Miscellaneous Heathen

MeFi noticed Jerry Clower today, and has a nice selection of his bits pointed out (at YouTube) for your perusal. If you grew up in the southeast, especially MIssissippi, Clower was inescapable.

Mmmm, badgers.

This isn't really a celebs-in-swimsuits kind of blog, but for Helen Mirren in a bikini at 63, we'll make an exception.

Holy Christ. I'm reminded of a conversation I I had with Mike years ago, after seeing then-70-year-old Paul Newman in something.

Mike: I hope we look that good when we're 70.

Heathen: Mike, we don't look that good NOW.

You'd think that, in a post-Borat world, it would get harder for Sacha Baron Cohen to pull of his stunts, but apparently not, at least in Arkansas:

LITTLE ROCK, Ark. — Crowds in Arkansas came for the lure of cage fighting and $1 beer, but police say what they got instead was men ripping each others' clothes off and kissing ... a stunt suspected of being orchestrated by Sacha Baron Cohen of "Borat" fame.

"We had a contract for cage fighting. We were deceived," said Dwight Duncan, president and CEO of Four States Fair Grounds in Texarkana, where the first of two Arkansas fights raised suspicions last month.

You get TV with no context at all, which must be part of the point of this bit of web goodness. (Via JWZ.)

John Scalzi weighs in on the baby-momma thing, and takes ZERO prisoners.

They keyed a graphic of Michelle Obama as the Obama's baby momma. Screenshots at the link.

Please, Fox, continue with this sort of thing. We want everyone to know just exactly who you people are.

Susan Jacobs: The Dumbing of America.

This is the last subject that any candidate would dare raise on the long and winding road to the White House. It is almost impossible to talk about the manner in which public ignorance contributes to grave national problems without being labeled an "elitist," one of the most powerful pejoratives that can be applied to anyone aspiring to high office. Instead, our politicians repeatedly assure Americans that they are just "folks," a patronizing term that you will search for in vain in important presidential speeches before 1980. (Just imagine: "We here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain . . . and that government of the folks, by the folks, for the folks, shall not perish from the earth.") Such exaltations of ordinariness are among the distinguishing traits of anti-intellectualism in any era.

The classic work on this subject by Columbia University historian Richard Hofstadter, "Anti-Intellectualism in American Life," was published in early 1963, between the anti-communist crusades of the McCarthy era and the social convulsions of the late 1960s. Hofstadter saw American anti-intellectualism as a basically cyclical phenomenon that often manifested itself as the dark side of the country's democratic impulses in religion and education. But today's brand of anti-intellectualism is less a cycle than a flood. If Hofstadter (who died of leukemia in 1970 at age 54) had lived long enough to write a modern-day sequel, he would have found that our era of 24/7 infotainment has outstripped his most apocalyptic predictions about the future of American culture.

Check this out; Chris Matthews lays a serious ass-whuppin' on right-wingnut radio goon Kevin James. At issue? James was all about calling Obama an appeaser in the tradition of Chamberlain, but it turns out James really has no idea what ol' Neville actually did. Chris notices this, and does not let up. It's beautiful.

This week, it appears that NBC has actually used the Broadcast Flag to prevent the recording of certain episodes of their programming. Fortunately, the only system that paid any attention was (wait for it) Windows Vista Media Center, but you can see where this is going. If the content dorks get their way, the networks will be able to prevent recording of their programs on a whim, ending the whole practice of time-shifting or saving favorite shows just because they would rather charge you every time you lay eyes on their (usually execrable) shows.

Vote with your dollars people. Don't buy equipment that you don't own and control. A computer that runs Vista clearly thinks it's more beholden to NBC than to you.

Remember: DRM isn't about fighting piracy. It's about the ability to strictly control how we consume content. Users who are interested in pirating TV shows and movies aren't going to do so with a DVR or buy them through PPV. They've already skipped the middle-man and gone straight to BitTorrent with its decent-quality, commercial-less, and DRM-free offerings. Boneheaded mistakes like the one apparently made by NBC and Microsoft Monday night will only serve to make alternative means of obtaining content more attractive.