PopCult: November 2005 Archive Page

In a matter of minutes Thursday morning, while they were in Herald Square hosting NBC's coverage of the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade, a balloon crashed in Times Square, injuring an 11-year-old girl and her disabled older sister.

Lauer and Couric didn't mention the mishap.

[...]

Couric and Lauer spent the last 10 minutes of the coverage reading from the sappy script, although they did note viewers at home were seeing last year's footage of the M&M's balloon, which depicts the candies in distress.

"Now, because of today's windy conditions, these characters are on video, and if we told you they were not in a panic, we'd be full of hot air," Couric joked.

Sure, you can make an argument why they shouldn't have mentioned the crash. But the fact that someone was injured in a similar incident in 1997 was enough to make the crash worthy of mention on-air.

If it was possible for NBC's cable network, MSNBC, to report the accident - before NBC's own parade coverage ended - then someone should have gotten a word to Lauer and Couric. --Richard Huff --NBC leaves Matt & Katie to twist in wind (NY Daily News)

Awopbopaloobop, alopbamboom! --Roger Ebert --Just Friends (Roger Ebert.com)

It's become cool to dismiss movies as awful. Wherever I go, teenagers say, with chillingly casual adolescent contempt, that movies suck and cost too much ? the same stance they took about CDs when the music business went into free fall.

[...]

What's really driving the studio folks crazy is that a huge chunk of their core constituency ? young moviegoers ? has evaporated. Poof! They've scattered to the winds. Young males aren't just AWOL from movie theaters, they're also not seeing the studio's TV ads ? either because they've stopped watching TV altogether, or because they've got the TV, iPod and IM all going at the same time ? not exactly a situation in which an ad leaves much of an imprint.

[...]

Even worse, the people who run studios are living in such cocoons that they've become wildly out of touch with reality....The ultimate perk of being a studio chief is having your own screening room, which puts only more distance between you and the rabble ? ahem, your customers ? who spend $75 to take the family to a movie. --Patrick Goldstein --In a losing race with the zeitgeist (LA Times (will expire))

For decades, the debate was very much focused on UFOs, sightings and abduction stories. Alien visitors turned into a modern myth. In an age when our other beliefs and ideologies were fading away, we could at least believe in UFOs.

Most scientists, annoyed as they were, simply chose to ignore it. Then some bright people, like my colleagues in The Planetary Society, realized that instead of just laughing at the matter, you could try to tap this truly huge interest for life in space, by shifting the focus to a related but more scientific theme: SETI. Since then, there are more articles about SETI than UFOs in our newspapers. They manage to shift the center of the debate, and to a small degree, they shifted our entire perception of the universe.

In a similar fashion, we now need to sow the seeds of a new ?myth? for the space program?in fact a whole new perception among people regarding our inherited place, role, and destiny in the cosmos. I am sure we won?t influence policymakers and budget planners right away. But we can make this seed grow in society at large: why not start already tonight with our kids? bedtime stories? --Hans L.D.G. Starlife
--Needed: a change of focus (The Space Review)