Quotulatiousness

July 12, 2012

Firefly 10th anniversary TV special to air in November

Filed under: Media — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 00:03

James Hibberd has the details:

To celebrate the cult-favorite sci-fi drama’s 10th anniversary, Science Channel is shooting a new one-hour special chronicling the Firefly cast reunion at Comic-Con this week.

The special — titled Browncoats Unite — will include footage from Friday’s reunion panel, featuring several members of the original team including star Nathan Fillion and creator Joss Whedon. Plus, the cast is shooting an in-depth behind-the-scenes roundtable interview that will dive deeper into burning fan questions about the beloved series. Both the panel and the roundtable will be moderated by Entertainment Weekly‘s own Jeff Jensen.

July 10, 2012

Telstar’s 50th anniversary

Filed under: History, Space, Technology, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 09:47

Scott Van Wynsberghe in the National Post:

What followed Echo 1 was a space race within a space race, this one determining whether government or industry would send up the first active non-military communications satellite. In 1961, NASA awarded a contract for such a satellite to the company RCA, but Pierce and Bell Labs were undeterred. According to Calvin Tomkins, Bell Labs spent US$50-million (at early-1960s rates) for research and development and devoted about 700 of its personnel to the project.

The baby that was born of it all was a sphere weighing 170 pounds (77 kilograms), called Telstar 1. Going by specifications collected by Bill Yenne, an authority on U.S. spacecraft, Telstar 1 received signals at 6,390 megacycles, re-transmitted them at 4,170, and boasted of 600 voice channels and one channel for television.

Perched atop a Thor-Delta booster — paid for by Bell Labs but launched by NASA — Telstar 1 ascended on July 10, 1962. It did not go far, parking itself in an elliptical orbit less than 2,000 miles (3,220 kilometers) away. Within hours, Bell Labs arranged what was previously impossible — transatlantic television. As described by T.A. Heppenheimer, the ensuing video exchange humorously followed national stereotypes. The United States sent France and the U.K. taped material heavy on patriotic themes, the French responded with footage of actor Yves Montand and other cultural figures, and the British muddled about for a few days before getting things straight.

Humour aside, the achievement left the world stunned. In just the month of the launching of Telstar 1, the New York Times ran almost 100 articles related to the satellite. Joe Meek’s Telstar composition stormed the pop charts later in the year, and that 1963 New Yorker profile of Pierce ran for 29 pages. Telstar 1 did not outlast some of this acclaim, as it ceased transmission in early 1963, but it had blazed a path. Today, anyone using satellite TV or radio is honouring that decades-old triumph of engineering.

Update: Bill Ray has more at The Register:

Arthur C Clarke is often credited with inventing the idea of satellite communications, though in fact his contribution was to point out that three birds in geostationary orbit could provide global coverage. Geostationary orbit is more than 35,000km up, beyond the reach of radios in 1962, so Telstar’s orbit peaked at less than 6,000km up and dipped down to less than 1,000km during its two-and-a-half-hour circumnavigation.

That dip is also what caused Telstar’s downfall. Its repeated drops into the Van Allen radiation belt did allow the satellite to gather information about the belt (which was part of the plan) but the information it gathered was largely the havoc such radiation plays with electronic circuits. If Wikipedia is to be believed then US nuclear tests at the time had left the Van Allen particularly charged, but either way the satellite failed intermittently for a few months and finally stopped relaying signals entirely in February 1963. However, it remains in orbit to this day, faithfully tracked by the US government as required by international treaties.

Telstar was solar powered, with 3,600 solar cells feeding 19 nickel-cadmium batteries which received a 6GHz signal and retransmitted it with 2.25w of power at 4GHz. The electrics necessary were all suspended by shock-absorbent nylon cords in the middle of the spherical body, which had to spin at 180 rpm for stabilisation (gyroscopes perform the same function on modern satellites, but weren’t reliable enough back then).

