Monologue

Thank you so much, folks! We've got a great show for you tonight!

Have you guys heard the new single by "Nickleback" called "Something in Your Mouth"?* You know, I'm a person who believes in free speech, and the idea that all people have a right to be heard, even if their message is unpopular. That being said, everyone involved with "Nickleback" should be JAILED.

But speaking of rock bands, somone recently pointed out to me that there's a book called "Metallica and Philosophy." I guess I'm not surprised. I learn an important philosophical lesson from every Metallica song. That lesson? Don't be a member of Metallica.

I guess you've all heard about Circuit City declaring bankruptcy? Turns out that now they'll have to close more stores than they first expected because the company couldn't find a corporate buyer. Supposedly they had one buyer interested, but it fell through when Circuit City started trying to sell them on an "extended warranty" plan.

You know, the Pope came under fire this week after he said that condoms don't help the spread of AIDS, and that distributing them only aggravates the problem. Sounds like the Bush administration's science advisors have found a new job! 

And speaking of politics, last year Ann Coulter broke her jaw and had to have it wired shut. Yeah, that's true. Now that she can talk again, she finally explained how it happened. Apparently you can only swallow so much conservative bulls*** at one time!

Oh, and you're not going to believe this. But on a lighter note, a few nights ago I actually heard a guy at a bar say "Come here often?" to a girl. You know, at that point, buddy, you might as well walk up to her and ask, "What's your favorite clichè?"

We've gotta take a quick commercial break folks, but we'll be right back. Fantastic show tonight! An angry mob of "Nickleback" fans will be joining us!

*I refuse to link to anything related to this for fear of exposing anyone to it. But suffice to say, yes, they really did.

The Candy Post

"The Learning Channel" is the new "MTV."

In much the way that people ask what MTV's programming has at all to do with music, we now have to ask how much "Learning" is going on in shows about tatoo parlors and people with lots of kids.*

In fact, they should really have to put "Learning" in quotation marks, even in the abbreviation: Tonight on T "L" C. *

Or maybe they could put a hyphen in the middle of "Learning," forcing the reader to sound it out. Making everyone say it as "The Learn-ing Channel," the way Ralph Wiggum might pronounce it, seems like an appropraite denegration.

For now, the Discovery Channel proper, T "L" C's parent station, remains a pretty good network. But it seems like only a matter of time before their other stations fall into the "Lifestyles" gutter.  Soon Discovery Health will be nothing but celebrity weightloss and more "look how many kids we have!" shows. The Military Channel will consiste of programs about custom Humvee's that celebrities drive., and of course, military families that have 6+ children. 

Animal Planet will, somehow, broadcast nothing but reality dating.

These people have made a living of selling info-tainment. It is their stated thesis. Yet their credibility is regularly called into question by flipping over to the Food Network, where one episode of "Good Eats" references science more frequently than T "L" C can manage in a day. 

*As of this writing, the top story on TLC's homepage is "What's Your Bridal Style?" Seriously.

A VH1 Counterpoint

There are two mysteries of humanity that I'll probably never understand.

The first one is why Kenny Rogers Roasters, though a commercial failure in the United States, is a huge success in the Philippines.  Apparently southern U.S. cuisine resonates strongly to the "Asian country with a strong Hispanic influence" palate.

The second mystery is why people retain any affection for the 1980's*.

Imagine for a moment that a small child brought you a picture he drew, but instead of the usual smiling stick figures, sunshine, and grass, it was a wash of bright neons and pastels-greens, pinks, and purples all jammed together.

You would take that kid to a psychologist, wouldn't you?

And you'd be right to do so. This is the aesthetic of a crazy person.

Combine those hideous colors with the 80's affinity for the screeching of a keyboard synthesizer and you've got quite a psychosis going.

It's no wonder, then, that there were so many good movies about time travel during the 80's. "The Terminator," "Back to the Future," "Flight of the Navigator," and "Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure" (yes, I consider that a good movie, even now) all represent a generation of creative minds who were thinking very hard about finding a way to get out of their decade.

How we finally shook free of the 80's is a matter for debate, but there seems to be a general consensus that the 80's lasted until about 1992. In that year, the rise of a grungier, minimalist idea finally toppled the shoulder-padded, tube-topped neon wall that had blotted out the Earth's sun for so long.

Some say that Nirvana's "Nevermind" signaled the cultural shift when it toppled Michael Jackson's "Dangerous," but personally I think it was the "Wayne's World" movie.  Here we have a film about two metal heads (grungy)  making a show in their basement (minimalist) who get swindled by a slick-haired producer (Rob Lowe portraying a typical clean cut  materialist).  It was a huge hit, transformed the pop-culture lexicon of the time, and maybe saved us from the 80's.

*Which is really best viewed as a recovery period from the 70's.

