Showing posts with label what's wrong. Show all posts
Showing posts with label what's wrong. Show all posts

Wednesday, August 12, 2009

What's wrong with the mainstream media. Well fuck, what's right with it?


First off, a little back story. You know the main stream media, right? Those boring people that you get on the television between american idol and gossip girl? The ones that make a nice writing surface for that overprice crossword puzzle you get sent every sunday? (I'm assuming. I have neither. And won't. I have nothing but contempt for this dilettante leechfuck rable. As you will too once you've finished reading this post.)

Weeeeelll. They seem to have a little bit of trouble with blogs. You know: like this one. Apparently, bloggers just copy all their hard research, and work, repackage it, and then bask in the public glory of it all.

Here, let me show you how it's done: instead of trying to write this post myself, I'm just going to crib a few other people's writing. Simpler, easier, and filling just as much space on the page.
Over the past months, I've heard several journalists make the same comment at various industry forums: That blogs are a "parasitic" medium that wouldn't be able to exist without the reporting done at newspapers.

I hear the frustration behind the comment. You bust your rear to get stories in the paper, then watch bloggers grab traffic talking about your work. All the while your bosses are laying off other reporters, citing circulation declines, as analysts talk about newspapers losing audience to the Web. It's not hard to understand why many newspaper journalists would come to view blogs as parasites, sucking the life from their newsrooms.
Well, boo hoo. Let's see how amazingly well these fuckers cover the news: maybe I should be going straight to the source after all. Another blogger's post, I rip off below:
This post may be a statement of the obvious, but it’s an observation I had this morning. As is typical, I skimmed the Kindle versions of The Boston Globe, The New York Times, and The Wall Street Journal on my subway ride to work. I thought it was very interesting how the three papers described the audience at President Obama’s town hall meeting in New Hampshire last night.
First up, The Boston Globe:
Obama’s audience at Portsmouth High School gymnasium was tame. The bleachers teemed with Obama supporters… The president wound up preaching to the choir, which applauded wildly at his calls for action on healthcare – at one point breaking into a chant of “Yes we can!”
Next up, The New York Times:
Unlike many of Mr. Obama’s town-hall-style meetings, usually filled to the rafters with supporters, Tuesday’s meeting included skeptics from whom he sought out questions. At one point he asked that only people who disagreed with his approach raise their hands to be called on. There were plenty who responded.

Finally, The Wall Street Journal:
Inside Portsmouth High School, Mr. Obama faced a friendly crowd, so much so that he sought out some tough questioners.
And just to round it out, I checked out Fox News once I got to work:
Obama faced no disruptions at his meeting, instead taking questions from supporters who soft-balled him opportunities to knock down criticism.
….and The Huffington Post:
The encounter was so friendly, in fact, that by the end Obama was even asking for skeptical questioners to come forward – to no avail.
Well, well, you little sacks of shit with your fedora hats and your pencils at the ready: go run to the payphone and phone in your scoop. You couldn't report yourself out of a paper bag full of flaming dogshit, and yet you complain when people report on your reporting? Your writing and your point of view would benefit a great deal from a strong dose of objectionism, delivered with a swinging blow to the back of the head.

Tuesday, September 2, 2008

Suspension of Disbelief

This morning, my underwear reminded me of something I'd like to share: suspension of disbelief. I'll spare you the entire train of thought, but suffice it to say that I got to thinking about the movie The Incredibles. Specifically, I was thinking about the superfast little boy who zipped up from his school desk, put a tack on his teacher's chair, and zipped back to his desk before anybody could register that he was not in his seat.

Ok. That's fine. Let's suspend our disbelief. Grant the little tyke his speedy feat. But what about all the consequent phenomena? Just how fast was he going? Faster than sound? He would have made a shock wave and everybody in his class would have heard the sonic booms. Let's say he stayed under Mach 1. His trip through the classroom would have left the air stirring like the wake of a semi truck. The tack he placed probably would have been sucked up into the low pressure zone he made as he vacated the spot he was in as he placed the tack. A roaring wind would have ripped around the classroom. Surely people would have noticed.

Completely unbelievable, even if you posit the one incredible thing. That brings me to the general point of this particular wet blanket. Suspension of disbelief is great. I like it. But there's only so far a reasonable person can go with it. We can easily suspend our disbelief regarding phenomena outside the human experience or outside the realm of knowledge. But once universal laws start getting stepped on, the disbelief suspension gets less and less easy.

Take for instance another movie, X-Men: The Last Stand (colloquially, X-Men 3). I'm willing to grant Wolverine his claws and healing ability and metal-coated skeleton. I can grant Professor X his telepathy. There are lots of the mutant powers toward which I am willing to suspend disbelief. But what about that one dude who kept throwing those spikes at Wolverine? Where did they come from? Where is all the mass coming from? And the scene with the bridge and Alcatraz? OOH! That is completely unbelievable, it had me spluttering and pointing in disbelief. Bridges are the shape they are because some really smart people spent a lot of time and energy designing them. And suspension bridges absolutely depend on the cables to hold them up. That bridge would have collapsed the moment that our nearly believable Magneto stopped holding it up.

I have another movie example. In Starship Troopers, which by the way absolutely murdered Heinlein's novel, a ship in orbit around a planet is shot down. Hm? Things in orbit don't fall out of orbit just because they get broken into two pieces. They are already falling. That's what orbiting is. They can't just fall out of the sky. Remember the Chinese weather satellite? It is still up there in pieces.

When well understood physical laws get violated, I start asking questions. And so should you. I don't mean to be a killjoy (or should I say, "wet blanket?"), but I do want people to do a little more thinking and question asking than they seem to do now. And if you are a movie maker, I would be happy to act as a believability consultant.

Friday, August 29, 2008

That Is Stupid #3: How do you make corn chowder?

1 can cream of celery soup
1 can cream of potato soup
1 can whole kernel corn
2 c. Half and Half
Salt and pepper to taste
1 can New England clam chowder

Combine all ingredients in large saucepan. Heat to blend, eat with crackers.

Yeah, eat with crackers, cracker. Why not just buy 5 cans of corn chowder? What kind of moron decided that corn chowder according to the above recipe was a good idea? The scary thing is that some people would consider mixing 4 cans of condensed soup together to be "cooking" and a "creative effort."

Well, I don't. And you shouldn't either.

Try the following, instead. It is a product of intelligence guided by experience.

Actual Corn Chowder

1 onion
2 cloves garlic
2 Tbsp olive oil
Sautee chopped onion and garlic in olive oil until onion becomes translucent.

3 cups milk
Place milk, onion, and garlic in a pot over medium heat.

2 potatoes
salt
black pepper
Cook cubed potato over high heat in the pan in which you cooked the onion. When browned, add to the pot.

3 ears corn
1 spring onion
Slice the kernels off of the cobs and into the soup. Put half of a sliced spring onion into the pot. Fry up the other half of the spring onion so that it is crunchy and use that as a garnish.

1 tsp cumin
1 tsp coriander
salt to taste
water
Make the soup taste nice, then let it cook for a few minutes. Add water to the desired consistency, or more milk if you'd rather.

If you're vegan, as I'm sure some of you are, substitute coconut milk for the cow's milk.

Thursday, August 28, 2008

Creationism is rampant

The United States is a country that was founded by puritans. An article in the NY Times last week discusses a teacher, David Campbell, who is struggling to teach Florida public school kids the theory of evolution by natural selection. Struggling because these children have not only been indoctrinated with ludicrous creationist bullshit by their parents but they've also been taught not to think, ask questions or come to conclusions on their own. They've been taught to adamantly, brutishly stand by something that they aren't, by virtue of the thing itself, allowed to question.

It upsets me greatly that people actively choose ignorance. I am disheartened by the fact that they willfully misunderstand what science tells them. The worst part? The wet blanket? It's only getting worse, thank you very much Kansas State Board of Education. The mere fact that there is a need for laws that explicitly require evolution to be taught in school is depressing. It means that there are thousands of teachers out there, teaching hundreds of thousands of students, in the name of science, that a man with a white beard waved a magic wand one day, presumably out of boredom, and we all appeared. Or worse, that perhaps out of sheer laziness, he just invented a way for it to perpetuate itself and that's where natural selection comes in.

"[Americans] have a deep-seated distrust of real intellectual effort (probably because we suspect that it will destroy, and I hope it does, that myth of America to which we cling so desperately). " James Baldwin, The Discovery of What It Means to Be an American, January 25 1959 .

Wednesday, August 27, 2008

What's wrong with politics #1

The election coming up is probably going to Obama. Well, more than probably - he couldn't lose it if he tried. Very hard. Extremely hard. The amount of difficulty involved in losing the election is directly proportional to how shitty the last people left everything.

And whoever comes next, and whoever comes after that, some things are now damaged beyond repair. The shitheads have run the country into the ground face-first and a lot of what's broken is gone forever. No use crying over spilt milk. Can't turn back the clock now.

Shitheads 8, Non-shitheads 0.

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Monday, August 18, 2008

What's wrong with the internet #1

The internet is a huge waste of time.

I've wasted time on the internet, and I know it. You've wasted time on the internet, and you know it. So has everyone else you know and they all know it.

If all the time that everyone you know wasted on the internet was used productively, then the world would be a much, much better place.

But it won't. It will be wasted on the internet.

Friday, August 1, 2008

What's wrong with holliwood #1

You can blame it on internet piracy, or audiences getting stupider, or film makers getting stupider, but whatever the cause, you can't deny that movies are going to be getting worse and worse as time goes on, even from the sorry state they are already in.

Can't deny it.

Music too. Pretty much.