Family Guy to jump shark after Simpsons crossover

Many years ago, Seth Macfarlane joked about Family Guy lasting twenty seasons, getting to a point the writers are so bereft of ideas they decide to do an entire episode about Greg the Weather-Mime. That doesn't sound as awful as the crap that's on the horizon for the show's thirteenth season.

The show's producers have released a 5-minute clip of the upcoming season premiere, which is a crossover with The Simpsons. That clip is actually pretty funny, in my opinion, and bodes very well for the show if it is indicative of the quality of the rest of the episode.

What the writers have planned after that episode is what makes me wonder if the show will become so pathetically lame that I stop watching it. There's apparently going to be an episode in which Stewie becomes pregnant with Brian's baby. Yeah, yeah, I accept the idea of a talking dog. I even accept the idea of Brian having a human son by a human woman. But a human baby boy becoming pregnant with a dog's baby? That sounds just way too idiotic to me.

Nitpicking the Vincent Chin memorial mural

About a week ago, Jim Fore asked me if he could write a blog post nitpicking the new Vincent Chin memorial mural in Detroit. He thought I would object, because on this blog we usually nitpick such low-brow fare as G. I. Joe movies and Republican political ads. A memorial mural would seem to be out of our depth here.

But given how seldom we publish posts on this blog, I think that maybe we should try to fire off a post every time we come across half-baked concepts and poorly communicated messages in whatever media we find them. The Vincent Chin memorial mural abounds in both. But part of the reason we publish so infrequently is just not having time. Jim sent me some photos of the mural, but now he started a second job so he really doesn't have time to write for this blog anymore.

So I'm going to write the post about the Vincent Chin memorial mural by Andrew Pisacane, a.k.a. GAIA in Detroit. Now, Jim lives in Detroit, I don't, so I'm less qualified than he is to write this blog post. But when he gets a chance to read it, he'll let me know if I've made any mistakes. Bringing GAIA to Detroit was sponsored by the Great River Creative Corridor (GRCC), which has also sponsored murals by Detroit artists.

Good art is supposed to communicate profound messages encoded with obscure references, right? The Vincent Chin memorial mural abounds in obscure references, portraying, in addition to Vincent Chin, these three other guys: Ludwig Erhard, Sun Yun-Suan and Hayato Ikeda.

Who was Vincent Chin? According to RememberingVincentChin.com, he was a Chinese American raised in metro Detroit who was killed by two white American auto workers a week before his wedding. The two idiots thought that Chin was Japanese and therefore responsible for the American car companies' problems. The two killers spent many days in court but never a day in prison.

Who was Ludwig Erhard? Was he one of the killers? Nope. Not even related. According to the Brooklyn Street Art blog, "Ludwig Erhard was a German politician notable for his role in Germany’s robust post war recovery." Huh? What?

Alright, moving on to Yun-suan: he "was credited for overseeing the transformation of Taiwan from being a mainly agricultural economy to an export powerhouse." Again: huh? What?

Then Ikeda: "the single most important figure in Japan’s rapid growth." Right. Okay. Sure. Whatever.

I'm confused. If I'm understanding correctly, according to the artist, GAIA, these three men represent "post war economic miracles as a portrait of global competition that led to layoffs in Detroit and fueled the frustration and xenophobia behind Vincent Chin's murder." Is GAIA making excuses for the two people who actually killed Chin and shifting the blame to three politicians who most likely never met Chin in person? This is disgraceful scapegoating.

GAIA goes around the country painting murals. In Greenville, North Carolina, he painted a nice mural with calla lilies. In Atlanta, Georgia, he painted a mural with a beautiful sky and many colors. In Detroit, Michigan, he painted a gray mural tying the death of a Chinese American to three foreign politicians. Jim says "this is your typical New York artist coming to Detroit to bash this city." Jim also told me that GAIA painted over a mural by a Detroit artist.

I don't know who this GAIA is, but I wager that he is a clueless white artist operating under his own set of misconceptions. Is he that different from the men who actually killed Vincent Chin? Maybe someone should paint a mural of Ronald Ebens, Michael Nitz, Judge Charles Kaufman and GAIA, see how GAIA likes that.

