Saturday December 31, 2005
It Ain’t Me
Back when this blog was new, I reported that another Jim Hanas, a New Jersey teenager, had invaded my Google by repeatedly appearing on the Distinguished Honor Roll at Westfield High School. Now, according to a story in China Daily, there appears to be yet another Jim Hanas out there. So, before confusion reigns, let me make it clear that I am not the Jim Hanas who is “chief engineer at Raydant International Company, contracted to provide tsunami warning solutions” in southern Thailand.
One really has to nip these things in the bud.
Posted by jim at 02:37 PM || Comments
Three Little Dots: While I Was Out
Joe Queenan tries to manage his reading list. … Brendan Halpin talks Narnia with his nine-year-old daughter. … The year in bad science reporting. … Gawker steals my idea and fails—albeit for completely different reasons. Something to do with popularity. … I’m going to start tastefully experimenting with Google Adsense in the New Year. That’s my resolution. As you may have gathered, I don’t actually have a job.
Posted by jim at 05:59 AM || Comments
Friday December 30, 2005
Bungles No More
There used to be a joke, current among Ohioans, that went like this: Why can’t Columbus get an NFL franchise? Because then Cincinnati would want one, too. I was back in Cincinnati, where I grew up, for the holidays, and it’s nice to see that the town has, in fact, gotten a football team. They used to have one, way back in 1989. That team made it to the Super Bowl, then went on to be the worst team of the ’90s and failed to make the playoffs for 15 years. Until now.
I hadn’t seen them play all season—since New York viewers are fed the Jets no matter how hopeless they become—but I got to see them play last Saturday. They lost, of course, to the pathetic Buffalo Bills, but they still have a playoff berth, a respected coach, a star quarterback, a flamboyant wide receiver, and a theme song and video starring native son Bootsy Collins. Oh yeah. P-Funk in the house. My dad has the ringtone on his phone. Bring on the Colts.
Posted by jim at 03:01 PM || Comments
Wednesday December 21, 2005
War On, Christmas!
Alexandra and I will be traveling for the holidays—first to Kentucky, then to Vermont—so posting might slow, perhaps even to a stop. Feel free to pass the time by adding my feed to your RSS reader, clicking around on my bio page, or checking in on any of these fine blogs:
#1 Hit Song: various topics
Go Flock Yourself: rants about Web 2.0 hype
The Flypaper Theory: Southern-fried politics
Heaneyland!: various topics
Maud Newton: books
The Painted Ground: pictures of sidewalk graffiti
Panopticist: media gags and unusual finds
Radosh.net: various topics
A Special Way of Being Afraid: various topics
Lost Remote: TV, baby!
The Poor Man: hilarious bile from the Left
Posted by jim at 04:31 AM || Comments
Clouded Judgment
Earlier, I joined Go Flock Yourself in ridiculing tag clouds as useless. But that was before I saw the cloud for this site at Technorati. Like Narcissus, I could not look away. Since going freelance in September, I have resisted the (rather prudent) urge to narrow the focus of this blog to a niche topic like advertising or the FCC or something else. That’s the best way to build traffic, apparently, but it also sounds a little too much like work. Vertical media is a job. Hobbies, on the other hand, allow for frequent napping. As a result, I have a difficult time explaining what this blog is about. The cloud, however, nails it. (Here’s a large view.) It’s like a look in the mirror. A long, cold, hard look.
Posted by jim at 04:07 AM || Comments
Tuesday December 20, 2005
Three Little Dots: Cut and Run Edition
Bush quietly switches sides in the War on Christmas. … Merriam- Webster has announced the top ten words of 2005, based on lookups on its website. “Integrity,” “insipid,” “inept,” “levee.” They’re all here. [via] … According to the National Enquirer, as cited by Slate, Teri Hatcher “has never engaged in sexual relations with men in a van parked on her property, nor does she leave her child alone in her house while having ‘steamy romps’ with men in a ‘passion wagon.’” But I know what I saw.
Posted by jim at 03:00 PM || Comments
Ms. Subways Weighs In on the Strike
Visit Gothamist for the latest coverage of the NYC transit strike. Click here for Ms. Subways’ previous advice.
Posted by jim at 10:14 AM || Comments
It Sounds Like a Modem Connecting
Speaking of the crummy technology we have endured, Andrew Hearst has posted his notes from a sixth-grade class presentation he gave about his TRS-80 computer back in 1980. They’re awesome—especially to anyone who ever put a data cassette in a tape deck to find out what data “sounds like.”
