Ordinary Nothing

Ah, the joy of seeing gender biases reflect through the eye of the American media…

As you can clearly see, the presented view is according to the age old stereotype. TV is presenting women as the more stupid and incompetent sex.

Eh, no, wait! That’s not it at all. There is a new stereotype. Since presenting women as stupid is not really allowed (huh?) TV is presenting men as the more stupid and incompetent sex.

There. Clear enough, isn’t it? Those swine that run TV shows show a clear gender bias. They’re picking up on men… women… men… women… Everyone! The feminist male-chauvinist hypocrites!

So rightfully enough, instead of lauding the TV industry for it’s overall fairness and equal representation, everybody complain.

Enough to give me a headache, but that can be expected considering I’m a member of one of the two stupid sexes.

Let me start by saying that I’m not a The West Wing
viewer. Mostly for historical reasons (Didn’t start to watch the first
season, didn’t have the time to catch up a little afterwards, was told
it’s not really worth it to catch up during the later seasons, and
don’t have the time to catch up on six whole seasons now). The reviews
I hear from people who watch it are that the latest is season is really
good, and on par with the first ones.

But they are making lots of noise in the media lately. It seems that hardly an episode goes by without someone getting insulted.

Early on December, they had an episode when they were dissing the hospital in Anchorage. And the mayor was greatly offended.

Last week they ran an episode saying some not-very-nice things about
the NASCAR races. And about the races’ fans. Which in turn got very upset.

And in the latest episode, they managed to rile the corn industry.

And I’m not sure why. If the latest season was bad, I’d believe
they’re desperately trying to get more viewers. But that’s not the
case…
Naturally most shows could easily manage to anger someone.
It’s easy to anger most people. But The West Wing is doing it best lately. I don’t follow The West Wing
on the news, and yet I heard about these. That’s more than for other
shows.

And it may be that Americans need to start taking
their entertainment TV shows a hell of a lot less seriously. And fast.
That would be another way to make everyone happier.

Once is Happenstance. Twice is Coincidence.The third time it’s Enemy action. Right?

There’s a soap opera called "Passions". My TV preferences do not lean toward soap operas, I normally can’t stand the things.
This one has one major thing going for it, though. It’s wacky enough to be considered more as a satire on soap operas, and not as a soap opera by itself. Kind of like a low-level "Soap".

In 2002, one of the actors died of a complication from a heart surgery, just when his character on the show died due to cardiac arrest. That’s once.

Now another one of the Passions cast has died, just after recording episodes in which his character was poisoned and slipped into a coma. That’s twice.

The third time is more complicated. Around here the show is being broadcast at a lag, we still haven’t reached the 2002 episodes where the first actors died.
A few weeks ago they showed here several episodes that were based on Psycho. The culmination of that silly sub-plot was in a bad reenactment of the famous shower scene. And guess what happened at about the same time we saw a character being stabbed in the shower… The actress Janet Leigh died. She’s the one who played the character that was stabbed in the shower in the original movie. That’s a clear third time.

Spooky. There’s something about this series…
I wonder what can be correlated with character death times in other countries and broadcasting networks. It may be even bigger than I think.

Then again, it may just be a coincidence enemy action.

The governor of Sicily is to stand trial for assisting the Mafia.
Although quite naturally he denies the charges:

"In the trial we will show that Cuffaro is not involved with assisting
the Mafia", defence lawyer Claudio Gallina Montana was quoted as saying
by the Apcom news agency

Clearly, innocent until proven guilty, and so on and so forth. And I assume proving connections to the Mafia can prove a bit… err… difficult.

Well, a TV crew for an Italian news program recorded him on his way to the trial. When out of the blue a nicely dressed person appears, notices him walking, comes over hurriedly, makes a very polite and deep bow of obeisance, and kiss his hand. All this while the governor tries to shoo him away, since he is aware he is being filmed.

Anyone who have seen any Mafia movie would have recognized something quite similar to a proper show of respect to a Mafia Don.

So did the Italian reporters, who supposedly don’t have to rely on American movies. They tried to speculate about the other reasons that there surely must be to explain the behaviour of the passerby. Because, noooo, surely the governor cannot be a Don, or involved in the Mafia. No way.
They would have sounded almost convincing if the overtones of sarcasm were not so obvious…

All in all, Italian TV news are surely fun for the whole family.

HDTV on cellular phones ?!

Yes, with current huge screen sizes on cellphone, surely the higher resolution of HDTV is the main reason the technology still didn’t catch up. The displays themselves are already extremely high quality, and regular TV movies would just look incredibly granular. No doubt.

How high a resolution do you need on 1″-4″ screens for crying out loud?! Seeing regular TV shows on a computer screen (Only old and public domain shows, of course), if I stretch squeeze the display small enough, they look perfectly fine. Higher resolution lets you see better on larger screens, but is totally wasted on tiny ones.



Nuts.



Hat tip to Mike on Techdirt.