Tiny Money Land

YET ANOTHER DIM MEMORY: While I'm thinking of something new to add, here's another insta-rant from March of last year dug up from a Thread aPa forum thread, inspired by an article in the Irish Examiner about a study over the course of 15 years that concluded children who watch violent cartoons are more likely to become aggressive in young adulthood. Their suggestion: banning all animated violence, regardless of the intended target audience. On another day, I might've gone on about the hopelessness of childproofing the world, but I guess my butt was asleep, so I snapped in a different direction instead. Appropriate mood music: Billy Joel's "We Didn't Start The Fire"...

But of COURSE...it all comes back to animation.

The decline and fall of the nuclear family. The rising tide of urban and (God help us) suburban violence. Spousal and child abuse. Latchkey kid-ism. The ongoing cruelty of kids towards anybody who is different. The ongoing cruelty of kids towards anybody who is too much the same. Raising children to really believe that horseshit about how they're precious gems, and that they have special rights and gifts above and beyond everybody else just because they're richer/thinner/whiter/more Christian/more anything else. Lack of effective gun control. Watching grown people arguing and killing on the news every night for the rest of your life. Watching certain grown people never forgive or forget any of the tiniest trespasses against their persons or personalities. The gradual decline of real-world networking. Palming off the idea that the ends justify the means and screw the morals. Babies making babies. The inability of many grown people to take responsibility for their own actions instead of creating a culture of victimhood. A generally lame public education system. Falling SAT scores. Sleepless nights listening to your parents fight. Sleepless nights listening to the gunshots in the distance. Sleepless nights listening to the Art Bell Show. Not being read to enough. Being allowed to sleep in front of the television at single-digit ages. Smiley faces in Internet chatrooms. Playstation 2. Backyard wrestling. Anna Nicole Goddamn Smith.

You would be a fool and a Democrat to believe these are the actual problems that could affect the way children deal with the world they live in, and thus create screwed-up adults. These are the symptoms of the only real sickness, the one caused by old cartoons being endlessly repeated on cable networks, and that alone. Let's complain to our cable companies, and devote our entire energies towards driving these heinous animated monstrosities off the air, because once this single act is done, nirvana will dawn, boys and girls of all creeds will frolic in the open air teaching each other merry songs, nobody will ever kill or hate again (even Shiite Muslims), and best of all, THE TOILET WILL NEVER, EVER BACK UP AGAIN.

Television messed my mind up, but it was REAL LIFE that made me a freak.

(Annnnnnd SCENE...the thread's still on the message board at this writing, but on the off-chance that Delphi crashes one day and never comes back, it's good to have backups of the type of overheated prose that led me to blogdom in the first place. There's a full-fledged Anna Nicole rant buried somewhere in that message board, but it was such a nasty flameout, I think you should be spared...for now.)

(Another cheery sidebar: The Blogger spellchecker wanted to replace "gunshots" with "sunsets". Interesting substitution in the context.)  

AND WHILE I'M ON A ROLL TODAY: The Unh! Project, is closer in spirit to the Lileks family of pages than Gone And Forgotten but if you're looking for a collection of out-of-context gutteral moans from the comics, here's your damn page, punk.  

I'M SURE GLAD THAT'S OVER WITH: The drama surrounding Michael Moore's new documentary, Farenheit 9/11, is over; Bob and Harvey Weinstein themselves, the founders of Miramax, put up their own money to buy the rights to the film. The company they founded, with a little nudge from Disney, declined to distribute the film, and admitted that part of the equation was the status of the tax breaks they got from the Florida government, headed by George the Younger's brother. So now, it's just the matter of plugging in with another distributor and we're off to the races.

Farenheit sounds like a fascinating work, if only because I've heard that Moore modulates his famously strident tone so it doesn't get in the way of his message. It also won the Palm d'Or at Cannes, which is definitely not a stunt award, and doesn't look bad in a newspaper ad.

Sidebar: As I'm typing this, George W. is dedicating the World War Two Memorial, to appreciative applause. As long as he doesn't try to tie his crusade directly to the Great Crusade, I can deal with him today.  

