“The View From the Phlipside” is a media commentary program airing on WRFA-LP, Jamestown NY. It can be heard Monday through Friday around 7:30 AM. The following are scripts which may not exactly match the aired version of the program. Mostly because the host may suddenly choose to add or subtract words at a moment’s notice. WRFA-LP is not responsible for any such silliness or the opinions expressed. You can listen to a live stream of WRFA or find a podcast of this program at wrfalp.com. Copyright 2013-17 by Jay Phillippi. All Rights Reserved. You like what you see and hear? Drop me a line and we can talk.
Programs from week of July 16, 2017
This Week’s Podcast
My name is Jay Phillippi and I’ve spent my life in and around the media. TV, radio, the movies and more. I love them, and I hate them and I always have an opinion. Call this the View from the Phlipside.
Sci Fi Foolishness
Years ago I seem to recall a comedian talking about comedy and noting that at the very least you can always “rip on your own”. So a Jewish comic can make Jewish jokes, and a female comic can make female jokes, et cetera. It’s not an absolute, but it’s stuck with me. So today I’m going to follow the rule and rip on my own.
No, not rapidly graying, middle aged guys with high blood pressure. It’s time to take a swing or two at science fiction fans.
The earliest sci-fi that I remember having an impact on me was the Tom Swift adventure stories (also beloved by folks like Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak and science fiction icon Isaac Asimov), and the original “Star Trek” series. Since then I’ve read and seen many, many science fiction offerings. Science fiction fans can be among the most intellectually adventurous and open to innovation folks I know.
They can also be some of most hard headed when it comes to change. They will not only resist it, they will act as if they are being personally tortured.
I’ve been seeing a lot of that recently. As always, it is a small but extremely vocal subset of the fandom that is getting all the attention.
The first big uproar came with the early looks at the new “Star Trek” tv series coming from the folks at CBS. Called “Star Trek-Discovery”. There was the usual carping about stuff that most folks outside the hardcore fandom could not care less about. Hearing people complain that the new crew was “too diverse” almost made this Trekkie’s head explode, however. Seems there are fewer white guys on board than in the past, and some folks see this as a major issue. I can only question if they’ve actually seen the series from the beginning because that would fall squarely in the vision of series creator Gene Roddenberry.
The other big kerfluffle just took off this past weekend, with the announcement of the newest actor to play Dr. Who. The British television icon will next be played by a, gasp, woman! Jodie Whittaker will be the thirteenth Doctor and some of the fandom is losing its marbles.
For a genre that is dedicated to stretching the imagination, and exploring all the possibilities of the future, science fiction fans can also be some of the most backward looking, racist and misogynistic people on the planet. So as one fan to another I’d like to make a couple points.
First, it’s all make believe. Second, the future never looks like the past, nor should it ever. Third and finally, you really need to re-prioritize your list of things worth being an idiot about.
Bring on the future, I can hardly wait.
RIP George Romero
I am a huge movie fan, as anyone who has visited the website for this program will discover. I have hundreds of movies reviews posted there, and I have several hundred more lined up in my Netflix queue, and still more waiting on my DVR. While my tastes range widely, I have to admit I have never been much of a fan of horror movies. Having a vivid imagination made putting all those scary images into my head a very bad idea.
But there are names in the horror genre that everyone comes to know. Tobe Hooper, Wes Craven or John Carpenter are names that everyone knows. The industry lost one of its all time greats this week, with the passing of director George Romero.
Without Romero, the modern zombie movie and television show simply doesn’t exist. His 1968 classic “Night of the Living Dead” launched his movie career and changed the way zombies and horror films looked forever.
Romero was born in the Bronx in 1940 to a Cuban father and Lithuanian mother. His love of movies began early. Eventually, Romero went to college at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh. After graduating he did some short films and commercials. One of his projects in the early 1960s was a segment for the “Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood” where the children’s programming icon had a tonsillectomy. It all changed with that first hit movie. “Night of the Living Dead” was an independent production with a budget of just over one hundred thousand dollars. While it was criticized at the time of its release for the gore, it grossed twelve million dollars in the U.S. and another eighteen million dollars internationally. It was filmed entirely in western Pennsylvania, just up the road from where I grew up in fact. The Pittsburgh area was one that Romero returned to regularly for his films.
“Night of the Living Dead” led to five sequels. It gave Romero the chance to make other horror films including “Creepshow” which paired him up with the icon of the modern horror novel, Stephen King. It was King’s debut as a screenwriter and actor.
Romero’s career as a movie director stretched from 1968 to 2009. Appropriately his last movie was the final installment of his signature series, it is called “Survival of the Dead”. It was not considered one of his best and the two sequels he had discussed never were made.
He died on July 16 in Toronto, Canada.
George Andrew Romero was 77 years old.
Fake News Quiz
Two words have dominated the news for about the last year. They are “fake news”. Those words represent everything from legitimate concerns over the origins of stories being spread, to a knee jerk reaction to stories that the listener doesn’t like or agree with. I’ve touched on the subject repeatedly here on this program as well.
It’s easy to treat it as all of a kind, one simply defined concept, but it’s not really. The folks at First Draft News (https://firstdraftnews.com/), an organization dedicated to improving skills and standards in reporting, offered a list of all the things they believe qualify as fake news. It includes everything from satire and parody, to misleading headlines, to outright lies.
Trying to decide what is fake and what isn’t may not be as simple as it sounds. There are plenty of fact checking sites, like Snopes.com, Factcheck.org or the Washington Post Fact Checker, but not everyone is convinced of the reliability of those kinds of sites. So I was fascinated to find a website called “Factitious”(http://factitious.augamestudio.com/). Factitious is designed to test our ability to tell the difference between reliable news and fake news. Along the way, it helps us learn what to look for as we read the stories that pop up on our newsfeeds.
The game is very simple. You are given an actual story to read. Once you think you have enough evidence you can click on whether you think the story is real or fake. You can have the original source revealed to you, but if you really want to test your ability, don’t open that information before you make your choice. After each question, you are given the correct answer and a little knowledge to help you understand what makes the news reliable or not.
When I took the quiz, which goes in three rounds, I scored 60%, 80% and 80% for an overall rating of 73%. Turns out I consistently missed on some UK newspaper stories. Not sure what that says except I don’t always remember which are the reliable papers over there.
In the end, it really comes down to paying attention to where the stories originate, looking for things in the story that can be looked up, and not buying into a story simply because it says something you want to believe.
Factitious was a project of the JoLT team at American University (https://edspace.american.edu/jolt/). JoLT is a project of the School of Communication and the Game Lab at the University to explore the intersection of journalism and game design. What they’ve come up with is a simple way to better educate ourselves on what fake news looks like that happens to be fun to do at the same time.
I have links to all these websites on The View From the Phlipside blog.
The sooner we can identify fake news reliably, the sooner it can stop being a topic of conversation.
Call that the View From the Phlipside
Copyright Jay Phillippi, 2017
Theme music for “The View From the Phlipside” and “TVFTP – Podcast” is “Hustle”
Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com), Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0
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