I saw Andrew re-create this presentation at the Little Gray Books lecture series a few years ago, and while he didn’t get the laughs he got for his middle school oral report on the Led Zeppelin bio Hammer of the Gods, the TRS-80 speech was almost profound. 1980 just wasn’t that long ago. I’m about Andrew’s age and every day I work in a medium that didn’t even exist when I was in college. Here’s young Andrew on data storage:
Another way to save and/or load in programs is with floppy disks, which are square disks that are floppy. Instead of using a tape recorder, though, you use what’s called a disk drive, which is a box that you slide the disk into. It is much, much faster than using tapes.
Yes. Much faster.
Posted by jim at 08:05 AM || Comments
A Word About My Blogroll
I’ve been doing some upgrades around here. There’s the new bio page, and I just sorted my blogroll into categories. There’s been some talk lately about doing away with blogrolls. With that in the air, I felt obliged to make mine useful—useful to readers, useful to people who link here, useful to those who are on it, and useful to me.
My blogroll consists of everything I’m subscribed to via Bloglines, so I actually read everything that’s on it. If I stop reading something, I unsubscribe and it disappears from the blogroll. When someone links to me, I almost always subscribe to their feed for a while and see if I like it. If I do, it stays.
For the new year, I’m going to formalize that process. If you link here—or participate in the comments on this site—I’ll add you to a section of my blogroll called “Recent Referrers” (presuming you’re not already on my blogroll), which is toward the top of the right sidebar. I hope that positioning sends you some traffic to reward your exquisitely good taste. And, obviously, I’ll actually be reading your blog. The limit over there, however, will be five links, so when a new referrer comes in, I’ll either have to promote a link or get rid of one, which will be done as needed.
That’s it. Hopefully this will mean links for me, exposure for referrers, and a list of links that I can honestly recommend reading regularly, because I read them regularly. So if you want me to check out your blog, link here and I will. Simple.
Posted by jim at 01:57 AM || Comments
Monday December 19, 2005
Three Little Dots: A Broken Clock and All That Edition
SNL produces three minutes of funny and the whole blogosphere loses its mind. I’ve continued watching the show for years—possibly because of this phenomenon—and have gotten my DVR-aided viewing time down to just under nine minutes. If Lorne Michaels is smart, he will now leave town. … Here’s a list of movies ranked by occurrences of the word “fuck.” [via] … Perhaps sensing its future importance, Michigan and Ohio once waged war over Toledo, the birthplace of Katie Holmes.
Posted by jim at 04:28 PM || Comments
Priorities
While some New Orleans residents wonder when they’ll have electricity and phone service, Nielsen and TV Week address a more serious concern: Will the city be able to participate in February sweeps? There are still so many children to train.
Posted by jim at 06:13 AM || Comments
Sunday December 18, 2005
Title Tales
Language Log tries out the Lulu Titlescorer—which estimates a book’s commercial potential based on its title—and finds out that The Da Vinci Code had less of a chance of becoming a bestseller than Russell and Whitehead’s Principia Mathematica. Whatever …
I used it to adjudicate Ben Marcus’ recent criticisms of Jonathan Franzen and found that, sure enough, Notable American Women had a better chance at success, title-wise, than The Corrections—41.9 percent to 35.9 percent—which might explain why Marcus is so disappointed. (Of course, The Bible only scores 35.9 percent as a title, too. The rest is all Oprah.)
Posted by jim at 11:31 AM || Comments
Three’s Company
What’s up with the Bono sandwich on Time’s “Persons of the Year” cover?
Is there something we should know—are Bill and Melinda Gates about to go all Nick and Jessica on us—or was this just the only way to visually balance the U2 frontman’s gigantic elfin noggin?
Just wondering.
Posted by jim at 10:17 AM || Comments
Friday December 16, 2005
Our F#*@ing Children Are Watching
You might have expected the website of the Parents Television Council—Brent Bozell’s crusading anti-indecency organization—to be kid-safe and family-friendly. It turns out, however, that it’s positively filthy. Here are a few choice words that appear on the site for all to see:
fuck, shit, asshole, motherfucker, pussy, tits, cum, bitch, cocksucker, cock, ass, bitch, piss, suck, whore, balls, crap, bastard, screw, son of a bitch, dildo
TIP: Use the site’s handy search box (upper left) to search for even more potty talk.
