January 09, 2004
Filler 14
TV series pitch
Spirit looking for Beagle.
Haircut today; pic tomorrow, maybe. Let's see how it looks in the morning.
Met up tonight with Max to see American Splendor, which I ultimately liked a lot, though some of it is rather hard-going.
Max is a notorious foodie, so I bullied him into picking the restaurant to eat in afterwards; it wasn't easy.
"What sort of thing do you feel like eating?"
"Oh no, you don't get out of it that way."
We wound up at The French House on Dean Street, which didn't even have a restaurant last time I was there (sometime in the late '80s, with some fellow film students, drinking Noilly Prat & bitters -- yecch! -- because, you know, Buñuel used to, or something). Food pleasant, company convivial.
Unsurprisingly, no amount of vigorous argument convinced Max of my thesis that the whole news media is a worthless and voracious memetic parasite that keeps humanity enslaved by persuading everyone they are in constant danger of not knowing what's going on. Another skirmish lost, but the war against the Today programme goes on. I tell you, I shall not rest until the head of John Humphrys is on a spike outside Broadcasting House as a warning to all of the dangers of journalistic hubris.
Ahem.
Perhaps my nagging about Max's photoblog will prove to have been more effective. If not, I'll have no choice but to reveal the URL prematurely and expose its fragile, incomplete state to the harsh gaze of the world.
Fair warning ;)
Posted by matt at January 9, 2004 12:48 AM
Why did you italicise the name of the restaurant?
ps. You thought AS too hard-going, I found parts of it too upbeat.
I thought the worthlessness of the news media was a fact understood and acknowledged by everybody, like the fact that we are carbon-based life forms.
Isn't the news media just a part of the entertainment industry, much of which is entirely worthless if not positively evil?
I'm going back to my cave now ;-)
[Max] It was a whim. Why, don't you like it?
[Faustus] "understood and acknowledged by everybody"? What proportion of the people in the world actually understand and acknowledge that we are carbon-based life forms?
[Adam] Yes, that was one of my arguments. Alas, Max is incurably infected with the NTK meme. I fear it may be terminal.
1. No, I don't.
2. I fully understand your problems with the news media. It is your extension of this position to the conclusion that an individual should not be interested in events beyond their local environment that I disagree with.
A significant percentage of the population appear to understand absolutely nothing at all.
They can be identified by the nature of their interactions with others taking the form:
"And she said to me... and I said to her..." ;-)
The dilemma is where to obtain information from further afield than the local environment without falling prey to the manipulative parasites.
Why, just listen to the messages the little green men send you.
You can't trust them either.
Sure you can. Little green men are 100% reliable. Why would they lie?
[Max] I know, and I apologize for misrepresenting you so.
