{"id":158,"date":"2009-12-26T22:56:17","date_gmt":"2009-12-26T22:56:17","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/fatsquirrel.org\/bologs\/vng\/a-quick-rant\/"},"modified":"2009-12-26T22:56:17","modified_gmt":"2009-12-26T22:56:17","slug":"a-quick-rant","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/fatsquirrel.org\/oldfartsalmanac\/a-quick-rant\/","title":{"rendered":"A Quick Rant"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Here is a simple example of something that highlights some substantial flaws in American culture. <\/p>\n<p>Generally speaking, I don&#8217;t watch much TV over here because of the outrageous number of commercials. I just can&#8217;t bear it. But today, I noticed that the SyFy channel (formally &#8220;Sci-Fi&#8221;) was going to show the first &#8220;Saw&#8221; film at 4:30 in the afternoon. I don&#8217;t like horror films, especially nasty ones but I wanted to see it out of a morbid curiosity. <\/p>\n<p>So I flicked over to SyFy to be confronted by a woman repeatedly stabbing a burned corpse in the face. It&#8217;s 4:25pm. This is the end of the movie &#8220;Autopsy&#8221;. Cut to a 7 minutute commercial break. Back to Autopsy. A two minute scene, bypassing the credits into a &#8220;viewer discretion warning&#8221;: &#8220;parental discretion is advised&#8221;. Yeah well it&#8217;s R rated so I imagine it would be.<\/p>\n<p>After around 40 minutes of movie, and about 20 minutes of jocular Christmas commercials, we witness:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>A man cutting himself to death escaping from a razor-wire mesh.<\/li>\n<li>A woman with a steel contraption attached to her head that would rip her mouth open 180 degrees if she doesn&#8217;t find the key in one minute.<\/li>\n<li>The woman extracting the key from the stomach of a drugged up guy in the same room, with a big knife.<\/li>\n<li>A naked man, covered in flammable paint trying to find the combination to a safe in the middle of a floor covered in broken glass.<\/li>\n<li>The violent kidnap of a mother and daughter where the kidnapper listens to the heart rate of the child while he waves a gun at the mother.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Yeah, maybe some parental discretion would be prudent, especially at 5pm. <\/p>\n<p>But there&#8217;s saving grace in all of this. OK, the scenes may contain some potentially disturbing material, especially for faggy liberals, but the word &#8220;shit&#8221; was blanked when the soon-to-kidnapped mother said the word &#8220;bullshit&#8221;. From past experience I also know that any immoral nudity and sex will be removed too. So in fact it&#8217;s all a bit of harmless fun for the kids after all! <\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;m going back to the family Christmas entertainment now; some bloke&#8217;s about to have two electric drills driven into his skull.<\/p>\n<p>[an explanation for the ironically challenged: I have no problem with gruesome films any more than I do with roller-coasters. Some people like them, fine, I don&#8217;t. Enjoy. But I do have a problem with them being shown in the name of science fiction. I also have a problem with them being shown at 4pm. But the biggest problem I have is that what&#8217;s considered dangerous and immoral is not the brutal violence, but some arbitrary words like &#8220;shit&#8221;, &#8220;fuck&#8221; and &#8220;cunt&#8221;, and even implications of sexuality.]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Here is a simple example of something that highlights some substantial flaws in American culture. Generally speaking, I don&#8217;t watch much TV over here because of the outrageous number of commercials. I just can&#8217;t bear it. But today, I noticed that the SyFy channel (formally &#8220;Sci-Fi&#8221;) was going to show the first &#8220;Saw&#8221; film at [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-158","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/fatsquirrel.org\/oldfartsalmanac\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/158","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/fatsquirrel.org\/oldfartsalmanac\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/fatsquirrel.org\/oldfartsalmanac\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fatsquirrel.org\/oldfartsalmanac\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fatsquirrel.org\/oldfartsalmanac\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=158"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/fatsquirrel.org\/oldfartsalmanac\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/158\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/fatsquirrel.org\/oldfartsalmanac\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=158"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fatsquirrel.org\/oldfartsalmanac\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=158"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fatsquirrel.org\/oldfartsalmanac\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=158"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}