FCC Headlines

I went to www.fcc.gov today to see what was there. I was struck by how four of the first eight "Headlines" were:

2/28/05 Commission Denies Indecency Complaints Against Veterans Day Broadcast of "Saving Private Ryan".

2/28/05 FCC Denies Indecency Complaint Against "Arrested Development" Program.

2/28/05 FCC Denies Indecency Complaints Against "Will and Grace" Episode.

2/25/05 FCC Denies Indecency Complaint Against "Angel" Episode.

The last item is referenced by also referenced the Parents Television Council, who filed the complaint, with:

FCC Rejects "Angel" Complaint filed by the PTC back in Nov. 2003. The show was canceled last year.

The Angel episode in question was aired on November 19, 2003, and is episode 5.8, "Destiny," and the now federally decreed decent scene involved a flashback sex scene between Angel and Drusilla. The PTC apparently had no problem with the episode's other sex scene between the consenting vampires Spike and Harmony.

I don't know exactly how long the process takes to determine indecency. The episodes of Will & Grace and Arrested Development also both aired in November 2003, 15 months ago. Could we get into a situation where the FCC decides that where it to air today, this would in fact be indecent, but under the decency standards at the time it was aired, it was not indecent?

Also, how much does the FCC spend each year responding to these complaints.

In an unrelated note, in case you missed the episode of CSI involving infantilism a couple of weeks ago, you can download it from the Parents Television Council website for free, and although there is the bold, red "WARNING: Graphic Content!!! Do NOT push play if you don't want to see the explicit video!!!" it is not protected by a page telling you not to enter unless you are over 21. It is their "Worst TV Clip of the Week." I also noticed that a few of their previous lewd clips availible for minors to download for free would have aired outside the 6:00 AM to 10:00 PM, EST, window where the broadcast standards are less strict, and so they shouldn't be outraged. I would however like to commend their efforts to make sure you do actually see what you are complaining about.

The Award for Worst Nomination Goes to...

Yesterday, the winners of the Razzies were announced, with George W. Bush winning Worst Actor and Worst Couple (with EITHER Condoleezza Rice OR the book My Pet Goat) for Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11, which also won Worst Supporting Actor (Donald Rumsfeld) and Worst Supporting Actor (Britney Spears, beating fellow nominee Condoleezza Rice). It should be noted that Fahrenheit 9/11 is unseen by this author.

Is it really fair for George W. Bush, et al, to have been nominated for the worst acting award? Maybe I could understand if the film were about Ronald Reagan, whom one could argue, as Edmund Morris partially does in his biography Dutch, was trying to play the role of president rather than actually be president. Is archival footage of Reagan a performance? I could possibly entertain this argument and that he could be elligible for playing himself, either for good or for bad, in a documentary.

It is somewhat of an historical anomoly that Michael Moore was not nominated for worst director. We have now seen 25 Razzies given out for Worst Actor, and winning the Worst Actor is pretty strongly correlated with a nominations for Worst Director, Worst Screenplay, and Worst Picture (or Worst Remake or Sequel) for the same film. Indeed, this is the first year since 1996 that a Worst Actor winner--Pauly Shore in Bio-Dome--came from a film that not also nominated for all three of these other awards; however that year Shore tied for the award with Tom Arnold in Big Bully and The Stupids, which did receive nominations in all three categories. In the previous year Shore did not share the award for Jury Duty, which was not nominated for any of the others.

The other times this happened were in 1993 (Burt Reynolds, Cop and a Half), 1983 (Christopher Atkins, A Night in Heaven) and 1981 (Klinton Spillsbury, The Legend of the Lone Ranger). In 1992, Razzie favorite Sylvester Stallone won his fourth Worst Actor Award for the dreadfull buddy cop film Stop! or Mom Will Shoot, which was nominated for Worst Sceenplay, but not Director or Picture.

