The pressure group Climate Name Change has published an hilarious video on YouTube, imagining a world where the World Meteorological Organisation names extreme storms not after everyday, innocent people (thereby tarring their names by association with devastating natural disasters), but instead after some of the more intractable anti-science climate change deniers currently serving in the US Congress:
I must say, I do quite like the idea of a Hurricane Bachmann or a Tropical Storm Steve King:
“Senator Marco Rubio is expected to pound the eastern seaboard sometime early tonight”
or
“Now, Michele Bachmann is on the way folks, and specifically the eye of Michele Bachmann will be hitting Florida in a few hours”
This is not to say that I am totally intolerant of climate change skeptics. I can certainly appreciate the potentially distorting effects of groupthink in the scientific community, and at a stretch I can see how some of the data points, correlations and trajectories may have been exaggerated to better fit a pre-ordained narrative, intentionally or not.
What I have no time for, however, are the mouth-breathing troglodytes – serving Republican members of the U.S. Congress – who talk about dinosaur flatulence or a literal interpretation of the Bible’s account of Noah’s flood as a way of trying to discredit scientific evidence. All in the cause, they innocently protest, of “having a fair debate about the issues”.
So apparently some crazy stuff went down at the VMAs last night. Something about Miley Cyrus gyrating inappropriately, Justin Timberlake reuniting with the Backstreet Boys (or is it ‘NSync?) and all manner of Hollywood elite naughtiness that promised to both amuse and titillate the audience.
I know this because various websites that I read to pass the time – Buzzfeed, Slate, et al. – have been writing and posting articles about the VMA shenanigans throughout the day. The format of said articles (and this doesn’t just apply to the VMAs, but about more or less anything that happens in America) generally follows this pattern:
1. EYE-CATCHING HEADLINE
2. FERVENT ASSURANCE THAT I REALLY WANT TO READ THIS STORY
3. BREATHLESS PARAGRAPH FILLING ME IN ON THE SCANDALOUS DETAILS
4. EMBEDDED VIDEO OF SAID SCANDALOUS HAPPENING IN ALL ITS SALACIOUS GLORY
5. THE “WASN’T THAT SH*T CRAZY?” PERORATION
Only I happen to live in the United Kingdom. Which means that the whole process falls apart when I reach Step 4. Instead of seeing the embedded video (from YouTube, or MTV, or Comedy Central or whoever the hell else), I get this:
4. SORRY, THIS VIDEO IS NOT VIEWABLE FROM YOUR CRAPPY THIRD WORLD COUNTRY. SUCK IT.
Thanks, Slate.com for linking to a video that only 4.45% of the world’s population can watch
But – and here’s the kicker – not before they make me sit through the obligatory 30-second commercial for J-Lo’s latest crappy perfume or whatever other shoddily-conceived and made wares that they want me to purchase. As a result, for viewers that God has chosen to curse by not conveniently placing them within the contiguous 48 states of the USA, Step 5 then becomes this:
5. WASN’T THAT GREAT THING THAT YOU DON’T GET TO SEE REALLY AWESOME?
I wouldn’t know, would I? I wouldn’t bloody know.
Comedy Central at least tries to be amusing about the fact that their bloodsucking intellectual property lawyers want to extinguish any last drop of enjoyment that I might possibly derive from their shows:
Even Colbert is in on the heinous conspiracy
But somehow this lame attempt at humour just makes it all the worse.
And no, it isn’t one of the “detriments of living under a monarchy”. It is one of the detriments of living in a modern digital age still governed by dinosaurs and fossils from a previous era who seriously think that today’s web-savvy, enlightened global consumer will put up with their bullshit and tolerate a smug, scornful, condescendingly second-class service.
And the fact that many such content providers, such as Comedy Central above, offer to redirect you to “your local country website” – which is, without exception, massively inferior to the US version in every way, from design to content – merely rubs additional salt into the wound.
THIS IS WHY INTERNET PIRACY HAPPENS. THIS. RIGHT HERE.
Do the suits seriously think that I am going to shrug my shoulders and hop on a plane to the US of A so that I can watch their two-minute-long, mildly entertaining video clip, or else sorrowfully abstain from ever viewing it?
No. In my rage, I will turn to Google and hammer out a stream-of-consciousness search request into my long-suffering keyboard, and fifty websites of dubious legality will instantly offer to show me the same goddamn video clip, without asking me to move continents, kill my firstborn son or jump through a fiery hoop.
The bottom line is that I get to watch the thing that I wanted to see. Semi-Partisan Sam wins. Always. In fact, the only people who lose out are the blood-sucking corporations who tried to throw pathetic, unenforceable legal obstacles in my path, and – sadly – the content creators, who would have materially benefited had I been able to watch on the official site, maybe sit through a couple more ads, and even make a purchase from the online store once in a blue moon.
But I don’t expect much from the likes of ViaCom-NBC-Universal-CBS-Fox-MediaTron-Gargamel-Corp.
It would be nice, however, if the news and entertainment websites that I frequent – respectable websites and publications that should know that much of their readership originates from outside the continental USA and does not appreciate being titillated with the promise of content that they cannot watch – smartened their act up and linked to sources that do not enforce petty, control-freakish regional access restrictions (or at least pressured content providers to stop their errant ways for the good of humanity).
Henceforth, I will be naming and shaming any site that falls short of this entirely reasonable standard of behaviour on this blog.
Dr. Lorraine Fisher-Katz commits every public presentation blunder and PowerPoint faux-pas known to man while addressing a group of young undergraduates in Boston…before it is revealed that she is an actress hired by their professor to highlight the importance of good presentation skills. Sadly, there remain serious people in the business world who would benefit enormously from sitting through this short “workshop”.
For the final installment, a look back at those early pioneering laptops. Yes, they may have weighed 15 pounds and set you back something in the region of $6000 to purchase, but with 16 MHz of raw processing power and an optional 40MB hard disk, they created the market for viable portable computers.
I still wouldn’t want one of these behemoths resting on my lap for any length of time, though.
For those interested in the recent history of IT and computing, this YouTube channel is well worth following.
Looking back at the Atari ST, a popular computing choice for creative people working with music or graphics back in the day.
Also featuring towards the end of the episode an excited announcement about an upcoming MacWorld Exposition in Boston, at which the first Apple laptop was to be launched.
Semi-Partisan Politics 