/* ** ************************************************************************ ** ************************************************************************ ** The Non-Sequitur Express ** Published at random intervals by Phillip Thorne ** Volume 3, Issue 11: Tuesday, 25 September 2001 ** http://nsx.underbase.org/ ** ** "That boy's crazy. Put'im in one'a 'em crazy buckets." ** ************************************************************************ ** ************************************************************************ */ OBSERVATIONS & C: Terms, headline sizes, air travel, why react?, telethon. ERRATA & O+A+A: Hyper-redundant modular robots in "StarGate SG-1". UPCOMING: WB, UPN, syndicated; FX "Buffy"; Toonami escapes "DBZ". plus Legalese, acknowledgements and opt-in/out instructions. http://nsx.underbase.org/ - back issues http://nsx.underbase.org/index_plus.htm - synopses, reviews, analyses, etc. http://nsx.underbase.org/tv/ - Philadelphia and network TV listings mailto://nsx-discuss-l@underbase.org - post on this issue (if subscribed) http://www.underbase.org/ - additional databases /* *************************************************************************** ** OBSERVATIONS & COGITATIONS ** The linguo-dilution of "ground zero" and "fallout". ** Newspaper headline sizes as index of crisis. ** Air travel: safest now? ** Who should react emotionally? ** Mega-telethon for relief: we control the vertical... ** ************************************************************************ */ In the author's continuing psycho-socio-SFnal coverage of the tue-11-sep-2001 2001 terrorist attacks in the US, in which he break his self-imposed boycott against opinions... *** Notice the ubiquitous use of the terms "ground zero" and "fallout" in press coverage, in regards to the World Trade Center and the economic ramifications of its collapse? There was a time when they applied only to nuclear weapons. The US military has dubbed its preparations to capture-or-kill Osama bin Laden, and punish-or-destroy Afghanistan's Taliban for harboring him, "Operation Infinite Justice". Allied Arab countries have objected that the adjective is applicable only to the Deity; and _Washington Post_ columnist George F. Will that "justice" implies a courtroom, jury, and reading of Miranda rights. *I* think it's just overblown and pompous. *** Can you track a crisis by the layout of a newspaper? The past two weeks of my hometown paper, _The Daily Local News_, have featured the following front-page headlines at the following letter-heights (centimeters): Date Headline Char H(cm) Char/cm ---- ------------------------------------------ ---- ----- ------- 9/12 ATTACK! 7 7.6 0.92 9/13 A 1 6.0 0.17 GRIM TASK 9 4.7 1.91 9/14 Hopes fade 10 4.8 2.08 9/15 A call to 9 3.1 2.90 Arms 4 8.5 0.47 9/16 'We're at war' 13 4.5 2.89 9/17 Return to normalcy? 19 2.9 6.55 9/18 Dow plunges 11 3.9 2.82 9/19 Somber nation tries to move on 30 2.8 10.71 9/20 Off to battle 13 3.6 3.61 9/21 'Defend freedom' 15 3.5 4.29 9/22 Bush demand rejected; military strikes loom 43 2.1 20.48 9/23 U.S. prepares to strike 23 2.9 7.93 ---- ------------------------------------------ ---- ----- ------- The height winner is the word "Arms" in fri-14-sep's four-word headline, at 8.5-cm tall. The wildly varied values in the Char/cm column indicates letter height doesn't shrink in direct proportion to the growth of the headline; but perhaps I have too few points for a full comparison. *** Companies in many industries, including the major US airlines, operate with thin financial margins -- dangerously thin. Any small disruption in their revenue streams can have severe effects. (See Vernor Vinge's novel _A Deepness in the Sky_ for the result when an entire multiplanetary civilization goes to just-in-time inventories, then has a social revolution that interrupts shipments.) Frightened Americans have stopped flying, which is having knock-on effects on aircraft manufacturers and the tourism industry. (Compare: Bristish tourism in the wake of the mad cow disease quarantines.) However, I would think *right now* is probably the *safest* time to travel by air, because everyone is still on alert for sneaky hazards, and because the manifests are small enough for a passenger to personally inspect all his fellow fliers. *** The major news media are like dogs: they all leap on the same bone, then chew all the life out of it. Consider the news coverage devoted to the current outpouring of support by Americans: $400 million in donations, standing in line for six hours to donate blood. Now, statistics indicate Americans are actually quite generous to charities, but where were all these people during every other Red Cross call for blood? The need doesn't subside. Some unasked questions: are there any U.S. groups that *haven't* stood up in a show of unity? What are the positions of the Amish and Quakers? Are there human-populated countries that *don't* require a major local catastrophe to mobilize relief efforts? Are the annual wildfires in the western US, the ones that had previously been absorbing all the available firefighters, still