Shut up and Listen.

Her sister has been a role model for a couple of years now.
Her mother has a book deal with a company that specializes in bibles to put out a book about her parenting.
Babies are the current gotta-have accessory. Personally, I think I preferred when it was just little doggies that were doomed to the pound or a lifetime of neglect.
Holy crap, people! When are you going to stop encouraging this!?!?!
You think because they are on Nick or Disney that there is some sort of chaperoning or monitoring?
Britney Spears is nuts. Jamie Spears is pregnant at 16. Hudgens is sending nude pics of herself over the internet. Paris, Lindsay, Nicole, Jessica, Ashley, (where are the fathers, by the way????) a legion of girls gone wild. Teenage girls are hopping from bed to bed on MTV. Sweet Sixteen extols the virtues of conspicuous consumption!
The message if this kid isn't brought up on Statuatory rape charges? Not that the rich can get away with whatever they want. That's abstract. Kids won't get that. No. The message that little girls will get is, sex is okay with an older boy! And that's all well and good. But the kids that adore Jamie Lynn aren't 18. They aren't even 16. they are tweeners. her show is for TWEENERS. 12, 13, 14 year old girls who idolize her and will think, well, she did it, it must be okay.
I sound like a prude but, come on. If there are statuatory rape laws that aren't enforced then, men, let's line up cause the cute one are just getting out of junior fucking high.

Holy shit.
Put an end to this. Put an end to it right now.
You know how??????
Start early. Get em while they're young. Get your head out of the gutter and pay attention.

Handbook for raising girls material:

DON'T infantilize them. Raise the bar. Raise their self-esteem. They won't look to boys for it.

Fathers: change fucking diapers! It smells bad? Boo the fuck hoo. Grow a pair. It's the best bonding you can do.

Be a role model. Boys learn how to treat girls by watching Dad treat mom. Girls learn how to BE treated by watching dad treat mom.

Teach your girls to be self sufficient. Teach them to defend themselves, think for themsleves, achieve, achieve, achieve.

Teach them to cook. For themselves. So they aren't reliant on a credit card when they get older and therefore looking for a man to pay down their debt. And then do something outstanding: Dads. Cook with your daughters so they don't get some fucked up idea of gender roles. (An entire nation of witless men out there who refuse to cook because it's "woman's work" but LOVE to talk about how all the best chefs in the world are men. Hypocritical fuckheads.)


Encourage excellence in schoolwork and DON'T even fucking go to KINDERGARTEN GRADUATION. What the fuck is that????? No medals for mediocrity. But no punishment for it either. We reward kids for doing nothing so they have no real sense of what a personal accomplishment is.

READ TO YOUR KIDS. Get them to read too. If they can read, maybe, just maybe you can give them a leg up on being smart.

NO NO NO NO NO Nickelodeon or Disney Channel. Stay the fuck away. It's evil, it just wants your money.

PAY ATTENTION TO WHAT YOUR KIDS WATCH. This isn't so hard. Have a conversation with them about what interests them.
If a tv show is interesting to them, don't put them down for it, find out WHY they like it. You will learn so much about who your kid is and what makes her tick.

Sing to them. Be goofy. girls are going to be more verbal quicker than boys. Don't criticize that. Embrace it.

get them interested in art. Paintings, all kinds. Music, all kinds. Film, all kinds. (On that subject: Aladdin is a movie. Aladdin 2, the Return of Jafar is NOT a movie. It's a straight to dvd pair of hands in your pocket. Get it straight. There was no Cinderella 2 for fuck's sake!)

get a Facebook account, a MySpace account, an ipod, an apple account, an iphone, a blackberry, whatever the new tech is. Don't eschew new technology because you are a luddite or you are scared or you take comfort in the "I'm just old-fashioned" mindset. Your kids aren't going to bond with you, they are just going to think you are OLD. If you learn about these things, if you text and chat, you know what they're world is and you have an understanding of their vocabulary. Do it. Don't be stupid.

TALK. Talk to them. Just fucking talk to them. You HAVE TIME FOR THEM. If you don't, then why did you have them??????

