More Very Special Episodes

On of my inexplicably popular blog posts is Very Special Episodes where I came up with modern day After School Special type plotlines for some shows currently popular with the tweener set.

That original post was inspired by Jamie Lynn Spears getting herself knocked up despite being a sixteen year old role model for millions of girls. Now another Disney starlet has caused a kerfuffle by posing in a revealing way for Vanity Fair. While it’s nowhere near as bad as going all Juno, it is causing plenty of consternation.

So to exploit a hot topic and give me an excuse to do more clip art trolling through the Disney and Nickelodeon photo archives, I bring you the episodes that might happen if some squeaky clean shows decided to film some Law and Order-style ripped-from-the-headlines sexed-up storylines.

	iCarly Carly and Sam notice that their website traffic has tripled overnight. Then they realize that it has been vandalized and redirects to a Russian Lolita site where somebody has photoshopped their heads onto naked pictures of underage girls. About the same time, they notice Freddie flashing a lot of money around. They don disguises and follow him but find out that it was his bar mitzvah money (nobody, including the writers, knew he was Jewish). They return home laughing off the misunderstanding only to catch Spencer installing a webcam behind the mirror in the bathroom. In the next episode, Tina Yothers joins the cast as Carly's Child Protective Services case worker.
	High School Musical 3 Sharpay’s dad loses his entire fortune in the Bear Stearns financial meltdown and the family is impoverished. To keep up her standard of living she begins a call-girl ring with her equally destitute friends. In a musical cat fight sequence set in the girls locker room, Gabrielle and Sharpay accidentally get their phones switched. When Troy finds the escort service website he calls the number and gets Gabrielle by mistake. She thinks he’s asking her on a date and he keeps trying to negotiate price without saying anything incriminating. Meanwhile, Ryan gets up the nerve to call Gabrielle for a date only to make an appointment with his sister instead. They all meet at a high class hotel and farcical misunderstandings ensue when it turns out that Chad and Taylor have also checked in under assumed names. Somehow Gabrielle ends up getting talked into taking nude pictures of herself that leak onto the net. The movie ends with a huge song and dance number set at the senior prom where all the guys' dates demand their money in advance.
	Cory In The House President Richard Martinez naïvely gets tricked into “tapping toes” with a guy in an airport bathroom right as a phony undercover cop walks in. Cory finds out from Sophie that her dad is being blackmailed and that if the president resigns Victor Baxter will lose his job. Corey and Newt develop a plan to catch the blackmailer, so they go undercover in full S&M gear to a DC leather bar. They find the sleazebag (guest star Alan Ruck) and trick him into admitting it was all a set-up. They bust into the Oval Office to give President Martinez the evidence exonerating him only to discover Meena giving him oral sex underneath the desk.
	Hannah Montana Hannah gets offered a photo shoot for a fashion magazine by noted artsy photographer Connie Lingus. Hannah gets all into it and reveals a little more than she should. Connie promises to not use the pictures but Rico finds them on a laptop and sells them to Oliver and all the other boys in the school. They pin the picture up in their lockers and start a bunch of trash talk about how Hannah is a cheap over-exposed tramp. Miley gets mad at how she is being made into a sex object and makes a big speech in the cafeteria about how it is wrong to objectify underage girls. Her dad takes her aside and shows her the royalty rates on her DVD sales and she slinks away chastised.

BlatantCommentWhoring™: I'm not even going to go into it. The Cyrus family seems to be doing plenty of whoring on their own.

Stalking MoDo

The Newseum in Washington, DC is a newly reopened museum located right on Pennsylvania Avenue. The old location, which closed a few years ago, was across the river in Arlington where it got poor foot traffic being way off the beaten path. The new digs are in a huge new building it shares with a Wolfgang Puck restaurant and high-end condos. The museum itself has all sorts of high-tech gizmos and exhibits. It has two working television studios and one is now used every Sunday for the taping of “This Week with George Stephanopoulos”, ABC’s Sunday morning political talk show.

I’ve been a regular watcher of “This Week” since its salad days with David Brinkley and the “classic” roundtable of George Will, Cokie Roberts, and Sam Donaldson. I got an e-mail alert that Maureen Dowd would be on the roundtable and I made plans to see if I could cross paths with her. Some may call it stalking; I call it celebrity fan worship.

