the timboucher experience

There was a time when I was in elementary school, where I was only allowed to watch Christian kids tv programs, in the mornings before I left for school. I wanted to nibble on the deliciousness of Looney Tunes, but instead was forced to munch on this sanctimonious piece of shit called, “The Gospel Bill Show.” It tried to teach kids about Christian values in a “fun” Old West-style town called Dry Gulch. Gospel Bill was the sheriff of Dry Gulch, and he was always raining on everybody’s parade - particularly this dude named Nicodemus, who was always sinning and getting into trouble. The series featured such thrilling episode titles as:

1. Pride Comes Before Trouble
2. Say Yes to Heaven, No to Hell
3. The Love of Money
4. He Sent His Word and Healed Them
5. Control Your Thoughts

It’s simply amazing the kinds of things that people try to pass off on kids. The episode summary of “Control Your Thoughts” actually contains the text, “The more he thinks, the angrier he gets….” What kind of a lesson is that to teach kids? I mean, shit, I guess it’s true though. Because the more aware you become of the nonsense people are peddling, the angrier you do get.

I came across a poorly written article on MSN (surprise!) about a wonderful piece of technology, called ClearPlay, which helps you mangle popular culture on behalf of your family. ClearPlay is a subscription service which allows you to download and program filters into compatible DVD players. They have a list of movies which they have filtered/reviewed for various categories of content. You can then go in and tweak the settings, and strain out exactly the kinds of objectionable content which you hate the most. According to that article, though, the editing it does comes out very messy and amateurish.

Of course, Hollywood is (or was) up in arms over this technology, claiming that it infringes their copyrights, and that ClearPlay should pay licensing fees. ClearPlay maintains that, since their technology does not modify the physical DVD, its fundamentally no different than a customer fast-forwarding. And as much as I think they are creepy, I have to agree with ClearPlay. The real reason Hollywood’s pissed is that they don’t want similar technology to be used to filter out commercials on tv, using DVR systems, such as Tivo. However, Congress passed (I think) the Family Movie Act:

To provide that making limited portions of audio or video content of motion pictures imperceptible by or for the owner or other lawful possessor of an authorized copy of that motion picture for private home viewing, and the use of technology therefor, is not an infringement of copyright or of any right under the Trademark Act of 1946.

This is certainly an issue that’s not about to go away though. In fact, I guarantee, that what we’re going to see is a technological arms race, which will put anything that happened during the Cold War to shame. The Great Beast of Advertising, now thoroughly enraged and endangered, is only going to become more aggressive and subversive. And the Content Resistance Fighters are going to become ever more crafty, in an effort to remove anything they don’t want to see. Let the battle commence!

• The Phantom Edit & ClearPlay
• Fan-Fiction as Apocrypha
• Return to traditional family values
• Testing Out AirPress.org
• Yeah, so I saw it