Goodbye, Entertainment Centers!

Over the holidays and into the new year, I came across several folks who had come to the same conclusion: The traditional entertainment center - the huge chunk of furniture designed to hold a number of components alongside a large TV set - is going away. More and more people are finding that new TVs don't fit those good-for-a-lifetime, pass-them-on-to-your-children, big-footprint displays.

One woman told me she'd given a flatscreen TV to her parents only to be asked to take it back because it didn't fit their entertainment center. One guy said he'd taken the top off his entertainment center to accommodate his new TV - and in another case I heard recently, the problem was solved by removing a side panel of the entertainment center so that the edge of the TV could poke through.

In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if the website devoted to kludges was soon filled with an assortment of new configurations for what used to be an entertainment focal point.

I know of two cases in which the owner is using the top of the entertainment center as the site of the new TV - but that leaves the challenge of the gaping hole in which the TV used to sit. I'm thinking large flower arrangements might do the trick.

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The Courtesy of Spoiler Warnings

I tried some time ago to track down who coined the term "Spoiler Warning" - with no success. My guess is that it caught on the the late 1970s, but that's just a guess. I know that Don and I grabbed it when we heard it and began to use it as a warning whenever we wanted to discuss a plot development that we knew some in our audience had yet to experience.

Linda Holmes' "The Spoiler Problem (Contains Spoilers)" essay on the Nov. 11, 2009, "Monkey See" page of the National Public Radio website - and the commentaries that accompanied it - may make up one of the best discussions of the problem of spoilers. As one of the brilliant recappers (as "Miss Alli") on the Television without Pity website a few years ago, Linda was freed from spoiler concerns in her recaps of The Amazing Race, Big Brother, Married by America, Survivor, The Apprentice, and The West Wing. Followers knew from the get-go that her delicious analyses took episodes from start to finish.

In effect, there was a big fat "Spoiler Warning" that went for the entire website. And that's my point: It is the civil thing to do to warn a listener or a viewer or a reader that the upcoming sentence or paragraph or essay is going to give away something that the listener or viewer or reader might want to have kept secret.

That is because: There will always be someone who hasn't seen or read an entertainment designed to be seen or read for the first time. Do we - should we - just say, "The hell with them"? When the American Film Institute came up with its "100 Years 100 Movies" list, I'd seen something like 96 of them. How many have you seen? As a grownup, you've certainly had the opportunity to view them all, but it's a safe bet that visitors to my website (who are more likely than the general population to be pop-culture savvy) are not going to score 100 out of 100. Nevertheless, from Citizen Kane (1941) to The Graduate (1967) to the last line of Some Like It Hot (1959), there are developments in many of them that are designed to be seen for the first time, rather than encountered as a conversational gambit or a cheap joke. (I have an intelligent friend who thought he knew what happened in Psycho (1960) but (as it turned out) hadn't seen it and was taken aback when he actually saw the film recently.)

Laura (1944) is one of my favorite films; I recommend it to people who like mystery movies and often lend them my copy. But the frickin' DVD packaging gives away a plot twist that doesn't occur until 46 minutes into the 88-minute film, so I always put the disc in a different shell and tell the friend not to read reviews before they watch the movie. (By the way, since I was 2 years old when the film was released, I didn't see it until more than a decade after its initial run; luckily, people weren't as determined in those days to show off that they had deep pop-culture knowledge, so I was able to see it for the first time without knowing that twist in advance. Whew!)

Because everything goes double for mysteries. The gag of people leaving the theater saying to those coming in, "The butler did it," was printed long ago - but the tendency remains. Agatha Christie mysteries, for example, can often be revealed in a sentence: hardly, then, bonus points for those who spill the proverbial beans. Whether it's Murder on the Orient Express (novel in 1934, film in 1974), The Murder of Roger Ackroyd (novel in 1926), or And Then There Were None (novel in 1939, film in 1945), it's simply impolite to give away the solution. Yes, even when the conclusion (And Then There Were None) differs between print and screen.

That doesn't mean you can't talk or write about it. It just means you need to warn your audience, so those who choose to do so can skip it. Mental Floss ran an informative article on Christie recently, and it included a discussion of Ackroyd. All it had to do was run a vivid text bar as the discussion began, a text bar that told readers that the article would reveal the solution to that mystery. Simple. Courteous.

People who Tweet comments along the lines of, "I just saw the season ender on SHOW X and was surprised when THE HERO turned out to be THE VILLAIN"? Well, I won't be following those Tweets any longer.

That doesn't mean it's always simple. Linda Holmes, for example, is faced with an endless, twisting, annoying complication, no matter what the subject of the pop-culture blog may be. Some may even be annoyed at something as basic as that a sequel to something is in the works. But, for the rest of us, I think we can handle things well by following a basic two-point guideline:

1) If people have seen something, you don't need to reveal it; if people haven't seen something, you shouldn't reveal it.

2) If you can't resist discussing an entertainment's surprises, clearly mark that discussion in advance with a "Spoiler Warning" notice.

