I have wanted to say something like this for a long while, but this letter to the NYTimes editor says it perfectly.

As a longtime peace activist who was opposed to the Iraq war from the beginning, I deeply resent Thomas L. Friedman’s reference to us as “antiwar activists who haven’t thought a whit about the larger struggle we’re in.”

We were bitterly opposed to the notion of pre-emptive war and to a devastating attack on a country that had nothing to do with 9/11. But one of our major arguments against this ill-planned, ill-executed tragic war was that it would distract energy and resources from a truly effective attack against terrorism and Muslim extremism.

This is exactly what has happened.

The Iraq war (and sadly, now the war in Lebanon) has only strengthened the terrorists, worsened hatred toward us and rendered us less rather than more capable of fighting terrorism.

Ann Edelman
Los Angeles, Aug. 16, 2006

I stopped my subscription to TimesSelect a while ago so I don’t know what Ann is replying to (maybe its time to renew?). It’s good news that the likes of George Will, Thomas Friedman, Andrew Sullivan etc etc etc et al are finally starting to ask the question “What was it all for?” but why do they feel such a strong need to malign the motives of those of us who asked the same question four years ago?

I hasten to add that I have no idea what comes next. I broadly agreed with Kerry’s prescription back in 2004 but it’s not 2004 any more, sadly. Staying will be a disaster, leaving will be a disaster. I hope there will finally be an honest debate and less of the debate-only-encourages-the-terrorists nonsense that Cheney and Bush (and, now, Lieberman) are STILL coming out with.

Raph Koster is one of my favourite bloggers. He was a lead designer on the best game of all time. His blog is nominally about games but he covers a lot of the surrounding territory too. Today’s post is about the recent history of pop culture as seen through the covers of Entertainment Weekly whenever a new actor took on the James Bond role.

In 1995, with Pierce Brosnan on the cover, we see an article on “What’s Hot (And Not) on Laserdisc.” To which today’s response is “what’s laserdisc?” We see a pre-Shakespeare in Love Gwyneth Paltrow insisting that “I’m more than a head in a box.” And the cover article asks, “Do we still need 007 in a post-Cold-War world?”

and

In 1987, the cover was Timothy Dalton. The cover boldly argues “Those Silly Simpsons: Why Tracey Ullman’s Cartoon Clan Deserves Its Own Show.”

He bemoans the ever-changing nature of pop (maybe that’s a definition of popular art? it certainly has very little to do with what’s popular)…

At any given time, pretty much everything in the pop cultural landscape is doomed to irrelevancy; the landscape is actually a landfill that hasn’t figured itself out yet.

…but concludes that the ever-changing landscape gives us hooks on which we can hang our own personal memories. I like that.

Stephen Colbert encouraged his viewers to demonstrate the wikiality - if enough people believe that something is true, then it is true - of Wikipedia. He asked everyone to edit every article on that mentions elephants and add the fact that the number of elephants has tripled in the last ten years.

I confess that I did not think the WikiGnomes would be able to withstand the challenge. But withstand it they did - with flying colours!

The discussion at the specially created Talk: page is hilarious. The discussion is about equal parts

• Colbert fans complaining that they are not allowed to add the unquestionable fact that the number of elephants have tripled
• The Number of elephant in Africa has Tripled in the last two months.-Fact
• WikiGnomes claiming that Colbert fans are idiotic automatons who do whatever their master tells them
• Colbert is a comedian. We don’t use comedians as sources for anything other than their own jokes
• WikiGnomes who claim to be Colbert fans saying that they understand that it is a joke but that Colberrorism of this kind is irresponsible because it gives Wikipedia a bad name
• Not how it works. Just leave it alone, the joke is over. Colbert is funny, you don’t need to do everything he tells you to do.
• To the media: you are doing Wikipedia a disservice by irresponsibly hyping the vandalism of “Elephants”, so please cut it out
• I love the Colbert Report, but come on people. It was funny for about 10 minutes. Then it just became stupid.
• the way I think about it, he probably wanted to warn wikipedia that it’s easy for a user to add false information and no one to analyze to correct it.
  
• Colbert fans claiming that the WikiGnomes response proves Colbert’s point about wikiality - that all truthiness is relative
• It is a fact that: many people in the wikipedia community believe that the population of elephants may have tripled in the last few months.
• Are you claiming that many people don’t hold the belief that the elephant population has tripled?
  