ANOTHER SIGN OF MENTAL DISTURBANCE?: I was buying my mom a birthday card at a local drug store; some guy was running the checkout, For once, I had exact change, so in a moment I was gone.

Just a few minutes ago, I look at the receipt, and it says, in part, "YOUR CASHIER TODAY IS PATRICIA." I don't know if it was the 5 o'clock shadow, the deep voice, or the prominent Adam's apple, but he didn't really strike me as a Patricia. Maybe it was one of those "boy named Sue" situations, that he had a terminally absent dad that wanted him to be tough in bad situations, but he could collapse Patricia into Pat, which any longtime SNL watcher could tell you is an intensely unisex handle.

OR...maybe "Pat" is really a girl with something extra. Taking the recommended hormone treatments, she's getting ready to make the long drive back home, to spring her "surprise" on her perpetually in-the-dark parents. She hasn't been home in a long time, because of the treatments. The car is loaded to make the trip back for Memorial Day weekend, where there will be much screaming and fighting when she reveals a he. Tears will be shed. Dishes will be thrown. The big hiccup in that theory is that we're not in a town where that can be done without a bit of fuss. That's a damn shame, because this is the type of story the small press lit magazines eat up with a spoon.

OR...maybe it's a guy at the end of his shift that just used a co-worker's login code because he wanted to get his ass out in a hurry. Nah, couldn't be; that theory's no fun at all.

I don't know if that was the more unsettling bit or that the NC sales tax went up to 7% without my noticing it. It's only a temporary hike, I'm sure, just like the last one a few years back (that never went away), just until the current budget crisis is over (we should live so long). Either that, or until the Carolinas merge into one mega-suth'n-state. Take your pick.

AND ANOTHER THING: The Super Walmart is now selling mini doughnuts with watermelon flavored frosting now. They wanted to go for red, white, and blue frosting in different packages, and the only flavor they could come up with for red is watermelon?

They were sitting right next to a dozen full size for only a dollar more, so of course I went for the regular size. Take that, Atkins boy.  

ANOTHER CELEBRITY GOES INSANE! AND WE GET TO WATCH!: On the off chance you've been with me since the beginning, you might remember the jarring transition Jewel undertook around this time last year from overly earnest folk rocker to Just Another Dance Diva. You might remember I asked how long it would take her to burn out, considering that the new audience she was courting wasn't very interested in her words.

May 22nd was the day Jewel snapped.

Her first show at the Hampton Beach Ballroom Casino was, by all accounts, a solid set that sent everybody home happy; the second show sounds like one for the ages, for all the wrong reasons. Gloria Dion, who subscribes to the South Park maxim that in America, if something sucks you should get your money back, put it thus: "I saw her live in Boston and it was the greatest show I’ve ever been to. I don’t know if she was having a nervous breakdown or what. She told everyone to stop looking at her teeth and look at her breasts." The manager of radio station WERZ, which sponsored the debacle, obviously got an earful. "She said she saw a better audience at a barroom brawl and that all drinkers and smokers were sinners."

Her management, in full defense mode, said that sometimes Jewel slips a bit of cheeky humor into her performances, but it probably would've been nice if she'd slipped some music in, too; in the hour she was on, she only played four or five songs. Instead, she grumbled about Paxil and Zoloft for ten minutes, poked fun at fat folks and people's teeth, and told everybody to shut up after she asked for requests. For her encore, she came out and yodelled for a minute, then walked off. When they left, audience members screamed obscenities at her tour bus.

And that's how you flame out a career...

(Thanks to VH1's Best Week Ever blog for the heads-up)  

JUST FINISHED: Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them by Al Franken. As if you didn't think I'd get around to this eventually...

I'm going to spend just a brief amount of time on the book itself since, unlike the moldy back catalog tomes I've been reading for the past few years, I know for a fact that I'm the last one in the crowd to have read Lies. It's up to the same standard as Rush Limbaugh Is A Big Fat Idiot, hooking the reader with the acid digs at the right wing commentators and politicians, keeping them with the researched material (we'll get to the errata eventually).

