Category Archives: Pop Culture & Society

Tired of the same old boring presidential candidates? Not happy with your party’s potential nominees?
Then get yourself one of these limited edition “Adama ’08” shirts! We will be changing T-Shirt providers soon, so order one today, before we discontinue this version of this product!
(Please. I need to sell just a few more, then I can switch to Spreadshirt….so order one today!)

MEMO
TO: Citizens of Boston
FROM: Everyone Else
SUBJECT: WTF?
Almost a month after the Great Mooninite Panic of 1/31, once again the Boston Police had a “security theater” moment detonating a “suspicious looking device,” sending the local area into a panic and putting the whole city on edge.
Instead it turned out to be a harmless traffic counter.
Citizens of Boston! Those of us who have visited your fine city note that it’s the home of more colleges and universities than pretty much anywhere else in the country. Every Bostonian I’ve met is a reasonable, intelligent human being, and most seem to have a healthy dose of common sense.
Why, then, is your police force so inept it’s blowing up traffic counters? Do you realize what’s happening? If they keep crying wolf, what’s going to happen if something really tragic does happen?
So I’m begging you, citizens of Boston: you tossed tea in the bay to help the Revolution – maybe it’s time your leaders reflected the good sense you all have.

This Sunday I’m devoting some blog space for a tribute to my cousin, Helen Dewar. Regular readers of the Washington Post for the past 40 years will no doubt recognize her name – she was a veteran political reporter for the paper, first covering Virginia politics, and for 25 years, national politics and the US Senate.
More importantly, she was a trailblazer as she was the first woman to cover these beats at a time when women didn’t really do that sort of thing. She got her start at Stanford Daily, where she covered campus and state politics, and was the first woman to edit the Daily.
While browsing the archives of the Stanford Daily, I found a fun little gem in the stacks of old papers. Helen had covered the student council elections in the early 1950s, and had the lead story on the results. The winner for the vice president position was a
young woman named Dianne Goldman – whom you know as Sen. Feinstein. It was interesting that less than 40 years later, Feinstein would be serving as a US Senator and Helen would be the Posts’s top correspondent in the Senate.
Throughout her career, she was recognized for her honest, integrity, and her dedication to the news. Before I moved to Seattle in 1994 to work on a US Senate race, she told me more about the state’s political history, and that of its legendary US Senators, Warren Magnuson and Henry Jackson, than I’d learned from anywhere, or anyone, else.
It was also fun to have lunch with her in the Senate dining room as inevitably, someone important would walk up to talk to her. I got a chance to meet Sen. Bob Dole this way, as well as a few other Senate leaders.
When Helen retired in 2004, her retirement party had quite a number of Congressional leaders, Democrat and Republican, who had enjoyed a great relationship, due in large part to her hard work and commitment to the facts, not silliness (as it seems most mainstream publications engage in today).
This past week, the Washington Press Club Foundation honored Helen with their Lifetime Achievement Award. This was another in a string of honors she’d received – last month Virginia Commonwealth University inducted her into the Virginia Communications Hall of Fame for her work as one of the first women to cover state politics in Virginia.
The Washington Post covered the event earlier this week, and it was featured on C-SPAN, but I couldn’t tape it (and oddly enough you can’t download C-SPAN on BitTorrent yet). Media Bistro’s FishbowlDC blog also covered the event as well, which was cool.
While the Post’s story does tell you a little about the event, it fails to mention something I got a kick out of – a short video tribute recorded by Senators John McCain and Ted Kennedy. I thought that was really cool of them to do, so I’m tracking down a copy of the DVD for myself and my various Dewar relatives.
More importantly, though, I think that Helen’s career and her integrity stand out even more as we live in an era where “newspapers of record” routinely pump out half-truths and falsehoods, and the DC Noise Machine does a lot to stoke partisan fires, and do little to get things done.
And in an era when most journalists think it’s All About Them, Helen’s quiet, steadfast, honest reporting of the news is a tremendous contrast to what passes for journalism today. So for now, I’m paying tribute to my cousin Helen’s life and work – and hope that despite her retirement that the concept of honest jourmalism doesn’t retire along with her.
© 2003-2006 Greg Dewar | All Rights Reserved | Originally Published at www.schadelmann.com

