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I started thinking about this topic after I watched this Craig Ferguson clip:
By now we have all heard about Conan and Leno dueling it out for the sacred 11:35 slot on NBC. However, the situation brings to light something that hasn’t yet sunk in at most major corporations yet. The public is changing.
Ferguson’s hypothesis is actually quite intuitive. The youth do rule our society. The 18-49 demographic is what all advertising dollars are based on, and that is what makes the big 3 networks all of their money. What Ferguson missed, however, is that that “deification of youth” has continued, but the youth have drastically changed.
The public today want convenience. They want everything now and exactly how they want it. It started slowly with Sunday shopping, and 24 hour supermarkets. Then it grew with super stores that sell everything from perscription drugs to fresh chickens and motor oil. Pay Per View popped up and let us watch movies whenever we wanted without leaving our homes. The web started creeping in and suddenly we could monitor prices of things like flights, toys, books and more to buy when we wanted to at the price we wanted to. Then, in one of the smartest moves of the 21st century, someone put a harddrive into a VCR and PVR (TiVo) was born: So now we could watch TV when we wanted. Bittorrent made a debut about 7 years ago and made data share faster and easier. Pagers and then cellphones became ubiquitous in people of all ages: So now we were always conveniently available and could conveniently contact anyone. We became obsessed with everything being at our fingertips (There’s an app for that™). We started bitching when we were charged for Internet outside of our house, so Free WiFi became synonymous with Café. Undergrounds subways across Asia and Europe starting piping in cellphone signals. TV companies started endevours like Hulu and BBC iPlayer to satisfy the lust for anytime access. LoveFilm and NetFlix popped up so we could stop strolling to Blockbuster and the Kindle changed the way commuters read.
But in the process, what happened, almost by accident, is we started to kill traditional television. Primetime was called such because that is when most people watched tv, and while that is probably still true, it isn’t the 18-49s any more. The ’sacred youth’ are playing XBox or using MSN or any of the other things that can be used to relax our lazy asses that didn’t exist in 50’s when this all started. Prime time is becoming ‘When I Want Time’ and this is what started the demise of such shows as Arrested Development, Jericho, The Fly and probably (sadly) soon to be Chuck. The fan base was there and arguably still is, but the generation of people that watch these shows isn’t watching them when Neilsens is recording the metrics. Suddenly advertisers are saying it isn’t worth their money and the networks are are saying we need to find something better, regardless of the quality. This is why cable shows like Dexter, Six Feet Under, The Sopranos and the like became such big long lasting hits, they don’t rely on ads, because the revenue comes from the cable fees.
Conan/Leno are the same in this regard. The part most people want to see of any late night show is the monologue, and in the case of SNL, Weekend Update. So we PVR that while we watch the prime time shows that we didn’t watch between 8 and 11, then watch the first 15 minutes and hit the sack, or save them up for another time: Convenience.
Mind you, the movie, airline and music industries are much farther behind then the big 3 when it comes to accepting the new technologies, but this doesn’t stiffle the fact that every year dozens of shows go off the air before they get to 6 episodes, because their on air rating are ‘too low’. Eventually the large corporations need to start catering to the desire of convenience. The food industry made the transition years ago with frozen dinners, the microwave etc., and pre-made dinner sales are always on the rise. Eventually the other industries will need to go down this path, because, for better or for worse, this is what their customers are demanding.
WARNING: Geeks only. (Persistent Link on the left hand side)
I have been doing an excessive amount of coding lately, for both work and for personal things and I found that I use the same handful of JAVA methods in sequence to perform many tasks. Specifically around persisting/converting data.
So in an effort to make my life easier I created a series of String and File utilities that I can call to avoid having to copy/paste and adjust dozens of lines of code.
The API is generic and mostly Object agnostic. I went through and fully documented all the methods, and I also overloaded many of the methods for the base case and specific cases.
I think eventually this will be “open source” in the sense I will let people add to it, but for the time being I’ll just see if anyone actually has an interest in it.
*Although not fully tested, There is a DLL version of this API. The DLL was generated using a neat little utility called IKVM. The ability to convert JARs to DLLs is really useful!
