The judges are an interesting motley. Mitch Gaylord is a former Olympic gymnast and actor (if that's quite the right word -- I've seen some of his film work). Aurelia Cats is a circus performer -- contortion and trapeze -- as well as an experienced circus festival competition judge (i.e., the member of the judging panel who actually knows what she's talking about). Louie Spence is a dancer and choreographer, as well as having judged other countries' versions of the show; he's also very very very very gay (believe it or not, this is actually relevant, if not precisely a qualification). The judging appears to be a mix of that from American Idol and that of Dancing with the Stars. Circus has, in fact, completely absorbed the judging model from the first season of "Dancing with the Stars", in which 50% of the score comes from the judges, and 50% comes from the viewers. Presumably, this means that people are simply ranked in order of the total votes received, and also the judges' vote ranking. In theory, this should mean that if you pay attention to the judges' votes, you may be able to tell which people are safe, and which are at risk, at least for the next three weeks. Beyond that, there aren't enough people left to be safe, no matter what the judges do.. Like American Idol, Celebrity Circus at least pretends that the competition has something to do with performance, as well as popularity, barring votes before the broadcast ends, but limiting both phone and online voting to only two hours after the show.

According to various comments through the show, the celebrities will be rotating through the apparatuses week to week. On the one hand, that's understandable -- you don't want the audience to get bored with seeing too much repetition -- but at the same time, I wonder how wise that was. Presumably, the eight weeks of rehearsal was to allow them to rotate training through each apparatus, and then the week before the show, they concentrate on the one for the upcoming broadcast. I would think that spending so little time on each apparatus would make them more prone to injury, as has already happened, and certain apparatuses will aggravate injuries that have already occurred.

I'm beginning to suspect that Joey Fatone is perhaps the wrong host for the series. He's personable and enthusiastic enough, I suppose, but he seems a bit lost some of the time. And he really seems to have no idea how to handle Louie Spence and his sexual innuendoes at the various celebrities; that would be understandable if Louie were aiming his remarks at Joey, but he really doesn't speak to Joey after the introductions. Really, it needs someone with a certain engaging smarm who can give as good as he gets, like, say, Tom Bergeron.

It'll be interesting to see how it goes through the summer.

In the DVD documentary Show Business, they show the path to Broadway taken by both Wicked and by Avenue Q, as well as the ill-fated Taboo and Caroline, or Change. What they didn't show, and I wish they had because it must have happened, is the increasingly intense discussion between the composers and the producers of Avenue Q, who would have been looking at the final song and thinking, "Are you SURE you want to do this to this weirdly fun musical? Really? REALLY?" Because it really is seriously weird fun, and the moments just before the last song can only be described as Happy Endings Gone Seriously Weird, Yet Still Happy, and then the main character realizes that he hasn't yet found his purpose in life, and the entire cast sings a song that basically says, "Yeah, well, a lot of people never find their purpose, so suck it up and deal and settle like they do." And, well ... that's a freaky weird ending to stick on a show. It leaves you feeling sort of ... "Ha ha ha! Oh, my goodness, that was fun ... and now I never want to think about it again."

It will be interesting to see how this makes a difference to people's careers -- or doesn't make a difference, as the case may be. Like they said, I can't imagine that it could possibly harm either DeGeneres or Takei, and Portia de Rossi's career seems to be ticking along quite nicely as well.

So apparently that whole "all your gay media are belong to us" model didn't work out so well for PlanetOut.

PlanetOut would not seem to have done well by Liberation, one wya and another. Even allowing that Specialty Publications was making most of Liberation's money and wasn't included in the purchase of LPI, I can't imagine that Specialty was doing so well that it would have made up $30 million in the price difference. (I had heard, though I might be mistaken, that Liberation had already sold Specialty's video division to Channel One Releasing, or that they were considering it; that may have been mistaken information.)

