features before, and if I term it "mature humor", I mean that in the sense that kids would be bored to tears by it, since she usually covers the type of things that only grown-ups can really identify with. Nothing obscene, indecent, or even mildy racy about her routine; it's the type of mostly harmless radio essay that turns up on NPR news shows all the time.

And now, she's being put in the same boat as Howard Stern. In fact, I got the link to the story of her plight right off the official Stern page. May God have mercy on us all...and soon. Please.