You can run the Test Class by executing “java -jar util_api_1.0.jar”
I’m tired of reading about people ‘losing privacy’ with Facebook and Twitter. People are not losing their privacy; they are losing their common sense. There was an article this morning in the paper which cited examples of ‘loss of privacy’:
1) A UK worker being fired for comments that her job was boring.
2) Employees in a service industry being reprimanded for posting negative comments about customers on their social sites.
3) Causing of problems in relationships when one person makes relationship-based remarks, or when a person ‘updates their relationship status’ without approval of the other party.
Hold on, none of those are examples of losing privacy; they all made their opinion public on purpose. Everyone at one time or another is bored at work. Everyone complains about idiots they have to deal with, and everyone has relationship troubles. It isn’t the fact that those people had those thoughts; it is the fact that they consciously made the thought public. Consciously making something known to people is not losing privacy, losing privacy is something that you didn’t make known to people, becoming known to people. For example, having your private diary published, or your best friend write a tell-all book about you, or a doctor telling everyone about your genital herpes is a loss of privacy. Standing on a box in the middle of Times Square and screaming that you have genital herpes, or handing out free copies of your sex tapes to strangers is not a loss of privacy.
If Facebook openly released all of your pictures to the general public, not just registered Facebook users or specifically your ‘friends’, then that is an invasion, but they don’t (I didn’t say can’t). In fact, they are putting in more restrictions around what can be seen.
We live in a knowledge-starved world. We put Tiger Woods on the front page because we found out he had a secret, but then scream bloody murder when someone finds out ours. We can’t have it both ways.
The sad part is that government agencies are spending millions to study Facebook for security holes, when in reality we live in a society that cares less about privacy and more about reading about our acquaintances’ lives than ever before. If something isn’t meant to be public, don’t make it public. It is as simple of that. Posting “I’ve had a horrible day,” is enormously different than posting “I hate my boss and work is shit.” Facebook does not require the same level of professionalism as a man in a suit in front of a microphone (but then again, even Obama called Kanye a “Jackass”), but it does require some common sense.
And you want to talk about privacy? Well how about laws that restrict who you can love/marry, in what orifice you can have sex, or upcoming flight rules that you can either be photographed in an ‘naked scanner’ machine or have your genitalia juggled before you can get on an airplane? We don’t live in a private society at all when a government can invade it like that. BTW: This is for another entry, but ‘naked scanner’ is by far the newest gross exaggerated term. Given the above two options I will gladly let a couple people stare at my colourless, featureless ‘naked’ body only to have the picture removed immediately upon exiting the scanner. It’s not like Playboy is standing behind them saying “Yep, I’ll take that one for our ‘frequent flyers’ issue.” In those pictures you are no more nude than that chick’s silhouette on a trucker’s mud flaps.
This last year 3 or 4 guys got caught for misuse of a firearm and animal cruelty because they did really stupid, depraved things to a duck during a hunting trip. They got caught, not because someone discovered the duck, but because they posted themselves on YouTube doing it. Had that not happened, the ducks would have decayed or been eaten and, assuming they wouldn’t brag about it (which is a stretch based on the video), they certainly wouldn’t have been charged.
Why haven’t we learned from this? Because we are not used to a truly global media. While screaming on top of a box in Times Square all of your dirty secrets certainly isn’t maintaining privacy, it is not the same as electronically posting something that within seconds the entire world can see… Until, of course, someone starts streaming your NYC rant. Which really poses the question, do we have any privacy anymore? If anyone can video/photograph us doing anything and YouTube it, wouldn’t you think that would make everyone more afraid than the stuff they knowingly post? It sure does for me…
As we all know by now on Christmas day a man attempted to detonate an explosive on a flight as it was descending into Detroit. The media reported this almost immediately as a “terrorist attack”.
There was a Republican senator on CNN this week denouncing Obama because “…he took 3 days to respond to the attempted terrorist attack,” and “…was too busy with the war in Iraq and pushing his Healthcare agenda to care about airport security”.
