Xark!

Think Warm Thoughts

News outlets are reporting that Hillary Clinton has unveiled her plans for national health care. I don't know many of the details, but if the picture accompanying the story is anything to go by, it looks as though they are planning on keeping costs down by offering low tech colonoscopy exams for everyone!

Think healthy, people.

FOX News: "We're not making this up!"

Fox & Friends apparently spent Tuesday morning covering a parody news story as a real news story. Says that guy who sits on the left side of the couch, "We're not making this up!... We're not being duped. I looked this up on a couple of Web sites up there."

And later in the day, Lou Dobbs picked up that erroneous "ham sandwich" fact from the Fox program, too (it was introduced in the Associated Content parody. The original incident involved a ham steak). Dobbs may not get his marching orders directly from Roger Ailes, but he's got his populist outrage down pat: "Mr. Superintendent, may I say, you're out of your cotton-pickin' mind."

Somebody. Shoot. Me..

Death knell for idiot marketing

I subscribe to WIRED, which means that I find out about cool new geek stuff at the exact moment when it becomes old and uncool (because nothing can be truly leet if a print publication has noticed it). On the other hand, WIRED acts as a bridge between the pioneers (Dewey) and the relatively early adapters (me, Janet, etc).

Anyway, I point out this video thanks to this item in the March issue's package on Snack Culture:

Sony's two-hour press conference on May 8, 2006, was a slo-mo car crash. Intended to rally geeks around the PlayStation 3, the event instead left them cranky about the feckless sales pitch, weak games, and high price tag. Over the next few days, bloggers tried to capture Sony's cluelessness, but none were so eloquent as YouTube user Macaw45, who posted a video titled "Sony E3 2006 Press Conference in 1 Minute." Editing footage from the event, Macaw45's clip distilled the meltdown with DJ-like dexterity, looping key moments for maximum effect. The defining shot in Macaw45's montage showed a game developer explaining how to defeat giant enemy crabs: "Attack its weak point for massive damage!" A meme was born: The phrase became the "All your base are belong to us" of 2006, and it was used as shorthand for Sony's lameness. The inevitable T-shirts, dance remixes, and homages followed. Marketing execs beware: Geeks with iFilm can pare you down to your essence - you'd better hope you like what they find.
- Daniel Dumas

I don't think this is a small thing culturally. How much of what we deal with in life is crappy because of slickly marketed shoddiness? And I'm not just saying this as a consumer. Shoddiness is a disease of the soul -- punished in individuals, but often rewarded by institutions and corporations. This is why we've come to hate flacks, mouthpieces and pitchmen. This is why advertising -- as we know it -- is in a state of flux.

Mooninites for morons

Attention, citizens of Boston (and over-sensitive drama queens everywhere)!

This is a mooninite. A mooninite is an advanced, absurdly arrogant and highly annoying creature from the Moon. They first appeared in an episode of Aqua Teen Hunger Force in October of 2001 and have since been featured in five additional shows (they showed up again for single episodes in 2002, 2003 and 2006, and in two 2004 episodes). The original mooninites episode is still probably the show's zenith (although for me, it's a toss-up between the mooninites and The Wisdom Cube).

They are all excellent spellers, but they are not terrorists. And those alleged bomb-like packages that got Boston's panties all in a twist? This is what they looked like. Terrified yet?

Some people were -- and are -- highly upset about the fact that a couple of "hoaxsters" put these up in Boston (funny -- in nine other cities the people who put them up were called "marketers" and nobody got upset). Then again, some people really need to get over themselves. It's a stupid joke. Laugh or don't. But don't ask me to take this stuff so seriously.

We do whatever we want whenever we want, at all times. -Ignignokt, a moonite

Sour grapes on a plane

Snakes on a Plane, one of the most spectacularly stupid American movies in recent memory, was the No. 1 box office movie in America this past weekend.

And -- according to the mainstream entertainment press -- it was a flop.  Or, to get more to the point, the blog-generated buzz that preceded it was just a bunch of empty hype. Here's the Chicago Tribune:

Sometimes buzz bites back.

New Line learned over the weekend that reining in expectations on a film is no easy task, especially in the unwieldy world of the Web.

The studio's "Snakes on a Plane" -- the one-time punch line that seemed to pick up steam after bloggers championed it -- landed at No. 1 in the movie box office race last weekend but was still tagged an underperformer.