June 24, 2012

Do your media outlets suffer from ADD?

Filed under: Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 10:23

Okay, it’s a trick question: they all do. Gerard Vanderleun pulls out an older piece (originally posted in 2003) that explains how and why your mainstream media became afflicted with ADD:

Recently I became acquainted with a young boy, just turned nine. He’s a brilliant and happy kid, but he has a problem with cleaning up and organizing his room. It isn’t that he can’t do it, he simply has to be told about every five minutes to continue the process. In the course of picking things up to put away he discovers anew their potential to fascinate him.

The Gameboy? “Oh, here’s where I saved that last stage of Turoc. Let’s see if I can get the flame-thrower and…”

Any one of the 3,000 + Lego units? “Gee, I never did get the moon base hemi-dome set up, just let me put these 400 blocks in place and…” Books? “Sure thing and, hey, did Horton ever hatch that egg…”

On it goes until, after the sixth or seventh cajoling instruction, a path has been cleared for the vacuum cleaner. After which, he promptly begins taking everything he has put away out and strews it about the floor once again.

Today’s pop psychologists, addlepated educators and the marketing departments of large drug companies are hard at work trying to convince me children who behave like this have “Attention Deficit Disorder” or ADD. But I know enough to know it is the companies who are obsessed, confused and greedy in about that order.

What this young boy suffers from is no more than being a normal, heedless and all around great nine-year-old boy. He doesn’t have ADD anymore than I have an elephant chained in my back yard. (Yes, I just checked.)

The only group that I can see in the United States that, as a group, is seriously afflicted with ADD is a group of would-be adults — the group we call collectively “The Mainstream Media.” For members of this group ADD is not an option, it is a requirement. Far from being a means to informing and enlightening the public, the primary role of the MSM is to distract it. At this they are very good since they are “Distracted from distraction by distraction” by their very nature. They are “the ADD professionals.” They actually get paid for doing this. Paid well for having a disease.

June 18, 2012

The wins and losses in the C-11 copyright reform bill

Filed under: Books, Cancon, Law, Liberty, Media — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 10:14

Michael Geist on the good and the bad aspects of bill C-11 which will probably pass third reading today in the House of Commons and be sent to the Senate for approval:

There is no sugar-coating the loss on digital locks. While other countries have been willing to stand up to U.S. pressure and adopt a more flexible approach, the government, led by Canadian Heritage Minister James Moore on the issue, was unwilling to compromise despite near-universal criticism of its approach. It appears that once Prime Minister Stephen Harper made the call for a DMCA-style approach in early May 2010, the digital lock issue was lost. The government heard that the bill will hurt IP enforcement, restrict access for the blind, disadvantage Canadian creators, and harm consumer rights. It received tens of thousands of comments from Canadians opposed to the approach and ran a full consultation in which digital locks were the leading concern. The NDP, Liberals, and Green Party proposed balanced amendments to the digital lock rules that were consistent with international requirements and would have maintained protection for companies that use them, but all were rejected. [. . .]

Since the Conservatives took power in 2006, there were effectively four bills: the Pre-Bill C-61 bill that was to have been introduced by Jim Prentice in December 2007 but was delayed following public pressure, Bill C-61 introduced in June 2008, and Bill C-32/C-11, which was introduced in June 2010 (and later reintroduced in September 2011). The contents of December 2007 bill was never released, but documents obtained under the Access to Information Act provide a good sense of what it contained (a call was even scheduled on the planned day of introduction between Prentice and U.S. Ambassador David Wilkins to assure the U.S. that digital locks were the key issue and would not be altered). This chart highlights many of the key issues and their progression over the years as the public became increasingly vocal on copyright:

