TV for baby

“I’m proud of what I made,” Ms. Aigner-Clark said in an e-mail message on Monday night. “Welcome to the 21st century. Most people have televisions in their houses, and most babies are exposed to it. And most people would agree that a child is better off listening to Beethoven while watching images of a puppet than seeing any reality show that I can think of.”

Julie Aigner-Clark, Baby Einstein founder

That's setting the bar pretty low, isn't it? Better than a reality show?

Regardless, I'd be interested to see if there are flaws in studies showing that television is bad, period, for children 2 & under.

Beyond Good & Evil 2

More good gaming news: Ubisoft announced a sequel to a critically acclaimed game that did not do so well commercially. Hooray! Here's hoping this one does better in the market so there will be more following it.

Not that I have time these days to play games. Nor do I have a newer game console. But that would all work itself out. ;)

Oh, and there are still used copies of the first game out there. Quite the bargain!

Oddworld

Mmm.. Oddworld news.

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Update: Lorne Lanning confirms.

Gin, Television, and Social Surplus

I was having dinner with a group of friends about a month ago, and one of them was talking about sitting with his four-year-old daughter watching a DVD. And in the middle of the movie, apropos nothing, she jumps up off the couch and runs around behind the screen. That seems like a cute moment. Maybe she's going back there to see if Dora is really back there or whatever. But that wasn't what she was doing. She started rooting around in the cables. And her dad said, "What you doing?" And she stuck her head out from behind the screen and said, "Looking for the mouse."

Here's something four-year-olds know: A screen that ships without a mouse ships broken. Here's something four-year-olds know: Media that's targeted at you but doesn't include you may not be worth sitting still for.

From a great talk Clay Shirky gave at the recent Web 2.0 Expo. (You can watch the video here.)

I had a similar experience recently. After watching some videos on my iPod touch, my 4-year-old put it down and tried controlling the TV similarly, tapping the screen, dragging her finger across the screen. I imagine it was quite disappointing to her. Here she thought she had just learned a secret to controlling videos, all you have to do is tap the screen and away you go. Alas, it's not that way most of the time. Maybe when she has kids.

Jobs on Kindle

“It doesn’t matter how good or bad the product is, the fact is that people don’t read anymore,” he said. “Forty percent of the people in the U.S. read one book or less last year. The whole conception is flawed at the top because people don’t read anymore.”

Steve Jobs on why the Amazon Kindle will be unsuccessful.

Serenity 2?

Everybody in the Firefly crew – and that includes the ones who died in the movie – are excited about the prospect of doing another.

Alan Tudyk on how Serenity DVD sales may have convinced Universal to do sequel (via Looking Closer).

Catholics prolonging life

More on whether "Catholics are enjoined to pursue all means to prolong life":

The Time article sets up the case for John Paul II’s alleged hypocrisy with this statement: “Catholics are enjoined to pursue all means to prolong life.”

This is false. It’s good for the story, but it’s not true. Time magazine will never find such a pronouncement in any official teaching of the Catholic Church. On the contrary. The Catechism of the Catholic Church, commissioned and approved by Pope John Paul II, clarifies that our moral obligation to preserve life in its last stages does not include applying extraordinary or disproportional means:

Discontinuing medical procedures that are burdensome, dangerous, extraordinary, or disproportionate to the expected outcome can be legitimate; it is the refusal of “over-zealous” treatment. Here one does not will to cause death; one’s inability to impede it is merely accepted. (#2278)

Father Jonathan Morris via GetReligion.org.

Coulter on Falwell & Tinky Winky

Ann Coulter does some research in Nexis, finding pre-Falwell references to gay Tinky Winky:

Beginning in early 1998, the news was bristling with stories about a children's cartoon PBS was importing from Britain that featured a gay cartoon character, Tinky Winky, the purple Teletubbie with a male voice and a red handbag.

People magazine gleefully reported that Teletubbies was "aimed at Telebabies as young as 1 year. But teenage club kids love the products' kitsch value, and gay men have made the purse-toting Tinky Winky a camp icon."

In the Nexis archives for 1998 alone, there are dozens and dozens of mentions of Tinky Winky being gay — in periodicals such as Newsweek, The Toronto Star, The Washington Post (twice!), The New York Times and Time magazine (also twice).

