I only mention this because I didn't mean to watch any TV tonight - for one thing I've got enough work I should be doing, and for a second I've been reading enough Csikszentmihalyi and Gitlin recently to begin seriously (honestly!) thinking I might just sell my TV/cut off my cable and have an altogether more fulfilling and cultured life. But first, I wanted to watch The Simpsons tonight. The channel guide said The Simpsons would be on - no sure thing between now and the end of the World Series. Just give me that, Rupert. I won't even ask for Arrested Development tonight. All I wanted was to watch The Simpsons, so I turned to Fox (spit) at eight and...

Fashion ROCKS! Or so went the premise of this awards show thing that's on my TV in place of The Simpsons. Only, this isn't an award show - it only acts like one. It's not a fashion show either, however many Beautiful People and The Men That Fund Them are there. I don't know what in God's name it is, to be honest, but I left it on just long enough to discover what "Fashion Rocks!" really means...and that is;

Largely bad music has a long, proud tradition of being married to truly ludicrous fashions (Andre 3000 does, of course, get the Elton John Exemption here)
AND
Fox doesn't think you've had enough of the insufferable Black Eyed F'in Peas.

A question: do you think Dennis Leary ever dreamt he would turn into the sort of reading-lame-cracks-off-the-teleprompter-at-bogus-Fox-'awards'-shows putz he used to excoriate mercilessly a decade ago? See, I don't even know what an awards show producer is thinking when he goes and gets Dennis Leary. He doesn't 'get' Dennis Leary. Hell, I don't think Dennis Leary can even 'get' Dennis Leary anymore. I realize that despite the chain-smoking, Bud-drinking, anti-authoritarian persona he came into our consciousness with, Leary has shilled his gimmick out a hell of a lot over the years. He gets a bit of a pass from me for things he does for firefighters and the like (rumor has it that Leary is just a regular Irish guy from Boston who likes to play hockey with his cop and firefighter buddies...but I dunno, you wouldn't know from watching TV over the past few years). The plain fact of the matter is that once you take away the cigarettes and the bottles of Budweiser on the stool and all the vitriol that went with it - you get...well...nothing. A somewhat pissed-off sounding guy doing an unnecessary job, who his old comedic self would have told in no uncertain terms to fuck off. One of the last people in the entertainment world I would pick to present something like this, which carried all the weight of one styrofoam packing peanut.

However, a glimpse of the crowds during Rod Stewart's performance (was he coming onto Ronnie Wood?) gave me an utterly fantastic idea. Look, today digital cable allows us all to have 500-some channels, and at the same time we're only scratching the surface - the bandwidth used by all your household cable and internet traffic is an infinitesmal fraction of the amount that could be handled by a regular fiber optic cable. Put another way - there's potential for a LOT more niche channels out there. I know the one I want to see is the Awards Show Crowd channel.
Here's what I mean: you know already that the second best part of any awards show is when they scan the crowd to show the just-defeated nominees desperately trying to hold back a cry of 'oh fuck!' or the clear mix of discomfort and annoyance exhibited by, say, Fifty Cent and his posse when, oh, Reba McEntire is performing (and vice versa). The BEST part of any awards show is when they scan the crowd and show various B-list, C-list and L-list celebrities, not to mention other besuited
Why not a channel devoted to this? Surely the technical means are there. I want a broadcast that lingers on the crowd and only the crowd, especially the swish seats; Let it float around Radio City Music Hall or the Kennedy Center or wherever. I want to see them all - every roly-poly, unfortunately-bearded Wall Street type and his call-girl-looking companion (him, swaying off-beat, her, playing the air guitar and hiking her top back up), every greasy-looking, fake-tanned internet entrepreneur/A & R 'rocking out' to some resurrected 60's rocker (or just the same, 'punk-rocking' out to Avril).
I bet you'll see this channel within 4 years, too.

Thankfully, before I had too much more time to think about this, I escaped to buy and cook dinner.
But got done in time for The Surreal Life. Which is a little something like getting done with everything in time to do a half-gainer into an enormous, soul-sucking, strangely compelling black hole.

"He had that European flavor to him, being Mexican."



Apologies to Sartre, but hell is not other people. Hell is not being able to find the remote control as "Creating The New Partridge Family", or whatever the hell it's called, comes on. This really happened to me tonight, for five minutes or so. Stuck way down in the couch cushion after all. I saw more Danny Bonaduce than I propose the introduction of something we could call The Bonaduce Factor, or perhaps The Mark Of Bonaduce. By that I mean you know that anything that Danny Bonaduce is involved with, or even makes a cameo on, sucks. And not just that it sucks, but that it's got that hanging stench of leering desperation and 'why didn't we think of this whole scam first?' inferiority. Sort of like a bad, sub-Stern shock radio act.

Following the recent Yusuf 'Cat Stevens' Islam deportation fiasco, the US is urging changes in airline watch list rules.

Presumably, it's to counter the imminent threat posed by the arrival of other DFSSSMD's (Dodgy Foreign Seventies Singer-Songwriters of Mass Destruction) on our fair shores. I don't need to remind you that under our current, pre-9/11 security regulations, Gordon Lightfoot could enter the United States at any time. Consider for a moment the chilling fact that the next evidence we might have of him being here could be a mushroom clou....er...an encore of "The Wreck Of The Edmund Fitzgerald" echoing out from some dinner theatre. And I have been told by sources that despite our best efforts, Jose Feliciano is already in the country.

