December 16, 2003

Shoot Moose and Squirrel

I just remembered this: how much I really hated the Rocky and Bullwinkle cartoon characters. I have been told by their multitudes of fans that they were so funny, see, 'cos the jokes on the show had all kinds of adult witticisms that sailed right over the heads of kids -- except, of course, the knowing, oh-so-hip Kool Kidz who loved the show when they were wee precocious things. Do I sound bitter? Please, just the memory of the high-pitched croaky whine that was the squirrel character's voice is so annoying, especially when I haven't been able to [TANGENT] get that freaking "9 to 5" Dolly Parton song out of my head for three effing days. [/TANGENT] Yes, it's too annoying to even swear about.

Anyway, I remember getting all the "jokes" on the Rocky and Bullwinkle Show, and thinking they were pretty lame. It's not as if I was a snob kid who would only watch PBS: I glommed onto crappy kandy-kolored fare like The Monkees (please, please stay in my head, drown out Dolly and the squawking 80s saxophones -- "hey hey we're the Monkees, and people say we Monkee around..." Yeah. Mike Nesmith (sp? It's been years) was my favorite. Sure Davey was cute and all, but Mike had that special I dunno something.

Where was I? Oh yeah. I think I hated all the "hip, knowing, really-about-grownup-stuff, we're just writing cartoons to pay off our ranch homes and wood-paneled hifi systems" children's programming. I think I could see through the pretense, and instead of it making me feel all special and part of the "grown up" crowd, just made me feel like throwing things. I didn't mind being treated like a child; I hated being treated as if I should not want to be one. And -- at least The Monkees was demented in an innocent sort of way, even if the show's creators were just trying to pay off their ranch homes and snazzy hifi systems.

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November 06, 2003

Murder, he blogged

I don't care about the Reagan "bio" that CBS, to use Jeff Jarvis's rather hyperbolic phrase, "killed"; but I know two little robots who are absolutely heartbroken about it.

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October 25, 2003

The Glamour of Evil

(Yes, I used the British spelling deliberately.) Speaking of the BBC, their cuted-up "dramatisation" of the British spy scandal is drawing all sorts of fuss. When even British teevee critics diss your show on the grounds that it was too kind to traitors you've got to realize you've slipped up somewhere, but the executive producer, one Mark Shivas, continues to justify the whitewashing. See, one still must have some sympathy for the views of Burgess, Philby, et al, because

''Maclean said it was dangerous for one nation [the U.S.] to have so much power, a monopoly on nuclear weapons, that that was a great potential for harm,'' he notes. "That has a certain resonance these days.''

Uh huh. If hating Amerikkka is wrong, we don't want to be right! I don't think it's working this time, boys. Perhaps you should stick to things like that show where they take a perfectly normal-looking woman and beat her down with insults until her self-esteem is totally destroyed and she consents to throw out all her clothes and let them dress her any way they want.

(Via Cronaca.)

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July 09, 2003

The latest marketing trend

Okay, this is for Sean. (It's work safe!) Anyway, that being said, let me tell you what I think I saw on teevee last night.

I wasn't really paying attention, and one of those booze commercials came on. It was for one of those beerish drinks they are always trying to sell -- this was (I forget the name) Hard Lemonade. Anyway, it was the usual scenario of the un-airconditioned apartment and the sweaty guy going to the fridge to get out the product. Then, as I glanced at the screen, I could swear I saw this: the shot of the guy holding the bottle next to his t-shirt-clad torso was showing that, um, thing that happens when a person's chestal area is hit by a blast of cold air. Then the camera pans up to the guy's face, and he gets this thoughtful grin, and then he calls into the other room something like (I forget the exact words): "Honey, would you like a hard lemonade?" I do remember the emphasis on the "hard." I know ad companies are always trying new things to get attention, but this struck me as a little... out there.

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June 29, 2003

How the squares do it

People who get all upset over the opinions of Fox teevee personality Bill O'Reilly should know that one of his shows was dedicated to dating.