But Fahrenheit 9/11 clearly does something qualitatively different than these other films. In a standard film, the director will ask for another take if an actor gives a poor performance. If we took the cutting room scraps, it might be possible to piece together a horrible performance by Jamie Foxx--who knows? perhaps one even worthy of a Razzie--but no, Taylor Hackford knew that Foxx's best perfomances should make it into the film. How is it fair to compare Bush's "performance" to that of fellow nominee Collin Farrell in Alexander, which presumably is in the opinion of Oliver Stone the best Farrell had to offer? Although Stone was nominated for Worst Director....

Even if you take the position that Bush was acting and that he was not saying what he knew to be true or something like that, it was partly Moore's point to show the worst possible takes, to expose where Bush was giving his least effective perfomances. Fahrenheit 9/11 should not have been elligible for any acting Razzie.

Of course I do have a remedy in this--pay $25 to get membership in the Golden Raspberry Award Foundation, which will give me a vote at the nomination stage.

Other nominees for Worst Nonimations include any posthumous Grammy nomination.

The Moon Hoax

A couple of years ago, I had the pleasure of seeing A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Moon, a film devoted to proving that man has in fact never set foot on the moon. From beginning with the story of the Tower of Babel to show the historical desire of man to go higher than he should and the tragic consequences of this folly to ending with three black title cards with quotes from Shakespeare, Orwell, and the movie Sneakers ("TOO MANY SECRETS"), the film would like to convince you that it was impossible for man to have gone to the moon. They give a list of various pieces of evidence, including how photographs claimed to be taken on the moon were clearly not taken their--there's wind whipping the flag, there are shadows that are coming from two sources of light, but their main argument is that passing through the Van Allen radiation belts will kill a person, and the Van Allen belts lie in between the earth and the moon, ergo, no man has been to the moon. I have heard James Van Allen himself debunk this myth, but sadly I could not find a link to this. Maybe it is true after all. Is Google in on it, not allowing this debunking to be found? I mean, clue #15 that we didn't go to the moon was that it happened during the Nixon administration, and so we can't trust it. Nixon did go to China, and China has been know to screen the internet.

The same theorists claim to have a new movie (I'll believe it when I see it. Anyone can put up a website claiming to have a movie for sale.) providing further evidence, called Astronauts Gone Wild. Since some people amongst us actually claim to have been to the moon, the producers decided to interview them. If we buy the video, we may discover "[w]hich astronauts refuse to swear on the Bible that they really went to the moon." The preview of the film on their website is Buzz Aldrin shoving the film's director. That's the entire preview. Four seconds of an angry old man calling someone a liar. We clearly did not go to the moon.

iRant

Actually I don't really see this as a rant, merely a product review, but since it is about an Apple product, I thought I'd give it a cool title and that was the first one I thought of.

Every once in while, I feel a little behind the times when because I don't have an iPod. Then I kick myself because for me, this is clearly not a product that is worth the $300. Whether something is poorly designed or not is certainly dependent upon what it is supposed to be designed to do, but since the ad campaign definitely tries to make it me feel it is for me, I feel like I need to take a stand.

Right before Christmas 2003, my friend Bryan moved from Chapel Hill back to Fresno, and so I helped him drive cross country. We loaded up all the music in his iPod and plugged it into his car stereo and never had to change it. I will say that was very nice.

0. I don't really have a whole lot of mp3s that I don't have on CD. I can listen to CDs at home and at my office on my laptop and in my truck, and I'm almost always in one of those places, and so a portible mp3 player of any sort isn't really the right device for me. And certainly not for $300.
   
   
1. The device is portable, but yet it doesn't have any type of belt clip. I'm sure it's not difficult to find something to hold it, like maybe a pocket, but the only time that I really use a portible device that plays audio things is when I run. Is something to hold it on me while I run too much to ask? I see that the iPod mini has an armband, but I hate armbands like that.
   
