“DISCONNECTED IN FUKUOKA” TOUR 2011: THE PREVIEW

I have returned from Japan.

I have photos.

They’re probably good for at least a dozen posts. One day I may actually post them all. But for now it seems like too daunting a task, for various reasons.

Anyway, suffice to say it was a very busy week – although the reason I didn’t post anything whilst I was there wasn’t because I didn’t have time so much as I didn’t have any Internet connection.

Well, not one to speak of. As it happened, my hotel had free Internet in the rooms – but only if yr laptop has an Ethernet port.

And there I was with my new Mac Air, which is Wi-Fi only.

And there I was in a hotel whose Wi-Fi options were limited to either a pay service that only worked about 40% of the time, or a free service that either gave you 10 minutes of connectivity every three hours, or unlimited access provided you (1) let them spam you for six months and (2) provided them with a proper email address (i.e. no Webmail), after which you had to check yr email to confirm that it was yr email address – which you couldn’t do because you couldn’t access the Internet to confirm the email address until you’d confirmed yr email address by checking yr email.

See what they did there?

There was also the option of the coin-operated Internets in the lobby.



Ha ha. Very funny, Hilton.

Yes. So I had very little connectivity for the whole week. Which was a fine lesson in how the Internet has permeated our lives and how challenging it is to do without it, yadda yadda yadda blah blah blah.

The lesson: from now on I’m taking my four-year-old Macbook on trips because my new laptop is too advanced for some countries. (Or at least I’ll make a point of checking hotel web sites to make sure they have Wi-Fi in the f***ing rooms first.)

Okay. Broadcasting resumes.

Online and loving it,

This is dF

NOBODY EVER MAKES NICE MOVIES ABOUT THE OIL INDUSTRY

So … what did I miss whilst I was away?



Huh. Well, that was inevitable.

Or maybe not.

But it probably is. This kind of thing is low-hanging fruit for Fox News hosts. Slow news day? Why not whip out the old “Liberal Hollywood” meme and apply it to whatever film is a hot item? Think of the SEO!

Also, it’s not like Eric Bolling is trying to make a logical argument. “Liberal Hollywood is indoctrinating our children” is an easy, intellectually lazy statement to make, particularly in this day and age where everything is political and raising taxes on billionaires another 3% counts as Communism, and especially when yr pandering to an audience who already knows for a fact that liberals control Hollywood and intentionally make films and TV shows to brainwash kids into being liberal, and so it’s their fault a whole generation of American children grew up into adults who think it’s okay to Occupy Wall Street.

No, really. Dan Gainor of the Media Research Center (a conservative “media watchdog” group created to “prove” that “liberal bias in the media does exist and undermines traditional American values”) actually said that.

He also said this, which I find amusing:

"They hate corporate America. And so you'll see all these movies attacking it, whether it was 'Cars 2,' which was another kids' movie, the George Clooney movie 'Syriana,' 'There Will Be Blood,' all these movies attacking the oil industry, none of them reminding people what oil means for most people: fuel to light a hospital, heat your home, fuel an ambulance to get you to the hospital if you need that. And they don't want to tell that story."

Fair point. On the other hand, does Gainor really think anyone would go see a movie about how oil companies successfully provide gasoline for ambulances? Besides oil executives, I mean?

I ask because, as has been pointed out time and again, Hollywood is run by corporations who – like any other business – makes their decisions on what movies to produce based on how much money they make, not their political content (no matter how vague). As such, if there was any significant public demand for, say, movies about how great oil companies and corporations are, where the protagonists are hard-working CEOs and the bad guys are communist hippies, every studio in Hollywood would be scrambling to make them.

You’d think someone who works at a place called the Media Research Center would know that.

Or maybe not. I mean, none of this is new. Conservatives have been uncovering secret liberal/homo/Commie agendas in kids TV shows for years. As well as schools. And Presidential speeches at schools. And pretty much anything that involves anyone telling children anything that goes against the Bible, the GOP platform or Fox News’ programming schedule.

Because that’s what liberal homo Commies do – they indoctrinate. They go after the kids to instill liberal bias in their precious pointed little heads.

Not like conservatives, who would never indoctrinate children by, say, revising history. Or by sending them to political summer camps. Or political church camps.

Or, you know, by doing what every parent in the world does – instill their personal values in their kids in the hopes that their influence will outweigh all the external influences (books, films, TV, Internet, comics, teachers, delinquent friends, etc) so that their kid will grow up into not only a productive, well-adjusted adult, but also one they can get along with.

So yeah, it’s hard to take the indoctrination meme seriously when what they really mean is: “If anyone’s going to be indoctrinating kids around here, it’s going to be us.”

But like I say, there’s a built-in audience for this meme, so it’s not like it has to make sense.

Same as it ever was.

There is a war going on for yr mind,

This is dF