Tiny Money Land

A FEW LOOSE ENDS TO TIE: If you were wondering, I've satisfied my curiousity that enough regular Canadians were ticked off to make the Triumph situation an incident, rather than just a chance for politicians to make themselves look good by being morally indignant, while other Candians didn't feel it was worth the fuss. After taking everything into account, I wasn't too surprised.

What genuinely floored me was all of the hyperbolic accusations of "racism", since I've always thought of the French as a nationality instead of a race. Only after checking Webster's did I figure out that misstep. After blaming my own loutish self, I put the finger on the "melting pot" factor, since quite a few families with deep roots in this country have a family tree that touches somewhere in Europe or the UK at some point. In addition, when multiculturalism was starting to catch fire, it was framed as a reaction to the academic "cult of the Dead White Guys" (read: Western Europe as a whole). So going to my default interpretation, which is all I can usually conjure up at 1am in the morning, it looked like a white guy with a puppet giving other white people (without puppets) a hard time. Maybe the guy with the puppet saw it that way, too, but I can speak about nobody's mind but my own.

That leaves us the culture gap between the French side and the American side, which isn't a trivial one by any means. Otherwise the French government wouldn't have invested a lot of time and money fortifying the native culture and language, to keep national identity from being eroded from the outside.
From that angle, I don't see the Triumph issue as racism, but old-fashioned cultural insensitivity. Cultural bigotry, if you want to put it into terms that'll clear the fog out.

I could be dead wrong on every bit of this, but sometimes a guy has to try and figure out his own mind, and my main dread, besides doing it in public, is that I'm using a television show as a prop for it. Anyway, there's only one schism between people that keeps me up at night these days: those that want to hurt me because I'm an American versus those that want to hurt me because they've actually gotten to know me.

I'm washing my hands of this month of apologies, so you won't be getting anything out of me on Howard Stern or Bubba the Love Sponge. Instead, I'll point you to a pageload of Late Night with Conan press coverage from 1996 up to the translator saying Conan never knew the touch of a woman. and hopefully we can move on to the pressing matters of beating each other up again. It's an election year, after all.
 

THE MONTH IN QUESTION: I was going to write up a description of the latest document from Project Gutenberg, but the title tells the whole story: Slave Narratives from the Federal Writers' Project. A remarkable oral history.  

THE POLL RESULTS: The results of my Grammy poll finally came in...20 people participated in our survey, and here's their votes for the most likely five minute delay excuses:

The thing moves so slow, it only SEEMS like a 5 minute delay: 30%
The CBS censors are all 90 years old and slow: 25%
In case the endless Super Bowl apologies put the control room to sleep: 15%
To give the writers time to escape after Jason Alexander's lame Britney jokes: 10%
Write-in for "It's the Grammys, dude, who the hell cares?": 10%
The big red button to kill the feed was across the street: 5%
Oh, come ON! Award shows don't run late enough as it is: 5%

And there you are...COMEDY WITH A CAPITAL K.
 

TV ALERT: Linda Ellerbee, since leaving the network news grind, has cut a good niche for herself explaining the news to kids on Nickelodeon. Now, she's explaining the news networks to adults in a documentary which debuts on Trio tonight at 9pm and 12am ET (repeat Thursday at the same times).

It'd be worth a watch just as that, but this quote from the AP article sold me:

"Many of us thought the global would become local with the advent of 24-hour news," Ellerbee said. "Instead, it's the other way around. So that Laci Peterson, which is a tragic story to her family but a local story, becomes a tragic national story."

Yep, Ellerbee plays the "news/not-news" game. I TOLD you it was spreading!  

AN INTERNATIONAL INCIDENT...FOR ME TO POOP ON: American TV can't seem to get a break from apologies lately. Conan O'Brien's Canadian adventure ended on a sour note, as a Canadian legistlator was movied to call Triumph the Insult Comic Dog's tour of Quebec "vile, vicious hatemongering". Really, if you were expecting anything else than what Triumph delivered, you simply haven't been watching this show in the first place.

