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Friday, August 11, 2006Worth a listen, for its sheer ordinariness, is this podcast with Michael Totten from the Israel-Lebanon border. The PJM reporter is at the same hotel as Shepherd Smith and John Roberts, but says without a good outside source for news, the fog of war obscures more up close than from a distance: out here, we have multiple sources, all he has is his own eyes and ears.Totten makes it clear that while journalists might like to be heroes, the army would prefer they stay clear when the actual shooting's going, and further that it ain't so heroic to be there as a journalist, even if bombs and artillery are going off in the area, when you put yourself next to the waitress waiting tables so folks can get a pizza, war or no war, because that's where she lives and how she pays her bills. 
posted by gbarto at 11:33 PM Tuesday, August 08, 2006The living room PC?This Slate article piles on computer makers about their multimedia efforts to give us a PC in the living room for entertainment. The author wonders why people haven't bit and posits that people want to keep their 2 ft and 10 ft gadgets straight - they look at computers up close and televisions from far away and that's that. I'm not so sure that's the case. Rather, the problem is one of mindset. Between life in grad school and life in high rent, postage-stamp size apartment California, I've known a fair number of people to watch DVDs on their PCs while the television simply ceased to be as important as it once was - if you're surfing the net, with its millions of offerings, who needs 300 pre-programmed channels? What the television is good for is not watching what you want to watch, but watching what's on because you've nothing better to do. With this in mind, an entertainment PC would have to be a pretty passive thing. If it gives you too many choices, your thought isn't going to be, "What's on?" but "Why am I messing with this?" In other words, an entertainment PC needs two sets of controls, one for the two-foot window, one for the ten-foot window. But the ten-foot controls should have little more functionality than a standard remote - it should offer control over the things a PC can do fast and if you have to go to the desktop to do things more complicated, such is life. In this way, it would be possible to blur the entertainment PC into things more easily. The author is correct that aspects of this hybridization don't make sense, however. The living room PC could only find a home in a house with multiple PCs. You can't pass up writing your proposal because the missus wants to watch Desperate Housewives, or whatever rubbish they're peddling these days. Nor can she pass up writing her proposal while you watch Sports Center. The living room PC, I think, is already here in that a generation of college students has now hovered around the computer to see something goofy on the net, watch a DVD and so on. But the way we use these devices and the expectations we have for them are going to shift. People who sit and watch jerky video because the cablemodem's not running quite right but they like the content aren't necessarily going to need picture perfect big screen televisions. What do we really need? If you look through the snazzier catalogs, they're starting to offer video glasses - headphones and little screens. The real killer for the living room PC is going to be a killer for big screen televisions too - we all watch our own stuff now and appointment television is a thing of the past - at least for the whole family. The kids have their appointments, maybe, and mom and dad theirs, but our last must-see tv, as far as I know, was Sex in the City, not something you'd bring the six and seven year-olds in to share with. Our real living room pc-tv is going to be two laptops and two wireless audio-video sets so that dad can watch football and mom can watch H&G while the kids watch Barney on the old tv. Ah, family time!
posted by gbarto at 10:57 AM Sunday, August 06, 2006Ann Althouse is cross about a M. Nerrière's proposal for Globish - a global English simplified for everyday use. Once upon a time, I might have joined Althouse in blustering about someone watering down my language. But for better or worse, there's neither need nor purpose for debate.I lived in France back when they were trying to get us to listen to balladeurs and all that other nonsense. And I've spent enough time at language study to know that there have been many proposals for simplified languages, from the artificial Esperantoes to Basic English. Althouse should know that Globish was already proposed and years and years ago. It ain't gonna happen. Here's what will happen: I live in California, outside San Jose. I'm well acquainted with what happens to English when a bunch of non-natives have at it, and while it may be simplified, it's not systematic. Spanish speakers use highfalutin Romance words with the wrong prepositions, Japanese construct sentences perfect save for their absence of articles or properly conjugated verbs and the Chinese make do without verb tenses of any sort. The native speakers, accustomed to this, speak a clear, concise English relatively free of the quainter idioms. When Globish comes, it won't be systematically. Rather, it will pass unnoticed. In fact, it may already have happened. Zahmenof, in founding Esperanto, thought to combine multiple elements from multiple languages to win people over. No need for the help, though, people can take care of this for themselves and will. The future is an English of simpler construction, sparser vocabulary and less colorful idioms, but in which new metaphors about technology, mass media and the like offer a new and different richness. I don't know whether the idiom will go fully global, but whether or not it does has little to do with either the protestations of purists or the aspirations of simplifiers. It will come, if it comes, all on its own.
posted by gbarto at 10:11 PM |
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