Brain Extractions by Nelson Allen

Capital Over Quality -or- SyFy WTF?

2009-07-21T05:08:00.000-07:00

My brain may experience a major meltdown at the absolute depths of stupidity that television execs are willing to descend to. The SciFi Channel has now changed their name to . . . The SyFy Channel! I guess we're all just supposed to call it "SyFy," thereby giving the name an extra dollop of coolness that it didn't have when we called it "SciFi."

If you fight the urge to throw your computer across the room and get past the headline, digging deeper into the press release will unearth the motive for this inane criminal act. Says David Howe, president of The SciFi Channel:

“When we tested this new name, the thing that we got back from our 18-to-34 techno-savvy crowd, which is quite a lot of our audience, is actually this is how you’d text it,” Mr. Howe said. “It made us feel much cooler, much more cutting-edge, much more hip, which was kind of bang-on what we wanted to achieve communication-wise.” (My emphasis)

In other words, über-wealthy, white, middle-age corporate puppets have such low self-esteem and feel so desperate to get back into the good graces of the younger generations (who HATE them) by adapting their lingo and rearranging a successful brand to appeal to the lowest common denominator. Seriously, gauging quality by how closely something resembles a text? Is the Idiocracy upon us already?

The brilliant corporate think tank that I'm sure SyFy/SciFi pays wheelbarrows of money to come up with such mind-numbing garbage has really done such a bang up job with the brand that Howe is happy to point out the net result of all of their effort by saying this incomprehensible dreck:

"So it’s changing your name without changing your name.”

Absolutely. Brilliant. Strategy. Retain your faithful fan base of 15 years and simultaneously attract new morons who could really care less about speculative fiction, but are compelled by the name SyFy like moths to a flame. Meanwhile, you've changed everything by changing nothing! So in essence, SyFy is just some vague Orwellian doublespeak (war is peace!) for new but old. And in any case, when said out loud (go ahead, vocally compare and contrast the two names SciFi and Syfy, see which one sounds cooler) it makes absolutely no difference at all anyhow.

In the end, the nerdy sci-fi fans like myself who would rather be sodomized with a hot poker than be a slave to "cool," will feel their world slipping even further away, following the trend set by Lucas et al. where the commodification of an idea trumps the idea itself, and empires can be built upon adult males who buy toys for themselves rather than flowers for girls.

Michael Jackson Saves Economy!

2009-07-16T04:32:00.000-07:00

Immediately following the final moments of Wacko Jacko's turbulent life, the national media went appropriately berserk, and wall to wall to ceiling to 4th dimension coverage of the passing of the King of Pop began. Despite being attacked with nonstop postmortem information ad-nauseum, I couldn't help but notice that during The Today Show's impromptu The Death of Michael Jackson special edition, the commercials were atypically not of the lame, local variety that I was accustomed to see on any given day. Instead of the forcefully creative, cutesy local ads featuring multitudes of business owner's wives and children, I was all of a sudden being treated to two and a half minute trailers for new Hollywood blockbusters and primo automobile ads, in other words, the kind of ad quality one expects to see during breaks in the Super Bowl! Instantly, as if struck by lightning, this ginormous epiphany slapped me in the face: Michael Jackson's death raised the ad rates overnight!

Now, being mired in the midst of a torpid economy, I was next sucker-punched by epiphany number two: Celebrity deaths can save the economy! And how could I not come to this conclusion? Astounded by the endless coverage of Michael Jackson on every single network and cable news station in America (and probably the world), I could see the dollar bills behind every transmission, floating skyward like resources in a video game, ever higher and upward towards the top two percenters who get to decide whether or not the economy is good or bad; Wall Street gods trading in death, in other words, business as usual in America.

So I see the efficacy of mega-celebrity death news and wonder if this couldn't happen every week. All it would take is for some loving, patriotic soul to go about hunting down top dollar celebrity personalities, vigilante style, until our economy is back on top where it belongs. Americans love nothing more than to wallow in an other's tragedy, or at least to use an other's hardship as a springboard for their own self-esteem. It's the people who demand the coverage anyhow: million dollar funerals in Los Angeles, T-shirts, reinvigorated album sales with the trajectory of a North Korean rocket launch. Not to mention how mobile our stagnant economy became, as thousands of reporters and citizens began flocking city streets to openly weep on camera as if auditioning for Touched By An Angel, consuming mass quantities of coffee and fast food. If this shit happened every week, by golly, America's economy would trump the world's again.

So, in order to feed our greedy, consumptive nature, and restore profits to the men at the top of the pyramid, let's see if we can't boost ratings through the roof with a few carefully chosen tragedies. I know some of those Hollywood liberals love to yammer on endlessly about all of their charity work and good samaratinism they like to manufacture. So let's see some of these folks roll up their sleeves and get to work on making a tragedy of their lives. It would really do us all a BIG favor.

Couldn't Have Said It Better . . .

2009-05-26T05:31:00.000-07:00

Some great quotes I've been picking up from my copy of Hitchens's The Portable Atheist:

"If you look at the matter rationally and without prejudice, the proper place to hunt for the facts of His mercy, is not where man does the mercies and He collects the praise, but in those regions where He has the field to Himself."

--Mark Twain

"I see only with deep regret that God punishes so many of His children for their numerous stupidities, for which only He Himself can be held responsible; in my opinion, only His nonexistence could excuse him."

