Day: August 10, 2005

Buffy The Milton Slayer

Australian Education Minister Brendan Nelson has created something of a row with his criticism of university education in his country. His complaints boil down to the claims that there is an excessive focus on postmodernism and more emphasis on pop culture studies than the classics.

According to the Sydney Morning Herald,

“You’ve got teacher education faculties that are in essence quasi-sociology departments,” he [Nelson] said, adding that it was hard to find undergraduates studying Milton “and stuff like that Â… but you can study Buffy the Vampire Slayer and those sort of things”.

Not being familiar with Australia’s education system, its hard to know how serious a problem this really is. Postmodernism is certainly a scourge — the intellectual equivalent of the Black Death, destroying rational inquiry where it alight.

Same thing with pop culture/media studies. Hey, my home office is filled with Buffy action figures, but I can’t imagine paying thousands of dollars for my daughter to go to a university where she can get credit for writing a Marxist or Postmodernist analysis of the show.

Criticism of Nelson seems to run along lines outlined by The Australian columnist, Emma Tom. According to Tom,

Yet postmodernism’s nibbling at the artificial divide between high and low culture makes a lot of sense. You only have to imagine what that old populist Shakespeare would have done if television had been an option when he was in the crowd-pleasing game.

As with the works of Shakespeare, Buffy the Vampire Slayer can be hilarious, gut-wrenching and immensely thought-provoking.

And – contrary to the notion that all products of postmodernism are devoid of values – it offers some extraordinarily old-fashioned conclusions about what it means to be a good person.

Characters are rewarded for selflessness, family fidelity and putting duty before hedonistic teenybopping. They’re punished for greed, betrayal and wanting to suck too much blood out of people’s throats while trying to destroy the world. Not very cappuccino-y at all when you think about it.

So give us Milton and his mates by all means. But anyone who tries to remove modern classics such as Buffy from the curriculum just because they were created in the 20th and 21st centuries and don’t have dusty pages deserves a good, hard, slaying.

Postmodernism’s destruction of the distinction between what Tom calls high and low culture is idiotic. Comparing Joss Whedon to William Shakespeare is beyond bizarre. Moreover, Buffy doesn’t even hold up against 20th and 21st century classics. Buffy is a wonderful show, but it doesn’t hold a candle to the best Akira Kurosawa or Ingmar Bergman films. If Tom wants students learning from recent masters, they should be reading Camus or Salman Rushdie, not wasting their time analyzing Buffy scripts.

Sources:

Buffy slays the stuffy in schoolroom stand-off. Emma Tom, The Australian, August 10, 2005.

Deconstructing Buffy leaves Nelson clueless. Justin Norrie, Sydney Morning Herald, August 6, 2005.

I Heart My Tivo

I should have know that the last thing I needed was a Tivo. I’m already a TV junkie, and the Tivo just made that much, much worse.

I bought the Humax DRT-400, which I goes for about $300. This is a Tivo Series 2 with just a 40gb hard drive, but this particular model includes a DVD recorder so programs captured by the Tivo can be burned to DVD (like many consumer DVD recorders, it only accepts DVD-Rs for some reason). The presence of a DVD recorder was crucial for me — I wanted a way to quickly and easily get programs off the Tivo. You can — and I have — add the Tivo to a home network, and from there transfer files to a PC and burn them to a DVD, but that’s a few more steps than I wanted to do on a regular basis.

I’ve been hearing people rave about the Tivo interface for years, and I was amazed. I expected to find the sort of glitches and design problems that seem to plague consumer electronics, but the interface is a thing of beauty. Subscribing to every episode of a show so I don’t miss a single episode of “The Life and Times of Juniper Lee” was a snap. So was searching through listings for that favorite childhood episode of “Buck Rogers.”

I can also look for programs based on a keyword search. For example, I’ve got a recent thing for pirates, so I’ve set up a keyword search that shows me all programs that have the word “pirate” in the title or description. Its not perfect since its a straight text search — for example, a show that used the term “buccaneer” was not highlighted since it didn’t meet the search term. I’ve got about a dozen of these search terms that I check a couple times a week.

I was less impressed with the Tivo Suggestions feature, wherein Tivo tries to guess what you might like to watch based on what you’ve watched before. But then, my habits and interests are so quirky, these sort of suggestion systems never work for me. And there are so many other ways to drill down to find hours of TV to record, that I rarely check out Tivo’s suggestions.

As I mentioned, recording those programs to DVD was essential for my purposes, and the DVD burning process is pretty much flawless. The interface does a good job of walking the user through the process of selecting which program to use, title the DVD and burn. Tivo does a very good job with the menu system it creates. I’m used to DVD recorders that add ugly-looking block text menu to their DVDs. The Tivo uses the same fonts and graphics from its interface a on the DVDs, which is leaps and bounds beyond most other DVD recorders I’ve used.

If a program is too big to fit on a single DVD-R, the recorder does a very good job of indicating how many parts the program has to be split into and letting the user pick which parts to save to DVD.

