Gabrielle's Friendship Day: television

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Television's snipe hunt challenge

High rewards for low standards

The so-called “reality” genre of television has explored such topics as survival skills, spouse-swapping, weight-loss, courtship ritual, and cohabitation with losers. In an exciting breakthrough for this “art form,” free-lance psychic investigators are soon to be rewarded for having the sloppiest experimental protocols and the lowest standards of verification. How else are we to interpret this wry report by Kevin McDonough in his Tune In Tonight column?

A new series “Paranormal Challenge” 9 p.m., Travel) offers the untrained and apparently “unaccredited” a chance at an apprenticeship of sorts.

Hosted by Zak Bagans of “Ghost Adventures” fame, “Challenge” invites amateur spook sleuths to “haunted” sites, arms them with gadgetry and sets them loose amid the ectoplasm.

The team that returns with the most “evidence” is declared the winner. The winner's sole compensation will be a newfound “respect” in the community of paranormal believers. And we all know that's worth twice its weight in pixie dust!

I think McDonough suspects that this could be an entertainment goldmine of unintentional humor. I suspect he's right.

A grave injustice

Postmortem testimony

There is a long and continuing tradition of dead people who refuse to shut up. Joe Gillis (William Holden) is pretty chatty in Sunset Boulevard despite floating face down in a swimming pool. Susie Salmon has a lot to say in The Lovely Bones even though she has been raped and murdered.

You can't keep a good corpse down, so why not let the dead have their day in court? The good folks at TLC have risen{!} to the challenge.

TUNE IN
Kevin McDonough

‘Paranormal Court’ takes family feuds into afterlife

TLC ventures into seriously creepy territory with “Paranormal Court” (10 p.m. Saturday).

Robert Hansen, a psychic medium famous among people who believe in psychic mediums, will mediate disputes between family members squabbling over possessions left behind by the deceased.

Hansen goes right to the source and communicates with the “owners” to set
things straight. If it's a hit, we can expect only more superstition and ignorance passing as entertainment on the network formerly known as The Learning Channel.

My psychic powers predict that the sheep will stream in to be shorn and TLC will have a big success. Unless, of course, Robert Hansen keeps telling the suckers that the dearly departed really intended to leave all of their earthly possessions to Hansen's pet cat, with him as trustee.

If only Paranormal Court had been around when my family went at each other's throats over my grandmother's will. It would have added an entirely new dimension of insanity and inanity.

"The Simpsons" did it

Where's the scoop?

The San Francisco Chronicle went berserk when Mark McGwire finally admitted to having used steroids to pump himself up during his baseball career. The weirdly wonderful Bay Area newspaper splashed a transcript of McGwire's remarks as its headline story, and accompanied it with an opinion piece by a sports columnist. On the front page!

Like I said, the Chronicle went berserk.

Normally this is the sort of story that would not hold my attention. My inclination is to snort in disgust and turn the page. If especially exercised, I might mutter, “Don't these idiots remember that they have a sports section?” (That's the part of the paper where game reports and box scores are conveniently sequestered so that I can conveniently dispense with them all by discarding that section of the newspaper.)

I put mendacious McGwire out of my mind and would probably have forgotten all about it except for a paragraph I encountered in John Ortved's The Simpsons: An Uncensored, Unauthorized History. Here it is, from page 253, where Ortved is discussing the celebrities who flocked to lend their voices to episodes of The Simpsons:

Of course, boys being boys, the real draw was always the sports figures.

Larry Doyle: The biggest hullabaloo was when Mark McGwire came in. That was when loads of people who didn't have any reason to be in the recording booth ended up there. All the girls and all the guys were there. He seems like a nice guy, but he looks like a monster. His arms are as big as your legs—that's not an exaggeration.

And I guess we now know why that was, don't we?

The lidless eye

Evil stalks us

An unsleeping malice has crept up from the Dark South and lain in wait for me. Today it pounced. I was minding my own business, tending to the fuel requirements of my vehicle, when the gas pump came to electronic life and began to bombard me with commercial advertisements. Yes, a northern California Shell station had become infested with TV ads, with small televisions blaring out commercials from atop each pump. It was a nightmare come true.

