American popular culture is getting better all the time, especially television.

Hmmm. Something we disagree on. A rare occurence. Judging quality by the best is an error. The median is a better way. And it ain't pretty.

I stopped watching TV years ago and haven't wanted to look back ever since.

Have to agree with you about "Friday Night Lights" - I wanted to dislike the show tremendously, but it gradually won me over. However, since reality TV and obnoxious game shows are the norm and FNL the exception, I wouldn't hurry to declare a new era in American pop culture just yet.

Kind of an aside, as I don't really watch much TV, but ER had other kinds of integrity. I found a writers' guide for them, in which the medical advisors spelled out what were acceptable changes in medical reality that were firmly justified for dramatic effect. These ranged from not using appropriate masks because facial expressions were needed, having drugs work fast enough to fit the available time, and having far better than real-world resuscitation success.

Writers were expected to clear other variations, and scripts were checked. In later years, I definitely had the impression that scripts were being written on a quite timely basis, reflecting active discussions on emergency medicine mailing lists.

Some details, or vignettes, hit personally. Without getting into unpleasant detail, there was one scene in which Carter, still a medical student, ran out of a treatment room, horrified by the particular patient. Benson, very much the cold surgeon in most situations, held the sobbing Carter in the corridor, telling him that if he managed to get through that, nothing would ever be worse. While it was a different patient presentation, I remembered running out myself, and having another previously cold resident talk me through it. I wish I could remember his name, and thank him, many years later.

--
Howard

*equal opportunity offense to both extremes*

"Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it" [George Santayana]

Friday Night Lights is so completely overrated. It's treacly and boring. I don't understand how people can even watch it.

I haven't seen FNL, but The Wire is almost impossibly brilliant.

In defense of popular culture: sure a lot of it is really really stupid, but it also is strong. Invincible really.

It can take just about anything and absorb it. Look at the Mooninnite Bomb fiasco. By the time of the press conference, people were holding signs mocking the connection to 9-11. Gary Brolsma has now made a not-insubstantial amount of money. And it's not like other cultures don't do similar things.... Nevada-tan springs to mind.

Perhaps I'm conflating American pop culture as a whole with more niche cultures (VH1, Adult Swim, etc.) but I rather like that aspect of it.

There is, of course, the genre of so bad that it's good. The one-shot category includes Amazon Women on the Moon, Plan 9 from Outer Space, and Attack of the Killer Tomatoes. I have mixed feelings about Attack of the Killer Bimbos, since the cast, try as they would to hide it, would slip into good acting.

Ahh, but those who could keep it up enduring awfulness. My Mother the Car, which made Mr. Ed seem like Franz Kafka. Lost in Space. Ben Casey.

At the other end of the spectrum, those that could do tragedy and keep doing it, including Law & Order, SVU. There were those that were superb, but got little attention -- Call to Glory, with Craig T. Nelson a very different role. Both Star Trek: New Generation and Deep Space Nine, although they needed a season or two.

--
Howard

*equal opportunity offense to both extremes*

"Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it" [George Santayana]

Better depiction of High School than Veronica Mars (before she went on to college)? Maybe it's the difference between Texas and So California.

Imus is and always was a shock jock. I thought that Patton bit was funny. One thing not to be overlooked here was this was simply not funny.

As a shock jock, Imus has no filter between his brain and mouth. The brain is that of a scrappy white kid who made it big mouthing off. Under these circumstances, it's not surprising that people will find his schtick offensive.

But even Imus's critics will admit the appeal of his show is not primarily prurient. MSM goes there. Politico's go there. They go there because he offers a unique platform. I don't listen to the show because I found the guests insipid and the humor simply not funny. I love Howard Stern!

Imus will not and should not be fired so long as there is an audience for his speech. His station is in business to make a profit and people want to listen to him. Removing him from the air will do nothing, but encourage the thinking that Imus, in part, represents underground.

Imus, Stern and the like are useful barometers of our psyche. I think dragging Imus out of his station and making him apologize, which must torture his ego to no end, sends a better message than removing him from the air. It is a well deserved public rebuke.

