The press is of course rebroadcasting Steve Jobs’ call for music companies to begin selling music DRM free. This will of course be met with cheers by the Apple fanboys and make it look like Steve Jobs is fighting for the consumer against the big evil corporations. In actuality Steve Jobs is jumping on the bandwagon of the Anti-DRM movement and doing it with a very particular agenda in mind. Here’s the salient points.

“Apple has been under pressure in Europe to make iTunes music compatible with players other than the iPod. On January 25 Norway’s consumer ombudsman said Apple must open access to iTunes by October 1 or face legal action.

“Perhaps those unhappy with the current situation should redirect their energies toward persuading the music companies to sell their music DRM-free,” said Jobs about the European action.”

In other words don’t force me to actually make ITunes music compatible with non-IPod players consumers might own. Instead Jobs is trying to feint and duck by directing attention to the music industry instead, The problem of course is that it’s been thoroughly proven by now that ITunes is all about the DRM.

Companies that want to sell their music DRM free, must nevertheless wind up selling their music with DRM included if they want to sell via ITunes. Steve Jobs is trying to pass the blame on to the companies but it’s ITunes whose business model to be a loss leader for the IPod and that business model wouldn’t work if people could buy 99 cent songs at ITunes and play them on their Sony or Creative Zen or Zune.

Locking people into the IPod and creating a monopoly has been the whole premise behind Apple’s business success. Steve Jobs can no more afford to lose DRM, then Wallmart can afford to begin giving their entire stock away. Steve Jobs in fact needs DRM more than the companies do.

But Steve Jobs’ Reality Distortion Field approach now lets him distract from his monopoly and forcible DRM by blaming the companies and appearing to be a crusader against DRM. What a douchebag.

Wonder why Battlestar Galactica’s ratings are falling, take no look further than the incredibly lame ‘Take a Break From Your Worries,’ which should have been titled, Take a Break From Writing Episodes, except that you can’t really blame this episode in isolation for perpetuating the idiocy of Battlestar Galactica’s awful third season.

Now here’s a simple quiz. Baltar, former President and Cylon collaborator, who has arguably been the star of the show with BSG focusing on him more intently than on any other character, has been captured and in the hands of the crew. With the show’s previous focus on politics, a focus that mostly went out the window this season, you’d think the logical move would have been to make his imprisonment the centerpiece of the episode, or at least an equally compelling story.

Ah but how foolish you are, unable to grasp the genius of Ron Moore and his crack writing staff (yes it is indeed a writing staff on crack) which instead decide to focus the episode on the ongoing Kara\Adama soap opera, which continues to go nowhere. It’s bad enough we had to hijack the previous two parter with this idiocy, but now we have an episode that dedicates a few minutes to Baltar and dumps the bulk of it on Kara\Adam\Whininess. Thank you Ron, you’re truly a master of bad romance novels.. oh wait you were trying to do a Science Fiction TV series. Sorry, my bad.

And of course the Baltar material has to employ the just discovered gimmick of giving him hallucinogenic drugs, an idea that apparently Adama didn’t bother to come up with when Cylon collaborating terrorists were blowing up parts of his fleet in suicide bombings. Because if it’s one thing that Baltar and the audience needs, it’s more hallucinations.

Battlestar Galactica’s ratings still dropping? Nope, can’t imagine why. Flush.

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“With the premiere of ENTERPRISE officially set for September 26th @ 8:00
P.M., UPN has sent the first completed or near-completed footage in the form
of a two and a half-minute sales promotion tape to UPN affiliates across the
country. In what may perhaps become the newest ‘Star Trek’ tagline, Scott Bakula as
Captain Jonathan Archer has his own unique phrase, similar to Captain
Picard’s “make it so” or “engage”. When getting the Enterprise underway,
Captain Archer tells the helm, “straight and steady.”

Apparently Berman and Braga were worried that people might believe the rumors of a gay Starship Captain and thus they made sure to have Captain Archer clear that up by proclaiming his heterosexuality every time the ship launched.

Alternative possibly catch phrases might include, “Go to Warp 5 and please understand I mean this in a purely non-sexual way,” or “Fire on the Klingons but realize that I am not at all and not not want to have sex with other men.”

Then there’s the always popular, “Hard to starboard, and I don’t mean that in a gay way in the least.”

