blinkit

Baby, it's TV!

WMD: I have a few hazy memories of being a toddler. They're mostly random mental images: the face of my family's housecat looking as big as lion; tap water dripping into a sink; standing up in the front seat of the car with my mom and dad as we drove up a hill to our new home. Note to child welfare police: this was years before child safety seats -- or seatbelts.

What I don't have in the memory bank for my baby and toddler era are any images of watching TV.

That's why I'm elated that a new channel debuted in Canada devoted exclusively to Canadians under three year of age. Called BabyFirstTV, this U.S.-based network features 24-hour programming of "multilayer content that is adaptable to all levels of a baby's development," according to the channel's website. It's about time for this channel, because no baby should go through the hell I endured without multilayer content.

Just the other day, I met a 14-month-old toddler, brought by her parents to an office barbecue, who convinced me today's babies are crying out for their own television channel.

"I'm very excited by the appearance of this new broadcast environment," she said. "It's time my demographic was exclusively catered to. Traditional children's programming is for an older generation of kids--those who have acquired early language skills, a sense of self and a potty training seat. Blues Clues and Dora, that's your older sibling's TV. They just doesn't get who we are."

At least I think that's what the toddler said. She had her finger up her nose the entire time we talked.

But she has a point. Babies need to look for hours at images of things that aren't really there. It's vital to their development. The ability to stare blankly at a flat surface was a survival skill early humans were eager to teach their young. Consider the 15,000-year-old, paleolithic cave paintings in Lascaux, France, famous as some of the earliest known art created by humanity. On the cave's walls are thousands of realistic images of animals that had possible religious or mystical importance to the people of the time. And in the corner of one wall, archaeologists have discovered a rendering of a fluffy sabre tooth tiger kitten playing with a primitive ball of yarn. It's Baby's First Cave Icon.

Turning babies and toddlers into TV zombies is eminently practical. For the first year, babies stay in one spot unless moved to another spot by a helpful adult. They need something to do besides endlessly demanding food and hugs, so hours of TV is a natural fit. And when they become mobile and start roaring through the house carpet-bombing the carpet with organic IEDs, they need to rest--ideally for most of their waking day--and focus on hypnotic cartoon images of birds, butterflies and the making of things out of Playdo.

BabyFirstTV says its programming offers "interactive tools to help babies and parents learn and play together." It's sad but true: The parents in our office regularly come to work, curl up in a fetal ball under their desks and rock back and forth quietly singing the lyrics to "Baby Beluga." Clearly, they need better interactive tools.

Promised programming on BabyFirstTV includes Harry the Bunny, about a rabbit who "teaches exciting things to young viewers;" Foodie Fables, which showcases animals made out of fresh fruits and vegetables; and the destined to be popular suite of shows that include Flow, Wave, Kaleidoscope and Sandman. According to the website, they're meant to help with naptime. A side bonus: they instill an early appreciation for Pink Floyd and corn chips. But these American titles pale in comparison to the offerings on yet another baby-centric TV channel, Baby TV, available in Europe. It features shows that appear to be borrow from French New Wave cinema with titles like Mixed-up Mary, Whose it? What's it? and the disturbing sounding Booby and Booba.

My personal favourite is "Spiritual Baby," in which a baby interacts with the natural world and receives "in return warmth, affection and satisfaction." It's meant to stimulate the "spirituality inherent in every child." Amen to all that. Nothing is better than to teach kids to interact with nature, which as we all know is warmly spiritual. I'm already emailing Baby TV in Europe to see if I can buy DVD versions of their episodes "Baby Gets a Hug from Katrina," and "Southeast Asian Tsunami: Whee whee!" It's the love I missed when I was two.

Blando: a mini-review of Manufacturing Dissent

WMD: I have no problem with a documentary examining documentary maker Michael Moore. He's the most successful and famous doc maker in history. In Roger and Me, his second best film, he gave us the movie of record about the hollowing out of America's industrial heartland. His most recent, Sicko, which is also his best, puts to (a sick) bed the notion that the U.S. health care system is in any way a model to envy or emulate. But, as everyone knows now, he's a flawed filmmaker and personality. For a guy dealing in a supposedly non-fiction genre, he's a fudger, sometimes shockingly so, and a ham. For a self-described man of the people, he's got an ego -- and an affluent lifestyle -- that's as wide as his girth. And he's apparently not the easier boss to work for. A guy like this is crying out for examination, especially in a film that emulates his patented style of gotcha "journalism". But after seeing Manufacturing Dissent, I'm still waiting for such an examination.

