Two words

EPIC WIN.

Nick Junior Will Turn Your Kids Fascist

Seriously. I've watched this channel enough to become convinced it's run by a master of subliminal messaging who's intent on indoctrinating children into a sinister neo-nazi cult. The ultimate goal of which is to turn humanity into homogeneous, peace-loving pansies where we'll all kept in check by dark - possibly alien - occult powers.

OK, I tend to only watch the Bedtime session, because the target audience is in nursery most of the day. But bedtime is when they're at the most vulnerable ! Surely we should expect good, wholesome family entertainment at a time like this. Stories about happy little animals who dance around and don't do anything. Not so.

The evening's brainwashing typically begins with a large dose of Peppa Pig. This tells
stories of the adventures of a family of pigs (who look more like large pink whistles). Their "adventures" are simple enough - sometimes no more than Peppa jumping in muddy puddles, or Daddy Pig losing his glasses. But while the plots may be innocent, the subtext is anything but.

For starters, the physics of the world is all wrong. Cars can drive up hills so steep that a mountain goat would balk at the prospect. Worse, it's just as easy on a bicycle. Is this merely artistic license, or evidence that the artist is actually from a low gravity planet and not familiar with Earth physics ?

The moral dimension of the show is where things get really bad. There's an overwhelmingly mammalian bias to everything, which is best exemplified by the line, "Don't be silly Mr Bull, goldfish can't talk." And why not ?  What about the lizards and birds and snakes ? They don't even get a look in.

Such blatant racism is exacerbated by the segregation of all the different species. The pigs live in the pig house, the zebras in the zebra house. There's no intermarriage whatsoever. Where are the hybrid pig-goats and elephant-zebras ? Eh ? This world is a Nazi utopia and an anathema to multiculturalism. And since only the pigs are the stars of the show, we can infer that they represent the "Aryan" race, with the other animals representing "lesser" aspects of humanity. In fact, the whole "different houses" thing smacks of death camps to me.

Nor do the actions of any animals (at least pigs) have any negative consequences whatsoever. When Peppa supervises a baby's party, she makes them all cry but no-one cares. When she runs over Daddy Pig's prize pumpkin that he's spent patient months growing, he just says, "Never mind". I'd bet he wouldn't have said that if a zebra did it. He'd probably cart them off to the gas chamber instead.

After Peppa we get a long break full of commercialisation designed to make kids want things. Worse, at the moment we get touted with some royalist propaganda, where some girl pretends to be a Barbie-esque princess and we're all her "loyal subjects." Sod off, Barbie - I don't remember taking any such oath of allegiance. Such royalist claptrap can only be designed to give everyone an inferiority complex, reminding us to always obey our social betters - yet more Nazi indoctrination, dressed up in a cunning romantic mystique. Which is shame, because there are much better princesses available to emulate.

Do you want your children to aspire to a) Aryan supremacist who doesn't do anything except get married b) a noted peace activist who got landmines banned or c) angry woman who kills oppressive tyrants by using a sharpened frisbee ?


Then comes Ben and Holly's Little Kingdom. This delightful show is even worse than Peppa Pig, because now the protagonists are all basically human. And this time the racism is even more explicit - the elves and fairies actively avoiding each other, even to the point of holding separate Olympics. Even Hitler didn't go that far.

Moreover, the show is overtly anti-science. One of the main characters is the villainous fairy Nanny Plum, who uses her occult powers of sourcery to guide Ben Elf and fairy Princess Holly through their surreal adventurings*. It seems that all problems can be solved with magic. This leaves Wise Old Elf, who solves everything by thinking carefully and logically about each situation but always gets it wrong, looking a bit silly. Science is thus humiliated and primitive paganism venerated as the answer to the world's troubles.

* She also insults witches, which is somewhat inconsistent.

Nanny Plum and Wise Old Elf are always at odds, and it's almost always Nanny who wins. Fairies are quite explicitly the higher social order here, with the King also being a fairy (incidentally, he's also the only male fairy). The elves are very much the oppressed working classes who spent most of their time doing manual (i.e. "slave") labour, making toys for human children. Whereas Nanny teaches her fairy pupils that they must always look beautiful, and they never seem to do any actual work at all, which again smacks of Aryanism. She might as well dress up in a Klu Klux Klan outfit.

Here's where it gets really interesting. Nanny Plum and Miss Rabbit the teacher (in Peppa Pig) are voiced by the same person. Coincidence ? I think not. There can't possibly be such a shortage of voice actors. More likely the two shows are in league with each other, since they have such similar fascist views. Clearly they are trying to steal children's souls for indoctrination into a cult.

(One might think that if the two shows have the same message then their creator can't, by definition, be an alien as postulated earlier -  how would fly to Earth if he's anti-science ? The implication, of course, is that he came to Earth in a spaceship powered only by magic, which does not bode well for anyone.)

Finally the evening ends with a song that's the audible equivalent of tripe. It's just too happy. I've never trusted anything so jolly it causes vomiting - look at Disney, he was a Nazi sympathiser, after all. Yet it's utterly mesmerising to its poor naive youthful audience, slowly convincing them to watch more and more Nick Junior until their souls are corrupted and their hearts wither and blacken with the dark fire of racial hatred.

For the Lolz

(another post where I steal someone else's idea and don't give credit except to point people towards http://www.fleecebucket.com/ )

The Joy of Treks

Star Treks, that is. I don't do a lot of trekking as it brings me out in a rash. Sorry people, but I'm a nerd, and that means periodic posts where I compose laments for one of the greatest TV shows of all time. It may not have ever had the best acting, script, plot, casting, cinematography, costumes*... well you get the idea. So why should non-trekkies give a damn about a show that was once Emmy-nominated for outstanding hairstyling ?