Winter is like a rude unwanted guest. It comes and overstays its welcome and this year around these parts, it hasn’t even had the decency to bring some decent snow. It’s time to give winter, the cold shoulder… by heading to where it’s nice and warm. By getting away from everything mundane and entering a world of makebelieve and adventure, at Orlando’s Walt Disney World. Disney is still the original name for imagination, for fantasy and still the one thing guaranteed to make kids of all ages smile and shout for joy. But buying Disney tickets isn’t anywhere as fun. That’s why you need, OrlandoFunTickets.com, which features loads of discount Disney tickets at prices so low, it’s almost magical. And maybe it really is. And if your appetite wends toward the Kennedy Space Center or Universal Studios or any of Orlando’s other famous theme parks, Orlando Fun Tickets, like a fairy godmother, can take care of you there too.

The end of winter may only be a month or two away but on a cold day when the wind is blowing from the east and the snow is falling from the west and it seems like your toes are about to fall off too, it feels more like it might be six months away. The winter blues get everyone down and studies show that the cold can wear down your immune system, induce depression and severely impact your productivity and your personal happiness. What’s the solution? Take a vacation of course, to some place warm and sunny. Someplace like Orlando Florida. Surrounded by dozens of theme parks, including the world famous, Disney World, it’s the perfect place to take yourself and your family away from the winter blues and into a world of summer fun. Get an early start on summer and a break from all the cold and head on over to its beaches, golf courses and theme parks, by planning your vacation and finding the right Kissimmee hotels now.

And there was great wailing and gnashing of teeth in fanboy town on learning that David Goyer had been dumped off The Flash. For anyone who was looking forward to a Flash movie in which the Flash constantly cursed at everyone, ran around aimlessly, incorporated montages from 70’s cop shows and struggled through a senseless plot Goyer thought up while snorting cocaine to try and be more like Sam Peckinpah… well you’re outta luck.

On the other hand Night At The Museum’s Shawn Levy is all but certain to make a Flash movie that’s fun for the whole family, in the Fantastic Four sense. On the other hand the only people who enjoy David S. Goyer movies are sadists who can take masochists to them.

Then Joss Whedon was dumped off Wonder Woman. Of course the amount of wailing and gnashing touched off by this epic tragedy in fanboy town is unbelievable. How? Why. Bwaaaah. And all that. After Buffy and Angel were gone, Firefly cancelled and Joss Whedon’s various Buffy spinoffs ranging from the British Giles TV show, the cartoon Buffy prequel, the Faith spinoff and possibly a spinoff focusing on Harmony and the undead corpse of that Irish guy on Angel who O’d after he was fired off the show… Wonder Woman was Joss’ stab at pretending to be gainfully employed on a major project.

Now with Joss’ removal from the project, we’ll never get the chance to have Wonder Woman talk in Joss’ trademarked weird and wacky ways, or see her take a job at a fast food place and spend 120 minutes dwelling on the ennui associated with fast food service or perhaps corporate law.

Oh the inhumanity.

There is no joy in fanboy town, mighty Whedon has struck out.

Why does it seem every genre show set in some kind of science fiction or fantasy universe feel the need to do an episode where a character finds himself or herself in a mental institution and being convinced that his universe is really a made up delusion of his own demented psyche.

Smallville is the latest show to do it, giving us a pretty tedious alternate reality Smallville. Buffy did it before in one of the remarkably bleaker 7th season episodes, and for the later seasons of Buffy, bleaker is saying a lot, but then having Buffy trying to murder her friends including her little sister, in order to “get well” is definetly on the bleaker side.

Before that Star Trek had camped out on the whole “you’re only hallucinating all this” doorstep basically refining and replicating this same kind of plot line, Smallville and Buffy lifted. Star Trek The Next Generation gave us Riker locked up in a mental institution, in a genuinely disturbing episode, that used the context of a play and distorted realities to simulate real mental illness.

By contrast DS9 churned out a pretentious Far Beyond the Stars, an episode so full of itself, it almost gagged on the stench of its own platitudes. Never mind that the show’s entire premise distorts reality by passing DS9 off as the progressive work of a black man in the 50’s, when it’s actually the tedious work of some white writers and producers in the 90’s. This dishonest attempt at historical revisionism then gave us a ’sequel’ in the form of Sisko briefly hallucinating himself in a mental hospital.

Voyager put out an episode that had the EMH flashing back through its memories imagining itself to be human, that was made a good deal more entertaining by the presence of Barclay. Not to mention the EMH informing Janeway smugly that she and the rest of the crew are about to be taken away and tortured.

Of course what almost all these episodes have in common as a driving mechanism is a weird brand of psychiatry in which therapists insist the character has to literally kill or destroy people or themselves in order to get “better.” You have to wonder if this entire plotline is a signal that the writers think they’re nuts or that the premise of the shows they’re writing is.

