The judge stepped out for a minute

Here's one that Phil Farrand would probably file under "Continuity & Production Problems:" in the early Matlock episode "The Author," Ben Matlock (Andy Griffith) questions Mary Ann Newton (Audra Lindley), the author of the steamy, semi-fictional novel Secret Confessions, hated by everyone in the small town of Hastings and presumed to be the intended target of a murder that claimed the life of the town preacher.

Matlock has come to believe that the preacher, himself an aspiring author rejected by several publishing houses, is the true author of Secret Confessions, and that Mary Ann wanted him dead so the truth of the book's authorship never came out. Since the preacher was killed in Mary Ann's house, it was natural for everyone to assume that the killer meant the bullet for Mary Ann. However, Mary Ann is much more concerned with asserting her authorship of the book than with asserting her innocence (or guilt) in the murder of the preacher.

As Margaret repeats her claim to authorship of Secret Confessions over and over again, the camera pulls back to emphasize her smallness and aloneness in the vast courtroom. But where did the judge go? For that matter, where did Ben go? Ben's absence from the shot is easier to justify; we can just say he went back to his chair next to his client. I suppose we could chalk the judge's absence from the shot to artistic license: Mary Ann is suddenly as literally alone as she was figuratively. But I have to seriously wonder if anyone thought about calling the actor playing the judge back to the set for that shot.

A little snow is falling: Help, the world is ending!

I live in the metro Detroit area, I won't be any more specific than that. In this part of Michigan, the NBC affiliate is WDIV, whose news division has introduced "Severe Weather Alert Days" with "escalated coverage" on those days designated as "Severe Weather Alert Days" by that station's weather forecasters.

They had been advertising the "Severe Weather Alert Days" for at least a couple of weeks ago now, but I think today is the first such day. About three inches of snow are expected today, with a much more massive snowfall predicted for tomorrow. Supposedly, the point of "Severe Weather Alert Days" isn't to scare viewers; they say so. But really, given how warm yesterday was, I'd be scared if it wasn't snowing today.

Low to medium computer literacy

The show: Medium
The episode: "Will the Real Fred Rovick Please Stand Up?" First aired last Friday on CBS.
What happened: For some reason, almost every man looks like Diedrich Bader to Allison. (On the IMDb, the actor Diedrich Bader is identified as playing the character of Fred Rovick, but in a very real sense, Bader also plays Joe Dubois and Detective Lee Scanlon in this episode, as well as quite a few other characters). This complicates Allison's work on a murder case, because even though she dreams the murder, both the murderer and the victim look the same to Allison (both are played by Diedrich Bader). Allison is still able to give sufficient information to the police to catch the killer. Eventually, Allison figures out that the reason that the reason so many people show the same face to her is that they're the people who've fallen pray to an identity fraud scam perpetrated by the man who actually has that face, the real Fred Rovick. Near the end of the episode, Lee and Allison figure out that the scam was perpetrated by sending out e-mails spoofing the city, claiming that the recipient's voting district had changed. People who opened the e-mails allowed a program into their systems which stole their private financial information, allowing Fred Rovick to clean out their bank accounts.
What doesn't quite make sense: Just reading an e-mail is not enough to inadvertently install Trojan malware on your computer. You have to take the step of downloading the infected attachment. For what plausible reason could an e-mail titled "Your voting district has changed" have an attachment? If such an e-mail is legitimate, all that it needs to tell you is what your new district is and where the polling location is; both these things can be accomplished with plain text. Maybe a legitimate sender would include a JPEG with a map of the new district and polling location; you can't put Trojan viruses in a JPEG.
Now, a video is starting to stretch it, but it is plausible and videos can contain Trojan viruses. However, the episode doesn't say that a video was attached to the fraudulent e-mail, and in fact makes it sound like the mere act of reading the e-mail infects the recipient's computer. But consider also the human factor: if you get an e-mail telling you your voting district has changed, how likely are you to delete it without even reading it? I doubt many people would fall for it. In the episode, Allison deletes the e-mail without reading it because she knows the city's computer systems have recently experienced some malfunctions. But even without that knowledge, Allison's reaction to the message seems perfectly realistic to me.

