June 30, 2008
What is appropriate?
What is okay for children to watch? Movie ratings in America have often repressed sex and rated movies with sex out of the range of kids, but lets them see all the violence they want.
In Venezuela, sex is not repressed at all -- but four-fingered yellow people are.
From today's AP: Venezuelan regulators are forcing a local TV station to show public service announcements as punishment for broadcasting "The Simpsons" during a time slot reserved for children's programs. The Televen channel yanked the animated hit from its lineup in April after regulators said its 11 a.m. showing violated broadcast rules intended to protect young viewers. "The Simpsons" returned to the air at night, and was replaced in the morning with "Baywatch Hawaii."
So just to be clear, big Pamela Lee Anderson tatas bouncing around in slow motion are okay for children -- but animated characters doing something (what did they object to?) are not okay.
I obviously don't run the world.
June 27, 2008
H.L. Mencken Quote
"The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed -- and hence clamorous to be led to safety -- by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary."
-- H.L. Mencken, writer, editor, and critic (1880-1956)
June 23, 2008
Quote: Louis L'Amour
"Too often I would hear men boast of the miles covered that day, rarely of
what they had seen."
-- Louis L'Amour, novelist (1908-1988)
June 04, 2008
Finale from The Empire Strikes Back
I just love watching people make music. I wish I could do this.
June 01, 2008
They may have landed on an ice field!
This is so cool. The latest Mars exploration mission, NASA's Phoenix Mars Lander, has as one of its biggest goals to find ice. And it turns out that not only may they have landed right on some, but their landing rockets may have done the work of blowing the topsoil off of it, exposing it to Phoenix's cameras.