The internet is like high school in that it’s all about popularity, link popularity that is. Everyone wants rank popularity and everyone schemes, codes and fights to get their grubby little site advancing a shade above the rest in google’s rankings and search results. Some pursue the goal of being linked to by the cool sites, but a link in a sidebar among 300 others isn’t worth what you think it is. Not nearly as much as a relevant link within a relevant article is. Or a myriad of text links like that. Not only do they generate more traffic but more rankings mobility in the bargain. That requires regularly generated sources of content. Your average website is more or less static, especially when compared to blogs which tend to be updated on a regular basis several times a week. Relevant text links from relevant blogs in relevant articles are a surefire way to race up the rankings and Blogitive, with thousands of blogs in its network, can distribute and target text links from blogs that hit your specific keyword and increasing link popularity to benefit you and your business.

Anyone who grew up in the 80’s probably can’t help but remember this, the intro to 21 Jump Street, where before Johnny Depp was the crazy guy who framed based on impressions of crazier pop and rock stars, he was a 20 something actor playing a cop who played teenagers. It provided gainful employment to at least two DeLuises before the unkillable Stargate franchise came along, not to mention for Richard Grieco, who’s hopefully dead in a ditch somewhere. From the oddly inappropriate theme song to the ridiculous premise though, it all worked somehow and it was all so very incredibly 80’s.

Imagine Law and Order’s tedious ‘Ripped From the Headline” format (translation we borrow our plots from the front page of the New York Post) in a show that was actually fun, action packed and moved fast. There’s a reason TV is dying now. Compare Law and Order or CSI to 21 Jump Street and you can see one more reason nobody under 30 is bothering with the TV networks anymore.

Jump!

Facing sagging ratings and a distinct lack of viewer interest, Rick
Berman announced after a closed door meeting with Paramount executives
that he will be scrapping Enterprise in favor of a new take on the
Star Trek franchise tentatively titled, ‘Obnoxious Trek.’

“Somewhere around the middle half of Feb, we realized what our mistake
had been all along.” Berman explains. “We were trying to create a
series that fans would enthusiastically love when what we should have
been doing was creating a series that fans would enthusiastically
hate. And that is what Obnoxious Trek is all about.”

Unlike previous Star Trek series’, Obnoxious Trek will feature a cast
of returning Star Trek cast members, rather than an all new cast with
Mulgrew returning as Captain Janeway in command of the U.S.S. Deviant.
Will Wheaton will also be returning to play Commander Wesley Crusher,
first officer of the Deviant who is also hiding his secret addiction
to cough syrup. Nicole DeBoer will also return as the navigator whose
only role will be to act confused and whine all the time since the
ship will never actually go anywhere.

The rest of the cast will be filled out by Doctor Neelix who knows
nothing about medicine and whose patients die more often that not.
James Darren as Vic Fontaine who will give the crew relationship
advice in the middle of tense battle scenes and occasionally break
charachter to hawk his CD’s and his brand of tomato soup on air. And
the series’ only new charachter, A Pakled as the engineering chief who
is unable to ever get the warp drive running thus preventing the
U.S.S. Deviant from ever going anywhere.

“Our goal was to bring back some of the most obnoxious charachters
from Star Trek history, charachters we knew the fans would hate. We’ve
given up on creating new charachters that would attract viewers and
we’ve decided to bring back charchters that everyone hated so much
that they simply wouldn’t be able to not watch Obnoxious Trek the same
way you can’t not slow down to see a car accident.” Rick Berman
explains. “And the entire show is geared towards this philosophy. For
instance every episode will end in the holodeck in the Irish village
of Fair Haven, even the cliffhangers, and Majel Barrett’s voice on the
computer has been replaced by Nana Visitor’s voice which will respond
to every command by delivering a speech about the oppression of the
Bajoran people. We really want to make people hate our show, we want
to make both long time Trek fans and casual viewers hate our show, and
we’re willing to do whatever it takes to make that hatred happen.”

Other plans under consideration for alienating viewers include a first
season finale which will end with a temporal anomaly that erases all
the events of the entire first season, random appearances by John
DeLancie’s son, playing John DeLancie’s son and getting Bette Midler
and Roseanne to sing the Enterprise theme accompanied only by the
sounds of cats mating.

“We’re really going into the experimental realm with this.” Brannon
Braga explains. “For example the ship will never go anywhere. DS9
tried to make a show like that but they added the Defiant when their
ratings began to sink. But the Deviant will never go anywhere. And no
one will ever leave the Deviant. All the adventures will come to it
and every episode will be a bottle show which will really save on
money.

