Tag Archives: current events

Fight Scenes Among Cultures of Pop, Geek, and Rape

March 19, 2013 By in Misc. Media Tags: , , , , , , , , 2 Comments

Judge Thomas Lipps, Steubenville

This judge handed down the guilty verdict. Clearly this is all his fault. LET’S GET HIM.

Concentrating on humor and hobbies is difficult when the specter of the phrase “rape culture” haunts every social circle and claws at us from the headlines. Our choices are plentiful today:

We can read about the verdict in the now-infamous Steubenville trial, in which two high school football players have been convicted of rape in a juvenile court, much to the consternation of local football fans, bookies, rape advocates, and anyone who treats sports as their church of choice. Sidebar: the victim probably remains traumatized, possibly even sad. Local newshounds have been unable to confirm if she’s allowed the incident to affect her views on this year’s draft or on March Madness.

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“Anne of Green Gables” Reboot Emphasizes Unimportance of Accurate Book Covers

February 9, 2013 By in Misc. Media Tags: , , , , , , , 4 Comments

Anne of Green GablesLiteracy pundits wept this week over a controversial re-release of Lucy Maud Montgomery’s classic Anne of Green Gables, which is now in the public domain and can be reprinted and reformatted by anyone who thinks they can earn a dime from it, regardless of whether or not they’ve actually read it themselves. Rather than publish it with a cover that reflects one iota of the content, dark forces working through CreateSpace instead revamped little Anne’s image by disposing of everything about her except her gender. Presumably a skewed focus group or an ad executive with a one-track mind advised that today’s younger readers are 75% more likely to read a classic novel if the cover resembles a supermarket magazine.

Do the guilty parties have a point? Some publishers have found that quality content alone, regardless of pedigree, is often not enough to entice new readers, especially if the content is really old and uses archaic terms such as “gables”. Schoolteachers do their best to inform students of the perks and wonders of reading, but they only have so many months to force the kids to read as much as possible before they’re turned loose on the world and free to avoid books for the rest of their lives. If the writing itself isn’t enough of a draw, if the recommendations of elders send them in the opposite direction, how else are the classics supposed to attract new generations of audiences?

Clearly the answer is repackaging that catches the casual eye at any cost. Sure, photogenic NĂ¼-Anne bears no resemblance to her textual counterpart and is somewhat of an affront to dedicated Anne fans, but you’ll note the Amazon listing as of this writing lists this new edition as sold out. Either someone ordered it pulled due to the media scrutiny, or the plan worked beyond anyone’s wildest expectations.

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Subway’s Scandalous Inconsistent Breadmaking: What Else Are They Hiding?

January 17, 2013 By in Mundane Tags: , , , , , , , , 15 Comments

Times Square visitors were warned to be on the lookout for rogue eleven-inch sandwiches impersonating cute, innocent footlongs.

Today Subway, the world’s fastest growing lunchmeat sandwich company, joined the sad but worldwide fraternity of restaurants whose only membership requirement is the awesome specter of a PR fiasco.

Mainstream news outlets reported an alleged Australian Facebook vandal sharing an incriminating photo of a “footlong” Subway sandwich next to a ruler measuring its length at a mere eleven inches. These same news outlets failed to ask the bigger question in my mind: shouldn’t a continent that primarily uses the metric system be offering “meterlong” sandwiches? I’d consider moving there.

Subway fans were appalled at this covert product reduction that the company allegedly perpetrated right under their noses. All those paid-for inches of fast food, withheld from countless sandwiches sold in good faith, were clearly a misdeed committed by greedy corporate one-percenters. Millions of enraged citizens responded by driving like mad to the Subway next door to their house, buying a footlong, measuring it, Instagramming the results with an indignant caption, and eating it anyway.

