Why Did We Care About Balloon Boy?

Last Thursday, the nation sat captivated as a silver object floated through the Colorado sky, supposedly carrying a 6-year-old boy as its passenger. Authorities couldn't figure out a way to free the boy from his shiny cage, so they sat helpless on the ground, waiting for the balloon to fall and hoping the boy would survive.

Once the balloon came down, though, it proved to be empty and the search began anew, as police believed that the boy had fallen out at some point during his flight. It was, therefore, much to the relief (and now anger) of everyone when Falcon Henne was found hiding in a box in his family's attic's garage the entire time.

The story wasn't one that we should have cared about, though, during a time when developments overseas could affect foreign policy, health care legislation is still developing and the economy is just beginning to peek out from the blanket of recession. So why has this story dominated our news cycles all weekend?

The answer is actually fairly simple. Originally, the story seemed interesting because a small child was in danger in large part due to the fact that his family was building an absurd-looking aircraft. Children in danger always capture the interest of the public, but we are even more fascinated by UFOs and crazy inventors than we are by kids. This story, therefore, was a huge story waiting to happen.

Then, once the story proved hoax-y and had a "happy ending," America began to wonder how it had been fooled, going from interested to angry. The United States is a country fascinated by news and by news cycles, so when something fools us as bad as this story did, we immediately want to know how and why it got past us. The next week or so will be followed by allegations and denials, but, ultimately, this story will be completely unimportant, just like it was from the very beginning.

Why Sunday Night Football is more important than Monday Night Football

When ESPN took the vaunted Monday Night Football franchise away from ABC four years ago, the sports giant assumed that the weekly games would maintain their dominance on the sporting landscape. Once that move was made, however, NBC instantly snatched up the floundering Sunday Night game that ESPN had relinquished and, ever since, the two franchises' roles on the weekly football landscape have been reversed.

There are several reasons for this, with the topmost being that NBC is a network while ESPN is on cable. America still has some subconscious discomfort with cable dating back to the days when ABC, CBS, and NBC were the only networks on the air. These are the networks that our parents' generation is most comfortable with despite the innovation of cable. For instance, when considering the new season's TV shows, the networks that receive the most attention are ABC, CBS, FOX, and NBC, with cable shows receiving a lesser degree of attention. This has changed a bit in recent years, but that has more to do with the cable generation coming of age than anything else.

The other reason that NBC is more interesting is the presentation. To put it mildly, NBC's presentation is just sexier and stronger than ESPN's. NBC has put together the strongest announcing booth in the game, with Cris Collinsworth and Al Michaels serving as the only team worth listening to right now. ESPN, however, has failed to find the proper chemistry in the booth, experimenting with people like Tony Kornheiser that just seem uncomfortable. ESPN may be a sports conglomerate, but NBC is a media conglomerate and can afford an overall sleeker presentation.

The final reason that NBC is stronger than ESPN is the flex schedule that Dick Ebersol ingeniously insisted on working into the contract. With the plan, NBC has a game that it schedules in the beginning of the year and then, 12 days before the game, the NFL and NBC can change the game that has been selected for the game of the week in order to stir up interest. ESPN, though, doesn't have this power. For this reason, ESPN is going to be stuck with games like the Giants at Washington in week 16, Arizona at San Francisco in week 14 (even though these teams are bad, it may matter in their division race), Tennessee and Houston in week 11, and Baltimore at Cleveland in week 10. There are restrictions on the games that NBC can pick, but instead of being stuck with games that don't matter, NBC can pick the game that matters the most.

Football will always do well in America, but right now NBC has managed to make the NFL an all-day Sunday thing (take today, for instance, when 1 o'clock featured a Saints-Giants and Ravens-Vikings matchup while 4 o'clock featured an excellent Bills-Jets game and the Sunday game featured a scintillating Bears-Falcons game), while Monday Night Football has lost some power since moving to ESPN.

Miley says goodbye

Miley Cyrus has decided that having a Twitter isn't worth it anymore and, in lieu of simply saying bye, the teenage superstar decided to instead go viral with this video:



Despite the obvious production value behind this clip, it does demonstrate something important about using the Internet: It no longer belongs to the technorati. Instead, stars are capable of turning to the Internet to further their own agenda, thereby spurning the view of the Internet as some kind of wild, wild west that belongs to the margin of society.

Someone like Cyrus can get fed up with the realities of the Internet and, instead of taking herself offline entirely, simply turn to a different element of the Web to make her point. By doing this, Cyrus is demonstrates both the strengths and the weaknesses of the Internet. She was able to delete her account entirely, simply wiping herself off of the map and effectively editing the past.

Those self-edits were, however, recorded for all posterity by the countless members of the media who were following the story. If Cyrus had been a more normal citizen, she would be able to self-edit herself even more easily than she was able to.

Cyrus, however, demonstrated the various uses of the Internet by producing an unfortunately not self-parodying rap video that comes off as more of a juvenile prank than something of actual value. The importance of it, though, resides in the idea that Cyrus was capable of deleting her Twitter and then creating an immediate, accessible response to the people who are concerned about why or who would attempt to criticize her.

Miley Cyrus is still a very small chip on the cultural mosaic, but her use of the Internet's various outlets demonstrates a valuable understanding of the modern media landscape.

Should children's classics be made into films?

It seems as if Hollywood is running out of original source material and, in a desperate effort to regenerate interest in non-Pixer blockbuster films, is turning to the one genre that people of all ages could enjoy: the children's classics.

Perennial favorites such as Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs, Where the Wild Things Are, and The Fantastic Mr. Fox have either all been made into or are in the process of being made into feature films, and this may indicate a disturbing future for these stories.

Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs is the first one of the three to have come out and, considering that it was not only my favorite as a child but that it's a claymation film, I am not interested in seeing it. I recall Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs as an unintentionally dark tale of greed and unintended consequences, but the film has turned it into a fun romp featuring actors like Mr. T and Anna Faris. Furthermore, the film suffers from not being live action. Much of the draw of making the classic children's book into a movie would be showing the massive pancakes slowly floating over the town like suffering zeppelins or showing boulder-sized meatballs forcing families inside by landing violently in front yards.

Maybe this would make the story a bit too dark, but it would certainly make the world hunger subplot more prescient than the silly and outdated claymation style does.

The Fantastic Mr. Fox will also suffer from this, but hopefully the Wes Anderson-written script will protect the aesthetic of the Roald Dahl novel without sacrificing any of the book's relatability. One thing that I am worried about, particularly with this film, is Hollywood's effect on the film. Dahl, who also wrote Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and its much darker sequel, Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator, didn't write time-wasting dialogue into his novels. Instead, he wrote frank and clear conversation that advanced the plot. Having playful, wasteful conversation would completely ruin the story, and Anderson must be aware of that.

Ironically, at least for me, Where the Wild Things Are could be the most successful and accurate of the movies, actually adding to the value of its source material as opposed to detracting from it. As a child, I never enjoyed Maurice Sendak's novel. Something about the large, furry creatures just seemed odd to me, maybe because I was freaked out by them or maybe because I didn't quite understand just why they were there. Unlike the other two films, though, Where the Wild Things Are is live-action, giving it the benefit of added believability (and, therefore, added meaning) when compared to its two brethren.

I'm not sure that the Spike Jonze adaptation will be the gift to film that some seem to think it will be, but out of these three films it certainly seems like it will be the most entertaining and potentially important. The goal of any adaptation should be not only to do justice to the original story, but also to give it additional meaning and to open the story to new audiences. Unfortunately, only one of these films seems guaranteed to succeed on that goal.

Letterman apology fascinating, terrifying

If you haven't seen it yet, David Letterman's nerve-racking 10-minute apology at least provides for enthralling television. Part of the reason for this is certainly that Letterman gave America something that it doesn't see from its celebrities very often - complete and total honesty on a national stage. Before I go into the matter any more, check out the video:



What is perhaps most striking about the clip is the audience's reaction. They start the clip by laughing along with Letterman, expecting this to be a prototypical late-night monologue from a man who has established himself as one of the snarkiest commentators of the late night scene. Around halfway through, however, they suddenly realize that Letterman is not kidding, at all.

We as a culture have become so used to our celebrities being little more than glorified goldfish parading down runways in designer clothing that when one of them takes the step of exposing his own flaws before the media can do it, the step seems nearly unprecedented.

The Internet plays a major role in this, as we all seem to know everything about anyone. Once the tentacles of gossip and rumors extend into very private details like they did Thursday, they acquire a degree of menace that is absent from People Magazine and E!

Letterman took what could have been the scariest moment of his life and, by stepping up and addressing it on his own terms, managed to turn it into one of the most positive moments of his public life.

Roman Polanski isn't worth it

Hollywood has undoubtedly produced some of the most important pieces of art of the last 100 years, but directors like Martin Scorcese and Woody Allen should keep their opinions about Roman Polanski's arrest in Sweden last week and potential extradition to the United States for raping a 13-year-old girl 32 years ago to themselves.

Polanski may have directed some very important movies, including Chinatown and The Pianist. But Michael Vick being very good at football didn't mean he was above going to prison and, last I checked, drugging and raping a 13-year-old girl was a more heinous crime against humanity than dogfighting. Being good at something does not preclude anyone from being subject to the law.

And for those who argue that being kept out of the United States for 32 years should be punish enough for Polanski, imagine if it had been someone you love who had been drugged, given champagne and raped by the director. Would you still be protecting him?

The defense for Polanski is shocking, as the 32 years between the rape and Polanski's most recent arrest don't mean that the rape didn't happen. If anything, those years only reinforce the perception that Polanski was running from a crime that he had already pleaded guilty to committing.

If anything, that proves that he is a coward and an even more despicable human being than he had already proven himself to be.

For more on this subject, check out what Kate Harding said on Salon.com or what Kate Dailey wrote for Newsweek.

Fox's Glee deserves rave reviews

When the pilot episode of Glee aired last spring, Fox essentially guaranteed that it would be one of the smashing successes of this season's new TV shows. With Dancing With the Stars, High School Musical, American Idol and various other shows performing well in recent years, the stage has quickly become an automatic hit when it is transferred to the small screen.

The reasons for this could be argued forever, but the most simple reason is just that theatrical productions (and shows about them) seem to be more fun, something that the country hasn't been in recent years. The carefree attitude of the performers is the direct opposite of the frantic reaction to the economy by professionals throughout the land.

Glee succeeds, however, precisely because it allows the kids to shine as performers even though they all have their own set of issues that they bring to rehearsals with them. (The fact that they did one of the best versions of perennial cover-bait "Don't Stop Believing" might help, too.) The tangled plot lines are beginning to become confusing, as pregnancies, affairs, coming out and other typical teenage drama are explored, but when the lights go down, the characters all manage to excel.

The show's decision to open this week's episode with a performance of Beyonce's "Put a Ring on It" was an excellent one, as it emphasized that the show really was about these people being performers, not the performers trying to be people. When Kurt's dad comes in to find his son in a leotard, however, the fun quickly stops and lying begins, at least until Kurt performs on what his dad considers the most important stage - the football field, giving him the confidence to tell his father the truth.

Glee's over-produced set (everything looks a little bit fake) aids the show's message, as it refuses to take itself too seriously and, in turn, doesn't let viewers become caught up in all of its drama. And really, that's the message of Glee - that drama and issues do happen, but that the most important thing will always be performing when it counts.