• WikiGnomes claiming that the successful resistance to the attack proves Colbert wrong
• That’s where you and Colbert are wrong. Facts are never established by the community, they are established by citations and verifiability.
• Colbert was wrong in that he thought Wikipedia was based on the community’s opinion when it is based on verifiable, cited facts.
  
• WikiGnomes who really are Colbert fans claiming that the successful resistance proves that Colbert is a genius of satirical comedy and that the whole point of the exercise was to demonstrate that the people who dismiss wikipedia because it is subject to wikiality are idiots - including the satirical character that Stephen Colbert plays on The Colbert Report.

I should have had more faith in the WikiGnomes - they are true heroes, even the humourless ones - and Stephen Colbert proves once again that you can use power of comedy for the good.

Of course, the irony in all of this is that the number of elephants has tripled in the last ten years.

Henry Jenkins does an interesting bit of search and replace …

USA Today can’t resist jumping on the DOPA bandwagon though, tossing off in the middle of an article otherwise concerned with youth engagement with social networking the following:

To deter predators, the House late Monday overwhelmingly passed a bill that would keep libraries and schools from allowing children to access social networking sites, as well as chat rooms. It now goes to the Senate.

Let’s see if this statement might even remotely make sense if we rephrased it in response to another medium:

To prevent false advertising, the House late Monday overwhelmingly passed a bill that would keep libraries and schools from allowing Americans to read magazines and newspapers.

Nope, I didn’t think so.How about this one:

To deter pornographers, the House late Monday overwhelmingly passed a bill that would keep libraries and schools from providing books, magazines, and other printed matter to their patrons.

Hmm. Funny, that one doesn’t make a lot of sense either.

Perfect.

I was just reading an interview with Matt and Trey (South Park is in way up in the top 3 favourite shows in our house) and a couple of things jumped out. First of all, I love this line from Trey :

So I think we’re losing our edge, but hopefully we’re gaining something else.

I have always worried that South Park will get more and more extreme until eventually they start making fun of shark-jumping. Gaining something else would be fandabidoze. They seem to gain something else every season and long may they continue to do so.

I watched Team America a while back and I found it incredibly offensive. Not because of the puppet sex [I like sex and I like puppets] or because of the subject matter or the swearing or the 10 minute vomit scene. I felt they had crossed a line where they were saying nothing matters, nothing at all.

That’s why South Park is so great. It’s not cynical. It’s curious - like a 4th grader. Like Trey said,

South Park has never been a cynical show and a show where we just want to throw gas on the fire and ‘F**k all you.’ It’s never been that. It’s always been trying to lighten things up. And that’s what we hope we’ll keep doing with the show.”

Or even better like the pope in Bloody Mary said,

A chick bleeding out her vagina is no miracle. Chicks bleed out their vaginas all the time.

They just tell it like it is. Like a little kid would see it.

Randy:	But the statue wasn’t a miracle!
Stan:	Yeah. The statue wasn’t a miracle, Dad. So that means you did it. That means you didn’t have a drink for five days all on your own.

Team America was like, all you people who care, fuck you. If 98.7% of the people watching are being satirized, is it still satire?

I contributed for the first time last night to a Wikipedia discussion page.

The entry on Godwin’s Law was missing the most interesting fact - that Godwin deliberately created his law as an experiment in memetics. He wanted to see if he could create deliberately create a meme and watch it through usenet.

I have made minor edits to Wikipedia pages before but this seemed such a blatant omission that I thought it would be more polite to enquire about it in the Talk page first. I was not familiar with Talk page etiquette so I tried to reverse engineer it from the existing comments. There seemed to be a bunch of substantive discussion about the content of the article, neatly divided into sections, with a bunch of name-calling and complaining about the edit wars (Lawrence’s Law - any Talk page at wikipedia will have a bunch of substantive discussion followed by name-calling and complaining about the edit wars. Just don’t call anyone a Nazi!) so I carefully inserted my question at the end of the substantive discussion.

Shouldn’t there be a reference to the fact that an Godwin originally proposed Godwin’s Law as an exercise in memetics?

Less than 8 hours later, I logged in to find that my entry had been moved, formatted, attributed and had it’s own little sub-section with name-calling and complaining about the edit-wars. I was also gently prompted to pay more attention to the four or five rules of etiquette that I had broken. Someone even asked me for a cite Those guys are efficient! I would certainly trust them to keep my trains running on time.

