Popular Culture

Confronting My Biases, Episode 12: Actors Hosting TV Game Shows

/ Jack Marshall / 27 Comments

I guess I should begin by saying that it is a sign of the collapse of civilization that game shows, once almost solely the slightly embarrassing denizens of morning and daytime TV, are now all over the networks in prime time. They are cheap to make, they appeal to morons, and it reduces the need for, you know, comedies and dramas, actual entertainment with lessons to teach and emotions to convey. Quiz shows were big in prime time during the mid-Fifties, then the rigged questions scandal killed them. They crawled back to daytime TV.

The source of my bias, however is that even in the daytime game shows, the role of game show host has been almost completely taken over by actors, or, in some cases, comics. The profession of game show host, as once practiced by worthies like Art James, Art Fleming, Alan Ludden, John Daly, Bud Collyer, Jack Barry, Monty Hall, Bob Barker and my personal favorite, the immortal Wink Martindale, has almost totally vanished, like the Tasmanian tiger.

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Ethics Dunce (Professional Singer Division): Ingrid Andress

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

See, I have a fair amount of sympathy for alcoholics. But the time to check yourself into rehab is before you kill someone driving, before you blow that crucial case for your client, before you leave your scissors in a patient’s stomach after you’ve operated, and, if you are an award-winning Country singer, before you massacre the Star-Spangled Banner at the All-Star Game Home Run derby, like Andress did last night.

Just listen to that caterwauling!

I find the Home Run Derby a bore, so I didn’t hear her off-key, dying-swan version of our National Anthem until the social media complaints about it reached me this morning. Andress’s breathless, lugubrious style, much in vogue these days, doesn’t appeal to me anyway, but that rendition was especially awful even by awful National Anthem standards, a high bar. How could a multiple Grammy-winner be that bad is a public performance on national TV?

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Ethics Dunce: Geoffrey Hinton, “The Godfather of Artificial Intelligence”

/ Jack Marshall / 10 Comments

You should know the name Geoffrey Hinton by now. To the extent that any one scientist is credited with the emergence of artificial intelligence, he’s it. He was among the winners of the prestigious Turing Prize for his break-through in artificial neural networks, and his discoveries were crucial in the development of advanced Artificial Intelligence (AI) software today like Chat GPT and Google’s Bard. He spent 50 years developing the technology, the last 10 pf which working on AI at Google before he quit in 2023. His reason: he was alarmed at the lack of sufficient safety measures to ensure that AI technology doesn’t do more harm than good.

And yet, as revealed in a recent interview on CBS’s “60 Minutes,” Hinton still believes that his work to bring AI to artificial life was time well-spent, that his baby was worth nurturing because of its potential benefits to humanity, and that—-get this—all we have to do is, for the first time in the history of mankind, predict the dangers, risks and looming unintended consequences of an emerging new technology, get everything right the first time, not make any mistakes, not be blindly reckless in applying it, and avoid the kind of genie-out-of-the-bottle catastrophes that world has experienced (and is experiencing!) over and over again.

That’s all!

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The Guinness Book of Records Is a Catalyst For Self-Destructive Conduct, Not That There’s Anything Wrong With That…

/ Jack Marshall / 2 Comments

I guess it’s that time on a sweltering Friday afternoon that I am not quite up to finishing any of the more substantive posts on the runway, and only feel like tackling the stupid stuff. (These are the posts long-time critic/commenter Neil Dorr prefers. This one’s for you, Neil!)

Tara Berry just set the Guinness Book of Records record for “‘most tattoos of the same musician on the body.” She has 18. ( The former record-holder has 15 portraits of Eminem tattooed on her body.) A big Madonna fan from the beginning of The Material Girls’ pop-culture ascent in 1983 ,Tara only started her Madonna tattoo collection in 2016 when she was looking for fans who had Madonna’s image tattooed on their bodies to feature in a video. I guess she’s suggestive (or <cough> or something): she had an overwhelming urge to get her own Madonna tattoo. Once she started, she couldn’t stop.

