culture: April 2006 Archives

Greg Saunders at Tom Tomorrow’s This Modern World digs up a possible geek influence for the hideous concept of standing “seats” to which The New York Times introduced us today, to our collective horror:

Airbus has been quietly pitching the standing-room-only option to Asian carriers, though none have agreed to it yet. Passengers in the standing section would be propped against a padded backboard, held in place with a harness, according to experts who have seen a proposal.

The concept?

Damn, that’s evil. And the engineering geek who thought it up may have been inspired by... well, check out the This Modern World link.

Me, it makes me think of this:

I’m not saying that all bloggers read comic books, or that everyone who’s active online in an Xer, but...

The two news stories caught my eye today: though they appear at first to have little to do with each other, they both reveal a certain rise in social power of the demographic at the intersection of Geek and Xer.

First, The Guardian has this to say:

Used to be, I would spend most of a Sunday reading The New York Times, which made for a pretty relaxing day of lazing around, drinking tea, and flipping through just about every section of the paper (except for sports). But that was years ago now -- I read news online today, and the idea of newspapers kinda makes me laugh: Who wants to read yesterday’s news today on a dead tree when you can read today’s news now with no sacrifice required of Arboreal-Americans?

But last year, I got the crazy notion in my head to try to reclaim those lazy Sundays, since Sundays have morphed into just another work day for me now, and so I ordered the weekend edition of the Times, which means that on Saturday you get the Saturday paper and all the sections of the Sunday paper that aren’t supertimely, like Arts & Leisure and the Book Review, and all the coupon circulars and such. And then on Sunday you get the Sunday newsy sections. And after three months of papers piling up and never getting read -- and after the revelation that the Times had withheld a story the previous November about Felony No. 8,455 of the Bush Administration because the paper’s editors were worried it would influence the presidential election when that was precisely what it should have done, and rightly so -- I cancelled my subscription.

Cartoonist Tom Tomorrow has an interesting tale on his blog, This Modern World, about censorship and the Internet. In a nutshell, a fan of his in Kuwait bought one of his collections of cartoons, The Great Big Book of Tomorrow from Amazon, but the package was opened by Kuwaiti censors at customs and a page was torn from the book. Tom replies:

The cartoon that the guardians of morality in Kuwait found offensive can be seen here. It’s the same cartoon that the guardians of morality in Oklahoma found so offensive when it first ran (more on that here). It’s nice to know that my little cartoon can help fundamentalists the world over discover how much they really have in common.

Bill O’Reilly wanted a War on Easter, and now he’s got it: Documentary filmmaker and atheist provacteur Brian Flemming and the Rational Response Squad have teamed up to create the official evil heathen goin'-straight-to-hell War on Easter, a project to secretly put 666 copies of Flemming's ain't-no-Jesus doc The God Who Wasn't There in churches all across this great free-speech-allowing, freedom-of-religion-lovin' land of ours. The WoE blog has pix and stories from the front from the volunteer atheists doing the clandestine distributing.

(You may remember Flemming as the guy who made the strangely intriguing -- and deeply culturally aware -- mockumentary Nothing So Strange, about the assassination of Bill Gates and the ensuing coverup and conspiracy theories; I reviewed the film a while back. And I'll review the God film soon.)

Two grandmothers from Yorkshire face up to a year in prison after becoming the first people to be arrested under the Government's latest anti-terror legislation.

Helen John, 68, and Sylvia Boyes, 62, both veterans of the Greenham Common protests 25 years ago, were arrested on Saturday after deliberately setting out to highlight a change in the law which civil liberties groups say will criminalise free speech and further undermine the right to peaceful demonstration.

Under the little-noticed legislation, which came into effect last week, protesters who breach any one of 10 military bases across Britain will be treated as potential terrorists and face up to a year in jail or £5,000 fine. The protests are curtailed under the Home Secretary's Serious Organised Crime and Police Act.

Campaigners expressed their outrage yesterday at Charles Clarke's new law, which they say is yet another draconian attempt to crack down on legitimate protest under the guise of the war on terror....

Mrs John and Mrs Boyes, who have 10 grandchildren between them, were held by Ministry of Defence police after walking 15ft across the sentry line at the United States military base at Menwith Hill in North Yorkshire. They were held for 12 hours before being released on police bail. They will learn whether they are to face prosecution when they return to Harrogate police station on 15 April.

[from the Independent]

Monty Python foresaw the coming of Hell's Grannies:

“We are conducting an ongoing, uncontrolled experiment on this generation in terms of media exposure and potential future behavioral and physical consequences, and it seems unopposed by the media industry and most parents.” — Donald Shifrin, American Academy of Pediatrics

The Kansas City Star yesterday ran a fearmongering article about how the kids today are going to hell in a handbasket because of TV, video games, music, magazines, and other media, mentioning “a stack of studies linking TV and video games to a host of modern ills among America’s youth, including obesity, sexual activity, consumerism, and antisocial behavior.”

Forget the fact that we are all responsible for our own behavior, and that parents are responsible for their children. Put aside the fact that the hypocritical -- nay, schizophrenic -- attitudes about sex and consumerism reflected in our pop culture merely reflect our own conflicted feelings about these matters, that if we genuinely cared about not sending ourselves into debt buying useless crap and about a healthy, playful sexuality, those are the attitudes we would see reflected.

The really salient fact to remember is that people have been making wild claims about the dangers of pop culture since there has been a pop culture. A few intriguing examples: