Metaphor's a hell of a drug

According to NPR's Morning Edition, the reason Michelle Bachman looked so crazy last night on CNN is that she was facing the right (as in to the right) camera instead of the left (as in correct for TV) camera.

The right camera was the webcam broadcasting to Tea Party nation over our beloved tubes. So to the Tea Party, she was eye to eye. To the rest of us, she was looking a little to her right.

Life, she is so sweet to offer us such as this to blog about.

Next week is Ninja versus Spartan

Adding: Yes, yes, orientalism, essentializing, and all that. I'm just saying.

Double Plus Addendum: YouTubeWard, Tylerjomamma -- who appears to share my refined tastes -- writes:

dam that was a gud fite better than last weeks i thot the viking was gna win wel my record is 1-1 i got the apache indian fite i won that one but this one was tough i had to give it the the viking,sux that he lost

These Futurama movies have been disappointing

There, I said it.

Ahem

Entered into the Blog of Record without further comment... for now.

Another sign of the pro-Obama times: An MTV exec says they're changing their reality shows: "Our shows are going to focus less on loud and silly hooks and more on young people proving themselves. These are themes that are consistent with the Obama generation." | via ben smith |

Really?

Let me see if I've got this straight. John McCain is a huckster, the caricature of Sarah Palin will do as well as the real thing for a national TV appearance the weekend before the election, and each and every one of the McCain campaign's arguments is a gimmick. Ok then.

Why are mommy and daddy fighting?

As of this morning, I no longer get NBC programming on my cable box. And neither do a few hundred thousand other Austin customers of Time Warner Cable. Apparently, the corporation who owns the local affiliate is engaged in brinkmanship with Time Warner over their long term contract. It's sad, really.

Sad, because neither can win. Even if they reach an agreement, and KXAN extracts a few extra million dollars from the TWC, both business models are headed for the landfills of history. And these antics are pushing a bunch of us to Hulu, iTunes, or worse, the 'rents. Or even worse, farther away from television altogether, accelerating their demise.

Anniversary

MSNBC is replaying their coverage from the morning of 9/11. I'm watching now and they've got an eyewitness to the first impact, and it's before the second, and I know that it's about to get much much much worse, and I can't turn away.

...maybe I should mention that this is the first time I'm seeing this. In 2001, when this happened, I was taking an early morning class, and anyway didn't have a television. I remember that one of my students stopped by my office hours at about 11am to ask if she could miss class. She wanted to try to get in touch with her brother, who worked at the World Trade Center. To this day, I'm shocked that she asked for permission.
'

Maybe 100 years

"Foolishly she continues to try to assert her control over the remote. This is a battle that will continue for a long time."

- John McCain, on control.

Bellman culture watch

Item: Mongol and Hellboy II are both excellent eye candy with annoying plots.

Item: Bud Light's new advertising slogan, "Endless refreshment from start to finish", describes a state of affairs which is not conceptually possible.

Item: "Real Vice Cops Uncut" is not the title of of a porn movie.

Belated Top Chef blogging

Watching the finale the first time, I found myself wondering who the buffoonish white dude dinner guest was. Turns out, he's Tim Zagat, famous for his Zagat Guide empire. Come to think of it, that's the sort of enterprise you'd expect to be founded by a buffoon.

Meetings

Lately I've taken to watching a lot of the Community Television Network. Of the four channels CTN operates, my favorite is 16, which bills itself as, "The meeting place...where Ann Arbor watches its City government in action."

I haven't seen a full fledged city council meeting yet, but have seen all manner of commissions and the odd advisory board. If I had to pick a favorite, I'd go with the Commission on Disability Issues. It's broadcast live the third Wednesday of every month and then rebroadcast the following Thursday and Saturday.