No, that's a bad idea. Two wrongs don't make a right. Here's a wild, crazy idea: if you really want to paint a mural that honors Vincent Chin, try thinking about the kind of man he was and the kind of man he could have become. Maybe then the Chin family will endorse your mural.

UPDATE, August 19, 2014: Pisacane's mural has now been painted over by Sintex. Of course GRCC money man Derek Weaver has put out a statement expressing condolences to Chin's family (hey, if I was an immigrant and my son was murdered by racist idiots, I should be very sad about a mural by some clueless, privileged white man-child getting painted over, right?).

Weaver's statement also paints Sintex as an ungrateful bastard. Also of course Sintex has not been given an opportunity to present his side of the story in a coherent way. No word yet on whether Sintex will simply repaint his original mural or do something different.

Thanks for the cash, but I'll pass on the duck

Aflac pays you cash if you're injured. There's a new commercial (I don't know when it started airing) that shows a woman in her garage telling a man about how Aflac is paying her cash as the Aflac duck makes a bit of a mess playing with the tools. "He doesn't know anything about tools," the woman tells the man in response to a question from him.

Insurance commercials these days seem to feel this need to be humorous. There's GEICO, with their ads that say everyone already knows that GEICO can "save you 15% or more on car insurance." "But did you know Old McDonald was a really bad speller?" It's irrelevant, but at least it's amusing.

Compare the GEICO Old McDonald commercial to the Aflac "he doesn't know anything about tools" ad. The duck at one point attempts to start a chainsaw that could potentially slice his belly. Then with a caulk gun, he shoots the woman's coffee cup and an overhead light. The woman reminisces about how when she broke her arm, Aflac paid her claim in just four days. But with that duck fooling around in her garage, she could soon have a new claim to file.

Maybe that's amusing to you, but it's not irrelevant. "He doesn't have to know tools when he pays claims this fast," says a heading on the Aflac website. Yeah, but he does have to know tools if he's going to even think about touching any of the tools in my garage. If I chose insurance based on commercials alone, I think I'd have to go with GEICO, not Aflac.

The obvious genius

One of the most tired tropes in movies and TV is this idea of the genius whose talent in a particular field is instantly obvious to any other practitioner in the field who sees an example of the genius's work. This conceit occurs frequently with writers. In the case of The Words (2012), the genius is a novelist played by two different actors (Ben Barnes in youth, Jeremy Irons in old age), yet for some reason he doesn't get a name.

Some time after World War II, the young man moved to France, took up a job writing for an English language publication for "expats," and married a French waitress. After the tragic loss of their baby, the young man was inspired to write a brilliant novel, but the novel was misplaced on a train and lost for many years.

Until it is discovered by Rory Jansen (Bradley Cooper), a mediocre writer who has gotten enough rejection letters to fill up a binder and is marking time as a low-ranking employee at a publishing company. Rory is so impressed by the typewritten novel that he is compelled to type it on his computer verbatim. His wife Dora (Zoe Saldana) convinces him to show it to someone at his workplace. Rory does, leading to inevitable success.

And an inevitable confrontation with the true author, who claims to want neither byline nor payment. Rory comes clean to his publisher, who is understandably angry. After some convincing from the publisher and from the true author, Rory decides to continue the charade, and the secret of the true authorship of The Window Tears dies with the author.

Here I have presented the story of the movie in a straight line. But the way the story is presented in the movie, you'd be forgiven for initially thinking that Rory might actually be a very good writer who just hasn't caught the break he so desperately needs.

That's because in real life, the work of a genius is not immediately obvious to everyone. Try googling "rejection letters to famous authors." You probably won't even have to type the whole thing. Animal Farm by George Orwell and Moby Dick by Herman Melville are but two bestsellers to have gotten rejection letters your search will turn up. And a book we're led to believe was a source of inspiration for The Window Tears, The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway, was deemed "tedious and offensive" by Peacock & Peacock in 1925.

So it's not just amazing that the misplaced novel was found by a novelist, it's also amazing that a novel which was so spontaneously written was also immediately recognized as a work of genius by the very first publisher it was shown to. Genius or hack, any novelist who makes any effort to get published will get rejection letters. Only in the movies will the publishers who pass on brilliant first time authors feel like idiots. In real life, publishers of print books have become very risk-averse, something this movie's screenwriters should have known back in the 1990s when they started working on this story.