The Onion article about Wikipedia would be funnier if there were a grain of truth in it. It might have been true once-upon-a-time but just try adding some random crap to a wikipedia page and see how long it lasts. The WikiGnomes will have removed your weeds before you have even finished planting them. They are Nazis in the best possible sense of the word.

There is a vicious cycle that repeats over and over and over.

A brilliant movie is about to be made/beer is about to be brewed/tv show is about to filmed/newspaper is about to be published and the money men get together to discuss how to maximize success - and, of course, success is measured in dollars.

“It might be a little difficult/complex/cultural for our target market”

says one.

Let’s remove the [parts that make it satisfying] to make it more accessible

responds the other.

Repeat this for long enough and large sections of the audience become unable to catch cultural references/stand any trace of hops/follow any story that is not about Peoria/understand english accents/watch a movie that doesn’t have a happy ending.

American Culture at is finest is still magnificent, but large swathes of America thinks that Budweiser is beer and USA Today is a newspaper and Ben Stiller is funny. Me, I can no longer tell the difference between Entertainment Tonight and Eye Witness News.

Expose a population to this kind of pap for long enough and they lose the ability to digest a richer diet. Only pap will sell. It’s a self-fulfilling prophecy. We reap what we sow.

My pet peeve for today is when they take a cultural icon from a different culture - The Magic Roundabout - and remove as many of the cultural references as possible. Americans are not familiar with the British actors in the original. No-one knows who Joanna Lumley is because Absolutely Fabulous was remade in america (and bombed) because no-one knows who Joanna Lumley is because …

It’s no use making cultural references because no-one is familiar with the culture because …

Can’t use actors with English accents because no-one understands English accents because …

Where will it end?

Why does every great French/Spanish/Japanese/even English movie have to be remade for the American market? Why couldn’t they at least tip their hat to Rudyard Kipling in the credits of The Road to El Dorado? Are they afraid that someone will go watch The Man Who Would be King and never watch an American movie ever again? I watched the entire “Making of the Lion King” just to see if anyone would mention the Prince of Denmark (they didn’t).

On the bright side, microbrews are really taking off. A lot of people still watch Jim Lehrer and, in sophisticated circles, everyone knows that Cheddar is “The Single Most Popular Cheese In The World”. A few niche markets - like anime - are making inroads. Maybe Harry, Ron and Hermione are the camel’s noses?

I am not hopeful.

One of the great things about the World Cup is that the standard of the commercials goes sky high - much better than the superbowl commercials, sorry. Who can forget the Brazilians playing football in the airport in ‘98 ?

[Pssst - Madison Avenue. TiVo owners don't use the skip-30-seconds button to skip the commercials. They use it to skip the bad commercials.]

The high water mark this year was the Jose+11 series for Adidas.

¡Jose! ¡A casa!

After watching it at least 73 times, I only noticed last night that the soundtrack goes something like “If you don’t give my football back, I’m gonna get my dad on you.”

Like the best of art, the best lines from the best commercials leak into the culture so that I can now walk into any house in California and shout

I have found a way to carry six beers at the same time!

and get the immediate response

You’ve found a way to carry six beers at the same time? Brilliant!

A long time ago, I read a book where the main character tries to persuade his dad that he should subscribe to some magazine. He explains to his dad that the magazine aims to educate their readership and to give them insight into blah-blah-blah. “Nonsense!” says his dad,

“The aim of the magazine is to sell more magazines. Same as all magazines.”

This was an epiphany for me. It explained all kinds of things that I had not previously understood.

Whenever you see the media doing something that seems counter-intuitive - something that is not in the customer’s best interest - ask yourself :

“Who is the real customer for this product?”

If the product is media-related, there is a good chance that the customer - the party who pays money for the product - is not the consumer, it’s the advertiser.

[Thanks to Jeff for this last insight]

In the old days, if the commentators of one game wanted to share the score of another they would say..

The score of the XvY game is about to appear on the screen. if you don’t want to know the result, please look away now.

Now you have to take counter-measures to avoid finding out who gets whacked in The Sopranos before the season even starts. The media has whole teams of people whose job it is to spoil your enjoyment of reality shows, sitcoms, movies and even American Idol by telling you the ending before the show is aired.