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June 22, 2003

It's not hip to be square

The Poor Man has some advice for the Algore's new synapse-burst, that Anti-Fox, Liberal Teevee Channel thing. (You know -- to combat all the right-wing Republican-adoring tv channels... all three of them: Fox, Pax and that other Godstuff channel with the people with the big frozen hair and the starving children -- which to fit with the other two should be called Shux, or maybe Styx). Anyway, here is a sample of his advice:

2) No Bill Moyers - I'm sure Bill Moyers is a really nice guy, and really smart and thoughtful fellow and all that, but he really sucks, and he needs to be kept off TV. Snipers need to be posted with tranquilizer darts and guard dogs need to be given scaps of his old Bill Cosby Collection sweaters to sniff and ordered to attack on sight. Look at that show NOW, and look what he's done with it - a bunch of earnest driver's ed videos about how Bush is destroying the country, followed by in-depth analysis by Barbara Kingsolver. It's unwatchable. It's like you're six years old again and have to sit quietly like a gentlemen while your old aunties discuss what kind of cassarole they are bringing to the church luncheon.

It's all good advice -- yes, even having Al Franken paired up with John Jon* Stewart. Stewart would make Franken look like a soured has-been, and the shock might actually drop-kick him into actually attempting to be funny instead of coasting on his former association with SNL.

The PM forgot one essential thing, though: keep Gore, and for dog's sake keep Tipper, far away from the camera. That pair has driven more people to tick off "Republican" or "Independent" on their voter's registration forms than a thousand stained blue dresses.

*Gary Farber says it's "Jon" so I will believe him. I could just look it up on the Comedy Channel website, couldn't I? Okay, It's Jon. Hey, I could have spelled his last name "Stuart" too.

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June 14, 2003

The news they don't show on tv

Yeah. Let's see, I was flipping through channels the other day and came upon a news report by the BBC. I can't remember what channel it was -- CNN, MSNBC, BBC America -- it wasn't Fox News, every time I turn that on they are having that Greta Van Susteren (however you spell her name) creature yacking about Martha Stewart or the Hillary Horror, or Hannity and Colmes is on and they are yelling at each other (or some other guy) about the Democrats. Anyway, I came upon this "news report" out of Baghdad. I put the quotes there for a reason. The reporter/journalist/presenter/whatever was some blond British woman whose name I didn't pay attention to. She was interviewing an Iraqi. Naturally the subject was how everything sucks in Iraq because of those Bad Americans and their war. Why, during the battle an American tank fired on a "crowd of innocent bystanders" and the man's son was "caught in the crossfire." Then we cut to the interior of somebody's house (the interviewee's, supposedly) where the man had his son lying face down so his father could pull up the boy's shirt dramatically and show the cameras a bandage patching the back of one of the boy's shoulders. This was supposedly where the kid caught one of Uncle Sam's bullets, though the bandage was about the size of my palm, no bigger than the one the doctor put on a boil I'd had lanced last summer. In fact, the boil was on about the same place on my shoulder blade as where the kid's injury was.

The fact that this Iraqi had been "a policeman" during Saddam Hussein's reign was mentioned as if it was no big deal, and had nothing to do with the fact that of all the Iraqi people to interview the BBC just happened to choose this guy. I guess it never occurred to the wide-eyed innocent reporters on the scene that the fact that this fellow was an ex-member of Saddam-era "law inforcement" might have had a lot more to do with the man's unhappiness with current events than his son's non-life-threatening injury. In any case I wasn't surprised that the kid never showed his face (he kept it buried in his arms throughout the ordeal) -- I can only imagine what it must have felt like to the kid -- he seemed no older than fourteen -- to have to act all pitiful and victimized in front of a foreign female. He had probably been using his wound as teenage bragging material. (I can see it now: "Hey! Hassan! Ali! Guess what! I got shot by the Americans!" "Wow! No way! Did it hurt?" "Nah! I hardly felt a thing!" "Let me see!" "Dude, you're gonna have a scar! Cool!") Then he gets home to find out his dad is having the reporters over and he would have to play the Pitiful Injured Boy. I would have died. I wouldn't blame the kid if he ran away from home.

Anyway, on that note, Denny Wilson has a letter From Baghdad (scroll down) which recounts that all is not ill-will and whining among the Iraqis. But you won't see that in the teevee news, most likely -- nor will we see anything recounting what the Army Corps of Engineers is doing for the Iraqi people. Dipnut has the details.