* Except one. See below.

Right now, there's a complete dearth of inspirational sci-fi shows, and inspiration was something Trek did better than any other show ever, bar none. As the 3 excellent documentaries Trekkies, Trekkies 2 and How William Shatner Changed the World make abundantly clear, this isn't wishful thinking on the part of some loser ultra-nerds. No, it's a very correct assessment by a group of really lovely ultra-nerds. Many of them have grown up to work for NASA and some fans have dedicated their lives to living by the ethics of Star Trek. A few are even married (but as far as I know none have become renowned hairdressers).

The thing is, if you're going to aspire to the ethos of show where humanity lives in a tolerant and mostly peaceful utopia, you're hardly likely to end up as a spite-filled brutish thug. Whereas if you follow Battlestar Galactica with the same level of devotion, you'll inevitably become a serial adulterer with lifelong crippling emotional problems, a confused obsession with religion, and an inexplicable burning hatred of all toasters.


Buy this on a T-shirt ! Be there and be square !


It could be worse though. A Farscape fanatic would grow up with a penchant for all things leather, wormholes and magic. Stargate would lead to a career in the army or archeology whereas aspiring to Babylon 5 or Andromeda would only lead to terrible acting skills. Firefly and Dr Who would at least instill an anti-authoritarian attitude, but both are borderline sci-fi at best. Caprica ? Alas I don't think anyone's going to plump for a career in cybernetics so they can create a killer-robot body for an emo teenage misfit genius.


Perhaps they thought there was an Emmy for the show with the most leather


Star Trek did two great things that few if any other shows have even bothered to imitate. Firstly, it was supremely tolerant of all colours and creeds at a time when such an attitude was needed most. Sure, the captain was a white all-American hero, though he had to wear a girdle for the safety of himself and those around him. But his crew were as ethnically diverse as the crowd at an Obama rally. A Russian navigator who was seemingly too young to be toilet trained, a Japanese sword-wielding pilot (who grew up to be George "I WILL have sex with you !" Takei), and a sexy fan-dancing black communications officer, to say nothing of the crazed Scotsman who lurked in the engine room - this was ground-breaking stuff at the time.


What's not to like ? Oh right, the girdles. But it's OK, it's Shatner.


Of course today no-one bats an eyelid at such things. Crazed Scotsmen can now be engineers without fear of shame or lynching, and the world is better for it. By the Next Generation, society was so tolerant that it could even allow a Frenchman in charge of a largely American crew. Black people were now so accepted that by Deep Space Nine, they could be captain and people were more apt to notice their blinding white teeth and terrifying stare than their skin colour. Indeed, only the presence of a female captain in Voyager elicited any reaction from anyone at all, and that was mostly because she had a voice that sounds like she'd been eating cigarettes and washing them down with a pint of whisky every day since she was 12.

But all this contemporary social justice would have been for naught without Trek's second clever thing : making technology cool. Everyone wants a warp drive. Everyone. Well, most people. But lots of people want a teleporter and I guarantee that everyone wants a holodeck. Sadly, the recent spate of 3D movies suggest we're better off without them, as the most successful movie of all time is about a bunch of 9-foot hippie smurfs who fly around on dragons protecting trees.

Now as I've said, no-one's going to be inspired by any of the contemporary sci-fi shows to go in for science or engineering. They're not lacking in interesting tech - Caprica had a cool take on cybernetics, but Star Trek did it better (of course, it took Trek a few goes before it stumbled upon the delectable Jeri Ryan and made everyone - ahem - happy*). The problem is that since Stargate Atlantis was cancelled, with only Caprica and the quite awful Stargate Universe left, it's nothing but bloody angst-in-space. Ain't no-one gonna work for NASA or get married (or even become a hairdresser) because of some show about teenagers moping around on a dark and dingy spaceship who spend their entire time whining that they can't get onto Facebook and that their iPhone's can't get a signal.

* Yes alright, Battlestar had Caprica 6, but she was a genocidal maniac. It'd be like doing Hitler, you sick freak.

Sure, there's a place for darker and more grown-up sci-fi. But can't we also have something where the future doesn't involve the Earth blowing up and everyone whinging about it ? Something where we venture into space and don't find 700 billion angry aliens trying to enslave us ? Or even something about a future in which humanity is not oppressed by armies of killer robots ? Call me crazy, but I think it's actually a lot easier to create a helpful robot monkey butler than it is to create an army of super-powerful robot killing machines possessed by the ghosts of teenage emo kids.

It doesn't even have to be Star Trek again. I just want a sci-fi show where the underlying message is not one of such complete doom that I feel like giving up and going to read the Daily Mail. That's not too much to ask, is it ?

What use is a baby ?

Often when people are haggling for funding for blue-skies research, someone will employ the classic cliche : what use is a baby ? It's a good line. Everyone knows that babies are useless but eventually some of them become really useful people, like Michael Buerk and Scarlett Johansson. And eventually, so science tells us, we'll be able to have designer babies. Which begs the question : are babies really as useless as the old proverb would have it ? Or, to put it another way, if babies were a product you could buy from JML then what would the sales pitch be ?

I guess we must first start by trying to fit them into some sort of category. Clearly they belong in the house so must be some kind of household utility. What is it that they actually do ?

1) Eat
2) Sleep
3) Poop
4) Pee
5) Make noise
6) Increase entropy
7) Move about
8) Hit things
9) Change channel
10)Turn lights on and off

All of which could easily be used in a marketing campaign. They are in fact extremely useful. Observe :

Sometimes I wonder if I have too much time on my hands, contrary to all available evidence. Oh well.