Me Three Shirts From Mail Order Far

In typical William style, this is a post about avoiding writing a post about what I am thinking about, which is that I went back to my church.  I will proceed to say that I won't say anything about it other than I don't exactly know at this point why I stopped going. Basically, there was no good reason, but almost three years had passed. There is a lot that I could say about that, but it is private, so I won't.

I had a digression here that had to do with something I purchased at office depot my senior year, if you were there (Dave, AChen, etc.) then you will recall that you felt I paid too much for it, but I felt that because it was exactly what I wanted, it was worth it.  The point is (a) I still have it, (b) there is no longer any thing for which I will pay the "no haggle" price because its exactly what I want. In fact, I am not sure there even is anything that I would point to and say "this is exactly what I want."

I don't think this is a function of being any more mature.  I think its the times.  I am just not convinced that anyone wants a new Lexus or a big-screen TV anymore, even if they could afford it, which (of course) they can't.

So, I got myself a Christmas present.  I got two white shirts and a french blue shirt for work: two from Amazon.com and one from Lands End. Total price is something like $55.  If I am an indicator of the market (and I am) then we are in for a long winter.

William Li, for real not fiction

I named a RPG character "William Li, for real not fiction."

Dr.Mitchell once told E$ that most of his students' first plays/novels/etc. are a thinly veiled pantomime of their unfulfilled fantasies. OK, but that's not really a criticism. "Your fantasy world is boring" or "You are a d-bag who, unlike the Heezy, we can't root for." Now, THAT's criticism. But I digress.

Fiction is a construct that can never be made real. I've spent a lot of time thinking about the ontological status of fictional universes. And trust me: fiction is always fiction. Naming a character with your name and adding the suffix "for real, not kidding I mean it" doesn't change it.

Neither does slavishly recreating it in real life (a la the first "Harry Potter" movie).

"What about the fact that the same images, characters, plots, feeling, etc. that you have... can also exist in someone else's head?" Good question that I've asked myself as a rhetorical device. Here is the answer:

•  "Abraham Lincoln"
•  "The mystery of the Adam Walsh kidnapping"
•  "The Challenger Disaster"

Get it? It is the ontological status of semiotics and memory, not of fictional characters. To illustrate further, you can also make fiction that is totally unsharable for those who didn't already have the necessary keys to decode the signal.

• While visiting Palette town town, Ash saw a Chimchar evolve into Snorlax.
  "Impossible!" he shouted.

Where am I going with this?

The topic that originally made me write about this at Rice (a few times, actually) and which still puzzles me is reality television. Starting with the 1970's PBS series, "An American Family", which featured The Loud family, and which was supposed to be mundane television about an upper middle class family but turned into juicy voyeurism, reality television seems to cast doubt on my ideas about the ontological status of fiction. To explain further: The Louds themselves were somehow freed by the presence of camera crews... The eldest son got a whole lot less closeted, the awkward daughter got a whole lot more bulimic, the bemused wife kicked out the overbearing jerk-face husband, and EVERYONE in America hated on them.  Big time.

Today, The formula remains is basically unchanged.

But the format itself did not re-surge until the 90's with MTV's "The Real World." The original rationale for "The Real World" that Bunham and Murray had for using real people without scripts was to improvise a soap opera rather than pay writers.  The essence of the genre is now various attempts to perfect this formula. My personal impression is that reality television is often a tautly-paced contest between real people trying to do an unscripted and grotesque hyperbole of what they think are the most interesting aspects of themselves, and the producers trying to keep the cast members drunk, tired, hungry, cut-off from any means of emotional anchoring, and under duress.

So at precisely what point, in this reality tv circus, does the fiction begin? My best guess is that fiction begins immediately. It flows from the bare lie of the whole contrivance.

But! There is a major difference from fiction. Notwithstanding, the fact that non-professional actors are merely pretending to be themselves, the real people who are on these reality tv shows can actually hurt each other; psychologically. The producers can really hurt them, too. And, as we saw with the Louds, pundits can really really hurt them (far more so than a TV critic could ever hurt an actor playing a character)

Most of this reads like a big "well... Duh." And I'm not satisfied to simply leave the issue there. Why should there be this dichotomy between the artifice that gives rise to fiction in reality tv and the very real human suffering? The answer has got to be "intent."

For a good demonstration of this, I recommend (no kidding) "Pauly Shore is Dead"

What, you say? You say Pauly Shore is really low brow and that he has no talent? You are so wrong. The movie is hilarious cringe humor with the sensibility and pacing of "Curb your enthusiasm" but with a much more likable protagonist.

