It is worth mentioning again, in case you somehow missed it and care.
Expelled is a film narrated by Ben “Bueller, Bueller” Stein for the Discovery Institute to help convince people that there’s no such thing as evolution and that evil atheists are going to force your children to have gay sex or something.
Well, anyway, it’s a creationist propaganda film which claims things like Darwin -> Atheism -> Nazis. In fact, it’s the central thrust of the film so far as I can see.
PZ Myers is a well-known blogger in the fields of evolution and biology. He runs a little thing called Pharyngula, which I gather is pretty good. He’s also a self-professed “godless liberal” (So, the other kind of liberal from me, and the other kind of godless from Ayn Rand), and not a big fan of that thing that is both bad science and bad theology and is pretending to be both under the name of “Intelligent Design”.
So, the target audience if you’re legitimately trying to have a dialogue about ID and whether it’s a legitimate thing to teach our childen.
Also, not the target audience if you know your claim is bogus and are trying to trick people into supporting you anyway.
So, suppose that you’re putting on a propaganda film about Intelligent Design. Your “science” relies on misquoting people, taking things out of context, and being academically dishonest. PZ Myers has filled out the form to be given an invitation to come see your movie. How should you handle this in a way that won’t make you look bad?
Well, one thing you could do is let him see it, and show photos of him going to see it. Hopefully, he’ll do something childish like throw eggs or something, then you can call him a big baby and make everyone laugh at him.
If he doesn’t oblige you, you could instead just treat the fact that he saw it as a tacit approval of your message: “Hey, even this well-known darwinist saw our movie!”
Of course, if he writes a bad review, that won’t work. Though maybe it won’t hurt so much, since the opinion of PZ Myers doesn’t exactly carry a lot of weight with anyone who is going to support your message to begin with. You could probably just laugh it off: of course the godless liberal hated it. It might even spin for you, you could quote him, citing him as a godless darwinist liberal. It would work the same way that it would work to use “I hated it — Joseph Stalin, Adolph Hitler, Osama Bin Laden” as a review of your movie to trick people into not wanting to hate it to avoid being lumped in with that lot.
Or, if all else fails, just stick a whoopie cushion in his chair. Who will take him seriously when it gets out that he let a big one fly the moment he sat down?
Hey, you know what wouldn’t work though? Kicking him out. You know what would work less? Kicking him out and threatening to have him arrested.
Want to guess which one they chose?
It gets better.
So, having handed their enemies a press coup on a silver platter, the makers of Expelled tried a few different tacks to save the situation.
Attempt 1: Lie: So they said that PZ had tried to sneak in to a by-invitation-only event to which he
had not been invited. I will quote someone on the subject. Who I am quoting is going to be the punch line to this article, so I will not attribute this quote yet. “The way to get into this showing of the film was simply to go on the Internet and apply. This was exactly what PZ did. He went on the Web and put his name down for a place at the showing.” PZ Myers had been invited.
Attempt 2: Spin (at windmills) (And also lie): From a press release: “I hope PZ’s experience has helped him see the light. He is distraught because he could not see a movie. What if he wasn’t allowed to teach on a college campus or was denied tenure? Maybe he will think twice before he starts demanding more professors be blacklisted and expelled simply because they question the adequacy of Darwin’s theory.”
Yes, because (patriotic music plays) Here in America, you should never be denied the right to see a movie, no matter how sane you are, and you should never be denied a job teaching biology no matter how totally incompetent you are in the field of biology. Because in America, if you show up and pay for your ticket, you have a right to be a college professor.
Oh, and it’s a lie because PZ has, so far as I can tell, never demanded that anyone be blacklisted for anything other than incompetence (Heck, maybe not even that).
Attempt 3: Be Holier than Thou (and also lie): Again, from them: “Recognizing the opportunity to make a point of the inconvenience and pain that they, and others like them, have caused to numerous scientists and educators, the decision was made beforehand to deny Myers access to the film if he actually showed up.”
So, “we banned him to annoy him,” is being used as an excuse? Besides, according to line producer Mark Mathis, “I banned pz because I want him to pay to see it. Nothing more.” (source)
So, they seem to have dug themselves in pretty deep.
It gets better.
Now, PZ Myers brought a guest with him to the screening. The Discovery Institute claims that his guest registered under a false name. This is a lie; the form PZ filled out did not allow him to enter his guests’ names, only the number of them. This guest was not actually asked to show any, ahem, ID. The Discovery Institute has claimed that this guest was a “gate-crasher” who tried to get in uninvited. But, as I mentioned, PZ had filled out the paperwork and registered his guest.
