Greg:
Jack Bauer has strong-armed innocent people, most notably Audrey Raines (Defense Secretary's daughter, his ex(?)-girlfriend) by choking her and backing her against a wall.
The worst 'EW!' factor of that scene? SHE FORGAVE HIM.
As for CSI: Nevada: they had one episode where all of the evidence pointed at one brother, but it was clear from the way he and the other brother were behaving, it was a case of Elder Brother did it and Younger Brother did everything wrong in trying to conceal it, thereby contaminating the evidence so badly he ended up facing the death penalty for it.
Otherwise you are correct, to the best of my knowledge.
We have the 'Poetry in Motion' bus ad placards, too, and a corresponding 'Art in Motion' poster campaign (although I haven't seen new ones in either series for a while, so it may be discontinued.) I've never heard of anyone declaiming live poetry or anything else on a bus or train, though.
Nor on the platforms, most places and most times. Near platforms, though, appears to be fair game.
The closest Calgary gets to the sort of public literary display Patrick mentions occurs during Freedom To Read Week, which is a yearly pro-lit event. Along with the child and adult literacy drives and the library events and the fair and everything else that happens, there is a day for 'guerilla readings' in public spaces. Volunteers read aloud from banned or challenged books to (often surprised) downtown office workers, usually with a before and/or after explaination regarding what they're doing and why.
I hear the Harry Potter books are a popular choice.
Randolph Fritz said: But we have to have something to write and talk about. That's the real problem; the public isn't ready for a progressive agenda yet (though a few more years of these aristocrat wannabees and they will be) ...
Bwah?
I'm with Xopher on this. The public is ready. And if they weren't, put the agenda out there anyway, so that people can see it and read it and smell it and know that yes, this is what they really want, and no, they aren't alone in wanting it. And if they have ideas on improvements to be made right here, right now, bonus.
It's a matter of education. You can't know what you really want unless you know what your choices really are.
Greg:
I like 'gangster' as a synonym for 'terrorist'. Pirate works, too, except that piracy has strong acquisitive/commercial overtones for me, whereas a gangster is someone I associate with a pattern of one person or a small group forcing control over a larger group of basically law-abiding people.
Although most gangs have a commercial aspect (thievery, drug sales, prostitution) they don't have to; their prime reason for being can also be social solidarity and mutual ego boosterism.
Transferring that general framework to a terrorist cell is easy: the cell is a group of people who have banded together for the express purpose of increasing their own power in society. They may have failed to achieve such power legitimately, or they may be too impatient to work for it, or their particular views may be so unpopular that they feel they must take extreme measures to achieve them, or... you get the drift.
Thinking of terrorists as gangsters helps me put them in perspective to the rest of society in terms of numbers and self-interest--and methods.
Thoughts?
That line of 'for the sake of the children' doesn't wash with me. I keep getting the impression that people who use the phrase are telling me that anyone who grows up without whatever brand of coddling they're peddling is destined to become a serial-killing crack whore anarchist, or a depressed dishrag fattie living on fast food and reality TV, or maybe just some loser homeless bum living off handouts... who is secretly a serial-killing crack whore anarchist.
Um... no. After all, they grew up without the coddling and they aren't (insert awful destiny here).
Oh, wait. I see my problem. I'm asking for empathy again. Silly me.
What I wanna say to all the neocons crowing about the Canadian arrests:
"Look! Seventeen arrests! And no foreign invasions or illegal wiretaps in sight!
Re: new black
It's from fashion. Black is out, so... orange is the new black!
Greg London:
Don't worry about the effect of Batman; everyone knows he's a comic book character and that hanging someone off the side of a building is over-the-top and unlikely.
Worry about Jack Bauer. Energizer Bunny Jack gets the truth, the whole truth, so help him God. Break a few fingers, inject a little pentothol... five minutes and he's off to save the country! And if the Bad Guys go after him in kind? Why, he has a convenient heart attack and has to be resuscitated. Once a week in your living room, This Is The New America Now.
Y'know, I've been thinking.
It seems to me that too many of the 'We have to get TOUGH with America's enemies!!!11!one!!eleventy1!' types have an airy-fairy John-Wayne-movie-geek attitude about what effects ubermacho behavior has on other people.
But if you ask 'em, "Would that (torture, invasion, Draconian sanctions, fill-in-the-blank-here) work on YOU?" they will say, to a man, "No way!"
If it won't work on you, why the hell would it work on the other guy?
Just sayin'.
Joann: I don't know anything about Benton, so I can't comment on what he may or may not have given Pollock, but I do firmly believe that you can't 'study with' someone without taking some part of them away with you--even if what you take is, "I ain't doin' it HIS way".
Pollock drip paintings can be given fractal numbers. Dunno if that carries over to programming, but it implies (to me) an understanding of form that transcends the purely representational.
During my university years, one prof specifically advised against trusting spellcheckers--he'd found a study where one group of students was given a page of text with twenty spelling, grammar, and punctuation mistakes and told to correct it, while another group was given the same page and allowed to use spellcheck to correct it.
The spellchecked version had half again as many mistakes in the final count, including some that were not in the original piece.
If I weren't at work, I'd google-fu a reference for this.
(guiltily ducks back under her rock)
Mike B: You may be treating written English as a heiroglyphic system (you remember the shapes of words, rather than merely their phonetic components). There is research to support this; it is one way of treating the most common form of dyslexia.
I do this myself. The wrong word is a physical wrench to the reading process. Certain common mistakes (teh for the, for instance) I've learned to gloss over, but most still make me wince.
I also tend to typo real words--thing for thin, for instance, or this for thin. Bah, humbug.
And a couple more...
'What the hay' and 'to hit the hey'.
Okay, they're colloquial, but still.
I'm surprised no one has yet mentioned the ever-popular 'to wreck havok'.
Incidently, I blame this on people hearing the phrase, but not reading it often enough to get the correct spelling implanted in their memory. So, when they pop up with it, they pick the spelling they think is most right.
And ditto for the reign/rein transpositions. I still boggle whenever I see a phrase like 'He took the reigns of the situation'.
From one of my fellow members of the local writing group:
"Their cloaks bellowed behind them."
Given a strong enough wind, that might happen....
My 2 cents CDN here:
'Dilution' is one of those vague terms that can mean different things to different people. For me, it involves first and second impressions.
F'instance, my first exposure to Buffy et al was through sexually explicit fanfic (most of it bad). Ergo, when I finally saw the series (I didn't own a TV during the series' first run) my reaction was not what the original creators intended--or wanted, I'm sure. I found myself wondering when/why character1/character2 so much that the stories took back seat. I lost interest completely shortly after.
I have no doubt I would have the same reaction to other fanfic/original work, so I avoid the former as much as possible. I consider it the only way for me to be fair to the original creator. YMMV.
The 'Christian Wife' thing looks a lot like a pamphlet on the subject of 'How to be a good wife' that I read some years ago. The pamphlet was printed some time before 1955; the edition I saw was 1954, but I believe it was a reprint.
Advice included things like always smiling, dressing up to greet your husband when he got home from work, arranging to keep the kids quiet and out of the way during the evening, and that reading cookbooks was a good way for a wife to spend her free time. I sincerely believe the pamphlet was not satire, but an honest attempt by the (male) author to give reasonable advice to young wives.
Therefore... the Christian Wife thing may be satire, but it's not particularly clever or original satire. On the other hand, it may just be plagiarized (some of those points look awful familiar.)
Personally, I find ID and Creationism insulting to God, because it forces Him to dumb down the cosmos to something mere humans can understand.
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