Otherwise you kind of look like an ignorant fool. You know?

“Damn that television … what a bad picture!”
“Don’t get upset, it’s not a major disaster.”
“There’s nothing on tonight,” he said, “I don’t know what’s the matter!”
“Nothing’s ever on,” she said, “so I don’t know why you bother.”

We’ve heard this little scene, we’ve heard it many times
People fighting over little things, and wasting precious time
They might be better off, I think, the way it seems to me
Making up their own shows, which might be better than T.V.

(CHORUS)

Judy’s in the bedroom, inventing situations
Bob is on the street today, scouting out locations
They’ve enlisted all their family
They’ve enlisted all their friends
It helped save their relationship
And made it work again

Their show gets real high ratings
They think they have a hit
There might even be a spinoff, but they’re not sure ‘bout that
So think of Bob and Judy; they’re happy as can be
Inventing situations, putting them on T.V.

(CHORUS)

Judy’s in the bedroom, inventing situations
Bob is on the street today, scouting out locations
They’ve enlisted all their family
They’ve enlisted all their friends
It helped save their relationship
And made it work again …

We’ve got some exciting news for this fall: our first Blu-ray discs are coming! We’ve picked a little over a dozen titles from the collection for Blu-ray treatment, and we’ll begin rolling them out in October. These new editions will feature glorious high-definition picture and sound, all the supplemental content of the DVD releases, and they will be priced to match our standard-def editions.

Here’s what’s in the pipeline:

• The Third Man
• Bottle Rocket
• Chungking Express
• The Man Who Fell to Earth
• The Last Emperor
• El Norte
• The 400 Blows
• Gimme Shelter
• The Complete Monterey Pop
• Contempt
• Walkabout
• For All Mankind
• The Wages of Fear

I’ve been wondering if Criterion was going to adopt Blu-Ray or not — they published only on Laserdisc for many years, and when DVD came out, they actually resisted publishing in that format for several years because they believed Laserdisc to be the technically superior format. (I’m sure that it didn’t hurt that they could charge $150 for Laserdisc editions, either.) I guess we can mark that question “answered”…

(Oh, and if you’ve never seen any of the movies on that list, what are you waiting for? The Third Man is one of the best movies ever, in my opinion; Gimme Shelter and Bottle Rocket are great too.)

David: If we did a sketch show and we lived in Flint, Michigan, I’m sure that a lot of our observations would be about the dying auto industry. We live and work and breathe in Hollywood. Bob’s wife is a manager, and his son is the star of Cake.

VF: Cake? What’s that?

David: It’s a reality show.

VF: I’ve never heard of it.

David: It’s about who can eat the most cake in five years.

VF: Bob, you must be very proud of your son.

Bob: Well, he’s not winning.

Oh, sure, there’s still the threat that some terrorist group will get their hands on a nuke. That would be pretty bad. But during the Cold War, we all lived with the knowledge that a few bad decisions in Washington or Moscow could result in a nuclear apocalypse so horrific that it would be, for all intents and purposes, the end of the world.

What’s the difference? A terrorist nuke would destroy one city, but the rest of the world would go on. Conflict between the U.S. and the U.S.S.R would have resulted in all cities, everywhere, being destroyed — either directly by missile strike, or indirectly by fallout, nuclear winter and other assorted post-World-War-III complications.

It’s also hard to remember, through all the hagiographic haze that has settled around the memory of Ronald Reagan, that in his first term he quite deliberately set out on a course that brought America and Russia closer to the brink of this disaster then they had been in decades.

The late 1960s and 1970s had been the age of “détente” — an easing of tensions between the superpowers, who both remembered how close the Cuban Missile Crisis had brought them to annihilation. Reagan, however, viewed détente as an admission of weakness, and chose instead to deliberately ratchet up tensions between the superpowers; he embarked on an unprecedented peacetime military buildup, relaunching nuclear weapons programs like the B-1 bomber the Carter Administration had cancelled, speeding up development of others such as the “MX” missile, and launching entirely new projects like the Strategic Defense Initiative (“Star Wars”). Reagan also embarked on military operations designed to bring American and Russian interests directly into confrontation, such as aiding anti-Communist rebels in Central America.

The result of all this was an increasing awareness in the world of the risk that nuclear war posed to everybody. People started to fear that Reagan’s belligerence would start the world down a slope it would not be able to climb back up again. And in 1983 — at the height of the tension — ABC spoke to these fears by airing a remarkable TV movie entitled The Day After.

