Month: January 2009

Bad Quality Ambivalence

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After watching last week’s episode of Supernatural, I got in the mood of watching some horror movies. I decided to get around to watching some of those cheap straight-to-video B-movies that are on the second page of the video store flyers.

I’ve watched about four of the dozen or so that I’ve decided to check out. So far, they are all as bad as I expected. (To be honest, I have quickly previewed several of them to watch the no-budget amateur ones first and save the better ones for later.)

Then this weekend I saw that episode of Seinfeld where George and Jerry are offered a pilot for their show about nothing. I took notice of the scene where George is trying to convince Jerry that turning NBC down was part of his negotiating tactic, but Jerry explains to him how a network gets hundreds of manifests but produce less than five pilots.

It occurred to me that the low-budget, no-budget B-movies and bad television shows that get cancelled quickly are the same thing. On the one hand, they are both terrible and most people would jump to bagging on them, possibly deservedly so. On the other hand, these awful productions at least allow people who are not Steven Spielberg’s nephew, or Brad Pitt’s neighbor an opportunity to do a little work in the industry.

Yes, they are bad, but they give nobodies a chance.

Breaking Records is Easy

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Jon Stewart just mentioned on the The Daily Show about how Barack Obama is the first African-American president to hold a press conference to lay out his financial plans, and then added that he would be breaking a lot of records.

The thing is that everything that Obama does breaks a record if you tack on “first African-American president to…” For example, he’s the first African-American president to drive to work, the first African-American president to eat Cheerios, the first African-American president to pee standing up, and so on.

In fact, you can extend this to anyone and anything if you’re specific enough: I am the first me in the world to sleep tonight, ever! Say, that’s not a bad idea. Good night.

Schrödinger’s Uncertain Cat

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In addition to his thoughts on quantum superpositions, Schrödinger’s cat could have allowed him to come up with the Uncertainty Principal that Heisenberg formulated. It would go something like this:

There is a cat, and it is in some state; alert, sleeping, purring, etc. However the mere act of observing it alters the state of the cat because it will react to your presence and become alert or purr, or otherwise stop what it was doing and do something else.

Topfree

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Somehow the topic of public nudity came up recently. Naturally—no pun intended—I though of the law that was passed in Ontario (Canada) in the mid-90’s that made it legal for women to go topless (wherever men can go topless that is).

It was a big deal and stirred up quite a bit of controversy, but it passed because the court decided that forbidding women to be topless where men are allowed is tantamount to sexual discrimination.

I recall that I (and my classmates, and almost all other adolescent boys) were excited at the prospect of seeing plenty of boobs. However even though I was young and fresh hormones were doing their thing, I still knew that the reality was that we probably wouldn’t be seeing much, and even less worth seeing.

As it turns out, I was right. Just because they were allowed to be topless, didn’t mean that females would suddenly be going everywhere half-naked. I’ve heard that there was a brief surge that summer (probably just in Toronto), but have not seen this occur personally, nor even known anyone who has. In fact, the law has since pretty much been forgotten. Not surprisingly—and yes, unfortunately—most of the women who do take advantage of that law are the ones who are huge, saggy, old, etc., not the hot, young girls we were hoping for, and certainly not our own classmates.

I’ve read that similar laws exist in New York and Texas, as well as some other places, but like here, little “good” came of them. Hehe.