Television

FCC is seeking to expand it’s reach into cable

According to Salon Magazine, Commissioner Kevin J. Martin of the FCC has been meeting quietly with religious leaders and industry leaders to try to organize a push for new stricter standards on what is broadcast over cable stations.
Pardon me, please, because I’m going to lose it right here.
USE YOUR FUCKING ‘V’ CHIP, PEOPLE. That’s what it’s FOR. I AM NOT YOUR GOD-DAMNED BABYSITTER.
I don’t want my cable television censored because you’re too damned lazy or stupid to monitor what your children are watching on television. You PAY FOR that cable and bring it into your own home. If you don’t want your kids to see something, SHUT IT OFF. You know how to do that, don’t you, you retarded fucking moron?
If this goes through, I’m going to calculate the cost of babysitting charges for every parent of every child in the entire country, and I’m going to start a lawsuit against someone, I don’t know who yet, to CHARGE PEOPLE FOR THE BABYSITTING SERVICES I’LL BE PROVIDING TO RETARDED PARENTS who are forcing me to have my television censored.
God damned, mother-fucking, retarded son-of-a-bitch morons. Shithead assholes. Losers. Uni-brow idiots. Stop fucking BREEDING if you can’t be smarter than this.

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The Long Tail

[Navigated to by way of Steven Johnson’s Blog. Johnson is the author of Everything Bad Is Good for You: How Today’s Popular Culture Is Actually Making Us Smarter which I read recently.]
Quoting from Wikipedia:

The phrase The Long Tail, as a proper noun, was first coined by Chris Anderson. Beginning in a series of speeches in early 2004 and culminating with the publication of a Wired Magazine article in October 2004, Anderson described the effects of the long tail on current and future business models. Anderson observed that products that are in low demand or have low sales volume can collectively make up a market share that rivals or exceeds the relatively few current bestsellers and blockbusters, if the store or distribution channel is large enough. Examples of such mega-stores include Amazon.com, Netflix and even Wikipedia.

Meaning that if you’re into some obscure punk band that no one but you and two people in Idaho have heard of, some businesses with large distribution channels can provide them to you, and their business on small demand items can exceed business for large demand items. Which explains who so many obscure movies are now being released on DVD, where there’s now a market for them via Internet companies that don’t need to provide a physical store to house them.

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Open-Heart Surgery on TV

Battlestar Galactica: on a recent episode, Captain Adama was shot, and was starting to code blue. Not having a defibulator handy, the medic opted to crack open his chest and massage his heart to restart it. Immediately after the procedure they show him lying on the table, with very few monitors around, with a simple tube in his nose. The scar from the surgery was too high up, it started at the base of his neck, and it looked like a simple red mound, not sewn-together flesh, as it should have looked. It should also have a lump at the top of the scar where a hematoma forms, and there should be other scars where drainage tubes would be inserted, etc.
I know the show is set thousands of years in the past, when their technology was far more advanced than ours (according to the show’s mythology) but not a very convincing portrayal of the surgery, nonetheless. I’m betting that, contrary to what it would be like in real life, he recovers soon and is up and about giving commands and being active.
Wonderfalls: In one of the episodes, a security guard from the gift shop has a heart attack during a robbery. In the cut outtakes of the show, the guard returns later after bypass surgery to show off his (very unrealistic) scar.
Heck, costume & makeup guys, you can find video on the internet that not only lets you see a surgery in progress, it shows what the scars looks like immediately afterward and at various points during the recovery process. There’s no reason you should not get the scars right on a TV show.

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Martha Stewart

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Martha has just wrapped up filming of her “Apprentice” reality TV show, which will probably air in the fall. That makes me really sad, actually, and I think going for this kind of a show was a bad move on her part. It will cement her image in people’s minds as a wealthy executive, and that’s a Bad Thing, because people’s negative opinion about her is already based on that image.
People’s positive images of Martha center around her design and home improvement ideas, and that’s the direction she should have gone with this show. She should have done her own version of “Queer Eye for the Straight Guy” or “Extreme Home Makeover” and picked people’s houses to rework with her considerable skills as a designer. It would make her more relatable on a personal level, and it would also highlight what she’s best at.
That would also tackle another major criticism of her work; that she’s out of touch with regular people’s needs and challenges. People say “sure she can do all that and have a perfect house; she has a staff of five hundred people.” If she showed people how they could accomplish what she’s able to do, on a resonable budget and within their own means, she could prove that criticism wrong.
And of course, she should start by redoing my house. Call me, Martha, I need help.

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