So, do we really need logic, or not?

New on FOX on Mondays nights this fall is a show called Vanished. It's about a Georgia senator's wife who's been kidnapped. Oddly enough, there may be something deeper going on. I've seen all of it so far, and I'm still on the fence. I'm not really claiming it's good, but there is some überspitzenkeit that I like about it.

the wife of the former mayor of Atlanta who had been missing for 10 years shows up. She's been dead for 10 years, but she was kept frozen all this time. And she was left with a cryptic symbol drawn on her hand. When the former mayor was told, he warned them to leave it alone, and then shot himself. We later find out that the wife was kidnapped in an effort to get the mayor to stop the building of a reservoir.

So far, we've had the ransom demand that the senator vote to confirm a supreme court nominee, who is the senator's "lifelong friend," a nominee who a year ago had an affair with with the senator's underage daughter. The senator does not know about this, but his wife did. Why exactly he would need the threat against the life of his wife to force him to vote to confirm his friend I don't really know.

Then there's the Glouster, MA, fisherman who claims that he knew the wife under a different name 12 years ago, and he has the video to prove it. Or at least he did until it was stolen from his truck at the same time that the copy that a report had made was erased from her computer. Oh, he may have just discovered he has a daughter by her.

The Masons and the Attorney General are pretty clearly involved (the AG, has Masonic stuff on his desk). In an effort to discredit the fisherman's story, the bad guys, hire another fisherman to say that 12 years ago, he found a dead body that was obviously her. She was buried as a Jane Doe in a potter's field, a potter's field that the night before we saw the man who hired the second fisherman burying a coffin in. As though they couldn't tell that the coffin had been buried 12 hours ago, not 12 years ago. Then the second fisherman was murdered. While it's amazing that things like this don't really bother me. In fact I kind of like it.

However, here's the thing that makes me want to stop watching. The FBI found a laptop that was receiving a live video signal of the kidnapped wife until a prisoner being transfered wrote a message in Masonic runes on her palm as a symbol to tell them to stop the broadcast, which means the FBI can no longer triangulate on the signal. However, the main agent gets an idea: "You said the laptop can send as well as receive. If you rig it to broadcast the signal, can't you trace it back to the source?"

"It will take time to isolate the signal, but in theory, yeah."

Okay, if they "follow the signal back to the source" when they are broadcasting it from their own office, isn't it going to lead them to their own office? And if they're broadcasting the same signal that they've been triangulating in on for at least an hour, don't they already have the signal isolated?

Look at Them, They formed a band

For the second concert in a row, I went to the show for the middle of the night's three bands. The Spinto Band opened, and they were okay, but all the time I kept wondering if any band really needs three electric guitars on every song. We Are Scientists closed the evening, and I did enjoy them a lot although I did think they began to get old after a little while. However, Art Brut is really something special. Really, how can you not like a band that begins their set with a song that starts "Formed a band, We formed a band. Look at us, We formed a band," and then in the second verse claims that "We're gonna be the band that writes the song that makes Israel and Palestine get along." So much fun.

Well, it is math, not English

The October issue of Notices of the American Mathematical Society arrived in my mailbox today, and the cover listed an article called "Tips for the Job Search," which I felt I should read without delay. There is naturally a section about having a webpage that offers the rather obvious advice that "a webpage with outdated information, broken links, or misspelling could work against you."

I soon realized this is a two-way street when I noticed that according to the AMS Employment Information in the Mathematical Sciences, the University of Marylad [sic] is hiring. They had a total of four postings, with two of them misspelling the name of the institution. Do I really want to work there?

Earth Sandwich

In May, (b/v)logger Ze Frank put forth the wonderful challenge of the Earth Sandwich. You take two pieces of bread, place one of them on the ground, and then place the other at the antipodal point. Given that so much of the earth is water, putting both slices on land is not that easy. (A good map is here.)

