Boob Toob 2009

Television has changed since I was a kid. I remember when I was around ten my family often referred to me when they wanted to know what was on. The reason was because each week when the TV Guide arrived on our doorstep via postal mail or from the supermarket or from the Sunday paper, I'd be the first to grab it and I'd practically memorize the whole thing. Certainly the prime time schedule and the cartoons on Saturday morning. I was a walking encyclopedia of useless television information. I knew Farrah Fawcett was the oldest Angel (30). I knew Kristy MacNichol and Leif Garrett had a thing for each other (but it ended in tears). I knew the names of all the Smurfs. You get the idea.

Today it's different. My television is in a corner of my room gathering dust. Its darkened unblinking eye reflects the distant light from my computer monitor as I type these words. I used to look at it but now it's looking at me, perhaps wondering what it did wrong. I used to enjoy passive entertainment. Now I still do, but I like a more interactive element to my entertainment. Or rather, I like the illusion of interactivity. I like making notes about shows I watch and I do enjoy comments and replies from others about these shows, but sometimes I wonder if I didn't get any feedback or input, would I be doing this anyway? I like to criticize the shows I watch, but I don't know if I'd like to do anything about it. Would I want to improve it? Could I if I were given an option? Most likely not. I used to believe I could make a living with ideas in my head. So far that hasn't materialized. I only make a living by blindly following the whims of other people's ideas, which is perhaps more than anything why I refuse to discuss 'work' in my blog. Well, that and office politics and nondisclosure agreements and things I don't understand. I go here to get away from all that stuff. 'Nuff said.

So today when I say "television" I'm not actually referring to a television. I watch pretty much all my TV online, so it's no longer really TV. It's Hulu or DVDs or YouTube or whatever I can find. I stopped paying for cable television when the SciFi Channel canceled Mystery Science Theater 3000. I had wanted to quit cable for a long time because I couldn't rationalize paying for all these channels that were subjecting me to commercials over and above my subscription fee. I thought the whole purpose behind Pay TV was to make commercials obsolete? Further, when MST3K was removed from the airwaves, it occurred to me that whoever the people behind cable television were making cable television for? It wasn't for me. They were keeping stuff I didn't like on the air and removing stuff I did like. So I left cable over a decade ago now and I have no desire of going back.

Hulu has been talking about going to some kind of pay model. If that happens, I fear I'll have to look elsewhere. If I were made of money it wouldn't matter, but already I pay to get on the Internet. Then there's ads all over the place. I'm not going to pay to access every website on top of that, and a pox on you if you give in to that. That would be like going to a club in Deep Ellum, having to pay to drive there (gas), then having to pay to park, then having to pay to get in the door (cover charge) then having to pay for everything I drink or eat at outrageously jacked up prices, then having to tip the bartenders and waitresses, and then having to pay the band for playing for every song. Yeah, I stopped clubbing about a decade or so ago too.

The cost of living is just too expensive to enjoy. So instead I like to spend my free time on the Web. The last bastion of serenity in a life where I'm pretty much waiting stupidly for something interesting to happen to me because I'm too cheap and lazy and unproductive to just go out there and make something happen to me.

Back in 2003 I boycotted FOX because they canceled Firefly, Tru Calling, and a host of other programs I enjoy. I was livid and felt helpless. I didn't quit on FOX because I thought it'd make a difference to them. I knew they wouldn't notice. I just no longer wanted to even passively support a network that refused to cater to my interests. This eventually expanded to most other networks too but to lesser degrees.

I have since gone back and looked for what I missed on the FOX network. The only show that comes to mind that I wish I'd seen as it was broadcast was HouseMD and recently I've 'caught up' on that one. DVDs are wonderful things. I still don't watch the Simpsons anymore, and pretty much everything else on FOX between 2003 and now has been kinda... well, Lie To Me is cool, but that's a relatively new show. I dropped my boycot when Whedon and Dushku got with FOX to bring Dollhouse to TV. I thought I'd give the network a second chance.