Of course he'll do it again. And he'll apologize again. I think the process is therapeutic, but I don't agree that combatting his speach is best served by removing it in light of the obvious audience.

All told there are far bigger issues to worry about than one "cantankerous old fool."

J. McCutchen

NEW YORK - Bruce Gordon, former head of the NAACP and a director of CBS Corp., said Wednesday the broadcasting company needs a "zero tolerance policy" on racism and hopes talk-show host Don Imus is fired for his demeaning remarks about the mostly black Rutgers women's basketball team.

Enough is enough people! Last night on MSNBC the network's media correspondent flagellated himself for not being critical of Imus.

"All of us in the media should be ashamed!" he whined

My God! Fire Imus? Please....starting with Mr. Gordon and ending with Rush Limbaugh, the entire US MSM establishment should resign for their sychophantic of the Bush regime and its catastrophic wars...

I read the book and loved it. Does that count?

and Night Court

Ted Knight in Mary Tyler Moore Show

LMAO...yep I remember that one, HAHAHA.

How 'bout the one where Louie walks over to Jim, who was sitting by the aforementioned pay phone, with a pair of pliers and twists Jim's ear lobe REAL hard.  Then 20 minutes later from off camera you hear Jim yell...OOOOOWWWWWWW!!! :-)

Don't you ever lighten up?

What's your favorite TV show?

Mine's American Idol.

Go Sanjaya!!!!!!!!!

I have had creepy experiences in real life, and high among them was realizing that I was dealing with a physician that was a parody of Frank Burns, except without showing his skill.

Another was a very intense period of work. I was approaching 48 hours, with a few collapses on a desk or behind it. It was night, and strangely quiet. I looked around me, on giant ramps, with walls of dingy green paint, odd crates, reminiscent of the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark scattered around. Indeed, I had a sense of being trapped in a really low-budget science fiction movie.

Snapping to my senses, I realized I was in the basement of the Pentagon, and that's what it looks like.

--
Howard

*equal opportunity offense to both extremes*

"Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it" [George Santayana]

You're right about FNL, I can't remember watching a better TV series. It is sooooo damn good. Even if you don't like football or Texas or mankind in general, every episode will bring tears to your eyes. Even the minor characters are beautifully written and acted.

The show never lets you forget that everyone in life is fighting a great battle, so maybe try to be a little kinder. For anyone who hasn't watched it before, NBC has the entire season archived online for free. So click on the link below, sit back and try out the pilot. I bet you'll be hooked and if you're not-- you can always go back to wasting the evening reading blogs. :o) http://www.nbc.com/Video/rewind/full_episodes/friday_night_lights_01.shtml

we should hold people responsible for what they say

To say that we should hold people responsible for what they say is almost a platitude. Who else are you going to hold responsible? I mean they say it so they are responsible for what they say. A parallel rule applies to actions. We hold people responsible for their actions. But here is the interesting part. We hold people responsible for the actions that are intentional. Indeed an action is not considered an action proper unless it has an intention behind it.

Unintentional actions that cause another person's death are not, by law, considered acts of murder.

But suppose the person intended to achieve one thing by his/her action but it resulted in something else. That is: actions often have unintended consequences.

Speech is a kind of action. Was what Imus said an intentional piece of verbiage or did it just drool out of his mouth like saliva sometimes does? I don't know. It seems that Imus has a habit of making these kinds of remarks. Does habitually insulting people signify that it must be intentional since if it was accidental, the person would not repeatedly have the same kind of accident?

Ok let's say that evidence shows that Imus' remark was intentional in the sense that it was not an accident, but a matter of habit.
What was he intending to do? Was he intending to get himself fired? Did he think it would pass unnoticed? Did he not realize the danger he was putting himself in in saying such a thing on his show for everyone to hear?

My diagnosis is that Imus just could not control himself sufficiently to stop it from happening. He must have realized ( while he was saying it perhaps) that it was going to get him into trouble; possibly be the end of his career. Is he self-destructive? I think the explanation is that he is compulsive about it. A person who suffers from a verbal compulsions is not fully in control of what s/he says. That's Imus' problem.

p.s. that he is a racist goes without saying. My point is that he is compulsive about it and thus self-destructive unlike those pious media types who feign shock, shock, shock at such (public) behavior.