I have to admit, I'm surprised that here Networks is buying LPI, or what remains of it. Buying two national magazines in a bear advertising market would not necessarily seem to be a great decision -- though, if you have the money, I can see wanting to keep Advocate and Out alive for historical reasons -- and Alyson seems to have profoundly lost its way in the past few years. (It may just be that the local stores only buy what people want and that's almost all I get to see, but it seems like most of what Alyson publishes these days is porn, and fiction and nonfiction books have moved in surprisingly large part over to Kensington -- the book publishing arm of journal publisher Haworth -- and other small companies, with a few large publishers also poaching a bit on the territory. That may just be perception and not reality, though.)

Something of a side note, but I'd also love to know how here's move to subscription style pricing, rather than their previous on-demand model, has worked for them. (I freely admit that here's change has annoyed the snot out of me; if I'm going to pay subscription prices as though it were a premium channel like HBO or Showtime, I want it to be a channel, something I can find simply by punching in the number. If it's going to be on the on-demand menu no matter what I do, then I want to pay per-item and on-demand. But I digress.)

It's going to be interesting to see how this works out for all concerned. For all that PlanetOut is now concentrating on its core websites, with the sale of its travel business and most of its publication arm ... there's not really a lot left of it, is there? And the web has expanded a lot in even the past few years. I can remember making PlanetOut a daily read, once upon a time, and now ... I can't remember the last time I deliberately went to PlanetOut. There are just other places out there that work better for the types of stuff I used to read on their site.

Anyway, here's hoping it works out well for all concerned.

But what really started getting me recently was how they were handling Ray Fiske, Frobisher's lawyer. It started to become obvious at one point that he was probably maybe really gay, and attracted to Gregory Molina, recent corpsicle and one-time waiter and witness, and that was fine. Let's face it; we're all massively attracted to a person at one time or another in a situation where, for whatever reason, we do nothing about it. It may be perfectly obvious, it may be a little pathetic, depending, but it happens to everyone. Not, in and of itself, particularly objectionable. But then it became more and more obvious that he had done something -- something quite criminal, as it turns out -- and he had made himself known, and he had been turned down, and then he wound up married and and and ... so by the end of things, he was pathetic and sort of weakly predatory and closeted and, oh yes, married with a wife who apparently didn't know. Really nice woman, it seems, too. And, you know, I get that they wanted to weigh him down with everything in his life. They needed him to despair enough to end up where he did. But you know, frankly, they could have easily stopped at "guy who did something for lust that he really shouldn't have." He didn't need to be married, he didn't need to be closeted. The romantic rejection paired with the really serious professional compromise would have been enough.

Sad thing is, I kind of liked the way Zeljko Ivanec was playing Fiske. He really worked as a character who was trying very hard to thread a very difficult ethical situation, and that situation was clearly eating him alive. It worked even before we knew for certain that he'd been rejected by Gregory, or what he'd done to try to win his love. (And, frankly, that gift? Makes Fiske out to be terribly stupid, not because it constituted the worst kind of insider trading -- both in the gift and its later sale -- but because he compromised himself for nothing. By that I don't mean that Gregory should have said, "Hey, stock worth thousands! Now I'll put out!" I mean that he gave a major gift to someone he really didn't know that well, even took him on a vaguely romantic getaway, in the hope that it would make him put out. That's seriously stupid, and seriously pathetic. And, of course, on said vaguely romantic getaway, Gregory went and boinked Katie. Had to make Fiske really swell, that.)

Eh. I'll probably take next week off, and then come back for the finale. I do want to know who done what and why; I'm just kind of tired of the trip.

Here, a little somthing to cheer everyone up: Stayin' Alive (... OK, perhaps "cheer" isn't quite the right verb in this case.)

Mind, it does seem to be a case of both a small sample biasing the data, and having enough people clumped at the very young end to seriously depress the average age. Granted, 10 percent of a sample is a notably higher mortality rate than the general population in a given age group. And I think the accident issue may confuse things a bit; how many of the accidents are directly attributable to the rock-n-rollness of it all?

(Though, looking at it, what I wonder is how many of the rock'n'rollers wind up taking other people with them. Does associating with these musicians shorten the lives of hangers-on and other people?

