Research proves it, tv is “detrimental”

What is it now, you ask? A recent study into parents, toddlers, and attentiveness has led to expected results. Science Daily includes the journal information at the bottom of their report on it for those interested in seeking the whole thing out.

The researchers studied about 50 1-, 2-, and 3-year-olds, each of whom was with one parent, at a university child study center. Half of the one-hour session, parents and children were in a playroom without TV; in the other half-hour, parents chose an adult-directed program to watch (such as Jeopardy!). The researchers observed how often parents and children talked with each other, how actively involved the parents were in their children’s play, and whether parents and children responded to each other’s questions and suggestions.

When the TV was on, the researchers found, both the quantity and the quality of interactions between parents and children dropped. Specifically, parents spent about 20 percent less time talking to their children and the quality of the interactions declined, with parents less active, attentive, and responsive to their youngsters.

Were they studying TV as a background attention catcher, or parents’ attentiveness while physically watching TV? It’s not completely a TV’s fault parents don’t pay attention, if that’s the direction they were going here. Similar results probably would have happened had the activity been housework, food prep, or any other random every day thing a parent does. Parents can’t possibly devote 100% attention to their child every moment of the day. Maybe TV is an added distraction, but it would never be the sole cause of parent-child interpersonal dysfunction. There are always more factors in play, more forces at work.

Not every parent would automatically pop the TV on to fill silence in a room. Some parents are naturally more intuitive and play well with their children and give them plenty of fun and functional activities and a lot of opportunities for talking back and forth. Other parents might rely more on siblings to fill attention gaps, much to the thrill of siblings, I’m sure. Maybe they’re relying on daycare or babysitters or nannies to provide the necessary socialization because they don’t have the time or inclination. We don’t know.

I’d be curious to see how the selection process worked. Did they get samples from enough kinds of families? Rich, poor, working class, etc? Would ethnicity skew these results at all? What about size of town they live in? Would the channel matter? Were they picking families that already admitted to high television use, or did they mix it up to include some that rarely watch, too? What if a parent picked Much Music Retro instead of a Q&A quiz show? Could they see the TV or just hear it? How was “level of interaction” determined in order to figure out how much less there was when the TV was on? Did volume play a role? Too many questions for the amount of information we have, sadly.

If this study is going to be worth a nod, it’ll have to be tried again with a bigger pool than 50 kids, surely? It’s evidence of a trend, but what else can really be said about it?

“Ridicule is the passport into the violence to come”

I’m picking on Andrée Seu again today. She was the one whose commentary I tsk’d over in regards to how women dress. Today her gripe is with Larry David’s character urinating on Jesus in a recent Curb Your Enthusiasm episode. I admit that I can agree with her assumptions of quality television.

One good thing about not being a TV watcher is that I am impervious to the “frog in the pot syndrome.” Everything shocks me because the last I tuned in was to the 1960’s Bonanza.

Supposedly if you throw a frog into a boiling pot of water, it’ll leap out in a panic. If you start with the frog in cool water and slowly warm it, the frog gets used to the changes in heat and doesn’t realize it’s getting boiled alive until it’s much too late to do anything about it. Turns out that’s all a lie. Once the frog gets uncomfortable, it’ll make every attempt to get the hell out.

Unlike this woman, I’m not at all shocked by what passes for entertainment in the world. She must wander the world with her ears blocked and blinders on if she hasn’t already noticed all the terrible humour out there. She’d be wrong to assume that’s all there is, though, just based on one bad experience.

So when my friend told me about the Sunday, October 25 episode of HBO’s Curb Your Enthusiasm, I suffered a genuine Alvin Toffler “future shock.”

Future Shock was written by Toffler in 1970. In it he suggests that technology has been changing so fast that it becomes stressful and traumatic for people who can’t adapt as fast. As someone who is witnessing the dawn of a New Library Age (more on that Monday and the coming weeks) I can concur in theory. I doubt a new library catalogue for the province is going to change divorce rates or increase drug use but I’ll bet library crime will see a big boost once people realize fines have increased to a dollar per DVD per day. I suspect a lot more will walk out the door and never return rather than get properly borrowed.

But I digress. Back to the Curb Your Enthusiasm episode.