Jesus christ. Someone put an end to this. Please. Stop the madness.

Why I love Apple. Reason number 45

Every time I get into a conversation with a PC user about my Mac they give me shit. I know I'm a new convert and I speak and act like a drone but lemme nutshell what just happened and you tell me if you would have had the same experience with a PC.

So I need to buy an external Hard Drive for the MacBook because we are going out of town and I am taking it and I am scared shitless that something will happen and I will lose important data, pics, my novel, etc.

I talk to THREE different Mac Store Dudes and they each tell me that installing the EHD is simple. A no brainer. So I buy a LaCie 320 gig which I convince myself will be enough and, for good measure and because I am loving life today I buy Leopard as well as an educational program for ages 6 months to 2 years. Can't start her too early, y'know?

I get the thing home and I am immediately prompted to install the backup program that comes with it. Something called Retrospect. It's freaking gobbledy gook. Not only does it read and act like a Microsoft program but the tutorial doesn't jibe with what is happening on my screen. I want to pull my hair out. It's freaking Saturday night. I was so looking forward to backing up the drive, installing Leopard then using Time Machine and being all happy and shit.

So, I decide to take the bull by the horns and do what would be impossible with a PC. I call the store.
The dude asks me three questions and, when I am just a wee bit confused, he says "hold on." He comes back. He needed to get on a macbook so he could walk me through the process. It's a simple drag and drop (it always is on a mac)
"Toss the Retrospect." He says. "You don't need it."

5 seconds later I am backing up my hard drive.

Can YOU call the store and get that kind of help for a PC? I think not. I never could.

Thank you, Apple. I knew there was a reason I loved you.

Nothing to see here.

I never thought the day would come. Or maybe, in light of the glut of available content I should have seen it coming but....

I have nothing left to watch.

I am looking at my netflix queue and I don't care. I look at the available titles and....I don't care. Wassup with that?

Seriously. I was a fucking film student.

Last night I was able to place a small guest star on Dirty Sexy Money with his comedy turn in a feature film from 1986. I know my film history.

And I am, well, I'm sort of done. I've been so disappointed by movies lately that I can't see myself sitting through another one and not hitting the fast forward button. And television shows too.....

But with the writers strike happening we are probably going to have to keep our netflix subscription going. But, and I mean this sincerely, why?

Oh, I'm just bitching but, truly.....I am out of things to watch that I give a crap about.

Okay. Bitching over.

Love is all around.......for the amptp, that is.

So, here's a great example of what the strike is all about. You can go to Hulu, choose this program to watch, sit through a 15 second comemrcial then watch it with 3 commercials for Axe or Saturn or something intersperesed throughout. You can not pause or fast forward through the ads. But there aren't that many of them.
NBC/Fox get ad revenue. It isn't much now, it's just supporting the site. But it will grow. And the creators and actors should be compensated for their work.
Love is all around....indeed.

Jerk test

Does this actually work for you? Does it make you sign up or log in or something?



If not, en-fucking-joy.

Too much television? Never thought I'd say the day had come.

It's overload. I am inundated. I don't know how much I can take before saturation bullies me either into submission or withdrawal.

Television.

It's everywhere. It's too much content.

Let me back up. I am beta testing Hulu. Me and, probably, millions of others. We're not special. I know that. But, truth be told, I wanted to see how the convergence, rather, this version of convergence might work. And, you know what? It isn't bad. I mean, I would actually watch the commercial breaks, because there's just one and it isn't long. But I am sure that no one is being adequately compensated for that but huzzah to the networks for making it impossible for me to fast forward through the ads. That's what DVRs should have been doing all along. Make it so you can't fast forward....or something.......
Anyway, the trouble is....well, I'm gonna back up again.

A couple years ago I confided to a friend that, gosh darnit, 60gig of music is just way too much to have at my disposal. I could never settle on one song. I would fast forward incessantly, waiting for that perfect harmonic convergence of desirability and singability. It would never happen and by the time I would arrive at my destination I would have heard....nothing. Not one song in it's entirety. It's too much choice. To much power.