Sometimes the subject matter of the meeting is itself interesting -- this is most often true of the zoning board of appeals, I think -- but even when not, I find myself taking an interest in various aspects of meeting dynamics. I remember one meeting in particular where the idea was to create a set of rules for an upcoming festival. One participant suggested that they base the rules on one or another set of widely accepted guidelines. Another launched the principled objection that no attempt to establish adequate guidelines can ever succeed, and kept insisting that no guidelines should be consulted even when it became clear that everyone else disagreed. The Chair deftly resolved the matter by creating a subcommittee.

Relatedly, there was a time when I thought of meetings as an impediment to getting things done. More and more, I tend to think of meetings as a very important kind of work in their own right, and that having good productive meetings is a key component in the success of just about any cooperative endeavor.

We Have to Kill Again

Gasp by billybofh

We've blogged about the HBO drama the Wire before, but I wanted to share that I'm so glad McNulty is back in the starting line-up.

Mark Bowden's recent Atlantic article, the Angriest Man in Television, criticizes the series for dwelling on the negative aspects of Baltimore's ghetto... with all due respect to Mr. Bowden, it's a ghetto. How hard are we supposed to look for happiness and light?

As The Wire unveiled its fourth season in 2006, Jacob Weisberg of Slate, in a much-cited column, called it “the best TV show ever broadcast in America.” The New York Times, in an editorial (not a review, mind you) called the show Dickensian. I agree with both assessments. “Wire-world,” as Simon calls it, does for turn-of-the- millennium Baltimore what Dickens’s Bleak House does for mid-19th-century London. Dickens takes the byzantine bureaucracy of the law and the petty corruptions of the legal profession, borrows from the neighborhoods, manners, dress, and language of the Chancery courts and the Holborn district, and builds from them a world that breathes. Similarly, The Wire creates a vision of official Baltimore as a heavy, self-justified bureaucracy, gripped by its own byzantine logic and criminally unconcerned about the lives of ordinary people, who enter it at their own risk. One of the clever early conceits of the show was to juxtapose the organizational problems of the city police department with those of the powerful drug gang controlling trafficking in the city’s west-side slums. The heads of both organizations, official and criminal, wrestle with similar management and personnel issues, and resolve them with similarly cold self-interest. In both the department and the gang, the powerful exploit the weak, and within the ranks those who exhibit dedication, talent, and loyalty are usually punished for their efforts.

There are heroes in The Wire, but they’re flawed and battered. The show’s most exceptional police officers, detectives Jimmy McNulty and Lester Freamon, find their initiative and talent punished at almost every turn. Their determination to do good, original work disturbs the department’s upper echelons, where people are heavily invested in maintaining the status quo and in advancing their own careers. The clash repeatedly lands both of them in hot water—or cold water; at the end of the first season, the seasick-prone McNulty is banished to the city’s marine unit. What success the two attain against Baltimore’s most powerful criminals is partial, compromised, and achieved despite stubborn and often creative official resistance. |The Angriest Man in Television - Atlantic|

I love the Wire, but I can never figure out if I'm supposed to be rooting for the cops or the drug dealers.

So I just root for Omar instead.

Ok, maybe I shouldn't blog while drunk...

Eat this, scum!

The 10,000 previews I was lucky enough to see for Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles featured an actress who was too young to be Sarah Connor but who looked vaguely familiar. Now that I've had a chance to see the opening credits I see that the actress is Summer Glau, who you may remember as the crazy genius from Firefly. Glad to see that she's decided to stick with the genre.

My favorite piece of Terminator trivia, by the way, is that O.J. Simpson was originally considered for the role of the Terminator but was rejected because, "People would not have believed a nice guy like O.J. playing the part of a ruthless killer."

Addendum: They just did some time travel sending them to 2007 and I found myself thinking, "ah, so the show will end up being set in the not too distant future."

"Heroes" thread

Sorry for the geek out, but I'm missing my normal opportunities to chat about this while I am traveling, so here goes. As the kids say, SPOILERz ALERT:

ITEM: I totally saw the Kensei = Adam thing coming, the moment he swore eternal vengeance on Hiro. I'm just sayin'. Anyway, my next prediction is that Kensei turns out to be a hero after all. Why? Well, mostly because of bad writing. But also because, who else is going to cut out his own heart, which Kensei did in the story, except for some dude who can live forever?

