Eideard

Contents potentially offensive to some. If you’re easily offended by George Carlin – go away!

 
The Supreme Court is poised to take a fresh look at a key aspect of multimedia regulation — “indecent” material aired on the broadcast networks during the supposedly “family friendly” prime-time hours of 8 to 10 p.m. Oral arguments in this key free-speech dispute will be held Tuesday.

Why pretend this is a “fresh” look? The fundamentalist nutballs in charge of America’s right-wing demand changes to free speech time after time. When sufficient pimps for censorship are in place in Congress and the Supreme Court – this predictable dog and pony show arrives on the set.

At issue is whether the Federal Communications Commission may constitutionally enforce its policies on “fleeting expletives” and scenes of nudity on prime-time television programs, both live and scripted. The agency had imposed hefty fines on broadcasters for separate incidents. An expected ruling by summer could establish important First Amendment guidelines over expressive content on the airwaves.

A range of competing interests are at stake: Free speech versus censorship; regulation versus responsibility; art versus indecency.

No consideration of a public capable of making a choice, competent to run their own family lives. The origins of “political correctness” in conservative censorship still rule.

ABC, CBS, NBC and Fox are all parties in the case challenging the FCC regulations. A federal appeals court in 2010 for a second time struck down the government’s policies, concluding they were vague and inconsistently applied. Pending fines against the broadcasters were dismissed. The government then appealed to the high court…

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South Africa’s advertising watchdog has banned a television commercial depicting angels falling from heaven because they are attracted to a man’s deodorant after a complaint from a Christian.

The advertisement for Axe deodorant (known as Lynx in Britain) features winged, attractive women crashing to earth in an Italian town.

The scantily-clad women are then drawn towards a seemingly unremarkable man preparing to get on a moped. They regard their quarry lasciviously while sniffing the air before one by one smashing their halos and advancing towards him.

A viewer who complained to South Africa’s Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) said the suggestion that God’s messengers would literally fall for a mortal being because of a deodorant was incompatible with his belief as a Christian.

ASA agreed, and ordered Unilver SA, which sells Axe deodorants, to withdraw the advertisement.

As such, the problem is not so much that angels are used in the commercial, but rather that the angels are seen to forfeit, or perhaps forego their heavenly status for mortal desires,” it said in a statement.

Idiots. Not just the dweeb who made the complaint, of course; but, the petty bureaucrats who made the decision to ban the commercial.

I wouldn’t expect either to have a sense of humor. That would allow for normal human emotions to overrule obedience to either social strictures leftover from the Dark Ages or government administrators assigning priority to democratic decision-making in the commercial marketplace.

Like – if you don’t like the commercial don’t buy the fracking deodorant!

Click to enlarge!

A new piece of artwork by Richard Sargent, featuring a huge crowd of robots from movies, television and more. Can you find WALL-E among them?

You might win a signed poster print of Richard’s ‘Where’s WALL-E?’ art! How many characters can you identify? Use the guide picture to name as many as you can. The most correct answers will win a poster. Answers to richard@hopewellstudios.com. Closing date for entries 31st August 2011. Entries will be judged by name and origin of each character; in the event of a tie a winner will be chosen at random.

Thanks, Ursarodinia

Indian health officials have taken an unusual step to slow the nation’s birth rate – offering prizes that include a car in return for being sterilised.

One lucky man or woman can win a free Tata Nano in exchange for ending their fertility.

The first person to volunteer for sterilisation in Jhunjhunu, west of New Delhi, will be given a Nano, the world’s cheapest car, with other prizes including motorcycles, televisions and food blenders…

Reports also suggest that those volunteering to give away their baby-making ability will be paid a cash incentive of Rs1000, and Rs200 to those who urged them to go under the knife.

The move comes as India tries to control its rapidly growing population, which a recent census estimating it at more than 1.21 billion people.

I guess I could say, “Times change.” When I got my vasectomy as a young man in a very Catholic state, the surgery had to be “underground” because it was illegal. As was the sale of contraceptives.

My urologist made me swear I’d tell folks I had it done in Rhode Island.

Thanks, Honeyman

 
Keith’s show starts up tonight on Current TV – Al Gore’s TV station. I’d let it slip to the back of my mind since I’d already scheduled my DVR to start recording it – but, I didn’t think he and Current would be badass enough to advertise his return to nightly television by buying space and time – on MSNBC – the chickenhearts who bailed on him for doing unseemly things like donating money to Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords election campaign.

This is gonna be fun.