This is getting out of hand, folks. The enemies of freedom and free speech are on the march.
All it took was a 5 month old cartoon in a paper in one country, and suddenly we see riots, threats, and now the burning of embassies. All because of one simple little cartoon.
If you’re a Muslim, and you think these people are acting like thugs and idiots, it is your duty to speak up and say something. Please. Otherwise you’re just as guilty as the ones that attack freedom and free speech.
Funny, Muslim papers print virulent racist anti Semitic and anti American and anti Christian stuff all the time, and yet….I have yet to see people burning the Saudi Embassy. Hmm. Oh and it’s funny how these people ask the GOVERNMENTS of Denmark and Europe to stop the presses. I guess if you live in a country where the government is an autocratic dictatorship, the concept of a free and independent press might be difficult to grasp.
What’s saddest is seeing Bill Clinton and our own State Department take the side of these rioting thugs. Sad, but predictable. I guess Hillary has to raise money or something.
Read the Rest-Click Here
© 2003-2006 Greg Dewar | All Rights Reserved | Originally Published at www.schadelmann.com

The din of idiocy surrounding the so-called “controversy” over the most popular video game on the market, Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas has finally reached a point I thought it could not.
It’s bad enough we have Sen. Hillary Clinton trying to make herself over into a Paragon of Moral Values (this, a woman who had had ethics problems throughout her career) with her media-based crusade, but now we find out that some grandma is suing the company, claiming she was “misled.”
Folks, it’s time we took a look at this non-controversial controversy through the lens of Reason and Common Sense. For example, when one reads the story at Yahoo News, a key fact comes out that makes Swiss cheese out of said Grandma’s lawsuit, and of much of the hoopla.
In this case, it seems the box, which had a big “M” rating, meaning “not for kids under 17” was ignored by Concerned Grandma, when she bought the game for her little grandson, Zutroy. Fun fact: Grandson Zutroy was 14.
Yes, you read that right. Moral Values Grandma was buying a game, loaded with violence, guns, and mayhem, with a big ol’ rating that said “this ain’t for your young ‘uns under 17” for a 14-year old. I guess buying the kid a book, or say, a documentary from National Geographic was out of the question. Grandma got the kid what he wanted – and he wasn’t old enough to play it. Hmm. I guess the parents were too busy to read the box, or pay attention to the game either, and take note of the violence. Oh, and he never downloaded the “patch” either.
And of course, here’s the kicker: the much maligned piece of “code” only works on the PC based version of the game. Most youth of America play games on Playstation or Xbox or GameCube, so they can download the bit o’ code all they want – it won’t work on their game systems.
Even funnier, now that the game is “Adults Only,” it has gone from being a game to be sold only to people 17 and older to…a game sold to people 18 and older. The fact that parents made this thing a best-seller amongst kids, buying this for them, without even bothering to read what the hell it was they were buying, I guess makes it tough for the li’l ones to make a decision about whether God would allow them to read this. Where’s the stadium church when you need it the most???
It’s time for assorted partisans of all stripes. politicians, judges, and government regulators to take a healthy dose of Clue Pills and shut up. If parents are too stupid to read a label that says “don’t buy it for kids under 17” then they should not. If the media would point out the technical speficics how this can’t be hacked on a Playstation, that would help. But I suppose with another Clinton forcing herself on us as our next president (which is about as likely to happen as Saddam Hussein being elected President), we’ll have to endure a media hyped crusade that will hurt an American company, and lead to more regulations of our personal lives.
In the meantime, I think I’m going to forgo rent this month and buy 1000 copies of Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, just to piss Hillary and the conservatives off. Even though I don’t own a game console, a PC, or really play games, I don’t care. Heck, I’ll drive around town giving them away to adults, 18 or older, just to really get the Nanny-staters’ panties in a knot.
For more information on Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, consult your local library, or read Maddox’s take, from earlier this month on the issue.
There’s also an interesting take on Sen. “Do as I say not as I do” Clinton’s crusade in the LA Times – but its headline makes a critical error, in that the XBOX version of this game cannot be hacked with the mod found online.
One other thing: though not perfect, I did think BILL Clinton was a great guy, and had the fortune of meeting him twice. Nice guy, and back in the old days people got paid better. But it is just simply foolish to think that Hillary Clinton will be elected President of the United States in this universe. So her crusading to try and remake her image, all for the sake of More Power for Hillary, wrapped up in values, is really just plain sick.
© 2003-2006 Greg Dewar | All Rights Reserved | Originally Published at www.schadelmann.com

