Joel's humanistic blog

As Beavis and Butt-Head would say, "Huh-huh, huh-huh, somebody keeps taking a dump in Manhattan." Cartoon Dump, that is — a twisted parody of childrens' shows of yesteryear combining live comedy and so-bad-they're-good old cartoons, created by animation historian Jerry Beck and Frank "TV's Frank on MST3K" Conniff (MST3K's Joel Hodgson has appeared in at least one CD installment in the past). CD had previously existed as a live show in L.A. and a set of online episodes, but on January 8 the show came to the East Coast for the first time; and there will be new shows on February 19 (this Tuesday) and March 11. The January show was really fun. The premise is much like the online version: Erica Doering plays the host, Compost Brite, of a warped cartoon "children's show". She's a perennially cheery and perky character with an optimistic outlook; as the old joke goes, if you gave her horse droppings as a gift, she'd say "Wow, a...

Last Thursday, the NPR show The Bryant Park Project did a nine minute segment on dorkbot-nyc 's meeting the previous day. Segment producer Ian Chillag interviewed me at the meeting, and a small snippet from me made it into the very end of the segment; I quote William Gibson's "The future is here. It's just not evenly distributed yet." (which I misattribute to Bruce Sterling) as a way of explaining the way ideas show up at dorkbot before they percolate to the larger culture. The quote, and a mention of me, also made its way into the online summary of the segment. (When Rocketboom covered dorkbot in 2006, a small portion of my head could kinda-sorta be made out for a few frames of a crowd shot; not quite as good.) Also, the presenters and Douglas Repetto are also interviewed; and some of the theme songs also appear.

On Sunday, February 24th, Turner Classic Movies will be airing Contact as part of this month's "31 Days of Oscar" , in which Academy Award-winning movies are showcased. Check out the TCM Movie Database entry for the film . Sean Axmaker provides an excellent overview of the film, from the production history to the issues and themes involved; Sagan is described as "one of the most effective spokesmen for the advancement of science and space exploration in the world", and the entry also includes a quote from Ann Druyan: "Carl's and my dream was to write something that would be a fictional representation of what contact would be like," explains Ann Druyan, Sagan's wife and collaborator. "But it would also have the tension inherent between religion and science, which was an area of philosophical and intellectual interest that riveted both of us." Each night's worth of movies is organized by a specific decade (all the way from the 192...

Among bad movie fans, one particularly special favorite is the 1990 "best worst movie" Troll 2 . Without the typical features that bring attention to well-known bad movies — big-name stars, a large budget, a recent release date, a showing on Mystery Science Theater 3000 — but solely on the strength of sheer badness and massive filmmaking ineptitude, it's charmed its way into a cult following, a near-permanent space on the low end of the IMDB Bottom 100 (including occasional stints all the way down at the #1 spot), and a RiffTrax . And this summer, Troll 2 is being featured at an ongoing series of special theatrical screenings , featuring a newly rediscovered 35mm print, at cities across the United States! The next two are this weekend in Seattle, and new cities and dates are being announced. Plus, they will have a large proportion of the original cast in attendance, who are fully appreciative of the movie's badness and the strange following it's gained, who...

Since I've mentioned on this blog the Sagan Gathering that was scheduled to happen in Ithaca, NY this past weekend, I think I ought to give a somewhat disappointing update. Through personal communication with organizer Patrick Fish, I found out that due to having to recover from an unexpected health emergency earlier last week, he was unable to participate in most of the planned events, and therefore (since as of this time, it's a one-man operation) had to call off most of the events. And as it happened, the Festival got rained out anyway. On the bright side: the preparations for the Gathering have unearthed a lot of goodwill towards Sagan's legacy in the Ithaca area, and have laid the groundwork for a bigger, better Gathering next year. Frankly, it's reinvigorated my Sagan-ania. And some Sagan fans did show up to participate in the Festival and tour Sagan-related locations in Ithaca on their own, including one all the way from Indiana.

The next two Sundays, Equal Time for Freethought's Barry F. Seidman and Neil J. Murphy will be interviewing one of the show's most famous guests ever: the one and only Noam Chomsky! The show is partially inspired by The Humanist magazine 's publishing an interview with Chomsky earlier this year; where as one would expect, he addressed his take on humanism in addition to his usual political topics. In this interview, Chomsky deals with a range of subjects, from humanism, the role of religion in politics, the free will question, human nature, to politics and economics. A few weeks ago, I helped the producers draft some of their interview questions. Now, I've just finished listening to the unedited version of the prerecorded interview, and I'm really happy at how it turned out. There's definitely areas where one can disagree with Chomsky: for instance, all of the ETFF crew take a much harder determinist position on the free will question than Chomsky, and his...