Congratulations to brothers Jon and Duncan for completing the world's first Earth Sandwich. They went with the New Zealand-Iberian Peninsula sandwich, but as far as I could tell, both pieces of bread were not laid down simultaneously. Any one up for a trip to {Hawai`i or Botswana} or {Borneo or Brasil} or {Tierra del Fuego or Lake Baikal} or {Greenland or Antarctica}?

One thing that I remember from my trip to England was that it was well-signed. I never felt concerned that I did not know where the emergency exit was because the green signs were everywhere. However, the picture from this article entitled "335 Road Signs in Eight-Mile Stretch" may be going a little too far.

Tabloiding

"Angie and I will consider tying the knot when everyone else in the country who wants to be married is legally able."
--Brad Pitt in the forthcoming October issue of Esquire.

As an avid NPR listener, I often feel unable to discuss whom a celebrity is dating dating and may or may not be marrying or having a child with or whatever with, and so I don't know which comment to post, and so I'll just do both.

Post A) Brad, burned by past relationships, is clearly commitment-phobic but does not want to admit to it, and so therefore he has chosen a convenient political cause to hide this fear behind.

Post B) Brad clearly supports Warren Jeffs.

Standoff

New FOX Show: Standoff

The show stars Ron Linvingston as an FBI hostage rescue agent who to win the trust of a man holding his son hostage at gun point tells him and everyone listening on the radio that he's been sleeping with his partner for three months, and so everything will change for the both of them. It costars Gina Torres as his boss.

In the first episode, the Causcasian convert to Islam and son of a US Congressman who is running for the Senate walks into a coffeeshop wearing a vest full of explosives under his jacket and demands to speak to the media or he will blow everyone up. Everyone has to put their cellphones into a big pile. Eventually one of them starts to ring. The ringtone is the theme from M*A*S*H. No matter what happens in the rest of the episode, I think this has earned it a second episode.

Justice

Woo-hoo, FOX has new shows. On Wednesday night, I took in the series premiere of Justice, an "unflinching, behind-the-scenes look at how high-profile cases are tried in these media-saturated times." It's executive produced by Jerry Bruckheimer, and I've heard it advertised as "CSI" from the perspective of the high profile defense attorneys. I will admit there is potential for some interesting stuff here, and there were a few things that the lawyers of the firm of TNT&G did in the pilot that I liked. When I first heard of the show, my initial impression was that they would follow only one case during the season, which I could be interested in. However, thanks to the another note they hit in the commercials, I knew I would hate this show.

"Ultimately," according to the show's website, "each episode will conclude with the series' signature epilogue. In a flashback to the scene of the crime, we see what no lawyer can ever see: what really happened, and whether JUSTICE has been served."

The first "signature epilogue," it went like this. Some rich dude has been charged with bashing in his wife's skull with a golf club though no murder weapon has been found. The defense has presented its experts to show that the injuries were more consistant with a fall. The jury agreed and found him not guilty. There is rejoicing and thanks from the defendant for his lawyers, but instead of going for drinks with them to see how they were effected by the case, did they do the right thing, we are thrust backwards in time to see the defendant tucking his daughter into bed as his wife climbs out of the pool, slips, and falls just like the defense's forensics expert surmised. Hooray, JUSTICE is served.

But is it really? If the show is really about trying a case in the media, why end it with objective truth? A truth that can only take place far away from the media spotlight. But even worse, it is a truth that can never be known by the main characters? Ending an episode of a television series with a character doing something that the other characters don't know about is often a very good device. This is because we know that when the other characters do find out about it, crazy things will happen. But the very nature of the Justice signature epilogue is that the main character can never discover the truth, but it is thrust upon us.

A device like this could possibly work in way like the way the flawed but interesting film Primal Fear systematically destroys its high-profile defense attorney, ending with a shocking revelation. But as evidenced by the final look on Richard Gere's face, it was actually revealed to the attorney! And with Justice, by showing that the lawyers were indeed right, it's not trying to undercut them at all.

Please cancel this show.