The plotline involves Larry David, who plays a caricature himself on the show, going to the bathroom in the home of a Catholic woman where there is a painting of Jesus on the wall next to the toilet. The David character somehow manages to spray a drop of urine onto the icon, and it lands on Jesus’ cheek, below his eye.

Later the woman emerges from the loo and announces that a miracle has happened: The Jesus picture is crying. The audience has a good laugh at the stupid Christian’s expense.

I’m going to agree with how tacky it is. It’s sad that people like Larry David use their shows to malign stupid Catholics. It’s not really their fault they see miracles where none exist. It’s built into the lifestyle. Unlike the frog who isn’t dumb enough to stay in a stupid situation, so few Catholics are willing to do the same. They can’t see how stupid it is for some reason.

Why would the first assumption be a miracle rather than thinking Larry’s an ass who can’t aim his stream? Why would any Christian put Christ’s picture so close to the toilet anyway? I’m forever worried I’ll drop a comb down the bog, they’d risk knocking Jesus in every time they reach for a new roll of toilet paper? Bizarre is all I can say about that.

The German population of the 1930s didn’t wake up one morning and decide to kill Jews. The relentless poisoning of the atmosphere through media softened them up. For instance, Julius Streicher’s Der Sturner magazine ran cartoons featuring characters with large noses, engaged in immoral acts. Ridicule is the passport into the violence to come.

Catholics had nothing to do with all that, of course. Pius was the very vision of piety. God must have wanted all those Jewish folk to die horribly. Hate Hitler, but don’t question God. But he did save some Jews, apparently. By insisting they abandon their faith and become Catholics. Isn’t that helpful? Sure is, betcha by golly.

No, the Germans left it up to their leaders to make some bad decisions and let themselves be encouraged to act on their dislike and distrust of the Jewish population. Why were they disliked and not trusted prior to the 1930s? I’m not a historian so I can’t illustrate just how the rest of Europe felt about them, let alone the Germans. I do know that Hitler’s holocaust wasn’t the first ever attempt to rid the world of Jews. It’s a two thousand year old prejudice. Maybe older. Is there any valid logical reason behind antisemitism beyond religious differences? Not that I can see.

You know how fear breeds? By pairing ignorance with superstition. Rather than make attempts to understand something different, it’s mocked, ridiculed and demonized instead. Is that fair? Hardly. The only way to fight prejudice is to be willing to look beyond it for some truth.

The difference between the presumed offenses Christians experience and the real offenses Jewish people have experienced is very great. I don’t think ridicule has to lead to violence, though. Propaganda can be a step toward violence, but Larry David demonstrating a complete lack of care is just bad television. Did people laugh at the crazy Catholic? Probably. Were Catholics offended? Probably. But they can’t say he didn’t illustrate a common fault of the Catholic faith. Belief without proof. Ignorance with superstition.

That’s something everyone should work on fixing, regardless of religious leanings.

Buffy fashion in fashion?

Clothes were the least favourite part of the show for me, but I couldn’t get over how well Buffy could kick ass in those pointy toed heels she’d wear. Some of the outfit choices were a little odd, but I loved that yellow coat she had that got all those grass stains when her and Spike were… But whatever.

I’ve tried commenting at lemondrop about a recent article there on Buffy and fashion and what’s available to buy now if you want to play a Slayer for any reason (kinks or vanilla?) but I can’t tell if they’re going into moderation limbo or getting lost, so I’ll repost here.

Two different articles from Slayage. First Real Vampires Don’t Wear Shorts:The Aesthetics of Fashion in Buffy the Vampire Slayer:

The aesthetics of fashion consists of three facets, or “looks.” First, and most obvious is the “look” of the trends and branding as a status symbol. The first season establishes fashion as a major aesthetic on BtVS. Buffy is portrayed as fashion-conscious (in fact, in the Revised Core Rulebook for the BtVS Role-playing Game, fashion is Buffy’s consistent “wild card”). She is fashionable enough, at the beginning of the pilot, to merit Cordelia’s attention and possible admission to the Cordettes. Much of “Welcome to the Hellmouth” (1001) centers around fashion concepts. Buffy agonizes over what to wear to the Bronze (“Hi, I’m an enormous slut! Hello, would you like a copy of the Watchtower?”), identifies potential vampires by their lack of fashion sense, and informs Giles that one of her greatest worries upon arriving at Sunnydale High was that she “would have last month’s hair.”