Another thing I saw as I was flipping through channels was one of those religious commercial things on one of the Christian channels. Some guy was saying how the most common disease among children and teenagers was not AIDs or anything like that, it was pessimism. Leaving aside the source of the comment and the postmodern notion of "pessimism" being a disease, I am not surprised that most teenagers are depressed. Just think of what is on the teevee news: either inane "local interest" goo or all the ways in which the world sucks and how (often implied if not stated outright) it is all America's, or at least Western Civilization's, fault. I'm not a fan of the "hide bad things from the Children™" nonsense, but sometimes I wonder if the Concerned Ones responsible for our Do-Gooder media, with their worries about how everything is connected in some sort of sticky metaphysical web, has really given any thought to the effect that their doomsaying is having on actual living people. No, don't answer that -- it was a rhetorical question.

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June 06, 2003

MTV suckssss....

But the movie awards show was funny, in that half-assed, anti-Oscar way it always has. Best moment? Gollum's acceptance speech. There was a sweet Michael Moore take-off that was just priceless...

Oh well, I'm out of here. Nighty nite.

Good morning. Well, afternoon, actually. I just had another thought. I can't be quite sure, but on the MTeeVee Movie Awards show last night there did not seem to be one single reference to Iraq, the War, Evil Bushitler, peace signs (unless Pink's upside-down peace-sign earrings counted), my buddy over in Kuwait, why can't all this war stuff go away?, the Children™, the famous dead people who would be against war, ad nauseum. In fact, there was no reference to the so-called "real world" at all. The show was entirely focussed on the teeny-tiny insignificant world of Hollywood plus the music biz, and that's just as it should be.

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June 03, 2003

To run away from you, is all that I can do

It's a regular 80's fest on Vh-1 Classics. I mean good stuff -- old XTC videos, Big Country (I was much more upset at Stuart Adamson's suicide than that of Michael Hutchence's -- see, I never got to see Big Country in concert, and now I never will.) Earlier today they played some good nineties stuff too -- though this might actually have been on MTV instead. (I get all the video channels mixed up.) They played My Bloody Valentine's "Only Shallow," and then "Fight the Power," by... heck, I forget the name of that rap band. The one with the guy wearing the giant plastic clock. I had a thought, watching it: how tastefully and almost conservatively everyone in the video was dressed.* Sure, they seemed to have filmed it in Harlem in November, so of course everyone was wearing big winter coats, but am I the only person who remembers that brief span of years in the previous decade when the 80s had calmed down yet fashion still had a little of that "I love a man in a uniform" look? Now all the people in videos look like they were either attacked by a crowd of mad tattooists or were caught in a multicolored spandex tornado.

*Yes, even clock-wearing guy seemed toned-down compared to some of the out-there freaks on music videos today. I can't remember his name either.

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June 02, 2003

Orange Noir

Ooh, City Confidential is focusing on Orlando today! Scandal in Disney! Blood on the Mouse! The dark underbelly of I-Drive! Tarnish on the buckle of the Florida Bible Belt!

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May 26, 2003

Movie nite

I just happened to catch The Faculty on SciFi tonight. Oh, okay, I taped it. Sue me, Elijah Wood starred, and I'm going through a cute young thing midlife crisis, though I don't see what's so "critical" about it. Anyhoo, the thing was billed as far as I have always known as a rather lame ripoff of Invasion of the Body Snatchers. Leave it to movie people to totally ignore the fact that the film is actually a shoutout to Robert Heinlein's The Puppet Masters.

Anyway, it wasn't a bad waste of time, though the concept the filmmakers had of what high school is -- or was, in 1998 -- supposed to be like was hilarious. Were they all home schooled -- or more likely, did all the screenwriters graduate from Beverly Hills High? I also had somehow missed the fact that John Stewart was in it, and got to come to a bad non-end -- you'd have to see the film to know what I was talking about. And the ending was a little too pat, leaving one wondering, in the way these films do. Worth renting out as part of a two-for-one bargain.

In between preparing dinner and setting up the vcr I caught bits of the previous offering, Roman Polanski's The Ninth Gate. I had thought about taping it too, but the bits I saw made me rather glad I didn't bother; it didn't look like one of Polanski's better efforts. Perhaps I should watch the whole thing. Maybe one day if I have nothing better to do, but I have already suffered through a Bad Polanski Film, which I actually paid to see (Bitter Moon), so I don't see myself seeking it out, even for the novel sight of Johnny Depp made up to be a graying-haired, bespectacled scholar.