 
I knew Keith’s show was starting up next week on Current TV – Al Gore’s TV station. I’d let it slip to the back of my mind since I’d already scheduled my DVR to start recording it – but, I didn’t think he and Current would be badass enough to advertise his return to nightly television by buying space and time – on MSNBC – the chickenhearts who bailed on him for doing unseemly things like donating money to Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords election campaign.

This is gonna be fun.

Daylife/Getty Images used by permission

Salman Rushdie is to make a sci-fi television series in the belief that quality TV drama has taken over from film and the novel as the best way of widely communicating ideas and stories. “It’s like the best of both worlds,” said the novelist in an interview with the Observer. “You can work in movie style productions, but have proper control.”

The new work, to be called The Next People is being made for Showtime, a US cable TV network. The plot will be based in factual science, Rushdie said, but will contain elements of the supernatural or extra-terrestrial. Although filming is yet to begin, a pilot has been commissioned and written. It will have what Rushdie described as “an almost feature-film budget”.

Showtime has announced that the hour-long drama will deal with the fast pace of change in modern life, covering the areas of politics, religion, science, technology and sexuality. “It’s a sort of paranoid science-fiction series, people disappearing and being replaced by other people,” said Rushdie, 63, best known for Midnight’s Children and The Satanic Verses. “It’s not exactly sci-fi, in that there is not an awful lot of science behind it, but there are certainly elements which are not naturalistic,” he said in the interview, which will appear in full in the Observer later this month.

The idea that Rushdie might create a television show came from his US agents who suggested that he would have more creative influence than with a feature-film script.

“They said to me that what I should really think about is a TV series, because what has happened in America is that the quality – or the writing quality – of movies has gone down the plughole.

“If you want to make a $300m special effects movie from a comic book, then fine. But if you want to make a more serious movie… I mean you have no idea how hard it was to raise the money for Midnight’s Children…”

Rushdie agreed that “my writing has always had elements of the fantastical” but said that he was drawn to television by the comparatively high status of the writer in the process. “In the movies the writer is just the servant, the employee. In television, the 60-minute series, The Wire and Mad Men and so on, the writer is the primary creative artist.

“You have control in the way that you never have in the cinema. The Sopranos was David Chase, West Wing was Aaron Sorkin,” he explained.

Rushdie said that he is also considering doing much of the writing for an ensuing series alone. “Matthew Wiener on Mad Men writes the entire series before they start shooting, and if you have that, then what you can do with character and story is not at all unlike what you can do in a novel.”

Looking forward to the work. If he and his associates can bring alive something with quality of Battlestar Galactica and Caprica – something with the depth of character of Damages – he’ll prove his point.

Think there might be anything interesting in there?

A frozen human body was found Monday evening by two people cleaning out the home of a deceased relative.

According to a news release from the Eddy County Sheriff, the body was discovered around 7:50 p.m. in a chest-type freezer. The remains were first thought to be those of an animal, but after further inspection were determined to be human remains.

The two loaded the freezer into a pickup and drove it to the offices of the Carlsbad Police Department.

After further investigation, the case was turned over to the sheriff’s department because the body had been located outside the city limits…

Although the sheriff’s department has not released the name of the victim, a source close to the investigation has said it may be the husband of the home’s deceased occupant. The man reportedly went missing in 1997.

News from downstate usually doesn’t get much traffic in central or northern New Mexico. When there’s real “human interest” like this – well, it gets more play than UFOs or the latest lawsuit by someone whose neighbor’s wifi network makes their brain buzz.

I have no doubt it would be banned in the United States.

Would it banned where you live? Should your elected government have the right to ban advertisements just because of the topic they suggest for discussion?

And should you have the right to end your own life with dignity?

Daylife/AP Photo used by permission

Google will launch its service to bring the Web to TV screens in the United States this autumn and worldwide next year, its chief executive said, as it extends its reach from the desktop to the living room.

CEO Eric Schmidt said the service, which will allow full Internet browsing via the television, would be free, and Google would work with a variety of programme makers and electronics manufacturers to bring it to consumers.

“We will work with content providers, but it is very unlikely that we will get into actual content production,” Schmidt told journalists after a keynote speech to the IFA consumer electronics trade fair in Berlin…

Schmidt also said Google would announce partnerships later this year with makers of tablet computers that would use Google’s Chrome operating system, due to be launched soon, rather than its Android phone software, which has been used for mobile devices until now…

The world’s No.1 search engine is hunting for new revenue opportunities as growth in its core Internet business slows and as new technologies such as smartphones and social networking services transform the way consumers access the Web.

Schmidt declined to comment on Google’s plans for a social network of its own, and while he said there were plans to expand in music, he would not elaborate.

Something more for me to explore and experiment with. Though I spend more time as computer geek, I started down this primrose path as a TV geek.

We always can use more convergence.