Pauly is keenly aware of his meteoric rise and fancies himself to have had an F Scott Fitzgeraldesque fall. On this conceit, the movie milks the idea that Shore faking his death would be the ONLY way to revive his career for many laughs. (In real life, I believe he eventually went back to his family's business of running a big LA comedy club.) Stylistically, the movie stands out for the unrelenting stream of highly personal put downs and humiliations that Shore endures.

But, he is also the director.

That means, "the wee-zel" can yell "cut" whenever he wants.  Moreover, all the actors are keen on making "Paul Shore, for real not just a character" as funny/real as possible. Big difference from reality TV, which just scoops up hours of footage and then plumbs it for the depths of human depravity.

 Pauly Shore... solving life's mys-teries BUUU-dee

Decrypting Life's Mysteries

It escaped my attention that Soupy Sales passed away.  As far as comedians go, Soupy Sales is who I am most trying to emulate. This is a strange statement to make given my age, and perhaps deserves more consideration.  Not for Sales, but for the person who is really fascinating: me!

I discovered that Sales died when I read an article in the NY Times that a new Yankees tradition is now to get a pie in the face when the Yankees win a home game on the last AB. If you are wondering who Soupy Sales is, click on the link, which is his Wikipedia article. And also: boo on you.

Anyhow, our own forgotten past and the effect it has had on our attitudes is one of life's mysteries to decrypt.  This blog has helped me solve one of them.  Why am I so fond of:

Soupy Sales
John Ritter
Dick Clark


Of course!  When I was in elementary and there were no cartoons on TV, I would watch  "$25,000 Pyramid" because it was a game show that I could understand and play along at home.

Deep....

Pirate Pastafarian in Perfectly Preposterous Predicament

So I'm blogging about this kid in NC and found the best website for covering the story. And I am commenting about it on my blog.

Last night in my trade secrets class, I asked about the applicability of the "hot news" exception to bloggers. Was blogging about someone news agency's release unfair competion. The answer (according to my take-away from what the professor said):

Probably for us mortal bloggers -- no.
But for commerical blogs or blogs pretending to be news sources (like Matt Drugde for instance) -- maybe but probably not.


So what about this kid in NC? Apparently he demanded that his "religion" get equal time with "the amount of time that Intelligent Design is given in Kansas." Do you think this kid really cares about the "culture war" issue? I dount it. He's just some wise-guy. Nevertheless, because I have no experience at all as an educator or an administrator, I feel that I can conclusively say that the principal of this school made the wrong decision. This kid shouldn't have gotten a suspension. Clearly that was a waste of a teachable moment. Bad principal! What would have really fixed this kid's apple cart would have been to demand that he explain himself in essay form. Here's the outline:

Title: The Satorial Requirements of the Church of the Flying Spagetti Monster

I: Thesis statement - Pastafarians are instructed to don pirate garb by the Flying Spagetti Monster
II: Context
A. Church of the Flying Spagetti Monster
1. Overall perspective on theology
2. Structure of the theology
3. Tenants of CFSM concerning dress
B. Piracy
1. In general
2. 18th Century pirates of the carribean
3. How they dressed and why
III. Analysis (Wherein the context is synthesized with authorities on theology, philosophy, piracy, and fashion to give some cogent explanation as to why the Thesis should hold)
IV. Conclusion (some larger point to which the Thesis is but a gateway)


Paper should be at least 15 pages of body text (i.e. excluding any footnotes, photographs, illustrations, charts, graphs, tables, etc.) in length, Times New Roman 12 point, 1" margins all around, double spaced. As much as possible the paper should conform to Chicago Manual of Style. The heads of the English and Social Studies department must agree that the work is at a "B" level grade.

The kid gets 1 month to write the essay or else he is suspended
If the kid gets a B, he can don pirate garb with impunity
If the kid gets below a B, but gets above an F he receives no punishment but is barred from ever stylin' with piratewear again.
If the kid fails, he gets afterschool dention for a month during which time he must attend tutoring from the librarian and others on how to write a paper.

Marathon TV

Posting with Jason on lap. You'd think that Dakota would have been harder than Jason for this, but Dakota was less wiggly when I would type.

esz


Stuff like above will just haapxpen with a little help from the baby editor. Anyway-- The new year is a time to make important resolutions. Be resolved to watch the TV that you missed. I'll help:

exciting tv

• dick clark's rockin new year with ryan seacrest
  
• NBC's l&o suv marathon
  
• cartoon network Metalocalypse marathon
  
• food network Ace of kidneys marathon. I'm kidding. It's called the "Ace of Cakes" Hi, Greg Chwerchak! This is followed by a full day of Bubby Flay. Hey, that rhymes! In truth, I hate Bobby Flay. Ever since I saw him give the worst misadvice on how to fry a turkey.
  
• SCI-FI Channel 26 hour Twilightzone marathon!!!! I remember when this was strictly a WPIX deal, but as I don't get that channel, GO SCI FI!!! This was the greatest pinball game ever.
  