Of course he fucking was! The American people elected him because that’s what he’d said he’d do! Airport security is not a political issue. Blaming Obama for a bomber boarding a plane in Amsterdam is like blaming the Queen because Royal Mail lost your package. A government owned agency failed here, not the leader of the government.
I promise you if Obama was told “Hey, man… Some Nigerian guy is gonna board an airplane in Holland with a bomb in his underpants,” he would have called someone and said “Yo, can you figure out how to stop that from, you know, like, happening?”.
Also on CNN they had a former head of the 9/11 commision on who commented that Obama was reluctant to use the word terrorism and therefore was undermining the event. I don’t care if the attacker is on a terrorist mission or a deranged girl scout who was driven to commit mass murder because of an unfortunate cookie selling incident: If a plane blows up it is a failure of the security preventing that from happening, which is exactly what Obama said it was.
World leaders don’t have a red S on their chests and fly around at night saving damsels in distress, they are human, and if you think world leaders know everything about their countries like some sort of human-embodied-omnipotent being, then your sadly mistaken. It’s just like the fiasco of the environmental conference in Denmark. Sending Stephen Harper to an environmental convention is as useful as sending Andy Dick to a vagina convention. Neither know anything about the subject, except what they are told by their peers. Let people who know science sort out the environment issues and make a global recommendation. You wouldn’t hire the CEO of Canadian Tire to fix your car right? You’d hire the mechanics who he employs to do it, because theyare the experts.
All of this is to use the media to enhance public perception, because in the end that’s what wins elections, and the Obamas/Harpers/Browns of the world all want to keep their pay cheques. Harper has to flash his smile in Denmark so that when the opposition puts their foot in their mouth for the millionth time of this parliament he can say “Well, I care about the environment, see? I saved my boarding pass!” And in the same way, even if you’ve never flown and have zero intention on doing so, having you PM or President stand up and say, “I am doing everything I can to protect you,” (whether from scary Nigerians or that pesky global warming) makes it desirable to vote for them.
The truth is, flying affects a fractionally small proportion of the population. It’s the media that portrays this as an issue of the masses and politicizes it. Restricting people from having liquids because someone once wanted to use a liquid for evil on a flight makes as much sense as making condoms out of steel because one in a few hundred break. (For more on this I suggest this article)
I am not going to die because a newly-wed couple wants to fly to the Dominican on their honeymoon, and you aren’t going to die because someone who happened to be born in Yemen is on your flight. We’re going to die because people die. I know we loving playing God, but in the end we all die. Whether a nutjob blows us up, or we have a heart attack after eating the large fries at TGIF, we will die. And for the record nutjobs come from everywhere, not just the 14 nations now on a permanent ‘frisk list’ by US order.
Flying is safe, don’t let a hypochondriac set of politicians and a fear mongering news network who couldn’t fill a day with 30 minutes of actual news change your mind about that.
Recently the file sharing site Mininova decided to stop hosting any torrent that was not sent in from a registered user with rights to the material that was being posted. It was if a million file sharers suddenly screamed and then were silenced…
With the fall of Napster, Supernova, Pirate Bay and now this I wonder the impact any of these widely publicized mini-victories has had?
The American “War on Drugs” was a late 60’s initiative and while various reports indicate drug use is down, an equal or greater number seem to report little change. Which isn’t surprising to me. If I ask any random yes or no question to any x number of people the result will likely vary from survey to survey.
It is impossible to determine the exact number of drug users for a variety of reasons. Avoiding the “since drugs being illegal, there is an apprehension about discussing their use” cliche, consider how I could go about calculating the number of smokers.
Obviously countries, and regions within those have different habits of smoking habits. If you broke down those regions based on something say like #of packs sold in a week, then determined the average number of cigarettes a smoker in that region smoked you could then calculate an estimate on the number of smokers in that region. Add all the regions up and (albeit with a fairly high margin of error), you could still get an idea of # of smokers..
There is no way to do this with illegal drugs in most of the western world. There is no idea how much of the product exists, and therefore no idea how much is sold and therefore no accurate measure of the use, or for that matter the change in use.