At any rate, this guest was allowed to go see the movie unaccosted. He’s the person who wrote the unattributed quote up there. Who was this guest?
Well, here’s a hint. He’s married to a former Doctor Who companion.
Give up?
Wait for it…
Wait for it…
Richard Dawkins.
Pretty much the most famous atheist in the entire world.
Month: March 2008
And Are Concordances Do Easy Hard Lyric Or Read Rock Roll Think To You?
Can you identify these popular songs when their lyrics have been rearranged into alphabetical order?
And Great Lyrics Quiz Rock Roll The
(For I It’s Got What Worth, 35 right, 12 wrong because I didn’t know the lyrics to the song, 3 wrong in spite of knowing the lyrics to the song.)
ITCXVII: Sacre Bleu
Found this in my pile of funny Google News Pictures. Little known fact: before getting into politics, Sarkozy used to do modeling for educational publications. I believe this was actually the picture from my French 1 textbook to illustrate the concept of “Zut allors!”
That or “And I would have gotten away with it too if it weren’t for you meddling kids and your dog.*”
*Et je m’en serais tiré si ce n’est pour l’ingérence de vous les enfants et votre chien. More or less.
Just A Thought
Things which are perfectly legal unless you get paid for them:
- Sex
- Voting
- Giving internal organs to someone
ITCXVI: It Beats the Alternative
Isn’t it a hair redundant to clarify that the “Age Champ”‘s title was revoked due to death? How many other ways are there to lose ones claim to be the “oldest living person”?
One Ford Can Make A Difference
If you know me — and given the size of my audience, you almost certainly do — you may know that over the years, from time to time, and precipitated by anything in particular, I will suddenly become obsessed with Knight Rider for a while.
In case you somehow don’t recall this show, it was about David Hasslehoff and an indestructible Trans Am played by William Daniels, who at the time was famous for having played John Adams in 1776 and for being one of the doctors on Saint Elsewhere, but who, if you’re too young to remember Knight Rider, you probably know as the guy who played Mr. Feeny on Boy Meets World. Also, the car could jump. This was incredibly cool, and we totally did not mind that some times when the car jumped into the air it was clearly a toy car being tossed over an H-O scale model, because it was the eighties and you could do that sort of thing.
In case you somehow didn’t know this next bit, a couple of weeks ago, NBC, which has recently resurrected the corpses of such popular properties-as-old-as-I-am as Battlestar Galactica and The Bionic Woman aired a backdoor pilot movie for a revival of Knight Rider.
If you know me, or you’ve been actually reading the article so far, you may be surprised to learn that I somehow managed to delay gratification and have only just watched Knight Rider last night.
Well, see, Leah got aggravated at her landlord, and decided to move. And since she wanted to watch it with me, being a caring and considerate boyfriend, waited until she had at least gotten the TV hooked up in her new place.
So, here we go:
Knight Rider
2008
Justin Bruening
Val Kilmer
Executive Summary: Apparently, there is a company called “Ford” which makes automobiles. These automobiles are available for purchase from many fine retailers, and include both high-performance muscle cars, and sensible and luxurious yet economical models.
Commentary: Knight Rider fans know that after the pilot episode of the original 1982 series, KITT was never referred to as a “Trans Am” again, only as a “Black T-Top” (For those of you who don’t know this either, a T-top is a car whose roof is made of two removable panels with a structural beam between them. Not quite as cool as a convertible, but a bit more structurally sound).
According to legend, and as any fan will tell you (One of the major league Knight Rider Geeks even gets to say this as if it’s fact on the Knight Rider Season 1 bonus featurette), this is because Pontiac dealers got “annoyed” at people coming in and asking to buy “The Knight Rider Car”. Because people coming in and wanting to buy something is such an annoyance. This legend is really a bit of a corruption of the truth of the matter: dealers weren’t annoyed: executives were worried. Specifically, they were worried about the liability if someone got themselves killed trying one of the stunts they’d seen in the show. The name shift was mandated by the desire to be able to maintain, if needs be, an official policy of “The car in that show is not a Pontiac: it is an entirely fictional vehicle which, in its fictional world, is completely custom made. It just happens that this fictional vehicle looks like a Pontiac, and also we made the prop, but KITT is no more a Trans Am than Sean Connery is a British secret agent.”