I take the makers of MD at face value when they say the are fans of Moore and set out to make a doc of him behind the scenes because they are fans. But when they were repeatedly rebuffed by his coterie of PR handlers and security over a simple request for a 20-minute sitdown interview, they were surprised. And then they discovered, as has now been written about for years, that Moore makes stuff up--both in his films and in numerous public appearances--to suit his own ends. The film does a credible job of examining Moore's background, how he grew up in a wealthy burb of Flint, his early years as a journalist/publisher (in which he apparently used stories from another publication without permission or payment) running his own paper, his failure/meltdown/assassination at Mother Jones, and his rocket ride to fame after Roger and Me electrified film festival audiences. We hear from friends, past and present, business associates and a range of figures from the U.S. left from Nader to Hitchens, and we get to watch him on the road trying to whip up the youth vote during the 2004 U.S. presidential election. And what emerges is a reasonable portrait of a man with all the charms and flaws I've described above. But they're also charms and flaws that have been written about and known about for years. The makers of MD seem to be shocked that Moore is Moore, and their criticism of him is altogether too moderate. They end the film with a statement from a disenchanted colleague and friend of Moore (and he's got good reason for being disenchanted) musing about how Moore is feeding into the same old cult of American celebrity, and that while he poses as a political radical, he's feathering his own nest. But what's left unsaid is that the film, by being about Moore, continues that cult of celebrity. And the reason that the film was made in the first place was because the filmmakers, as Moore fans, were part of that cult. And we don't get the impression they've left it by doc's end.

Final note: The filmmakers are Canadian, and while there's some reference to that in MD, it doesn't go far enough. Moore frequently uses Canada as a shining example of the social welfare state in his films. And as a Canadian who's reasonably happy with our goals of social welfare (if not always our implementation), I find Moore's lavish praise embarrassing. Yes, embarrassment is a Canadian trait, but if Moore fudges his American examples in films like Bowling for Columbine, he's an outright distortionist when it comes to Canada. A classic example was his wandering through a Toronto neighbourhood and discovering all the doors unlocked. The unsubtle lesson: sweet Canadians are so unconcerned about violence, because we have none, that it's doors open policy all the time, neigbhours! Maybe in 1950 in small towns on the prairie where everyone went to church or was too drunk to care. In 2007, you can count up the alarm security signs and stickers in just about any neighbourhood in Vancouver and end up with a pretty high number. I really doubt Toronto is any different, especially now that our largest city has acquired world class youth gang gun violence.

Today's bLINKit: I'm way too old for MySpace, and never troll it, but through this show, I stumbled upon the song that plays when you open this page. Sentimental me, I like it.

In your Facebook

Today's bLINKit: A parody of a Facebook commercial. Facebook, for those who need to get up to speed, is the Web app that's taking over the universe.

For those in search of other parodies, here's The Sarcastic Gamer's re-narration of actual commercials for Wii Fit and Microsoft Surface.

Europa, Europa: SL demographics

SL Neighbourhood Update: According to demographic data for June (stupidly, I've lost the source of this information, but I found it in a past post at the excellent New World Notes), one quarter of the active avatars in SL are American. American residents also participate in SL beyond their numbers, racking up nearly 35 per cent of the total hours users spent in the world. But if anyone dominates SL, it's Europeans, who make up, by a rough count, almost half of the active residents. I've noted this before, in the increasing presence of European languages on the chat logs and Eurocentric buildings and institutions appearing on the landscape. Just across from me, an Italian avie is building what looks like an art house/gallery in the sky. It's massive, with several floors and ten times the floor space of my flying loft. And although I can see the building from my living room, I have to see anyone actually in it. The Euros are on when the North Americanos slumber.