Issue Pre-Bill
C-61 (2007) 		Bill C-61
(2008) 		Bill C-11
(2012)
Fair Dealing Expansion No No Yes (education, parody, satire)
Format Shifting No Limited (only photographs, book,
newspaper, periodical, or videocassette) 		Yes (technology neutral, no
limit on number of copies, includes network storage, and no reference
to contractual overrides)
Time Shifting No Limited (no network PVRs,
Internet communications) 		Yes (C-61 limitations removed)
Backup Copies No No Yes
User Generated Content Exception No No Yes
Statutory Damages Cap No Limited ($500 cap for
downloading) 		Yes (Max of $5000 for all
non-commercial infringement)
Enabler enforcement provision No No Yes
Internet Publicly Available
Materials Exception for Education 		Yes Yes Yes
Public Performance in Schools No No Yes
Technology Neutral Display
Exception in Schools 		No No Yes
Limited Distance Learning
Exception 		Yes Yes Yes
Limited Digital Inter-Library
Loans 		Yes Yes Yes
Notice-and-Notice Yes Yes Yes
Notice-and-Takedown No No No
Three Strikes//Website Blocking No No No
Internet Location Tool Provider
Safe Harbour 		Yes Yes Yes
Broadcaster Ephemeral Change No No Yes
Expanded Private Copying Levy No No No
Commissioned Photograph Change Yes Yes Yes
Alternate Format Reproduction No No Yes

[. . .]

Public engagement on copyright continuously grew in strength – from the Bulte battle in 2006 to the Facebook activism in 2007 to the immediate response to the 2008 bill to the 2009 copyright consultation to the 2010 response to Bill C-32. While many dismissed the role of digital activism on copyright, the reality is that it had a huge impact on the shape of Canadian copyright. The public voice influenced not only the contents of the bill, but the debate as well with digital locks the dominant topic of House of Commons debate and media coverage until the very end. Bill C-11 remains a “flawed but fixable” bill that the government refused to fix, but that it is a significantly better bill than seemed possible a few years ago owes much to the hundreds of thousands of Canadians that spoke out on copyright.

June 16, 2012

Obama’s really bad week

Filed under: Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 10:56

Matthew Continetti on President Obama’s really awful week:

I can’t be the only person in America who, at about minute 35 in President Obama’s almost hour-long “framing” speech in Cleveland Thursday, wanted to tell the president, as the Dude famously screams at Walter Sobchak in The Big Lebowski, “You’re living in the past!”

Obama’s overly long, repetitive, and by turns self-pitying and self-congratulatory address was so soaked through with nostalgia that MSNBC should have broadcast it in sepia tones. The speech — which even the liberal Obama biographer Jonathan Alter called one of the president’s “least successful” political communications — revealed an incumbent desperately trying to replay the 2008 election. But no oratory will make up for a flawed record and a vague, fissiparous, and unappealing agenda.

The president himself forced this abrupt re-launch of his reelection campaign. After a bad week that began with terrible job numbers, proceeded to Scott Walker’s victory in the Wisconsin recall, and culminated in awful fundraising news, Obama tried to recover last Friday by addressing the press on the state of the economy. Except things went horribly wrong. The president uttered six words — “the private sector is doing fine” — that not only will plague him for the rest of the campaign, but also perfectly captured his complacent attitude toward all things outside the realm of government.

Explosion 1812: “one of the biggest explosions that had ever been witnessed in North America”

Filed under: Cancon, History, Media, Military, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 10:22

I may have to make some time to watch TV tomorrow:

This month’s 200th anniversary of the start of the War of 1812 will be marked with a colossal bang: the television premiere of Explosion 1812, a new documentary that argues the intentional detonation of Upper Canada’s main ammunition supply at present-day Toronto in April 1813 — described as “one of the biggest explosions that had ever been witnessed in North America” — is a greatly underappreciated moment in history that was key to thwarting the U.S. conquest of Canada.

The two-hour, Canadian-made film — to be aired by History Television on June 17, the eve of the bicentennial of the formal U.S. declaration of war on June 18, 1812 — recounts how retreating British-Canadian troops at Fort York blew up the colony’s “grand magazine” along the Lake Ontario shore as American forces closed in on Upper Canada’s capital on April 27, 1813.