And, given that the mortality rate of younger popsters is dropping, apparently the whole Just Say No thing is sorta kinda taking hold -- Lindsay Lohan aside. Apparently, younger popsters are indulging at ever lower rates.

And for those who don't say no, there's always Celebrity Rehab! ...No, really.

No. Really.

REALLY.

I can't even begin to enumerate all the ways in which this is a relentlessly bad idea. For one thing, people who wind up in rehab have generally done things that are, at a minimum, terribly embarrassing, and sometimes actually illegal -- apart from the drug thing itself, I mean. And while I would think that the therapy sessions would be terribly juicy -- "So, Mr Sizemore, were you in a nondrugged state when you decided it would be a good idea to make a porn movie in which you dissed your administering judge? In fact, were you in an unaltered state to make any of the porn movie? What about all the stuff you did after the porn movie? Really, you might as well just talk about the porn, since you haven't done anything of note since then. Perhaps you and Ms Carey could just make a porn vid right here and now!" -- I'm also surprised that anyone even pretending to be a reputable therapist or rehab center would have anything to do with this show. It can't possibly do their reputation any good, and I can't imagine that it's not going to bias the treatment in some ways.

I also can't quite imagine a therapy group with Andy Dick and Tom Sizemore going terribly well. And of course, these people would all be their own therapy group; nobody with a lick of sanity would sign up to go through their own personal hell on camera with these people, though I would imagine that VH1 desperately wants a few normal-ish people to fill things out, just to contrast the massively out-of-control behavior of our average addicted celebrity. I do hope they don't get it.

Have to admit, I wonder how many people might tune in just to see who beats Andy up this week.

Questions? Comments? Miscellaneous drug abuse and rehab recommendations?

The pilot is sort of vague and blah for about 90% of its length. The lead actors are playing the material as if they were in Battlestar Galactica, when the writing clearly was aiming for the cheesiness of the 1980 film, or maybe even the earnestness of the original serial. And unfortunately, the only actor with a major role that seems to have had the "Good god, this is incredibly cheesy, so I might as well ham it up" revelation is the guy who plays Zarkov, although a few of the supporting players seem to have gotten a clue. Everyone else is acting their socks off in material that really can't support it. (...Well, OK, except in the first fight scene, which is so desperately absurdist that even they can't take it seriously. It involves a frying pan, a blender that doesn't get used, an electrifying thing, a ray gun that misfires, Flash punching an alien in the helmet with his bare fist, with said alien later dissolving once it gets electrocuted... But then, once the fight is over, they're serious again.) Flash is written to be terribly, terribly stupid, giving away information to people whom he knows -- he knows -- killed someone on earth and attacked his mother (They then torture him decoratively.).

The last 10-15 minutes, though ... It's as though everyone finally got a clue and realized just how cheesy the material is and how to play it. And judging from the upcoming episodes section, apparently there will be scantily clad men everywhere (including, of course, Flash), which is always an encouraging sign.

But still, it really needs a good pair of leather shorts.

Ah, the French! They're so very ... French.

I really would love to know what the British actually think of the ad. Granted that many are more cosmopolitan and sophisticated than we are, I still thin they might be a tad ... nonplussed, shall we say?

On the other hand, now I want to go and watch another rugby game.

Every once in a while, you will come across stuff that you never knew you wanted until you come across it, and you suddenly realize You Must Have This. And so it was with this collection. The power of Miss Bassey compelled me!

But first, a musical interlude.

I can only say that this CD careens from "ohmygawd, that was just DEMENTED!" to "ohmygawd, that was EVEN MORE DEMENTED!" to "That was so DEMENTED that I have to have a little lie-down because it gave me the vapors." Uncommon for a remix album, most of the songs are just long enough, and don't go on until you are ready to beat the remixers vigorously about the head and shoulders to just make them stop, because you had enough of that song 25 minutes ago.

