Actually, it’s not so much of a crush as a recognition of this woman’s talent and likability. Jenny Slate got on my radar just last week with the season premiere of SNL. She did a hilarious “biker chick” character who hosts a Wayne’s World-esque TV show in her basement with her frickin’ best friend and her frickin’ mom’s best friend as guests. She famously let an F-bomb slip during the sketch, (accidentally saying “fuckin’” instead of one of the dozens of “frickins”) but that’s not what got my attention. What I noticed was her 100% commitment to her character and the nuance with which she delivered it. She was totally believable and awesome.

So today I happened to follow a link to a short that Slate stars in. I’m going to show it to my film class on Wednesday. It’s a 20-minute romantic comedy that’s sweet, charming and full of really juvenile humor. Here it is…

[UPDATE: Vimeo is breaking my blog, so I'm linking to the film instead of embedding it. Click here.]

Coincidentally, another short I show my students each semester is this wonderful little piece starring Nasim Pedrad, who was also recently added to SNL’s line-up…

Click here.

The event is free and open to the public and will be held in Norwich on Wednesday evening (7PM at the Norwich Congregational Church).

Featured readers include Emily Bernard, Tom Bodett, Jody Gladding, David Goodman, Garret Keizer, Karen Hesse, Galway Kinnell, Willem Lange, David Macaulay, Ron Powers, Sarah Strohmeyer, Catherine Tudish, and Naima K. Wade.

These writers will be reading selections from the likes of Maya Angelou, Carlos Fuentes, Emma Goldman, Farley Mowat, George Orwell, Pablo Neruda, Katherine Paterson, John Steinbeck, Kurt Vonnegut, and Alice Walker.

For more information…

I have to teach my class on Wednesday night or I’d make the drive down for this. If you go, let me know what you think!

It turns out that Vermont is front and center for some of the more fascinating Constitutional legal questions currently being discussed. Sexting, border crossings and laptop seizures, Al Jazeera-English on Burlington Telecom cable TV, Burton snowboards featuring “indecent” art — these have all been specific issues here in Vermont, though not all of them have invoked actual litigation.

I’ve edited and uploaded the entire conference onto the Vermont ACLU’s blip.tv channel. It’s in seven parts and each part is labeled with the specific issue that’s discussed. I’m embedding my personal favorite segment here. It’s Catherine Crump, a staff attorney for the National ACLU in NYC, talking about privacy and free speech issues surrounding global, instant, digital communications tools. It’s worth your time…

If you’re reading this post on Monday June 29 between 10 A.M. and 3 P.M., click here to view the live stream. The Burlington Free Press ran a story on the conference on the front page today. Read it here.

The implications of this are awesome. The future of live video is bright.

In pursuit of this goal, a few of us have banded together and are evangelizing social media around this conference. We’ve agreed on a metatag for online posted media (“acmne09″) and the awesome folks at Found Line have built a little aggregation site (like the one they made for Vermont’s Town Meeting Day) that helps you organize all of the material coming in.

After having a miserable time trying to follow all of the SXSW tweets in March, it’s clear that this sort of page (and a diversification of relevant tags) is what that conference could have used.

Even if you’re not attending the conference this week, tune in and follow all the hot community media action! (The oening night party with a cash bar is tonight at VCAM so look for inappropriate photos tagged acmne09 on Flickr tomorrow!)

First, there is an actual fight that is being waged, though it’s not against Christmas, per se, but against attempts by certain religious folks in this country to blur the line that separates church and state. The establishment clause (not to be confused with the Santa Claus) in the US Constitution has traditionally been interpreted to mean that public institutions (like public schools, government offices, post offices, police stations, etc.) cannot favor one particular religion over others. Still, occasionally a local public school or fire house somewhere will put up a Christmas tree or a nativity scene, thereby celebrating a Christian holiday, and non-Christian members of that community will (rightly) point out that, legally, public institutions ought not show that sort of religious preference. So up goes a menorah or an atheist plaque and that gets some Christians bent out of shape. Never mind that they could put their tree or nativity scene two blocks down the road at the local church and avoid a Constitutional crisis, some Christians feel entitled to force their special day down everyone’s throats in spheres both private and public.