[. . .]

U.S. soldiers outraged at what they considered an act of extreme treachery — even a war crime because of their comrades’ fatal proximity to the explosion — went on a vengeful rampage in the captured capital, terrorizing the civilian population and pillaging residents’ property.Ê

Those actions, in turn, prompted a similar assault on Washington, D.C., in 1814, when the U.S. capital was stormed by British and Canadian troops who set fire to the White House.

Among the U.S. casualties at York was the famed commander of the invasion force, Gen. Zebulon Pike, an early explorer of the American West whose death — his chest crushed by falling rock from the blasted armoury — would be exploited to rally patriotic sentiment in the U.S. for the duration of the war.

June 12, 2012

Stop worrying about the approaching police state: it’s already here

Filed under: Law, Liberty, Media, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 13:18

I saw Twitter updates about this, but I assumed it was an Onion story that someone didn’t recognize as being from a parody news site. I was wrong:

The police state is not only here — it is being welcomed with open arms.

Exhibit A: In Aurora, Colorado, police searching for suspected bank robbers locked down an entire intersection, dragooned 40 random motorists out of their cars at gunpoint, handcuffed them and “asked” for permission to search their vehicles. [. . .]

Naturally, no one refused permission.

The action itself is startling: 40 people, guilty of nothing more than proximity, of being in the same general area where a suspected criminal might also be, are literally pulled from their vehicles, shackled and detained for more than two hours — even after it was obvious they were guilty of no crime at all.

Even more startling, however, than these over-the-top tactics is the fact that (apparently) every one of these 40 innocent people complied without a peep of protest. Not one said: “I’m sorry officer, but unless I’ve committed a crime I’d like to be free to go about my business.” Not one said, “I do not consent to any searches.”

None put up a fuss when the cuffs came out.

One woman interviewed by ABC News clucked happily: “Yeah, we all got cuffed (laugh) until they figured out who did what.” No doubt this woman will not object when a gang of armed men kicks in her door, invades her home and holds her family at gunpoint until they figure out who did what. After all, there are criminals about. They could be anywhere. Which means, anything is justified.

In the words of one ABC News blogger, “Sounds like the police did their job — and did it exceptionally well!” And another: “I think the police did a great job in an unusual circumstance and protected the people of the city from a dangerous criminal. Those people should praise the police, not sue them!”

It’s amazing that none of these people who were the victims of an insane amount of police overreaction seem to feel that the police did anything wrong. There must not be a civil liberty equivalent of the ambulance-chasing lawyer.

June 11, 2012

We can’t “save” capitalism, because we don’t “have” capitalism

Filed under: Economics, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 09:38

James Delingpole in the Telegraph (the italicized opening paragraph is a quite from Tim Morgan):

    Reforming capitalism so that it serves the majority, and strengthening the individual against the collectivist and the corporate, are inspiring visions. This is where government should be taking Britain.

Easier said than done, of course — as I was reminded yesterday when I Tweeted it under the headline “How to rescue capitalism….” only to have some Twentysomething smartarse Tweet back “Rescue it? Bury it!”

This is the kind of fifth-form, sub-Banksy political analysis which passes for conventional wisdom these days. It’s the dominant strain of thinking at the Guardian, at the BBC, among the studio audience at Channel 4’s apocalyptically lame 10 O’Clock Live, on Twitter, in the right-on brains of groovester opinion-formers all the way from Ben Goldacre to Graham Linehan to Polly Toynbee — and, of course, across the world in the entire Occupy movement. Capitalism, they all maintain, has failed.

No, capitalism has not recently been tried: that’s the real problem. And what I particularly like about Morgan’s report — well worth reading in full — is that it addresses this extremely important point. What we’re experiencing around the world at the moment is not laissez-faire, self-correcting, authentic, free-market capitalism but an excedingly corrupt and bastardised form thereof.