Most of the songs are a delight to hear. I will admit that I wasn't horribly fond of "Can I touch you there" or of "I will survive". Not that they're at all bad; the arrangements just didn't appeal. And let's face it; at this late stage, Gloria Gaynor is probably the only person in existence who can do "I will survive" and not sound like a slightly jaded drag queen. In any event, your mileage may vary; as I say, they're not at all bad.

Much to my delight, this CD also includes Miss Bassey's definitive version of "Slave to the Rhythm" (that link goes to quite possibly the e Gayest Video Ever; this musical arrangement of the song is also included on the CD). It also includes her take on Nancy Sinatra's "You only live twice", a somewhat odd song to include, but then, this is a collection of odd songs. (I guess that either they couldn't get clearance, or there was just no real way to update Miss Bassey's version of "Kiss Kiss Bang Bang", her original theme song for Thunderball, which got jettisoned in favor of the one that made Tom Jones pass out. In any event, you can actually hear her having fun with all the various arrangements on this release, and how often can you say that about a recording? I wish they'd included the Away Team remix of "Where do I begin" and Propellerheads' "History Repeating", just for remix fabulosity completeness, but it's still fun without.I

Questions, comments, descriptions of hot pink and low-cut dresses you've seen on 60-year-olds lately?

What I want to know is, as long as they were running it all into one word -- for trademark purposes, since you can't trademark common terms -- couldn't they spare a few extra dollars for an E? As it stands, it looks like it's an all Truman Capote, all the time, network, and who wants that?

Canadians do not get the weird, oh no no no. Canadians get the charmingly quirky, albeit replete with overtones of Magical NonWhite (well, they're neither from the US nor apparently African, but the intent is the same). To wit:

I assume the ad to be Canadian because of the way the other guys sound, plus the whole "flavours" thing. It may be that this ad (with corrected spelling) appears in some US markets somewhere; however, given the current hostility to immigrants, I think it would not play well, and it wouldn't surprise me if it simply wasn't aired here. (Note that I'm also not sure how old that ad is; it may have played here in the past and simply be past its air dates.) Regardless, it's a reasonably standard, if vaguely quirky, presentation of the product. It gives you the idea that someone might actually want to eat it. This, it seems to me, is at least part of what a decent ad does; it makes you curious about the product for itself, and not just because it's a catchy or clever ad campaign.

This ad, however, is clearly too infatuated with its cleverness -- if that's the word -- for its own good.

Now. Leave aside the fact that, colloquially speaking, when one speaks of "milking" a man ... the above is not at all what is meant. Leave aside the fact that when people talk of experiments attaching milking machines to males -- usually involving adolescents, dairy farms, extreme amounts of PAIN! and ruined batches of milk -- again, this is not at all what they mean. Yes, just leave that all aside.

We're left with a man giving milk, a concept that would appall most men, who really don't want to give milk. We're talking about a man with truly a surfeit of supernumerary nipples -- the guy has at least six, for crying out loud. We're talking a man who apparently gives milk for human consumption and profit. And his main problem is somehow that Skittles is making his milk sour.

This is an ad that was somehow allowed to escape from the ad firm into the wild. Someone at Skittles' corporate offices was seduced into thinking that putting this ad on television would be A Great Idea! (I'm guessing that they ate too much of their own product, if this ad is anything to judge by.) Somehow, they lost sight of the fact that most people would fixate on the whole, "freak man giving milk" thing, and it would kind of swamp the product itself -- leaving aside the fact that the commercial itself is so oddly low-key and matter-of-fact about what appears to be a workplace issue that on its own, it makes the product nearly invisible. To the extent that it doesn't ... how many people really want to try a product associated with lactating men?

To be sure, this is not the first time that Skittles has embraced the weird. There was this ad campaign from a couple years ago:

I ask you, would you hire a person with a mobile beard? In fact, leave aside the weirdness of the mobile beard. Would you hire a person who mocked you during the interview process and then stroked your cheek? The message of this ad seems to be "Skittles animates your hair and makes you lose all connection with reality." And the woman's reaction, deadpan as it is, does seem to reflect that.