I forgot to add: the version of The Faculty that Scifi chose to show was the cleaned-up, one might say Tipper-Goreized, version of the film. That struck me as just so wrong; when you know that a character said "Fuck you," not "Forget you," that throws the whole viewing experience off-kilter. For chrissake, the thing was on at 9:30pm EST, when all impressionable young things are ideally supposed to be in bed dreaming of Spongebob Squarepants, or whatever. Family Hour is over at nine pm, or it is supposed to be. A minor point, maybe, but it bugged me.

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May 24, 2003

Quote of the week

While watching an interview on MTV2's Headbanger's Ball show, I heard this answer to a question on dancing styles at heavy metal concerts: "No one dances man; I haven't seen anyone dance at a metal show in years. They beat the crap out of each other!"

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Freaky Friday

Sort of watching Fright Night Part 2 on Scifi while tooling around here. I just had this revelation: vampire movies are the softcore porn of the horror movie genre. Not that there is anything wrong with that.

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May 18, 2003

Late Nite Teevee Follies

The conspiracy to keep me from liking teevee continues apace: last night, afflicted with my usual insomnia (when two glasses of wine and an antihistamine don't do anything to knock me out I think that qualifies as insomnia) I lay in bed and flipped channels on my bedroom teevee. Since the bedroom set isn't hooked up directly to the box, I don't get all the channels, but I do get Scifi on it. Last night there were back-to-back made-for-Scifi offerings. I left versions of the following in the comments to this post of Michele's on bad movies, but I was so proud of them (har har) I thought I'd offer them to all five of my readers:

Speaking of awful movies, do tv movie series count? I'm thinking of something the Scifi channel has started playing called "The Deathlands." It's some post-Apocalyptic crapola filmed all in orange. I guess it's to convince us that in the future all our cyan filters will have been destroyed. Best line so far, from former porn star Traci Lords: "Die, Mutie bitch!" ("Mutie" as in "mutant" -- mutant meaning you have long red hair and look smashing in a ragged leather minidress.) There's also a hero with an eyepatch.

Right after that thing was over the next movie on Scifi was something called "The Apocalypse." It was some sort of thing set in outer space. It featured that chick from Sex, Lies, and Videotape (the bad sister) playing a crazy woman in a space ship whose dialogue consisted of the soliloquies from Hamlet, and Sandra Bernhard playing a captain of a space ship. I would have watched the whole rancid thing but I needed to sleep, and I haven't hooked the videotape machine up to the cable. (This was also filmed all through some sort of rust-colored filter. Are they having budget problems at the Scifi channel? They can't seem to afford to use the entire color spectrum.)

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Betrayer

There I was happily half-listening/not-really-watching Headbangers Ball on MTV2 when they started showing that guy from Staind playing live in the studio. Noooooo--!

Quick... channel change... Ahhh. Saved by Motley Crüe's "Girls Girls Girls" on Vh1 Classics.

Update: MTV2 is having Unplugged now, that's why the bald, ugly, depressing Staind guy is still on. Fortunately, Vh1 Classics is having repeats of old heavy metal and hair metal band videos. I needed some cheese tonight.

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May 17, 2003

In the belly of the cod

Among the reasons why I might be tempted to keep the cable teevee: the cool stuff that does occasionally turn up. For one thing, BBCAmerica is showing a David Bowie concert right now. He's still the nazz. Also, I saw some of The Iron Chef. Either the Japanese are one seriously fucked up people, or they are the coolest nation on the planet. Tonight's theme was cod. Or as the Iron Chef expressed it: "Caaaahhhhhddd!" One of the guest/contestant chefs was one of the Japanese royal family's chefs. The look on his face clearly said: "I went to Japanese haute cuisine school for this?" I had to change the channel, though, because eating leftover pizza does not mix well with the sight of some guy digging brain-colored roe out of a giant cod's guts.

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TV Damnation

Among the reasons why I may not keep this free cable teevee, despite the wonders of good reception and being able to watch reruns of McMillan and Wife on the Hallmark channel is -- oh, well, just read this:

LOS ANGELES - Reality television has officially swallowed the United States whole. Three of the top four TV shows last week were American Idol, Survivor and American Idol again. Actors and writers walk around Hollywood with beaten looks on their faces, mumbling about the Good Old Days when the boob tube was filled with scripted programming performed by actual artists.

