Day: March 30, 2002

Is a New Movie Worse than 9/11 Terrorist Attacks?

Jeff Deverett produces a kid’s show in Toronto called Ricky’s Room that is carried by some PBS channels. Deverett is currently protesting the new film, Death to Smoochy, a dark comedy about such children’s shows. According to Deverett, Death to Smoochy is the equivalent of the Sept. 11 attacks for kids.

When the World Trade Center fell, it was like a movie happening. But when a mascotted character like Barney gets his head blown off, that’s real. It’s real violence on their level. To [kids], this movie is Sept. 11.

Of course young kids who are watching an R-rated movie like this probably have at least one and maybe two problems that are far worse than anything in Death to Smoochy.

The funny thing is that Deverett claims he is suing Warner Bros. on the grounds that the Smoochy character is to close to his Ricky character. Yeah, because Everett’s the only person in the world who ever thought of putting an actor in a dumb-looking animal suit and building a kid’s show around it.

The 9/11 comparison, on the other hand, puts Deverett in a far more exclusive group of idiots.

Source:

Smoochy gets the kiss-off from kiddie show. Tamsen Tillson, Toronto Globe and Mail, March 27, 2002.

On a Related Topic . . .

For the last few months I’ve been (slowly) updating all of the articles on this site with a keyword system. Whenever I update the site with a new entry, I have a list of 13 categories with numerous subcategories under each of them.

For example, when I posted this article about a new high-resolution image of Saturn, I clicked on a couple options to indicate that it was a Science-related story, and then one level deeper it was an Astronomy-related story.

Not all stories have been marked up in this way, but I am slowly getting through the older ones (it took me awhile to settle on a taxonomy I liked). Now, though, for those stories that are labeled with keywords, a “Related Topics” set of links shows up in the right hand column. Visit that story about Saturn, for example, and a link back to the Astronomy page shows up under “Related Topics.” My recent review of a baseball computer games includes links back to both my baseball page and my computer games page.

This is the sort of thing that Conversant really shines at. I have complete control over what sort of categories and subcategories I want to set up, adding or deleting categories and subcategories takes just a few seconds, and once articles are tagged with this sort of metadata, there are some extremely powerful knowledge management-style applications that can be done without a lot of effort. Changing the template for this site to display the Related Topics information took just a few minutes.