APPENDIX 40: POP CULTURE

Return to Encyclopedia Introduction

AMERICA'S MOST WANTED:

It's tabloid television at its worst, and it has lots of fans.
--Geov Parrish, 12 Aug 2002

BEAVIS AND BUTT-HEAD:

Beavis and Butt-head, the flagrantly imbecilic cartooned teanagers who appeared daily on the youth-oriented MTV channel, managed to create a large dent in American culture between their debut in 1992 and their cancellation in 1997. They were hugely popular with youngsters, having twice the ratings of any other MTV offering. To the delight of child and adolescent viewers, the two characters flunked all their courses, started fires, picked their noses, denigrated reading, indulged in the few prerogatives of youthful lust, and so on, all the while cackling moronically. The same strident idiocy that made them so attractive to youngsters also necessarily repulsed their elders; of all television shows, this was the most frequently banned by parents.
--Jib Fowles, quoted in Media Violence: Opposing viewpoints, pg 50

GET-RICH-QUICK:

This is the last get-rich-quick scheme you'll ever need.

Who is rich?

That is the person who has more than he needs.

Ah, but how much does he need? You'll notice that changes enormously according to who you ask, and when. A lawyer will give you a different answer from a vagabond.

The big tragedy is that mostly you'll hear an answer which is about twice as much as the person currently has.

What if you changed your ideas and feelings about it? What if what you "need" is about HALF as much as you currently have? Then no matter what you have, you'll always be rich.

And this is not just a semantic trick, on the contrary this is the ONLY way you'll ever be rich. There are billionaires in this world who still are poor, because they still don't have enough.
--Eolake Stobblehouse

FRIENDS: (the television show)

Friends is not a sitcom, it's a commercial that has yet to settle on a product.
--REX MURPHY, Cross Country Check Up, CBC Radio One

CLASSIC ROCK

By the eighties, a lot of radio stations, realizing the size of the market out there, had started playing sixties music again. They called it "classic rock," because they knew we'd be upset if they came right out and called it what it is, namely "middle-aged-person nostalgia music."
--Dave Barry, 1947-

RAP STARS:

Today, the closest thing we have to the [Black] Panthers are rap stars, who -- while barking revolution in doggerel rhyme -- travel in limousines, live in McMansions and shelter their income in Caribbean tax havens.
--David Benjamin, US Policy Continues to Fan the Embers of Terrorism, CommonDreams.org, 09 May 2005

SOUTH PARK:

[T]he Parents Television Council, the take-no-prisoners e-mail mill leading the anti-indecency charge, has condemned the show on its Web site as a "curdled, malodorous black hole of Comedy Central vomit."
--Frank Rich, Conservatives Love South Park, 01 May 2005

SPECIALTY CHANNELS:

Because there are empty spaces on the converter and static hasn't been licensed yet.
--Gilbert Smythe Bite-me; Royal Canadian Air Farce, 17 Oct 1997
(see TELEVISION)

TELEVISION:

Television is for sloths, (there ought to be a specialty channel that airs upside down) . . .
--Mike Boone, Television Critic, The Gazette, 27 Jul 1996

TELEVISION VIOLENCE:

This whole episode of studying television violence is going to be seen by history as a travesty. It's going to be used in classes as an example of how social science can just go totally awry.
--Jib Fowles, media scholar, quoted in The Media Violence Myth

TV:

Actually, TV is just a HALF-vast wasteland.

TV TRUTH:

In a soap, everything happens to the same 20 people.

UNFAIR THING ABOUT LIFE:

The really unfair thing about life is the way it ends. I mean, life is tough. It takes up a lot of your time. And what do you get at the end of it? A death. What's that? A bonus?!?!

I think the life-cycle is all backwards. You should die first, get that out of the way. The you go live in an old folks home. You get kicked out for being too healthy, go collect your pension, then, when you start work you get a gold watch on your first day. You work 40 years until you're young enough to enjoy your retirement. You drink alcohol, you party & you get ready for high school. You go to primary school, you become a kid, you play, you have no responsibilities. You become a little baby, you go back, you spend your last 9 months floating with luxuries like central heating, spa, room service on tap, then you finish yourself off as an orgasm!
--George Costanza's Words of Wisdom