I saw a snippet of one of those shows -- I forget which one, they all run together in my mind until they form some Dante-esque vision of hell where there's a stage on an island lit only by huge tacky klieg lights and unpleasant hosts with snide British accents run around with pitchforks stabbing at unattractive half-naked ex-bar-hags who are too busy fighting over some dufous of a guy who is supposed to be a millionaire but is really a postal worker from Cleveland to notice. Unlike many other sad victims (some of whom openly admit, and even seem to celebrate, their addiction) I am unable to watch these shows because I never could enjoy pain. Watching "reality" teevee is like having the air sucked out of your head with a straw through the sinus cavity, or ten-thousand ice cream headaches all at once, or nails scraping along a blackboard amplified to ten thousand decibels. But, to each their own.

(PS: yes, I am tracking back to those persons' weblogs because I am evil.)

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May 13, 2003

Well, hell

Cable teevee hell has already started. I turned it on only to see a message that my service had been turned off, to call the service. So I call. "Oh, they changed some software, call this number to have your box turned back on." So I did, and after twenty minutes of unsuccessful fiddling I have another appointment with a cable guy on Thursday. All hail technology! Frankly, I think it's a conspiracy to get me to wake up early.

Oh well, I still have my dvd player. By the way -- I just wanted to point this out: the opening words of The Fellowship of the Ring where Galadriel is "the world is changing, I feel it in the water, I feel it in the air" etc., are actually in the book -- Treebeard says them to Pippin and Merry in The Two Towers. It strikes me as quite clever of the scriptwriter to choose those words to open the movie with. (With which to open the movie? Bah, you're not getting good grammar from me at this hour.)

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Where is my mind?

Oh god, I just found myself thinking that Tiffany's* version of "I Think We're Alone Now" wasn't half bad. The chick still couldn't dance to save her life, though.

*I was also unaware that she still had a career. I pay no attention to these things, usually.

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May 12, 2003

Eighties flashback continued

Geez. I had forgotten all about double-wrapped belts with studs, wearing suits with the jacket sleeves rolled up, singers with bleached ivory hair and black eyebrows, and androgynous guitarists who were nevertheless actually attractive instead of merely creepy.

Posted by Andrea Harris at 11:28 PM | Comments (9) | TrackBack

Moore teevee

Wow, Michael Medved and that guy on MSNBC's Scarborough Country show really just slammed Michael Moore up against the wall. "Liar," Fraud," and so on. Cable teevee has gotten fun.

Of course, everything they are talking about has already been talked about in blogs. (The Minuteman mascot hullabaloo at UMass, Senator and ex-Kleagle Byrd's hypocritical huffing over the president's wearing "military" regalia when he flew on that fighter jet to the carrier, and so on.)

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I don't mind you coming here, and wasting all my time

Well, I've got cable teevee (and a clear picture) for the first time since sometime in 2000, and I have no idea how much older celebs and music people and such have gotten in the past three years because right now I am watching VH1C, and they are playing old 80s videos. Right now they have the Kinks doing a live version of "You've Really Got Me Now," and they just finished playing the Cars "Just What I Needed." Aaagghh! The clueless limp-spaghetti-armed dancing! The in-between-fashion-movements look of everyone's hair and clothes (basically everyone looked as if their 70s Farrah Fawcett shags had grown out and they were making do with their over-laundered old disco clothes until someone thought up new ways for people to look)! The shine all over everything that was "different" from that washed-out matte look popular in the Seventies but was not yet Eighties glitter! And... everything was pink. Weird. Did I actually live through all that?

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Cable teevee goodies

Well, the dealer cable guy was just here and he finished installing my new addiction one month of free cable. The first thing I find is an unexpected treat: a Simple Minds concert from 1995 on some channel called Trio. I'd only ever seen them live once, in 1985, when the success of that song from The Breakfast Club made it possible for their tour to make it all the way down to Miami. I've got to get my videotape machine hooked up to this teevee. (The machine is attached to the useless bedroom teevee, which is only set to get the first twenty-five channels or so.)

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May 08, 2003

Pour some sugar on me

I got a call the other day and it was a saleslady from Brighthouse, which used to be Time-Warner Cable. Brighthouse has been having a promo. After I hung up I not only had one free month on my Earthlink account, I had one free month of cable teevee. The cable guy is coming Monday. Now, I know I am always saying I hate teevee, but heck, this is free. And besides, I am getting it just in time to enjoy the return of Headbanger's Ball.