The museum opens at 9 a.m. and I was part of a small scrum demanding entrance right at nine. “This Week” airs at 10 a.m. in the Washington area, but the actual taping takes place at nine. By the time I bought a membership, figured out where the studio was, and made my way up there, the first segment was already in progress.

The studio that “This Week” uses is the smaller one in the front of the museum on the third floor with the Capitol building in the backdrop. The Newseum broadcasts the feed on the enormous high definition screen in the lobby, but the sound was turned off. A couple of minutes before the end of the segment, out walked the full Roundtable Panel which included George Will, Donna Brazile, Maureen Dowd, and Matthew Dowd (no relation as far as I know).

Maureen was wearing a charcoal gray skirt with a red top that was flirting with coral or salmon. Her beige high heeled shoes were very simple without veering off into FMP territory. While I expected her to be short, she seemed just a little more full-figured than I expected, not that she was anywhere close to Donna Brazile territory. In the post-show webcast she did admit to eating more cheesesteaks than Obama. For a woman that splits the age difference between me and my mother, she came off professional but not matronly.

They all made small talk with each other on the atrium walkway until it was time to do their teaser. Dowd chatted with George Will and briefly leaned over the railing to admire the news helicopter hanging from the ceiling. For a brief instant the cameras went on and everybody smiled. Then they went into the studio.

There is only one small window into the studio that isn’t blacked out. I later learned that the fourth level of the museum has on overlook into the studio, but the view doesn’t seem to be much better. For the most part, I just watched the feed on the big screen waiting for brief glimpses of Dowd, who seemed a little nervous and didn't get as much screen time as the other guests.

After the segment was over, everybody unclipped their microphones and walked from the studio to the green room back in the staff-only part of the floor. Donna Brazile was still animatedly discussing Hillary Clinton’s campaign strategy. The two Dowds hung back and were talking to each other. Maureen gave me a quick look briefer than a glance and continued on.

My behavior for a smitten stalker was admirable. I stayed in the public spaces. I didn’t approach the guests (except for the senators, who were glad to have their picture taken), and I avoided any disruption of the show’s production. The only request they had was that I not use my flash, so most of my pictures were done with available light. You can see other pictures from my visit in the Flickr set, not all of which feature Maureen.

BlatantCommentWhoring®: On a scale from Mel on The Flight Of The Conchords to Rupert Pupkin, how big of a stalker am I?

A Bitter Taste

Fruit flavored bottled alcoholic drinks were in the news in Maryland this week. At the last minute, Governor Martin “Rockstar” O’Malley declined to sign a bill that would have treated flavored malt-beverage drinks such as Smirnoff Ice and Mike’s Hard Lemonade like beer instead of distilled spirits. This law was pushed by the liquor industry to allow these sweet drinks to be sold wherever beer can be sold and to avoid the much stiffer taxes on hard liquor. It’s all rather arcane, but the Baltimore Sun summed it up pretty well:

If the bill is vetoed, he said, the drinks will be taxed at $1.50 a gallon, the same rate as spirits, instead of the 9 cents a gallon of beer.

Flavored malt beverages, or “alcopops” as opponents call them, are usually less than 5% alcohol, much like beer. Most liquor, like my favorite, Jack Daniels, is around 80 proof, or 40% alcohol. That means that the effective rate for booze is 3¢ an ounce of actual alcohol while a 3.5 beer is 2¢ per liquid ounce of alcohol. Sounds fair enough.

Since the Maryland Attorney General ruled that alcopops are distilled liquor, they should be taxed higher. The effective rate would then become 23¢ an ounce of actual alcohol. This amounts to a tax of about 14¢ a bottle for a sweet drink versus less than a penny for a beer.

That’s enough to get a hard lemonade drinker like me up into a Boston Twisted Tea Party level frenzy. It’s bad enough these drinks cost more than a six pack of beer for just four bottles, now the state wants to nick me for an extra dime on every bottle. I’m outraged.