Today, I understand that FOX has canceled Dollhouse, but it doesn't really mean anything to me now. It has no relevance, because FOX and ABC and NBC and and Scyfy and BBC and CBC and Discovery Channel and Comedy Central are to me really all Hulu. HBO is a pain in the ass because it doesn't put jack shit on Hulu. So I don't watch Bill Maher as often as I'd like. When I do it's in pieces over at YouTube. I've only started watching Monk because it's now available on Hulu, but unfortunately I started liking it just in time to watch it end. CBS also hasn't entered the 21st century yet so I have to find Big Bang Theory by 'other means.' These networks, both the ones getting with the program and the ones holding out, are in fear of obsolescence. They want to still matter. They still want you to know that LOST is on ABC or HEROES is on NBC. I know this, but it's about as pointless to me now as memorizing the special guest stars appearing on Happy Days back in the 1970s. It might be a novel thing to know, but it's trivial, because it has no practical usefulness to me any longer. The networks can fret all they want, but they're already obsolete.

They can either speed this process along and embrace their own extinction, or they can fight it, but the latter won't even slow it down, and the former won't be a more noble way to go out. Just as the dinosaurs couldn't stop the meteor from slamming into Earth, television has no way to stave off its own execution. It has served its purpose for almost a century, but now it's going the way of the dodo. One could argue that it's because people like me no longer wish to pay for it, but I think that's more of a symptom than a cause. It's an after effect.

Recently I saw a news report claiming that nearsightedness is on the rise in America, just as obesity is. The question then became is that because more Americans are embracing entertainment via smartphones and laptops as opposed to trying to make a three pointer shot in the basketball court of a community YMCA? Or is it that we human beings tend to prefer entertainment that is less taxing, and lends to our strengths? I'm near sighted but I've been nearsighted since I was a kid. Granted, I was practically born and raised on television, but I think this is a kinda 'chicken and the egg' deal. In my youth I liked TV cuz it's easier than trying to entertain myself by going outside to play. Today, I prefer the web because it's cheaper and when it tries to tell me what to spend what little money I have, I can usually squelch the noise. I don't have that option with television, and with billboards getting bigger and becoming more and more prominent on my daily commute, real life is becoming more and more annoying.

The Internet allows me to create my own network. ZachTV. My programs are broadcast when I want to see them, not when some guy in a suit decides its most ideal for some demographic. My programming never conflicts. If CASTLE and HEROES are on the air at the same time for the rest of the world, I just wait a day and watch them at my leisure, in whichever order I prefer. I can include in my virtual network programming that regular networks would never touch. My programs don't have to be thirty minutes or an hour long. They can be five minutes long, or three hours long. Whatever length is necessary to accomodate the needs of the program itself. I get my news from Jon Stewart, Marta Costello, Uncle Jay and The Onion Network. My programs don't get pre-empted by the President's speech. In fact if it weren't for Jon Stewart telling me on The Daily Show that the president recently had a speech, I wouldn't know about it at all, and that's just the way I like it.

Aside form network shows like Dollhouse, Castle, Monk, Big Bang Theory, Heroes, Fringe, House MD, Sanctuary, Lie To Me, Lost, and The Daily Show w/Jon Stewart, I also regularly watch Mister Deity, Felicia Day's The Guild, Mediocre Films, 2 Hot Girls In The Shower, Rooster Teeth, Kilplixism, The Art Of The Drink, The Onion, Val's Art Diary, Gnooze & Uncle Jay Explains The News. In conventional network television, these shows don't belong together. As far as I'm concerned, this is the best that today's entertainers have to offer me, so for me they're all one big happy family.

I was watching Kevin Pollak's Chat Show until recently. Even though the show actually still exists on the web for anyone else to see, KPCS is currently on hiatus in my virtual network with a demographic of one. I'm debating whether or not I want to renew it for a second season. There are some things about it that I like and other things about it that I don't. I guess that's like how Fox Network executives feel about Joss Whedon's Dollhouse. It's a good show, but for some reason just doesn't accomplish what it needs to in order to keep the audience at an acceptable level of interest.