Milestones*

I don't retain any particular fondness for high school, but I also don't look back on it with the seething disdain that so many people seem to harbor. A big part of the reason is that I simply don't remember that time (I usually can't remember what I did more than a couple of days ago without some thought.)

I guess this is good, in a "Tiger or the Rocks" sort of way, because it suggests that I won't miss out on life's little "strawberries." I don't know if that's true, but I can tell you that it makes for awkward Monday morning conversation when someone asks what you did over the weekend and you genuinely don't know. (And then you have to convince everyone that your amnesia isn't chemically induced.)

But I can say that high school was definitely weird, and now I have the persepective to see why. 

It's a time of intense scrutiny.

It is a place where, if you knock over one of the poles on the rope-barrier for the lunch line, making it clang on the floor, the room will go quiet and 300 people will sarcastically applaud you. 

That's not a joke. That's something I saw happen. 

And that's a pretty typical response. When you take a group of people who's grip on social grace is somewhere in the "fumbling" range, put them together in a space that's roughly equivalent to Gilligan's Island, then begin sorting them into recognized groups, that tends to create a somewhat cuthroat environment.

So if I could give those in high school one piece of advice, it's this: 

In the real world, for the most part no one gives a crap about you. 

It may sound harsh, but it's actually quite liberating!

*Post 100

Sugar

Fiction isn't true, by very definition. But good fiction isn't exactly "false" either. Rather, stories represent a kind of distilled reality, where all the underlying elements of human life filter out though characters who, for whatever reason, seem really motivated to move their collective narrative along.

In other words, fictions works on the following basic principle: ignore the fact that most people are fairly non-confrontational.

And that's why I love it when people are unintentionally poetic. When, in normal conversation, someone will drop a line that's espectially profound, or so well composed that it seems thougtfully constructed.

One of my favorites was when a friend told me, "I know you don't understand, and I don't know that I can explain."

(I pause here to let you know that, although that line sounds melodramatic, it really wasn't in that context. We were talking about her buying a house.)

I wrote her an entire email back about how nice a line that was, what a good symmetry it executed (I know you . . . I don't know that I . . . ) but I'm pretty sure that she was only convinced of me being a crazy person who fixates on words.

But those poetic moments need not be so elegant. The one that really sticks with me came from a guy I knew who was always in debt. He had recently managed to pay off all his credit cards, and I wanted to know how. 

"Well, he said, it was simple. I took the $100-$200 a month I usually spend on crap, and put it towards my bills."*

That's not just poetic, folks, it's a damn revelation.

*He also once said, "Thank you, Sam, for coming along on the rolling, clanging freakshow that is my life." Remind me to someday name a band "Rolling Clanging Freakshow."

That's reimagining, itself

HBO's "Rome" series is really good. The cast is top-notch, the cinematography is high-quality, the story is . . . well it's been retold for two-thousand years, I think it's safe to say that the story has something going for it.

Aside from HBO's usual "here are the nipples you paid for, enjoy!" content, there's not much negative to say.

Yet I do have a big problem with "Rome," and it's this: At the end of Season 1, they kill off the most interesting character, Julius Caesar.  (Sorry if that's a spoiler for anyone, but as has been established, there's a statute of limitations on this kind of thing.)

The series does such a good job of establishing that character, understanding him not as a tyrant nor a savior, but just a complicated individual who did what he did because that's what his mind was built to do. 

And then they squander it all by having him get murdered.

And yes, I know that in a historical epic there's some expectation of adhering to what "actually" happened. But is that really important?

This story has been told so many times over so many years, what can one honestly expect to bring to the table? Most of the time, when you see a "fresh" take on an old work, it's just the same old thing set on, like, Mars or something. So it's the same story with a different backdrop.

If I'd been writing that first season of"Rome," I would have have looked down at the page, shrugged my shoulders and said, "you know what, screw it, he lives!"

Maybe he undoes the robe and he's got on armor on under there, like Doc Brown in "Back to the Future," and it turns out someone came from the future to warn him*. Or maybe he just takes 23 stab wounds in stride, cause he's JC and that's how he rolls.*

*"And the warning wasn't all they brought me! Check out my T-Rex!"

Digital Discontentment

Digital distribution has thrown a real wrench into our culture. And by that, I guess I mean it's thrown a virtual wrench, not a real one.

The people who make content for a living (music, movies, games, books) once used the physicality of their medium as a sort of control. The fact that you HAD to have a CD or a floppy disk to transfer content around was it's own sort of lock and key. The only thing they had to worry about was controlling access to those physical things.

And that's why mp3's scared the bejeezus out of the music industry for so very long. It meant the pirates no longer had to worry about things like inventory.

But as time goes on, content makers are realizing that not everyone is interested in keeping their Bittorrent client up to date and remembering to sort their search results by number of seeders, and that many of those people will pay money to NOT understand what the $&#* I just wrote.