Opponents of these drinks call them gateway drinks because no teenager has ever drunk a beer despite its bad taste. A rather alarmist editorial in the Washington Post ranted this way:

The drinks, known as "alcopops," "malternatives" and "flavored alcoholic beverages," are popular with young and underage drinkers. Dressed up to taste like lemonade, iced tea and various berry-flavored juices, they are designed to appeal to people who haven't yet developed a palate for booze itself. Wrapped in splashy, multicolored packaging and promoted by images of fresh-faced drinkers who in some instances look college-age, "alcopops" are a hit with entry-level drinkers, especially women (emphasis mine). They are, as Mr. O'Malley put it, "a gateway type of thing."

Now I’m being insulted. I’m a man (last time I checked) that has been drinking for the last 28 years of my life (don’t do the math, Dad) and have never really acquired the taste of beer. Sure, I’ll drink it if there isn’t anything else, but at picnics and other gatherings I like a nice sweet mild intoxicant.

They way to keep alcohol out of the hands of kids is not to make it harder, more annoying, and more expensive for legal adults to enjoy the drink of their preference. In the past twenty-five years, there has been a serious ratcheting down by what I call the No Fun Allowed Crowd. Groups like Mothers Against Drunk Driving have put into place serious restrictions that have arguably saved lives. On the other hand, I have an outraged teen-age son that has to register with Selective Service next month but can’t legally enjoy a refreshing fruity alcoholic malt beverage with his dad for three more years.

And that sucks. Like bitter, sour hard lemonade.

BlatantCommentWhoring™: Are so called alcopops any different from beer?

Card Carrying Geek

I brag and/or lament about my geekitude often on this blog, but until now you have had to take my word on it. However, now my status and is official and permanent. I have a DCI card. DCI does not stand for Drum Corps International (that would represent a entirely different plane of geekdom), but for, well, I’m not quite sure. It does mean I am a certified tournament player of Magic: The Gathering® (check out this post if you have no idea what that is).

Last weekend, my son and a friend wanted to go to the pre-release tournament for the Shadowmoor set of Magic cards down at College Park. I offered to drive and rather than make the whole trip down just to turn around, I decided to stick around and see what the big deal was.

Wizards Of The Coast publishes new Magic cards three or four times a year and they make a big production out of it with sneak previews on their web page and hints about all the new rules. Part of the point of Magic is to make the rules as cumbersome, arcane, and confusing as possible. Then about two weeks before the cards go on sale to the public, they have a pre-release tournament with the new cards.

The tournaments require that you be a DCI member (which is free) so I filled out my form and now I have a permanent record. I could go on the pro-tour (and there is one) if I were good enough, which I'm not. The tournament is divided into several categories. I entered a sealed deck tournament that cost $20 to enter but came with about $15 worth of cards.

We got there quite early so we could be near the front of the line. Plenty of other people had the same idea. Some were in such a hurry that morning that they hadn’t bothered to shower. The guy standing in line next to me was a student from a private school in Baltimore with a particularly tragic case of acne and a rather distinct odor. Not a way to impress the ladies.

But then that point was fairly moot. Of the couple of hundred participants, at most a dozen were women. In the second round of my tournament, I happened to draw one of the more attractive female players. She had a vaguely Eastern European accent and seemed a little shy and unsure of herself. In hindsight I’m certain that at one point the both of us badly misinterpreted one of the rules. She may have only been an average player, but she had great accessories. While not the biggest I have seen, her icosahedron was one of the prettiest I had ever laid my eyes on.

I ended up losing my first two matches two games to one, which put me out of prize bracket, so I forfeited my other two matches and ended up 29th out of 32 in that draw. My son fared little better, placing second in a draft tournament earning him three booster packs, but he didn't make the prize pool in any of his other entries.

Back at home I showed him the cards that I got from the tournament and he was impressed with my Oona, Queen Of The Fae (who is a mighty sweet legendary creature). He explained which of my cards were better than others and what I would have to do to build a better deck. Most of that went over my head.

Next weekend is the official release and my son wants to go to another tournament. I think I will pass. I have had all the nerd-bonding I can handle for now, but that doesn't change my status as a world class geek. After all, I’m official now. And I've got the card to prove it.

BlatantCommentWhoring™: What are your geek credentials?