I suppose I'm terribly old-school about advertising. It always seemed to me that advertising wasn't just about making the ad memorable; it was also about making the product appeal, in some way, shape or form. Now, I don't know about you, but I do not wish to give milk, nor do I wish to have my body hair begin to move about in strange and interesting ways.

The Russian ad actually kind of works in an old-school way. Kind of.

Mind, I do not think I would ever care to eat candy from a bear's coat, nor does the ad explain quite precisely what is wrong with the bear. We are left to assume that Skittles are apparently hallucinogenic to large mammals -- which would explain a great deal aobut the various ad campaigns, wouldn't it? In any event, it at least presents the idea that the candy is so good that you would want to eat it out of a bear's coat, if not why the bear would allow you to do such a damn fool thing. I can at least see where you could present this ad as something cute and quirky that nonetheless says, "Despite our product being in a somewhat disgusting state, it's so incredibly good that people will risk being mauled and possibly catching who knows what, just to eat it, even though it's dusty and muddy and furry and ... ew. It's just that good!"

I don't think it is that good myself -- not that I particularly do or don't like Skittles; I just don't favor getting mauled in the hunt for candy. I prefer to find it stunned and helpless in the candy aisles of my local store. But maybe that's just me.

Questions, comments, cigars, cigarettes, cigarillos?

If you want to see someone get all ranty about these issues of analog/physical preservation and access versus digital preservation and access, talk it over with an old-school special collections librarian. What do we keep and why? How is it generated? Once it's generated, how do we catch it and keep it? These are all issues that society generally, and librarians specifically, are looking at. Most correspondence these days is digital -- email, online journals and weblogs, jottings in Word or Notepad or some other text editor or word processor -- and much never makes it out of some digital format. More and more, photography has become digital; the convenience of being able to see what you've done right now, of keeping or printing only the best images and throwing away the rest, avoiding the camera desk clerk's leer if you happen to take a naughty image of your significant other, or avoiding prosecution for merely taking a picture of your kid in the bathtub -- all these reasons have caused a major shift from film to digital photography for those people who only want to keep a record of the times of their lives.

From the archival point of view, this is all terribly troubling. Correspondence, for example, presents specific issues. A lot of ordinary correspondence and writing generated in the past (shopping lists, quick letters, postcards, etc.), is still being generated in different formats; however, much was kept only accidentally in the past, and now it's cleaned out pretty regularly, both because electronic storage space is more intrinsically limited, and because people simply don't need to keep it around, and really never did. Much of our historical information was kept only accidentally or incidentally in the past. Now, that same type of historical information, produced as digital originals, is likely lost forever, barring strenuous forensic reconstruction, which is expensive, time-consuming and difficult. In addition, because we can go back and read some data formats now doesn't mean that we'll be able to do so in the future; Word 2090 is unlikely to be compatible with Word 2.5.

A personal sidenote: Back in a previous existence, one of the things that I was charged with was keeping around old computer equipment so that some older files and programs could be read. Manufacturers then very considerately stopped making equipment that could read them, or cards and other things that would allow the old equipment to be attached to new computers. At one point, for something we were trying to retrieve, I had a 5.25-inch drive, a card to connect it that wouldn't fit in any current computers, and media that could therefore not be read. We eventually had to change the mission statement so that if something hadn't been backed up to more current media, that was just too damn bad; it was gone and there wasn't anything we could do.

Or, in other words, just because computers can now read CD/DVD/PhotoCD format doesn't mean that they'll be able to do so 5-10 years from now. That said, judging from what's going on in the photography world, it may not be too long before photographic film, of whatever stripe, is so specialized an item that it's ruinously expensive to deal with.

You makes your bets, and you takes your chances, and you just hope you're betting on the right horse. Or media, as the case may be.