Come on now, everybody sing! "I'm hot/sticky sweet/from my head/to my feet..."

(Via A Small Victory.)

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May 04, 2003

Media Bores

Am I the only one who is not obsessed with this poor dead woman? I have noticed one thing about people who go on and on about the horror of media circuses such as this and how they compromise our justice system: they are, nevertheless, still watching.

I mean, hey, it's a Free Country®, do whatever the hell you want. But I'd like to go on the record as saying 1) I did not watch the obsessive OJ trial coverage (I couldn't escape seeing it in friend's houses or hearing the talk about it at work, but that was out of my control); 2) I never watched any of the Clinton/Monica crap; 3) I avoided the Elian scandals, the Leona Helmsley foofaraws, and the 2000 Election Debacle®. I long for the days when they forbade cameras in the courtroom. Cameras are no better at "revealing the truth" (something we all learned after the Rodney King fiasco, which I also didn't watch) than the sketches of the courtroom artists who found themselves out of a job the minute teevee took over.

This country was supposed to be a representative democracy. Our elected officials are supposed to be the ones to deal with all the messy details of herding this giant army of cats we call America. We the people tell our representatives what we want, our representatives are thus kept busy trying to juggle these often-contradictory desires, and eventually make compromises that make the least amount of people unhappy. But I am seeing a shift towards a messier, less-workable sort of "democracy" -- one which can slide into "mob rule" at the drop of a hat. This is my roundabout way of saying that I agree with Talkleft's premise that the blabbing going on and on about this Peterson dude is just not right.

I wish we'd go back to the days of no cameras in the courtroom -- at the very least, it would provide jobs for starving artists again. It would also lend some dignity and distance from the smelly crowd to a justice system that desperately needs it. What can I say, I was raised on Perry Mason. But that's not going to happen -- there are still too many people that think that being on teevee is the be-all and end-all of existence.

Anyway, my media blackout continues. How so many other people can stand the kindergarten level of discourse served up to them from the other glowing box I will never get. I never could stand being talked down to myself.

Posted by Andrea Harris at 07:56 PM | Comments (6) | TrackBack

April 28, 2003

Free the Kiwis

What do they want? FOX News! When do they want it? Now!

One reason given:

It annoys lefties so much that they write really outraged things about it, like these people here and here and here and even satire. Outraging lefties is a good thing. Can you imagine how our local do-gooders will react when rampant American neo-conservative triumphalism is beamed into people's actual houses in the People's Republic of Aotearoa-New Zealand? They'll probably want to outlaw it! If you're anything like me, you'll be hugging yourself with excitement at the thought of how upset they'll get. (Links in the original. -- Ed.)

Can't argue with that. Go, NZPundit!

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April 22, 2003

Sign of the coming Apocalypse?

Oh. My. God. MC Hammer is on Conan. I had no idea that he was hosting new "reality teevee" show The Surreal, because I don't follow such things. I didn't even know he was still alive. Hmm... maybe I should give this teevee thing a chance.

(Personal note: if my ex-boyfriend wasn't a dad now of a toddler and waking up at 6am for some sort of "real job" gig every day, I'd be calling him and telling him to turn on Conan now, because he tormented me with the CD of all the known remixes of MC Hammer's "Can't Touch This" when we were dating. No that isn't why we broke up.)

PS: and a week of the White Stripes, one of the few decent bands to come out recently. Gonna be watching Conan all week.

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Don't watch tv -- watch our tv commercial!

Just for that, Adfarters, I'm gonna turn on my tv. And I don't have cable so I don't have CNN so I can't watch your AD. Ha Ha!

Inspired by this guy and this lady.

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April 21, 2003

Punk Rock girl

Way cool: a website dedicated to my favorite Quincy episode, the one where the punk rock kid gets killed. Like this writer and her friends, my friends and I also mocked this episode relentlessly. At the time, of course, it was stilted and silly, even though many of the things featured in the episode were actually true (a lot of punkers really did slash their skin, most of punk was relentlessly negative, at least that segment of the punk scene that made the mistake of taking itself too seriously -- but even the sarcasm inherent in the Sex Pistols' shtick was a dark, nihilisitic sarcasm). What we didn't realize was how prescient it was -- but then, we couldn't have realized it, because some things you come to understand only through the passage of time. Now I am more likely to listen to the sort of music that ends the show than loud punk or goth stuff (though I still crank up the loudness on occasion), and I am not as sanguine about idiot kid movements as I was, even though ny "involvement" with the punk scene went no farther than listening to the music and going to concerts. (No self-mutilation for this girl, thank you very much.) So I would probably not be so inclined to laugh at the "naive" reactions of Quincy and the other squares in the show the way I used to.