The premise of The Day After was simple — it aimed to show, as clearly and realistically as possible, how a nuclear war between the superpowers would impact the lives of ordinary people in America. It was set primarily in the state of Kansas, because that state, which contained many American missile launch sites, would have come under direct attack in any nuclear war; the Russians would have hit it hoping to knock out the American missiles before they could be launched. After the missiles landed, the rest of the movie focused on isolated bands of survivors trying to pull things back together as best they could without descending into anarchy.

The movie was a landmark in television history; its special effects were unsurpassed for its time, and the audience it attracted — 100 million viewers — was the largest in U.S. television history. It sparked a national debate about the risks of nuclear confrontation and helped to push the idea of nuclear disarmament into the mainstream. That idea, and the movement that formed around it, eventually bore fruit in the form of the INF treaty — an agreement between the U.S. and the Soviet Union to reduce the number of short-range nuclear weapons deployed on both sides. The INF treaty was the first treaty ever signed between the superpowers that resulted in an actual reduction of the number of deployed nuclear weapons.

The movie contained several unforgettably harrowing sequences. For reference, here is one of them: the initial nuclear exchange, as the residents of Kansas City and Lawrence, Kansas, realize in horror that the missiles they have lived next door to for years are being launched, with the first Soviet missiles arriving just minutes later.

(The movie depicts the first blast being detonated high in the atmosphere, causing cars to stall on the highway. This may seem unrealistic — a nuke that just stalls your car? — but it is actually a quite accurate depiction of nuclear tactics; that high-altitude burst would cause a massive electromagnetic pulse that would short out every electronic circuit within miles, causing cars to stall and airplanes to fall out of the sky. The idea was to use this EMP to make it harder for victims in the target area to flee from the other missiles following behind.)

So why am I writing about this? Because I noticed the other day that the Sci Fi Channel has been re-airing The Day After. At first I thought this was good news, because this movie is an important historical artifact, and more people should see it — especially those who do not remember what it was like to live under the nuclear Sword of Damocles.

Then I watched it. And I was disturbed to discover that Sci Fi has edited the hell out of it. Even more disappointingly, they have edited away most of the most frightening parts of the movie. In the Sci Fi version of the nuclear exchange sequence I showed you above, for example, we don’t see the people being vaporized on the streets. We don’t see the sheets of flame setting people on fire. We don’t see the farmer’s son being blinded by the nuclear flash. We see buildings collapsing, and mushroom clouds rising, but we don’t see people dying. Which is kind of contrary to the entire point of the movie.

(Note: yes, I’m aware that the YouTube clip above has the Sci Fi “bug” on it. It must be from some earlier airing, because the ones I’ve seen have not included this footage. This looks like an older version of the bug to me, so perhaps at some point years ago they were airing it unedited.)

There’s two reasons why they might have chosen to go this way. One is financial; The Day After is a long movie (three hours plus), and when it was originally aired, ABC chose not to run any commercials after the first nuclear explosion because they felt interrupting for commercials would lessen the film’s impact. That was a brave artistic decision for them to make, but Sci Fi may have felt that they could not afford to follow suit, so they had to take some movie content out to make room for commercials. That would explain why they would edit the movie down, but not why these sequences in particular would be edited out. (Indeed, since they are really the most memorable scenes in the film, you would think they would be the last to hit the cutting room floor.)

The other possibility is that Sci Fi thought that their audience’s delicate sensibilities simply couldn’t handle the graphic depictions of nuclear annihilation in the film, so they chose to leave them out. (How the sensibilities of the basic cable viewer of 2008 could be considered more sensitive than those of the network TV viewer of 25 years before, I have no idea.)

Either way, shame on Sci Fi for choosing to show a santized version of this important film. The Day After is not just another made-for-TV movie; it’s a part of history, and it helps us look back into the anxieties of a bygone age and understand why people feared that the end of the world might be coming nigh. Cutting out the sequences that made the film’s point most forcefully neuters it to the point where it would probably be better for them not to show it at all.

So, if you see The Day After in your Sci Fi program listing, skip it. You’re much better off renting or buying the unedited version on DVD, which has not only all the footage that aired on American TV but six extra minutes that were added for theatrical release in Europe as well.

What is a colonoscopy, you ask, and what could it possibly have in common with Ann Coulter?

This consists of the doctor inserting a tube into your rectum and snaking it through your lower digestive system. There is a light at the end of the tube that allows the doctor to look for abnormalities and to take pictures.

Sometimes the jokes pretty much write themselves…

Congressional Democrats are backing away from healthcare reform promises made by their two presidential candidates, saying that even if their party controls the White House and Congress, sweeping change will be difficult.

It is still seven months before Election Day, but already senior Democrats are maneuvering to lower public expectations on the key policy issue…

Sen. Charles Schumer (N.Y.), a member of Senate Democratic leadership and a key Hillary Clinton ally who also sits on the Finance Committee, said he is “not sure we have the big plan on healthcare.”