The ads were interspersed with public-service announcements, offering me advice about road conditions. I guess that's supposed to make it all okay. Then the screen flashed an in-house ad for PumpTop TV, extolling the benefits of shoving advertising into yet a another new venue. (Yesterday, the inside surfaces of restroom stalls; today, the tops of gasoline pumps; tomorrow, the world!) The purveyors of this new intrusion into our lives are not shy when it comes to bragging about their intentions:

PumpTop TV is a premier Out-of-Home Digital Media network that delivers current news, entertainment and advertising to millions of drivers as they fuel their vehicles at the gas pump. Daylight-viewable LCD screens mounted at eye level on top of gasoline pumps at select, high-volume gas stations provide a broadcast television-like experience (video and audio) to a desirable, captive audience out of the home.

Yeah, “captive audience.” They actually say it.

Damn them.

Apparently this new venture has been building for a couple of years. Westinghouse brags that their equipment is now installed in some 700 service stations. The invasion apparently began in Los Angeles in the first half of 2007. I was blissfully unaware of its gradual encroachment on northern California until the ads began to blare at me.

I will not go to that gas station again, but I fear I am fighting a doomed rear-guard action. The soulsuckers are here.

I'm too mild-mannered to use the hammer from the toolbox in the trunk of my car, but I can think of some nice new applications for contact paper.

Damn.

Stewie exposed

Who is Stewart Gilligan Griffin?

It has long been apparent to even the most casual observer that there is something disturbingly odd about the youngest offspring in the family of Peter and Lois Griffin. Despite being a toddler somewhere between the ages of one and two, Stewie Griffin speaks the Queen's English with an effete Rex Harrison accent and a vocabulary that eclipses those of the other family members. Stewie is familiar with such old-fashioned notions as box socials but is out of touch with his contemporaries. For example, he sketches blueprints for time machines, but is at a loss when expected to act like a child (“Blast! What do kids draw these days?”).

The conclusion is inescapable: Stewie Griffin retains many of the traits and faculties of a previous life. Peter and Lois have spawned the reincarnation of a totalitarian autocrat. But who?

The study of past lives is properly the endeavor of trained parapsychologists. I fear that I am but the merest of dilettantes in this field, lacking any professional qualifications. Nevertheless, I will forge fearlessly ahead, striving to adhere to the rigorous standards one would find in any psychic research lab. I will follow where the evidence leads me and I will never ever fudge any of the data (unless, of course, I can't get positive results otherwise; this, too, is a psi lab tradition).

Let us therefore regard the treasure trove of circumstantial evidence before us and home in on Stewie Griffin's previous identity. It was probably male, since totalitarianism has not been a hobby readily accessible to females in the past. (And we can't consider Margaret Thatcher, since she was still inconveniently alive when Stewie was born.) He was almost certainly British, if not specifically English. The obstetrician who delivered Stewie at birth noted the curious presence in the afterbirth of a map of Europe (marked with “bomb here” annotations). That makes one think of Hitler, of course, but it's more likely that Stewie was once a British-born Nazi sympathizer.

The noose tightens. We should search for Stewie among Britain's homegrown version of National Socialism—namely, the British Union of Fascists.

Who among the members of the BUF was a Nazi sympathizer with his own dreams of dictatorship? While virtually all members were Nazi sympathizers (customarily although not officially anti-Semitic), the likeliest individual who fancied himself a future Führer was none other than its founder and leader: Sir Oswald Mosley.

What the deuce?

As a member of the British aristocracy, Mosley certainly had the accents of privilege in his spoken voice. Several of Mosley's speeches are available on-line at the OswaldMosley.com website. Sir Oswald started his political career as a Conservative member of parliament, but he was not content as a Tory MP and eventually went into opposition as an independent. He signed up as a member of the Labour Party after the Tories lost their majority and a Labour government was installed. Mosley, however, was never entrusted with the kind of high-level ministerial position he coveted. After half a dozen years as a socialist radical in Labour's ranks, Mosley left the party in frustration and his pendulum swung toward the extreme right.

