Strike Opens Door to Television Alternative

Friday, January 11, 2008

Page 15

AT THE SIDEBAR (Column)

Strike Opens Door to Television Alternative

By J’AMY PACHECO

I just read that the Golden Globe Awards won’t be presented with traditional film industry red carpet style this year. Instead, the Hollywood Foreign Press Association will announce its award winners in an hour-long news conference covered by one news network.

I can hardly wait.

With the writers’ strike moving past the two-month mark and Hollywood’s big names lending support, I think it’s time to start thinking about alternative entertainment.

I assure you, I fully support my fellow pen-pals. I’ve said before that I think Hollywood writers have traditionally been at the dinner end of the food chain, and I’m okay with them holding out for fair compensation. If I lived in Los Angeles, I’d bring donuts to the picket lines just to be friendly and supportive and to make sure nobody starves.

But while they’re out pounding the pavement with pickets, what’s an ordinary family to do for entertainment?

Some of us turn to books. I, for example, have been reading fatter books with longer words than usual. Just kidding – I’m reading the sequel to “Gone With The Wind.” At almost 900 pages, it’s definitely a heftier novel than usual for me. But rather than being intellectually stimulating, it’s pretty much a really, really long romance novel in which Scarlett spends her time pining for Rhett instead of Ashley, and dancing. A lot.

It’s just the kind of thing to replace television until the return of the writers and their newly penned words.

But sometimes, I want mindless entertainment that doesn’t require holding up a big book or thinking. Mindless entertainment that is fresh, funny, and usually, in bad taste. I’ve found it on the Internet.

The idea of using the Internet to replace television first occurred to me when I read an article about something called the neti pot. This interesting little gadget looks sort of like a cross between a teapot and a gravy boat and serves a bizarre purpose: to irrigate one’s nasal passages.

There is, I discovered, a YouTube video that demonstrates this concept, in a rather twisted way. I watched with a mixture of fascination and disgust as a man placed the spout up one nostril, tipped it, and endured a stream of water running out the other nostril. He repeated the demonstration first with coffee, and then with bourbon – each time, his face contorted in apparent pain.

Now, that’s entertainment.

My daughter and her friends discovered another site where they watch performances of the “Potter Puppet Pals.” This hilarious hand puppet (and one potato on a stick) troupe performs routines like “Wizard Angst” – where Snape’s greatest potion ever is revealed, and “The Mysterious Ticking Noise” – the only musical extravaganza where the elderly wizard Dumbledore appears naked.

The Internet is a place where anybody with a good idea – or even a really stupid idea – and a video camera can achieve fame. I know this because my daughter and I have spent countless hours laughing over classic cartoons dubbed with new dialog by people with no sense of taste and few language boundaries.

We also discovered a site where we can spend hours drawing lines in a variety of shapes, creating hills, valleys and even loops. When our drawing is complete, we can launch a little cartoon guy who will use our lines as a path on which to ride his bicycle – usually into oblivion. The poor little guy takes a lot of spills, but always comes back to try again.

In addition to the online games we play, we’ve taken to reading fan forum sites associated with these games. It’s incredibly entertaining to discover how many people can’t spell, formulate a rational thought, or maintain even a minimum of personal dignity when “chatting” online with strangers.

We’ve spent a lot of time being entertained by what we find online. (I’ve also spent some time mildly frightened by the content I find online, but that’s another story.)

As I understand it, one of the key sticking issues in the writers’ strike is how much scribes will get paid when their work is distributed via the Internet. After spending much time looking there for entertainment and enjoying what I’ve found, I think it’s worth sticking to their collective guns.

But until the strike ends, the Potter Puppet Pals and the neti pot guy will have to do. If the puppets ever get noses, maybe the two can even be combined into one twisted Hogwarts Neti Pot experience.

Now, that would be entertainment.