A lot of the time, we get what I call "that's just Al" moments, the ones that can be traced back to the man who did a comedy sketch in the 1970s about having a brain tumor. The "Operation: Chickenhawk" and Supply Side Jesus stories come to mind, not to mention the misadventure at Bob Jones University. In those moments, Franken speaks strictly from the spleen, but sometimes, as in the chapter on the Paul Wellstone memorial, he does come from a more heartfelt place. Presumably, anybody who buys the book is paying for spleen, but it's good that he occasionally modulates the tone.

I've always said that those who think the current round of cranks is the most dishonest ever don't have a sense of history. The GOP senator in the 1930s who "debated" a selection of out-of-context recordings of FDR speeches comes to mind, not to mention the Czar's guy who wrote that "Elders of Zion" thing. O'Reilly, Coulter, and Hannity are lightweights in the rich history of reality twisters, which is small consolation for those who have to deal with them. A book like Lies might be considered the "comfort food" of political discourse, something to read to make yourself feel better after trying to decipher the latest speech from Bush the Younger, but it was still entertaining, thought provoking at times, and hopefully will encourage further reading.

And now, a few points on some things that have sprouted around the book...apart from the Fox News lawsuit, anyway. One of the most fascinating articles I've read lately was a right-wing commentator getting about forty pages into Al Franken's latest book when he hit a single "bent" statistic about the press coverage in the 2000 election that caused him to snap the book shut and never return to it. He then proceeds to write an essay slamming Franken on the first 40 pages of a book our fearless commentator never bothered to finish, which tells more about the article author than the book author. It's really a shame, since at that point, Al was just getting warmed up.

I would be remiss if I didn't point out a page, very cheerfully labeled FrankenLies.com, which points out a few slips in a "humorous" tone. To be fair, at least one point brought up (the "vandalism" of the White House by outgoing Clinton staffers) is one on which Al spends quite a bit of space, but while helpfully linking to the official report, they very studiously skip what I consider a key point: the 1993 transition from Bush (the elder) to Clinton involved "missing office signs and doorknobs, messages written inside desks, prank signs and messages, piles of furniture and equipment, and excessive trash left in offices." Of course, that's exactly what the report is investigating regarding the outgoing Clinton staffers. The report also mentions a 1981 article regarding some things the incoming Reagan staff found.

Neither Franken nor FrankenLies.com bother to mention any of this; I can understand why the Franken-buster didn't bring this up, since by the page's definition, the webmaster is only obliged to stick to the text, but Al, come on! It was right there! It's very easy for me, an amateur, to draw a conclusion that this type of low-minded horseplay goes on all the time, but because it was Clinton's people, the media made a "special case" out of it. You made the right attack for the wrong reason!

I can't help but notice another error Franken's roasted for is clearly a joke that somebody didn't get. A lot of that's going around in the country these days.

Oh yeah, check this site out, if you dare. The guy stopped updating it when he started WastedIrony.com, but it should give you a general idea of where the blonde demon is coming from. Where Coulter's Streisand fixation comes from, I have no idea.

AND WHILE I'M IN A SNOTTY MOOD: This would make a good tie-in with the Passion movie. And I'm evil now.  

SOMEBODY'S GOT A SPECIAL SUITE IN HELL WAITING FOR THEM: Do you remember how we were saying that the best episodes of American Idol were the audition shows, where we got to see the misfits that were turfed after only a few bars? The local WB affiliate has chosen Sunday afternoon to repeat Superstar, which could be termed Joe Schmoe's evil twin brother. In this bizarro Idol scenario, the good singers were hustled off, and the bad singers were fawned over.

The part that inspires the headline is in the execution of the plan: the truly good singers were disembowelled (Simon style) while the haplessly tone deaf were strung along, constantly teasing the moment when the other shoe drops and they're told it's all an elaborate joke. One of the good singers was sliced up so properly that she was driven to tears. And that's what passes for entertainment these days. Feh.

As usual, several "proper" journalists have leapt on this one as the decline of Western civilization, and as usual, I see this more as a symptom rather than the whole damn disease. The woman who took her clothes off to sing "True Colors" gets a thumbs-up, though, although not on performance grounds. Judge's comments: Too gimmicky. "I'm not saying get rid of the whole naked thing..."