Well, bless her heart. It’s her skin and her body: this is one example of “choice” that doesn’t hurt anybody except the chooser. Hey, if she wants to go for 20, or 50, I won’t criticize.

I do hear a bit of a ping one of my smaller ethics alarms about the Guinness Book of Records. Why does it even have a record in this category? I’ve touched on the issue in the past: the GBOR seeds the needs of narcissists and sad, insecure people searching for some level of fame or notoriety with records that can only be set or sought with some danger to the aspiring record-setter. There were “the Biking Vogels,” the various children endangered by their parents to have them be the “youngest” to achieve some pointless and dangerous goal, and my personal favorite, Sheyla Hershey, who ended up with size M breasts to set the Guinness record for “largest breast implants.” I concluded that 2010 post by stating that it was unethical for Guinness to publish “records” that can only be achieved by risking long-term harm.

And yet…blaming Guinness for Tara Barry mutilating her body is like blaming hip-hop records and violent TV shows or movies for people doing in reality what is only sung about or shown on a screen. It was her choice, albeit a crazy one. Tara is supposedly an “artist,” so maybe being festooned with pictures of a washed-up and aging pop-star won’t harm her at all, as long as she doesn’t seek employment at a school or a bank. Or with me.

As I said, that ethics alarm isn’t pinging very loudly. The GBOR doesn’t make anyone do anything. But the alarm has been pinging, however faintly, for 13 years.

Ick, Unethical, or Illegal? The Fake Scarlet Johanssen Problem

/ Jack Marshall / 17 Comments

This is one of those relatively rare emerging ethics issues that I’m not foolhardy enough to reach conclusions about right away, because ethics itself is in a state of flux, as is the related law. All I’m going to do now is begin pointing out the problems that are going to have to be solved eventually…or not.

Of course, the problem is technology. As devotees of the uneven Netflix series “Black Mirror” know well, technology opens up as many ethically disturbing unanticipated (or intentional) consequences as it does societal enhancements and benefits. Now we are all facing a really creepy one: the artificial intelligence-driven virtual friend. Or companion. Or lover. Or enemy.

This has been brought into special focus because of an emerging legal controversy. OpenAI, the creators of ChatGPT, debuted a seductive version of the voice assistant last week that sounds suspiciously like actress Scarlett Johansson. What a coinkydink! The voice, dubbed “Sky” evoked the A.I. assistant with whom the lonely divorcé Theodore Twombly (Joaquin Phoenix) falls in love with in the 2013 Spike Jonze movie, “Her,” and that voice was performed by…Scarlett Johansson.

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So It’s Come To This: A Brief But Depressing Addendum To “In the Hallowed Halls of Congress, Ethics Dunces, Dolts, and Disgraces All Around”

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

In the comments to the previous post regarding the juvenile incivility and playground level exchanges of insults in the House of Representatives last week, Chris Marschner notes in part,

“Today, our representatives are products of our public education system where the original classics have been banned for being offensive to one group or discarded as irrelevant to current society. Linguistic presentations today reflect the gutter because that is how the teachers they had speak.’

Last night, before Chris issued his comment, I had already resolved to write about the following revolting development:

In a new episode of “Blue Bloods,” the long-running CBS police and family drama that Ethics Alarms awarded “Ethical TV Show of the Year” several times back when I was doing such things, the show concluded with Erin ( Bridget Moynihan), the NYC prosecutor and police commissioner Tom Selleck’s daughter, making an erection joke. At Sunday dinner. And not even an original or particular funny one.

The discussion around the dinner table of this devout Catholic extended family—where grandpa constantly reminds the brood to “keep it civil”—involved the fifth wedding anniversary of youngest son Jamie (Well Estes) and his policewoman wife. The group noted that traditionally this was the “Wooden” anniversary. Erin then asked, “So, Jamie, are you up to giving her wood?”and punctuated her witticism with a suggestive upward arm thrust.

Hearty laughter all around.

I look forward to next season, when Sunday dinner is disrupted by Grandpa (Len Cariou) loudly farting during dessert.

How can anyone still argue, as I have many times, that Donald Trump is too crude to be President?