I will say, though, I have never seen the CHIPs punk rock episode. There were just some things I refused to do, and watching CHIPs was one of those things.

(Via Fraterslibertas.)

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April 16, 2003

Blogger gets sucked into TV screen

Details this coming Monday: Michele's gonna be on CNN. What a time to not have cable teevee. Oh well, I'm sure some nice blogger out there will be taping it, right? Oh come on -- we don't all have Tivo.

Posted by Andrea Harris at 11:23 PM | Comments (3) | TrackBack

April 14, 2003

TV Party tonight

Usually I delete the newsletter I get from Earthlink, but this time they had something that I know all you kiddies will enjoy! TVParty.com. Sure, it's a commercial site full of pop-ups (hint: right-click from the taskbar to get rid of pop-ups), but you can watch Ronald Reagan's last tv role! (Besides being president -- come on, these days it's a tv role as much as anything.) You can watch snippets of Irwin Allen's lost scifi tv show pilot! Old Batman episodes! It's a smorgasbord of delight! Or something.

So kick back, have a couple of brews, and relive those awful days of after school syndicated reruns, after homework was done but before it was time for Starsky and Hutch to be on. You know you want to. (Note: some words shamelessly appropriated from Black Flag's punk hit "TV Party." True story: I almost saw Black Flag play live, at a punk club on Miami Beach whose name escapes me at the moment. No one went near the stage until well after midnight. We sat through about three local bands that were mostly awful, and had to endure the pestering of a waitress who wanted us to buy more drinks. Finally it was nearly three-thirty am, and still no freaking headlining band. We were nearly comatose by this time -- from exhaustion, not booze -- and since one of us lived nearly twenty miles from the beach, we decided to leave before we were unable to drive. So I never actually got to see Henry Rolllins live. Boo hoo.)

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March 23, 2003

And then back to La la Land

Must... not... give in... to urge... to make fun of Pedro Almodovar's hilarious Espanish accent.

Because, you know, that would be wrong.

"Epa epa! Andale! Legalité!"

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Oscarzzzz Pt. 6897

I don't get this montage of Oscar winners just sitting there and applauding themselves. Talk about boring filler.

Dustin Hoffman looks like his best friend just died. What's up with that?

Jeez, I thought half these actors were dead. Maybe it's a "we're not dead yet, Hollywood!" thing. I dunno.

I still haven't gotten over how grizzled and old Chris Connelly looks. What's next, Kurt Loder is fat and bald?

Olivia De Havilland wins "best gown" if you ask me. Nice blue color, tasteful without making her look like she's ready for her own funeral. I can't believe I'm talking about the gowns. Somebody shoot me.

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Speechlessless

Jeez, they let Adrian Brody go on and on. All I can think of is "he looks just like Emo Philips." (Who is still around.) Oh well, he said a nice thing about his friend who's in the troops in Iraq.

Did Dustin Hoffman just say artists can "correct the future"? My head. Hurts.

Uh oh, Babs is speaking. She. Is. Enunciating. Every. Word. Carefully. So we numbskull "little people" can get it, I guess.

Update: Eminem beat out U2? That's... weird.

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That's what we needed to do!

We needed to give Saddam Hussein an Oscar! Hasn't he done some of those "Great Leader my people worship me" propaganda things? Heck, an Oscar for "Best Performance As a Bloodthirsty Tyrant" would have been just the thing to let Saddam know the world loved him and only wanted what was best for him. Why, we'd have had Peace in Our Time in no time! (How pathetic was that, Michael Davis saying winning an Oscar gave him a "sense of my identity"?)

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The joke's on the fat man

Good one Stevo! "...It's so sweet backstage." (Laughter.) "Right now the teamsters are helping Michael Moore into the trunk of his limo." (Gales of laughter, clapping, Sean Astin (Sam) among them.)

