From - Sat Oct 25 11:19:34 1997 Path: news.coli.uni-sb.de!fu-berlin.de!newsfeed.nacamar.de!newsfeed.ecrc.net!newshub2.home.com!news.home.com!howland.erols.net!torn!nott!uottawa!csipc15.csi.uottawa.ca!u1500478 From: Dan Jones Newsgroups: alt.barney.dinosaur.die.die.die,alt.tv.barney,alt.tv.dinosaurs.barney.die.die.die Subject: READ: Pronunciation on the State of the World Date: Thu, 23 Oct 1997 09:52:02 -0400 Organization: University d'/of Ottawa Lines: 252 Distribution: world Message-ID: Reply-To: Dan Jones NNTP-Posting-Host: 137.122.16.116 Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII X-Hormel-Sez: Keep your SPAM to yourself! X-X-Sender: u1500478@mail.site.uottawa.ca Xref: news.coli.uni-sb.de alt.barney.dinosaur.die.die.die:21157 alt.tv.barney:10067 alt.tv.dinosaurs.barney.die.die.die:3152 NICE! Productions Present: DragonFyr's Pronunciation on the State of the World and Happy Stuff In Swahili with English subtitles Once more upon the breach of reality and semantics, wielding katana and pulse rifles, in flowing robes of blood red and burgundy, the questors stand against the wind. The leaves begin to turn dry and brown, and the common folk turn their thoughts to the warm indoors -- and to cheap .edu accounts. The time is September 1997. The place is everywhere. And in the hearts of these faithful questors rages a purifying flame to cast shadows upon the hottest fires, to burn the very essence of darkness and decay down to dust blown in the wind. They are crusaders, the Knights Templar of the modern age; they are scholars, worthy of audience with Socrates and Ptolemy; they are fighters and conquerors, a tribe and a nation, a brotherhood and a sisterhood of those who are sworn to defend their name and their kind against the ravages of ignorance and fear. In one purpose and destiny, one path in unity, they are the fighters in the endless Jihad...against Barney, the Purple Dinosaur. (canned laughter; the questors look offended) WHAT!? You got a PROBLEM with that?!?!? (more canned laughter; morale lowers) Listen man, it's not what you think. Sit down and grab a cuppa java. No not the language, the coffee. Huh? Okay, hot chocolate's fine. (the audience[you] sits down and grabs a cuppa hot chocolate) The Jihad to Destroy Barney is about people, first and foremost, according to one principle: Barney must Die, all else is irrelevant. These people who hide behind names and titles are people just like you, who share your lineage, maybe your name, and a cluster of your DNA, who believe that Barney the Purple Dinosaur must unequivocally die. For a start: Why? (I'll be going somewhere with this.) Barney is a symbol of everything we hate and despise. It wants to love us without caring. It wants to equalize without sharing. It has all the warmth and feeling of compressed wheat crunched up into a dry, multicoloured breakfast cereal. It leaves no room for struggle, no room for experience, and no room for learning. Barney is a rote memorization tool with no room for independent thought. In fact, I'd venture to say that staring at an apple for an hour every day would have the same effect as watching "Barney & Friends", the Purple Panacea's purportive PBS programme. On the other hand, says the propagand...er, publicity, "Barney & Friends" is every parent's dream; a show that entertains children (nevermind if you don't always understand the simple humor; heaven can be found in simple things) and educates them about useful things at the same time; starring a lovable, non-threatening, good-natured fantasy dinosaur who talks, sings, and dances in every show; along with smiling, courteous children who would be sure to make excellent role models for any child. This program is everything you asked for! Civics, science, manners, and math; numbers and alphabet, animals and seasons -- everything! Therefore, for half an hour each week, your child is slammed with a SPAM fruitcake of prepackaged, ready-to-serve mass-produced and mass-administered infotainment, along with over a million other children (which is a thousand times worse, numerically, than one university's first-year english course, but is comparable to a standardized english curriculum). Your child is watching the intellectual equivalent of Baywatch, only instead of swimsuited/inflated lifeguards, it's children, and instead of learning about love and loyalty to one's fellow human beings, the purpose of swimming restrictions and why you shouldn't go swimming on an empty stomach