We’ll also save on money by firing all the writers and just openly
recycling old scripts. I mean we’ve been paying writers thousands and
thousands of dollars just to recycle old TOS, TNG, DS9 and Voyager
scripts we allready had and we figured that we have hundreds of old
scripts around and we might as well reuse them openly. And the same
thing goes for special effects. Admittedly some of the old FX footage
we have in the can is a little incompatible and some of it is decades
old, but we’ll make do. And as a final money saver, all our episodes
are going to be directed by David Livingston whom we’re going to keep
chained up in the studio basement.”

As a bonus, Obnoxious Trek will also be reusing all the Enterprise
sets without even bothering to redress them. Once the studio would
have avoided such a move for fear of alienating fans but now banking
on its new approach, such a move will only serve to enhance the hatred
that viewers will feel for the show.

“I don’t know why we didn’t think of this before.” Brannon Braga said
while sensualiciously sipping his swiss mocha cappucino. “It was
always staring us right in the face. We’re just not any good at
creating a series that people will like and we were so good at
creating shows that people just hated almost as much as they hated
Saddam Hussein. And we should stick to what we’re good at. Obnoxious
Trek.”

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Get Two Dimensional.

As anyone who occasionally browses Gawker couldn’t have helped but notice the site has gone into a state of Eric Schaeffer mania. This seems to be par for the course these days for the more snippy gossip blogs picking out a target, usually some middling obscure figure with a web presence, and beginning to pound away at him.

It’s not that Eric Schaeffer isn’t slimy and pretty much everything he’s been called. He is. And there’s no shortage like him. It’s that blogging at places like Gawker and the rest of the slimy Nick Denton network or the Ivy League Blog comes down to picking on someone and making a spectacle of abusing them and letting the readers join in. When it’s done well enough the story can explode so it makes the news, witness Aleksei Vayner whose big crime was being a compulsive liar and making a retarded promotional video for himself. Now granted Vayner was entertaining but the bigger picture is that this is the blogging form of Reality TV, the American version of the Chinese morality mobs. And it’s ultimately abusive and senseless.

Bloggers who have gotten tired of eating their own in all the petty spats, outings and blog wars and finding real politicians and celebrities too big for all but a handful of them to reach, have settled on this kind of process of plucking obscure figures out of the refuse of the internet and various social circles and beating them up for public entertainment.

After the firestorm caused by the incisive and brilliant political
analysis of McDougal’s Open Letter to America from a Canadian
appearing in the Baltimore Chronicle, which proved among other things
that the FBI killed JFK, blew up the World Trade Center, assassinated
Enron executives and of course the international banking conspiracy
that runs the world (see Kampf, Mein) and that all Americans spend
their time eating cheeseburgers while watching COPS, we had no choice
but to give a public craving more, more Open Letters from that same
fount of brilliance. While they seem to concern more ordinary everyday
affairs, they nevertheless contain that same scintillating wit and
trademark mastery of rhetoric and logic, that made the original Open
Letter to America from a Canadian such a masterpiece of political
oratory in our time.

Letter 1:

READ AT YOUR OWN RISK:

Open Letter to My Upstairs Neighbor

Dear Mr.. Sagall,

And so it has come to this.

Our once untroubled relationship has gone by the wayside as you seem
to have descended into a pervasive madness that causes me to question
your sanity and shudder in terror at the horrors your diseased mind is
set to loose upon your downstairs neighbor.

You are a sick man, but you continue to carry on as if nothing is the
matter. Strange noises resound through the thin walls of our building.
Horrid animal noises. Your dubious excuse for this has been to claim
that these satanic wails are meant to be some form of music, yet I
would contend that they are nothing less than the willful and craven
means to intimidate me into rescinding my complaint to the landlord
and the police over the inappropriate noises by you and the succession
of whores who traffic their way into your apartment.

You have become a whoremonger, Mr.. Sagal.

Hypocrite.

Liar.

Monster.

Adulterer.

I have long tolerated a seemingly endless succession of your crimes.
The noises your bicycle makes early in the morning. The time your
newfangled toaster oven blew out the electrical circuits leaving me in
the dark to contemplate the newfound depths of your evil as I was
deprived of my weekly broadcast from Mr.. Lyndon LaRouche. The number
of visitors to your apartment who knocked on my door, claiming to have
accidentally mistaken my apartment for yours, though this is clearly
impossible as our two apartments are on different floors and marked by
different numbers.