Nicholson Baker tackled this issue in his book Double Fold, in which (among other things) he railed against libraries converting materials into digital formats. I believe I might have said he should be kicked in the shins quite a lot, or something along those lines. Possibly belabored vigourously about the head and shoulders with his book. I forget which. It was, to put it mildly, an aggravating book. Not that he didn't have some valid points, to be sure; that said, those points were mostly buried in a lot of bombast having nothing to do with the real world, using individual isolated cases of bad judgement to represent the whole, and for a brief time, it made the job of librarians a bit more difficult. But consider: maintaining old newspapers and other items in their original paper format takes a great deal of money and a great deal of space. Unless he's going to come up with the space and the funds to deal with his preferred solutions (no digitizing or conversion of anything ever), keeping everything as it was originally published is pretty much impossible. Without building a lot of specialized buildings, we can't store old newspapers and books forever. Rant all you wants about libraries throwing stuff out once it's converted; where do we get a place to keep the stuff, and the funds to maintain it? That level of construction and maintenance is expensive; you need to treat items to reduce or eliminate the acid count (if they'll stand it -- one of the best methods involves actually soaking the item in a deacidification solution, which would simply disintegrate much older material), maintain extremely rigid temperature and humidity levels to prevent further disintegration, building not only to extreme weightbearing standards (books and papers and the shelves or drawers to hold them all weigh) but to try to deal with the whole vermine thing (old books and newspapers and old book glue are tasty to vermin, yes indeedy, and those big buildings have plenty of places to hide)...it's not cheap.

A project in which many libraries and archives are engaged, and which Baker would hate, is overseeing the digital conversion of newspaper archives that have become too fragile to allow patrons to touch. Yes, we could microfilm, which Baker prefers -- but then nobody would use them. Patrons hate microfilm, especially when compared to the relative ease of digital, and I can't say I blame them. The alternative is to keep them in the archives and say, "Well, yes, we have them, but you can't use them." That seems user-hostile in the extreme, doesn't it? But that's what we're having to do right now. We also accept that when we convert them -- whether to digital or microfilm -- that's the last we'll see of them. They simply won't survive the handling. The paper will likely turn to dust. So do we archive them in a format that nobody wants to use, but which may preserve better over the long haul, or do we archive them in a format that can allow for the widest use, but which may become obsolete much faster? You have to pick one; aiming for both means that the second generation -- making digital from microfilm or microfilm from digital -- is significantly lower quality and more difficult to use. Preservation versus access, in a quite literal way, right there for your delectation.

Put it another way: Part of what libraries are doing is responding, slowly and reluctantly but steadily, to patron demands for access. Putting items on microfilm is all very well and good, but as noted, most people don't have the desire or patience to deal with it. Some microfilm equipment is getting obnoxiously expensive, sometimes difficult to maintain (depending on what it is) and takes a great deal of justification to administrators in a way that digital does not. We can only resist what people want just so far ... and honestly, part of our job is to preserve, but more of our job is to provide information and access. Give 'em what they want, and when they want it, and let 'em have it just that way, as the song says. We are, after all, largely a customer service profession. How does it provide service to maintain things in a way that people hate, for what will seem to them a terribly esoteric reason?

Chances are, a lot of the stuff we do now and in the future isn't going to be available to future generations. There may not be multivolume sets of the letters of our once and future presidents, not because they're not writing but because it will have all went with the digital wind, so to speak. That's just ... life, I guess. No doubt people railed in a prior age against the movement from stone carving to vellum and papyrus, arguing that it wasn't as durable. (And, hey, they were right about that, too. Does better in earthquakes, though, and it's easier to read a book or scroll in a building rather than reading the building itself, after all.)