or when there are sharks around, your child is learning "civics, science, manners, and math". Joy-ee. Through their own admission, the executives at the Lyons Group acknowledge that "Barney & Friends" is a thirty-minute advertisement for toys, books, backpacks, wallpaper, bedding, and lunchboxes. A half-hour of escapism for the toddler set. Why do I say this? Not just because some comfy-chair executive said it, but because I believe it and feel it. "Barney & Friends" is about as good for your child as Froot Loops with 8 essential nutrients, Frosted Flakes with 10, or Chocolate Frosted Sugar Bombs with 19. You may chuckle. Do you feed your kids something that contains seventy-five percent starch and sugar BUT also contains some essential nutrients, like calcium, iron, magnesium, vitamins A, D, and E, the B-complexes, maybe some sodium or phosphorus? If yes, then I suppose it's your right to buy your kids a videocassette that contains seventy-five percent audiovisual placebo and some essential educational tenets like looking both ways when crossing the street, the symbols representing the seasons and holidays, 2+2, and whether or not it's punishment enough to get a stomachache from stealing and eating all the cookies. If you read this far and you aren't angry, friend, then step right in. In the face of a society plagued by crime and corruption, ignorance and hatred, disunity, factionalism and decay, what do we do to survive? Not sit down and watch a purple dinosaur. Too slow, possibly ineffective. It would help to have a truly educational television curriculum, but not one that influences "buy my cereal, buy my toys, love me all you girls and boys". If you want to stop the decay of society, if you want to raise your children to be pioneers with a sense of humanity, you first have to turn off all your electronic communications devices and realise that it's your responsibility to do what you believe is right; not your bank's, not your government's, not your corporation's, not your organisation's, and NOT YOUR TELEVISION'S. Remember the old complaint that television is nothing but brain candy? When you and your child watch TV, you're watching someone else's ideas and bias. Entertainment, sports, drama, even news is biased towards a certain point of view, which is never totally yours. Barney is a symbol, an intangible representation of the Great American Dream; the wish to be great, the dream of being king and queen of your own private empire, everything that today has made our world grand and perilous. Barney is a teacher, a desk clerk, a seer, a bureaucrat, a father, a prime minister, spouting its grand SPAM fruitcake lessons in an attempt to summarize in thirty minutes the infinite complexities of life as a six-year-old knows it. Like going from kindergarten addition straight to multiple-variable calculus in one day. Maybe not so odious, but it's along those lines. So, you still with me? We hate Barney because we believe it lies to our children. We hate Barney because we don't see ourselves mirrored in the white-picket-fence homes, the feculent, sterile school playgrounds, just as we don't perceive windows to our souls in the monolithic blocks of concrete that make up the skyscrapers. We hate Barney because we have an idea of what happens to people who are deceived into living a life that they have not dictated for themselves. And this is where I break with canonical Jihad doctrine, because I, personally, have never been very comfortable within the restraints of doctrine. Back before this group was formed from the grumbling recesses of alt.tv.criticism, the ultimate enemy was the TV writer: the swamis of slap-assed laugh tracks, the princes of pernicious plot twists, the poor souls who have to sit down every week and laboriously drag old jokes to death in the attempt to bring new life to fading concepts. Sitcoms. Made-for-tv movies. Commercials. True art bastardized into a sickening, strained ritual of mile-a-minute jokes, perforated plots, catchphrases, stilted, set-up dialogue, set-up emotions. As TV is a fantasy, regularly shot in small studios where mammoth vistas should be expected, the writing no longer reflects reality. As a result, the "reality" that some poor viewers see is at best merely a fantasy, at worst a momentous lie. I met a kid once who told me that everything on television is the truth. I don't know if he was joking or not, but imagine his life as a free-thinking adult if he was serious...? He'd be