I used to blame networks for that. Now, I have no one to blame but myself if I watch something I don't like anymore.

Doer of Wonder

I'm no great seminary student or learned scholar of biblical texts. However, I have had my humble share of teaching in this area. From practically birth to my mid teens I regularly attended Baptist Churches every Sunday morning, most Sunday nights, and depending on the church in question there'd usually also be social opportunities on Wednesday nights as well. I didn't do this because I wanted to or needed to. I went to church because my family were church goers and therefore so was I. I had no reason to rebel beyond the fact that most of the time, it was usually incredibly boring.

I recall once in my junior high years we had an active Youth Director who was Filled With The Spirit and had taken it upon himself to educate us youngsters on the Power of Christ. I think he had recently attended some seminars where he'd purchased cool looking educational materials and he felt if we were armed with Knowledge, we'd be able to Witness to Nonbelievers and our own Salvation would be intact with our Belief. ..or words to that effect.

I should reiterate here that I didn't go to church because I wanted to. Thinking back I can't even say I went because I did believe, although I must have. I think. I went to church because my parents asked me to and I didn't want to displease them. I went to church because that's what you do when you live in a family that goes to church. I don't even think I'd thought that much about the whole thing before this point. I got more out of comic books that illustrated bible stories than I did out of the bible itself but to me it was all the same. If adults told me there was a god, there was a god. Just like any answer to "why is the sky blue" was acceptable so long as it was some kind of answer. I couldn't have been more than 15 at this point and the idea I'd one day be 40 was fantastical. Most of the universe was fantastical to me. I didn't take much of anything seriously. Even when I did take something seriously, it'd be in that melodramatic way where kids strung out on hormones take serious things. Whatever bad thing happened it'd be the end of the world and I would experience my life as if it were an episode of a TV series named after myself. I should also point out here that I did attend these meetings at least partially cuz there was a gorgeous blonde chick whose name escapes me at the moment but that I had completely failed to ever impress.

Our Youth Director planned to have us meet together every Wednesday night all summer and he'd relay to us the Wonder of Jesus from an historical perspective. I recall one particular night where he came in armed with all kinds of charts and booklets and a whiteboard upon which he'd jotted bible verses and he was going to prove to us once and for all that Jesus lived, and that the Bible was a valid historical tome as well as living proof to the Word of God. The room had us surrounded with authentic looking evidence, but that I could tell didn't really tell me anything more than we already knew.

Jesus was born in Bethlehem because his parents had to go there for the purposes of the Roman Census. Joseph followed Mary even though they both believed that the unborn Jesus wasn't his. That alone always troubled me but that night I didn't bother to mention it. We know very little about what happened to Jesus between his birth and his adulthood. There's one scene when he was about a decade old where he rebelled from his parents by spending all day in a synagogue arguing with pharisees. When Joseph demanded he return to their house, Jesus said he was already at his Father's house. I always found this a very rebellious sentiment, kinda like when I'd diss my Dad over worthless trifles. It amused me that Jesus was as petty and self-centered as I am. There's entire years unaccounted for. Jesus goes from birth to puberty in the space of a couple paragraphs, and then graduates to a beard and sandals by the turn of a page. This is a rather cryptic historical record for a guy that's supposedly the centerpiece of an entire religion. George W. Bush prized his privacy throughout his reign as Leader of the Free World, but we know where he attended college. We know he drank a lot of alcohol in his youth and probably did cocaine. We don't know Jack about Jesus.

The Youth Director went on and on but my mind was drifing, and I found myself more concerned about the fact my eyes kept involuntarily flitting back to the gorgeous blonde chick and her sandy blonde hair and crystal blue eyes and soft white skin. I honestly wanted to concentrate on what the Youth Director was saying, but I found myself combating sinful thoughts instead. They didn't seem all that sinful really. I wasn't thinking of nudity in that moment in fact I kinda preferred her wearing clothes. In fact it woulda been fun if the both of us were fondling one another fully clothed, inside a big sleeping back, near a cozy campfire underneath a moonlit sky...