Earth Day Rant

Hank Stuever (no stranger to this blog) today claims Yoga Beri-like that Earth Day is passe because it's too popular. I have news for him. Like the whiny kid on Mothers Day that wonders when Children's Day is, every day is Earth Day. It's great to get together and hold hands and hug trees, but every day people all over the earth make a choice between damaging the earth and feeding their families.

Here is a dirty secret: Clean air and water are luxury goods. And like all luxuries and all necessities, there is a price for it. We Americans as a society started paying that cost in the 1970s when we passed the Clean Air Act and traded in Smokey The Bear (“Only you can prevent forest fires.”) for Woodsy The Owl (“Give a hoot. Don’t pollute.”) Delve just a little into economics (like the book Naked Economics reviewed here) and you learn about direct and shared costs and benefits.

Anytime tougher regulations are suggested, the resource extraction and waste producing industries band together to minimize their direct costs at the benefit of our shared benefits. Dick Cheney speaks for the oil industry, but who speaks for the trees? Senator Lorax?

Behind the general lack of civil rights and the suppression of internal minority groups, the environmental damage China is inflicting on itself and its neighbors is a major issue people are interlinking with the upcoming Olympics. I share their concern. Air pollution in Beijing is atrocious. From the top of the hill in Jingshan Park, you can’t see the front gate of the Forbidden City. The Chinese have been paying lip service to respecting the environment for some time, but the demands of economic growth have kept the coal-fired power plants chugging.

And when I mention China’s “neighbors” I mean the whole world. Smog from Asia works its way across the Pacific to acid rain on Oregon. A few years back when we went to Halong Bay in Vietnam, one of the most beautiful and serene natural places on earth (check out the pictures if you don't believe me), we passed a steady stream of large earth-moving trucks transporting coal from the nearby mountains that will end up in power plants in southern China. Vietnam is trying to balance mining with ecotourism, but selling off your backyard pays well. Just ask West Virginia.

Here in our own country we are leveling mountains and filling in stream beds to feed the coal plants that power the enormous internet engines of northern Virginia. A single building of internet servers can draw the energy needed for a small city. And coal is a dirty, dirty fuel. Back in the 80s when the threat of underpowered whiny electric cars was first being being bandied about, the hot rod magazines liked to point out that there is a smokestack at the end of every plug.

In London, they have spent nearly a decade peeling two centuries worth of grime and soot off of St. Paul’s Cathedral. You can see the restored white walls right next to the still blackened surfaces. Victorian London probably made modern Beijing look like a clear country meadow

The developing world sees our cars and highways and hears us preaching environmentalism and rightly asks “What about our turn?” It seems wasteful for me to drag 2,000 pounds of metal and plastic around with me everywhere I go just because I might have to put a dresser in the back of my SUV every now and then. Or even more ironically, to take my bicycle down the road for a drive.

One of the great advantages of a compressed industrialization cycle is that other countries can bypass our mistakes. In China and Vietnam cell phones are ubiquitous because it’s easier to raise a few cell towers than run miles of wire. The newly refurbished streets of Beijing are a mix of highways with access roads that have wide physically divided bike lanes. Their spanking new subway system has massive bicycle “park and ride” racks. It would be great if we could just skip the whole air-you-cut-with-a-knife phase and move onto clean energy sources.

Worldwide food resources are beginning to tighten and some doomsayers are already predicting that Malthusian chickens are coming home to roost. I doubt that, but our wildly optimistic hope that biofuels will let us extend our energy hogging ways another generation or two is looking pretty naïve. Burning food to power cars doesn’t make any more sense than burning dead dinosaurs.

The eventual solution will be a combination of big and little. I forsee a future where solar cells are as ubiquitous as semiconductor chips are now. But you can’t power a Google server farm without raising the albedo of an entire county. Nuclear power in some safe sustainable way will have to become a contributor, if only to make us less dependent on peoples that hate us because we have a six-hundred year head start on the philosophical cycle that runs from fundamentalism to enlightenment.

We as humans are lazy indifferent animals that tend not to be prodded into action until disaster is imminent, and then not always. Just ask Pompeii. We tend to do Just Enough and we tend to do it in The Nick Of Time. I just hope we aren’t Too Late.