What we’re seeing is a grotesque stitch up between the banking class, the corporate class and the political class — at the expense of the rest of us.

One day, I like to hope, those of us on the libertarian right will find common cause with (at least some of) the Occupy crowd and unite against our real enemy.

June 9, 2012

QotD: Counteracting those irritating “nudgers”

Filed under: Economics, Education, Liberty, Media, Quotations — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 00:09

In the wake of Mayor Bloomberg’s proposes big soda ban, I have some suggestions for paternalistic nudges for economists who advocate such paternalism. One idea is when they go to a restaurant, by default they should be seated at the table that places them in the most proximity to people near the median income level. Or when they turn on their TVs, have them by default turn to awful TV shows popular with the median household, like America’s Got Talent, Dancing with the Stars, or some poorly written show about cops. Of course they will need a nudge so that when they rent an apartment or house it comes by default with a TV and cable. Perhaps if we want to escalate from nudge to shove, we could have them signed up to teach one class a semester at a local community college or technical school, so they get exposure to students much closer to the median ability and future income level than they’ll find at the top departments they normally teach at. They can opt out of this, of course, but have them enrolled to teach as a default upon completing their doctorates.

You see, paternalists clearly have a problem with reasoning from their own preferences, and so giving them exposure to the median consumer might help them learn valuable lessons. Paternalist economists, it seems, simply cannot imagine how a “nudge” or a “shove” like buying only 16 ounce sodas or smaller would be any kind of inconvenience to someone. What they don’t understand is that as Ivy League economists with IQs north of 140 their preferences tend to be very far from the median consumer’s, so it should be no surprise that they can’t imagine it being an inconvenience. After all, they also probably can’t imagine wanting to drink a lot of soda in the first place. In the same way, the median consumer probably could not imagine letting their kid not eat birthday cake. So from the start they should be aware that their imaginations and preferences aren’t useful guides

Adam Ozimek, “Nudges for Paternalist Economists”, Forbes, 2012-06-05

June 7, 2012

Reason.tv: Bath Salts, Naked Zombie Cannibals & Stupid Senators

Filed under: Cancon, Government, Media, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 14:53

June 4, 2012

The “sex traffic” meme is this decade’s version of the “Satanic panic” of the late 1980s

Filed under: Media, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 13:03

An interesting post at The Honest Courtesan on the strong similarities between the media freak-out about Satanic ritualists kidnapping children back in the late 1980s and early 1990s and the current media meme about sex trafficking rings:

How well do you remember the “Satanic Panic” of the ‘80s and ‘90s? Do you remember when you first heard about it, and what your reactions were? Do you remember how widespread and exaggerated the claims were, and how seriously everyone took them? The reactions from believers when skeptics pointed out the tremendous absurdities? The decline and fall of the hysteria? I sure do, and if you do as well you’ve probably noticed the strong resemblance of “trafficking” hysteria to its older sibling. Both revolve around gigantic international conspiracies which supposedly abduct children into a netherworld of sexual abuse; both are conflated with adult sex work, especially prostitution and porn; both make fantastic claims of vast numbers which are not remotely substantiated by anything like actual figures from “law enforcement” agencies or any other investigative body; both rely on circular logic, claiming the lack of evidence as “proof” of the size of the conspiracy and the lengths to which its participants will go to “hide” their nefarious doings; both encourage paranoia and foment distrust of strangers, especially male strangers; etc, etc, etc.

[. . .]

