Infidels of Every Denomination

The Big Deal about Big Love

HBO's new series Big Love has gotten quite a bit of press, mostly aimed towards its portrayal of a polygamous family.  The key word being "polygamous."  Perhaps some of their promos mentioned the word "Utah."  One word you most definitely didn't see, however, was "Mormon."

Interesting, that.  Especially since, from where I'm standing, the show's about a Mormon polygamous family -- the most relevant word being "Mormon."

I wonder how the press -- and the Mormon church -- would have reacted to that?

Wagering War

For those of you worried about the effects of the Grand Theft Auto games, here's something a little more worth your concern:

Italian web designers taking bets on worldwide terror attacks

No, seriously, these dudes have set up a website where you go and bet on where the next terrorist attack will take place in the world, and how it will be done. They're claiming some sort of high-minded awareness-raising purpose for this little exercise, as though that negates the sheer callousness of raking in money from the cold calculation of the death and destruction of innocents.

I mean, holy crap. This sounds like a plot from South Park, not an actual endeavor. What kind of person could place a wager here, turn out to be right, collect their winnings, and not be consumed with self-loathing?

Seriously-- WTF??

Edit: Apparently the Pentagon already considered this idea back in 2003 and the plan was dropped after the PR backlash bitch-slapped it. Gee, ya think?

Chatty Cathy, Mach 2

Is it just me, or is this doll creepy as hell? "Amazing Amanda", due on shelves in about a month, is an incredibly advanced robotic doll that not only talks and has facial expressions, but has voice-recognition technology, memory chips, and radio tags both in the doll and its accessories-- so that, for example, if the doll asks for a particular kind of "food" and you "feed" her the wrong piece of plastic food, she will tell you that's not what she wants.

All I can think of is the super-scary Living Doll episode from The Twilight Zone.

Talking dolls are just plain creepy. I can't pinpoint exactly why, but they are, and making the talking seem even more realistic JUST DOESN'T HELP.

Also in the article is this eye-roller:

"I think girls have more active imaginations than boys do when it comes to play," Mr. Riley noted. "If girls have a button on their doll and can feel an engine inside it, that takes away from their ability to imagine."

Nice backhanded sexism there. Why, exactly, can't girls use their imagination with robots and machines just as much as with dolls? I seem to remember me and my brothers being equally enraptured the Christmas we got the giant walking At-At with light-up "lasers".

In any case, neither talking dolls nor talking robots are toys that really promote imagination, IMO. In my crochety old-fart worldview, that honor goes to things like building blocks and their many variations like Legos, art supplies, and in particular the castoff clothes, cardboard boxes, sauce pot "drums", and other items that kids manage to find extremely creative ways to play with.

This also weirded me out:

What the doll is actually doing, Ms. Shackelford said, is "voice printing" the primary user's voice pattern. By asking a child to repeat "Amanda" several times, the doll quickly comes to recognize and store in its electronic memory that child's voice, and only that child's voice, as its "mommy." Other voices are greeted with Amanda's cautionary proclamation, "You don't sound like Mommy."

I suppose it goes without saying that it pisses me off that kids are still taught that dolls are "girl toys". What pisses me off more is that so many "girl toys" are still sexist propaganda centered on the idea that a girl's role in life is wife, mommy, and homemaker. Am I the only one who finds it disturbing that dolls like these push little girls to identify as "mommies" long before they will ever begin to make a choice about that part of their lives?

"We don't want to make kids scared of technology," said Ms. Shackelford, who says she is in her mid-60's and has no children of her own. "You have a baby doll that is supposed to make a little girl feel like the doll loves her. Girls tell dolls all the time that they love them.

"This doll," Ms. Shackelford said, "acts like she loves you."

Well, *I* just got a chill.

Trash Talker Kicked To The Curb

Talk show host Michael Graham fired over anti-Islam remarks

Washington radio station WMAL-AM fired talk show host Michael Graham yesterday after he refused to soften his description of Islam as "a terrorist organization" on the air last month.

Graham had been suspended without pay from his daily three-hour show since making his comments July 25. The station had conditioned his return to the midmorning shift on reading a station-approved statement in which Graham would have said that his anti-Muslim statements were "too broad" and that he sometimes uses "hyperbole" in the course of his program. WMAL also asked Graham to speak to the station's advertisers and its employees about the controversy.

But Graham refused both conditions, prompting the station to drop him.

What does Graham have to say for himself? Let's go to the WingNutDaily:

Graham's suspension stems come from characterizing Islam a "terrorist organization." Graham explained that when a significant minority of a group conducts terrorism and the general population of that group does not denounce it, it is safe to conclude that the group promotes it.

Hmm...so should we assume that because the most extreme and vocal factions of Christianity in America promote bigotry, hatred, misogyny, and even murder, and the "general population" has not risen up with a mighty hand to bitch-slap them into silence, that all Christians "promote" those things?

Gee, maybe Graham doesn't know that Islam doesn't have one leader or council that can speak for the faith as a whole. So maybe when local leaders or groups speak out against terrorism, it just doesn't count as far as he's concerned.

Here's another of his gems, from his Wikipedia entry:

"moderate Muslims are those who only want to kill Jews".

Nice. This guy's a riot and a half.

Needless to say, he's all about the sanctity of free speech NOW, just like any other whiny wingnut who thinks s/he's entitled to a paid forum from which to spew hate. Now if he's got the huge and loyal fan base that he claims to have, surely some other station will feel it vital (and lucrative) to book such a controversial ratings-spiker like him. See, honey, *that's* free speech, that chance that you can be hired somewhere else, if in fact anyone really wants to hear what you have to say. The right to free speech just doesn't go hand in hand with a right to make people care about your opinions.

Of course, this channel still carries Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity, sort of the Huginn and Muninn of the Bush administration and the neocons, so the station can't be given too much credit for decency.

Let's finish with another deep thought from Mr. Graham:

Graham said he couldn't accept the idea of apologizing "for the truth..."

Sometimes, you just need to let them speak for themselves.

"Wolverine can move a mountain"

Earlier this evening I saw a commercial showing a man on a gray rock cliff.  The camera panned back, and words were superimposed over the image:  "Wolverine can move a mountain."  More of the hillside is shown, and you can see other hills and valleys.   The text goes away for a moment, so you can see the complete scene before the word "Wolverine" comes up again, with a picture of the Wolverine work boot beside it.

The complete scene, unless I'm quite mistaken, is a strip mine.

Yes, Wolverine can move a mountain.

Real Women, Real Beauty

I wasn't going to post about the Dove Real Beauty campaign because to me it's kind of a non-issue, but...well, I couldn't resist.

On the one hand, I feel like praising Dove overmuch is kind of the equivalent of when your boyfriend does the dishes for the first time in four years and then expects you to throw him a parade or give him head or something. It's a nice effort, but not a terribly big one, and almost too long overdue to be worthy of much praise. On the other hand, I can't bring myself to be a total cynic about it. Yes, it's still using women's bodies to sell butt cream and it's still exploiting on our notions of beauty &yadda. But it's advertising. Its very nature is to exploit things we care about in order to convince us to buy stuff, and if our buttons are still being pushed that hard about the shape of women's bodies, then it's as much still our problem as Madison Avenue's. And unless we all want to go out and do a whole lot of painstaking research every single time we want to buy something, and to pick products from a whole range of mysteriously wrapped brown paper packages labeled in carefully literal terms, we're still going to have some use for the ad industry. Which is not to say that we shouldn't pressure them to change, or that they shouldn't feel compelled to think about the message they're sending, or that the uber-commercialization of the world is a particularly good thing, but railing against the industry for being what it is, is kind of pointless.