"Snakes" performance shows that what's important to the Internet crowd is not necessarily of interest to the general population.

Unlike most movies, the hype did not come from the studio. The antithesis of "The Blair Witch Project" experience, the fate of "Snakes" suggests that Internet "marketing" guarantees nothing.

The self-perpetuating hoopla has overshadowed both the film and its box office results. "Snakes" slithered to $15.3 million domestically over the frame, adding another $2.6 million overseas, mostly from the United Kingdom.

But based on the ocean of buzz that surrounded the film, some industry watchers had been predicting a U.S. bow of $20 million to $30 million.

You can read other similar pieces at Google News, but here's the shorter version of the consensus entertainment-press storyline: Bloggers can't deliver where it counts -- on the bottom line -- so stop paying attention to them. You still need us, Mister Studio Executive, and don't you forget it!

Let's put this in context.

That Snakes on a Plane was ever filmed in the first place is the first joke in a long string of stupid SoaP jokes. Mere words cannot describe how intellectually, creatively and sexually retarded this movie is. That's why bloggers thought the concept was funny in the first place, and that's why we made it a phenomena. We laughed at Hollywood, and eventually Hollywood caught on and figured out a way to make money off of us laughing at them. So clearly they're not financially retarded.

The mainstream entertainment press (talk about snakes!) says that the blog hype didn't equal profits, on account of SoaP only grossing about $15 million on its first weekend. The better question would be, what would SoaP have grossed if it hadn't been for bloggers? How much would Pacific Air Flight 121 (the title the studio planned to give the movie) have grossed? Would it have even finished in the top 10? I doubt it.

Snakes on a Plane is going to be a profitable movie with a (pardon the pun) long royalty tail, and its studio can thank bloggers for just about every dollar.

As the great Annalee Newitz wrote:

... it's important to remember that nobody actually expected to like this movie. To the extent that we do like Snakes, we're getting pleasure out of it as a joke -- a joke on itself for being so flagrantly silly, but also the butt of jokes we've made for the past year online. Of course, there's the less-acknowledged joke Snakes plays on us when we buy tickets to see a movie that can never be as cool or creative as the videos, songs, posters, and satires people have already published about it for free on the Internet.

If you're stuck in the mainstream entertainment press cycle -- a corrupt and corrupting cesspool of  influence and celebrity and for-profit inanity -- that truth is a loaded gun pointed directly at your head. Or, to borrow from SoaP, a loaded scuba diver spearfishing gun pointed directly at your black mamba...

So much for science

The June issue of Scientific American includes an article by George Musser on the effect of those NASA budget cuts we first heard about earlier this year (NASA's Reverse Thrust). Once again, the reality is far worse than our "watchdog media" ever got around to explaining.

In order to keep up the illusion that President Bush's manned spaceflight initiative is still on track, NASA has been forced to gut its science program:

The NASA budget announced in February mows down a scarily long list of science missions, from a Europa orbiter to a space-based gravitational-wave observatory. Research grants to individual scientists, traditionally kept safe from high-level budget machinations, have taken a 15 percent hit, retroactive to last fall; hundreads have already received "termination letters" canceling their projects...

The countdown to crisis actually began a year ago, when the Bush administration lopped off the dollop of bridging funds it had promised. Then came Hurricane Katrina, which damaged shuttle facilities in Mississippi and Louisiana, and an across-the-board federal budget cut, largely to raise money for the Iraq War. Worst of all, a new analysis of the shuttle and space station found them at least $2 billion in the hole. (NASA administrator Michael) Griffin went cap in hand to the administration but was told to make up the difference from the agency's own wherewithall.

The damage? A 20 percent cut to the science program, amounting to $6.4 billion between 2007 and 2011. Worst hit? Planetary exploration -- 40 percent.

Meanwhile, the human spaceflight budget gets a $5.2 billion boost -- which doesn't even come close to solving the program's biggest problem: Our obsolete space shuttle fleet is scheduled to be retired in 2010, and we don't have anything lined up to replace it.

In other words, we are dismantling the thing we do best -- efficient, brilliant unmanned scientific missions -- in order to fund manned missions that accomplish little beyond inflating the profits of defense contractors. The implications extend beyond the obvious budget horizon.