I had issues. No doubt about that. However, they didn't seem to be particularly hellfire and brimstoney. I was really just mostly thinking how could I get her to be mildly pleased about the fact we shared the same air.

I blinked back to reality and the Youth Director was talking now about the authenticity of the Bible itself. How it WAS the Word of God, and he'd prove it. Then he spent the next half hour or so explaining how the Bible actually got written.

Thousands of years ago we didn't have printing presses or magazines or anything like that. They had paprus. The Egyptians invented paper and it was rolled up in the form of scrolls because they kept better that way, but paper is very delicate and moisture or insects or any number of other things could damage them over time. Before paper was invented, the only way stories could be captured was if they were chiseled in stone, or more commonly if they were passed down from one generation to the next.

Tribes of people would live together like a community, and the wise people of the village would regularly tell stories of great wonder to the others in the community, and the older generations would challenge the younger generations to memorize these stories so they'd be able to tell them to their children. And this is how most of the Old Testament was chronicled. These stories passed down for scores of generations were eventually transcribed onto papaya by people the Youth Director called Scribes. These Scribes would then keep collections of scrolls hidden away for safekeeping from extreme weather, hungry bugs, marrauders, etc.

"Password," I mumbled I thought to myself.

The Youth Director turned to me, "I don't understand."

"Yeah, I don't either." I glanced about the room. The cute blonde wasn't looking at me. She was looking at the Youth Director. Everyone else though was looking at me. I found it uncomfortable and yet the attention whore in me perked up - always preferred an audience even if I were the butt of the joke. "We were playing the game Password in this very room just a few months ago," I looked at everyone else in the room to see if anyone else remembered this. They either didn't, or didn't care, as it made no difference to them. "One person started with one phrase and after twenty people whispered it to each other we came up with something entirely diffferent!"

"You're right!"

"So if we can't keep a simple phrase accurate in the same room over the course of a minute, how could entire tribes of people keep bible length stories straight for over twenty generations?"

The Youth Director responded to this as if he were expecting the answer, and launched into a very detailed account of how younger generations were required by elders to learn not only the exact wording of these stories but identical inflections and mannerisms and what not. I asked him how he knew this was so and he said some historians whose books he'd read had researched this.

"How could they research it?"

"They're historians. They looked it up."

"But we're talking about pre-history. We're talking about a time before writing and paper. What are they looking up? Other historians?"

The rest of the summer went kinda downhill. Every Wednesday night for weeks the Youth Director came in armed with more answers and I came armed with more questions. By the time we got to the King James Version of the Bible and canonization practices of the Roman Catholic Church, I walked away from the whole thing more confused than ever. I think the Youth Director thought he won the argument, but by then I'd realized that pretty much everyone else in that class shunned me, because I was a squeaky wheel, and that cute blonde chick was never going to know I'm alive, so I didn't really care about the class at all anymore. I'd just stopped arguing. And then I stopped going.

None of them were there to learn more about God. Like me, they were there because when you're a white anglo saxon protestant in suburban America in the 1980s, you go to Youth Group on Wednesdays because that's what you do. You go to public school during the week because you go. You do what your parents tell you cuz you do what your parents tell you until you get rebellious and learn when and where and how you can break that particular commandment, and suddenly some of the other commandments (like lying and coveting for example) get easier.

You believe in God because you believe in God. You don't question it.

I kinda repeated this to a lesser extent in college. I attended a Methodist university which required some theology classes. I took the New Testament course because I figured it'd be an easy A. I'd already read enough of the textbook to pass. I came out of that class with an even firmer understanding of how weak The Holy Bible passes as an historical document, that outside the Bible itself there is zero documentation that Jesus ever existed, and I also molded a detailed opinion of Saint Paul of Tarsus that left me thinking when I got to heaven the first thing I wanted to do was walk up to the guy and punch him in the mouth.