Next Wednesday evening, dorkbot-nyc will have its May 2007 meeting (the last until next fall). Douglas Irving Repetto has put up a flyer I made for the occasion. Also, he's posted photos I took at the December 2006 and January 2007 meetings. I'm also using this occasion to kick off something I've been meaning to add to this blog for a while: an "upcoming events" section in the sidebar. For now, I'll be maintaining this manually (let's hope it stays reasonably current), but if I figure out a way to automate it, I'll do so.

Today is the 97th anniversary of the death of Francisco Ferrer, an anarchist and freethought educational pioneer whose persecution by both church and state and execution on trumped-up charges led to outrage and an international movement to emulate his ideas. Ferrer and other European educators wanted a "modern" approach to education based on freedom and reason, in place of the traditional one based on coercion, rote and indoctrination. Emma Goldman, who visited Sebastien Faure's French modern school La Ruche, conveys the atmosphere of the school in her description from her autobiography : He [Faure] had taken twenty-four orphan children and those of parents too poor to pay and was housing, feeding, and clothing them at his own expense. He had created an atmosphere at La Ruche that released the life of the child from discipline and coercion of any sort. He had discarded the old methods of education and in their place he established understanding for the needs of the child...

Last month, dorkbot-nyc got off on a roll with its first meeting after the summer hiatus. Bret Doar showed his hybrid roboticized musical instruments including the Huffyphonic Gyrobanshee 1000 , a combination of a bicycle wheel and a guitar. Jon Lippincott demonstrated Vis Virtual Universe , which displays and navigates through a surreal 3D animated solar system, which he wrote from the ground up in C++ (which fit in with my blenderheaded fascination with all things related to 3D computer graphics). David Kareve explained his exhibit which uses freaked-out crash test dummies to explore the culture of fear reinforced by the terror alert system; I was tickled to see that his presentation of the various spoofs of the terror alert system included the Sesame Street one that I've had on my blog sidebar almost since the beginning of the blog (which I got from freeman, libertarian critter ): The next day's installment of the popular video blog Rocketboom did a segment covering t...

Once again, my promotional flyer for next month's dorkbot-nyc meeting (May 3) is up on the dorkbot website. See also: my post on dorkbot's fifth anniversary , dorkbotters map .

A much-awaited film series has begun this week: the return of the Film Society of Lincoln Center's series about the wide-ranging intersection of animation and music, Cartoon Musicals ! This is a dream come true for animation buffs: the series features some truly rare and offbeat stuff, and curator Greg Ford shows his excellent taste and vast, insightful knowledge of the medium. The first part of the series, back in August, already set a high bar. A Disney compilation showcased the early Silly Symphonies with their imaginative world-building -- the best one showing the rivalry in a music world between lands of classical and jazz music -- and the wild graphic inventiveness of some of the more experimental segments from compilation pictures like Three Caballeros , Make Mine Music , and Melody Time -- the best being "All the Cats Join In" from Make Mine Music , which I recognized as largely animated by Fred Moore's, since the wild joy of the dancing teens in the cartoo...

This month, New York City's monthly watering hole for techies, artists, and hackers, dorkbot-nyc , had its fifth anniversary meeting. Founded by artist and Columbia University Computer Music Center professor douglas irving repetto , its motto, "People doing strange things with electricity", gives the impression of what to (un)expect. Its dorky arena includes almost anything within the wide bounds of electronics, including both hardware and software, with a square emphasis on low-budget, do-it-yourself, personal projects. The results are geeky, goofy, technical, off-beat, and as wacky as the presenters' personal interests; the three presentations of a typical session will have almost nothing in common. The first meeting I attended, when dorkbot had been around for less that two full years, was in April 2002 , featuring a video by Kyle Lapidus and Tali Hinkis, who together with their children, the musical prodigy Rama (who's already composed a theme song for do...

On September 13, I had the chance to see in person one of the leading education writers, one whom I admire while simultanenously having profoundly mixed feelings about. With an incredible amount of energy and raw passion for a 69-year-old—especially considering that this is just one event of a two-month book tour—Jonathan Kozol talked to a packed crowd at the Astor Place Barnes & Noble in Manhattan to promote his new book The Shame of the Nation : The Restoration of Apartheid Schooling in America (there's also an excerpt in this month's issue of Harper's magazine, "Still Separate, Still Unequal: America's Educational Apartheid" ). Dozens of copies of the book (in a deluxe hardcover edition, to boot) were flying off the shelves; such demand is certainly a testament to the huge numbers of people who care about education and want to improve it. I was tipped off to the appearance when I unexpectedly heard Kozol on The Leonard Lopate Show on WNYC radio earli...