Multiyear projects require some consistency in their funding. By making such an abrupt budget change, NASA will mothball or abandon half-built (in some cases, fully built) hardware, lose expertise developed at great effort, and leave gaps in data coverage, notably of the earth's climate. NASA has had budget crunches before, but seldom have they been so wasteful.

I read this while sitting on the beach, and it made me so furious I had to get up and jump in the water. I smashed into waves. And as I stood out there in the surf, the thought struck me: I'm sick and tired of having a government that can't do anything right, led by people whose first inclination is routinely wrong, whose first explanation is routinely dishonest. Enabled by those people on the beach, reading People magazine and Southern Living.

I think I'm done with being polite about it.

Here's the bottom line: Iraq will cost this country $101 billion this fiscal year, and since we're borrowing that money, the actual payback cost will be much higher.  Even without figuring in the interest, that's $276.7 million a day.  To put that in a Charleston perspective, less than three days of the Iraq war would build a second Cooper River bridge. About three weeks of war spending would cover South Carolina's entire budget for 2007. It's obscene how much money we're wasting there, but there's no end in sight.

Those figures don't even begin to account for the secondary costs. By derailing NASA's science programs, we are, in essence, opening the door to other countries that take a longer view. Pacific Rim nations that see the value of biotechnology have already taken advantage of our absurd policy on stem cell research. Genius goes where genius is welcomed, and the benefits accrue to those who recognize its value.

This travesty is just one in a long line of stupid moves. It just happens to be the one that flipped a switch in my brain.

Low, wide right and foul

Vice President Dick Cheney threw out the ceremonial first pitch at today's home opener for the Washington Nationals, but the crowd of 25,000 didn't stick to the FOX News script. They booed him loud. They booed him long (watch the Quicktime video via ThinkProgress).

How did FOX handle this incoming-reality crisis, this bit of Heartland kitsch theater gone awry? Well, first they turned off the audio. Then their talking head made sure not to mention to crowd's surly response -- at all.

Let's put that in context. It would be like Cheney going to a photo-op at Yellowstone and being mauled by a grizzly, and the FOX New guy just nervously talking about the administration's brilliant environmental record.

Fortunately for us, the FOX producers turned up the audio in anticipation of the cheer that usually accompanies a typical ceremonial pitch -- only there was no cheer this time. Just loud derision.

What's a FOX media lackey to do? Apparently, the solution is to praise the veep's throw, which started shy of the mound and still didn't make it all the way to the plate:

Let's take a look here. There's the vice president, tossing out the pitch. Not a bad pitch. Seemed like it was over the plate. A little low. A bit of a bounce before it hit the catcher's mitt. Pretty good for the vice president. And of course wearing his Nationals' jacket. Folks in Washington, DC, thrilled finally to have a baseball team back in the nation's capital...

As someone going by the handle War4Sale commented at Think Progress this afternoon: "19% Approval rating!!! Cheney is now less popular than herpes."

Ah yes. Listen to that sound. When a politician can't do a photo-op at a ballpark without being publicly humiliated, something has changed. And it's about time, if you asked me.

Duke's valedictorian writes...

Bull-moose blog star (and Tar Heel fanatic) Ed Cone's recent newspaper column on a book about the UNC/Duke rivalry got him this piece of fan mail today:

Think about this from a Duke fan's perspective for a moment. You've just paid more than $100,000 for a piece of paper that says you've graduated from a faux-Ivy in a tobacco town, and all that money really bought you was the right to sit next to this guy in a sports bar.

Man. What a great day.

I'll take a case, please

From a CNN/Business 2.0 list of the Top 10 Dumbest Business moves of 2005 (via Scripting News):

"With the help of Latin pop sensation Thalia Sodi, Hershey introduces Cajeta Elegancita, a new candy bar for the Hispanic market. Though the wrapper features a picture of Sodi, apparently she neglects to fill her Yanqui partners in on a subtlety of Spanish: In Mexico, 'cajeta' can be used to mean 'nougat.' Elsewhere in the Spanish-speaking world, however, it's slang for female anatomy."

Thank God this is real. It kinda makes up for the urban legend about Chevy marketing the Nova (Spanish translation: "Won't Go") to spectacular failure in Latin America.