Is that so hard? It's been our policy at Comics Buyer's Guide for 27 years, and it seems to have worked without many glitches.

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Abandoning Condescension in 2010

Yesterday evening, son Stephen called my attention to a brilliant essay on National Public Radio's Monkey See blog. That it is brilliant didn't surprise me; the writer is wordsmith Linda Holmes, whose commentaries have always illuminated their topics while providing delicious (and quotable) phrasing.

The essay opens,

"Familiarity breeds contempt."

Perhaps it is this little saying, or some variation of it, that convinces people that disdain and discernment are the same thing: that the more things you roll your eyes at, the smarter you must be.

Those of us who have spent many hours in following a variety of fields of popular culture have surely run across the phenomenon. "I don't own an idiot box." (I suddenly realize that I haven't recently heard that cliche; at least that phrasing seems to have gone out of favor, though the sneer remains in what amounts to the same thing.) And in comics? Even as the term "graphic novel" actually intimidates some, the humble "comic book" still hasn't achieved the same respect - though they're synonyms.

In any case, do check out Linda's "Let's Resolve" - and join us all in the resolution.

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Working Around, Coping, and Generally Managing

My mother was a master of the work-around in decades past: She could make a Kleenex tissue serve as a coffee filter. She used her freezer to keep from mildew the dampened clothes that awaited ironing during a busy summer. She learned to use plastic wood and screening to patch decaying paneling on our "woodie" station wagon. She figured out that home brew was cheaper than commercially available beer and learned how to make her own.

What occasionally surprises me is that the necessity of figuring out ways of working around problems continues into our 21st century. We are certainly living in a science-fictional age. The grocery-store door opens as we approach. We carry our telephones with us. I have a lightweight tablet that, though newly purchased, lets me carry in one hand the complete works of Mark Twain, the Bible, and 33 novels by P.G. Wodehouse. (I'm in the midst of the introduction of Psmith, one of my favorite Wodehouse characters.) My living room is a theater, complete with Surround Sound and impeccable picture. But that doesn't mean I don't have to go on coping with idiosyncrasies of technology.

My Verizon PocketPC cell phone (Model RAPH500) runs Windows Mobile 6.1 Professional, bought because it has a pull-out physical keyboard and connects to the Internet via dial-up (so I never need a Wi-Fi hot spot), supposedly connected best through "Opera." Except that no one at Verizon could figure how to make the e-mail display properly. After six different consultations, I returned the phone as defective, Verizon sent a replacement - and Opera still didn't work. So much head-scratching. Until someone at Verizon pointed out that I could use Internet Explorer as one of the Windows doohickies, and it has worked just fine. Worked around, coped, and generally managed.

Yesterday, I tried to post two images of absinthe, photographed at my brother's home. One image gave no grief. Two images not only distorted the opening paragraph, they also changed the font. OK, one picture yesterday. One picture today. Had to put it at the start of the post, because it glitched the text when I tried to move it to this paragraph. Worked around, coped, and generally managed.

Airlines are making carrying luggage more and more complicated and expensive. So one box of clothing and such resides at Valerie's home. One box of clothing and such resides at Stephen's home. And I travel with a carry-on and backpack. Worked around, coped, and generally managed.

When we have colonies set up at the North Pole and under the mid-Atlantic Ocean, we'll have solved a lot of problems to do it. But we'll still need to have work-arounds, to cope, and to generally manage.

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Absinthe Makes ...

"Absinthe makes the heart grow fonder" is such logical wordplay that it's even the title of an episode on the Showtime series Californication. So no sense trying to pretend it's a brightly original opening for a brief post on my holiday introduction to the absinthe experience. My brother, Paul, learned that absinthe drinking is legal and began to build a home collection of a variety of that beverage. (He prowled the Internet, turning up such sites as that for The Wormwood Society. That organization notes that there's no law that prohibits absinthe by name but that no drink containing "in excess of 10ppm of thujone" is legal in America. However, "several authentic absinthes are now available for purchase at liquor stores and bars in the US." Clearly, there are restrictions. Also clearly, many kinds of absinthe are OK.)

My curiosity was connected with its reputed attractions for such creative folk as Oscar Wilde and an assortment of Parisian artists and writers. The Wiki writeup seems pretty clear on much of the history and comments that American bottlers resumed absinthe production a couple of years ago.

So Paul has spent the last few days providing me with a different brand of absinthe every evening for a tasting experiment. (The preparation is its own complex process, involving a special absinthe glass, mixing with water, and sometimes adding sugar.)

Absinthe (mixed with water) basically comes across to my jaded tongue as weak, slightly sweet licorice. Some varieties slightly numbed my tongue; I felt no alcoholic effects from any of the doses. After several days, I'm here to report that, while Paul's tastebuds can detect the many differences among the varieties and I was able to note that the super-expensive variety did taste different, I'll stick to my one-dose-per-day cabernet sauvignon or rum and Coke.

But at least now I'll know what some of the literary references are talking about.

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