Second, Dressed to kill: Fashion and leadership in Buffy the Vampire Slayer:

As Barnard (2002) notes, there have always been complex and shifting discourses connecting women, feminism, leadership and fashion. Many early second wave feminists took an interest in the way fashion contributed to the challenges women faced. They noted that women’s clothing was often restrictive and designed to exaggerate secondary sexual characteristics (De Beauvoir, 1972).The argument ran that the fashion industry contributed to the establishment of women as functionally inadequate creatures who were designed as objects of desire for men, whereas men wore functional clothing that coded them active rather than passive. Fashion, it was argued, contributed to our inability to take women seriously as leaders and workers (see Hollows, 2000 for a discussion of shifting feminist approaches to fashion).

Interesting…

The new vampires – too good is too bad?

Vampires sure are the thing these days, aren’t they? Esquire has an interesting take on their popularity in terms of mainstreaming gay love, specifically in the show True Blood. Neil Gaiman’s article also makes some good points in relation to pop culture, his own writing, and why the mythic vampire persists in so many guises.

Several feminist writers have pounced on Stephanie Meyer’s writing to illustrate everything that’s wrong with her series and its portrayal of obsessive love and twisted desires.

At least Buffy wanted to kill the damn things. Angel was a special case (cursed with a soul) and Spike, well, who hasn’t felt like having a fling with a bad boy once in a while to escape a monotonous drudge? She never had to wonder how he felt about her either. He was very clear when it came to expressing desire. Plus, she had just come back from the dead and who else was around who could understand what that was like? Spike may have manipulated her into it, but Buffy is the one who made all the rules and forced him to follow them. It was the only way she’d play the dark secret sex game Spike was craving. He needed that connection to someone else as much as she did so he complied with every one of her secretive demands.

I read and saved around two hundred Buffy studies articles from Slayage and other sources as and when I could find them. They run the gamut of topics, too, from language to philosophy, religion, culture, sexuality, fashion, whatever. For any discourse a scholar can suggest, I think a Buffy scholar could pull a reference to Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Besides tracking the number of times vampire teeth touched human beings, Paul Shapiro’s piece also examines work by several other writers so you may as well start with his. A tidbit to whet the appetite:

Since vampires exist along a border of life and death, vacillating between human and monster, Stater (1997:1) argues that there is no real reason for a vampire to obey traditional gender roles. She says, “Social constructs such as sexuality cease to be of such importance when the possessor of that sexuality, more importantly than defying ideas of what sexuality ought to be, defies the very laws of life and death.” This is interesting because even with the freedom of being “dead,” “soulless,” or “evil,” the vampires in Buffy the Vampire Slayer appear to mostly follow traditional gender lines and heterosexual norms–at least when it comes to their biting patterns. It is beyond the scope of this paper to debate the larger overall questions about whether or not Buffy the Vampire Slayer violates heterosexual gender norms. [Arwen (2002) and Alessio (2001) say it does challenge gender categorization and shatters female stereotypes; while Levine and Schneider (2003) and Owens (2003) say the show reinforces hetero-normal sexual and gender stereotypes.]

Fascinating.

Saskatoon psychic stymied by police skepticism

So smart was I to decide to follow CBC Saskatchewan on Twitter. Otherwise I might have missed this story completely:

Saskatchewan police charged with investigating unsolved cases are reluctant to appeal for psychic intervention when leads run dry, according to a Saskatoon psychic.

Barb Powell, a psychic medium, said she rarely is approached by local police to help in ongoing cold case investigations, but does get criminal case work from some southern U.S. states.

Because our people don’t want to rely on hocus pocus mumbo jumbo to solve cold cases? Proving DNA evidence is a big enough gamble without relying on some psychic to point southish and then see someone wearing green. On Rider Day, that might be everyone.

Powell told CBC News she feels her work is only one investigative tool available to help cases along, not to solve them.

“You know, I’d like to think that some of the information that comes through to me obviously helps or at least gives a detective, or police … just that extra nudge if you will, to put two and two together and hopefully come up with a full picture,” Powell said.

Sgt. Brent Shannon, a cold case investigator for the Regina Police Service, acknowledged that in some historical cases any information is considered important.