--Albert Einstein

"I cannot prove to you that there is no personal God, but if I were to speak of him I would be a liar."

--Albert Einstein

"The system of the Universe . . . is upheld solely by physical powers. The necessity of matter is the ruler of the world. It is vain philosophy that supposes more causes than are exactly adequate to explain the phenomena of things."

--Percy Bysshe Shelley

Elephants, Donkeys, and the Need for a New Party.

2009-05-21T05:58:00.001-07:00

If I had to describe the polarity that separates the warring political parties in America in one sentence, it would be that Republicans see the world as it should be, while Democrats see the world as it is. It was this seemingly obvious epiphany that led me from being an elephant into becoming a donkey, but still leaves me feeling as though I could use another option.

The difference between the two is more subtle than a simple listing of their core beliefs. The battle in America's two-party system could be described as Republican's wishful thinking versus the Democrat's realism. Republicans wish to see a world in which no fetus is aborted, all humans have proper heterosexual tendancies, and no one ever had to pay taxes. Democrats, on the other hand, realize that sometimes a fetus may be the product of rape or incest, unwanted and unloved, that homosexuals have been a part of humanity since before Homer, and that without taxes, underfunding the necessities of government may cause suffering.

One might say, that by not attempting to acheive an idealized lifestyle, humans will live for the lowest common denominator and fail to evolve into something greater than themselves. But how wise is it to attempt to idealize something that is impossible to change? At what point, in other words, does the ideal become impossible? For the sun shall always appear yellow, no matter what color one wishes it to be. Homosexuals, for example, have been a part of the human experience since, most likely, the dawn of man. It seems terribly imprudent to say that lawmaking alone will remove an abberant human behavior (aberrant in the sense that, if we we all failed to procreate, civilization would cease to exist) from existence. We could no easier remove all birth defects, prevent every injurious accident, or change people's skin color. Abnormality is a part of life. In fact, there is no such thing as normal--it's a myth.

This is why I chose to go blue. (That and the fact that I recognize all religious texts as being unreliable guides for wise, morally well-adjusted human behavior.) Democrats are not the perfect party for governing the actions of all Americans, but I would certainly rather follow the party that understands certain realities of the world we live in and legislates accordingly. However, this decision is merely a placeholder until America creates what it needs the most: a new political party.

Without a third party to bring balance to major issues, we will constantly exist in a state of flux, while the rest of the world, meanwhile, holds their breath before each election, trying to anticipate which version of America will appear to shape the actions of mankind. Since around 60-80% of Americans consider themselves to be centrist in nature, a party that applies itself to prudent decisions on major issues, acceptable to most, would capture the vote of an overwhelming majority come election day. Each party fears the worst will happen should their nemesis be elected, which leads to our current, lesser of two evils option that faces us in the voters booth. I have chosen the lesser of two evils for now, but I await the day when a new choice comes along, one that allows us to use prudence in finding a middle-ground that, while not satisfying all Americans, will at least offer an alternative to extremes.

Before Columbus

2009-05-20T09:24:00.000-07:00

Just finished reading 1491--New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus and I'm feeling positively enlightened about the history of the place I call home. Turns out, this bountiful, Edenic paradise with it's millions of roaming bison, masses of pigeons blotting out the sky and all manner of flora and fauna that had the Pilgrims grimly frowning with joy was actually created by . . . drumroll . . . marauding bands of Spaniards! That's right, when good ol' Pizarro et. al. went a pillagin' and a rapin' through South America and south North America with their dirty and diseased pigs and horses, they also managed to (unwittingley), also wipe out one ginormous fifth of the world's populace.

Can the fact that, despite their dispicable behavior, these lusty Spaniards, with their gold fever and craving for upward mobility back home, were only aware of their own personal body count, whilst completely unaware of the microbial Wrath of God that symbiotically hitchhiked its way across the Atlantic to remove upwards of 90% of the Native American population, remove white guilt once and for all? Probably not. But though the fact remains that the only Europeans to even remotely consider the Natives as approximate equals, or at least, profitable trading partners, were the French, a new understanding of how the mass killing of Amerindians that led to their downfall rests mostly in the hands of the Pilgrim's loveable, cuddly, but angry and wrathful God.

Like the solar-eclipsing billions of Passenger Pigeons, God saw fit to wipe 90% of a culture out of existence in less than a century, a mere blip on the eternal, linear timeline. So while Winthrop and the gang were promoting God's "City on the Hill," they were doing so in a paradise of God's making, a result of the loss of predatory activity on the continent. There were billions of fish, birds, deer, and bison to eat because no one had been around to kill them anymore! So in a sense, the Pilgrims had much to be thankful for on Thanksgiving, because God had removed a stubborn population from the planet to make their manifest destiny all the easier and the Pilgrim's Progress suddenly became a walk in the park.

Now, just imagine the Americas today if the Europeans alone had been tasked with removing 90% of the local population of The New World. What would it look like? Would the Europeans, even with their steel and gunpowder, have been able to hunt down and destroy a culture that knew the territory like the back of their hand? Seems highly unlikely. Talk about a majorly, ponderous, "what if" of history. From now on I'll always wonder what my homeland would look like today, had God not killed 100 million Indians.