burning? If the average American doesn't react to deaths in an Israel-West Bank terrorism incident, or in a Bangladeshi mudslide -- events that don't affect him personally -- why should I (considering the situation dispassionately) react to the 6000 deaths at the WTC? I don't *know* these people. They're faceless casualty statistics, and the mere fact that they're nearby in time and space doesn't give them special emotional (as opposed to economic) status; their suffering [1] doesn't generate in me any greater empathy than for, say, Pennsylvanian soldiers killed in the US civil war. There's an apropos passage in physicist Fred Hoyle's 1957 novel, _The Black Cloud_, at the close of chapter eleven: Lives lost through an "act of God" are regretted, perhaps deeply regretted, but they do not arouse our wildest passions. It is otherwise with lives that are forfeited through deliberate human agency [...] one deliberate murder can produce a sharper reaction than ten thousand deaths on the roads [...] But in the eyes particularly of the United States Government, the hydrogen deaths were murder, murder on a gigantic scale, perpetrated by a small group of desperate men, who to gratify insatiable ambitions had allied themselves with the thing in the sky, men who were guilty of treason against the whole human species. (The situation: a black interstellar cloud has taken up residence around the Sun, altering Earth's climate and causing megadeaths; but the scientists studying it have just discovered it's sentient. The US and USSR fire ICBMs into the cloud, hoping to poison it; but at the scientists' warning, it turns the missiles back towards their launch sites. The leader of the scientists does not suffer fools or politicians lightly, and had previously made some rather bold statements and threatening bluffs.) Yes, many people died; yes, being ripped from the social fabric no doubt caused local disruption [2]; yes, the event has political and economic repercussions beyond the immediate victims. But I'm not going to lose my head and start wailing in anguish, providing photogenic fodder for the visual news media: it's unseemly and unconstructive. There's a passage in the Bible about mourning, the people who do it in private, and the people who make a big production of it... ...If you're a celebrity, and *everything* you do is a big production (desired or not), then does the above passage apply, or is it a "of those to whom much is given, much is demanded" situation? I speak of the fri-21-sep-2001 celebrity performer telethon to raise money for the victims' families. Channel surfing that night had (for long blocks) no visible effect on the image -- talk about "we control the vertical, we control the horizontal." It sprawled across at least nine broadcast and 14 cable networks: ABC, CBS, FOX, NBC, PAX, PBS, Univision, UPN and WB; BET, Comedy Central, the Discovery Channel, E!, Fox Family, FX, Lifetime, MTV, Showtime, TLC, TNN, TNT, USA, and VH1. [1] Suffering earns greater empathy than quick deaths. That's why (I theorize) the humanitarian aid organizations use footage of sad, dirty children eking out sub-survival in locations with inadequate physical and social infrastructure, and why Amnesty International mentions prisoners in cells instead of summary executions. [2] Society has (it seems) certain expectations about death. It is appropriate to die if you are old, ill, or a soldier in wartime. It is slightly less appropriate if you are engaged in a hazardous occupation or persist in visiting dangerous locales. It is severely resented if you are young, healthy, a civilian or a bystander in a "perfectly" safe city. Note outcries of outrage such as "it's not fair!" There are well-established damping mechanisms (institutional and personal) to compensate for the abrubt removal of certain nodes: police widow pensions, a sustaining belief that Johnny died fighting the forces of the Hun to protect Mom, democracy and apple pie. When these mechanisms do not apply, the social fabric goes all wobbly. *** Today's masthead quote is from "Invader Zim" episode 9b, "Hamstergeddon". This animated SF series by macabre-twisted-satirist comic artist Jhonen Vasquez airs Fridays at 21:00 on Nickelodeon. /* *************************************************************************** ** ERRATA & OMISSIONS, ADDENDA & ADMISSIONS ** Hyper-redundant modular robots in "StarGate SG-1". ** ************************************************************************ */ Issue 3.9's "Technology" column asserted that "hyper-redundant modular reconfigurable robots have *not* appeared in visual SF, probably because they're nightmarishly difficult to model and animate." This is not entirely true. In the third-to-fourth-season cliffhanger of "StarGate SG-1", the alien Asgard civilization is threatened by small bug-like robots, the so-called Replicators. In fact, each bug is a collaboration of dozens of small rectangular blocks; these can combine in other ways, to form a factory for new blocks, or to cover an exit. The show's creators realized the Replicators in CGI, with shortcuts to