Information coming from non-traditional means such as psychics is often not specific enough to be useful to police, Shannon said.

There’s a great Torchwood episode (if you haven’t seen that yet, what’s wrong with you?) called Ghost Machine where this alien device gives anyone who holds it a look at some event in the past, but more than that – an emotional connection to that past person. Gwen sees a little boy lost in the streets during the Blitz and out of curiosity hunts him down to see how accurate the device was. In one word: very. Owen, meanwhile, witnesses a young woman get murdered back in the ’60s somewhere. He’s ripped to shreds over what he’s seen, because the killer wound up getting away. Now he knows who did it, but what can he do with that information, call the cops and explain how it “came to me in a vision” or try and deal with it himself? In typical Torchwood fashion, nothing ever seems to go according to plan, of course.

But back to our psychic. Even people who physically witness events will give varying responses. Memory is incredibly flawed and no matter how vividly people feel they’ll recall some event, every recollection will be clouded by time, by media reports, by nonsensical shreds of detail that likely match no other witness account of the same event. Even two people standing side by side will latch onto and recall different things, and none of it might be actually useful. Given what the police have experienced when it comes to dealing with witness testimony, why would they give any credence to something a psychic comes up with?

One example would be the investigation into the still-unsolved disappearance of five-year-old Tamra Keepness, who went missing from her Regina home in 2004.

Shannon said many aboriginal elders came forward to police with dreams and visions in the hope of helping investigators find her.

Shannon said while the efforts were well-intentioned, the information provided was too vague.

There’s a tendency to over-report. I’m sure they were swamped with calls of suspicious vehicles and people and whateverall. And I’m sure they have to check all of it, no matter how unlikely, and wind up ruling 99% of it out.

Families of cold case subjects seem more willing to take a chance on alternative methods of investigation like those offered by Powell.

I suspect this is because people want hope more than they want truth.

Another Torchwood moment from a different episode, Adrift, where a boy is whisked off a bridge by an unknown mysterious event, just as he’s within waving distance from home. Gwen still has friends in the police department and one of these fellows has the sorry job of telling this poor mother that her son is still missing, so many months later. Gwen can’t let it sit once it becomes obvious this woman’s not the only one missing a loved one and eventually finds out that this rift in Cardiff not only drops aliens off, but sucks locals in. Only a few ever get back to Earth and those that do are permanently traumatized. Gwen still feels it’s vital to inform Mom that her son is one of these poor unfortunates (“closure” and all that) and the mother winds up traumatized and depressed over that. That desperate hope that he was alive and happy somewhere was better than the reality, by far.

Powell said a few families in Saskatchewan have contacted her for help, but she said she’s learned the work is so draining that she’s become cautious about what cases she takes on.

“There are some families that do come to me and I just have to say, ‘I can’t help you because the emotions are so, so strong,’ ” Powell said.

“Which is why I would rather work more so with police or detectives because they too … are not necessarily emotionally attached to the situation,” she said.

Interesting to note she turns people down, though. I wonder if psychic style folks down south would do the same. Shows she has some standards, at least. Won’t take complete advantage over the miserable. I’ll give her credit for that, if nothing else.

I still think psychics are a load of hooey, but if people want to give this woman money to buy a chance in the hope lottery, who am I to stop them?

Arrogant Worms and Buffy the Vampire Slayer?

This is Nerd Heaven! It’s great to be a Nerd!!

I heart Joss! I miss Buffy the Vampire Slayer! I guess now I’ll have to watch all the seasons again…

Started watching True Blood season 1

And so far I like it – but not because of Sookie and Bill. No, it’s the rest of the regulars that are making it enjoyable. Tara’s awesome, Sam is sweet, and Jason’s hilarious.

Why did they pick Anna Paquin to play a Southern waitress? Are there no good actresses from Louisiana and area that could have taken on the role? I just don’t get how they pick casts sometimes. But whatever.

I wonder how close they’re going to follow the books by Charlaine Harris. It’s been a while since I read that series.

K, that’s it for a bit. I think I’m going to dare to bundle up and take pictures of our stupid early snow now. Thank you Old Man Winter. If I could find your ass, I would kick it…

Girl dies after car crash, nobody gives a rat’s …

As I was watching Smallville Season 4 last night (yeah, I’m years behind) I was struck by how seriously tragic the prom episode was (#418 – Spirit).