Racism for its own sake

I had commented before that Family Guy now seems to be more about being offensive than about being funny. After watching the newest episode last night, in which Meg becomes a hardened criminal, it becomes clearer to me that the brand of offensiveness the Family Guy writers are most interested in is racial.

When the maid Consuela goes to visit her grown son in jail, she actually Windexes the glass separating them. Oh my God, oh please. Much worse near the end: Meg decides not to rob Mort Goldman's pharmacy and leaves with Brian, causing Mort to express relief at not being robbed and then greet "four fine Black gentlemen" who are not even seen onscreen. Nothing good can possibly be inferred from that, either for Blacks or Jews. I hope Black people are faring better in The Cleveland Show.

I, killer robot

The film: I, Robot, made in 2004, supposedly an adaptation of Isaac Asimov's classic I, Robot anthology of short stories.
What happened: Detective Spooner (Will Smith) has a strong distrust of robots, so when renowned robot scientist Alfred Lanning (James Cromwell) turns up dead in the lobby of U. S. Robotics, the lawman immediately suspects a robot is the killer. Everyone else considers Spooner irrational in his dislike of robots, because the Three Laws of Robotics form "a perfect circle of protection" against robots killing or harming their human masters. But Spooner stays on the case and discovers that the newest robots have the ability to temporarily disregard the Three Laws. With the help of Susan Calvin (Bridget Moynahan), Spooner destroys the misguided VIKI robot and discovers the mitigating circumstances behind the Sonny robot's murder of Lanning.
What bothers me about this film: Before we can proceedd any further with this, it is necessary to review the Three Laws of Robotics, which, in the stories of Isaac Asimov, all robots must follow:

1. A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.
2. A robot must obey orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.
3. A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.

The First Law is meant to calm fears that a robot would decide to kill a human for the pure hell of it. But the inaction clause is troublesome, as this film shows, though well-intentioned, as it is meant to insure that a robot will actually do something if it sees a human in danger. The Second Law insures the subservience of robots to humans. And the Third Law insures that the robot will be around to take orders from humans in most cases.
Most of Asimov's stories derive their tension from the robots' black-and-white application of these rules to an essentially gray world. So it feels like a huge cheat in this film to have robots that can disregard the Three Laws even though the justification ultimately turns out to come from the Three Laws (namely, from VIKI's misunderstanding of the inaction clause of the First Law).
From the very first trailers I feared that this 'adaptation' would be completely unfaithful to the spirit of Asimov's stories. On the one hand I understand the need to make one feature-length film as opposed to a miniseries of episodes taking one short story at a time. But on the other hand, I find it insulting to Asimov's memory that none of his stories, nor the screenplay he actually co-wrote a long time ago, were considered worthy of putting on the big screen.
Something that doesn't quite make sense: I can't recall if this phrase occurred at all in the book, but in the film the three Laws of Robotics are referred to as a "perfect circle of protection." To me, that phrase makes sense only as a marketing slogan, yet in the film it is uttered by both Lanning and Spooner. The way I understand the three laws, a column would be a much more appropriate metaphor than a circle. The First Law is the base without which the Second Law could not stand, and the Second Law is in turn a base for the Third Law. The circle metaphor implies that the First Law is as dependent on the Third Law as the Third Law is on the Second Law, and perhaps also that the dependencies apply in both directions with equal force.
To further examine the circle metaphor, and test the idea that the dependencies apply in both directions, let's go the opposite of the usual order and start with the Third Law. The point of the Third Law is the self-preservation of a robot. A robot will not deliberately step on an exposed land mine just for the fun of it. However, a human could order the robot to step on the land mine and the robot would have to do it; thus, the Second Law can be seen as a check or balance on the Third Law. A human could order a robot to hurt other humans, but the robot would have to refuse to obey that order; thus, the First Law is definitely a check or balance on the Second Law. So, how is the Third Law a check or balance on the First Law? The only thing I can think of is that the Third Law ensures that the robot exists so that it may obey the First Law. But since the robot's self-preservation may be overridden by danger to humans or even humans' orders, there is no guarantee that the robot will always be around. Let's say that the only robot in a large area sacrifices himself to save humans from a fire. But then some wild animals show up to menace the humans. The robot is no longer around to protect the humans from the wild animals. Therefore, the Three Laws hardly make a perfect circle.
Tacky product placement: Detective Spooner (Will Smith) laces up vintage 2004 Converse shoes. It makes sense for Spooner to prefer old-fashioned (e.g., early 2000s) music playback devices over the newer voice-activated players, but the Converse shoes serve practically no purpose in the story. Do trendier shoes in the movie's time frame incorporate robotic components? I even looked in the deleted scenes and couldn't find any such story justification.