“Healthcare I feel strongly about, but I am not sure that we’re ready for a major national healthcare plan,” Schumer said.

Schumer said he would focus “on prevention above all and cost cutting until we can get a national healthcare plan.”

Lots of new features coming for Ubuntu and for Kubuntu. I can’t wait.

Last weekend, I had the opportunity to visit the National Air and Space Museum's Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center, their annex facility out by Dulles International Airport.

Longtime Readers™ will know that I'm a complete airplane geek. So I took the opportunity, and I brought my cameraphone with me. The result is a new Flickr photoset with nearly 50 photos of what I thought were the highlights of their collection.

I've taken the time to mark up each photo with a short essay that explains what you are looking at, why it's significant, and how it fits into the history of aviation. So if you're an airplane geek, a history geek, or just a geek, I hope you enjoy browsing through it.

Share and enjoy!

(If you’re curious about the choice of music — it’s a rickroll, so there’s really only one song to choose from.)

Remember back in August 2006, when Joe Lieberman’s campaign Web site crashed on the day of the Connecticut Democratic primary, and Lieberman’s campaign claimed that his opponent’s people had hacked their servers to knock them offline?

And remember how I told you that was bullshit, and that the real reason was most likely that Lieberman’s Web people were a bunch of doorknobs?

Well, the FBI investigated and concluded that I was right:

It seemed to be the ultimate political dirty trick of the digital age: crashing an opponent’s Web site on the eve of a primary election in order to disrupt an opponent’s last-minute efforts. Or so the campaign of Senator Joseph I. Lieberman of Connecticut charged in 2006 when its site crashed the day before the upset victory of the challenger, Ned Lamont, in the Democratic primary.

Mr. Lieberman still went on to win re-election in November as an independent. Then, in December 2006, the state attorney general and the United States attorney, in response to a Lieberman request for an investigation, reported that they had found no evidence of foul play.

Now an F.B.I. e-mail message from October 2006 has been disclosed, saying that its investigation — also in response to a request by the Lieberman camp — showed that it was not angry bloggers or Mr. Lamont’s insurgent campaign workers who rendered the site inaccessible, but sheer technological ineptitude…

“The server that hosted the joe2006.com Web site failed because it was overutilized and misconfigured,” [The Stamford Advocate] said the F.B.I. wrote. “There was no evidence of (an) attack.”

“Overutilized and misconfigured”. Sounds a lot like what I wrote at the time:

Apparently Joe2006.com is hosted on an el cheapo shared hosting plan. If that’s the case, it’s easy to imagine that the site went down due to a simple spike in usage (it is primary day, and their primary is being closely watched across the country) rather than any malicious action.

Just Well Mixed: where you can read the stories that will appear in next year’s New York Times, today!

I mean, I know they’ve made a ton of money coming up with a “… for Dummies” book for every possible subject. But calling the audience for this one names seems a tad cruel, ya know?

You may not have noticed, but Monday was the ten-year anniversary of the birth of the Mozilla project.

Specifically, it was the anniversary of Netscape’s release of the source code for its Web browser — an event which made possible the creation of Firefox and which eventually broke Microsoft’s monopoly on the Web browser market (though the path to get there was longer and stranger than anyone at Netscape probably imagined at the time).

To mark the occasion, Jamie Zawinski (one of the original Netscape programmers and the current proprietor of the DNA Lounge nightclub in San Francisco) has resurrected a bit of Internet history — the original Web site for the Mosaic Communications Corporation, which is what Netscape called itself before it called itself Netscape. You can view it today at the same URL it was found at in 1994 — http://home.mcom.com — and all the content on the site dates from ‘94 as well, since that was just before the company released the first beta of the Netscape browser and officially became a Big Deal.

If you want to complete the paleo-Web experience, Zawinski has also put together a collection of old versions of Netscape that you can download and use to view the site (and any other sites you care to try — though odds are most modern sites will fail in dramatic and/or hilarious ways). The collection goes all the way back to Netscape 0.4, so you can get a 1994-vintage browser to go along with the 1994-vintage Web site.

I first discovered the Web myself early in 1994, so if you’ll excuse me, I have to go wallow in nostalgia for a while…

That’s me in my Civil Air Patrol uniform (I’ve written before in this space about my experiences in the CAP). The uncropped full-size version of the photo contains a timestamp that shows it was taken on June 9, 1989. That would put the me in that picture at a month shy of 14 years old.

I really need to clean my closets out more often.

I’m guessing that to get the list up to ten, they had to include a few that involve using your feet.