Gotta agree on Friday Night Lights.

I followed my wife's career to Central Texas a few years ago. Previously we lived in Seattle and Juneau. And I gotta say this show absolutely NAILS the small town high school reality like no show I have ever seen. I'm now teaching at a local high school and know of what I speak. They get everything absolutely right.

Interestingly, the show gets better and better the less actual football they show. The most compelling episodes have been those with no football scenes at all. They film it around the Austin area so that really is what Texas looks like. Unlike that silly show Jerico, for example, in which the obvious mountains and foothills of Southern California stand in for the pancake flat plains of western Kansas.

My wife had no interest in the show when it first came out but now cannot miss an episode. The romance between the coach and his wife is the most real portrayal of marriage I have ever seen on TV. And the awkward romances between the high school students transport me back 25 years to my high school days like no high school show I have ever seen.

The show gives me chills it is so good.

Of course NBC in its wisdom has matched it against Dancing with the Stars and American Idol so WTF do they expect if it doesn't get ratings.

You gotta good point there, cscs.  Let's say it's true that the telephone techies in Mumbai are keeping Sanjaya afloat - doesn't that sort of redefine "American pop-culture?"  "America" is splooging out of its confines.  Wouldn't a high-school melodrama set in Rio Grande del Sul be as appropriate as one set in Tejas? 

MJ might be too young to remember Richard Boone Theater also.  But dang, he's not too young to remember Carol Burnett.  I wonder why that didn't qualify as great TV.   

Personally, the best show on TV today is the Henry Waxman show on C-SPAN.  Runner-up is the Pat Leahy show, also on C-SPAN.   

But me?...I'm torn between Melinda and LaKisha.  Sanjaya is growing on me, though.  I just realized that he's a bit better than Menudo.  But even if my wife didn't force me to watch American Idol, I doubt I would watch Friday Night Lights - I was a beatnik in my high-school days, and high-school culture was incomprehensible to me.  It still is.

I can't sign-off without mentioning Hill Street Blues - probably the best TV production ever.  Generally, I'm not amused at all by cop shows, but Hill Street Blues crossed an important milestone to distinguish itself.  Besides, when it came into my life it filled an emptiness created by the demise of Barney Miller. ;-) 

Neoboho

My diagnosis is that Imus just could not control himself sufficiently to stop it from happening. He must have realized ( while he was saying it perhaps) that it was going to get him into trouble; possibly be the end of his career. Is he self-destructive? I think the explanation is that he is compulsive about it. A person who suffers from a verbal compulsions is not fully in control of what s/he says. That's Imus' problem.

I disagree. I think his whole schtick, with the constant racist and sexist inuendo was really a carefully cultivated persona designed for one purpose only, to capture an audience and increase his ratings. Imus wanted to be a bad boy and market himself as such to his primarly white male audience who laughs at that bullshit. And it was very very lucrative for a long time. Of course he is racist and sexist. That stuff doesn't come from nowhere. He chose to let it out for fame and fortune. That's really the most vile part of this whole episode. I can understand the disgruntled racist old coots who grouch and grumble in the seedy bar down the street. They are who they are. But Imus chose to make his fortune that way. It was his choice every step of the way.

What happened to Imus was two things. First the times changed on him to some extent. Second, he tried to have it both ways. If he had never tried to be the political guru and Larry King style kingmaker of MSNBC then no one much would have paid attention to his ravings. But since he decided to become a media kingmaker he opened himself up to much more scrutiny.

Finally he just stepped over the line by making it personal. Thats perhaps his biggest error. George Allen was running a perfectly successful Senate campaign as a not-so-closeted racist and neo-confederate. And people just shrugged about it. His huge mistake was personally attacking a SPECIFIC young man with racial slurs. You NEVER make it personal. If Imus had been ranting about women's basketball in general no one would have really noticed. You hear that sort of stuff all the time on sports talk. But no, he made a very personal and vile attack on 12 young women from Rutgers. Women who have faces and families. Women who were not professional public figures. And that's a line you just don't cross. Especially when you have a microphone provided by public corporations over the public airwaves that goes out to hundreds of stations.

