Danimal's blog

“Dia de los Muertos —  or Day of the Dead — is sometimes referred to as Mexican Halloween.”

“Which is actually quite offensive to people familiar with ‘Mexican Halloween’ as a sexual position.”

http://www.hulu.com/watch/105441/community-introduction-to-statistics

Dollhouse's Dushku Dilemma

I watched the most recent Dollhouse episode, Belonging, last night, and it was fantastic. By far the best of the second season, and right up there with any non-Epitaph One episode from the first. There were, as always, plot twists a-plenty. There was a compelling villain who drugs a girl he can’t seduce and then uses the Dollhouse to turn her into his own personal hooker. There are moral dilemmas and gray areas. And there were several great performances from the actors who play supporting characters like Sierra, Adele and (especially) Topher.

Which brings me to the one thing missing from the show: Eliza Dushku.

Dushku plays Echo, the main character of the show and, as we learn in Epitaph One, the woman who ends up becoming the Neo/John Conner savior as the world collapses into Armaggedon in a decade.

Dushku is absolutely beautiful. And she’s incredibly charming in interviews. The problem is she can’t act. She’s at her best when she plays a tomboy being chased by a hunter, or in small doses as a bubbly sorority girl. But the sad truth is that Dollhouse is at its best when Echo is in the background, or at least playing an equal part in an ensemble.

The writers started to get the formula right at the end of the first season, culminating in Epitaph One, which is orgasmically good and probably features a total of 13 seconds of on-screen Dushku. That episode left me thinking they were ready to take the show into hyperdrive, but the momentum got stalled right away this season for two episodes of Dushkubating when Echo got to explore her maternal instinct and be an undercover cop. And now Fox is going to mothball the series until December, and it will probably go off the air shortly afterward.

It’s sad that the show will probably not get a whole lot more time to explore the dense mythology, interesting characters and compelling issues it’s developed so far. But it’s not like Dollhouse hasn’t been given the chances. It just wasted too many of them on Dushku (who also produces the show and, to her credit, helped come up with the idea for it) (and who I am still in love with, regardless of her Dollhouse performance).

Shows like Dollhouse really don’t have a whole lot of wiggle room. It’s hard for people to join a serial drama once it’s already started, so those shows need to start out with a Lost-like bang to make sure they have viewers from the get-go. And when they don’t, the really can’t risk any off-weeks where someone might watch an episode for the first time and be underwhelmed. As one critic noted this week, ”Dollhouse is too fragile a show to withstand that kind of frequent backsliding.”

The model that newspapers have worked to great success for years — wring 80% of revenue from advertisers and 20% from readers — is in tatters.

…

“We looked up and said that we have this circulation revenue, which is a considerable base of opportunity,” said Jim Moroney, publisher of Dallas Morning News and executive vice president of A.H. Belo. “We wanted to leverage that base and make up for some of the shortfall in ad revenue and decrease the dependency on advertising.”

Circulation hews close to this formula: An increase in price results in a decrease in volume. To ratchet up circulation revenue, publishers need to know how far to push pricing while mitigating the effects a precipitous drop in the number of copies sold could have on any potential revenue gains. 

…

When asked about the perception of content in tandem with price increases, the survey found a four to one gap in price versus defection. For example, if the paper raised the subscription price 100% and readers felt they were getting more content, the fall off in volume would be around 10%. At the same price, if readers felt like they were getting less content, the volume would decline more than 40%.

http://www.editorandpublisher.com/eandp/news/article_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1004030792

Proverbs for Paranoids:
1. You may never get to touch the Master, but you can tickle his creatures.
2. The innocence of the creatures is in inverse proportion to the immorality of the Master.
3. If they can get you asking the wrong questions, they don’t have to worry about answers.
4. You hide, they seek.
5. Paranoids are not paranoid because they’re paranoid, but because they keep putting themselves, fucking idiots, deliberately into paranoid situations.

(In celebration of being named “Thomas Pynchon” in the “Which Crazy Writer Are You? Quiz”)