A couple of things they're probably not gonna teach you in screenwriting class

"Those who can, do; those who can't, teach." Nowhere has that aphorism been truer than when it comes to screenwriting. My young cousin Jim took a screenwriting class with Joel Silvers at Wayne State University, and told me that Silvers is the worst washed up has-been to ever teach screenwriting (though I doubt he would have gotten a much better instructor if he hadn't gone out of state).

From what Jimmy has told me, Silvers is quite awful. But if you go to almost any university that has screenwriting courses, you will find that the screenwriting instructor is a hack more interested in telling stories from his long-gone glory days than in critiquing the dozens and dozens of pages he's made you write for nothing.

Anyone who seriously wants to be a screenwriter needs to know these two things:

• A successful screenplay has more than one author. A hack teaching screenwriting will put a lot of pressure on you to write an excellent screenplay. Not by offering insightful critique, mind you, but simply by repeatedly saying worthless things like "It has to be good!" The hack won't explicitly say so, but he might occasionally make the very subtle acknowledgement that most of Hollywood's most successful screenplays have at least two credited authors and who knows how many uncredited. It's true that most Oscar-winning screenplays have only one credited author (usually a famous director, like Spike Jonze, Quentin Tarantino or Woody Allen), and it's also true that some of the worst movies have had as many as five credited screenwriters. But in general, if your screenplay gets made into a movie and you're not the director, your screenplay's gonna get rewritten by someone else. Plus the director may cut out some scenes and let the actors ad-lib.
• Not everyone watching a movie is a completely ignorant moron. The hack screenwriting instructor will pressure you to do lots and lots of research but he will also pressure you to not actually use it in your screenplay. For example, the student might be expected to read an entire book about whist (it's a card game, more like bridge than like poker, from what I understand) and write a complete set of biographies for every single character in the screenplay before the next time the class meets. But then, when the student screenwriter writes a whist scene with authentic, believable whist play, the hack teacher tells the student to change it to something more dramatic, and to sacrifice the whist authenticity, because "no one watching this movie knows anything about whist." But this is a false dilemma. High drama does not rule out authenticity, and authenticity doesn't rule out high drama. The director doesn't need to show every hand being played. But there will be someone watching who does know about whist, even if just enough to notice if something is not quite right about the game. If the movie gets the whist wrong, that might make someone not want to watch the rest of the movie. Of course some of these things cross over into the job of the continuity staff. If the screenwriter can make things easier for the continuity staff, he should.

A couple of lessons on military rank for G. I. Joe screenwriters

If you want military accuracy on the big screen, a G. I. Joe movie is the last place you should be looking for it. You know, I could write an entire book nitpicking either G. I. Joe: Rise of Cobra or the latest installment, but I am not so inclined. But there are two details in G. I. Joe: Retaliation which compel me to address the lack of military accuracy in that film.

First of all, early on Duke (Channing Tatum) tells Roadblock (Dwayne Johnson) that he has to "take" his next promotion. Is Roadblock dodging promotion? That sort of thing might make sense on Star Trek: The Next Generation, but it does not really make sense in the context of today's military, in which rank is considered to be of paramount importance.

Consider for example that promotions to some of the lower enlisted ranks are almost automatic: if you are a Pfc with no bad marks in your SRB, you're going to be a Lance Corporal well before the halfway mark of your enlistment contract. Consider also that there is attrition due to rank stagnation: maybe you can be a Staff Sergeant though an entire 4-year contract. But if you're not in line to make Gunnery Sergeant, you should probably not bother to apply for reenlistment. Yeah, I know, those are Marine ranks. Maybe the Army is a little more lenient about soldiers who get stuck at a particular rank. But probably just a little.

The other detail that compelled me to write this is when Lady Jaye (Adrianne Palicki) tells Duke that she wanted to outrank her father so that he would have to salute her. I'm not going to try to psychoanalyze Jaye to determine why that would make sense as a motivation for her.

But I will question why she chose to enlist (as opposed to trying to get into a military academy and becoming a commissioned officer) if being saluted by her father was indeed her goal. A Staff Sergeant outranks a Sergeant, but a Sergeant does not salute a Staff Sergeant. Someone a Sergeant does salute is a Second Lieutenant, even one who just got her gold bars.