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Morgan Freeman Photos Convey Authority, Win Debates, Certify Anything as Gold

December 17, 2012 By in Misc. Media Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , 6 Comments

Morgan FreemanDuring the solemn, lamentable weekend following last Friday’s senseless tragedy in Newtown, Connecticut, Facebook users who were already struggling with their own reactions, the reactions of their friends, and the fights breaking out between friends of conflicting reactions all found themselves interrupted dozens of times over the course of the weekend by the reassuring face of Academy Award Winner Morgan Freeman, perceived as one of the kindliest, most grandfatherly figures in all of Hollywood. His face was attached to a short essay decrying the culpability of mass media in encouraging too many broken young men to become power-tripping mass murderers because of the seedy allure of posthumous headlines and ten minutes of front-page infamy. Few would argue with the content of the well-meaning essay, but this wasn’t just any old essay written by an ostensibly intelligent typist. This was an essay attached to a photo of Academy Award Winner Morgan Freeman.

Somehow the photo imbued those words with a godlike acumen that transcended all racial, economic, and spiritual barriers. Within seconds one out of every one-and-a-half Facebook users was forwarding the words and picture to everyone in striking distance under the assumption that they naturally had something to do with each other. No need for fact-checking, no verifying sources, no asking why Freeman would release a public statement as if he’s an official White House spokesman — someone they knew forwarded it to them, so it had to be true.

What you saw probably resembled this, except more professionally cobbled together and without my modified attribution:

Morgan Freeman Fraud Sample

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The Parable of the Little Reindeer Candle

December 14, 2012 By in Meta, Mundane Tags: , , , , , , , Leave a comment

Once upon a time, there was a cute little reindeer candle. I have no idea who gave him to us or on which Christmas, but we accepted him with open arms into our diverse family of Christmas decorations. Unlike other reindeer, he was white and chubby, but no one made cruel albino jokes or excluded him from reindeer games. If anything, he reminded me of me. Like many other candles, he was made of wax and topped with a fuse. Perhaps he was made to chase away the dark, but to us he was too cute and innocuous to light up.

When I retrieved our Christmas decorations from the attic last week, during the unpacking phase I discovered to my dismay that the attic’s complete lack of environmental controls had taken an unkind toll on the little reindeer candle. The summer heat had jump-started the melting process, no open flame required. His hooves and horns were now deformed. A homemade yarn-and-popsicle-stick from someone’s childhood had melded with his poor, softened, formerly rotund face. I yanked it off as delicately as I could, but several strands and dog hairs were stuck fast, leaving him with a scraggly, patchy, mountain-man countenance. He didn’t look very happy to be rescued.

Little Reindeer Candle

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How the CALM Act Promises to End Our Regular Games of TV Volume-Control Teeter-Totter

December 13, 2012 By in TV/DVD Tags: , , , , , , , 2 Comments

TV volume control, CALM Act

“Left! Left! GO LEFT! The Cialis spokesman will wake the baby!”

As a habitual night-owl who does his best to permit his normalized family their precious circadian rhythms, I’ve found that watching TV in the evening requires continuous vigilance to ensure that my programs don’t detonate a virtual sonic bomb in the living room when they go to commercial. Some channels have been better than others. It took me a fair amount of trial-and-error to determine the exact volume numbers to use as my thresholds while watching NBC’s Revolution on our set — up to 19 during the show, down to 14 during commercial breaks — to minimize my disturbance of others. Up and down, back and forth, ping and pong, I’d keep dragging the onscreen cursor in a tricky balancing act, lest I invoke the wrath of the rudely awakened if I failed to compensate quickly enough.

Last weekend we found one basic-cable channel that was far more egregious about it. Some senseless marketing department apparently asserted authority over the ad volume and insisted on a difference of dozens of degrees between it and the volume level of the actual show. I enjoy Dean Winters in those GEICO skits as much as the next Sarah Connor Chronicles fan, but bludgeoning my eardrums with his insurance pitch will not clinch a GEICO sale in our household.