Ford, it seems, has no such misgivings. Aside from the advertising blitz (The only way you can tell, on cursory examination, that it’s a commercial and not the show is the absence of the channel bug), the Knight Industries Three Thousand bears all its original markings, and every time the scene transitions to KITT, it does so by fading to one of the Mustang Cobra (KITT is not actually a Cobra per se, but I may call him that because Ford used to make a car called the Mustang Cobra which is basically the same sort of car as this is. KITT is a Shelby Mustang GT. “Shelby” here means that Ford went hired Carol Shelby to do his thing to the Mustang. Carol Shelby is a racecar designer who car companies occasionally hire to take their muscle cars and make them even cooler. He takes the car apart and studies every feature and calculates the optimal set of modifications. No one knows why he does this, however, because his next step is invariable “stick in the biggest engine we can find and slap a picture of a snake on it.” Carol Shelby’s real skill lies, at least in part, in being able to work out how to fit a V-8 into a car that is much too small to hold one. His first such outing was to stick a V-8 in a British AC, producing the “AC Cobra”. He went on to design other cars with snake emblems on them, such as the Dodge Viper and a boatload of Mustang-based cars, some of which were called “Mustang Cobras” and some of which were called “Shelby GTs”) emblems on the vehicle. And they are not shy about showing these cars do unsafe things (this was one of the major failings of the previous Knight outing).
This is the fourth attempt to revive the Knight Rider franchise. The fact that even if you do remember Knight Rider, odds are you don’t remember that this isn’t the first revival attempt speaks to the success of these attempts. The first, a straightforward “reunion” movie, Knight Rider 2000 reunited KITT and Michael in the then-still-a-bit-off year 2000, where Dan Quayle is president, guns are illegal, and criminals are frozen using cryogenics. The role of KITT was played by a red custom-made car, which Knight Rider fans will tell you is a Dodge Stealth, but this is about as accurate as saying that a wooden chair is really a tree: the car was an entirely custom body dropped onto the frame and inner workings of a Dodge Stealth. In later years, it was given a police siren and black-and-white paintjob and occasionally turns up as a futuristic police car in cheaper sci-fi, such as Power Rangers Time Force.
Despite having an awesome theme tune by Jan Hammer, and featuring a very funny gag involving James Doohan, the revival went nowhere. Also, the car couldn’t jump (It could drive on water, which they thought was nearly as impressive and didn’t risk damaging their one-of-a-kind prop car. It probably was more impressive if you didn’t remember that the original series had already given KITT a Jesus-mode back in the second season).
So, a few years later, they tried again, as part of a syndication package, either the one that brought us Babylon 5 and no other successful shows, or the one that brought us Hercules The Legendary Journeys and no other successful shows, with a pilot movie called Knight Rider 2010. This time, any connection to the original series was entirely implicit. Rumors have it that they were intending to expand on the connections if they went to series, but they didn’t. Set in a Road Warrior post-apocalypse (Thanks to the Mad Max series, everyone who makes movies has an implicit understanding that, for no reason that needs to be explained, no matter how unlikely it may seem, if civilization collapses, the entire world will look like the Australian Outback), some guy who may or may not have turned out to be Michael Knight’s son if they’d gone to series armors a classic car and sticks a magic crystal containing the disembodied mind of his dead girlfriend in it, and goes off to fight injustice in the form of a sort of urban assault vehichle made out of a crashed Stealth Fighter. No. Really. I kinda suspect that the original script for this movie has “Mad Max The Series” crossed out and “Knight Rider” penciled in.
The third, and most successful — but also the one that evoked the most ire — actually went to series. This was Team Knight Rider, following a sentai-ish team of five drivers driving three Fords and two really ugly custom motorcycles which could merge to form Voltron. This aired in the syndication package that is “the other one” of the two I mentioned above. The cars weren’t all that impressive, largely due to the budget. Knight Rider fans are pretty rabid in their love of Pontiacs. Also, the show suffered in spades from trying-hard-to-be-cool. It lasted a whole season, just long enough to show us a stand in playing Michael Knight, David McCallum playing the Evil Overlord, and a metal ball playing KITT. Anyway, a lot of fans actually claimed that the show’s producers secretly hated Glen Larson and had intentionally set out to make a bad show in order to tarnish his legacy. I told you Knight Rider fans were a bit nuts.
Anyway, now that you’re caught up, I’ll head on to the spoilers.
But I find myself wondering: what is it about the Knight Rider franchise that makes people keep wanting to revive it — and revive it even though there’s never been any precedent for a Knight Rider revival succeeding?
ITCXV: With More Pixels
How many pixels is too many? This many pixels is too many.
If you don’t get today’s joke, please read this, and then do not google what it’s about. wikipedia