The most offensive thing, though, is the news and web stories that imply this is "the show that proves we'll watch anything". Um, excuse me? They're being mighty presumptuous with that "we" bit. You know my rule: I'll watch or listen to anything once, but whether I come back for seconds is the true test. I've done my time on Superstar...no more, thank you.  

GROCER JACK, GET OFF YOUR BACK: I just heard for the first time "Excerpt From A Teenage Opera (Grocer Jack)", and now I see where Pete Townshend got the idea for his teenage operas. I understand that EMI pulled the plug when, after the second single from the project didn't take off, they realized how much money was being spent and choked on the bottom line, thus making A Teenage Opera one of the great lost albums of the rock era. And yeah, all things considered, I think everybody involved got smacked by the wrong end of a bad deal.

Just like Brian Wilson finishing Smile for a concert tour, it's hardly likely that when original composer/producer Mark Wirtz finished Teenage Opera (although he's calling it something else) thirty years later, he came up with the results he would've in 1967. Because of record company weirdness, we might not get a chance to find out, but there is an album out representing itself as Teenage Opera, which will do for now.  

YOU WRECKED MY REVEAL!: The plugs have been going on all week: "We can't tell you why, but Jerry Seinfeld returns to NBC Thursday!" Apparently, the online listings services can tell us why now...all that homecoming hype was over another one of those ten minute Seinfeld and Superman ads for American Express. They're entertaining and everything, but consider this: they've just run a set of teaser ads for the world premiere of ANOTHER AD. At least when the wizards of ads (*) did that for Madonna's two minute Pepsi plug, they were honest with us.

They're just damn lucky the first one was entertaining, or I'd start bitching about an commercial that was so long it shows up in the listings.

(* Footnote: I consider "wizard of ads" only a slightly less flaky position than "the Wizard of Id". Very fine edge there.)  

NOT QUITE A "JUST FINISHED", but I did manage to make it through Ralph Waldo Emerson's Nature, folded into Viking's Portable Emerson. The editor's introduction warns us that it's one of Emerson's most difficult works, and mmmmboy, but he nailed that one. I had to reread much of it several times, just to be sure I was getting the gist of it.

If the verbiage seems a bit thick in places, at least I can take comfort in the idea that some of Emerson's contemporary critics felt the same way, although I'm skeptical of a counterpoint that uses the word "perspicuity" in an argument for simplicity of phrase.

What Emerson was driving at in this work was that we should pay more attention to nature, that the natural world contained lessons for us if we could really learn how to perceive it. That's a thought I could agree with, although his definition of "nature" wouldn't satisfy anyone who currently calls themselves a naturalist. To Emerson, nature wasn't just what industry would call "raw material", but the end results of what was done with it. I could be wrong, but I'm assuming he thinks just as highly of a cedar tree and a cedar chest. Nature-related art also figures into the grand equation.

Anyway, this is the one with the classic "transparent eyeball" imagery, and like any philosophy, it is worth digging into even if you don't agree because of the questions it raises. Also, as I mentioned, it's only the beginning; this is the most formative phase of the Transcendental school of thought that swept through the pre-Civil War American literary community, especially in Emerson's New England home base. I'll need a bit of time to catch my breath before moving into the next phase, "The American Scholar". Light a candle for me, just in case.  

THE MYSTERY IS RESOLVED: I think I've figured out why Blogger was so sluggish...they changed the layout for the whole thing. If you have a blog at all, you've probably already noticed this. If you don't, click on the above link...and...um...keep in mind that what you're seeing didn't look like that last week. I'm just sayin', that's all...

HEY, IT'S KURT VONNEGUT! And hasn't completely lost his mind yet...well, no more than most of us these days. It's an editorial, though, so don't say I didn't warn you before you click here. If you never picked up one of his books, just keep in mind he's always sounded like that.

ANOTHER INDECIPHERABLE JOKE: The stat tracker is a remarkable thing, and points out other links I might've missed, but should I be worried about #132 on the Yahoo search list for...um...a familiar name?  

JUST MADE MY WEEKEND: At the end of a Prince special that just ended on BET, the guy who had been interviewing him throughout the night asked if the Charlie Murphy pickup game on The Chapelle Show actually happened. His Purpleness answered "Yes (...) I don't know about the rim-hangin' part, but the whoopin' happened."  