I’ll give you a little back-story for this prom plot. Clark Kent and Lana Lang aren’t planning to attend prom. Clark would take Lana, the love of his life since forever, but the fates (and the writers) keep tearing them apart so all year she’s been with a guy she met in Paris. Lana’s not going because she’s afraid it’ll be a let-down after four years of dreaming of it. Plus, she still loves Clark but his secret keeping keeps causing trust issues. And boyfriend Jason has been causing her all the same grief this year, so she’s not feeling the win in her life at all. Chloe Sullivan, Clark and Lana’s best friend, is the head writer for the school newspaper and she just finished writing a scathing attack on the pointlessness of prom popularity contests since prom should be for everyone, so she’s planning to boycott the idiocy. Only Clark has now nominated her for prom queen as something of a joke. Ha ha, Clark.

Now add Dawn Stiles into the heady brew that is teen-oriented television. (She’s never been seen in a episode before so you know she’ll be the villain in this one.) She’s a bitchy ditz. She’s bitchy ditz squared. No, she’s bitchy ditz to the power of infinity plus one. She is not likable in any way, shape, or form. But she’s still in line to be prom queen for some reason and she’s completely pissed off at Chloe. Then, an even worse thing happens. Her boyfriend dumps her the day before prom because he doesn’t want to be just a matching accessory anymore and who can blame him.

Fast forward a few hours and she’s digging through a year book looking for a new date (it’ll be Clark), and on the phone and driving distracted and she crashes through a safety rail and plummets into a ravine, coming to rest in a pile of kryptonite chunks. The “meteor rock” that fell when Clark landed as a toddler has super-properties that can affect normal human beings in bizarre ways, so you just know something bizarre is going to happen to her now. I had my heart set on the walking dead, because that girl should have been after all that. But what they did instead was just as good – an Out of Body episode where the OB can take over anyone just with a touch. She’s the one really on stage when Chloe accepts the tiara.

But I’m getting ahead of myself.

Watching this episode, I was struck by how self-centered everyone is. Lana, Chloe, Clark. Everyone. There’s just been a major accident involving a student the day before prom, for fuck’s sake, and there isn’t any scene in there showing someone upset over it. It’s social life as usual as this poor girl in line to be queen for a day lies near death in the hospital. Nobody gives a shit. She may have been secretly despised by the whole student body, but really, nobody feels a little grain of shock or pity for her situation? No one cares?

Dawn’s in Lana’s body when she overhears her own BFF’s talking about her like she’s always been a waste of perfectly good oxygen. Justifiably miffed, she spies the ex-boyfriend and makes a beeline for him, thinking that “Lana” can ask him to prom. He says some more horrible shit about Dawn and that pops the last sane braincell she had. Only Clark manages to keep “Lana” from killing this guy and that’s when they realize they’ve got a body snatcher on their hands. But, where is she now?

Dawn is not horrified to be out of her body at any point in this. She revels in it for some reason and it seems her only moment of dismay occurs when she visits herself at the hospital and sees how bad she looks, all cut and bruised. Dawn then takes over the nurse so she can give herself a lethal injection.

Yeah.

So now the potential prom queen is dead. At a real school, I’m sure prom would have been canceled at this point. There would be counselors around to help the students deal with this unexpected loss. There’d be flowers by the side of the road, students weeping and hugging in the halls, memorializing speeches given by her friends who wished they hadn’t been so out of touch with the real her, we’ll miss her so much etc, etc.

But nope, it’s barely a blip on the plot meter and the prom plans go on unaffected. Dawn manages to finagle a date out of Clark using Chloe’s cousin, Lois Lane, and is on hand to take over Chloe as soon as she’s announced to be the winner.

Now we get to step right into the surreal bizarro world that is this episode. It’s been emotionally vapid throughout the whole of it anyway (except when Clark pines for Lana and vice versa). So to top it off, Dawn’s giving her acceptance speech as Chloe and says “Dawn deserved to win this, not Chloe Sullivan,” and the crowd boos.