His next move was to found the New Party, which embodied many of the principles of Mussolini's Fascist Party in Italy. Mosley had visited Italy in 1931 and found much he liked in Mussolini's approach to government. When the New Party was unable to win any seats in parliament, Mosley decided to found the British Union of Fascists. The BUF's bully boy enforcers were known as the “Blackshirts” after the paramilitary uniforms Mosely selected for them (in apparent homage to Mussolini's preferred fascist garb).

Mosley favored a corporatist approach to government. Members of the House of Lords would no longer have life peerages; rather, the upper house of parliament would be replaced by a body representative of major industries and the Church of England. You would have, for example, a member of the upper house representing Rolls Royce in lieu of a lord. If a similar practice were followed in the United States, there'd be senators from Exxon and IBM instead of senators from states. (One wonders, rather unkindly, what would have happened to the senators from Enron and Bear Stearns under such a system.)

The BUF was a force in British politics during the 1930s but fell short of accruing any parliamentary representation. The big rally at Earls Court in 1939 was both a high point and the swan song for Mosley's organization. While over 10,000 British fascists turned out to cheer their leader, a year later the BUF was suppressed as a threat to national security in the face of World War II. Mosley and many other fascist leaders sat out the war under internment, which was later reduced in his case to house arrest.

Discrepancies?

How confident can we be that Sir Oswald has been reborn in Stewie? While the argument is plausible enough, there are problems with the identification. Stewie, of course, is a fetishistic cross-dressing latent homosexual with sadomasochistic tendencies. His relationship with the family dog Brian is intimate to the point of bestiality. These qualities mark him out as an individual of peculiar characteristics.

Do these traits conform to what is known of Sir Oswald's life? There are significant discrepancies. Although Mosley liked to dress up in basic black to address his fascist comrades, that's not quite the same thing as a passion for wigs, dresses, and lipstick.

By contrast with Stewie, Mosley was a notorious philanderer who constantly pursued women. He had affairs, for instance, with both the sister and stepmother of his first wife. However, this may not be a disproof of the link between Sir Oswald and Stewie. Fears of latent homosexuality may provoke an exaggerated acting out of the heterosexual role in overcompensation. Then, too, there is the undoubted impact of the genetic heritage of the new incarnation; we cannot expect to find a precise one-to-one correspondence in all respects. We might also note that it is unavoidably premature to discuss Stewie's sexuality, as it is unlikely to be fully formed in one so young. He is ambiguous in his nature and has on a number of occasions seemed inclined to seduce female companions or engage in “sexy parties.” It is, of course, uncertain whether Stewie really understands the implications of such parties.

Rigorous proof of the identification of Stewart Gilligan Griffin with Sir Oswald Mosley is beyond our reach. We have only sifted the possibilities and found a plausible candidate for Stewie's earlier life. Extensive further research must be done before we can be certain, in which case we should be cautiously alert for the first stirrings of a Quahog Union of Fascists. The ominous signs cannot be denied.

No Bones about it

Ben Stein as Zeitgeist

[S]cience leads you to killing people.
—Ben Stein

Vernunft ... ist die höchste Hur, die der Teufel hat. (Reason ... is the greatest whore that the devil has.)
—Martin Luther

The season finale of Bones revolted me.

No, it wasn't because Bones specializes in scenes of graphic gore and I'm squeamish. (I am a bit squeamish, despite the helpful influence of a farm upbringing.) One can forgive a certain amount of sensationalism in a program whose lead character is an adamantly nonbelieving scientist. If it weren't for the shock value and the excitement of each week's mystery, how many people would tune in to the musings of a relentlessly logical and minimally emotional protagonist? Atheists seem to need a lot of window dressing if they're to be cast as heroes in a TV series. (In the case of Bones the openly secular scientist is counterbalanced with some conventionally devout costars.)

