Reality of Reality TV

To get a sense of what the business of reality television is like, check this link to a MediaChannel.org post by media prankster and "socio-political satarist." (I was about to use the same phrase, and realized that it was on his web site - certainly one of the more interesting approaches to web site navigation I've seen.) Apparently, at least for this reality show about being a prankster, the producers want to own outright anything you send them as an example of your work, and they don't want to pay you a penny. That seems like the biggest hoax there could be.

Discovery Institute Steals Harvard Work?

The Discovery Institute claims to be a non-partisan think tank, but is actually interested in promoting specific political agendas ("The Institute discovers and promotes ideas in the common sense tradition of representative government, the free market and individual liberty."). One of the activities it embraces is trying to disprove the theory of evolution. But if this blog entry is right - and the video examples it links to are accurate - then DI personnel have blatantly plagiarized an animated educational short Harvard produced, even stripping out the school's copyright claims. Was this an evolutionary process, or simply divine intervention?

Turkey: The Bird, The Country, The Misunderstanding

What better for the day before Thanksgiving (US variety, at least) to consider the origin of the word turkey. According to several sources I've checked (all of which, for all I know, read the same damned web site at one point or another), the first bird called a turkey is not what we know in this country, but something like a Guinea fowl. It was a bird known to the Greeks and Romans, but that disappeared from Europe until the late 15th or early 16th century. The people who brought the birds to the region were probably Turkish traders, and the birds, at least in England, popularly came to be known as Turkey bird. According to Michael Quinion, only the English thought that the birds came from Turkey, which much of the rest of the world guessed India. Not long after the reintroduction of the guinea fowl, merchants brought actual turkeys from ... Mexico! But they were still associated with Turks, and so became turkeys, even as people realized that there was already a name for the guinea fowl.

Shakespeare know of the bard ... uh, bird ... and mentioned it in a line from Twelfth Night: "O, peace! Contemplation makes a rare turkey-cock of him; how he jets under his advanced plumes!" No mention of cranberries or stuffing, however.

Writers? Scratch that - Entprepreneurs

If Hollywood thought that splitting revenues with writers and then a strike were problems, then it has the real shock coming. This LA Times piece reports on how television and movie writers are beginning to turn into entrepreneurs, pretty much cutting the studios out of the major business. Movie stars apparently take lower pay if there are actually good parts, versus what most studio machined movies have, and writers get to pocket a lot more money. Maybe the studios can go on strike, trying to get a cut of the Internet revenues ... oh, wait, that's right, they can't actually hold up anything.

NEA Study Says American Reading Is Doing Badly

The National Endowment for the Arts did a reading study, but unlike its previous one, this looks beyond literary reading (which didn't even include literary nonfiction) to all types. The answers are not the stuff of happy evenings. Here are some of the lowlights:

• Less than one-third of 13-year-olds are daily readers, a 14 percent decline from 20 years earlier. Among 17-year-olds, the percentage of non-readers doubled over a 20-year period, from nine percent in 1984 to 19 percent in 2004.


• On average, Americans ages 15 to 24 spend almost two hours a day watching TV, and only seven minutes of their daily leisure time on reading.


• Reading scores for 12th-grade readers fell significantly from 1992 to 2005, with the sharpest declines among lower-level readers.


• 2005 reading scores for male 12th-graders are 13 points lower than for female 12th-graders, and that gender gap has widened since 1992.


• Reading scores for American adults of almost all education levels have deteriorated, notably among the best-educated groups. From 1992 to 2003, the percentage of adults with graduate school experience who were rated proficient in prose reading dropped by 10 points, a 20 percent rate of decline.

A country whose youth are not reading is one whose future generations may not be equipped to adequately participate in a democracy. And given the poor job we're doing, going downhill from where we are now is a scary concept.

Open Source Attempt to End Internet Stupidity

This seems like a real grasp at the impossible, but some people have started something called StupidFilter.org. They hope that with the right combination of filters and rules-based processing, similar to spam detection engines, that sites allowing user participation will be able to catch human stupidity in the process and stop it before it gets posted. I don't know whether this is inspired, or an example of the evolutionary nature of stupidity and its ability to avoid deterrence.

FreeRice.com - Word Games and World Hunger

FreeRice.com, sister site to Poverty.com, has a novel way to fund work in donating food. People play a vocabulary game, matching an increasingly difficult set of words to their meanings. Every time you get a right answer, the organization donates 10 grains of rice. It's driven by advertising, so the more words you get, the more ads come up, and the more money they get to turn into the grains of rice. Started on October 7, its use has been growing exponentially. So, go do some good and run into some pretty interesting words.