   
2. Would it be too hard to build a radio into the thing? When I run, I almost always listen to NPR. Sometimes, WYXC, or occasionally a football or baseball game or classic rock (somehow that works for me when I'm running much better than when I'm sitting still. I still haven't figured that out.) but virtually always NPR, and this isn't likely to change even if I had easy access to all my mp3s. I should point out that I think I heard that the next generation of iPods will have a radio built in whenever it comes out.
   
   
3. I found the thumb wheel interface to be incredibly annoying. Yeah, up-down button would be the obvious way to make a cursor move up and down, but that's not cool. "You’ll find such thoughtful construction only from Apple." What good is having a song if you can't access it?
   
   
4. I've always had this same problem with stuff made by Apple. Part of the selling point to me at least of the Mac has always been that they look cool, hip, and exciting. Their cutting edge aesthetics aren't just thrown together. Except that I don't think they look very good at all. Maybe I'm somewhat aesthetically Amish? What's so wrong with black? If it's an electronic device like stereo equipment or a computer, it should not call attention to itself. (It is okay if they have buttons though.) I realize it's easier to sell something if you brand its image with a distinctive look, but if you insist upon something like the little white bud earphones, you have to accept that not everyone likes them.
   
   

Fear not, Bruins fans

I remember back in 1990, Red Sox fans were all psyched because they knew that based on their last World Series win being in 1918, their beloved Sox had this habit of winning the Series in years following Russian revolutions. But of course the Sox did not win the 1990 World Series, giving evidence that the Red Sox-Russian revolution correlation is not so simple. (If the communists return to power, and then the Red Sox, maybe we'll have something here. They are the Red Sox, after all.)

Now, at lunch today, the TV at Subway was on Sportcenter, and they pointed out the interesting trend how with the cancellation of the NHL season, the two times that Lord Stanley's cup has not been awarded, 1919 and now 2005, it followed the Red Sox winning the World Series. This year it is due to the labor strife. The 1919 championship series between the Montreal Canadiens and the Seattle Metropolitans was cancelled due to a flu epidemic.

So what are fans of the Boston Bruins, who presumably also root for the Red Sox, to do? Will a Red Sox championship prevent the Bruins from skating around with the Cup held high? Let's look at what happened to Lord Stanley's Cup in the years the previous four times the Red Sox won the World Series. (Oh yeah, the Sox won 5 of the first 15 World Series, and now only the Yankees, Cardinals, and A's have won more World Series than the Red Sox. (The Dodgers also have 6 titles.) What have the Sox fans been complaining about all these years?)

1903 Sox win --> 1904 Ottawa Silver Seven win Stanley Cup
1912 Sox win --> 1913 Quebec Bulldogs win Stanley Cup
1915 Sox win --> 1916 Montreal Canadiens win Stanley Cup
1916 Sox win --> 1917 Seattle Metropolitans win Stanley Cup

So fear not Bruins fans. Cheer on your Sox--two thirds of the time there is a Stanley Cup final in the year after the Sox win.

Some good with the bad

It's nice to see:

That NBC is airing Scrubs during a sweeps month for a change, and at 9:00 to boot. Tonight's episode even featured a full act that was a parody four-camera sit-com act. Why exactly this would want me to stick around and watch the four-camera show Committed that follows it, I don't know.

It's not nice to see:

That the FOX brain trust shortened the season of Arrested Development from 22 to 18 episodes, forcing it to end before the May sweeps (as well as making it go on hiatus for the remainder of the February sweeps period). They are doing this so that they can throw their full backing to the May 1 premiere of American Dad, which drew 15 million viewers after the Super Bowl, myself included, which means I was witness to the horror that was this show. Maybe with three months to retool it. Flush of the German scientist in the body of a goldfish down the toilet. It seems to me that they just decided to throw as many jokes as possible into the show counting on the few that were good to make people ignore the inordinate number of misfiring ones. I have similar problems with Seth MacFarlane's other show Family Guy, and since it seems like a cheap rip-off of this show, it's no wonder that I didn't like it. Take a show like Arrested Development with great characters and replace it with one with terrible characters for sweeps. Thanks again FOX.