I am not arguing that the War on Drugs hasn’t worked, I am arguing that there is little they could do to prove it has and it has been going on since the 60s!
Assuming we know that for 40 years the government of the US (and many other countries) has put billions into fighting a war on something which we also know still exists and have no real way of measuring any affect, what does that mean in the case of Internet file sharing? Is the War on Pirated Music/Video identical to the War on Drugs?
Before every movie in the UK there is an ad with a famous person saying don’t copy this movie and there are plenty of celebrity anti-drug campaigns out there. The agencies doing the fighting have just as much propaganda available see the little bit I did on drug propaganda previously and the RIAA’s wonderful news releases on their slowly being killed industry which set a new record for profits last year.
Don’t get me wrong, I am not indicating that because music and theatres are making money this legitimises illegal actions, what I am simply putting forth is that fighting something that isn’t going to go away is like randomly waving your hand in the air with hopes it’ll hit and kill a fly.
It took 40 years to make an insignificant dent (if there is one at all) in drug use with “The War on Drugs” and its Most Wanted culprits are still in daily use. My bet is that the Internet landscape will change so vastly in the next 40 years that by the time the corporations fighting this massive swarm of file sharing website “flies” by waving lawsuit “flyswatters” randomly around the world the technology will have advanced far past today’s torrents and will become even more widespread. Their method is too much like peeing in the Atlantic Ocean: It isn’t going to change the pH level of the Pacific.
The beta of Google Wave has started, and I begged and grovelled for an invite and a friend was gracious enough to send one over. Here are my first thoughts.
Google Wave will change virtual communication. It won’t be over night, and it won’t be accepted by all, but then again Facebook was founded in 2004 and didn’t take off until 2 years later and Twitter is just finding an audience after 3 years in obscurity.
Social Networking in the virtual world is an interesting beast. While Twitter still hasn’t found a model to make decent money, and websites that collate/sort/rate/track tweets are popping up everywhere trying to be the first to make financial gain off of Mr. Dorsey’s brainchild. Facebook went from a simple and usable interface to an ad-centric model where instead of putting your friends at the top put a series of sponsored ads, tailored for you by data mining your profile. How kind. The same can be said about MSN (sic) aka Windows Live Messenger.
Since the Web has grown into a marketer’s wet dream and consumers are demanding everything for free, there seems to be a skew on the supply and demand charts. Because of that it means the newest challenge is balancing ads and ad space alongside product. And this is where Google thrives. Whether we talk about their minimalistic search engine interface (which makes Yahoo’s and MSN’s webpages look like a a 3 year old’s finger painting from the 60’s) to the subtle scrolling ads in Gmail: Google has nailed the balance of making free products while still capitalizing on the lust of web marketers.
So what does all of this have to do with Wave changing the virtual communication landscape? Wave currently is a ad-less, persistent, collaborative, realtime, multimedia, open source communication tool. I am sure the lack of ads will end coincidentally at the same time as the beta program. But the rest of my adjectives are a huge distinction from what is currently available.
At the moment products such as WebEx and Net Meeting dominate in the web conferencing space right now. While desktop sharing is a must in our international business world, what these technologies lack is the collaborative nature of a meeting. These products allow one user to display their screens, “whiteboard” and allow a basic MSNesque like text chat. While Wave lacks the desktop sharing, the ability to, in real time, share links, sites, photos, and a variety of other “gadgets” (polls are quite interesting where people can vote on any question and the tallies are immediately updated). How would this affect taking meeting notes, minutes etc? Every try to take a poll in a group chat room or over a conference call? Think about group projects in a university setting and how much easier it would be to all make decisions from the comfort of your home, in a “secure” (more notes on this later) and 100% traceable, copyable, printable way? No more will you argue over who said they’d print off the report.
Multimedia is a huge plus. How nice is it that you can add a gadget that shows a direct map to your place while you are “chatting” about directions to your place. No more need to lose a link in an accidentally closed MSN window, or having a subject less email with a static screenshot attached. And the small fact that it uses rich text. Now you can give your thoughts headings and highlight important words. Now when you copy and paste from one medium to another you won’ t get stupid bats flying in your post, or lose the spacing/formatting so you have alphabet soup on your screen. In the end this provides a clearer message to the people you are communicating with.(Did I mention inline spell checking?)