"Give unto Caesar that which was Caesar's." What a coward. He'd tell the followers in entire cities what he thought of them while sitting comfortably in someone else's city, judging even though he wasn't the one who should be judging, a believer in his own press who became arrogant and drunk from power, and he wasn't even one of the original twelve! There were twelve people who hung out with Jesus - why is over 80% of the New Testament from a guy who was Caesar's lap dog? He rebelled a bit and got thrown in jail and wrote even more letters to cities telling them how to live their lives as if he were some authority. And his statements against gay people are harmful and cruel. Even though I was then and still am now a recovering homophobe (sorry gay people you creep me out but that's my trip not yours don't sweat it), Paul is downright prejudiced to the point of disgust. THIS was the guy who founded Roman Catholicism? Paul's the ass upon which all contemporary Christianity is based? No wonder the religion makes no sense.

Yet despite all this, despite the fact that the more I investigated about the religion the less credence I could give it, I still considered myself a Christian all the way up until March of this year. Even when I embraced The SubGenius Church in 1985 and found ways to laugh at my own beliefs, I still thought of myself a SubGenius Christian and honestly thought I could balance the two.

Sure MANKIND had fucked up chronicling and accurately citing proof to the existence of God, that didn't mean God didn't exist. It meant we humans failed to prove His existence but that's just because we are inferior.

I look at a leaf or a baby or the stars in the sky and think surely this was all made with a purpose. It's too majestic and wondrous and amazing to just be there with no logic behind it. There must be a Presence. An Instigator. An Artist of Universal Proportions. Something. Surely something so breathtakingly wondrous as the Universe didn't just happen by sheer chance. There must be a method behind the madness. That method must have been orchestrated by something akin to human, or at least humanoid, or at least something or someone who is on our side. Otherwise, if there is no god, a random 'planet killer' asteroid could at any second be discovered on a collision path with Earth, and there wouldn't be a god to coincidentally place Jupiter in its path so that we'd be saved.

I still let myself believe in god and just stopped believing in Man. I stopped believing in religion many years ago, because that was a construct of Man. I stopped believing in god less than a year ago, because it finally dawned on me that if religion is a construct of Man, then so are gods. Even and especially The One True God. It's all a lie. I hope it doesn't take you forty years to see it. Whoever you are.

Temporal Ethics In Lost

Ethics? Really? Time doesn't need ethics any more than the Voyager 1 spacecraft needs a burrito.

There are no ethics of time travel, beyond what sentient beings choose to place upon it. I imagine that if any individual ever got close to discovering time travel prematurely, people from the future would approach them in the past and place their own self-centered rules and restrictions. Far more likely though, time travelers from the future would seek to protect their own historical records, for fear that deviations of their past may erase their own future, placing someone else in power for example, or wiping out their race. If that guy was meant to figure out time travel, messing with his present could destroy their past, so it would be in the best interests of anyone not to travel into their own past for fear that it might upset their own present. If there is only time time line, that is a valid concern.

I happen to accept currently the Many Worlds Theory of Quantum Mechanics, until I see sufficient evidence otherwise. However, the writers of LOST don't seem to be falling on that overused hack answer for time travel in fiction which is to their credit. The story becomes much more interesting if there's only one time line.

In the movie Back To The Future 2, Biff goes back in time and (among other things) kills Marty's father, thus building an empire for himself that ruins Marty's future. However, when old Biff went back to young Biff and gave him the sports statistics so he could bet on the winners, he didn't erase the previous timeline. He also didn't invent a new timeline. He committed actions that were always meant to happen that were always meant to fulfill that timeline. This sounds like predetermination I know but it's not. Because Old Biff was the kinda guy who would do such a thing, there's a probable chance that he would. There's also a probable chance he wouldn't. So BOTH of those realities exist, as well as an infinite number of others. We just didn't see those other realities cuz they're not the ones to which the DeLorean took 'our' Marty McFly. Notice that in Rich Biff's time period there was another Marty McFly who was in another country. This is a fun storyline, but it's chock full of paradoxes and impossibilities, if followed to its natural conclusions.

