Word Soup

Dumb kids continue to do dumb things, informs this hard hitting bit of journalism over at the New York Times.

"While asphyxiation games have been around for many years, a series of locally publicized deaths around the country over the last few years, coupled with a realization that teenagers are seeing the game on Internet sites like YouTube, and playing it in more threatening variation -- are sparking a vigorous and open discussion in schools and among parents’ groups, summer camp administrators and doctors."

Take something insanely stupid and centuries old like autoasphyxiation and suggest a dangerous new trend based on potentially unrelated self-suffocation suicide statistics, with an unsubstantiated reference to YouTube to make the piece timely. Quality!

Apparently the problem is so severe there's a support website dedicated to wiping out "the choking game" (aka being dumb). They offer some warning signs for worried parents, urging them to keep an eye out for, among other things:

"Any kind of strap, a rope or a belt lying about near the child without any reason."

Once you've confirmed your child isn't just a completely normal stoned kid with hickies who just dropped his fucking belt, the time may be right to talk to your child about avoiding paste eating, bathing with electronics, and attempts to sever his or her own head.

Posted by karl at 10:09 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

As someone who has written about network neutrality from the start, it's been depressing to watch the discussion devolve from an honest consumer concern into a twisted carnival of distorted truths, stick figures wielding bad metaphors, dancing men in green tights and flying saucers. It began, simply, as a worry that incumbent phone and cable providers would block or degrade competing content services. It was a valid concern, given the CEO of AT&T's comments at the time.

But then somebody made the fatal mistake of suggesting legislation as a solution. That fired up the engines of the phone industry's lobbying arms. That includes the obnoxious think tanks with antonym names dedicated to crushing all government oversight of industry. It also includes the fake consumer advocacy groups funded by phone providers that spew noxious propaganda. Trust me, after watching them work for a decade, these are guys who could convince the public that shoving a watermelon up its collective ass could cure cancer.

Think tanks managed to turn the network neutrality issue into a mindless partisan fight (as if being screwed by a massive company is really a partisan fight), and the legions of loyal political zealots with lobbyist talking points in hand and a marginal grasp of the subject matter -- piled on with talk of Internet oblivion or free markets. Endless lame metaphors and straw-men later has left the discussion a lump of living, breathing idiocy driven ever onward by old usenet verbal pugilists with nothing better to do.

I mean look at the battle scars and "fair and balanced' disease evident in the Wikipedia entry at this point. It resembles E.T. shit after a Reeses Pieces binge. It barely addresses the original, legitimate concern (which remains valid).

Phone industry lobbyists had this one won before it started. The good news is it opened a lot of people's eyes to how companies distort reality by pretending to be consumer advocates, and it puts PR pressure on ISPs to behave. The bad news is the FCC and Congress remains so saturated with telecom cash, AT&T could start painting their operation center walls in baby blood without repercussion.

The "genius" of it is that while the entire technology Internet community has been obsessed with network neutrality, the phone companies have been busy stripping local communities of all authority via their bogus franchise reform push -- which is a considerably more insidious and immediate threat. Yet that subject is getting largely no attention among national tech writers and bloggers -- who'd rather cover safer and more hit generating subjects such as what kind of toilet paper is used at Google, or just how world-changing the iPhone will be.

Posted by karl at 04:57 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The most terrifying thing I have ever seen.

Hot damn, sodomizing the constitution makes you hardcore.

Do you think Abeer Qassim al-Janabi would find it funny?

Posted by karl at 09:56 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

For those of you who might be thinking Hell is an aging concept of eternel torment designed countless millennia ago to control the less-affluent masses before tazers and Fox News were invented, be warned.

Hell "really exists and is eternal, even if nobody talks about it much any more", the Pope reminds you.

He also tells us that purgatory is “only a theological hypothesis” and not a "definitive truth of the faith."

So for those of you trapped in some kind of Jacob's Ladder-esque hellscape, keep your chin up!

Posted by karl at 09:13 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Terry Gilliam is no stranger to having his ass repeatedly kicked by the studio system, which considers him unruly and difficult (that's code for he won't make pieces of shit like Shooter, and sometimes comes in over budget).

I was reminded how bad the guy has it when I tried to see his latest film, Tideland.

Based on the Mitch Cullin novel, the film tells the tale of a young girl whose drug-addled parents both die, leaving her in the Texas wilderness to hang out with her father's bloated corpse. She falls backward into her imagination, developing a child-like romantic relationship with a retarded young man and an insane, one-eyed taxidermist while having sophisticated conversations with severed doll heads.

You know, real mainstream fare.

While the film is occasionally weird, it wasn't nearly weird enough to warrant the treatment it received on the American market. The film was only released in a few theaters. Critics generally hated it. I wandered around the other day curious if I could find it at retail. No copies of course at Target or Walmart -- I found one copy stuffed among the old releases at Barnes and Noble, nowhere near the new release racks -- its retail holster apparently pre-empted by Carmen Electra videos.

Anyway it's a great little film. A bit disturbing to those with their brains on too tight I'm sure, but it tries something new -- which is saying a lot these days.

Terry Gilliam is one of those living artists who'll have to be dead thirty years before full credit is applied to his bill.

Posted by karl at 01:42 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

As a kid who grew up reading Frank Miller and company, I'm not sure how I missed Warren Ellis's graphic novel Transmetropolitan, but I've corrected the error.

As a writer who spends every day dissecting corporate press releases and wading through astroturf to offer technology consumers something that vaguely resembles truth, I found his quote in this interview particularly refreshing:

"There is such a thing as truth. Non-relative, unassailable, valuable truth. Do not let people relativise the concept of truth into vapour."

That interview was in 2002, and his fear by now is an all pervasive American culture meme that says the truth is subjective and relative. That if you argue long enough or loudly enough you can shift the pillar of truth one hundred meters closer to you (made easier of course if you have your own think tank and paid-off scientists to blow smoke up the public's ass at your behest).

The result is a country filled with millions of people, politicians, bloggers and companies that are never wrong -- and do the right thing at all possible times.

But enough about that, the world needs more panda porn.

Posted by karl at 04:39 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Let's fire this thing up again and see if there's anybody out there.

Posted by karl at 04:21 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)