Persistence. This is a huge problem with the web in general. Say goodbye to losing a lengthy Facebook message after accidentally clicking “back” or closing your browser. Wave stores your details in realtime. If you hit the k button, not only does everyone see that you hit that button, but you can immediately close your browser without any “save” keystroke and it persists. Add to that that you can file your sessions, re-open, re-play or continue them at any time and this is the most persistent capability the web offers today. Another key to all of this is that you don’t have random MSN-style .rtf files saved all over your harddrive with cryptic names like “chat with John” or “sweet cyber sex”.
Another feature is the concept of “Public Waves”. This is(*ahem* will be) the ultimate combination of mIRC, Internet forums, Message boards, CraigsList and knowledge bases. Combine the entire global community speaking on any subject in a realtime fashion with the search and storage capabilities of Google. It’ll put Yahoo Questions to shame.
And finally on my “pro’s” list, open source. Once the hardcore geeks get a hold of this (I’ve already read that the race for the first usable iPhone and Blackberry apps is on) the possibilities are endless. Put on an MSN skin that minimizes the product into a compact chat forum for just you and your friends, build it into a WebEx-like technology to combine realtime knowledge and data share with PowerPoint and desktop presentations. An infinite communication market has just been opened up!
Of course with any great technology comes the bad. At the moment security is a huge concern. Notwithstanding the recent Google problems with security; Are corporations going to trust their internal data to Google. I don’t know the answer to this question. But in the open source world, I am sure that someone can develop quite quickly a security model that addresses the concerns that will undoubtedly arise.
The current interface is clunky and unintuitive and forces you (practically) to be in a full screen mode. This isn’t useful for most of us in our multitasking culture. Again, open source to the rescue.
The tracking issue. Google is renowned, and routinely chastised, for gathering data. And while I still agree that tracking my searches is a help to me, is tracking every personal/professional conversation I have necessary? I haven’t read a lot on this topic yet, I hope to shortly, but I have to assume some level of data mining is occurring. What will this do to corporate use? It would be a stumbling block I am sure for this technology to take off on that front. For the public market? Well, 300 million people use Facebook and that site is entirely about mining data.
WebEx and Net Meeting are bloated and for no good reason. They require downloads and constant updates and still tend to be prone to errors outside of the IE world. Wave has none of these problems. The slickness of Google has yet again struck.
All in all, I 100% agree with Google’s marketing of this technology that Google Wave is what “e-mail” would have been if it was invented from scratch, and not made to mimic the existing postal system we had world wide.It took almost 3 years for Gmail to open to the general public and now it boasts 150 million users, both corporate and personal. I am very excited for the next 3 years.
Regarding the recent news of the e-mail phishing scam on Gmail, Yahoo! and Hotmail (and presumably others) my blood has been absolutely boiling over the horribly inaccurate, sensationalistic comments that are being published in all sorts of reputable newpapers!
First lets be clear: These guys are NOT hackers. They are not. At very best they are clever people who realized that you can get people that are less clever to tell you things they shouldn’t. This is not new to e-mail, Facebook, corporate logins… In fact people take advantage of less clever people all the time. 3card monte in some form has existed for centuries and continues to fool people! Yesterday and today a fake Amber Alert message has been circulating the web, thousands have been fooled into propagating a false message. Tricking people is not the same as hacking. mafiaboy is a hacker. Kevin Mitnik was a hacker (although he was never malicious and wrongfully imprisoned).