Once one is able to examine the hysteria from an historical and sociological perspective, it becomes rather fascinating (though none the less frightening for those of us whose profession is being targeted by the witch hunters). For example, one can see how events that would have been interpreted one way 15 years ago are now seen through the lens of “human trafficking”; this recent trial in which members of a Somali gang were convicted for forcing young female members into prostitution would have been reported as a “gang-related violence” story in the late ‘90s, but is now labeled a “sex trafficking case”. In the ‘80s, every city in America imagined itself overrun with Satanic cultists; now it’s “human traffickers”, and there’s a creepy competition for the title of “leading hub for sex trafficking”, generally on the basis of how many interstate highways pass through or near the city (since none of them have any actual statistics to support their claims). In the past year I’ve heard New York, Dallas, Miami, Portland, Atlanta and Sacramento vying for this dubious distinction, and now Tulsa, Oklahoma is as well.

H/T to Jesse Walker for the link.

BBC coverage of the Jubilee Thames Pageant nearly as bad as the CBC coverage

Filed under: Britain, Cancon, Media — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 12:32

I was in the same room as the TV yesterday, which was tuned to the CBC’s “coverage” of the Queen’s Jubilee celebrations along the Thames River. Every time I paid a bit of attention, Peter bloody Mansbridge was committing another linguistic atrocity (HM-C-S Belfast? She’s a former Royal Navy ship, not an RCN vessel, Peter — oh, and she’s a light cruiser, not a “battle cruiser”). And aside from the Royal Barge, and the canoe from Peterborough, the boat that got the most attention was a bloody power boat that apparently was in a James Bond film. Crikey!

It seemed as though every appearance of a maple leaf had to be relayed to viewers — not, mind you, actual footage of the things they were talking about. The mandate seemed to be to keep the faces of the presenters front-and-centre all the time when they weren’t showing the Royal Barge. And on the odd occasion they’d show part of the flotilla, the CBC personalities felt the need to talk as much as possible even while they weren’t on camera.

From the National Post, Scott Stinson on the banality of it all:

Long after the royal barge had passed my vantage point near Chelsea Bridge on Sunday afternoon, I nipped into a London pub to warm up, dry off, and catch the rest of the proceedings on the television.

After the first few times someone on the BBC broadcast gushed about this or that aspect of the Thames Diamond Jubilee Pageant, I chalked it up to a mild case of homerism. The 1,000-boat flotilla was, after all, an impressive spectacle. Then I noticed how often the commentators were using the pronoun “we” when describing things, as in “we are all so anxious to catch a glimpse of Her Majesty.” So much for journalistic detachment. By the time one of the broadcasters was positively marvelling at the skill and ingenuity of the captain who was in the process of docking the royal barge, it was apparent that most of the Beeb’s broadcast team had gone right bloody native.

I mean, shouldn’t docking a boat be part of the job? Would we not expect that the person given the task of piloting the Queen up the Thames be better than decent at it? Yet, here was the commentator, oohing and aahing at the fact that the captain of the Spirit of Chartwell had pulled up alongside the dock and was now moving the boat sideways up to it for a gentle landing. “Look at that!,” he enthused. “It’s amazing!”

Jan Moir in the Daily Mail:

Turn the royal trumpets to the parp and piffle setting. Muffle the funeral drums. For on a molten grey stretch of the Thames, with a global television audience of millions watching, something died yesterday.

It was the BBC’s reputation as a peerless television broadcaster of royal events. It just could not survive under an onslaught of inanity, idiocy and full cream sycophancy uttered, muttered and buttered on thickly by a team of presenters who were encouraged to think that they were more important than the events unfolding around them.

Someone, somewhere thought that their celebrity personalities were enough to see them through this all-day broadcast. How very wrong they were.

‘I’ve just spotted my 70-year-old dad out there,’ gurgled Sophie Raworth, as barges packed with senior royals and VIPs slid by, unremarked upon. Who was in all the other boats? We never did find out.

Yes, the BBC1 coverage of the Diamond Jubilee Thames Pageant was historical — historically awful.

[. . .]

What were Beeb bosses thinking? If ever an event was crying out for a Dimbleby to dimble nimbly in the shallows, with that trademark mixture of gravitas, humour and sagacity, then this was it.