Posted by jim at 11:20 AM || Comments
Above the Law
You have to think that the folks at New York agency Kaplan Thaler knew that they were making a play on words in their recent campaign for Marshalls, they just didn’t understand what they were making a play of words on. They couldn’t have, right? “Martial law,” according to Webster’s, is “the law administered by military forces that is invoked by a government in an emergency when the civilian law enforcement agencies are unable to maintain public order and safety.” Kind of like what we’ve got in Iraq. And this makes me want to shop for bargains how?
“Marshalls Plan” would have made a happier—if no less ridiculous—tagline.
UPDATE: Whoops. Forgot to mention this story I found in the late, great Weekly Week, which made hay of the Marshalls/martial law play way back in 1999.
Posted by jim at 02:14 AM || Comments
Thursday December 15, 2005
Three Little Dots: That is So Unfair Edition
Have you been looking for some scientific evidence that President Bush speaks like a moody teenage girl? You’re in luck. … What’s next? WikiDoctor? … Check out these codependency comix from the past. … Freak off a leash Peter Braunstein has been spotted in my old stomping ground—Memphis, Tennessee.
Posted by jim at 10:14 PM || Comments
Mystery Solved!
You may have noticed that the designer behind the mysterious “New Ephemera” travel pamphlet has revealed herself in comments. She is Amanda Spielman, who owns a site called Graphomanic. Spielman stresses that the site is way out of date, but I still like it. Thanks for a few days of puzzlement.
Posted by jim at 01:11 AM || Comments
Wednesday December 14, 2005
Radar No More
It was fun while it lasted. Radar, where I was a contributing editor, has folded. More from BusinessWeek, the New York Times, and editor in chief Maer Roshan, who says he’s looking for investors to save the magazine.
Posted by jim at 08:37 PM || Comments
Two Degrees of Scooter Libby
Well, Republican FCC commissioner Kathleen Abernathy’s last day was Friday. This week, new Republican commissioner Deborah Taylor Tate is gliding through confirmation hearings, while Democratic commissioner Michael Copps used his hearings (for a second term) as an opportunity to call for a crackdown on cable indecency. Cable companies have been scrambling to avert such a crackdown—foreshadowed by FCC chairman Kevin Martin’s recent tough talk to the Senate—by unveiling family-friendly subscription tiers. Still, the big news will be when Bush appoints a fifth commissoner. I run to my computer every morning to see if he has.
While working on something unrelated, however, I did run across an interesting fact about Chairman Martin—a connection to Scooter Libby and Plamegate. As I’ve mentioned before, Martin earned his stripes with the Bushies during the 2000 Florida recount, and with the Parents Television Council for being tough on indecency. But his Harvard law sweetheart and wife, Catherine Martin, also works for Bush, and she used to work for Dick Cheney, as Assistant to the Vice President for Public Affairs. In fact, according to the Washington Post, “apart from Libby, only press aide Catherine Martin is known to have accompanied Cheney,” on a 2003 flight from Norfolk to Washington, where Libby discussed strategies for responding to inquiries about administration critic Joseph Wilson. Libby had his famous chat with Time’s Matthew Cooper later that day.
She also makes an appearance, by title, in the Libby indictment, which reports that “not earlier than June 2003, but on or before July 8, 2003, the Assistant to the Vice President for Public Affairs learned from another government official that Wilson’s wife worked at the CIA, and advised Libby of this information.”
What does this have to do with the FCC or her husband? Nothing. (I mean, who would try to discredit a man by appealing to the occupation or actions of his spouse?) But I’d still love to be a fly on the wall at Chez Martin.
UPDATE:: After I posted this, I just couldn’t believe that this connection had never been noted before. I was right, but not by much. TV Week mentioned it in their gossip section on October 24 (in an item titled “One Degree of Separation”), while RCR Wireless News (another pub put out by Crain, my former employer) alluded to it on November 7. But that’s all Nexis turns up.
Posted by jim at 03:30 PM || Comments
Die, AD, Die!
The Hollywood Reporter says Showtime is looking at picking up Arrested Development. After two seasons of near extinction (and constant hand wringing) AD has become like the Terry Schiavo of TV shows—and we’re the Republicans! May the record reflect that I’m changing my vote. Let nature take its course.