open game to any infomercial or marketing scam, to fanatically idolizing a hero who may betray his aspirations as easily as build them. He'd be told what to eat or drink, to say or think; nice life for all the rugged individualists who are just like everybody else! Whenever people peek into someone else's private world, be it through TV, books, periodicals, movies, or reading these words on a computer screen, they are gaining an insight into another person's way of thinking. Often, reading comprehension skills not being tip-top in North America, they immerse themselves...experiencing the fullness of the story, the characters...and, if they're not careful, learning the moral of the story, which they may or may not fully agree with... The writers who script "Barney & Friends" are trained to know what children will understand and appreciate. They take psychology courses in order to write at a first-grade level, using words that a first-grader understands. They are also trained like every other TV writer is: to drag out the longevity of a concept, to compress a complex plot into a twenty-five-minute period by cutting out the development, to compress every idea down to a ten-second span, to work by strict, easy-to-understand cause-and-effect, to believe that the public are idiots and will watch anything if it has an endearing character. To be perfectly blunt, maybe that's what kids are learning from "Barney & Friends": how the television writer, the master of synopsis, views them. Learning to react favourably over and over to the same concept, learning to have a ten-second attention span, learning to think by strict, easy-to-understand cause-and-effect. And maybe, at the very worst, learning to believe that the public are idiots. Oh yes, this is educational programming at its very best, a sign of the times, an innovation, a show that is entertaining, endearing and educational. BUNK. Children deserve more than what this show can give them; a lot more. They deserve to be treated with as much respect as we treat ourselves, not tickled and numbed by a silly dancing dinosaur. Yes, it's nice to hear a child's bubbling laughter, but don't make it automatic, man, that's what I'm saying. Life is beautiful in all its respects, and children deserve to know that. 1970's-vintage Sesame Street taught me that. God bless the Children's Television Workshop; they were giants back then. I really wish I could explain to the people who will be reading this EXACTLY why I feel this way. However, you and I both know that I can't; over a year trolling this newsgroup has taught me that. ;) I can only say that these are conclusions I draw from my experiences with life: I know that life is beautiful in essence, I know that society is getting awfully wierd nowadays, and I think I know a little bit about what makes people tick (what with being one of them). (the audience [you] chuckles) SO! That's what we're all about. Questors, avengers of the downtrodden, protectors of the yadda yadda yadda. We're just about two hundred of the million-or-so people in the world who don't particularly like Barney -- whether we know why or not -- and we've got Internet accounts. Whether or not Barney really IS the demonic incarnation of all hell on earth, we still don't like him. Or rather, it. Care for a mentos? The ThreeFold Truth by The High Prophet (pbuh) 1) Barney is the demonic incarnation of all hell on earth. 2) Barney seeks to make the world his Purple Kingdom, and does so by corrupting the innocent and weak into Sponge Minions. 3) Barney must be destroyed. All else is irrelevant. This message was brought to you by the letters C (Captain Jones, XO Theta Squad, TRES Corps), L (Little Daniel Jones, Corporal, Desponge Division, LoD), and by the number 2 (2nd Consulate Brother DragonFyr of CoStDtA). DISCLAIMER: I like being nice to people! I like smiling! I like learning new things! I like having friends! I like drawing, writing, keeping my body and my mind in shape, expressing myself and finding outlets for my imagination and creativity! I cherish life in all its forms! I like taking a laid-back yet enthusiastic approach to everyday life! AND I still hate Barney! Got it? -- u one five oh oh four seven eight at uottawa dot ca daniel b b jones esq st_dogbert at hotmail dot com curator, doberman pizza univ. of ottawer CS unsolicited commercial email will be eaten and perps will be left flaming I AM NOT ANDY WARHOL! ANYONE WHO EMAILS ME ASKING FOR ANDY WILL BE SHOT!