...of which I'm never really short on, anyway.

Current news headline from the AOL.com home page: "Hurricane That Devastated Haiti May Target U.S."

I'm not about to go all media studies on this little nugget - I've had enough of that all day and am just winding down from it now, but I couldn't help but notice. Perhaps the headline link writer didn't have any ulterior motive as she wrote that - maybe she didn't even think twice about it (doubtful, given the layers of production that the content of a major corporate homepage must filter through, but still.) But do you notice anything about that sentence? I do - it's the hardly-required anthropomorphizing of this otherwise-nothing-like-any-person-I-know weather system (as if giving it a name wasn't phase one in that process, but I digress). Things that don't think don't 'target' - nor do they attack (and for the sake of argument, put the word 'attack' in place of 'target' and see how jarring and ridiculous it sounds.)
Unless you're willing to tell me Hurricane Jeanne has suddenly, spontaneously developed a consciousness - in which case I'd say that's fantastic, but perhaps it would have been a little more convenient if it did so before killing 700-odd Haitians. That better be one penitent hurricane.

Let's look at a couple verbs that just as easily could have fit in that metonymic slot:

To approach...
To move towards...
To target...

What do you feel in your gut when you hear that word 'target'?
Who else (so we're told) 'targets' the U.S. on a constant, eternal basis, who's always coming at us with destructive, hateful, evil ambitions?

Take out the first four words of the headline, leave the last three:

"_________________ May Target U.S."

That's got to be saved in a macro at just about every corporate media office. Say you're a journalist - nary a day would go by that you couldn't use it somewhere. Wonderful.

The language of fear is even - or perhaps, most profoundly and subtly - at work in the most innocuous places. Perhaps it's even more important to notice it when it's in incremental little episodes like this. Picky, picky, picky, right?
Remember, never stop being afraid.

Perhaps you need some napalm.

TheSmokingGun.com recently took a break from its usual repertoire of hilarious celebrity mugshots and reports of true (sick) crime capers to try out the new Stamps.com/USPS feature by which you can have (almost) anyone put on a real, live, true blue US postage stamp (a sheet of 'em, actually). The potential, if you just think about it for a moment, is boundless. Want Uncle Stan on a stamp? Perhaps Fido, or Frisky the kitten?

How about the, er..'happy' couple, Golan Cipel and Governor Jim McGreevey?



Even better, why not mail the electric bill in with a stamp of executed nuclear spies Julius and Ethel Rosenberg?




And Zoran, I don't even think I want to know what the reaction would be in the Bosnian postal system if I sent you a Christmas card with this guy on an (official United States!) stamp.



Like I said, the possibilities for this are endless - notwithstanding the obviously infamous figures who don't get by the guardians of good taste. Remember the debate a few years back about what version of Elvis to honor with a stamp - young and fit or old, bloated, drugged up and leaning against death's door? Nothing stopping you from putting the fattest, sweatiest King you can find on a stamp now - a fact that makes me positively giddy.

Wanna bet you could get Sambo, Aunt Jemima, Amos n' Andy, or other caricatures on a stamp, Mr. Edgy Po-mo? Wanna bet you couldn't?

Noam Chomsky? Jon Stewart? Pol Pot? How about Borat?



Me, I just want a sheet or two of stamps featuring a true American hero, John Wolyniec.




And I'd encourage you all to try it out for yourselves along with me, but I've just gotten around to checking the stamps.com terms and conditions, and dammit, they're claiming not to accept any photos of teenagers or adults anymore. Doesn't mean you can't try. And it still leaves us with this little tyke...

If you missed it first thing Saturday morning (and who in their right mind wouldn't? It starts at 6 am, when most sane people are cozied up in bed) here's what I played on RFA.

We're going to be in Iraq for a very, very long time. Saddam Hussein was himself a weapon of mass destruction. "Draining the jihadist swamp". The weapons are there. Blad-de-blah-de-blah. Click above if you've got a strong stomach.

Hypocritical, I say, because I'm sitting here blissfully unaware of what's going on in real-time in Manhattan tonight - who's up to speak at the moment, what scurrilous lies and inconceivable claims about the war, the economy, and that repulsive man are being shoveled out there tonight like so much manure (and being the home of the Rangers, you know MSG has seen more than its share of shit.)
It doesn't even mean enough to me that I'd leave the TV running in the other room. This is where I'm at right now - perhaps unfortunately; having to listen to Dick Cheney go prattling on for a half hour, unfiltered, would induce apoplexy. It's a show, nothing more (so was the DNC, and I watched that sparingly). A show I'm not watching.

So perhaps condemning the networks for not showing more than a few hours of the RNC in prime time isn't wholly fair. Pertinent to the article below, what's worth thinking about is the sense that the Arab world feels it has more at stake in this campaign than many Americans do. Is that a fair assessment? To some degree, I'd wager: after all, Americans merely get ripped off by BushCo, while Middle Easterners - be they Iraqis, Iranians, Syrians, etc. live under the spectre of current or future invasions. To say that the US is a Middle Eastern power is a bit facile now, isn't it? Arab audiences may have some distorted views of the US and its political processes (sometimes distorted, sometimes maybe truer to reality than what we see from within) - and god only knows what they're going to be thinking after watching this week's charade - but compare that to the apathy and disengagement from the whole sphere of real issues (in favor of comparatively irrelevant single-issues), which is evident among a lot of people you and I know.

God bless America. And Nielsen.