MEANINGLESS SPACE-FILLER: For the first time in several weeks, the Blogger controls loaded right up, without an extended waiting period. You know what that means...MORE COWBELL!

Also, I discovered the Delphi forum I set up as a pathetic tie-in with this page has reverted to a Basic forum, which means I can actually get to the control panel again. Hoo. Rah. I'd really like to make this the default for comments, since I found out some of the older comments some of you put up on HaloScan last summer just aren't there anymore.

More talk as I get around to it...  

NO MORE FRIENDS!: This is my only statement on the subject, since I never bothered to watch the show more than three or four times in the entire ten year run: you people are out of your frickin' minds...

For the past few years, I've been catching these almost operatic promos for Friends on NBC, toxic levels of overhype, painting everything these people did as monumental, tear jerking, and (God give me strength) MUST SEE TV. I sat there with my hand trying to keep my jaw from hitting the floor, and always I asked myself the same question: this is supposed to be a sitcom, isn't it? I imagined applying this fly-swatting-with-a-bazooka hype machine to one of my favorite classic sitcoms. Some bombastic movie score-style symphony to get us in the mood, maybe a soprano wailing wordlessly in the background...then, an all-too-familiar melodramatic announcer kicks in:

"On radio's most important night, it's a very special trip down to Dugan's Lake with Mayor LaTrivia, as the struggle to catch Old Muley continues. (sound effect of a fishing rod being cast) AND A TRIP TO THE HALL CLOSET THAT WILL LEAVE YOU BREATHLESS. (The orchestra reaches a crescendo, mixed in with the traditional mound of junk tumbling out, followed by a tiny bell.) Fibber McGee and Molly. Tuesday night at 9:30, 8:30 Central, on NBC. And stay tuned for President Roosevelt!"

Our ancestors were much simpler than we are today, so of course they would've laughed that crap right off the air and asked a more sensible question, "What's the quartet singing this week?" The real ad, if the copy writers ever decided to get that clever, would be more along the lines of "In these trying times, America turns to one program to bring it together...but enough about Jack Benny, tune into Fibber McGee..." There's a reason the British call it "light entertainment", you know. But I digress...

I missed the first years of Friends because I had a series of low-paying crappy jobs that kept me from the television on Thursday nights, and the last few years I've dodged on principle, due to the overinflated self-importance of the hype machine. $1 million per episode per cast member? No wonder they've plugged it like it was the second coming.

For those who bit the hook on all this, let me help you downshift your gears: It wasn't a television revolution. It wasn't a life-changing event. It was a goofy show about people who have perfect teeth, skin and hair, working at high-paying jobs in a city most of us will never live in. What's more, it's 30 minutes a week (22 minutes if you take out the ads) you get to have back now! Just because it's labelled Must See TV doesn't mean you have to watch. Get the hell over it.

Somebody else wrote an article taking a similar viewpoint to mine, but to be honest, she knows far too much about the show for someone who never watched it.

(As my "only statement" this will probably be revised when I have more time (and it actually was, late into the night)...as it is, I'm late for my latest crappy job...)  

NO SCREAMING THIS TIME, PLEASE: Howard Dean is trying to get a talk show.

I'm leaving a blank line to allow that to sink in.

Dean and Larry Lyttle, the guy who once headed up the company that gave us Judge Judy, have been shopping the idea around, and since Lyttle has a production deal with Paramount Domestic TV, that seems to be the obvious place to pick them up. Unfortunately, the most unsettling thing I've read on this potential show was straight from Lyttle's mouth (my emphasis, as always):

"The last thing we're going to talk about is politics. He'd look at things like: What happens if you lose a sibling? What about when you're victimized by not having health care?"

You've got a politician as your on-air man and he's not going to be talking about politics? I'm wondering if he's missed the point of having Dean in the first place. That's like hiring Bonnie Raitt and asking her to put away the guitar and juggle. I'd kind of hope you'd play to your host's strengths when you're casting around for a format, but I guess I'm 2,500 miles from Hollywood both mentally and physically.

If this show makes air the way it's laid out above, I give it six months tops before it goes out of production.

(Edit for analogy adjustment...)