BlatantCommentWhoring™:Will life be better or worse in fifty years?

The Master Schedule

When I signed on to post a blog post every day for a year, I knew it would be tough going. One reader even predicted I would become bored with the gimmick. Well, it’s nearly a third of the way through and I have for the most part succeeded. Rather than force a lot of drama and anxiety into my blogging, it has given me some pace and structure.

The rules of Blog365 state that any blogpost anywhere counts and even allows for things like Flickr uploads to count. While I haven’t resorted to Flickr tricks, I have used some gimmicks. I really write three separate blogs: Foma* (I like it when people include the asterisk), my flagship blog: Dowd Report, “written” by my Maureen Dowd obsessed alter ego, Mo MoDo; and China Sights, a photo blog of my visit to China last year.

The key is that China Sights is the safety valve. I have a nearly unlimited reserve of pictures to blog about that make for a quick and easy post when the time crunch gets too great. I’m so guilt-ridden about using this shortcut, that I will often post three or four related posts in rapid succession which can be a bit dizzying depending on what order you read them.

The structure comes from the publishing schedule of Maureen Dowd’s New York Times column which comes out Sunday and Wednesday. I like to post about these as soon as possible while they are fresh. So a typical week of blogging works like this:

Sunday: Dowd Report. I usually have all morning to read the column and research the silly pop culture references that are my focus. I try not to get to worked up about the politics itself because plenty of other people do that already.

Monday: Foma*. If I have a lot of free time on Sunday, I can leisurely work on an entry to be posted later. I often also spend Sunday uploading pictures to Flickr or doing other nuts and bolts maintenance.

Tuesday: Foma*. Since it is one post per day and the Monday entry is usually up in the morning, I have a day and a half to come up with the next one. This is usually posted late in the evening.

Wednesday: Dowd Report. This is the most difficult post of the week. I try to get it written and posted before I go to work. I’ve learned to hack the url of the NYT columnists pages, so sometimes I get a sneak peak at the column Tuesday night so I can collect my ideas.

Thursday: Foma*. If I can get a Foma* post written by Thursday morning, that keeps with the general every day-and-a-half pace I like to keep.

Friday: Dealers Choice. I sometimes write posts about what other bloggers have written about the latest Dowd column as a Dowd Report Blogwatch item or I’ll have something time sensitive I want to get into Foma*.

Saturday: Any Of The Above. Depending on what I posted to on Friday, I will do one of the other two blogs on Saturday. I like to make sure that either the Friday or Saturday post is to Foma* so that I don’t go too long between posts.

So in any given week I will have posted at least four times to Foma*, twice to Dowd Report and once more to whatever strikes my fancy. This may sound very rigid, but it’s really quite flexible and has taken some of my procrastinating tendencies out of the picture.

Now if only I could get the rest of my life into this level of order, I’d be doing fine. But I can only control what I am in charge of.

BlatantCommentWhoring®: Do you blog on a routine or whenever it strikes your fancy?

Cables And Wires And Dongles Galore

Faithful readers will recall that I made the plunge into the world of high definition television recently. One of the first things that got hooked up to it was my son’s Wii (which is only 480p for those of you that follow these things).

We had the Magic League (remember them?) and one of the players was wearing an obscure tee shirt with an funny logo. He said it was based on a web cartoon called Making Fiends check them out). Curious, we wanted to watch some sample episodes so we fired up the Wii that has a built in web browser and started watching the deranged but funny cartoons. Unfortunately, the quality was fairly poor and the navigation really clunky. Wiimotes are great for playing games but lousy for typing in url’s.

A couple of weeks later, we were planning our summer vacation with two other families. We’re planning on sharing a vacation rental and we wanted to reach some consensus on which property to get. We used a video to S-video adaptor to send the signal from my wife’s four-year old MacBook to the TV. The image was also grainy, but serviceable. It was also awkward barking commands at my son who was sitting at the laptop running the mouse and keyboard.

I remembered that the TV has a VGA input suitable for a computer. I knew I had a spare VGA cable around but it turned out to be female to male and I needed male to male. Even more than that, the laptop has a non-standard outlet that Apple calls mini-VGA so I needed a mini-VGA to VGA converter and a VGA cable. I daisy-chained that all together and adjusted the resolution on the laptop. Voila! I was surfing the web in crystal clear full color.