Chief among the Europeans are Germans followed by the French and Brits. My hunch about Dutch going into SL in a big way was correct. Despite Holland having one-sixth the population of Canada, they rank one level above Canadian residents in both number of active avatars and number of hours spent in the world.

Asians are generally down the list, but NWN notes that Japan has come on strong lately, with a look and in-world culture uniquely their own.

Other updates: according to NWN, Linden Labs has declared gambling illegal in SL. That's huge.

And around my hood: the neopagan I sold my initial land to awhile back is building a castle. There's that art house project across the way. And some very ordinary, and refreshingly so, new houses have popped up. But whenever I log on, there's still seldom anyone around. It's not very neighbourly.

The pic: the flag of a united Europe flies over my hood.

Today's bLINKit: Neocons on a cruise, and how they go fascist when lounging at sea.

More DVDs: Doing it his way

By sheer coincidence, I've been watching a lot of Sinatra movies recently. And here's my conclusion: Frank Sinatra was one of the better and underrated actors of his generation. Or at least he was prior to the heyday of the Rat Pack and all that fooling around with the Mob. But even in something later like Von Ryan's Express he's both eminently watchable and believable. He prefers stillness over histrionics, calm over shouting, and he commands attention when the camera closes in on his face: here's a torn, conflicted man of street-smart intelligence and barely constrained rawness. Not very polite, but also decent. Driven, but always followed by doubt. It's these kinds of qualities I've found in two recent viewings.

The first is The Manchurian Candidate, a prize in itself. Part satire, part political thriller, it concerns a hilariously straight up international communist attempt to brainwash American GIs captured in Korea to become zombie-like assassins in the U.S. But with sophisticated editing, deftly staged setpieces, a great sense of humour and overshadowing paranoia, it likely set the bar for future politco-conspiracy flicks like The Parallax View and JFK. Sinatra plays one of the soldiers who, on his return from the war, is plagued by strange dreams. He slowly comes to the realization his former sergeant has become an involuntary killer for evil commies. Add the talented Laurence Harvey, various character actors like James Gregory and Henry Silva, and Angela Lansbury in a role so Freudianly evil it's as far away from Murder She Wrote as Kansas is from Khandahar, and it's highly entertaining. And Sinatra sews it all up as the central character desperately trying to keep up to events and save both his friend and his country.

Saving his friend is also the struggle Sinatra faces in 1958's Kings Go Forth, about two American soldiers involved with the same woman in the south of France during the Second World War. Tony Curtis and Natalie Wood co-star. Sinatra meets the girl first and falls in love with her. He inadvertently introduces her to the charming, handsome but shallow Curtis, who steals her away. That she's also half-black, in an era of intense racism, is a real zinger, and one of the major underlying themes of the story. The writing here is crisp, an example how a relatively ordinary film can also be literate with well-rounded characters, especially the women. It's enough to make you miss old films. Once in American cinema people actually sat down and had grownup conversations about real things. And again, Sinatra, at the core of the film, holds the film together brilliantly, largely be doing more with less.

In ORBit

WMD: Why carry your MP3s, photos and videos with you when you can stream them remotely via something like this? I've been testing out Orb the past couple of weeks and on balance it works fairly well. I've used various computers, including at work, with various connection speeds and have been mostly successful in connecting to my home computer and using it in essence as a remote media server. I've called up photos, listened to my music and watched downloaded TV and movies. (It also allows remote access to Word files and anything else that's not an application.) The video quality is shaky and largely unwatchable, but the music and photos work very well. Orb holds great promise: it now allows you to connect on a local network to game consoles like the Xbox 360 and Wii so that you can stream videos on your computer to your TV via the console. I really like the idea of an application that uses existing technology to do some interesting things, instead of consumers being forced to buy new stuff like this, which thanks to the lack of video for sale on iTunes outside of the U.S., and the usual Apple closed ecology, is fairly useless for non-Americans. I hope the video quality increases though.

Orb isn't the only application of its kind. Tversity seems to be doing much the same thing, except it's seems to be the Linux of remote software: complicated, not user friendly, but highly versatile and powerful.