. . . he made a very personal and vile attack on 12 young women . . . who were not professional public figures.

This analysis seems right to me. The issue is fairness and justice, the power of the corporate microphone as opposed to the impotence of the rest of us. As someone said -- Vivian Stringer, maybe -- "they didn't deserve this."

But what was Imus attacking? Was it the women's beauty*? And in today's sexualized culture, is that the equivalent of attacking our grandmothers' chastity?

* I don't think this is about racism or sexism. I think it is about beauty. And I think that these women did not -- merely by the fact of appearing in a nationally televised athletic contest -- open themselves up to public scrutiny of their physical appearance.

I'm not sure Sanjaya redefines American pop-culture, but I am sure he is forcing the producers of AI to take a good, hard look at what they've created, and how they're going to keep it moving forward.

Hill Street Blues is up there on anyone's list of the best. It really was the first TV show to, as you say, cross a certain line of quality, where people realized the medium could be taken seriously.

Dissent Protects Democracy.

I guess you could call any serialized TV show a "soap opera." But if you're doing a close and serious examination of TV and popular culture, I'm not sure FNLs is really a soap opera.

Is Sopranos a soap opera, too?

Dissent Protects Democracy.

Interesting point about medical illustration then and now. There is a superb small handbook by Asher and Mattox, Ken Mattox probably being the dean of trauma surgery, called Top Knife: The Art & Craft in Trauma Surgery . It's different in focus (and about $140 cheaper) than the massive textbook Trauma by Moore, Feliciano and Mattox, which is on my wish list, or the older Johns Hopkins The Management of Trauma, which is on my shelf.

Top Knife purely deals with what a trauma surgeon does in the operating room, especially with something challenging. I don't think there's a single photograph in it, as is the case with a great many medical books. Surgical illustrations often are done by people who are physicians and artists, or at least artists with a great deal of medical training. Often, the best illustrations are black and white, so you can see clearly that you need to cut between two structures that really are just part of a wet and colorful view in the patient.

Some of my other books do have photographs, black & white or color as appropriate, which tend to be used to help diagnose. Color is most useful for things like rashes. I can think of some photographs, in B&W, that did cause my stomach to flip a couple of times before seeing that.

So, you'd actually find a lot less gore and more information in modern textbooks for professionals. As to some pop culture things, I've heard surgeons comment on a horror flick that they didn't see as much blood in a battlefield hospital. After all, a large part of surgery is making sure the blood stays in the patient.

Apropos of your mystery bite, my grandfather was in the wholesale produce business. He'd often bring home "hands" of bananas, which is a bunch of bunches, several feet long, and pass out bunches to our neighbors.

Unfortunately for my grandmother, the bananas weren't all that were always imported from South America. Hey, when I was six or seven, I thought the giant spiders and assorted snakes were rather neat, about as fascinating as my grandmother high-jumping to the kitchen table where she could scream more comfortably. Funny, though -- in those days, I was scared of cats.

I worked in a hospital lab in high school, and my all-time triumph was with a slightly above mundane job, doing microscopic analyses of urine. You really don't want to know about the least pleasant jobs in a hospital lab. Anyway, I was doing the usual cell counts, and this strange, beautiful, and fairly large thing swam by. Shortly thereafter, I saw more, and tried to remember where I had seen them.

It turned out that Johns Hopkins had forgotten to ask this businessman about foreign travel. Peon that I was, I spotted the flukes (parasites) he had picked up while swimming in Egypt a couple of months before.
--
Howard

*equal opportunity offense to both extremes*

"Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it" [George Santayana]

I was sure that you were leading up to those Amazon fish that swim up your urethra if you make the mistake of pissing while in the river.  That would have looked like a giant sea bass under your microscope.

Neoboho

Nahhh...right end, but what you describe is much more elegant than assessing the success of tapeworm therapy by finding if the head has been expelled.

--
Howard

*equal opportunity offense to both extremes*

"Working where the Sun don't Shine: the Colorectal Surgeon's Song.". Better a colonoscopy than a Cheney?