My wife gave my the url of a YouTube video she wanted to watch. Youtube videos look awful on a bigscreen no matter what, but the tinny sound out of the laptop was something I could do something about. I had two choices. I could use a 1/8” stereo wire and run it straight from the laptop into the television or I could use a 1/8” jack to RCA cable splitter and use the auxiliary input to the home theater system. I settled on the latter even though YouTube video through anything is just as bad. What did sound good was the AOL.com full CD listening party stream of the new Hillary McRae album while I was surfing blogs with my feet up on the couch.

While I was at MallStoreOfWires I noticed that they had a very small USB cordless mouse. That would go a long way to freeing me from having to keep the laptop within arms distance. That took a certain amount of experimentation to learn that while the arm of the sofa made a terrible mouse pad, the seat cushion next to me worked fine. Coupled with a Bluetooth keyboard, I can be anywhere in the room as long as my eyesight is keen enough to read the text.

My wife also has a newer PowerBook from work that is, of course, incompatible with with all the adaptors for the MacBook. It’s video connection is mini-DVI which converts to standard DVI which then connects to the TV with a DVI to HDMI cable. The DVI cable resulted in some weird stuff. Program windows (like Firefox) that appeared on the laptop screen wouldn't show up on the television. But then the Mac program Dock only worked on the TV. It was like the set-up was haunted. I gave up and switched back to a VGA cable and fiddled with both the Mac and TV settings until I got a really great full screen image at 1280 x 768 (the internal video card will support higher resolutions, but the TV won't). Still, it's a great image.

So here is the full list of items sitting in the backet o’cables next to the TV:

Mini-VGA to S-video convertor
Mini-VGA to VGA convertor
Mini-DVI to S-video convertor
Mini-DVI to DVI convertor
6 foot DVI to HDMI cable
6 foot male to male VGA cable
6 foot male to female VGA cable
6 foot 1/8” stereo cable
6 foot 1/8” to RCA cable
6 foot S-video cable
USB mouse
Bluetooth keyboard

And that doesn’t include the various sundry Wii peripherals.

The point wasn't to brag or show more pictures of my BigAssTV, but to take some baby steps towards convergence and see what I could lash together using my existing consumer electronics inventory and some cables. Now that I've completed the proof of concept phase, I can move on to exploring online video options and go from there.

BlatantCommentWhoring™: Is a 48" monitor too much or not enough?

Tale Of Two Cameras

Just before I went to England I bought a new camera body. The Canon Kiss Digital N (the equivalent of the Rebel XT in the US) that I had bought in Japan three years ago had been in the shop three times for various things and parts were as slow as molasses coming in. So I sucked it up and bought a Rebel XTi which is essentially the same camera but with 10 megapixels instead of 8. The advantage here was that I could continue to use the lenses and accessories I already owned.

My wife had a very old Sony digital point and shoot that just went south on her. For a replacement, we wanted something not dependent on proprietary Sony MemoryStickDuoProPlus whatevers, so we went with the Panasonic DMC-TZ1 which is 6 megapixels and has a 10x optical zoom and uses standard SD cards.

We both took tons of pictures, me more than her, and we had over a thousand shots between us when we returned. As I was very slowly sorting them and uploading them to Flickr, I noticed something odd. For the most part when we took pictures of the same thing we usually had a different composition or emphasis. But these two pictures of the National Gallery were nearly identical.




The top one is mine and the lower one is hers. Click on either picture to be taken to the Flickr page or see the full image (warning: very large files) by clicking on either this link for mine or this one for hers. The Canon seems to have a slightly brighter exposure and a very different white balance, not that I understand what that terms mean. So I cropped a very small portion of each to see what I’m getting with my camera with nearly twice the megapixels and easily ten times the weight.



As you can tell, not much. I love my digital SLR because of its power and potential, but I’m still learning all the features of it. It seems that when you just need to capture some quick memories those little pocket cameras do just fine.

You can see more of my rather cloudy London pictures here. And be forewarned that I will be trickling out more in the weeks to come.

BlatantCommentWhoring™: What do you take pictures with?