Instead, we got Sophie Raworth and Matt Baker, bouncing around as if they were presiding over the jelly stall at a chimps’ tea party, somehow managing to sound patronising about nearly everything.

June 2, 2012

The end of a weird week in Canadian journalism

Filed under: Cancon, Media — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 10:26

David Akin on all the unusual happenings over the past week:

I suspect Alex felt that way because he and his staff had to deal with a) the ongoing battle between students and Premier Jean Charest b) a grisly murder that forced police in Montreal to issue an international warrant for kitten-killing gay porn star Luka Magnotta c) a freak rain storm that put 70 mm of water on the ground in 30 minutes pretty much flooding most of downtown Montreal for an afternoon. But enough of that, let’s get to God using a bear to deliver God’s own brand of justice [. . .]

“The corpse of a man eaten by a B.C. bear was that of a convicted killer, officials have confirmed.”

[. . .]

“46 mm of rain in half an hour floods Montreal.”

[. . .]

On Friday, heavy rain would contribute to flooding which would end up flooding and shutting down Toronto’s Union Station on Friday causing commuter chaos

[. . .]

The Montreal flash floods occurred as Quebec Premier Jean Charest was trying to broker a deal with post-secondary students who have been “on strike” for more than 3 months because they don’t want to pay an extra $350 or so a year in tuition — over five years. Charest has been over-patient. The students have been, as they say on St. Urbain Street, “stiff-necked”. So the two sides met and then talks broke down.

All that, plus the kitten-killing, body dismembering fugitive porn star…

The Eurovision Song Contest and the European Union

Filed under: Europe, History, Humour, Media — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 09:45

Mark Steyn on the similarities between the top TV event in Europe and the EU itself:

One recalls the 1990 Eurovision finals in Zagreb: “Yugoslavia is very much like an orchestra,” cooed the hostess, Helga Vlahović. “The string section and the wood section all sit together.” Shortly thereafter, the wood section began ethnically cleansing the dressing rooms, while the string section rampaged through the brass section pillaging their instruments and severing their genitals. Indeed, the charming Miss Vlahović herself was forced into a sudden career shift and spent the next few years as Croatian TV’s head of “war information” programming.

Fortunately, no one remembers Yugoslavia. So today Europe itself is very much like an orchestra. The Greek fiddlers and the Italian wind players all sit together, playing cards in the dressing room, waiting for the German guy to show up with their checks. Just before last week’s Eurovision finale in Azerbaijan, The Daily Mail in London reported that the Spanish entrant, Pastora Soler, had been told to throw the competition “because the cash-strapped country can’t afford to host the lavish event next year,” as the winning nation is obliged to do. In a land where the youth unemployment rate is over 50 percent, and two-thirds of the country’s airports are under threat of closure and whose neighbors (Britain) are drawing up plans for military intervention to evacuate their nationals in the event of total civic collapse, the pressing need to avoid winning the Eurovision Song Contest is still a poignant symbol of how total is Spain’s implosion. Ask not for whom “Ding-Ding-A-Dong” dings, it dings for thee.

May 31, 2012

Old worry: the “digital divide”

Filed under: Media, Technology, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 00:06

The good news is that the much-feared “digital divide” between the rich and poor never came to pass. Now the worry is rather different:

Remember the “digital divide”? Back in the 1990s, the problem was that poor people did not have enough access to computers and the Internet. Today the problem is that they have too much access. Evidently the digital divide has given way to the “time-wasting gap.” I shit you not. The New York Times reports that bridging the digital divide “created an unintended side effect, one that is surprising and troubling to researchers and policy makers and that the government [naturally] now wants to fix”: “As access to devices has spread, children in poorer families are spending considerably more time than children from more well-off families using their television and gadgets to watch shows and videos, play games and connect on social networking sites.” Silly lower classes! Don’t they realize this wonderful new technology is for self-improvement, not for pleasure? Something must be done

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