There’s a second, more subtle dynamic going on too, however, that adds to the war-on-Christmas meme. It’s the decision on the part of many people (and organizations) to opt for “happy holidays” when wishing good cheer to others in December, rather than choosing to reference a specific holiday (like “merry Christmas”), and thereby presuming the well-wishee’s religious affiliation. This has nothing at all to do with the separation of church and state or some edict from on high demoting the status of Christmas in America. Rather, it stems from people not being assholes, generally. I could, for instance, go around telling everyone I saw on the street or in the supermarket or at the bank “have a nice day off from work, even though we all know there is no God!” but that would be wildly presumptuous of me. If I knew it was a presumptuous thing to do and chose to do it anyway, I would be kind of an asshole. Most people aren’t assholes, hence, we hear a lot of “happy holidays” out there. Stores in particular like this phrase because they have no reason to offend their non-Christian customers.

For the record, I actually think this line of reasoning is flawed, however well-meaning it is. The United States has a secular government (despite what the fundies say) and it celebrates “Christmas” on December 25th as a national holiday. We all get it off from work, regardless of our religion. The banks and post offices are closed. In this respect, saying “merry Christmas” is no different from wishing someone a happy Thanksgiving. As an atheist, I am utterly unoffended when someone says “merry Christmas” to me, and I suspect the same is true for most non-Christians. I would likewise be unoffended if someone wished me a happy Hanukkah or Kwanza or Festivus (for the rest of us) or whatever. I just don’t think an actual problem exists of people getting offended by holiday cheer… except for those who are offended by the phrase “happy holidays,” and those people are just crazy and should be mocked.

So this “war on Christmas” that Bill O’Reilly and his cohorts rail against stems from an idiotic conflation of these two distinct phenomena — public buildings belonging to everyone, not just the Christians, and a majority of people and businesses not being assholes. The two things are separate and not part of some larger conspiracy to demote the value of “Christmas” in our culture. To think otherwise is to be a numb-skull.

It’s interesting that I have never actually met a person who thinks there is a concerted “war on Christmas.” I think those people are only on TV.

And with that, I leave you with this video collage that I put together a few years ago, featuring Charles Dead or Alive performing The Nutcracker Suite.

Merry Christmas.

Charles Dead or Alive, The Nutcracker Suite from Bill Simmon on Vimeo.

Here’s a snip from the AT piece…

The Council’s conclusions come from an analysis of 280 YouTube offerings. When PTC inspectors searched for the term “porn,” for example, over a quarter of the videos returned didn’t ask for age verification, they claim. Many included ads or links to pornographic Web sites. “Clicking a link would instantly take the user to a webpage containing extremely graphic photos and videos of homosexual and heterosexual oral and anal sex,” PTC complains.

…

While the survey praises YouTube for prohibiting outright pornographic videos and “algorithmically demoting” sexually suggestive fare, the decency group criticizes the company for taking no steps to reign in user comments, which its authors find at least as disturbing as the videos themselves. From July 1, 2008 through August 5, 2008, the PTC’s “analysts,” as they call themselves, collected not only videos, but user remarks.

The article also wisely quotes from SCOTUS justice William Brennan’s dissent in the landmark Pacifica Foundation v. FCC (the George Carlin “seven dirty words” case)…

“There are many who think, act, and talk differently from the Members of this Court, and who do not share their fragile sensibilities,” he wrote. “It is only an acute ethnocentric myopia that enables the Court to approve the censorship of communications solely because of the words they contain.”

…

Pacifica vs. FCC, Justice Brennan predicted, will have its biggest impact on broadcasters seeking to reach people “who do not share the Court’s view as to which words or expressions are acceptable and who, for a variety of reasons, including a conscious desire to flout majoritarian conventions, express themselves using words that may be regarded as offensive by those from different socio-economic backgrounds.”

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“In this context,” he added, “the Court’s decision may be seen for what, in the broader perspective, it really is: another of the dominant culture’s inevitable efforts to force those groups who do not share its mores to conform to its way of thinking, acting, and speaking.”

I don’t know if Google is actually reacting to the PTC’s complaints with their recent crackdown or not, but I suspect their decisions will wind up biting them in the ass. It’s not like there aren’t alternative video sharing services out there for people to jump to when YouTube becomes passe. Merely serving a majority of a certain type of web user is no guarantee of permanence. Remember what happened to MySpace.

Thanks AlexW for the link!

