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Everyone was so surprised to find that Hamas had been doing what all political/religious groups have committed throughout history: Indoctrinating the young. Of course, in the case of Farfur the Friendly Vermin I guess a lot of people were genuinely surprised that anyone would knowingly risk the wrath of the Mouse's lawyers.
For me the punch line in the whole mess wasn't that a cute, cuddly children's television mascot was being used to teach hatred and intolerance- what isn't used to promote or justify hatred in the Middle East? My own personal risibles were tickled by the fact that Hamas isn't solely engaged against Israel/the West/Infidels/(Your Group Here), but they are also struggling against another political party, Fatah. (Not that I enjoy death and suffering for their own sake, but really, some of the half-assed excuses we half-evolved apes make up for murdering each other are so bizarre that one can't help but to laugh... or cry... or heavily self-medicate...)
Hamas and Fatah are handling their disagreements in the traditional Middle East manner, so no doubt some of the rugrats being brainwashed educated and enlightened by Hamas will be blowing themselves up to kill Fatah and their supporters... and anyone else who happened to go to the market that day...
Now before anyone starts I am NOT trying to imply that anyone in the Middle East has any sort of monopoly on this sort of bait-and-switchery. I've seen quite a number of radical Christian types here doing things that Jesus expressly condemned in that blog He used to do a couple of millennia ago. I just wonder how long it will take The Powers That Blind to ease the kiddies from targeting Israelis to being willing to kill their neighbors who just happen to be Fatah instead of Hamas.
F- A- Rrrrrr " 'R' we martyrs yet?"
F- U- Rrrrrr " 'U' 'R' going to burn, infidel!!"
M- O- U- S- Eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee eee!!!
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When I saw the first promos for Heroes, my first impression was a cheap X-Men knockoff. Of course, Hollywood has never been noted for excess originality, and I like X-Men enough that even a cheap knock-off seemed to be worth watching.
I was quite delighted to find I had seriously underestimated the series. Yes, one can play "Match-the-superpower" between the two, but that way lies visions of Wolverine wearing a cheerleader outfit. What made Heroes stand out is a vast array of characters who, while their importance might shift, are clearly drawn with depth and human feelings and frailties. One can come to care about these people (well, most of them, anyway), and even to suspend disbelief to follow and enjoy their story.
And it's been quite a ride for this first season, as our Heroes have come to learn about their powers with some trepidation and unease- except for Hiro, a geeky trekkie who is outright delighted to have developed the kind of superpowers he's been reading about in comics all his life. Even when only peripheral to a given week's story, Hiro's scenes have always been intensely enjoyable.
Yes, many of the others do (and even sometimes overdo) the "This is my blessing/this is my curse" bit over their special powers, but so far they've always pulled back before getting into the annoying Super-Whining that Smallville has far too often over-indulged in. Even teen-aged Claire, very conscious of the popular-weirdo demarcation in public schools, managed to realize that there are benefits to being able to heal from virtually anything.
Like most of our superpower-endowed worlds, not everyone with an unusual ability is a hero. The most up-front and immediate less-than-heroic players here is Sylar, who's left a trail of dead super corpses behind him due to his power of absorbing others' powers by cutting open their brains. This doesn't appear to bother him at all, contrasting him with the gentle caregiver Peter who can also acquire new powers merely by coming close to someone who has them.
A less in-your-face (unseen until the last few episodes) villain is Lindermann (Played by Malcolm McDowell, how can he be anyone but the villain?), who has been pulling the strings of quite a few of our heroes. His side's agenda requires the destruction of half of New York- something that the good guys have been striving to prevent ever since Hiro accidentally jaunted a few weeks into the future and witnessed it.
To be safe I had prepared myself for the traditional season-ending cliffhanger- props to producers Tim Kring and Jesse Alexander for not jerking their audience around and actually resolving the Season One story. Of course there were some nice foreshadowings of things to come in Season Two- and that final scene with Hiro was perfect!! Certainly this show is on my Absolutely GOTTA See list for Fall.
There actually was some news this morning beyond the demonstrators demanding that immigration laws shouldn't apply to people entering the country. Israel's government issued a report on the debacle war between Israel and Lebanon last year.
In short: The war was a bad idea, poorly planned out and failed to reach the unobtainable goals. This is a very generous understatement: While the Israeli army tried to bomb Hezbollah out of Lebanon, the result of the war was that Hezbollah came out more respected and stronger than they were a year ago.
This is often the case with unwise and poorly-planned wars. Just because you bomb the living shit out of a country doesn't guarantee that the "collateral damage" will blame the folks you meant to bomb.
At least Israel stopped short of completely destroying the Lebanese government and armed forces. History (you know, that thing our so-called "leaders" tend to fail to learn anything from) has shown that when you do that, then all kinds of unsavory elements can creep in.