As usual, the problem isn't just about the act itself, but that roughly US$760,000 was paid by the city and provincial governments for the show's week-long relocation, so this "hate crime" was done partially on the public's dime. Coming so close to the Don Cherry thing probably doesn't help matters, either. Of course, Cherry really does have it in for Quebec, if the Reuters examples are representative. Triumph, on the other hand, is like that to everybody, regardless of race, creed, sexual orientation, or species. He's truly an equal opportunity offender, and that's what makes him a real American icon. Read into that what you will.

It occurred to me that I'm defending Triumph on the same page where I'm saying another advocacy group had a point for their protests. Of course, it also occurred to me that nowhere in the coverage that's made it this far south have we heard how any French Canadians feel about the situation. Maybe they need to be reminded to be offended?

Being as image-protective as they are, I'm surprised the RCMP hasn't jumped on the 30 Rock refugees for using a man in a Mountie uniform to help rig a footrace between Seattle's Space Needle and Toronto's own CN Tower. At least there was a little solace for longtime wrestling fans: this one didn't use a cattle prod.

JANET RUINS THE BODY FOR EVERYBODY...AGAIN: I'm playing the catchup game on irrelevant news today, so I'll just point at the ABC network's yellow streak for suddenly getting cold feet over a sex scene in an upcoming NYPD Blue and be done with it. The trims will only be made for the Central and Mountain time zones, where the show airs earlier, so if you live in the Eastern or Pacific zones, forget you read this paragraph.  

THE DAY AFTER THE DAY BEFORE: Ladies and gentlemen, 14 February, 2004 is now a memory, which means it is now officially Saint Halfoffheartshapedcandy Day. We've formalized a few rituals since I wrote the originial treatise on the holiday (at least, that's my story, and I'm sticking to it), so as soon as the markdown signs go up, grab yourself some dark chocolate hearts and chow down.

One of the highlights of the time I did at Walmart was the day after V-Day, when I would help the American Greetings representative round up the heart-shaped balloons and ritualistically puncturing them one by one with a box cutter. It was very therapeutic at the time, and probably would be now, too. Of course, today I'd have to BUY the balloons, so it's not happening.

Anyway, I know there are a few people who read this that ARE in happy, long-term relationships. To those people, I have a special holiday wish for you: LAY THE HELL OFF ME, OKAY? I'll come around when I damn well feel like it!

Cheers!  

THE PAST IS ALIVE! ON BETA! Oooookay, a lot of you know my long-time fascination with Betamax and other now-obsolete A/V technology. Well, the guy who runs the Ultimate Betamax Information Guide has just posted scans of what is probably the first consumer-level video magazine, the Videophile's Newsletter. Read about the industry as it was unfolding in 1976-77, when a 60 minute blank tape cost $13.50. Some of the speculation about the future is pretty wild, too:

"I fully expect that when the MCA-Phillips Video Disk comes on the market the desire for most movies will be satisfied in that format and that TV tape will be useful primarily for preserving TV shows themselves as well as obscure films like 'She Demons' that no repsectable video disk maker is ever likely to produce."

I have to laugh, not at the first half of the prediction, but the bizarre concept that there are films no company is willing to try and sell. If you've seen the ads for The Underground Comedy Movie, you know what I mean.  

SUPER FOLKS: Since I was just talking about how dumb the Superman comics are getting in the near future, it's only fair to present an example of how dumb some of the Superman stories used to be. As much as I dig the Man of Tomorrow, they really made him do some supremely lame things back in the day. Therefore, gasp in amazement as Unka Cheeks, the Toy Wonder presents the Kryptonian Baby Stewie: BEWARE THE SUPER-GENIUS BABY.

It's an IMAGINARY story. Aren't they all? (Sorry, Alan Moore fans...)

The main page of the Cheeks site and some of the articles and images don't seem to be there anymore (it's a FortuneCity page that hasn't been active in a long time), but what's left of the site is an all-around fun read, giving a quick trip through the highs and lows of Silver Age comicdom.