What fascinates me, though, is the fallout I've seen on the consumer side. Just as the loss of physicality scared publishers, it scares a lot of consumers too. They don't trust the legal purchasing of digital content yet.

Now, as I sit mere feet away from a bag that contains my mp3 player, a electronic book reader that has built-in access to Amazon's e-book store, and a Nintendo DS that I'll soon trade in toward the new model that has downloadable game capability, I must admit that I'm not, erm . . . wassat called . . . eh . . . unbiased. I freely admit that I see the physical nature of media to be nothing but a quaint inconvenience.*

But just look at the two most common arguments against Digital Distribution, the ones I always hear when I talk to people about it:

"I don't like buying a digital copy because I don't feel like I really own the game."

"I like buying the box copy because I can hold it in my hand."

Isn't this strange? I mean, the whole idea is that the movie on the DVD, the words on the page, the music encoded onto the CD, THAT is what's valuable. But now that they're given a way to receive just the content itself, we find out that they view the physical elements as the valuable part. 

And these are people who keep spindles of CD's and DVD's right next to their printer. They KNOW those things aren't so valuable.

It's like people are mad because a digital copy means the publisher didn't have to do as much work.

*Also I am super-lazy, and I can download things without getting up.

"Whoopie! . . . Whoopie! . . . Whoopie!"

Tower Defense (or TD) is a subset of strategy video games. Where most tactical games would have you ordering units around on a map, TD instead asks you to place different kinds of towers - then throws waves of enemies at you to see if your towers can effectively wipe them out.

The purest expression of tower defense gameplay is the free flash game Desktop Tower Defense.

The idea of laying out towers and watching them shoot at enemies, just so you can process this data and figure out even better ways to lay out towers next time, may not sound all that "fun." But if you are a person who likes machines, who's mind siezes on complex problems that need solving, who has a very "systemic" way of thnking . . . and I pause here to rephrase that as "But if you are Sam" . . . then these games represent less of a "recreation" and more of a "danger to your health and productivity."

Like Double-Stuff Mint Oreos, I often suspect that the Tower Defense genre was created by the Universe as a way to keep me, personally, in check. Like a well-placed frost tower, these games slow my progress so I can be more effectively dealt with.*

And I guess it's working, because between Savage Moon:

And "Ninjatown"

Tower Defense games seem to be about all I'm playing lately.

*I wonder if the designers who work on pedestrian malls and other public areas enjoy TD games. Seems like a similar skillset, using the environment to control a horde. I like to imagine one of these people looking a map of a shopping mall's food court and thinking "We're getting too many people bunched up at the entrance, I'll have to install some Cannon Towe . . . I mean some railings.

And before you ask, no, it's not "cold"

Does anyone really eat cole slaw?

I guess they do, sometimes. I know I've seen people put it on barbecue sandwiches. But it sure seems like a lot of restaurants include a little foam cup of the stuff with every meal, and I can't remember the last time I saw one of those cups empty, a spork wedged triumphantly into it's base.

I feel bad throwing out food, but as with the stuffing I mentioned last week, I can only recognize one version of the dish, and that's my mothers's. So unless Cane's is willing to add some little chunks of apple to the mix, I'm not going to be won over.

I think the whole inclusion of slaw with fast food meals might just be a consumer-perception thing. On one level, one more item means more for your money, never mind that some cabbage and mayonnaise didn't exactly break Long John Silver's treasure chest. On another level, cabbage is a vegetable, which gives the whole thing a much more healthy, down-home vibe. And that's a comfort when your other side dish was likely fried in the same grease as the main course.

I wonder about the people that work in those restaurants, toiling to mix up a fresh batch of cole slaw everyday. Do they sit there, grinding up all that cabbage, thinking about how many cups of it are going to be thrown out? All that hard work just so that, maybe, one guy out of twenty will take a bite or two.*

*So I guess it's kinda like making an independent film.

The Original Post

Time to play Tribond! What do these things have in common?

1. Hot-Alpha-Under

A: They're all kinds of dogs. (Hot Dog, Alpha Dog, Underdog.)

2. Invitations-Credit Cards- nouns

A: It's too good, I can't spoil it.

3. The works of Shakespeare-Japanese Horror Films-Classic rock songs

A: All things that, when a remake of it comes out, people get super-mad.

It's not an agument I've ever understood. People talk about remakes like they're going to replace the original, and you won't be able to get anything but the remake anymore. And that scenario just doesn't happen (except with Star Wars). 

It's not heracy to do your own take on a previous work, because it's not scripture to begin with.

(Please note that actual scripture has gotten plenty of remakes, many of which have been well-received.)

There's just no reason to get angry about remakes.* I mean, I think my mother's Thanksgiving stuffing is the definitive version of THAT, but you don't see me getting riled up when someone buys some Stovetop.

*Unless they cast Keanu Reeves. I'll give you that one.