Still, Israel did enough damage to make Hezbollah a major political power in Lebanon for years to come. Sometimes it's comforting to realize that our own country doesn't have a monopoly on ass-backwards leadership.
After the tragedy at Virginia Tech, the news was full of (your punchline here!) Cho Seung-Hui's so-called "manifesto." We heard his words of alienation and anguish, and developed a much higher respect for all the grunge-rock garage-band wannabes who were much better poets. We saw him posing with his guns (and of course the inevitable arguments that gun laws and/or everyone packing heat could have prevented the massacre), and generally abusing his fifteen minutes of fame.
How many essays or poems of the victims were read on the news? The news channels were obsessed with Cho, not even considering that the far more mentally stable victims may have had even more worthwhile insights into life, the human condition and man's separation from his fellow man
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In the beginning there was the Stargate, and it was a pretty neat flick- but the producers could'st not afford Kurt Russell for the TV series and thus they brought in Richard Dean Anderson and Michael Shanks, and verily the ladies did'st swoon about them, and the producers did remember that there were indeed many many boys in their target audience, and thus they brought in Amanda Tapping who looked hotter in a jumpsuit than the Star Trek skanks in those ridiculous painted-on catsuits...
Stargate: SG-1 had a good run; after several years on Showtime it was saved from premature cancellation by the SciFi Channel. In the tradition of modern TV programming, the producers didn't want their heroes to spin their wheels, always returning to the same old status quo. So, over the years we saw the battle against the Goa'uld System Lords advance, slowly (and sometimes stumbling along the way) turning the tide against the ancient and far more advanced society
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Stop the presses!! A veritable army of media hounds have converged on the latest Story of the Day- that one story that dominates every newscast, that the whole industry is holding under a tunneling-electron microscope.
The story today (and tomorrow, and tomorrow...) is that a radio shock jock actually said something stupid and offensive. And in other breaking news, the Sun is hot
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Easter memories- drifting in and out of a hyperglycemic fog... the kiddies grabbing the newly-discovered eggs with all their innocent might... the anticipation of the lawn mower 'discovering' the forgotten egg after it sits out in the long hot Spring and Summer for a few months... explaining to the children what Love Canal was, and how it altered Peter Cottontail's DNA to the point of producing a rabbit that not only lays eggs, but lays fully cooked eggs with multicolored shells... the TV specials...
Of course the TV specials always stick in one's mind- after all, we get to see then every Easter time. Now I love a good egg salad as much as the next guy, and any excuse for eating chocolate critters is a good one (just as the cinnamon jellybeans are a good enough excuse for eating the other ones), but to me, it just isn't Easter unless I can spot at least three channels showing Jeffrey Hunter's King of Kings. Okay, that and a few other particular favorites
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President Bush has been giving speeches in which he tries a different tactic to excuse his Iraq fiasco: He pointed out how after World War II we kept troops in Germany and Japan, and look! Now those former enemies are friendly allies and trading partners and so forth.
Of course, fifty years ago Germany and Japan were both eager to get their economy rebuilt- there was no civil war, and no 'insurgents' destroying the rebuilding efforts. It also helped that the Administration of long past actually had a plan for what to do after the war (Google "Marshall Plan
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Hirings and firings go on all the time in any large company. When eight U.S. Attorneys were let go by the Justice Department, there was no reason to expect anything untoward there- except, of course, the e-mails that were saved detailing how the White House wanted to get rid of them for political, rather than professional, reasons.
The one question not even Congress has yet brought up is that why are the top people at the Justice Department so insanely incompetent/clueless? Do they truly have no concept of what "evidence" is? "Yeah, lets keep these e-mails that show the attorneys were fired for being insufficiently Republican- no way they can come around and bite us..."
Way back before Star Trek was a franchise, it was just a TV show. A cancelled TV show, but being so much better than the pablum we were being inundated with in the early 70's it lived on in reruns. The syndication success convinced Paramount to produce a movie reuniting the original cast, and the success of that movie prompted them to make a good one (Wrath of Khan is still the best Star Trek movie), more movies, comic books, bedsheets, computer games and so on.
Given the profitability of the franchise, it was little wonder that Paramount decided to even try launching a new Star Trek TV series. Next Generation got off to a rocky start but by their third season they were delivering some solid stories. Likewise, when their popularity spawned Deep Space Nine, that show finally came into its own by removing the saccharine Utopia complex that made the human race too perfect to be interesting
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Comment by Francis
on Your Favourite Styles of Television Comedy
Passionate Apathy
I don't class The Daily Show or The Colbert Report as sitcoms; they're more like satirical versions of the news.
And yes, even something as whacked-out insane as the evening news can be satirized.