Posted by jim at 02:14 PM || Comments
Tuesday December 13, 2005
Three Little Dots: Steal This Book Edition
Friend and Boring Boring co-conspirator Francis is offering his very funny Holy Tango of Literature—in which he answers the too rarely asked question, “What if poets and playwrights wrote works whose titles were anagrams of their names?”—as a free download. You should go download it. No, I insist. … Regret the Error rounds up The Year in Media Errors and Corrections, and the great “toothing” hoax— which broke (or, rather, broke apart) right here—made the list as “Best Hoax.” … A cached version of my first blog recently washed up on Google. You’ll probably need the Zoomy plugin to read its tiny, tiny text. Before that, I built a blog sort of thing with my friend Pat. It had frames, with a big gray scrollbar down the middle of the page and everything. I loved those frames. I really did. The internet’s finally old enough that we can look back and see ourselves wearing embarassing pants and bad haircuts. A reminder: All of this will look stupid much sooner than you think.
Posted by jim at 01:37 PM || Comments
Call for Entries
I wanted to make sure you ad industry go-getters didn’t miss this item. It was buried way down deep in yesterday’s Times. (Stuart Elliott ignored it completely, as usual.):
An insurgent group, the Victorious Army Group, has extended a deadline for a Web design contest, according to an Internet posting. The group has set a Jan. 15 deadline for submissions of a design “worthy of the group’s reputation and the reputation of the jihad and the mujahedeen,” according to a translation provided by the SITE Institute, which monitors jihadist messages.
The winner is promised “God’s blessings” and the opportunity to fire three long-range rockets at an American military base.
It’s no Cannes Lion, but it will probably look better in your book than, say, an Addy. (And it does come with some serious hardware.)
Posted by jim at 01:16 AM || Comments
Sunday December 11, 2005
Museum of Jurassic Vacations
Our friend Rose has made a wonderful find. She was on the subway recently when a woman passed through the car, placing pamphlets on empty seats. Rose expected them to be religious tracts, but she picked one up and discovered something more mysterious: a travel brochure for an imaginary destination called New Ephemera.
The “City of Fleeting Fulfillment”—as the brochure calls it—sits near the Gulf of Water in the Sea of Enumeration (here is a larger map). It is apparently a mecca for the literate, since its original motto translates from the Latin as “people who don’t read can’t be trusted.” The city has seen unrest only once—during the Five Week War of 1987, the details of which are not provided.
All of this is played exquisitely straight. The brochure provides no web address and nothing turns up in Google. There’s just a phone number for the New Ephemera Visitor’s Bureau, which I have now called. I’ll let you know if I find out what it’s all about.
Posted by jim at 06:18 PM || Comments
Saturday December 10, 2005
It’s All About Me
Although, for once, that’s appropriate. After maintaining this blog for a year and a half, I finally got around to putting up a bio page. There, you’ll find some background, a photo of borderline quality (shown), my favorite blog posts of 2005 (‘tis the season), and links to some things I’ve written or worked on, dating back to my days in Memphis. Enjoy or ignore as needed.
Posted by jim at 10:06 PM || Comments
Three Little Dots: Weekend Edition
Noel Gallagher blasts Jack White for agreeing to do a song for Coca-Cola. He also says White looks like “Zorro on doughnuts.” Now, who’s Noel Gallagher again? [via] … You really must listen to Jonathan Coulton’s song “Furry Old Lobster.” You must. … The FCC wants to let people choose their channels. How about letting people choose their shows? [via]
Posted by jim at 09:16 AM || Comments
Friday December 09, 2005
Speak of the Devil
Well, what have we here? Just as we were discussing the hackery of Sofia Coppola, here comes a teaser for Marie-Antoinette, which I believe—without knowing anything about it, mind you—will be awful. This advance clip is coyly (too coyly?) set to New Order’s “Age of Consent,” although the footage doesn’t suggest anything so postmodern. We do, however, get to see this movie’s “underwear scene.” If the film’s a success, all articles will be required to discuss how Kiki Dunst didn’t want to be filmed naked behind a fan but changed her mind after Ms. Coppola ripped off her own clothes and modeled the pose. Because that, my friends, is how you win an Oscar for screenwriting.
[All of this, except the bad attitude, via kop-e-kat. Kop also links to a trailer for Michael Winterbottom’s (24 Hour Party People) adaptation of Tristram Shandy, which I expect to be great. Can’t seem to get the trailer to play, however.]