My revulsion at the last episode came as a delayed reaction, once I reflected on the illogic and tacit assumptions of the surprise ending. For the sake of melodrama, the writers decided a perversion of logic would provide the exciting twist they needed for a jolting conclusion to the third season's big story arc.

Fans already know that the Bones finale unmasked Dr. Zack Addy as the mole hidden inside the Jeffersonian Institution's laboratory, the new apprentice of the cannibalistic serial killer called “Gormogon.” Zachary Addy (Eric Millegan) had been established in earlier episodes as a kind of counterpart to Temperance Brennan, the lead character portrayed by Emily Deschanel. Both Brennan and Addy are scientific and logical to the point of compulsion, although Brennan is somewhat more successful in her social relations. She, after all, is a bestselling author and has a relatively normal sex life, while he is the quintessentially awkward nerd. (When interviewed, his neighbors are certain to say, “He seemed like a nice, quiet type and he always kept to himself.”)

The crimes of Gormogon were a continuing thread throughout the third season, sometimes fading into the background, other times taking center stage. Gormogon kills people and eats them, assembling bits and pieces of them into a composite skeleton. (Since each victim presumably comes with a complete skeleton, it was never clear to me why it was necessary for Gormogon to create a slow and tedious composite. Perhaps my attention nodded off during one of the less interesting expository scenes. Or maybe the writers didn't bother with an explanation any more than they bothered to write a sensible season closer.)

Gormogon is not only a serial killer, he's multigenerational. Each Gormogon recruits and trains an apprentice to take over the responsibilities of killing and eating people. The apprentice, of course, is expendable, and one is expended earlier in the third season in a jail house suicide. It's assumed that Gormogon has recruited a new apprentice, but his identity and activities are mysteries to the members of the Jeffersonian team (or, rather, to all but one member).

Addy, of course, was part of the effort to unravel the earlier crimes of Gormogon and his late apprentice. Despite this exposure to these macabre atrocities, Zack proves astonishingly susceptible to the killer's blandishments and falls under his influence. By day he works at the Jeffersonian in a team effort to expose Gormogon, but by night he's available to do his master's bidding, even to the point of murder. (In a weird bit of amelioration, we learn later that Zack had yet to graduate to the cannibalism level of his initiation, preserving some modicum of his boyish innocence and reducing the viewer's disgust. That's only-in-television convenient.)

The final episode's conclusion is supposed to reveal the subtle logical cantrip that ensnared the cerebral young Dr. Addy. As Dr. Brennan explains in the scene where she and Booth (David Boreanaz) confront him:

Brennan: Zack responds to logic, Booth.

Booth: Really? Because I'd love to hear the logic of killing and eating people to change the world.

Addy: The master's logic is irrefutable.

Oh, this is going to be good, right? Sorry. Here is the word-for-word transcript of Brennan's brilliant counterargument, as she discerns and unravels Zack's highly logical motivation:

Brennan: I've never met anyone more rational or intelligent. But there's a fault in your logic.

Addy: With all due respect, you aren't cognizant of his logic.

Brennan: Assumption No. 1: Secret societies exist.

Addy: Accepted. Hodgins has been explaining this to me for years.

Brennan: Assumption No. 2: The human experience is adversely affected by secret societies.

Addy: Accepted.

Brennan: Assumption No. 3: Attacking and killing members of secret societies will have an ameliorating affect on the human experience.

Addy: Accepted.

Brennan: All of your assumptions are built upon a first principle, Zack. To wit: The historical human experience as a whole is more important than a single person's life.

Addy: Yes.

Brennan: Yet you risked it all so that you wouldn't hurt Hodgins.

Addy: There's ... You are correct: There is an inconsistency in my reasoning.

Yes, he had risked his mission to spare a colleague from danger. Zack sheds a tear as he realizes he was wrong to agree to become the secret apprentice of a cannibalistic serial killer. He has been defeated by the very logic he worshiped. Ironic, no? The silly boy was ready to join a small secret society dedicated to eating the members of other secret societies. It's, like, poetic.

