Month: August 2005

A Remarkable Moment on Television:

I enjoy watching MSNBC’s Countdown with Keith Olbermann, which I think offers the smartest, most candid news coverage on TV. Lately, I’ve been disappointed at the number of days that Mr. Olbermann has been “on vacation.”

It turns out, Keith has been away having a tumor removed from the roof of his mouth. His show today is mainly about the late Peter Jennings and it’s really a remarkable, compassionate report on his deceased colleague. But the most startling moment — one of the most powerful things I’ve seen on TV in years — comes in the last seven minutes of the show. In it, Olbermann reveals what he’s been going through as a result of his own smoking, relates it to the death of Peter Jennings due (largely) to smoking…and tells viewers, basically, what idiots they are for continuing to smoke.

(Via news from me.)

Well, maybe if I say what a wise, witty, and self-effacing man Mark is, he’ll link to me anyway. Or what fun it was watching him moderate the Weblog panel at San Diego, though I’m disappointed he wasn’t blogging it in real time. That would have been worth major geek credentials.

…just as lots of other folks on the net are. While I have a long post brewing on this and related subjects, as a stopgap I refer you to Richard Dawkins’s Ignorance Is No Crime:

“It is absolutely safe to say that if you meet somebody who claims not to believe in evolution, that person is ignorant, stupid or insane (or wicked, but I’d rather not consider that).” I first wrote that in a book review in the New York Times in 1989, and it has been much quoted against me ever since, as evidence of my arrogance and intolerance. Of course it sounds arrogant, but undisguised clarity is easily mistaken for arrogance. Examine the statement carefully and it turns out to be moderate, almost self-evidently true.

By far the largest of the four categories is “ignorant,” and ignorance is no crime (nor is it bliss– I forget who it was said, “If ignorance is bliss, how come there’s so much misery about?”). Anybody who thinks Joe DiMaggio was a cricketer has to be ignorant, stupid, or insane (probably ignorant), and you wouldn’t think me arrogant for saying so. It is not intolerant to remark that flat-earthers are ignorant, stupid, or (probably) insane. It’s just true. The difference is that not many people think Joe DiMaggio was a cricketer, or that the Earth is flat, so it isn’t worth calling attention to their ignorance. But, if polls are to be believed, 100 million U.S. citizens believe that humans and dinosaurs were created within the same week as each other, less than ten thousand years ago. This is more serious. People like this have the vote, and we have George W. Bush (with a little help from his friends in the Supreme Court) to prove it. They dominate school boards in some states. Their views flatly contradict the great corpus of the sciences, not just biology but physics, geology, astronomy, and many others. It is, of course, entirely legitimate to question conventional wisdom in fields that you have bothered to mug up first. That is what Einstein did, and Galileo, and Darwin. But our hundred million are another matter. They are contradicting– influentially and powerfully– vast fields of learning in which their own knowledge and reading is indistinguishable from zero. My “arrogant and intolerant” statement turns out to be nothing but simple truth.

Unfortunately, I’m becoming more and more convinced something criminal’s going on here… more later.

Every so often, I ask myself in the wee small hours of the morning, “Why am I doing this?”

And then, I hear a deep voice echo back, “Because you’re on television, dummy.”

And I say, “Hey, no, sorry, not me, I haven’t been on TV in a while, you’ve got me confused with Howard Beale.”

And the voice says, “Whoops, sorry. Let me check my notes– because by doing all this, you’re going to be on television…?”

“I don’t think so.”

“Ummm… you want to be famous?”

“Eh. Not particularly, no.”

“Dang. You sure you don’t want fame? There’s an opening on CNN now.”

“No thanks.”

“Fox?”

“Yuck. Pass.”

“MSNBC?”

“How is that going to make me famous?”

“All right, all right. I think there was a screw-up at Central. Let me check in, and I’ll be back in a jif.”

“Take your time. I’m not going anywhere. Well, maybe the diner, but that’s just down the road, you can find me there.”

“Hey, diner. I could use a good cup of coffee.” And then it gets quiet again, and the cats look at me funny.

Maybe I’ll figure it out later.

Just Lost Two Hugos:

gnomi suggests I should look under the bed.

(Via MABFAN’s Musings.)

It’s true– people really do sleep with the Hugo Awards they’ve won.

The big, rocket-shaped, Hugo Awards.

The great big hard-as-steel phallic substi–

I’ll stop now, lest I conjure up an image I will never ever ever get out of my brain.

Fox Reality Offers to Buy Yanked ABC Series:

The new Fox Reality cable channel has offered to buy ABC’s Welcome to the Neighborhood, the reality series in which in which a group of seven families from untraditional backgrounds were to vie for a four-bedroom home in an Austin, TX suburb. The judges were to be the white, Christian neighbors living on the cul-de-sac where the house is located. ABC yanked the show after it was attacked by such groups as the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation and the National Fair Housing Alliance. But Fox Reality CEO David Lyle told today’s (Wednesday) New York Daily News that he had made an offer to ABC to air the series because he found it “really quite gripping.” However, he told the newspaper, “So far they haven’t taken us up on our kind offer.”

Yes, very kind. But they were apparently legal problems about retitling it The Monsters Are Due On Maple Street.

Yes, it may be one of the funniest movies I’ve seen in a while. But what may be one of the funniest moments, I still haven’t gotten a good answer to and it’s keeping me awake at 3:30 in the morning…

…why does the mime have a body mic?

Go see the trailer if you haven’t already. Go see this out take (VERY NOT SAFE FOR WORK, and quite possibly offensive to boot). And go see the film. I’ll actually recommend seeing this in a theater, because you’ll want to hear the other folks around you laughing. It’s good for you.

Really, when was the last time anybody said something to you that really shocked and surprised you, particularly in a film comedy?

If you didn’t catch tonight’s Daily Show with Jon Stewart, catch the reruns. Really. I’m not kidding. You really must. I promise.

Watch it, come back, and we’ll discuss it. Assuming I don’t get handed another weekend killing deadline, of course.

Semi-normal blogging will resume as soon as possible.

UPDATE: If you haven’t seen it, C & L has part of it. Of course. But there are SOOOO many good things in the full half hour…