Regarding preservation of images: Deterioration and obsolescence issues present themselves no matter which option you pick. Film and some paper may survive better than digital, yes -- I've dealt recently with photos taken back in the 1880s (glass negatives, terribly entertaining and fraught, and lantern slides and other stuff) through the early part of the 20th century (acetate negatives which, if not cared for correctly, have an emulsion that turns to vinegar and slides right off the negative) and forward; I doubt that nonarchival CDs and DVDs will survive so well, and I doubt that people 100 years from now will have any idea what to do with TIFF or JPEG or GIF or PNG image formats. That said, a lot of the film and photos and negatives we were working with, even some from the 1950s and later, had to be discarded because it was simply in too decrepit a condition to work with; no recognizable image remained or could be pulled from it. Most people don't take care of photos or negatives or slides in a way that will ensure they survive; image survival, again, is mostly accidental and almost always has been. From an archival point of view, maintaining film archives is even more expensive; to prevent deterioration, film actually needs to be frozen, and maintained in subzero archives. And again, the equipment to do that is terribly expensive, and it weighs. Film photography is also becoming a specialist option; increasingly, what will be documented on film will not be ordinary life, and thus will be more useful for art historians and less so for people trying to see how we lived way back when. Even professional photographers may soon be forced to go digital for much more of what they do; Kodak and Agfa keep waffling about whether they'll continue making developer chemicals for certain classes of film. Polaroid is effectively out of the film photography business, although they do make a few types of instant film to support older cameras (but as the cameras break down and disappear, how long will they keep doing that?) -- Polaroid also no longer makes film cameras, and only seems to make two models of digital camera.

Despite the explosion in weblogs and other sorts of online personal writing, less of the written word will survive. (Even this very site, with over 2,000 pages of writing from the past 10 years, on politics and ordinary life and media and other stuff that might -- I say with no doubt a great deal of hubris -- might be of passing interest to historians of a later year ... this site is unlikely to survive in any reasonable archival form. I don't print it out -- where would I put it all?) Despite the proliferation of digital cameras and photography sites, fewer images of how we live will survive. Ultimately, in the future, there will simply be less documentation of our current daily life. How that's going to play out, and whether we wind up reliving Santayana's aphorism over and over -- Those who cannot learn from history are doomed to repeat it --because we simply no longer know what a particular history is ... I have no idea. But we can't unring the bell; we can only catch as much as we are able, try to maintain that in a way that allows both access and archiving. Most librarians have been realizing that this is coming for a while now, and now it's here with a vengeance. We're sort of resigned, if not terribly happy. (And, for the record, most resist throwing old forms of anything out until some level of administration says, "You will do this because you have no choice. You can't keep it all." And then we try to find homes for it, and it turns out that nobody wants it, because they've all been forced into the same corner.)

We do what we can, within the limitations we have, and we hope that's enough.

It rather has to be, doesn't it?

It's a stunningly badly argued piece; if it weren't for its headline, it would be unclear precisely what he's arguing for.

In general, he seems to be arguing that intellectual property rights -- including, probably, copyrights, patents and trademarks -- should all be protected in the same way that real property rights are. To be sure, he sets up a few straw men in his argument; for example, I can't recall that anyone has precisely argued that because something is trashy, it should automatically lose its legal protections, but he defends that side premise as though someone has done so.

He also draws parallels between real and intellectual property, stating that you're allowed to keep real property more or less intact (taxes aside), while intellectual property rights lapse after set amounts of time. I confess, while I think there's something wrong with that argument, I'm not entirely sure what it is or how to express it.

In any event, it may well be true that the distinction between intellectual property rights and real property rights lies in the fact that when this country started, there were relatively little of the former being generated, while many people had very recent, very unpleasant memories of having their rights to their real property violated. It would make sense that the protections afforded to real property would be stronger. That said, it's worth noting that, apart from noting that private property shall not be taken for public use without just compensation (eminent domain), the Constitution is rather profoundly silent about the disposition of real property. If it were not a direct government taking -- and the lapse of intellectual property rights would probably not be such, since the government doesn't profit directly in any way -- then it might be entirely Constitutional for the government to say, "Your rights to all real property cease at your death, and your property and effects must be distributed and sold in some fashion." The government could even then step in and purchase everything you own without offending the Constitution, as long as the compensation was "just".

It's also worth noting that, absent a constitutional amendment, you actually couldn't extend copyright eternally. The Constitution does, after all, say "for limited times". While it's possible to make the argument that life + 90 years is "limited", even this individual-rights-hostile Supreme Court might have problems with the idea that "limited" means Eternal.