Recently seen on DVD

Crude Awakening: A documentary examining the belief that we're heading toward (or could be past) peak oil. Goodbye cheap energy and carefree lives, hello increasing cost, economic dislocation and international conflict over what's left. It's a good introduction to the whole concept, one which not everyone agrees with. A good complement to this doc would be to catch a rebroadcast of the CBC Ideas lecture by SFU prof Mark Jaccard on Fossil fuels: friend or foe? He agrees cheap oil is nearing its peak, but says the efficient and, thanks to the smart application of developing technologies, the relatively ecologically friendly use of all sorts of remaining fossil fuels will help us make a transition to a future of clean alternative fuels. But only if we act now.

Shooter: Bang, bang, bang. How a protagonist who's eerily skilled as a sniper and a field tactician could blunder into an incredibly obvious trap by incredibly obvious bad guys undermines the premise of this whole otherwise OK film. Things explode really well though.

Death of a President: Widely praised as a daring film depicting the fictional assassination of U.S. president George Bush, this one literally put me to sleep. I thought the opening was a reasonably clever mix of real and staged events, but then it plodded and felt stagey. Otherwise, I have no idea what it was like since, truly, I was asleep long before it was over.

The Good Shepherd: The early years of the CIA, fictionally rendered. Lesson: spying is hard on families. Matt Damon is pretty good in this, but how the completely emotionally closed up nebbish geek he plays gets girls like Angelina Jolie remains unexplained and classified.

The Good German: Filmed with the style and technology (including lustrous black and white) of the 1940s, this is loads of fun. Riffs heavily on films like The Third Man and self-consciously so. Lots of flaws, including a central mystery that remains impenetrably awkward almost to the end, but generally worth the trip. Think Casablanca with the F word.

Blood Diamond: Too preachy, and yet another film in which Africa is largely seen through white people's eyes. But weedy little Leonardo DiCaprio is convincing as a Rhodesian/South African mercenary and smuggler with a choice accent.

Hot Fuzz: Best movie these incredibly funny Brits have made since they made this one.

Strawberries in the freezer

Today's bLINKit: This might come a bit late for people in my biozone, since strawberries seem to be pretty much done here, but for those with different growing seasons or those still enjoying the little red fruits, here's one of the better bits of online info I came across on how to freeze strawberries. I've frozen three big Ziploc bags of 'em (now that the bug war is done, I have to find another use for my Ziplocs other than protecting my clothing). I didn't want to smother them with sugar, since they're sweet enough, so I froze them using the non-sugar method. So far, so good, and we'll see how they last during the winter. Strawberries don't freeze especially well, or at least don't hold their shape when they thaw, but they do thaw tasty and, I imagine, at least nutritious in a way that junk food is not. When the blueberries come out next month, I'll freeze at least 40 pounds of those as a winter reserve. It's my small contribution to buying and eating local. And in reference to that, I was appalled last week when entering a local Save-On: here we are in the middle of local abundance, with farms bursting with produce only a few klicks away, and almost all the vegetables and fruit were from California.

Speaking of local abundance, when in my area check out the Westham Island Winery. I recommend the rhubarb and currant wines as great summer sippers. Also note in the winery tasting room the signed pictures of people like Charlie Sheen. Lots of filming goes on around Westham, I'm told, including this and this.

An honest journalist (alternative title: Is Paris burning?)

Today's bLINKit: I wish more news anchors would burn or rip up their scripts on air. If Tony Parsons does it, I'll send him $10 of my own money.

Hot enough for you?/VB Day

WMD: I woke up with summer in Vancouver. This evening, it feels like Kamloops. I very much appreciate my fridge, and realize this is another lesson in our dependency on the regular flow of cheap energy.

And today I'm announcing that to the best of my knowledge, the scourge is over. The much previously discussed bugs are gone. Now that the war is over, life is getting back to normal. The troops are coming home, industry is turning out consumer goods instead of tanks and rifles and the women are being sent back from those factories and back into the kitchen to make apple pies. It's the 1950s at Blinkit, and we're enjoying the opening years of the Eisenhower administration and booming economic growth. And don't worry, we'll let the women get work again. Perhaps part-time to start.