I don't think we want that much control over what entertains us. Too many quick options means we don't get caught up in anything. At least I don't. I find it hard to stick through a 5 page article in Time. If they don't wrap it up in 1000 words or so, I'm lost. Forget Harper's or The New Yorker. No patience. I found myself convinced that I could decipher what scenes in the interminably long and boring second season of Heroes were superfluous and fast forwarded accordingly. You know what? I was right. A 42 minute Heroes episode was over in less than 20 for me. Blammo.

I watch movies and tv shows on my ipod at the gym. A movie gets broken up into two or more workouts. It's piecemeal.

And I have too many options, as I said. Lemme give you an example:
I have three televisions in my house. One in the living room that has a dual mode DVR and records mostly shows that Beth and I like to watch together. One in the kitchen that is just stuff I like to watch when I am cooking or writing or surfing. The bedroom television is almost too small to be watched and we don't really do that anyway. But the Tivo is connected to a wireless network adapter that can send the recorded programs to my macbook and can then be dispersed to my ipod for viewing at said gym. We are also subscribers to Netflix, to whom I am grateful for now I have seen all of Freaks and Geeks and Undeclared and consider myself to have more than a passing understanding and knowledge of the works of one Judd Apatow. Three years after I sat next to him in a restaurant after I appeared with his wife in a show.
And now there's Hulu.

It's just too much. At first I thought it was just that the quality cant keep up with the tech and availability but that's not true. As I write this I am 2/3 the way through the Hill Street Blues Pilot. I watched WKRP (which sucked for lack of licensed music). I saw the Arrested Development pilot. And the unaired Lost in Space pilot.
But I never saw any of them in one sitting. It's all piecemeal. So none of them have an impact. They are all just noise. Clutter. Which makes me sad since I think that television far outweighs, pound for pound, film as a visual storytelling medium. The reasons are too numerous to mention. But I think I am right. There is qualitatively more resounding work in television that even 20 years hence still has resonance. The same can't be said of film. Pound for pound.
And don't get me started on videogames. If there are only 7 basic stories told over and over since the greeks wrote them down, in the videogame world there are basically three and they don't even change except for graphics. They are a neat little pastime but they are as disposable as a used condom. Great to play with at the time, but when they are done you never want to see them again and no one really cares about your conquest.

Not so a great television show. That has impact. Chuckles the Clown? Swanee River? The Hospital in the mind of an autistic child? Edith's attempted rape? The Lost Pilot? "To serve man, it's a cookbook!". Dr. Who, Star Trek, Monty Python? Resonance.

But, it's too much. Too much choice. I can't sit still. I'm supposed to be writing a book. How can I write a book when I can't sit still long enough to read Time or even Everyday with Racheal Ray (don't judge, there are good recipes in there).
I love to be told stories. Love it. It's something we as humans love and take to from the earliest of ages. And television is the great storyteller because the characters are the same but the scenarios change. We can hold onto the people and listen or watch them go through adventures. It's Peter Cottontail but to the nth degree.

It's like Italo Calvino said in "If on a Winter's Night a Traveler". (A book I have never finished but have talked about for 20 years) You go into a bookstore and the unread books on the shelf call out to you (I'm paraphrasing). There's not enough time to read them all. And you have to remind yourself what you came in for. And just buy that book.

Television is becoming like that. But when the day comes that it's all Hulu or something like that and the list of shows, the FUCKING LIST of shows, to watch is laid out in front of you, I dare you not to collapse under the weight of too much choice.

I don't think I'll be able to you. I might just have to go back to reading.


post script. for the sake of full disclosure, I must admit that, even though I used to read books like a crazy kid, in the dark, unde the covers when I was supposed to be asleep, those books were novelizations of episodes of Star Trek. That's right. When I was 8 I would READ my favorite television show and then watch it every night at 6 on WPIX. Spectre of the Gun being the only episode I read before I ever saw it. Okay, disclosure over.

Hulu

The pilot from Lost In Space. Sans Dr. Smith. Brought to us by Hulu. Incidentally, I thought this would be a "clip" of the show. It's the whole damned thing. And Hulu encouraged the embed.
Go figure. Enjoy. I will post more.