(edit @ 3:13pm to unsnarl my early morning syntax)  

TODAY'S GOLDEN MOMENT came from Nickelodeon's U-Pick Live, when Adam Sandler and U-Pick's own masked wrestler Garbagio followed up last year's no-holds-barred wrestling match against a Thanksgiving dinner by literally knocking the stuffing out of a Teddy bear. What really sold the bit was the post-match shenanigans, when (presumably) Rob Schneider threw a heart-shaped box of chocolate at Sandler's chest, and Adam sold it like a chair shot. Of course, this is somehow supposed to promote 50 First Dates and remind us of the Day Before Half-Priced Heart-Shaped Chocolate Day, but it was one of those moments that gets me ready for the absurdity of work.

Top THAT, Cartoon Cartoon Friday!  

SOME NETWORKS JUST CAN'T CATCH A BREAK: I had an itch to mention the OutKast performance of "Hey Ya" at the Grammys, and how the overblown Native American trappings--complete with a lime green teepee that shot out sparks--would come down on somebody soon enough. Then I thought better of it, not because I didn't think it would cause offense, but it was one too many overblown production numbers for Andre and...um...the other guy. Just a blip on the radar compared to the other ridiculous goings on, I figured.

Whoops. Wrong again. The San Francisco-based Native American Cultural Center is calling for a boycott of CBS, NARAS (the Grammy organizers), and Arista Records.

I agreed with the group's chairman, Andrew Brother Elk, that somebody should've pointed out how potentially damaging the production was, but I also got the feeling that quality control wasn't the strongest thing going at Sunday's ceremony. I'm sure they were preoccupied with keeping the performers clothed and the language clean.

As always with these types of stories, at least one quote makes me cringe: "If people were wearing yarmulkes and the Hasidic dress and bumping and grinding, we would see that as ridiculous, but for some reason we don't see what OutKast did as ridiculous," Brother Elk said.

I've caught at least a half-dozen "Hey Ya" TV performances since the fall, each one goofier than the last, and that's why I hope the yarmulke quote doesn't get back to OutKast. It might give them ideas.

CALL IT PROTEST ART (NOT A CRY FOR HELP): Since my stat tracker indicates it's really pumping up my hitrate this week, I'd like to add the following to this update...

(melodramatic clearing of the throat)

TITTY TITTY TITTY. JANET JACKSON JANET JACKSON. Oh yeah, and PICTURES.

For those of you who found me for the first time because of this lame stunt: Yeah, I talk about it a few paragraphs down the page. No, you won't find any pictures of it here. Thank you for your patronage.

(deep bow as the crowd hisses and throws overripe tomatoes)  

GRUMPY (AND BORED) OLD MAN: It's the dumbing down of the nation, I tell ya. First they rounded off the corners of the Doritos. Then they replaced the metal lids and sharp rims on the Planters' cans with foil lids and safety rims. And now, we've finally hit the bottom: Campbell's Soup cans now have pull-tab lids. No more can openers...EVER.

In MY day, you had to learn how to work the can opener in the kitchen drawer to eat your lunchtime soup. The first time you did it as a kid, you lined the opener up badly and it bit into the wrong part of the can. Because you were always taught to handle flat, round things by the edges, the jagged edges of the discarded part dug into your tiny fingers. That's when you found out that without the thick rim, the can was a bit too flexible in overeager hands; you got so nervous that soup was soon flying everywhere but the bowl. Since you opened the can in the wrong way, the next step was you checking for metal filings, never a good thing to digest. Then, and ONLY then, did you feel safe enough to search for the crackers. These things made lunchtime a disaster and an adventure. That's the way it was, and we LIKED IT!

Okay, maybe that was all just me. Of couse, you probably had better motor skills than I did. Of course, you had one of those rotten families who had an electric can opener. Of course, you're mocking my awkward childhood ways. Of course, I want to kick you ass.

Next thing you know, they'll start leaving the water in, and the cans will be twice the size. That won't be right at ALL!  

