From the BBC:

Police in the US state of New Jersey have ordered a family to cover up their snow sculpture of the famous nude Venus de Milo after a neighbour complained.

Eliza Gonzalez sculpted the snow-woman with her son and daughter on her front lawn in Rahway following a snowstorm.

It may be decent, but is it art?

Leo Tolstoy in his later years was taken to see a film by a friend. His response was, “why would anyone watch such rubbish?”

Malcolm Muggeridge, after a lifetime of making his living from television, retreated to a small English village and had his television aerial removed. I met him in the early 1980s and mentioned how much I enjoyed his writing. He said that that was music to his ears; I doubt he would have responded similarly had I said how much I enjoyed his TV appearances.

Theodore Dalrymple isn’t swayed favourably by the pernicious twaddle that emanates from the electronic purveyor of mental pollution either:

Shortly before Mr Blair was elected Prime Minister of Great Britain, a newspaper discovered that I had not had a television in my home for about thirty years. This struck the editor of the newspaper as an extraordinary circumstance; so extraordinary in fact, rather like having been an anchorite in the Syrian desert subsisting on locusts and honey, that he contacted me to ask whether I would agree to having a television installed in my home so that I could tell readers, after a week of watching it, what I thought of it. This I consented to do on one very firm condition: that the newspaper took the television away at the end of the week. The newspaper agreed.

When the television arrived, I plugged it in and turned it on. The picture was grainy, for something else was required, evidently, to have a good reception. But it was good enough to know what was going on.

The programme was one of those in which a degraded family, or perhaps I should say a group of human beings who have lived in close association for some time or other, airs its appalling behaviour in public in return, I should imagine, for money, and for the prurient delectation of a voyeuristic audience.

A fattish woman approaching middle age was complaining in a monotonously high-pitched voice, halfway between a harangue and a wail, about her three daughters who were aged twelve, thirteen and fourteen respectively. According to her, they ‘did drugs’ and had left home to be prostitutes.

At this point, the presenter of the show interrupted her and asked the audience to give a warm welcome – with, of course, a round of applause – to the three young trollops in question, who came tripping down the steps to the television set with smirks of self-satisfaction on their faces. No lack of self-esteem there, I thought; rather too much, in fact.

Of course, mother and daughters began at once to trade high-pitched insults and accusations, and generally behaved like a dog and a cat enclosed in a sack. There was undoubtedly a morbid fascination in all this, though the spectacle was disgusting; suffice it to say that I was not encouraged by it to take steps to ensure that the television had a permanent presence in my home.

The newspaper had given me a timetable of programmes to watch, though it did not inform me as to the criterion it had used in their selection. Whether what my wife – who likewise had had no exposure to television for years before I met her – and I watched was better or worse than the average that was on offer to viewers, we could not say; but it seemed terrible pabulum to us, having approximately the same effect on our consciousness as a food-mixer on vegetables. It turned it into a kind of soup.

Malcolm Muggeridge used to say, “the camera always lies”. His denunciation was frequently made while holding forth in front of a camera – he seemed to enjoy sawing off the branch on which he was perched. According to Muggeridge the camera was a perfect example of what William Blake meant when he wrote:

They ever must believe a lie
Who see with, not through, the eye.

I wonder what he would have made of Youtube; he probably would have hated it.

Like much of the Internet, Youtube has given the common man a means to express himself, wresting it away from the grasp of the elite – who generally are inclined to overindulge man’s natural tendency to lie. This isn’t such a bad thing: with 10 hours of video being uploaded every second, the lies will tend to cancel each other out.

From the Post:

YouTube at five: how its videos became our collective memory.

Chances are, we never would have heard of Susan Boyle without YouTube.

If the frumpy Scottish songstress had blown away a skeptical audience with her rendition of “I Dreamed a Dream” in April of 2004 rather than April of 2009, no one except those who were watching Britain’s Got Talent on television that evening would know the name Susan Boyle. The more than 120 million people around the world who watched Ms. Boyle’s television debut would likely never have seen the rags-to-riches story.

That’s because five years ago, YouTube didn’t exist.

While it’s hard to imagine a world without YouTube, it was just five years ago last Saturday that a trio of ex-PayPal employees joined forces to register a Web address which would eventually become a site where anyone could post videos to the Internet.

A few months later, the first video, “Me at the Zoo,” was uploaded to YouTube’s servers, kicking off a revolution that would fundamentally change the role video and the Web play in our culture, altering our collective consciousness and helping millions of people understand obscure references from The Simpsons.

Today, YouTube is the world’s largest repository for video clips on the Internet, with a mind-boggling 10 hours of new video uploaded to the site every second and more than 100 million videos watched every day. It is now physically impossible for any human being to watch every video on YouTube in the span of a single lifetime.

I took my mother to see Titanic when it came out. As soon as the first actor spoke, I knew it was a mistake: my mother at the time was in her late 70s, but her mind was – I was going to say the equal of a 20 year old’s – when idling, the equal of the combined mental capacity of fifteen average 20 year olds concentrating hard. She liked her films to contain interesting dialogue, a commodity that had been thoroughly expunged from Titanic.

So my expectations from James Cameron’s latest attempt to turn the graphics backdrop of Far Cry 2 into a film were low. I watched it this evening and was not disappointed; my mother, were she still with us, would not have approved.

Leaving aside the inevitable demonising of the military, large corporations and industry, the lionising of noble savages in ecstatic pantheistic harmony with their computer game vegetation – all of which are irritating enough in their own right – the dialogue was so mind-numbingly trite, it make Titanic look like Proust.

For those who are interested and want to save 3 hours, the story is: nasty men want a rare mineral that is under the noble savages’ village. Nasty men try to kill noble savages to get rare mineral; some enlightened scientists and a crippled soldier help the noble savages drive out the evil humans with bows and arrows and send them back to their own planet which is not green; in fact Gaia earth is dead. Finis.

And it was very long.

Other than that, I enjoyed it from the professional perspective of marvelling at how many hours it took to render so many pixels for so little edification.