Dawn’s body is chilling in the morgue at this point, remember. Whether or not you agree with her qualifications to be prom queen (the most emotionally crippled person wins?) the loss of her life should be a way bigger deal than it is. It’s a death, not just a plot device. And Clark, who’s usually so compassionate about people, friend or foe, has his head up his ass throughout, pining over what he wishes he had with Lana.

Dawn is dead. They’re standing on the gym floor and they’re booing a dead person. And Dawn doesn’t give a damn about her dead self, either. She’s not upset at her classmates because they don’t care that she’s dead. She tries to pull a Carrie just because they didn’t want her to be prom queen. Clark manages to shift his Super brain into Care gear by the end, thankfully, and stops Dawn before she can burn the school down. Clark’s dad has a hand in the saving as well, once Dawn leaps into Clark’s body. A shard of meteor rock keeps Dawn from doing any damage and after she’s forced out of Clark’s body, she just drifts away and dematerializes. End of story.

Not quite.

Dawn is truly dead and gone now. Do Clark and his father have a quiet moment contemplating the meaning of life or whatever? Does Chloe marvel over surviving another close call and reflect on the uninspired life that was Dawn’s? Hardly:

Clark: Chloe!
He helps her up.
Clark: Are you okay?
Chloe: Yeah, I’m fine. Thanks.
Clark bends over and picks up the tiara.
Clark: I think you dropped something. Congratulations, Chloe.
He hands the tiara to her and she smiles.

They go back to the dance, Lana finally shows up (wearing something that’s supposed to be pretty but I think is just godawful on the part of the costuming department) and she and Clark slow dance to the gravelly voice of Lifehouse’s lead singer.

Roll credits.

Isn’t that tragic? The actress who played Dawn was only in it to growl at Chloe, insult some random girl, and get dumped before driving her car off the road. The last we see of her is her luminous shade as it zips into Clark’s mom. Every other Dawn scene was played by other actresses. We didn’t know her in life long enough to care about her death and we only ever saw one side of her, the bad side. She was barely a character. No depth to her whatsoever, a one dimensional shade.

If people are treated like they have no value, how will that affect how they treat others? It’s cuts both ways in this episode – she doesn’t care about people, so ultimately nobody cares about her. And when she realizes how little they like her, she goes ballistic against them.

When this first aired, did that underlying message resonate with viewers as it has with me? I hope I’m not the only one who was deeply moved by it.

If they missed it, then I suspect they missed something the writers might not have intended: a reminder that it’s far easier to dismiss that which you don’t bother to understand.

Should any person be dismissed that easily?

—
Editing already.

There is a moment in the furnace room where Clark confronts Dawn:

Clark: I know it’s you, Dawn. You don’t want to do this.
Chloe walks toward Clark.
Chloe: All those years I kept trying to be what everyone else wanted. And it turns out those losers don’t even care. This was supposed to be the best night of my life and they laughed at me!
Clark: Let Chloe go!
Chloe: I will. [She smiles.] See, Clark, there’s a whole life after high school, and I can be whoever I want.

So we finally get something that gives us the reason why she’s on this spree, some understanding that Dawn has deep feelings after all, but Clark is the only one who hears it and it doesn’t change anything. A new body but the same old bitch. He has no compassion for her here. The irony is that he doesn’t care about her existence any more than anyone else does. He just wants to end her before she can hurt anybody else. Hence the kryptonite ace in the hole.

Not a good day for Superman. Not at all.

Does a reputation still matter?

I pity the fool who disagrees, but weren’t we a little better off when people (and by people I mean celebrities) worried about their reputations before they did anything that might affect them?

see more Lol Celebs

That Kanye West/Taylor Swift speech fiasco comes to mind as a recent and totally obvious example. Jay Leno asked him how his recently deceased mother would feel about how be behaved. Will Kanye’s televised apologies change anything about how he’ll behave in the future? Although he claims he’ll re-evaluate his life a little, I have my doubts about his sincerity. Had he kept his trap shut in the first place, none of this would have happened. But then he probably wouldn’t have been invited onto Leno’s show, which proves once again that behaving like a jackass pays off. He has no real incentive to behave himself. People buy his albums no matter what he does or says.

I watched a few episodes of Ozzie and Harriet some time ago and found it to be pretty entertaining. I think my favourite one out of that batch involved a decision to clean out the garage and how all the neighbours helped turn it into a swap meet instead of a trip to the dump. Anyone who thought the doofus man stereotype was a new thing needs to watch some old TV.