You have a face for radio

The show: Ally McBeal
The episode: "They Eat Horses, Don't They?" First aired in 1998 and now available on DVD (second season, first disc).
What happened: Ling (Lucy Liu) sues on-air personality Harold Wick (Wayne Newton as a thinly veiled Howard Stern) for contributing to sexual harrassment at a plant she manages. After a judge refuses to dismiss the case, Nelle (Portia de Rossi) convinces Ling to drop the charge and issue a statement at a press conference explaining that she's dropping the case because she's just become aware of an unspecified physical or psychological deficiency Harold Wick has. Soon after, Harold invites Ally to appear on his show. To everyone's surprise, Ally agrees. As she's being made up, Ally expresses surprise at that the show is not just on the radio.
Meanwhile, John defends a restaurateur sued for serving horse to a diner who enjoyed the meat before knowing what it was.
Why it doesn't quite make sense: So Ally is sometimes quite disconnected from reality. But even she should know that Harold Wick's show is not just a radio show. She was watching it on TV with Renee in their apartment earlier in the episode! It's probably the director who's to blame for this one; the script probably did not call for any image of Harold Wick as Ally and Renee listened to his show. Or maybe Ally was just making small talk.

Jumping Jiminy

The show: The Big Bang Theory
The episode: "The Jiminy Conjecture," first aired September of last year and reran this past Monday.
What happened: While eating dinner in Sheldon's apartment, Sheldon, Howard and Raj hear a chirping cricket, which Sheldon immediately identifies as a snowy tree cricket. Howard is convinced that it's a common field cricket that they're hearing. Sheldon and Howard wager special items in their respective comic book collections and proceed to trap the cricket. However, visual inspection of the specimen fails to resolve the issue. They take the cricket to Prof. Crawley (Lewis Black), the university's appropriately named bug expert. Unbeknownst to the three friends, the university funding to Crawley's lab has been cut and now the old professor is more interested in venting about his personal and professional frustrations than in identifying the cricket that has been brought in. Crawley snaps that the specimen is just a common field cricket. Dejected, Sheldon goes to the bank to retrieve the comic book he put up for the wager from his safe deposit box.
Meanwhile, Leonard and Penny deal with their lackluster sexual encounter. Penny actually takes Sheldon's advice in the matter.
What doesn't quite make sense: Given how obnoxious Sheldon is about always being right (amply demonstrated in the episode's first scene, in which Sheldon proves Wolverine once had retractable bone claws), I think he gives up rather easily at Crawley's identification. For one thing, the cricket did not chirp at all while in Crawley's lab, and an earlier scene suggests that visual inspection is insufficient to distinguish the snowy tree cricket from the common field cricket (whether or not that's the case in real life I don't care to find out). Sheldon doesn't bring this up. Nor does he protest that Crawley is way too emotionally distraught to be able to render his expertise with the necessary due consideration.
Granted that there's little time left in the half hour episode to allow Sheldon to fully cross-examine Crawley, much less find another bug expert to bug about the cricket, but the nit could have been avoided altogether by just putting in some chirps into that scene and having Crawley say something to the effect of "Those chirps don't fit Dauber's correlation." (Sheldon mentioned Dauber's correlation earlier in the episode, so no time would be needed to explain it again, and if time is short, Raj's unfunny parting remark to Crawley could have been deleted with no problem whatsoever).