Posted by jim at 09:51 AM || Comments
The Redbook Curse Knows No Bounds
It’s coming from inside the magazine. In April 2002, Christina Applegate talked to Redbook about married life, panting:
Johnathon and I lived together before we married, so we’re used to each other. But marriage has allowed us to relax and enjoy that feeling of complete security.
“Security” as in “social” or, perhaps, “Homeland.” The pair are getting a divorce, presumably over irreconcilable spellings of Mr. Applegate’s name.
Posted by jim at 04:32 AM || Comments
Thursday December 08, 2005
Three Little Dots: Take Your Lumps Edition
Is the Black Eyed Peas single “My Humps” the worst song ever recorded? I’ll buy that. [via] … Vance Packard was an optimist, according to Harry Shearer. … Coke’s new global ad slogan is “Welcome to the Coke Side of Life”? I may have given Wieden + Kennedy too much time. … Disney is offering cash and prizes to pastors who work Narnia into their sermons. No kidding, C.S. Lewis. [via]
Posted by jim at 09:28 AM || Comments
We’ll Always Have Adidas
A completely unreliable source reports—or, rather, just mentions in passing—that director Spike Jonze and rocker Karen O. are no longer a couple. Poor kids. At least they got to immortalize their relationship in an advertisement for a global sports apparel manufacturer. Watch it, one last time, and think of them. And to think, if they’d held out just a few more months they could have mocked Sofia Coppola’s Marie-Antoinette together. I don’t see how that movie can possibly be any good.
Posted by jim at 08:47 AM || Comments
Is It Ok to TV in Public?
The telecoms love to hype mobile TV. The analysts I’ve talked to are more than a little skeptical, and so am I—although I have to admit 800K at $1.99 doesn’t sound too shabby. But have you seen those people in that Samsung commercial, just lying around like a bunch of junkies? “The world is your living room,” the spot promises, but is it? Can it ever be? I’ve promoted the following question, posed by my good friend Pat, from comments. It gets at one good reason mobile TV might not catch on: Shame. He writes:
It hadn’t occurred to me that the problem with cellphone TV is that cellphones aren’t TVs. That’s an elegant analysis and probably true. But I was thinking that the imminent failure of this particular media vector would be due mostly to potential users’ fears of the explicit geeky sadness of doing something like sitting on the bus watching Friends on your iPod or cellphone. It seems to me that all of the other things we do while in public that save us from interacting are actually ways of interacting, albeit, dysfunctionally, by ignoring each other for good reasons.
We began by reading, which is a defensibly noble pursuit. We weren’t ignoring each other as such, we were just reading an important article/comic book/cheesecake publication and thus projecting an image of ourselves as well read/cool/ horny. Then transistor radios arrived on the scene. (“I’m not ignoring you, I’m just into this very important baseball game. As you can see, I am a fan.”) Then portable private music systems came along and, like the guy in the commercial, we all could have our own soundtrack. (“It’s not that I’m ignoring you, it’s just that this is the movie of my life not yours. You’re just in it.”) And now we’re all on our phones or snapping pictures of the dilapidation all around us or text messaging our possies or blogging about apparitions of Jesus and Mary in various foods, so we’re just really busy doing important stuff, not intentionally ignoring each other.
But you see, I think deep down inside we all know that watching TV, even good TV, is a little shameful. Being immediately good at watching TV is an evolutionary adaptation that was in place for us before the environment that the adaptation suited even existed, like our weakness for refined sugar or cocaine. And at some level we are aware of this quality that TV has, that it fits our brains like a key in a lock, and this makes us a little guilty about it. It’s too good to be good. And so I guess I’m wondering, are a lot of people going to be comfortable with being seen getting a fix in public?
Posted by jim at 12:57 AM || Comments
Wednesday December 07, 2005
Three Little Dots: Save It For Later Edition
Researchers are looking for a cure for procrastination, even though everybody knows it’s gin. … The Boston Globe commits a faux pas. … Ford won’t be advertising in gay pubs anymore. Why? Because Donald Wildmon doesn’t want them to. … Some churches are closing this Christmas because the holiday falls on a Sunday. No kidding, Kierkegaard.