Sheesh.

As the ensemble stands around wondering how Zack got caught up in the Gormogon conspiracy, Dr. Brennan underscores the episode's theme with one word: “Logic.” (Shudder.) At least U.S. prosecutor Carolyn Julian (Patricia Belcher) offers a facile refutation: “This happened the way this always happen: A strong personality finds a weak personality and takes advantage.”

That's the slender straw we're left to cling to at the show's end: It was domination by a criminal mastermind of a hyperlogical nerd boy. Nevertheless, we must remember our lesson: Logic kills.

Especially its absence.

Like a House of Representatives on fire

A government fantasy

Sprint Nextel is running a humorous 30-second commercial titled What if firefighters ran the world? It depicts a group of begrimed firefighters all kitted out in their work gear and assembled in a legislative chamber. With a few raps of the gavel and a couple of voice votes, they quickly solve all the problems of the world. Most of the comments posted on YouTube are quite positive. One rather wistful commenter says, “I think in some respects, it really COULD be that easy.”

Yeah, right.

It's really pretty idiotic. Check it out for yourself or scan the transcript I provide below:

Fire Chief: [gavel] All right, firefighters. Settle down!

[Screen text: What if firefighters ran the world?]

Fire Chief: How about the budget?

Firefighters: Balance it!

Fire Chief: And the taxes?

Firefighters: One page or less!

Fire Chief: Anyone want better roads?

Firefighters: We do!

Fire Chief: All in favor?

Firefighters: Aye!

Fire Chief: Opposed? [silence] [gavel] Done!

Fire Chief: [riffles a bunch of pages] A lot of paper to tell us we need clean water. Need clean water, guys?

Firefighters: Aye!

Fire Chief: All right. This is the easiest job I've ever had. We're out of here! [gavel]

Okay. I get that it's just a commercial, but it irks the heck out of me anyway. Sure, I'm a former legislative aide and know the system from the inside. I could be overreacting. Still, this parody has an underlying snideness that makes me grit my teeth.

You want a one-page tax form? Great! Show me what you have. Think you can get a majority vote on it? (Let alone a unanimous vote like with the firefighters.) Tell me, did you include a write-off for home mortgage interest payments? You'll lose quite a few votes if you didn't. Did you decide on a flat tax? You'll lose quite a few votes if you did. Are some people exempt? How did you choose the cut-off? I'll bet you that won't be unanimous.

Some one-page proposals in various states are based on letting the Feds do all the work: (1) Write down what you paid the IRS. (2) Send us xx% of that. Good luck getting consensus on what xx% should be. Of course, most states refuse to pin their tax receipts to whatever the federal government chooses to do. It's the easiest state income tax scheme of all (a postcard would suffice!), but most states recoil from it because they're jealous of their modicum of sovereignty.

Whatever you do, you're going to get stuck with compromises. The Sprint commercial lives in a fairyland where people vote “yes” for good things and “no” on bad things. So simple! It is exactly what governments do in reality when they merely pass feel-good resolutions: We think you should be nice to your mother on Mother's Day. We think you should practice conservation on Earth Day. We think you should be patriotic on the Fourth of July. We think you should have a Merry Christmas/Happy Hanukkah/Cheerful Kwanzaa/Joyous Solstice. That sort of stuff. It's virtually content-free sense-of-the-legislature resolution language.

Actual legislation is tougher. Clean water? Good roads? Work is involved. Hard work. Tedious work. Details. As brave as firefighters may be, they won't get it all done in 30 seconds.

The only real point of an advertisement is to sell products. The advertising firm that created the Sprint Nextel ad is probably thinking it's a feel-good spot that will cause viewers to associate Nextel with efficiency in getting things done. For me, though, the stupidity burns. I see a reinforcement of the idea that sound public policy is as easy as one-two-three. Well, keep counting...

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