ITEM: So, Kensei must be a Patrelli family ancestor, right? Cause Claire has the same ability...

ITEM: So, Peter took his new girlfriend to the future, and then traveled back to the present without her. That means, he can't change the future, because if he does, he erases the future in which she, uh, is. Am I right?

WSOP

I didn't get home from work in time to watch the penultimate episode. Maybe some good poker was played at that stage. But the last episode? Shit poker all the way through.

Are not my ways equal?

Greetings from the land of moderately priced digital cable!

• What the hell is broccolini? Also, Anthony Bourdain seems like kind of an asshole. So I guess he probably gets along great with Tom Coleccio.
  
• Speaking of Top Chef, this is fucked up.
  
• UFC is waaaaaaay better than WEC. But thanks for trying Versus. You done brung me through the wilderness.
  
• Did you know that David Lynch has had his name removed from the Dune credits? The film is now brought to you by Alan Smithee.
  
• Speaking of Alan Smithee, the free movie offerings on *On Demand* have really expanded since the last time I had access to the Digital Starter Package.
  
• Apparently the M*A*S*H revival is only taking place on Super Basic Cable. Who'd'a thunk?
  
• Don't be fooled by the lame advertising campaign. The women's World Cup is awesome.

Look past the volleyball

Greetings from the land of super basic cable! Like the rest of you, I've been swept up in the late night M*A*S*H revival. Sometimes I even use the flash back button on my remote to watch two episodes at once, though that only works when two channels happen to be simultaneously showing episodes with the same cast. You just can't integrate M*A*S*H circa Frank Burns with M*A*S*H circa Charles Emerson Winchester. No sir.

But here's something that's been bothering me. I distinctly remember that, in my childhood, Hawkeye subscribed to girlie magazines prominently featuring nude beach volleyball. As near as I can tell, though, no records of those magazines exist in the syndicated version of the show. This leads me to doubt my memory, so here's a question for all of you. Did those magazines exist in the original run, or did my adolescent mind conjure them up? Also, for the historians and cultural critics among you, I'd appreciate some information about the cultural phenomenon of nude volleyball girlie magazines.

Today is the day

CBS will be broadcasting a video game competition at high noon. I'm guessing that it'll be unwatchable. Because of CBS, not because of the watchability of video games. At any rate, I'd rather watch skateboarding.

Addenum: Yeah, it sucks. CBS is making the Olympic mistake. That is, they're trying to appeal to an audience that doesn't actually like the, uh, sport being covered. But those people have lives and won't tune in. On the other hand, anybody who actually plays the games that they're showing is going to be frustrated by the fact that CBS isn't showing enough of the game for you to be able to tell what's happening.

Double Plus Addendum: They have a panel of judges for Guitar Hero so that they can judge style. This is so unbearably, incredibly lame. Also, as a non-WOW player, that segment just made no sense, thus I declare the pandering to non-players to be a total and abject failure.

The Addendum to End All Addenda: For the record, live-blogging the network premiere of the World Series of Gaming does not even come close to being the geekiest thing I've done in the last week.

Last word: "The rockstar lifestyle is a lifestyle you live from the day you're born." -- nameless gamer, closing the broadcast and explaining that he'll be there at the next event, rocking.

Jughead changed my life, and then Goober changed it back

I don't know if there are any hipsters out there wearing one of these hats ironically, but I caught a few minutes of the Andy Griffith Show last night, and Goober wears it with the kind of sincerity usually reserved for a ball cap or a kippah. Perhaps this was meant to reveal something about Goober's character. For my part, I couldn't quite get my head around the choice.

Sopranos blogging

Even though it'll probably be a year or so before I get around to watching it, here's my prediction for the final episode: There will be ducks.