Posted by jim at 11:02 AM || Comments
The Passion of CNN
I enjoy CNN kitsch as much as the next weirdo, but could someone tell me why this sectarian geegaw is for sale—in several different styles—at the Inside CNN store in the Time Warner Center? Is it a) to fend off the Red State advances of Fox News, b) a plot to take $5.99 off traveling yokels, or c) an effort to inoculate visitors against the vampiric magnetism of Anderson Cooper before they embark on the studio tour?
[Thanks, as always, to Hanasiana’s bargain shopper Alexandra, who spotted and procured this artifact.]
Posted by jim at 10:48 AM || Comments
Tuesday December 06, 2005
Three Little Dots: I’ve Been Wrong Before Edition
So Kurt was talking to Lewis—just not about a job. … Tyson Foods practices faith-based capitalism by putting chaplains in its plants and prayer booklets on its website. … Our good friend Rahul Mehta just earned an honorable mention, for his story “The Better Person,” in the 2005 Zoetrope: All-Story Short Fiction Contest. Hooray for Rahul.
Posted by jim at 09:46 AM || Comments
Monday December 05, 2005
Curse Claims Another Couple?
Has the Redbook curse claimed yet another happy Hollywood couple? Radar reports that the 11-year marriage of Heather Locklear and Richie Sambora might be unraveling. Given the experience of former Redbook cover subjects Nick and Jessica (March 2004), Brad and Denise (February 2005), and Jennifer Aniston (June 2003), this news will hardly come as a surprise to students of the curse. Locklear’s cover (October 2001) did tempt the Fates, after all, by making explicit reference to her “happy marriage.”
Posted by jim at 05:36 PM || Comments
Saturday December 03, 2005
The TOC of Broken Dreams
Alexandra just brought home a copy of a book called Literary Agents: A Writer’s Introduction. She found it in the street, complete with notations made by its previous owner. Here is the table of contents. Did this person succeed? Did they give up? In any case, I can relate.
Posted by jim at 04:43 PM || Comments
Friday December 02, 2005
CBS Still Smells Like Old People
November sweeps is over and the headline is that CBS had the most viewers overall and fought ABC to a tie among 18- to 49-year-olds. And although CBS took that demo last November as well, I can’t beat the feeling that the Tiffany Network is the same as it ever was—my grandpa’s network, stodgy and square. Whatever the numbers, CBS—which brought us such shows as Touched by an Angel and Murder, She Wrote—still smells like old people.
Let me try to explain. Part of it is obvious. A lot of the network’s recent success was tied to the departed Everybody Loves Raymond, a multi-generational sitcom set in suburban New York. It was pretty much like that other CBS hit, All in the Family, which my grandfather watched growing up. It might have eventually won critics over, but it never felt young. Survivor, I suppose, is neutral for my purposes. CBS deserves whatever booty it can bank for ushering in the reality boom—for good or ill—but it’s worth noting that the show did make a grouchy septuagenarian something of a star. Anyway …
What I really want to talk about is CSI. The show’s variants held two of the top 10 slots last week with indistinguishable counterparts Cold Case and Without a Trace grabbing another two. Like those Cadillac commercials set to Led Zeppelin, CSI feels like a 49-year-old’s idea of what an 18-year-old (or a 36-year-old, like me) might like. In our youth-driven culture, that’s bound to draw some older folks who think they’re down with the kids, but what about the kids? I hope the kids know better.
From the opening strains of “Who Are You?” to the grainy, Fincheresque flashbacks, the whole thing feels like a 10-year-old music video. And, for a crime show, it is surprisingly unseedy. The CSIs coil up in an antiseptic, dimly lit lair straight out of Minority Report as hip-hop and heavy metal tracks back the execution of their heavily montaged experiments. The show poses as a police procedural, but really it’s not. Solutions are plucked, Star Trek-style, from scientific brainstorms, the makings of which have been concealed from the viewer. And the cops don’t seem to know anything. One recent episode featured a man with a genetic disorder who literally ate himself to death. The trail led to a competitive eating event sponsored by the E.X.E.F.—the “Extreme Eating Federation.” The promoter wore a trucker cap that looked like the initials had been stamped on it at the mall. The cops were totally amazed by what they saw at the event, like they’d never seen CNN on the Fourth of July. And this gap wasn’t played for camp. It was supposed to be realism.
