…misguided Ren and Stimpy “adult” revival show was a flop, but he’s still a great scholar of cartooning and animation. His personal blog provides an ongoing lesson in these deceptively simple looking art forms. A recent entry on the Chuck Jones short Inki and the Minah Bird lauds Jones for having “the idea to constantly try new things and experiment and always be restless and never satisfied with anything. I might be the last person on earth who remembers the concept of ‘progress’ as a positive thing, a concept that just a few decades ago was the American philosophy that made the country the greatest, most influential and fastest moving nation in history.”

Of course, that same idea of “progress” has caused the film in question to become banned from authorized screenings and TV showings, due to the questionable racial portrayal of the African hunter boy Inki.

“Doctors say how we taste affects health.” The Colbertian response: Yes. If we weren’t so delicious, bears wouldn’t stalk us.

…when right wingnuts take a SciFi Channel show too seriously? What happens when the show changes its storyline, muddying its once-supposedly-clear political metaphors?

…has called it quits after 36 years, six locations, hundreds of productions, and a huge 2004-5 fundraising drive that was supposed to have saved it. Apparently director Alison Narver couldn’t get her Jeopardy!-loser brother to finagle a donation from Ken Jennings after all.

General Electric’s gonna slash 700 jobs at NBC and Universal Studios. More importantly, but buried in this linked story, is that NBC will drop all dramas and comedies from the 8-9 PM prime-time hour, presumably starting either next season or this next midseason, presumably filling the hour with more cheap “reality” shows.

…do on the air, if you’re a playoffs baseball announcer: #3. Hurl an ethnic slur at Lou Piniella.

…tried to appeaal to the sleaze-talk radio audience with a promotional tie-in to Sean Hannity, it’s now trying to appease progressives. A new TV commercial tries to extend Chevy’s “all-American” brand image by featuring images of Rosa Parks, Martin Luther King, Nixon’s resignation, 9/11, and Katrina; all done to an original jingle performed by John Mellencamp (who, when he was more popular, publicly scoffed at oldies-rock stars selling their songs for commercials).

…(can you even imagine he used to be on SportsCenter?) expounds again, this time on why it is indeed possible to criticize Bush without being a terrorist sympathizer.

…from a company that’s been brimming with dumb ideas of late: “GM Hires Fox News Mouthpiece Sean Hannity As Spokesman.”

…lives. The Boondocks comic strip, alas, might not be back for a good while, if ever.

…of Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip was everything I’d expected–really predictable Hollywood-insider soapiness. But there was one funny rant about filming in Vancouver.

…about this being five years since you know what. Except this:

• I’ve only found a couple of reviews of the apparently silly, allegedly far-right-biased ABC 9/11 TV movie. As cheap publicity stunts go, the hype over the movie’s writer-embellished Clinton bashing seems to have brought more attention than the piece-O-tripe deserved.
• The right-wing sleaze machine still doesn’t want you to realize several things about the attack. Foremost among them: Al-Qeida has no interest whatsoever in overthrowing the United States government or imposing a strict Islamic regime on the U.S. citizenry. They’d like to install such regimes in Iraq, Somalia, the “Stans,” and Turkey; and they’d like Israel to disappear.
• The hijackers came not from Iraq but from “friendly” Saudi Arabia. You know, that country where the official religious poilce harass insufficiently-covered women, where a corrupt monarchy rules everything, and whose said monarchy’s big pals with Bush’s oil-piz pals.
• The real threats to the U.S. Constitution, U.S. democracy, and the U.S. way of life are internal, and they can all be traced to the right-wing sleaze machine. This is acknowledged by just about everybody who’s not directly or indirectly employed by the sleaze machine.
• As Nov. 2006 nears, and with it the potential end to total one-party control of the federal government, the sleaze machine will only get sleazier. Because fear-‘n-smear is all they know how to do anymore.
• But what if more of us stood up to the fear-mongering, not just in politics but in our daily lives and in the economy (too many of us, including many of us in the media biz, live in fear of being left behind by an increasingly inequitable economy, and thus become willing slaves to anything that will allow us a toehold into the “haves”).That’s the premise of Arianna Huffington’s newest book/web site, Becoming Fearless. Unfortunately, the site’s shackled by adherence to self-help publishing industry rules, including the rule that such material must be by/for/about women only.

  And what drives these media-biz rules? Strict commercialism, which at its bottom line is just another form of fear.

…than watching myNetworkTV:

• Buffing toenails.
• Cleaning tile grout.
• Emergency oral surgery.
• Removing the cellophane wrapping from compact discs.
• Reconfiguring a small-office LAN installation.
• Tongue piercing sans local anesthetic.
• Proofreading volumes of small towns’ municipal codes.
• Scraping old gum off the bottoms of restaurant tables.
• Hand-grading standardized tests.
• Separating recyclables from non-recyclables.
• Being interviewed for a job you don’t even want, pretending you want it.
• Listening to jackhammers.
• Listening to coworkers or customers complaining.
• A ten-mile freeway backup.
• A middle-school piano recital in which you are not related to any of the performers.

I’m home waiting for the installers to show up for my Internet phone service. I’m watching MTV on its 25th anniversary day. Surprisingly, for an institution that usually can’t stop cvelebrating its own self-proclaimed fabulousness, the channel and its Web site are nearly ignoring the birthday.

(MTV’s Web site does offer a selection of ’80s oldies videos, but in an annoyingly Mac-incompatible format. Rival site Fuse has no such discrimination.)

I happened to tune in during a show called The Big Ten, in which the channel reverts, for at least one hour, to its former shtick of playing music videos. (Remember those?) Madonna’s still on the roster there. So are the Red Hot Chili Peppers, Justin Timberlake, Mary J. BLige, Christina Aguilera, Beyonce, Nelly Furtado, Green Day, Beck, the Goo Goo Dolls, Snoop Dogg, and even Mariah Carey. As for the up-n’-comer acts on the show, they fall into definite generic categories. There are corporate-friendly Cobain impersonators, gold-chain-twirlin’ white and black gangstas, bootay-shakin’ soul divas, boys wearing eyeliner, metal-rap-punk fusion confusions. You’ll be comforted, I’m sure, to learn the primary video-imagery cliches still revolve around big cars and small garments.

But, as I’ve sure you’ve heard, MTV’s main fare these days is young-adult “reality” shows. These still include such workhorse concepts as The Real World, Cribs, and Pimp My Ride. There’s also My Super Sweet 16, in which a different rich girl in each episode spends more on her birthday party than you’ll make this year.

MTV’s “remit,” or corporate mission, has always been to own the advertiser-beloved teen and young-adult audience, without spending a lot of money to do so. As this prized audience gravitates further away from TV viewing toward other leisure pursuits, and as better-funded TV ventures take aim at the same target, this task keeps getting harder.

So, like an aging pop star desperate to stay on the charts, its every attempt to prove its continued youth and vitality only shows off how old it’s gotten.

From a decade ago, here’s one guy’s prediction of “why DVD would fail” in the home-entertainment marketplace.