Questions, Comments, &c over here

You know, what baffles me about this whole extravaganza is that Disney has owned both ESPN and ABC for some years now. Disney owned ESPN back when they were broadcasting Playmakers, a soapy drama about football players that sent the NFL into fits, and which the NFL essentially forced ESPN to cancel.

Football Wives was based on the British series Footballers' Wives, with UK soccer transposed into American football. Footballers' Wives has had storylines dealing with adultery, bisexuality, homophobia, drug use, racism, sexual harrassment and murder.

Sound familiar?

From the NFL point of view, the problem with Playmakers and Football Wives was not, and wouldn't be, the unrealism. The problem would be that they were entirely too real. After all, we've had two NFL players go to jail this year alone for repeat offenses; Ricky Williams is about to be denied re-entry into the NFL after failing Yet Another Test (for pot, again, of course). We've had players coming out of the closet after their career, and clearly stating that the homophobia was so virulent that they never even conceived of coming out while they played. One player's wife accused him not only of adultery, but of committing it with his best (male) friend, although she later withdrew that accusation. There's even been a murder, although the player who died committed no crime and was in no way to blame. The problem with Playmakers, and the problem with Football Wives is that they would have taken these scandals -- Ripped from the headlines, as the "Law and Order" shows like to put it -- and presented them to us for our delectation, in a nicely cheesy format, just as the NFL was hoping to sweep everything under the rug and present to us its nice corporate face, squeaky clean, new enforcement policies in place to maintain cleanliness, all is right with the world. Can't have some stupid soap opera reminding people that NFL players are human and screw up really badly at times. No sir, just can't have that.

You really wonder what made any division of Disney think that they could possibly get away with it.

I wish Shed Productions great good luck in shipping this to other networks. Every single US network is currently in bed with the NFL in one way or another, either directly or indirectly. NBC has Sunday Night Football, ESPN has Monday Night Football, Fox and CBS have the NFC and AFC games respectively. That leaves just the CW, which is an oddball sibling of CBS, and don't think that the NFL wouldn't point that out, and MyNetworkTV, which nobody watches. On top of that, "Football Wives" would almost certainly skew both too old and too male to match any of the CW's other shows. The only option reasonably open would be to take it to cable. Of those, the only one of the most watched channels that's both nonsports and non-children's programming is TNT -- which, through CW's tenuous attachment to Warner Brothers through the dearly departed WB (Warner) and UPN (Viacom/Paramount) netlets, is also an oddball sibling to CBS. Even so, TNT may be distant enough that the NFL would ignore it; that said, the content is well out of TNT's original series wheelhouse. Maybe they're looking to expand their reach.

Even if it does manage to find its way onto a cable channel somewhere, the question remains: what on earth was Disney thinking?

OK, so here's what I don't get about this:

Cartoon Network/Adult Swim has complained long and hard that with the sole, solitary exception of Inuyasha, People Will Not Watch Anime. Yet they complain when they don't get it. To be sure, I think at least a little of it is the scheduling -- Saturday nights is a horrendous time to try to woo the young adult audience, considerably worse even than Friday night, which is bad enough. And I do think that Sci Fi will probably do better programming on Monday nights -- albeit not necessarily better during the summer, but then again, they probably have almost no late night viewers during the summer.

I am mildly surprised that Sci Fi managed to yank the contract for Ghost in the Shell away from Adult Swim; that had seemed to be one of their anime staples, even if people weren't watching it all that much. (... Well, I was! Really!)

Yeah ... well. Good luck with that. Seriously, the concept of Sci-Fi as a "lifestyle brand", whatever that may be, kind of doesn't work. I mean, when I think of "lifestyle brand", I think Martha Stewart or something like that. (Although, come to think of it, a Sci-Fi themed cooking show would be fascinating, for the geekly disaster factor if nothing else.)

Ah, well. I just want it to survive long enough for me to get my GitS fix. That'll do me. (Unless they decide to be both retro and edgy and do something like Cyber City Oedo, which has more cursing per second than any series I've ever seen. Even the guys on The Shield would think, "You people need to clean your language up a little.")