When I was teenager, there was a term going around based on a semi-famous episode of Quincy (an NBC show), in which some punk rockers got into trouble. The caricatures of the punks were so bad—yet treated so seriously by Jack Klugman—that obvious posers (like myself, no doubt) became known, derisively, as “Quincy punks.” I mean, can you imagine Lenny Briscoe (God rest his soul), being anything but bored by a competitive eating contest? Law & Order, at least early on, reeked with a realism to which CSI doesn’t even seem to aspire. Briscoe and company had seen everything and they didn’t have time to stop and explain it to you.
The fact is, Jessica Fletcher could arrive in Gil Grissom’s office next week, babbling about some plot she’d stumbled into, and the audience wouldn’t blink. If Briscoe showed up, however, the CSI set would fall down around him. Grissom would be left standing there as parody, as cinematically credible as Fred Flintsone.
Posted by jim at 10:36 AM || Comments
The Techiest Generation
I was having a conversation with a trendspotter this week, and we were talking about how the younger generation—Gen Y or Millennials or whatever—are comfortable with technology and demand that it be convenient and easy to use. Then she and I, both Gen Xers, had to laugh. Perhaps they’re like that because most of the technology they’ve grown up with, you know, works.
After the conversation, I looked around my office and realized, with some surprise, that most of my technology actually does work. My three-year-old Windows XP desktop, my smartphone, my DVR, my CD burner. They’re all pretty reliable. While just five years ago I treated any functioning installation of Windows 98 like a delicate house of cards that might crash at any moment, today I install and uninstall programs with abandon and without disaster. I can’t remember the last time I had one of those dreaded “conflicts,” a formerly standard Windows feature that meant it didn’t work and no one knew why.
This dawned on me as it only could on a Gen Xer, because—I realized—we’ve been fighting bad technology our whole lives. I imagined what it would have been like to have grown up in this new world—the world of reliability. I would be comfortable with technology—and demand easy solutions—too.
Think about the crummy technology today’s 18-year-olds have never dealt with. They’ve never had to program a VCR or search for the program they recorded once they get home—perhaps, as was often the case, to find that it is not there. They’ve never had to cue up a blank tape with their finger or spend hours making a mix only to find that the last song doesn’t quite fit. They’ve never had to respool a cassette with a pen after it’s been eaten by their tape deck or spend minutes going back and forth, back and forth, looking for their favorite song. They have never used a Lynx browser or experienced a dropped dial-up connection or tried to get anything done on a BBS or attempted to remotely retrieve messages from an analog answering machine or carried a stack of 5ΒΌ-inch floppies to the campus computer lab just to have them refused, one by one, by the giant metal drives of a TRS-80. It is possible, though hard to believe, that they have never, ever experienced the Blue Screen of Death. (Can XP even produce such a screen? Someone must know.) These kids, can they even begin to understand what humiliation, and data loss, we used to suffer at the hands of CTRL+ALT+DEL?
I hate them. I really do.
Posted by jim at 01:20 AM || Comments
Thursday December 01, 2005
Party Time
The Land-Grant College Review—which kindly published a story of mine in issue #2—is hosting a party Saturday night at New York’s Lakeside Lounge to celebrate the existence of issue #3. That issue includes stories by Frederick Barthelme, Kenneth Bernard, Lewis Buzbee, Brock Clarke, Evan Lavender-Smith, Padgett Powell, Joan Silber, Terese Svoboda, Mary Swan, and Diane Williams. The festivities will follow longstanding LGCR tradition be featuring absolutely no readings.
Posted by jim at 10:12 PM || Comments
Three Little Dots: The Revolution Will Not Be Televised (Not on This Tiny Screen) Edition
Proving that the Kenneth Tomlinson-leveraged, Paul Gigot-hosted Journal Editorial Report was always all about balance, it’s been picked up by Fox News. … It seems that no one—not tweens, not hackers, not tuners, not tweakers, not bloggers, not pre-teens, not Millennials, not toddlers, not influencers, not connectors, not geeks, not freaks, no one—wants to watch fucking television on a cellphone. This bubble’s gonna be good. … Friend of Hanasiana Daniel Radosh has sold a book. It’s about the hip, trendy side of the end of the world. Don’t bother to bring your cellphone.
Posted by jim at 03:02 PM || Comments
I’ve Seen the Future …
… and Arrested Development ain’t in it. Fox has announced its mid-season schedule, and there’s no room on it for AD once 24 returns on Jan. 15. With the series returning on Dec. 5—and with eight episodes left in its downsized order—that leaves six weeks to be done with it—or perhaps Fox will let it linger, dribbling out episodes as the mood strikes.