When I was on the VCAM board of directors, we spent a great deal of time dealing with the issue of “objectionable content” (a phrase which, like most language used in the discussion, is actually meaningless – all content is “objectionable” in that all content is “able” to be “objected” to). Our mission at VCAM is largely related to protecting the free speech of our community in the electronic milieu, and occasionally, we as a board were called upon to determine if a certain TV show was “appropriate” for broadcast or whether it should only be played late at night, when children were less likely to see it and so on.

Inevitably, these discussions would devolve into generating lists of types of content that would or would not be okay to air at what time of day, etc. One of the things I learned in these talks was how quickly the discussions became utterly absurd and how easy it is to think of scenarios that aren’t covered by whatever guidelines we could come up with.

I think these discussions must be RAGING in the Googleplex these days. On December 2nd, YouTube announced that it was ramping up it’s restrictions on “mature” and “sexually suggestive” content. They’ll apparently be using automated, “algorithmic” methods of screening content for profanity and “demoting” those videos that Google’s machines find offensive so that they are harder to find. This strikes me a profoundly stupid idea and one that will lead to all sorts of arbitrary and useless censorship.

To get a sense of just how deep in the censorship woods the folks at YouTube are, take a look at their Help Center page on age-restricted videos. Here’s a snip…

When are videos considered ‘sexually suggestive’?
Videos featuring sexually explicit content like real sex acts are not allowed. Other content like nudity and dramatized or implied sexual conduct may be considered sexually suggestive depending on whether or not it is intended or designed to arouse viewers.

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Nudity includes exposed or partially covered genitalia, buttocks, or breasts, as well as sheer clothing. Videos featuring individuals in minimal or revealing clothing may also be age-restricted if they’re intended to elicit a sexual response.

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Additional considerations include a combination of:

• Whether breasts, buttocks, or genitals (clothed or unclothed) are the focal point* of the video.
• Whether the video setting is sexually suggestive (e.g. a location generally associated with sexual activity, such as a bed);
• Whether the subject is depicted in a pose that is intended to sexually arouse the viewer;
• Whether the subject’s actions in the video suggests a willingness to engage in sexual activity (e.g. kissing, provocative dancing, fondling); and
• If a subject is minimally clothed, whether the clothing would be acceptable in appropriate public contexts (e.g. swimwear vs. underwear).

* Focal point is determined by factors including the length of time an image appears in the video (fleeting vs. prolonged exposure) especially relative to the overall length of the video, the camera angle and focus, the relative clarity of the images in the video, the lighting, and the video thumbnail (content that appears in a thumbnail is also considered to be its focal point).

Wow. YouTube is getting into the vagaries of explicit vs. implicit content, what’s considered the “focal point” of the content, the intent of the video maker, the uploader AND the performers in the videos… this is exactly the sort of off-the-chart insanity that results when you go down the censorship road.

YouTube publishes a document like this because they want to be transparent and fair about how they apply their standards, but you simply can’t apply fundamentally subjective content standards in an objective way. Trying to do so yields nonsense like this. They would be better off with a blanket statement that simply says “we reserve the right to remove, censor, flag or demote content for any reason whatsoever” and leave it at that. At least then they would be honest in their tyranny.

Ultimately, we on the VCAM board discovered that putting the power to filter unwanted content in the hands of the viewer was far more effective than censorship. An informed audience can make their own viewing decisions, so our goal was to arm viewers with as much information as possible about what sort of content they might encounter and let them watch or not as they see fit.

We further recognized that defining “sexually explicit” content (for example) was necessarily a subjective call and so rather than describing types images and acts and messing about with trying to determine the intent of the producers, we focused on the system we used to vet controversial material. It’s the process that we made sure was transparent and fair rather than focusing on specific body parts and whether or not there was a prurient intent on the part of the producer.

Hopefully the powers that be at YouTube will eventually realize the futility of their actions. I, for one, will have a hard time recommending YouTube to people who ask about video hosting/sharing services while they employ such arbitrary and capricious content restrictions.

FWIW, there is a YouTube “blackout” getting organized for the next several days in protest to these new policies.

via Dear S

Also…

• NASA tests “deep space internet“
• The future of Pushing Daisies doesn’t look good
• I’ve heard of being caught red handed, but this is too much
• First visible extra-solar planet?