The other advantage of the Humax Tivo with the DVD recorder is the ability to record video such as from a video camera to the Tivo and then burn it to a DVD. I use this for largely for one of my obsessions — recording in-game video from my computer. Thanks to the Humax Tivo, I now have dozens of DVDs of my WoW character adventuring (i.e., dying over and over).

Finally, the Tivo Series 2 can be connected to a network. The box only has USB ports, so you have to use a USB Ethernet setup. I bought a cheap Linksys USB Ethernet connector, plugged it into my network and everything worked without any configuration on my part (other than telling the Tivo to use DHCP). As I mentioned before, you can transfer files from the Tivo to the PC, but I doubt I’ll ever do that. Instead, I installed it primarily to play music and show pictures stored on my PC through the Tivo. That worked okay. The picture playing feature worked as I expected, but I was annoyed that with the music feature I couldn’t set the system up to play my music in the background while I scheduled programs, etc. If you want to play music, you have to stick with the music playing screen. That’s sort of pointless on a box with so many different options and things to do.

Otherwise, the only real downside to the Tivo is paying $300 for the box and then still having to pay a $12.99/month subscription fee. So far, though, the fee is more than worth it. This is easily the best gadget I have ever owned.

Minnesota Governor Rejects PETA’s Request To Protect Walleye Pike

In July, People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals’ Karin Robinson sent a letter to Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty.

That letter asked Pawlenty to make it illegal for fisherman in Minnesota to catch the state fish, the walleyed pike.

Instead, the Governor’s office released the following statement,

The following is a statement from Governor Tim Pawlenty regarding a request from People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) to declare walleye off limits to fishing in Minnesota:

“PETA continues to display goofy judgment. Fishing is part of our way of life in Minnesota – moms, dads, kids, and grandparents enjoy beautiful summer and winter days fishing. We care for and enjoy our natural resources the right way. The PETA ‘Fish Empathy Project’ is nutty and misses the mark. Fishing is not, as they claim, the same thing as hooking a dog through the mouth and dragging them behind your car.

“PETA should stay out of Minnesota’s proud fishing lifestyle. Because of their letter, I’m going out for a walleye dinner tonight.”

Source:

Pawlenty rejects PETA ‘fish emapthy’ request. Associated Press, August 4, 2005.

Governor Pawlenty’s Statement Regarding A Request From PETA To Declare Walleye Off-Limits To Fishing. Press Release, August 2, 2005.

PETA’s Anti-KFC Protest Draws More Customers

People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals’ Benjamin Goldsmith organized a protest against a KFC in Jackson Hole, Wyoming. But along with 10 protesters, the activists attracted additional customers to the restaurant.

According to the Associated Press,

Jacqueline Newbold, a supervisor at KFC, said at an uncommon rush of customers required the store to call extra employees at work.

“We had a line going out the door and through the lobby,” Newbold said.

. . .

During the first four hours of business, from 11 a.m. to 3 p.m., on Monday, the store had 211 customers compared with 130 the Monday before, supervisor John Simmons said Tuesday.

KFC customer Rusty Smith summed up one view of the protest, telling the Associated Press,

I think there’s a place in this world for all God’s creations . . . right next to the mashed potatoes.

Protester Marcos Carillo chalked such attitudes down to ignorance,

People don’t understand.

No, as I’ve said before, people understand exactly what animal rights activists are demanding, which is why their views are so overwhelmingly rejected by the larger culture.

Source:

Protest draws extra customers. Associated Press, August 3, 2005.

South Korean Researchers Clone Dog

South Korean researchers in August reported that they have succeeded in cloning a dog — the first time that species has been successfully cloned.

Veteinarian Woo-Suk Hwang led the team that cloned the Afghan hound. Hwang had previously cloned cows, pigs, and a variety of cows that are resistant to mad cow disease.

Unlike those animals, however, cloning dogs is a bigger challenge since dogs don’t respond ot the hormons used to stimulate ovulation. Cloning dogs required monitoring more than 100 female dogs. In all, 1,095 embryos were transferred to 123 surrogate dogs resulting in just 3 pregnancies. Only two of those were carried to term, and one of those dogs died from aspiration pneumonia at 22 days old.

The puppy that did survive, however, appears to be a completely normal Afghan puppy and is now 3 years old.

Hwang is also an expert at stem cell production, and in 2004 successfully derived stem cells from a cloned human embryo. His research on dog cloning will soon shift to developing a line of embryonic dog stem cells which could potentially be used in understanding and treating human diseases.

Animal rights groups weren’t exactly happy about the announcement. Despite the enormous difficulty in cloning dogs, Humane Society of the United States’ Wayne Pacelle told the Associated Press,

This technology could lead to a brave new world of puppy production if it were hijacked by profiteers seeking to use cloning to supply the pet trade.

Sources:

South Korean scientists clone dog. Peter Gorner, Chicago Tribune, August 3, 2005.

Snappy response to Snuppy’s birth. Joseph Verrengia, Associated Press, August 5, 2005.

Dog cloned in South Korea. Bryn Nelson, Newsdady, August 2005.