In its Jan. 8, 1999, issue, USA Today accused The Washington Post of "outing" Tinky Winky, with a "recent Washington Post In/Out list putting T.W. opposite Ellen DeGeneres and Anne Heche, essentially 'outing' the kids' show character."

Michael Musto of The Village Voice boasted that Tinky Winky was "out and proud," noting that it was "a great message to kids — not only that it's OK to be gay, but the importance of being well accessorized."

All this appeared before Falwell made his first mention of Tinky Winky.

After one year of the mainstream media laughing at having put one over on stupid bourgeois Americans by promoting a gay cartoon character in a TV show for children, when Falwell criticized the cartoon in February 1999, that same mainstream media howled with derision that Falwell thought a cartoon character could be gay. (Jewish World Review)

Unfortunately, she didn't do enough research to discover that Teletubbies is not a cartoon.

Gay Tinky Winky

What am I reminded of today, the day Jerry Falwell died? His unfairly being "ridiculed for pointing out what is common knowledge in the gay community".

The Rev. Jerry Falwell, who has been ridiculed by some in the establishment press for saying one of the "Teletubbies" is meant to depict a homosexual toddler, appears to have found some unlikely corroborators among the gay media.

Falwell caught his share of flack for suggesting that Tinky Winky, the purple Teletubby who carries a purse and has a triangle protruding from his head, is homosexual.

In telling his supporters about his concerns regarding the Teletubbies, Falwell warned that Tinky Winky promoted homosexual messages, making note of the triangle – a common gay-pride symbol – and the purse the character carries.

However, in a number of media outlets, there is no doubt about the "gayness" of Tinky Winky, one of four fuzzy Teletubbies in a TV show for toddlers. "Tinky Winky is the unofficial gay Teletubby, in the opinion of myself and many others," reads the Gay Teletubby page on the Internet web site LesBiGay, Etc, a web site that calls itself "the place for youth-friendly gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender and straight sexual orientation information and resources."

Read more about it. The only thing I'd add is that the gay press aren't merely "corroborators" -- they're the ones that pointed out the "gayness" of Tinky Winky in the first place. But it's the fundamentalist that is accused of having a sick mind, attributing sexuality to a children's show.

Down with cliffhangers

OK, almost to the end of season 1 and I'm still watching Heroes. Here's one reason I know I'll be happy with the season closing episode:

A modern TV creator like Kring can't think about just the next episode. He has to think about a world audience and plan several seasons out. "A big complaint for Lost was that you had to wade through too many shows before something happened," Kring says. He is committed to wrapping up story lines each season instead of sinking too deeply into a meandering mythology. "The apocalyptic event in Heroes will be resolved in season one, and we'll move on to something else in season two." (Wired)

Yes! This is exactly what I've been telling people I wish TV shows would start doing. What I like about shorter-run British shows vs. American series, the latter which feel the need to draw major plot lines out over years. (Never mind if you really know how long the American show will last or whether it'll be cancelled before the plot lines are wrapped up.)

I don't need everything wrapped up each season. But don't end a season mid-episode. Take a lesson from book serials, like Harry Potter.

Apple TV disappointment

Well, this is a little disappointing. I had been looking forward to the new Apple TV device that would allow me to easily stream videos from my computer to my TV. (Yeah, yeah, I know other devices exist but [a] they're not Mac-friendly and [b] I want something that'll "just work", preferably with iTunes.) I don't have cable and download more shows than I watch over broadcast. But look at one of the requirements:

Widescreen (16:9) enhanced definition or high definition television with an HDMI, DVI, or component video input

Maybe I'm on the only one on the planet that would be willing to pay $300 for this device but only has a TV with composite inputs? If a Macbook can output to an analog TV, why can't this thing?

Not to say that I wasn't going to have to think about it. $300 is quite a bit to pay for the convenience of not having to hook my notebook computer to the TV. But I did have some gift money saved up and would probably have gone for it. Oh well, guess I'll have to find a more honorable use for the money (because, no, I'm not going to plunk down over $1000 for a new TV).

MPAA protecting children from religion

The MPAA has given a movie ("Facing the Giants") a "PG" rating because it is too religious.

The MPAA, noted [Kris Fuhr, vice president for marketing at Provident Films], tends to offer cryptic explanations for its ratings. In this case, she was told that it "decided that the movie was heavily laden with messages from one religion and that this might offend people from other religions." (Terry Mattingly On Religion)

Are anti-religious films rated similarly because they might offend believers?