Lady Jaye's plan becomes completely nonsensical if her father was an officer to begin with. Let's say Lord Jaye was a Lt. Colonel. A Lt. Colonel salutes Colonels and Generals. But not Second Lieutenants. Unless that Second Lieutenant won a Medal of Honor... At the end of the movie, General Joe Colton (Bruce Willis) salutes Lady Jaye, substituting Jaye's now defunct father. Yeah... okay... sure, whatever.

Debunking the deceptive ads about the ballot proposals

There is more to this election than deciding whether or not Obama gets a second term. In Michigan, voters will be faced with six state ballot proposals and, depending on where in Michigan they live, a potential slew of county and city proposals. There have been ads on TV for five of the six proposals, and a lot of those ads are filled with lies. Here now I try to debunk some of those lies.

Proposal 2 aims to protect collective bargaining, and has been described by opponents as "forced unionizing." One of the opposition ads claims that with Proposal 2, a teacher can be caught drunk on the job five times before getting fired. Now, I'm not a lawyer, but I don't see anything at all in the ballot proposal language that tells me "teacher has five chances to be drunk on the job."

Another item with a number brought up by anti-Prop 2 ads is that Prop 2 would jeopardize 170 laws. I don't dispute the count of the affected laws, since the ballot proposal language does reference "future and existing" laws. But what I wonder is this: why are those laws worth keeping intact? The ads don't say.

Proposal 3 would require energy companies in Michigan to use at least 25% renewable energy sources by 2025. Predictably this scares energy companies, which have put out ads claiming Proposal 3 would hike a customer's energy bill up to $2,511.40. Given that the average energy bill is $72.00, the $2,511.40 figure sounds very scary. But the ballot language explicitly puts in a 1% cap on rate increases. The $72.00 bill would go up to $79.20. Oh my God, the humanity. There are actually good reasons to reject Proposal 3, but the energy companies have insulted the intelligence of the voters by employing scare tactics and lies instead of simple, logical arguments.

The only Proposal 4 ads I've seen show seniors and medical professionals expressing their endorsement of the home care amendment. I can't really object to that, though I plan to vote no on the measure.

I've only seen one ad about Proposal 5. The opposition ad tells it like it is: the initiative is from billionaire bridge owner Matty Moroun, who is determined to reduce his taxes to $0 if at all possible. The measure would require a 2/3 majority of the state legislature or a statewide vote at a general election to raise any tax by any amount for any reason. It's hard to know how many state legislators have been bought and paid for by Moroun, but my guess is more than a third. Therefore, the effect of Proposal 5 would be to effectively kill any future tax increases, no matter how necessary for a state that already takes in less in taxes than what it needs to provide vital services.

But the proposal that is nearest and dearest to Scrooge Moroun's heart is Proposal 6, which would  require the people to vote on any international bridge project. The ads in favor of Proposal 6 are outrageous lies in service of Moroun's short-sighted greed. But a lot of people have been fooled, making me want to scream: CANADA IS PAYING MICHIGAN'S HALF OF THE BILL!!! And if they renege, we can invade their country.

By ignoring the inconvenient little fact of the agreement with Canada, ads in favor of Proposal 6 then go on to raise the question of how is it possible for there to be money for a new bridge but not money to pay police and firefighters (some localities in Michigan have had to drastically cut back their first responder staff). Let me scream again: FEDERAL MATCHING ROAD FUNDS CAN ONLY BE USED FOR ROAD PROJECTS, AND NOT FOR ANYTHING ELSE. If Michigan doesn't do a road project for something like the bridge, then the federal matching money goes to another state.

Do we really need a new bridge? That's a valid question. Moroun's deeds have told the truth where his words have not: If you drive on Fort Street by St. Anne, you will see that Moroun started construction on a new bridge right next to his Ambassador Bridge. But since neither the American nor Canadian governments gave him permission to do this, Moroun's new bridge stops well short of the Detroit River.

Be sure to vote this Tuesday. But first be sure to educate yourself on the difference between the proposals' stated intentions and their true consequences if enacted.