The people who did this have done nothing wrong (I assume the lawyers for the above companies will disagree)… They asked for people’s passwords and the people gave them to them, I can do that right now: Please send me your passwords… In fact post them directly below this entry so that everyone can see them…. Sure they set up a fancy phishing site and sure they claimed to be someone they aren’t, but that is immoral, not malicious. Now, the people that use those passwords for malicious purposes are the ones breaking the law. Just as it is illegal for me to open your (snail) mail. (and yes, I concede these people could be one and the same, but it is important to distinguish that, which the media is not)
The problem, and I know I have beaten this to death, is that people seem to think technology is something new, and it isn’t. It is an adaptation of something. All technology is is an advancement of a previous incarnation of something else. Cell phones are an advancement of cordless phones, which are an advancement from corded phones, where were an enhancement on dial phones, which were an advancement on the original switchhook phones, and the cycle goes back to the first person to every tie a string between two cups. The concept and basic requirement is the same in all of these cases: I have information and I want to share it with someone who isn’t within sound wave receiving distance of my voice.
And finally, the calls for “increased security” and “more education” at these companies is absolutely preposterous. There is NO level of security or education that can prevent a person divulging personal information. How hard is it to understand “Don’t tell people your password.”? And yes, these guys used a sophisticated website to garner this information, but how is Google to prevent people from writing a webpage that looks like theirs? I mean I could mock up a Gmail page and have it be identical to it. How do you teach the mass public to make sure the website they are typing personal data into is legit? Well forward this Blog URL to 15 people and you will find out, because if you don’t you will have bad sex for the rest of your life! I mean after dozens of friends sending me hundreds of those over the past 10 years I am sure they all learned that that is a scam…
Contrary to popular belief, people do not learn from their mistakes.
Has no one ever looked at the €1 and noticed that Sweden is trying to have unaroused sex with the U? (Click on the pic to see for yourself)The land doesn’t even look like that! They seem to have totally cut off Norway like some bizarre cartographic STD that needed removing.
But notice they left in Finland to complete the topographical cock and balls dangling over Europe like a 14 year old boy does over a keyboard.
Way to go Europe in spreading subliminal porn into the minds of our youths.
I am all for “nouveau” designs, but why mess with a classic? Putting the 0 in the middle of the elevator numbers makes about as much sense as having the bullseye on a dart board to the left of the triple 20.Notice there is braille, which is good because we would hate a bunch of blind people walking around lost in the basement when pressing where every hotel on this planet except this one places the 0.
Highlighting it in green just adds insult to injury. They essentially are saying “We know we fucked this up, so we’ll try and make it more obvious for you.”
Apparently odd on the right and even on the left is too inefficient in Germany
A fine watch for a dictator
This ad in the International Herald Tribune is proudly pronouncing they supplied Napoleon with watches.Apparently naming himself the emperor of France wasn’t enough for this man, he also needed a nice watch. And 200 years after his death the company decided this was a great sales pitch. Also, really “From 1798″ is a little misleading, I mean unless they keep throwing watches at his grave.
But really? I mean this isn’t as bad as a sausage shop in Poland advertising a new cut of meat named after Hitler, but it has to be close, no?
Also, how do we know Napoleon had good taste in watches? Maybe his taste was shit and all this ad is saying is, well Napoleon liked shit watches, so you should too. I mean Tiger Woods advertising Nike, I get it. He plays sports, probably knows good equipment… Napoleon isn’t remembered in history as a “Great Teller of Time”…
So I am told that 27 years ago today I was born into this world. I say “I am told”, because who knows if I can trust my parents… They lied to me about Santa and the Easter bunny for years.
This really isn’t a milsetone, but then again milestones are arbitrary anyway. If we lived in a base 3 world I’d be 1000, or in base 9 land I would be 30, so I guess I can celebrate that. (Thus concludes the mathematics/geeky section of this blog)
Besides our obsession with celebrating decades, we conveniently decided to celebrate “odd numbers” once-in-a-white. 15 isn’t special, but we have sweet 16. Our various world governments seem to love 18,19 and 21 (or some combination) and once you hit 50 we seems to celebrate the half decades a lot more… Apparently people that are closer to the average mortality rate need more to celebrate.
The celebration of an anniversary of any arbitrary event is a time old tradition that Hallmark loves and men anguish over. But I for one salute the arbitrary partying for my impressive achievement of being born. Truth be told I can’t take all the credit, I think my mother was there too…
I love the question “Do you feel any older today?”, Of course I don’t I am simply one 24 hour period older than I was yesterday… well actually, not true, I do feel older, but that may have to do with the 27 alcoholic drinks my mates and I consumed over the past 30 hours.