Wodehouse in India

Wodehouse never wrote about India, but sells better on the subcontinent than in Britain, with pirated copies in common circulation. He is one of the most heavily requested authors at the British Library in Delhi and there are clubs and internet chatrooms devoted to him.

[...]

The club’s president in the mid-1980s, Thomas Abraham, is now president of Penguin Books India, the country’s largest Wodehouse publisher. “We’ve all grown up with Wodehouse,” he says. “It’s a phenomenon here. When one of his books goes out of print, everyone goes ballistic. My publishing counterparts in the UK are very amused.”

The Times

Superbowl commercials online

For those of you that decided not to waste precious hours of your time on the Superbowl but still want to participate in the commercialism, Google Video has all of the commercials online.

Children's programming by Hamas

"Our television show will have a message, but without getting into the tanks, the guns, the killing and the blood."

"Uncle Hazim" on Hamas's new television program for children. But don't worry, Hamas won't be watering down its message:

[the] television show, which begins in a few weeks, will teach children the basics of militant Palestinian politics - the disputed status of Jerusalem, Palestinian prisoners in Israeli jails and the Palestinian refugees' demand for a right to return to the lands they lost to Israel in the 1948 war

The Sparrow movie

Having seen Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ, I am aware that not even God could get a faithful screen adaptation of His book, so what chance does a housewife from Cleveland have? Nevertheless, the studio reportedly intends to retain the religious underpinnings of The Sparrow.

Mary Doria Russell steeling herself against disappointment in the adaptation of her book The Sparrow.

Which, by the way, is a great book. Very entertaining science fiction (or is it fantasy?) and a profitable exploration of disappointment with God. (No easy answers here.)


(Thanks to Looking Closer.)

Pornification, Jon Stewart and Walter Cronkite

In an essay bemoaning the "pornification of public spaces and narratives" comes this testimony of a father watching Jon Stewart's Daily show with his 9-year-old daughter:

“Came the bit about the gay male escort/model who’d mysteriously gotten White House press clearance torepresent a Republican-funded online ‘news’ service and lob the president softball questions. The show flashed a photo from the escort service’s website showing the man naked, spread-eagled, his genitals blurred. [...] I don’t want to beat up on Stewart; I’m a liberal. Maybe I should have used better judgment, but, man, my parents never had to think about jumping up and shielding my eyes when we watched Walter Cronkite.”

When has Jon Stewart ever come close to approaching Walter Cronkite? Yes, yes, yes, I completely agree with how sick/sad it is the amount of commercial sex that exists in today's media. But guess what, if you're a consumer you're a part of the problem.

This guy doesn't want to beat up on Stewart ... no kidding! He's buying what Stewart is selling. Why does he think shows like Stewart's are being broadcast instead of shows like Cronkite's? Because he's watching them! You want to change the world? Turn the television off. Stop consuming trash.

The future of television & Firefly

Obviously, we'll see advances in technology. TiVo, iPods, streaming video -- the way we watch TV is changing dramatically. It's on our phones, in our cars -- even projected on specialized eyeglasses. But don't listen to the talk about having shows beamed directly into your brain. That's science-fiction nonsense. Shows will be stored in the pancreas and will enter the brain through the bloodstream after being downloaded into your iHole.

And what of me? My short-lived series Firefly was the basis for the epic action film Serenity (now available on DVD! I have little or no shame), and the future will see even more incarnations of this visionary work, as it returns to TV as Serenity: The Firefly Years, then back to film as Firefly: Serenity's Sequel, back to TV as SereniFly, and finally end as the direct-to-eyeglasses series Choose a Damn Name Already. I promise it'll be as heartwarming and exciting as the original Serenity, now available on DVD. (Explain again this thing you call shame....)

Joss Whedon, creator of Buffy and Firefly (and Serenity!).

Christians at the most risk from radical Islam

My show is produced for the Western world and for Christians who are at the most risk from radical Islam

Hal Lindsey explains why he won't water down his criticisms of radical Islam for TBN.

I hope he's not saying that Christians in the Western world at the ones most at risk. Maybe I'm in the minority but I haven't suffered near the persecution of Christians in Muslim nations.