NEVER ENDING BATTLE (FOR SANITY): Shows you how out of the four-color loop I am when it takes a whole month for me to find out the latest stunt they're pulling with Superman. And I quote (from All The Rage):

I'm told DC's new Superman revamp will be based on an event that alters the past and creates three separate timelines, giving the creators on each book complete freedom to write the stories they want without worrying about continuity.

My source says the Brian Azzarello and Jim Lee Superman will operate in a world without Lois Lane. She'll be dead, allowing for more violent and dark yarns. In the Chuck Austen and Ivan Reis Action Comics it will pretty much be the status quo. Lois is alive and she's married to Superman/Clark Kent. In Adventures of Superman written by Greg Rucka and illustrated by Matthew Clark, Lois and Clark aren't married and she doesn't know about his secret identity. This book will apparently revive the love triangle concept.

All three Supermen will live in Metropolis simultaneously, but will have no knowledge of the alternate timelines. I hear this split will set up a big crossover at the end of 2004 pitting the three Supermen against each other.

I grew up on Superman; I got the book in the 70s that gave an aerial tour of the character's history, and read it repeatedly until the color pages started falling out. I jumped back into comics with both feet during the death and rebirth of Big Blue, stuck it out through Zero Hour and its fallout, and then...

AND THEN...??!!!

Well, then they whipped the pure energy Supes on us, the one with the lightning bolts for eyebrows, and I put the book down and backed the hell away. I stuck my head through the door for the Lois and Clark wedding issue, but all the comic shops in town closed not long after that, which made the "stay or go" decision for me. That was one of the many hazards of rejoining the ranks during the mid '90s, when the speculator scum ruined the hobby for everybody.

It makes a fella pine for the pre-Crisis days, when you could just make an alternate earth for an undertaker-grim Superman and people would get the picture. My first and favorite has taken too many body blows in recent years' battle of art vs. commerce, with the basic integrity of the character holding it all together. If they can get good stories out of this, that's fine, but if this is just another stunt to pop anemic sales, I'll wait for the trade paperback.

Oh yeah, and I'm glad they brought Krypto back in '01. A man who has been through that much deserves a dog.

(And now, to dig out my "Return of Barry Allen" issues...)  

GRAMMY'S HOUSE SMELLS FUNNY: The Grammys haven't moved me in awhile, so I ditched all but the last hour or so, when I was lured in by a poorly organized "salute" to funk music. Not only did I apparently dodge the most pitiful Beatles tribute outside of the local drunken karaoke night, but also the umpteenth apology for the Evil Wardrobe Malfunction. Just shut up, Justin; we're sick of hearing about it, and the reasons have nothing to do with being offended.

The other music was what it was, for better or worse. The Warren Zevon tribute was tastefully done, although thanks to overly clever direction it took awhile to figure out what was happening onstage.

The presenters were as excruciating as ever, as all the "zany" pairings and teleprompted banter made my brain itch and my imagination bleed.

However, three words bugged me more than anything that happened onstage: FIVE MINUTE DELAY. We were told about this decision repeatedly last week and it still didn't compute until the night itself. Are the CBS censors 90 years old? Was the mute button for the satellite feed across the street? Has the network's parent company, at long last, completely lost its mind? I'm putting up a poll to get your thoughts on it. Results will be posted here in the next week, because God knows we need to drag this whole debacle out longer.

No, I don't remember who won anything. Why do you ask?  

SOME OF THESE ARE JUST FOR ME, YOU UNDERSTAND: I recognize this is a jarring transition from the heartbreaking saga of Janet Jackson's jugs, but you might remember at the end of last year, I went on a Plato jag. I still think a trip through the Republic is something everybody should at least attempt, but in lieu of that, the Ancient One of our Delphi group pointed me to an article that went into the relevance of Plato to modern life, and (of course) the currently-in-progress downfall of civilization. Good read, and tasteful use of Homer Simpson.
 