Anyway, included with the episodes was some documentary footage about Ozzie Nelson and his famous family. Ozzie kept them all on a pretty tight leash, “family values” wise. Since they were in the public eye (Ricky was from birth, I think) Ozzie felt it was essential for everyone to be on their best behaviour at all times. I suppose he was something of a PR tyrant that way, but given how much of his own reputation as a writer and producer were tied into the successful family show, I can’t say I blame him. It ran on television for 15 years and Rick wound up with three decades worth of pop hits thanks to a start on Dad’s show, so he must have done something right. I’m just gonna quote the twist at the end of the story:

Shortly before his death, Ozzie Nelson published his autobiography, in which he shocked many of his Bible-belt fans by revealing that he was a lifelong atheist.

Awesome.

Now to tie it back to the beginning – Molly Lewis singing “I Pity the Fu.”

(Sing along with the lyrics)

Watched Torchwood: children of earth last night…

I’ve got it from the library for a week so I think I’ll wind up watching it again. It sure got to DVD in a hurry. Wikipedia states it just aired in July. Gone are the days of waiting nine months or more for a show to be buyable. Love it.

Anyway, without revealing too much plot (Wiki’s got the whole thing, though), I think what I liked best about it were the ethical conundrums everyone faces when the alien race known only as 456 comes to Earth and demands the collection of ten percent of the world’s children. To show their refusal to accept a fraction of that, they release a quick acting virus in the MI5 building which kills everyone and make it clear that they could kill everyone in the world should their demands not be met.

One minor flaw in that plan that occurred to me – isn’t Earth the only planet with humans on them? Given what it turns out they need these kids for, it would be akin to a meth addict blowing up the only lab in town. Then where are you going to get your fix, dummy? Unless their first visit in 1965 was for the purpose of something like a wine tasting party. Get a taste of humanity, see how it compares to other species out there, come back for more later if earthlings turn out to be best in the universe.

Yay us.

So, the ethics here. Aliens come demanding children. Again. A precedent was set back in the ’60s when it was agreed to give them twelve children in exchange for what they claimed was a cure to a strain of the flu. The humans involved were led to believe that these kids would be granted eternal life, which I guess made it okay. Now, the PM of Great Britain graciously kicks responsibility down a peg and makes a civil servant the diplomatic go-between for Earth and the 456. This poor bugger is the one who has to tell the PM, the Americans and the UN what’s what.

Then all the talking heads get their heads around a talkie table and debate their choices. The 456 have demanded 10% of kids from every country so which British kids should go? It’s eventually decided to base the choice on standardized ratings for schools and the worst schools “win”. To encourage participation in this venture, they lie to the country, claiming the kids are getting inoculations. Then they’ll lie to the country again when the aliens take the children away, and claim they had no idea that would happen.

(I found myself wondering if in the States some fundie group would mistake the mystery of children speaking in unison as the angelic host speaking through children, and choosing children to be first to walk into the holy light of rapture. Then after all the fundie parents joyfully sent their kids up to be the equivalent of alien crack, the truth would come out that they’d been wrong…)

Even if they did allow these aliens to take so many kids this time, there’s no reason to believe they’d never come for more. Add to that all the secrecy and lies required to pull it off – millions of kids in one fell swoop? How did anyone think they’d collect all those kids without the truth getting out? Craziness.

Of course, the heart goes out to this poor civil servant who’s been given this really shitty task. He’s worked there for years, keeping his head down, doing his job and what reward awaits him? The PM informs him that he’s going to be the political face on this and his kids are going to be televised on the way to school…

The heart also winds up going out to Captain Jack Harkness. He’s the only one still alive who gave those kids to the 456 the first time they were here and he’s not going to let them leave the planet with millions of children now. Especially since he knows what’s planned for them.

Jack also knows he has the means this time to stop them, but to do it requires a painful sacrifice on his part. He has to risk killing a child he loves in exchange for the chance to save the lives of millions of strangers.

He can’t not do it because the alternative is unacceptable.

Isn’t that the basis for a thought experiment or something? Can you do a horrible thing if it will stop something even more horrible from happening? Could you live with yourself if you do? If you don’t?