While reading the Los Angeles Times politics section, I found this interesting article about the themes in Battlestar Galactica that touch on current events in a way unique to television programming of today.
It’s worth a read, since it’s a great way to acquaint yourself with this series, if you’ve not already checked it out, and also to see how people tend to project on to a piece of programming as much as the programming tries to project out.
Meaning, that there is a tendency today by people today, especially hyper-active partisans on all sides of any issue, to imediately “see” in a TV show what they want to see, regardless of the original intent of the author. People who want to watch a piece of sci-fi programming like Battlestar Galactica will immediately draw simplistic parallels to Our World of Today, and then start assigning blame or praise to the writers and producers, fitting their MoveOn or FoxNews pre-salted interpretation of world events.
(To be fair, I engaged in a wee bit of this myself for fun’s sake last year when I wrote about the series beginnings, and about Gen. Wes Clark. It was fun and all, but I didn’t make the mistake some of these fans do, and get all militant about things that do not exist!)
People are free to watch TV how they like, but I think doing so denies a viewer a chance to really see what it is the creators are trying to do. Plus it shows a simplistic thinking – i.e. “we” are the “Colonials” so therefore President Roslin is a 1 for 1 stand in for President Bush – which isn’t really the way to watch something like this. (I had to grimace when I read that someone called it “The West Wing in Space” – that show is so pompous and overblown I literally get ill when I hear the theme music while flipping channels).
Better instead to enjoy it for what it is – a new kind of sci-fi that can address issues, but in an alternate continuum not bound up by the world of Today and Now, and a great way to develop solid characters and explore their actions and responses to extraordinary events. Such TV writing is not easy, nor is it common in an era of reality show dreck and methodic repetition of scientific terms set to bad rock music.
Which is why I’ll be taping/watching/bittorrenting/whatever-ing the new series when it starts on July 15th. Woo hoo!
PS: I’ve had Comcast digital cable + Comcast OnDemand for 3 months now, and am going to write a review of my experience with the service vs. Netflix…If anyone out there has had experiences with Comcast, good or bad, I’d be curious to hear them. Send me a message if you’ve got any suggestions or comments. Just be sure to leave your name so I know you’re a real person, and not a spam-bot.
© 2003-2006 Greg Dewar | All Rights Reserved | Originally Published at www.schadelmann.com