In the LOST universe, we've been given every indication that there is only one time line. Whatever Happened Happened. Dead Is Dead. The producers and writers of LOST are not playing with paradoxes. They're saying there is no paradox, or rather if there is, it's only one, and it's a biggie, and it's what will get resolved at the end of season six for better or for worse. What I'm hoping though is that the use of time as a plot device is behind them, and as we start season six they'll make it very clear that Whatever Happened Happened, and they'll move forward. I understand many fans speculate that what we've seen are actually multiple time lines. However, the writers have gone out of their way to keep everything on as linear a line as is possible in episodic storytelling that involves seemingly sporadic and arbitrary temporal hopping. This goes against my own personal "beliefs" (for lack of a better word) about how time would work, but I'm not writing LOST.

Time is like a river. Metaphorically, time starts at the top of a mountain as a raincloud. It falls down the mountain first as a trickle then a stream and then a river. At times it collects in pockets like ponds or lakes. At other intervals it may fall quickly like down a waterfall or surging through river rapids. Sometimes it'll be in the form of a small creek and at other times the creeks merge together into larger streams or rivers, and sometimes those rivers branch off into smaller tributaries and this can go on and on until finally it reaches the ocean. Of course that is sort of where the metaphor breaks down, because water in the ocean can then be collected up into the atmosphere once again as rain clouds and the whole process repeats itself. Many fans of LOST think that is exactly what's going on: that these characters are caught in a loop and while UnLocke finds this a futile endeavor, Jacob feels that repeating their little game will eventually lead to progress - a different result. Any psychiatrist will tell you: repeating the same actions over and over, anticipating a different result, is a sign of madness. I'm not convinced Jacob is the good guy here.

Unlocke (aka Blackie or Nemesis) & Jacob have been doing dance of theirs this since at least the ancient Egyptians. Perhaps even before that but the producers haven't shown us anything older than that four toed statue. If we are to accept the conversation between Unlocke & Jacob at the start of S5's finale at face value, every time they've repeated their little game, Unlocke's prediction has come true. So Jacob has "lost" to Unlocke thru ancient Egypt, the time of The Black Rock (which I believe to be Richard's time) and on and on up until our present day.

So Unlocke & Jacob have stuck themselves in a loop, but linear time continues to keep on slippin slippin slippin into the future. Unlocke is trying to stop Jacob from changing what he believes to be the acceptable result. Jacob wants something to change. It appears that it's humanity's faults and short-sighted selfishness that is the hinge of this change. Unlocke believes their pawns are lemmings that will continue to make the same kinds of mistakes. Jacob is either aspiring for something better, or more likely he's going for something worse, because based on the lowly 3D restricted humans chosen to be their pawns, Jacob's not trying to cultivate piety and perfection and excellence. He's tilling the soil of humanity hoping to grow some weeds.

They each seem to have some control over life & death, time & space. However, they each can only cause one effect as they traverse through, and can't go back to undo what they've done or undo what the other has already committed. These are their rules of the game.

We don't know why Jacob visited Kate, Sawyer, Jack, Hurley, and perhaps even others in our Losties' pasts, and we may assume he did this by traveling back in time from some point near current present (say Sept 2004 after the crash). We may also assume he met them in his linear travel through time, either by happenstance or because he knew their fates were sealed, or a third possibility that he was altering their fates so that they would better assist his future.

We still don't know to what end, and that may not be made fully clear until the very last hour of the very last show. I don't question the ethics of time travel when it comes to Blackie & Jacob because I'm not yet convinced they're able to do so at the drop of a hat. The temporal distortions we witnessed in season five did not appear to be as a direct result of either Jacob or Blackie's actions. They knew about them. They're not surprised. Jacob could sense their impending return from the past as he lay 'dying'.

No matter how many tributaries meander about the surface of the planet Earth, all water eventually finds its way out to sea. Man can build a dam, but that only holds back the inevitable. Years, decades, centuries from a dam being built, it will fall, or the river will simply reroute itself making the dam irrelevant.

As Mrs. Hawking is fond of saying: Time has a way of course correcting.