• BBCA's traditional new year's eve AbFab Marathon WHeels on fire! Rolling down the road...
  
• CMT Hee Haw Marathon Hee Haw aired at the same time as "Laugh In" the difference was that Hee Haw used computers to edit the show and laugh-in did it manually. Hee Haw lasted a billion years longer than Laugh-in and the jokes are still as funny as they ever were (I understand that this is a matter of taste, but even if you don't think that Minnie Pearl is amusing, my statement is still true).
  
• TNT will ALSO have a law & order marathonn. No link. TNT is for suckers.
  

The past is overrated

I'm going to do a subset of the Canonical Rant called a Cranky Diatribe. I won't explain why it's more specific than the general class of C-R. So, T.S.

Ben posted Quindlen: Hillary Is Wrong About Youth - Newsweek Columnists - MSNBC.com on his blog, words because he was responding to the "the rat race is not all it's cracked up to be." I'll leave it to Trav to discuss whether the real reason there is so much middle-class discontentment is (a) the revolution of rising expectations and (b) crazy people stretching for a house jacks up prices on everyone. I want to go to one of my canonical rants:

The past is overrated. Quindlen tears into the notion (from our ancestors) that our ancestors were nobler then than we are now and that the good old days are gone. But I think Quindlen's focus on codgerims (her term) is wrong. It's not finding fault with the present that's wrong (that's a good thing to do); it's comparing the present with the past, which is overrated.

There is no such thing as the good old days, and our ancestors were not better than us. The past was bad, and we improved it. Some of these improvements helped the situation; some just caused new problems. Nevertheless, in the past, the (then) present-day people were a whole lot more honest about the fact that the (then) present needed a whole lot of fixing up, and the (then) modern-day contemporaries spent a whole lot of time and effort developing {technology X} and {medicine y} and fighting {evil historical figure Z} and on beyond Zebra.

Do you know that in the past, people had to get out of their chairs to change the channel on the TV, and in any case, it hardly mattered because there were basically only three channels, and all of them had virtually identical programming? And before that, people just listened to the radio? And before that, the one person who could read would merely read the latest installment of a serialized drama out loud to his illiterate family. Today, I don't even need to watch the show. TiVo will suggest something for me and record it for me; I can read the summary and flip through the good parts, and be done with it. I watched the movie "Emma" this way. I can tell you for certain that I would have hated the movie, hated the radio play, and hated having to listen to it being read by my dad in my drafty Victorian hovel. However, I liked the movie at 2x speed for the parts featuring Alan Cumming and 8x speed for everything else. I finished the movie in 3 minutes.

"But you don't know what it was about?"

I wouldn't have known what the heck they were going on about any better if I had been forced to suffer through one of those other delivery methods, but at least this way, I can tell you who was in the film and that it depicts the past, and as best I can tell: the past is overrated.

John Ritter never got any respect when he was alive. Here is a prime example of that.

As it so happens, Hooperman was cancelled because the excellent cop show had great cinematography and John Ritter singing to a cranky dog named Bijou. Then the weasels at ABC said, "Your numbers aren't high enough to renew you nor are they low enough for us to step up and cancel you, so we are going to sabotage your show by making it video instead of film." (This is not actually how that conversation went. I am paraphrasing.)

John Ritter had the self-respect and integrity to decline being set-up for failure. That can be hard when you are the star of the show.

I don't like it when TV show synopsis sites don't have the plot synopsis but list the title of the show anyway. Case in point: HoloGuides's synopsis for "Frank Leaves For the Orient" doesn't even have an episode title list. It only had six episodes! C'mon, make an effort!

This was a great show, in a stupid way. I found Frank's desire to do something interesting with his life in the face of his own blandness to be very compelling. The myriad banalities that prevent him from just leaving his old life behind are obstacles that he sets for himself but blames on everyone else. It reminds me of that scene in The Hobbit where Gandalf is shooing Biblo Baggins out of his house without a hankerchief. What happens to us when Gandalf isn't there to shoo us out of our comfortable lives? How many of us hear the call and desire to respond but can't because we are stuck in our Hobbit holes fretting the laundry?

The dearth of information about the show and the fact that I only watched episodes 1, 2, and 4 leave me with nothing but questions. Does Frank ever leave? Does he get to Japan? Is he surprised to find that the Orient is exactly like the West?

Which brings me to my point: If I cared enough, I would have a TV show episode synopsis site that was in this format:

*Title of show
*Premise of show
*Summary of all the major plotlines for all the seasons
*detailed synopsis (~1000 words) of the LAST EPISODE ONLY
*Musing: "So what does that all mean?"

I wouldn't list a show if I didn't have all that information.