A Reward For the Historically and Culturally Literate: “Unfrosted”

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

If you are looking for a funny rather than syrupy entertainment diversion for your mother (or grandmother) this Mother’s Day, you couldn’t do better than spend 90 minutes or so with Jerry Seinfeld in his new movie for Netflix, “Unfrosted.”

Don’t worry: it’s a lot better than “Bee Movie.”

The film, co-written by the comic, is sly, clever and funny provided that the viewer knows enough about the popular culture of the early Sixties—you know, before everything went crazy—as well as U.S. history to understand what is being satirized. Seinfeld has always been a Sixties trivia buff as he demonstrated repeatedly on his classic sitcom, but this movie is an orgy of such references: JFK, the space program, the Cuban Missile Crisis, Jack LaLanne, Werner Von Bron, Quickdraw McGraw and Saturday morning cartoons, Johnny Carson, Walter Cronkite, Silly Putty, the Twist, Thurl Ravenscroft (the original voice of Tony the Tiger who also sang “You’re a Mean One, Mr. Grinch!” ) the Doublemint Twins (who are both apparently impregnated by JFK while Jackie is away), on and on.

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Ethics Quiz: Elected Officials Acting In An Undignified Manner

/ Jack Marshall / 18 Comments

I had to post an ethics quiz on this, especially after beginning the day writing, “I’d say anyone celebrating Star Wars Day today (“May the Fourth be with you!”) on this May 4 needs to get out more. In addition to being a day that promises further depressing developments on college campuses as the decades of progressive, anti-American, and Marxist indoctrination have their predictable (and probably intentional) consequences—though somehow the ivory tower revolutionaries in charge of those campuses were oddly unprepared for them!—this date has an ominous history.”

And there he is, J.B. Pritzker, the Governor of Illinois, posing with his wife on social media to celebrate “Star Wars” in a pose apparently evoking a yet-to-be released “Star Wars” sequel in which Luke and Leia are victims of the Empire’s diabolical fat ray.

Your Ethics Alarms Ethics Quiz of the Day is…

Is it responsible for high-ranking elected officials to present themselves to the public looking and acting ridiculous?

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Ethics Dunce: The Heisman Trust [Expanded!]

/ Jack Marshall / 18 Comments

Ugh. This gets the Steve Buscemi foot-in-the-woodchipper GIF from “Fargo,” because that’s what stories like this make me want to do: dive into one and end it all.

The Heisman Trust announced today the formal “reinstatement” of the 2005 Heisman Trophy to former USC college football star Reggie Bush 14 years after he had been stripped of it. That 2010 decision was made when the NCAA sanctioned USC for multiple rules violations, which included Bush receiving “improper benefits,” as ESPN coyly puts it, during his Trojans career from 2003 to 2005.

USC and Bush cheated, you see. They cheated, and nothing has changed regarding their guilt. They broke the rules. But because the NCAA, the Heisman Trust, football, American sports organizations generally and the American public that supports them all have the approximate ethical literacy of dung beetles, Reggie’s cheating doesn’t count.

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Ethics and Columbo’s First Name

/ Jack Marshall / 23 Comments

This goes into the Maslow’s Hammer file, as in “If the only tool you have is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail.”

I have been watching all the original “Columbo” episodes, first because they’re still worth watching, second because Grace and I used to watch them when picking something else was too much trouble and we couldn’t agree, third because Spuds likes Columbo’s dog (a Basset Hound), and fourth, because they usually distract me from stuff I don’t want to think about and leave me relaxed for a while, unlike, say, watching the Red Sox. As I finished the seven seasons, I wondered if I had ever heard Peter Falk’s character called anything but “Columbo” or “Lieutenant” on the show. My research revealed that I had not: the character’s creators Richard Levinson and William Link deliberately kept the eccentric sleuth’s first name a secret as one of the show’s quirks, and were adamant: nobody should ever speak his first name.

This raises the question of whether a character who only exists in television episodes where his first name is never mentioned has a first name, but that’s not an ethical question. However, the saga of Columbo’s first name did tick a few ethics boxes.

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