A Diamond Is For(n)ever

"Today, more than 200,000 diamond engagement rings are placed on ring fingers every year." (A Timeline of Diamonds, from www.debeers.com )

However, according to the National Center for Health Statistics the number of couples who got married in the US in 2001 was 2,327,000.

Granted, De Beers does say "more that 200,000" and not just 200,000, but would you have guessed that fewer that 1 out of 10 marriages start with a proposal of a diamond ring? (Although I have tacitly assumed that (a) the giving of an engagment ring eventually results in a marriage, which is of course not always true, and (b) no one gets married outside the US.) I have no idea how many of those who propose with a diamond actually follow the "recommended" guideline of spending 17% of your annual salary on the ring.

I can't decide if I believe this statistic. De Beers's share has fallen to a mere two-thirds world's wholesale diamond market over the last decade or so, but still they should know how many engagement rings are sold. Also they have built their success in part due their perpetuating the myth that diamonds are actually rare, and so maybe they need to underreport the sales of diamonds.

But it wouldn't be the most successful ad campaign of the 20th Century if it didn't have an effect on me, and so it does feel weird to me the rate is this low. Is it really true that 9 out of 10 couples don't go with a diamond engagement ring? I already knew there was no shame in not having one; in fact, I think it is laudible and preferable, but I also thought it was somewhat uncommon. Is the diamond engagement ring a myth that needs to change?

But how? I suppose one avenue is guilt. Would you want to start your marriage by killing or maiming African children? Or something like how diamonds are a poor investment because they don't increase in value all that much? These are negative campaigns. Nobody likes these. It is difficult to win over an audience by tearing down your opponent.

Thus, I submit what is needed is a positive campaign. That it is, in fact, more romantic without the diamond. Any idiot with two months salary can go out an get a diamond ring. It's not like they're uncommon--you can get one at most any mall, which I suppose makes them as rare as cell phones or sweaters from The Gap. Men often jump through elaborate hoops to find a creative way of giving a ring. This is what is lauded. This is what people think of as romantic, and even when they go comicly awry, it makes for a great story. Never does the cut, color, carat, or clarity come up when telling these stories. Romance is borne out of creativity. It does not come from the bottom of pit in Pretoria, South Africa. It is made by couples. It is homegrown. It is not the province of the greeting card industry, florists, chocoletiers, and jewelers, and I think most everyone knows this. But how do we sell this nonproduct?

Xinnian kuaile!

That's "Happy New Year" in Chinese (if you add the proper marks to indicate the tones). It's the Year of the Roster.

In honor of this, I'll point out that the corporate motivational speakers are wrong, the chinese word for "crisis" (weiji) is not composed of the words for "danger" and "opportunity."

Here is an interesting statement of the misconseption, followed by an explanation of why it's not true.

Again, based on purely financial motives, which is a better usage of a studio's $2.4 million?

1) Financing one-fifth of the budget of Sideways.
2) Airing one commercial for Constantine on the Super Bowl.

Neither of these films has been seen by me, but I wonder if that one commercial a better use of a corporation's money than actually making another movie. It's true that if no one knew about a film, no one would see it, but it seems to me that although I have seen commercials for Sideways, I knew about it and wanted to see it before I saw them. It has earned nearly four times its budget so far according to IMDb.

Will that one (1) commercial pay for itself by swaying 350,000 people who wouldn't have otherwise seen the film to go see it? Probably not.

I suppose that this logic when applied to commercials for other products fails as well. Will Pepsi generate the sale of millions of bottles to justify the cost of airing its multiple ads? (Plus who knows how much it cost to actually get P. Diddy et al to be in the ads.) Not directly, but they do it to sell the brand, not the product. I don't remember seeing any Coke commericals. Pepsi has to do something to try to sway public image in the Cola War. But films are completely different animals. It's not like there will be this decade long struggle for control of the box office between Constantine and XXX: State of the Union. These films will come and go quickly, to be briefly resurrected when the special edition director's cut DVD will be released in September.