Despite the fact I dislike large, faceless, hopelessly bureaucratic corporations like Comcast, SBC, Halliburton, the entire Health Care Industry, et al, who devote legions of troops to the cause of ripping off the consumer, I have a confession to make.
I like advertising. I like marketing.
Now, I’ll qualify that. I don’t like the majority of ads on TV, or at the movies, not because I dislike ads – it’s because most of them are so dumb, and so useless, they just take up space in between things I want to actually watch.
No, what I like is smart advertising and marketing.
For me, I enjoy seeing the rare moments in advertising when someone in the industry figures out a new way to sell something old, or someone else finds a way to get the word out about something they like – and for a rare moment the corporate battle droids don’t just step on it.
For example, while doing a Google search trying to find a Photoshop tutorial on how to convert existing photos into iPod style ads, I came across an old article in Wired Magazine about a home-brewed iPod ad that had its 15 minutes of prime time a while back. You can watch the ad at Wired or see it at a mirror site that is hosting it.
This is not the first time I’ve seen or heard of such a thing – the idea that someone Out There likes a product so much, they make their own homage to it. What’s unique is that Apple didn’t send a telegram to the Lawyer Brigade to shut the guy down.
Instead they let it go – and within weeks it was seen by thousands of people likely to buy an iPod. Best of all, they didn’t have to spend a dime to get all sorts of good press about the iPod, or pay for ad space – the consumers did all the work themselves.
True, this was a fortunate case of someone talented enough to pull such a thing off – one can imagine the consternation of Apple if someone made something that, while meaning well, sucked. When you consider just how bad most ads are, though, one has to ask – could Joe or Jane Average do any worse than some of the mindless drivel we tune out thanks to the remote, TiVo, DVR, and DVD?
A more macro-level example of this concept is that of the “fan sub” movement devoted to bringing foreign programming to the US and other countries that otherwise might not get it. It’s interesting to watch how American producers have responded to technological advances in distribution – rather than learn and adapt to a new model, they spend more time in court, and on attorney’s fees, instead of figuring out new ways to get their product to people who want it, and get both themselves, and the writers, directors, actors and others paid.
For years now, enthusiasts of Japanese animation and other foreign language programming have been taking it upon themselves to acquire the latest programs, translate and insert subtitles in English (or other languages) and distributing them on BitTorrent and other networks. What makes these folks unique in the grey area of “piracy” is that they deal almost exclusively in programming that has not yet been licensed for distribution in their own country, thus making what they are doing somewhat illegal – but somewhat not illegal, if that makes sense.
Personally, I would never have discovered Samurai Champloo, now being shown on Cartoon Network, had it not been for a fansub group’s original distribution of the series online. I now watch it on TV, and will most likely buy the DVD set once all DVDs in the series are released.
Likewise, there is no way I’d ever get to see the Japanese live-action drama GTO had a group of volunteers not started translating and posting said files. There is little to no chance this will ever see any sort of distribution in the United States, so the producers aren’t losing any money with this stuff out there. More to the point – should they ever release this series on DVD, I’d be the first to rent it. Best of all, the producers did not have to pay a dime to tell me about it – and I’m already hooked.
Now, you’d think that as more and more people started doing this, the owners of said programming would hit everyone with lots of lawsuits. But as the technology advanced, and the increase in popularity of “fan subs” grew, Japanese media companies realized what they were dealing with.
Thousands of people were spending their own money and time putting out content, making a point of inserting in said video files that they were not to be sold, and in essence acting as a test market for their products in the US.
Japanese producers took note, and started to send people to conventions and fan clubs to promote their work. All they asked that once a series was licensed by a US distributor, that groups passing along the files stop, and for the most part, they do. Rarely does anyone get sued for putting out copies of video files they should not.
The rest is history. Go to Netflix or Blockbuster and see how many Japanese DVDs now for rent. Go to any chain bookstore, and see the 100s of Japanese comic books taking up shelf space. A whole new market is now available to Japanese producers, and all they had to do was come on over and put the stuff on the shelves, and it sells. Instead of spending money on the Lawyer Brigade, they spend money on bean counters, who now have more beans to count.
It’s not perfect, and in any situation there are those who are dishonest, but let’s be realistic – dishonesty and cheating people is something all sides of the entertainment industry engage in – there are no knights in shining armor in this business anywhere.
More importantly, there’s an opportunity to hold off on the big guns of the Lawyer Brigade and think for a moment – in a world where people really want to see good quality programming, how do you find new ways to get it to them in the way they want, and do so in a way that is not ripping either a) the consumer b) the artists or c) the producers?
Surely there’s someone out there who can put the pieces together, and make money for everyone. Or have American business schools beat any sort of creativity out of our MBA squads?
Perish the thought. What are yours?
PS: For a provocative read, check out this article that discussed the case history of Battlestar Galactica and its effect on SkyOne, SciFi channel, BitTorrent, and the world of broadcasting.
It makes for an interesting read. I’ll say this – had it not been for a chance to see the show on BitTorrent, I would never have been able to see Season 1 aside from a few episodes. Now that I’ve seen it , I plan on watching it on cable this summer, and will buy the DVDs. I went from being a non-consumer, to a fan who has promoted the series here. And I’m not the only one.
© 2003-2006 Greg Dewar | All Rights Reserved | Originally Published at www.schadelmann.com