Thank you to everyone for the Facebook well wishes and to the people that send cards over the ocean, your love is much appreciated! For those that are around, party in London, England September 19th, all you need to bring is your mouth and some, no doubt, lovely waiter or waitress will kindly supply the booze (for a small fee of course). Details of locations to be sent out this week.
As recommended by a friend and source of always different and enjoyable reading/viewing material, I recently started watching “True Blood”. For those of you that haven’t seen it, I will try not to issue too many spoilers, at least none that a pre-pubescent goth freak couldn’t grasp about 12.5 minutes into the first episode.
The show overall is enjoyable. I can willing suspend my belief that in this world vampires exist and Anna Paquin can read thoughts as a relatively good plot device, between her periodically losing her fake southern drawl that is. But, I do have to admit Mel Gibson did a better job using such a talent to his benefit, I mean banging Helen Hunt & Marissa Tomei in one movie? Good for him…. I digress…
A few things I find interesting:
For a religious small town in New Orleans, these people not only have crazy amounts of sex, the sex itself is more wild and elaborate than most Private releases. However that isn’t the disturbing part. what disturbs me is that before many of these sexcapades that would make Jenna Haze blush, they make it very clear to each other that they have had plenty of sex ,with plenty of people, and sometimes even state that it was just earlier that day. In fact, when our heroin Anna Paquin finally gives up her cherry, in what can only be described as the best display of breasts on television in 2008, she feels it necessary to scream it out loud… to a bar full of people… where she works… which the guy she just went on a date with a couple nights before owns…The few days after she discovered two loved one’s murdered bodies… But,hell, she had great hooters though, eh?
And then there is Jason, the brother, who I can only picture as an homage to Ellis’ Patrick Bateman, who fucks a girl doggy style behind a bar, while covered in garbage. I am all for adventure, and exhibition… but seriously? I am pretty sure I saw his truck in the background of the shot, it was 20 yard away… trade-offs, man, trade-offs…
Now, for a country that has been fighting the war on drugs so long that the girls they initially were targeting now have more problem with their nipples touching the ground, than with excessive marijuana use, they certainly are promoting the hell out of “V” (aka Vampire Blood). This apparently is a miracle drug! It saves a person’s life by miraculously healing her and giving her a dog’s smell and a bat’s hearing, then in one episode it acts like Viagra on Ecstasy and pumps up a guys cock in the most fake erection through the pants seen in TV history, and in the very next show it makes fireworks shoot of some guest star girl’s tits. Well, truth be told I see fireworks every time I see tits too, that has less to do with drugs… It also has this magical power of making you fuck up everything in your life. But then again, don’t all drugs? Don’t do drugs kids.
The other thing that is interesting about this town is that everyone seems to have a job (or 2) and they never need to go. I think the phrase “<blank> isn’t coming in today” is uttered once per episode. But, I mean I guess there are more important things to do, like getting arrested for every girl you sleep with dying, but then getting let go after the cliffhanger, or trot around town with a vampire who you have more of a Ross/Rachel relationship with than me and my constant love/hate affair with Tostitos.
Now, what is missing from this review? Oh yeah, the VAMPIRES! For a show that has a premise of vampires, they are really nothing but a subplot and allusion to the black/white race issues of the southern US. It isn’t even an allusion, actually. It is referenced in the damn title sequence!
The references to this are not poetic and are not subtext-ed at all. The characters bringing up segregated bars, a main character comments, after her daughter notes how white a vampire is, “No honey, we’re white”. The continuous assertion that a “few bad apples are making all vampires look bad” and even the utterance that once you go vampire you never go back (Doesn’t really have the same ring to it, does it?)… Do they really need to spell this out anymore?
In the end, entertaining. Not my favourite show, but I find myself caring a little bit for what happens, and when sitting alone in a hotel it makes for good watching… wait, did you just say there is porn on the Internet? umm… bye…
The beta of Google Wave has started, and I begged and grovelled for an invite and a friend was gracious enough to send one over. Here are my first thoughts.
