I was just talking to Left Wing Cracker offline about how I am not fan of Valentine’s Day and he is a fan of the Anti-Valentine’s Day events which I find to be very groovy. My sis, Homer, and I also decided this morning as we drank coffee looking at the snow in the sun room that we think it’s a bunch of corporate hoo-haa.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m a die-in-the-wool romantic. I don’t like Valentine’s Day or the movie Titanic, but I will secretly watch a rom-com when I’m in the mood. My favorite, of course, is Shaun of the Dead.
But, I do like zombies so I guess if I were going to get a Valentine’s Day card, this would be the one I would want from Io9.
My random observations on pop culture this week aren’t that pithy or clever, but I did randomly observe them so there is that.
1. Donny Osmond will remain in your tubes with ebbs and flows forever. The man constantly reinvents himself. (And, yes, I did like his song in Mulan. Shut Up. Yes, I did watch him when I was 10-years-old because I had three damned channels and I was 10.) I don’t watch Dancing With The Stars but I do read Entertainment Weekly and dude won.
2. I’ve seen all the controversy on Adam Lambert’s appearance on the AMA awards this week. I have two mindsets on this. Once again, I don’t watch American Idol either, so what I’ve seen of Lambert is peripheral. First of all, I don’t have children but I can see this upsetting parents. My Facebook account has shown that it wasn’t by any means appreciated from the people there and I understand that. As a matter of fact, I think that’s completely appropriate. Letters have been sent to ABC complaining about his performance and the last I heard was roughly about 1,500. On the other hand, for three solid days from a social media perspective, we’ve seen him trend on Twitter with a huge blast of support from his fans there as well which people haven’t been talking about, he’s been interviewed a kajillion times and that’s the kind of publicity you can’t buy.He reminds me of David Bowie (I know, call me Captain Obvious) and because I’m an old codger without kids, my first reaction was that his vocal performance was very pitchy (my mother was a singer, so I play critic sometimes on vocal live performances which, however bad, are always better than lip synch crap.)
Was the simulated sexual act over the top, yes it was way over the top in a live performance and was nothing more than shock value and gratuitous but I’ve seen other stuff too that sort of shocked me on the tubes. Was Lambert kissing a dude over the top? No. Been done a million times by other performers not just between two guys. He pushed open a door where people are talking about freedom of expression/gay rights and that’s not bad. So I see this from two perspectives. Do folks have the right to be upset about simulated oral sex? Yeah, their feelings are valid. Everyone’s feeling are valid. Did Lambert kick down a door? Yeah, but people have been kicking this door for years and it needs to be kicked. It was a reminder more or less. Remember when they wouldn’t show Elvis’ hips on the Ed Sullivan show because he was too sexual. Back then, that was scandalous as well so I have been keeping that in mind.
I remind you I’m a codger butt.
So I see both sides where this issue is and it’s intriguing to me, especially in the day and age of the Internet.
3. Zhu Zhu pets are apparently the toy of the year. I am constantly perplexed on the world of robotic pets.
5. Also in the Thanksgiving vein, I offer you the impossibly optimistic website called “Gives Me Hope” which is smaltzy and did, indeed, make my eyes well up because I’m a silly nostalgic woman. (Pssst … don’t tell anybody.)
Homer will not let me put this picture on my blog. As the new dog, Pinkey, brought in a dead snake upon her arrival to Chez Coma her first week here and Homer locked herself in her minivan, you know that this scared the pants off of here. Snakes the size of a plane. (Make obligatory Snakes on a Plane comment below.)
Dirk Diggler has accepted the honor of becoming my personal chef for the whopping sum of two six-packs of Busch beer a week. Now all I have to do is get me a life coach. My lawyer is on retainer for $10 bucks a year. I’m nothing if not frugal. Yes, I need a new photo of Dirk. No, he won’t let me take one.
Although I have no cabana, I would love to employ a cabana boy. My Craig’s List ad would read “Must be mute, worship my mere existence, love to give massages, fetches beer for me when requested and leave me alone when the remote is in my hand.” Yes, I’m not only an 18-year-old dude but a commitment-phobe comfortable with silence.
Just go here and read the basic 101 of why zombies are important.
Originally, most movie zombies were voodoo oriented. Either re-animated dead, or people who were made into living zombies. This was a slave metaphor. People being bound to a will that was not there own. They weren’t the rotten flesh, braining eating variety we know now. They were homunculi, false men.
It wasn’t until Romero that the modern zombie really emerged. And the symbols he laced into his zombie metaphor were incredible. The source of the zombie plague? A satellite that fell out of the sky. What are the zombies after? Your brains. What people normally don’t know is that the same year that Night of the Living Dead came out, was the same year that we got the first live news coverage from Vietnam. The first satellite news coverage. Romero was worried that with the growth of world-wide mass media we would all be responding to the same stimuli. We’d start to think them same, which would lead us to act the same, which would make us into zombies.
The storyline of this fictional show has the castmembers of a Big Brother show trapped in their home playing to win the cash prize while outside the house/set zombies have taken over the world. Then when each houseguest is eliminated, they exit the safe house and the first thing they encounter is the undead seeking to eat their brains.
Brooker has conjured up a very clever satire, mocking the people who take part in these shows and the sort of people who watch them. In one brief scene a zombie, drooling blood and spittle, sits transfixed by the Big Brother live feed. Such are the perils of watching too much telly.
Endemol, which makes Big Brother, also produced Dead Set. Talk about having your cake – or should that be zombie? – and eating it.
It is also very scary. In an era when TV eschews the horror genre, I can’t remember anything quite like it. It makes Ultraviolet – remember that? – look like children’s hour.
Hoping I can find a bootleg somewhere because if you watch the clip at the link, there is a ton of bitching awesome going on here.
Basically, employees of the network cannot use Facebook, Twitter, Blog or even comment in forums and chat rooms without permission from the CNN higher ups according to Chez Pazienza, who was famously fired from CNN for blogging at Deus Ex Malcontent. His story is here.
You can head to their blogs to get the vibe of what’s going on.
I agree with Mark who says this:
Did I give up my right to protest or vote when I started working for a newspaper? I hope not.
Many newspapers are actively encouraging reporters to take up blogging. Newspapers invite reporters to express opinion in the print editions. Newspapers have long held that as long as the opinion expressed is marked clearly as that of the reporter, it is acceptable.
I talk about evolving trends in the news business a lot. I don’t understand why more media folks don’t blog or use Twitter. I’ve seen more breaking news on Twitter that it still boggles my mind.
Technology has run laps around the print media — giving readers instant news, open-source journalism, no barriers to become publishers, and an infinite news hole.
The idea that your daily news is collected, written, edited, paginated, printed on dead trees, put in a series trucks and cars and delivered on your driveway — at least 12 hours stale — is anachronistic in 2008.
I think these things are connected. The writer talks about his 18 years with the Times. I’ve worked in news off and on for nearly 20 years. The way I started out has vastly changed in those two decades.
And the blogosphere has changed in the nearly three years I’ve been blogging. Some media outlets get it and have actively worked toward changing their model to accommodate changes that will happen in the future, which is smart. Even some rural outlets do although there are a great deal of folks who do not and angrily (yes, I said angrily) hold on to that the old ways are the only way to do news.
There is chasm that exists between old and new.
And CNN is treating online communication like a dinosaur. When you edit free thought, then what do you have?
The Hello Kitty Zombie Cake