Norman Mailer, Gentleman

It's sad to hear of the passing of Norman Mailer. Not that I was a huge fan of his work - being the erratically and questionably read person that I am, I hadn't read much of it, although I wonder how many hours a day one would need to devote to turning page after page to address even a smattering of the "absolutely necessary" sections of whatever canon was in question.

But the issue of how much time should be devoted solely to reading or writing is part of what Mailer an interesting person. He eschewed the bookish existence, and thought that a writer should embrace the earthy, and not just the ethereal. Certainly he had an ego and could be publicly pugnacious, and his ability to deal with a stable family life would raise an eyebrow, but he refused to retreat into the safety of the study.

I never spoke with him, but did exchange letters about two years ago. I had a provisional interest on the part of Pages Magazine, back when it was in existence, in a piece I wanted to write on writing feuds, their nature, and why they came into being. Of course Mailer was on my list of potential interviewees, given his toussels with Vidal, Capote, and others. Not having his address, I nevertheless sent a letter to him in Provincetown, thinking that the post office could certainly find him, and it did.

Unlike Vidal, whom I also tried to contact, Mailer actually wrote back, apologizing that he was finishing a new novel (that did finally come out) and that he, unfortunately, had to turn down all interview requests. The degree of thoughtfulness in that gesture touched me. He could have simply tossed the letter, but didn't.

Perhaps it was ego that drove him, though I find that people fueled only by self-conceit often ignore the "little people." Maybe it was his having had to dig up sources and do the legwork necessary for his own journalistic endeavors. I still hope that tipping the balance was that I had included a SASE and used Joe Lewis commemorative stamps on both the envelope to him and the one to return to me. He did love a good fight.

Waterboarding, Torture, and Definitions

The appointment of former judge Michael Mukasey is closer, with democratic senators Feingold and Schumer voting in favor after private assurances that all ending the simulated drowning technique required was Congressional action. How convenient. All it would take is for the House and Senate both to spend time to draft bills, send them through committees, take votes, go through a reconciling process, and present it to the president - who, presumably, would veto it. And then Congress would only need two-thirds majorities in both houses to override.

This may not be the height of deception, whether of voters or of the senators themselves, but it at least hits a plateau. Such a law will never surface with so many other things to do, and with probably enough resistance to make a veto override impossible. This is window dressing and playing with the meaning of such words as torture and assurance.

Anyone who has ever come close to drowning - and I speak from personal experience, here - can tell you that being forced to feel as though you are breathing your last is not mere intimidation nor strenuous questioning. It is a form of torture that dates back to the Spanish Inquisition. There may be times for scholarly debates over the meaning of words, or legal disagreements over how to construe a sentence. But this is not one of them. For a people to stand for something, it must actually stand for those principles, not twist definitions for expedience.

By accepting such a preposterous concept as needing a law for every single condition whose characteristics easily fit the broad premise, Feingold and Schumer are looking for an excuse of convenience. Perhaps they think Mukasey is the best candidate they might get. Pragmatism has an obvious place in life, but there are times you must put your support behind not what seems of practical advantage, but behind what you truly believe. To do any less is to abdicate responsibility, duty, and humanity.

One-Sentence Stories

Have you ever tried to take a letter or paper and dramatically cut the length? If so, then you'll appreciate the effort that can go into posting on the site, One Sentence. People take what is supposed to be a true story and boil it down to a single sentence. It's an interesting concept - coming up with something that has a degree of finish to it in that short a space. Unfortunately, to post one, you basically have to provide, non-exclusively, all rights. In other words, if the person wanted to put together a book using all the stories and not pay a single contributor, that would be legal.

Blogger Wins SLAPP Suit

A number of blogs have been following the case of third party eBay drop-off company, BidZirk, suing blogger Philip Smith for saying critical things about it and its president, Daniel Schmidt. Apparently, Smith ran a four-part article on his blog about eBay drop-off services in general and BidZirk in particular. The company sued, and apparently it and its lawyer went so far over the top - including putting a lien on the blogger's condo without having any basis to claim a right to the property - that a judge granted Smith summary judgment ... a year and a half after the suit was first filed. You can read about this at the Citizen Media Law Project, the Technology & Marketing Law Blog by Eric Goldman, and Smith's own blog.