Thursday, June 19, 2008

bad santa

at an office White Elephant party a couple of years ago, i ended up with the following item (most certainly procured at a local Spencer's Gifts):

- a clear pint glass, unadorned except for a smiling cartoon Santa extending both middle fingers and exclaiming, via caption: "You ain't gettin' shit!"


it went home with me and saw semi-regular use both during holiday and non-holidays alike

starting a few months ago, i decided to reduce my consumption of disposable plastic cups at work and instead started keeping the bad santa glass at work to hold my drinking water.

as a vessel to contain liquids i have no complaints against it; is it odd though that it feels...weird.. to have such a decidedly seasonal (and moderately crude) item on display at all times? after some time to appreciate its presence at my desk i'm actually inclined to replace it with a more benign glass that doesn't express any particular sentiments to the passer-by

Wednesday, June 18, 2008

Clear Play

on the fox news tv station i sometimes see advertisements for a new tech product called Clear Play

basically it's a DVD player with software inside that allows you to download information to the player about controversial scenes in movies (sex, nudity, violence, etc.) and when you play a particular movie you can tell Clear Play to cut out those scenes entirely

Clear Play

i'm confused on the target demographic though - it's obviously targeted to parents with kids who don't want to expose the kiddos to content that they're not yet mature enough to handle. but wouldn't family-values parents dedicated to safeguarding their children from bad influences likely not be interested in movies with that type of content anyways?

or if the parents like watching movies with some 'blue' content to them couldn't they just, i don't know, watch them when the kids are asleep or playing over at someone else's house? can't see what the point is of watching T2 without the violence or Glengarry Glen Ross missing entire scenes because someone dropped an F bomb - the films wouldn't make any sense, it'd be like experiencing a constant and sudden attack of amnesia every few minutes.

the new Rambo movie sans action scenes would probably be ten minutes long; kids would think all Rambo ever did was walk around in a jungle for a bit, then mysteriously be in a village, then suddenly be in another part of a jungle or on a boat, the end.

might be fun to get one just to mess with the different filters and level of filtering to see what kind of strange product you could make out of your favorite movies