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News break

I. HATE. PETER. JENNINGS. WITH. EVERY. LAST. BREATH. IN. MY. BODY.

I hate him almost as much as Kevin Parrott hates the song "All That Jazz."

The way that some people say "the war with Iraq" sounds like they are saying "war with a rack." Maybe that woman's from that Fat Greek thing's rack.

The actors in the audience look like they are bored out of their skulls. I get the feeling Denzel Washington is taping CNN back home. I don't know why.

Well. Let's see if Michael Moore wins a golden doorstopper.

Ah. I see that Hollywood still fears the fat man. I wonder how many Oscar committee members Michael Moore threatened to sit on.

For chrissake, couldn't he shave?

Oh my, they are booing Michael Moore's anti-Bush speech. Some of them, anyway. Some of them look happy for the diversion. "Man, I was about to fall asleep when Moore's B.O. wafted this way." Come on, an actor could say "wafted."

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We love you to peaces

Poor sad little foreign guy (whoever he was -- missed the name). He's so cute, I just wanna ruffle his hair and give him a lolly.

Posted by Andrea Harris at 10:07 PM | Comments (3) | TrackBack

I'm going to stab myself with a fork

The only thing interesting about the Oscars is the clips of the movies. I am so going out tomorrow and watching The Two Towers again.

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You're damn right

Isaac Hayes!

Can you dig it?

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So that's how they're doing it

An ABC anchorlady came on just now and said "What the stars said about the war; we'll show you after the Oscars!"

And I really, really want to smack Peter Jennings good and hard. With a nail-studded cluebat. "Far away from the cameras." You putz.

Posted by Andrea Harris at 09:12 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

March 20, 2003

US too arrogant, Pt 693274

Goddammit. I turn on the tv for some news and the only station that I have with news is NBC, and they had to go and put Katie Couric on with some broad from the Foreign Relations Committee. Ms. Rachel Bronson was billed as a "Senior Policy Analyst" but she came off more as one of those girls who was in all the clubs, whose main preoccupation (when not backstabbing her way to the top of every high school group) was bothering all the independent-minded students in the school. ("How can we draw you out of your shell, Andrea?" "You're such a bright girl, you should join some clubs so you'll have someting to do.") Here she is, very Concerned that the administration has pissed off all the foreigners. ("In the previous Gulf War we talked to China!") Yeah, daddy Bush's administration was much more attentive to the world's "needs." That's why we are in this lovely situation today.

Update: She's back on, cooing about how the Iraqis need someone to cuddle them into the dictator-free world. For chrissake, they aren't five-year-olds going to kindergarten for the first time, they don't need self-esteem counseling. Please, someone keep hot, moist paragons like this away from the Iraqis.

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Warcasting

ABC News just played a snippet of some Iraqi incidental teevee filler. I love the way the anchordude said, of the rather doleful martial chanting accompanying the image, "That appears to be music playing in the background..." So those years at journalism school weren't wasted!

Ooh, and they've got old man Saddam on tv. "Dear Homeland, yadda yadda, the family of Iraq, yadda yadda, Great Satan blah Glorious Victory blah." His version of a morale booster, I guess. I think he's been forgetting to apply his moustache dye lately.

More: "Light the torture in the night"? Oh -- that was the translator's accent. He was saying torches. Yeah.

I do declare Saddam is reading his own poetry. I knew it -- he's a Vogon!

If I were in Baghdad I'd be praying for a missile right now. He's talking about love and peace. He sounds like a hippy. A Vogon hippy.

Ooh -- he threw in something about "Long live Palestine." Just because.

PS: You know what sounds really weird? Cheery commercials for cars and clothes right after a speech by a nutso dictator we are trying to kill.

New: this caption appeared over the NBC broadcast a few minutes ago: "Saddam Hussein condemns shameful crimes against humanity & Iraq." You don't say.

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How many pinheads can dance on an angle?

Well, that foray into mainstream teevee was particularly painful. I got tired of the picture of the mosque, minaret, whatever it is, so I changed over to the David Letterman show. Only Letterman was nowhere to be seen; instead, some blond woman with a loud, yappy voice was on, she and Paul Shafer trading inane compliments ("You look beautiful." "You look beautiful too!") and babbling at length about the Oscars ("There won't be a red carpet?" "So, there's not going to be a red carpet this time..."), blah blah blah. Then they announced that the guest was going to be Carson Daly. My eyes... back to the war news.

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