Thankfully, the FCC decided last year that enough was enough, that this irritation merited official government interference. Effective December 13, 2012, the Commercial Advertisement Loudness Mitigation Act will finally take effect after a one-year grace period that a few companies obviously didn’t take seriously. The new rule according to the FCC’s official site states as follows:

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Even If You Can’t Vote by Faith, by Party, or by Common Sense, Vote Anyway.

November 4, 2012 By in Indiana, Mundane Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , 3 Comments

Voting stickerAfter being raised in a household free of overt political discussion, I never had any idea which political party was mine. A moment of clarity arrived in eleventh-grade Physics class when a fellow student named Jeff sought to offer me personal definition: he asked me my views on abortion. I gave him an answer. He told me which party was mine. To him, it was as simple as that. I decided then and there that the two-party monopoly left a lot to be desired. Thus was my head sent spinning into years of aimless political apathy, college-campus pluralism, irritatingly noncommittal neutrality, alternative-newspaper perusal, and Jello Biafra spoken-word albums. Truly it was a time of intellectual isolation for me, though the accompanying music could be cool at times.

Two decades later, I’m no more into taking arbitrary sides, generalizing entire parties based on the actions of a single faction, or collecting campaign buttons than I was in my misanthropic youth. However, at least now I can say I’m participating in the voting process anyway, because the small local elections are close enough to home that the votes really can make a difference, free of interference from unhelpful interlopers like the Electoral College. Also, just because I can.

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The View from 128,000 Feet

October 14, 2012 By in Misc. Media Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment

In case you somehow missed it because of football games on TV: today Austrian skydiver and BASE-jumper Felix Baumgartner broke more than one world record by riding a balloon 128,000 feet into the outer reaches of what can still technically be called atmosphere, jumping out of his claustrophobic cockpit, free-falling at speeds exceeding Mach 1, and landing safely several minutes later on the correct planet and in one very relieved piece.

This was his view mere moments before taking one small step for sponsor Red Bull, and one giant leap for mankind:

Felix Baumgartner, Red Bull Stratos freefall #livejump

Nothing I do for the rest of my life will ever be as cool as this. I think I’m getting ill just looking at this.

Temperatures outside the capsule were near zero Fahrenheit. Baumgartner and his beautiful balloon were upward bound for over 2½ hours before maxing out in the upper reaches of near-outer-space. He and Mission Control reviewed an exhaustive checklist of 30+ steps and checks before undertaking his epic plunge, not including what must have been an extensive, tortuous process to arrive at this historic moment in the first place. Cameras followed him as best they could every step of the way, and broadcast their viewpoints via live YouTube feed.

I imagine much of that footage should be reposted by hundreds of impressed YouTube users by the time I finish posting this. As of this minute, no such luck. Please hurry so everyone who missed it can see for themselves, fast-forward through the few quiet moments, and know what daredevil courage looks like in action.

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Updated 4:30 p.m. EDT: video posted at last. Now that’s service!

My “Forbes” Subscription Does Not Determine My Political Affiliation

October 3, 2012 By in Mundane Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , 5 Comments

Some of the most interesting events in my life were the result of my asking one simple question: “What happens when I do this?”

Sometimes my random experiments yield positive results — e.g., my 2004-2005 diet; home ownership; trying salt and malt vinegar on French fries; wedded bliss to an awesome woman; this blog. Sometimes my ventures turn into cautionary tales — e.g., my first marriage; ghetto apartment living; turnip greens; watching Constantine. Simple, earnest curiosity without an agenda or an expectation has been responsible for more than a few odd occurrences in my life.

Last March I received a random mail offer for a multi-issue subscription to Forbes Magazine for a mere pittance of ten dollars. I’d never flipped through an issue at a newsstand, let alone purchased or even read one. At the time, all I knew was that they publish articles about upper-class people, and they like writing lists of billionaires. Otherwise, I was clueless as to their content or nature. At a retail price of $4.99 per issue, ten dollars seemed like a bargain. In my mind, that meant it was time for an experiment.
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