avoid my objections: the modules are usually seen only in their combined state, and since they're joined using "monopolar force fields" instead of hinges, a collection of loose modules simply *flies* together instead of painstakingly clambering over each other. /* *************************************************************************** ** UPCOMING ** WB, UPN, syndicated SFF. ** "X-Files" and "Buffy" from the beginning. ** Toonami escapes "Dragonball" gulch. ** ************************************************************************ */ ADVISORIES... The next two weeks feature the premieres of all the WB, UPN, and syndicated SFF (science fiction and fantasy). UPN has "Enterprise" ("Star Trek" series #5), "Special Unit 2", and (inherited from WB) "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" and "Roswell". WB keeps its "Angel" ("Buffy" spinoff) and "Charmed". The syndicated Tribune series "Gene Roddenberry's Earth: Final Conflict" and "Gene Roddenberry's Andromeda" begin in two weekends, on wphl-17-wb. "StarGate SG-1", syndicated on wtxf-29-fox, appears at near-random times on Saturday afternoons, displaced by baseball. sat-15-sep-13:00 60m 29, "StarGate SG-1" season 4 synd premiere. mon-24-sep-21:00 60m WB, "Angel" season 3 premiere. wed-26-sep-20:00 120m UPN, "Enterprise" series premiere. thu-27-sep-20:00 120m WB, "Charmed" season 4 premiere. tue-02-oct-20:00 60m UPN, "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" season 6 premiere. wed-03-oct-21:00 60m UPN, "Special Unit 2" season 2 premiere. sat-06-oct-18:00 60m 17, "Gene Roddenberry's Andromeda" season 2 premiere. sun-07-oct-11:00 60m 17, "Earth: Final Conflict" season 5 premiere. tue-09-oct-21:00 60m UPN, "Roswell" season 3 premiere. ("Enterprise" features a starship that resembles the "Akira"-class from "Star Trek: First Contact". It looks nothing at all like the hints of the pre-Kirk pre-Constitution-class, as provided in other movies. See: [ http://nsx.underbase.org/analysis/enterprise/enterprise_evolution.htm ]) FX has been stripping "The X-Files" for several years now, but this week it starts over from the beginning. It also adds the first five seasons "Buffy the Vampire Slayer", just in time for the sixth season on UPN. mon-24-sep-18:00 MTWRF 60m FX, "The X-Files" stripped, from start. tue-25-sep-01:00 TWRFZ , encore. mon-24-sep-19:00 MTWRF 60m FX, "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" stripped, from start. tue-25-sep-16:00 TWRFZ , encore. The Cartoon Network's three hours per weekday of action animation (usually anime, but also US superhero cartoons) is divided between Toonami (17:00-19:00) and Midnight Run (00:00-01:00). Right now, the programmers have reached a low point in diversity: five of the six shows are "Dragonball" or "Dragonball Z". Coming in October, "Batman Beyond" is added to the schedule, and "Gundam: 08th Mobile Suit Team" returns to Midnight Run and is duplicated in Toonami. (The earlymorn airings don't count as encores, because pre-emptions soon cause sync to be lost.) mon-01-oct-17:00 MTWRF 30m TCN, "Gundam: 08th Mobile Suit Team" in Toonami. mon-01-oct-18:30 MTWRF 30m TCN, "Batman Beyond" in Toonami. wed-10-oct-00:30 TWRFZ 30m TCN, "Gundam: 08th Mobile Suit Team" in Midnight Run. /* ************************************************************************ ** Legalese ** Acknowledgments ** Opt-in/out Instructions ** *********************************************************************** */ The set of creative works herein reviewed and analyzed, including the subset {books, movies, TV shows, toys}, are the property of their respective copyright holders. No infringement or endorsement is expressed, implied or intended. The original reviews and analyses are themselves copyright 2001 by Phillip Thorne. In this issue, certain data (possibly not otherwise acknowledged) have been obtained, aggregated and synthesized from: The Cartoon Network cartoonnetwork.com The _Daily Local News_ dailylocal.com Excite TV tv.excite.com The Sci-Fi Channel scifi.com TCN's Toonami toonami.com If you're receiving this newsletter, you've probably intentionally subscribed to it, or possibly you're interested in special topical coverage, or maybe I've sent you a teaser issue. To subscribe and unsubscribe, follow standard mailing list protocol with the addresses below: Publisher: nsx@underbase.org Newsletter: nsx-l@underbase.org nsx-l-subscribe (to subscribe; blank subject) nsx-l-unsubscribe (to unsubscribe) Discussion list: nsx-discuss-l@underbase.org nsx-discuss-l-subscribe (to subscribe; blank subject) nsx-discuss-l (to post) nsx-discuss-l-unsubscribe (to unsubscribe) /* *************************************************************************** ** *************************************************************************** ** The Non-Sequitur Express ** http://nsx.underbase.org/ ** Volume 3, Issue 11: Tuesday, 25 September 2001 ** Copyright 1999-2001 Phillip Thorne, nsx@underbase.org ** *************************************************************************** ** ************************************************************************ */