I have seen your soda bottles piled in the bin like a mountain of
human skulls. I have gazed upon the trash you collect in large
oversized bags the color of darkness, of your black heart, hoping to
conceal their contents from me. But though the material of which they
were made was tough, it was not impenetrable and I know that you have
had an ear infection as recently as this February. Yes I know that and
many other things about you and when the time comes I shall reveal
them to an eagerly waiting world which has not yet come to know you
for monster you are. And still despite all these atrocities I remained
silent (except for my anonymous notes signed ‘A Vigilant Watcher’ and
‘The Shadow’ hoping the madness of your parties and your endless
carousing would come to their close. Yet matters have only grown
worse.

You stood by as Mrs.. Zanuck in 3B slaughtered untold amounts of
innocent ants and roaches with a bug spray. A chemical bug spray full
of pesticides. And when her own supply ran out, you gave her more.
Your conscience was not troubled by the terror that she wrought, nor
was your soul stirred by the chemical messages of desperate ants
scurrying for shelter as they were poisoned, exterminated from the
air. Adolf Hitler himself could have been no more ruthless, no more
callous to their helpless plight. No monstrous tyrant in all of
history had more crimes to his record than yours. Not the worst
butcher felt so little pity for his victims as you. And in your
cynical arrogance you say that they are only ants. You say that if
they stopped living in my apartment, there would be no need to kill
them.

And yet this entire campaign was a folly. The ants have returned as
have the resources. Your chemical perversions of nature could not keep
them down. And yet rather than recognize the folly of your actions,
you continue to perpetuate this same hopeless campaign with more
powerful and lethal bug sprays. Blind to your own evil madness, you
seek out more powerful chemical substances from the supermarket like a
madman never satisfied with the carnage he has wrought against the
helpless and the innocent.

How can you look at yourself in the mirror every morning, Mr.. Sagall?
Does this record of your crimes not trouble you in the least?

You were never concerned about the impact of your disgraceful
behavior. No you were too busy swilling all sorts of alcoholic drinks
and listening to vile music that leaks through the walls like toxic
waste polluting my mind and my sprit. No it’s simply time for you to
party again.

Go back to your ten billionth party, Mr.. Sagall. Stuff your rotten
decaying corpus with every form of vile snack and beverage. Let the
toxic rhythms of your stereo system destroy your hearing and the last
sad remnants of your brain. You’ve never used it anyway. Since you
refuse to listen, you might as well be deaf and since you refuse to
think, you may as well be brain dead.

When did you stop caring Mr.. Sagall? Was it when you first moved into
the building and you dropped a gum wrapper in the lobby? Was it when
you began radiating secret orders to my cat, Paine, forcing her to do
your dirty bidding to spy on me, thus forcing me to poison her kibbles
with draino? Does your conspiring with the Martian Priests from the
Ancient Cult of Gra not cause you the least bit of worry, even though
by doing so you have betrayed your own race?

Forget it, just throw another party.

You excoriate those courageous souls like myself and 89 year old Mr..
Shelby from 4E, though they are the only individuals in this building
who have the courage to condemn your amoral lifestyle and alien
conspiracies. You hound them as you hounded me when you called me a
‘loon’, a ‘crazed kook’ and a ‘nut-job who needs to be locked up in a
loony bin.’ And yes I remember when you sent your hired goons from the
telephone company to fix my line, even though there was nothing wrong
with it at the time.

Mr.. Sagall, you are a goddamn shame.

What law matters now in your despicable state? What justice? What
truth?

When will you wake up?

If there is any spark of human decency left in you, you would dig out
that alien transmitter from your frontal lobe with a pair of common
household pliers and take out an ad in the next to last page of every
paper written in backwards script proclaiming that the international
Martian-Zionist-Commonwealth conspiracy no longer controls your
thoughts. But you are dead, spiritually, emotionally and
intellectually dead.

As I write these words, I can only imagine what horrors you and your
alien puppet masters are plotting together and what you will commit to
justify my extermination. For you must know that I have stumbled onto
your plot and that you must terminate my existence or risk me exposing
you to the world for the monster that you are? A massive conspiracy
with its roots in every European capitol. The diversion of my mail for
several days? Perhaps a hypodermic needle used to inject dihydrogen
monoxide into my soymilk?

Or perhaps I will slay you first, committing that terrible deed and
taking your life. The last thought on my mind, is keeping the promise
I made to Paine as he lay there, the draino eating out his guts. My
cat shall be avenged!

——
Mr. McDougal’s neighbor has at yet to respond to this letter in any
way. Should this state of affairs continue, Mr. McDouglas wishes to
state that he will no longer be responsible for his actions.

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