TOOK 'EM LONG ENOUGH: I don't really have a lot to say about this...when I saw Kid Rock's Stars and Stripes poncho (in the only part of the Super Bowl halftime show I actually watched), I figured it was only going to be a matter of time before somebody pinned his ears back for it. MTV-ready stars have draped themselves in the flag for years, so that in itself wouldn't be an issue. What really ticked off the Veterans of Foreign Wars is that either Kid Rock or his wardrobe person (and HOO BOY, what a concept that is) sliced into a flag to make a fashion statement, and even worse in the VFW's eyes, nobody else made a yip over it because of the ongoing drama of Tittygate.

Excuse me for a moment...I must pray for forgiveness for uttering a -gate suffixed word in this blogspace.

You'll notice that I haven't stated my opinion on the whole thing, and that's because of the lateral approach I take to certain types of controversies. I'm more than happy to get up to my elbows in women's cleavage (and there's an image that's bound to linger), but I keep my hands out of flag politics, since it's usually a distraction in election years...hey, like THIS ONE! I'll just stick to the obvious, that the stunt pushed a different set of buttons than the ones for which I'm assuming Kid R was aiming.

I'll also mention that it was roundly ignored a few years ago when Comedy Central's TV Funhouse gang decided to give Hawaii "its own flag" by cutting out star number fifty (with safety scissors, of course) and pasting it to a flap of cardboard. All in the context, I guess.

AND SPEAKING OF DISTRACTIONS, another all-nighter with the things rattling around in my head inspired a new tagline, inspired by Doctor Who's long-term villians the Daleks. And really, it states its own case, doesn't it? Blogger calls it the description field, but I call it THE BILLBOARD OF MY MIND. Have fun figuring that statement out; I know I will once I'm fully awake again.  

TITTY TITTY TITTY, ASS ASS ASS: Ah, that wicked, evil halftime show...I didn't see it live, because I had sworn off the Super Bowl halftime show years ago and was watching cartoons. Apparently a breast shot (either on purpose or by accident) on national broadcast television was enough to signal the downfall of civilization, panic in the streets, cats lying down with dogs, and (Heaven help us) peace without honor.

Like any red-blooded jerk who has no idea what's really going on, I have a few dozen comments to make, but I'll limit myself to a few main points, just so we can get this crap out of our system and move on to more important things.

The most obvious one: There have been tits on this planet long before Janet Jackson was born, and there'll be more to come long after she's gone. These breasts, however, have a massive marketing machine behind them, which is the only way to explain why this "costume malfunction" is now the number one Tivoed moment of all time. Obviously, the concept of Internet porn eludes some people.

The double standard angle: If Justin Timberlake had accidentally flashed a peek at Little Justin, it would've been the end of his career. On the other hand, Janet just jumpstarted sales of her new album. The universal male lament rings loud...WHY DO YOU FEAR THE MIGHTY SWORD?

And now, the one you've been dreading, MY PATENTED PHILOSOPHIC ANGLE:

In the rush to punish, some people are missing the bigger picture. The key to the whole thing, in my eyes, is the quote from Police Chief Joe Breshears as to why criminal charges (groan) will not be pressed: "Actions that may seem in poor taste do not necessarily rise to the level of violations of Texas law." People don't always want entertainment in good taste, but they almost always want entertainment that tastes good. Sorry, Charlie.

Sadly, an obnoxious misinterpretation of "tasting good" appears to be the overpowering idea that currently drives the market. When MTV was ramping up for the event (and yes, it's much more of an event than the tepid Madonna-Britney smooch ever was) the main angle was how shocking it was going to be, how it was going to "raise the bar". The implication was that they were going to do whatever the hell it took to keep your attention. Nobody ever said it was going to be GOOD, though, which is my primary criteria for paying attention to any entertainment for more than a few minutes. I don't go for shrill for shrill's sake, noisy for noisy's sake, or shiny for shiny's sake. That was why I was watching Looney Tunes while Janet's nipple jewelry was being exposed to the rest of the country. It's good for shock value, but honestly, what else ya got?

I end up going back to Cervantes on this one: "The fault does not lie with the public for demanding absurdities, but with those who cannot stage anything else."

However, I think I'll let the public have the last word:

Wade: "If only Justin had gone for two..."
Max: "Cuz it worked so well for John Fox. "