David Simon's Treme is back for another season on HBO

By R.K. Barry

The 11-episode season two of Treme starts on Sunday, April 24th on HBO. Those of you who had the pleasure of watching season one will know that Treme is a brilliant drama based on life in post-Katrina New Orleans.

Not only does it hit all the hot button issues one would expect like race, the anthropology of a city close to collapse and the politics surrounding efforts to revive her, but it is done with a New Orleans musical soundtrack that is beyond fabulous.

By the way, someone not at all associated with the series went to the trouble of setting up a website to provide information about all the great music featured on the show. You can find that here.

David Simon is the creator of Treme and was also responsible for The Wire, which was another HBO drama with, in this case, each season focused on a different facet of life in Baltimore (the illegal drug trade; the seaport system; city government and bureaucracy; the school system; and the print news media). Another amazing effort, which would appeal to political junkies everywhere.

In fact, both Treme and The Wire are largely political statements about who matters in our society and who does not and how the system conspires to make those distinctions as clear as possible at every turn. Truly brilliant.

As mentioned, in Treme, the music, and the professional life of musicians depicted, is not so much background as another way of telling stories about how people do what they have to do to survive. And then you get to listen to them sing and play -- people like Allen Toussaint and John Boutte.

If you are in a position to watch, I suggest you do.

Here's a clip of the opening scene with theme song and credits from Season 1:

(Cross-posted to Lippmann's Ghost.)

What's Sesame Street in Urdu?

By Michael J.W. Stickings

 
The BBC reports:

The United States is funding a Pakistani remake of the popular TV children's show Sesame Street.

In a new effort to win hearts and minds in Pakistan, USAID - the development arm of the US government - is donating $20m (£12m) to the country to create a local Urdu version of the show.

The project aims to boost education in Pakistan, where many children have no access to regular schooling.

The show is to be filmed in Lahore and aired later in the year.

"The programme is part of a series of ventures that is aimed at developing the educational infrastructure in the country," Virginia Morgan, a spokesperson for USAID, told the BBC.

"Education is one of the vital sectors that need help in Pakistan."

The show will be set in a village in Pakistan - rather than the streets of New York - with roadside tea shop and residents sitting on their verandas.

The remake will star a puppet called Rani, the six-year-old daughter of a peasant farmer, with pigtails and a school uniform, according to Britain's Guardian newspaper.

There are some who have criticized Sesame Street for turning education into entertainment, that is, for making learning a bit too much fun (as if "thought control" and "dark sarcasm" are preferable). There's something to that, I suppose, but the decline of educational standards, and of cultural literacy generally, is hardly the fault of a single TV show, and, personally, I've always loved Sesame Street and found its educational efforts to be genuine and beneficial. (I was even on it. No, not with the Muppets, alas, but on some French-language segments produced for the Canadian version, back when I was a kid.) Besides, compare it to so much of the rest of our culture. It stands out as a model of decency that encourages children to do more than just sit and drool.

There's always a bit of concern when the U.S. government gets involved with spreading "culture," but this seems like a pretty good idea:

In an interview with a local edition of Newsweek, Imraan Peerzada‚ a writer for the new series‚ said the protagonist was a brave and daring girl.

"She will represent what little girls have to go through in this gender-biased society," he said.

He said her journey would inevitably touch on Pakistan's ongoing fight with militancy, but would not directly refer to religion.

"We don't want to label children‚" he said. "The basic learning tools of literacy‚ numeracy‚ hygiene‚ and healthy eating have to be in place first."

A noble goal, to be sure.

(photo)

Beware those who don't heed history's lessons: A review of HBO's Triangle: Remembering the Fire

By Edward Copeland

"People forget the Triangle fire at their peril... If people want to know what deregulated industry would look like, look at the bodies on the sidewalk outside the Triangle building."
Leigh Benin, Adelphi University labor historian

With big corporations seeking to gain more and more power by using bought-and-paid-for politicians to strip away regulations and weaken workers' rights, there couldn't be a better time to look back at the tragedy of the Triangle Shirtwaist Company fire, which killed 146 people 100 years ago March 25 and brought about the reforms and labor movements billionaires and the historically ignorant seek to dismantle today. A well-done and brief primer on the fire and the events leading up to it and its aftermath premieres on HBO tonight. Triangle: Remembering the Fire debuts at 9 p.m. EDT and PDT / 8 p.m. CDT.

For those unfamiliar with the story of the Triangle fire, this 45-minute documentary gives you almost all you need to know about the 100-year-old tragedy and offers lessons needed for today as it seems we risk the rise of a new Gilded Age where tycoons value profits over the safety of their workers and the government at both the state and national level seems to be more-than-willing co-conspirators with its push to deregulate anything and everything. If one wants to look for modern examples of this, they need looks no further than the lack of safety enforcement at various coal mines that have cost many miners their lives, the BP Gulf disaster which killed their own workers and destroyed an ecosystem and the "fracking" techniques used in the search for natural gas that has been linked to poisoned water sources, cancer deaths and possibly even earthquakes, all of which exploration companies were exempted from environmental laws under the Bush Administration. This doesn't even take into account how the blind eye of regulators allowed financial speculators to cause the biggest financial crisis since the Great Depression and a housing bubble that sparked a foreclosure debacle. Just last week, both parties in Congress, led by Sen. Jon Tester, D-Mont., all still doing the bidding of the big banks, sought to delay the huge fees the banks collect on debit card transactions for another two years, weakening already toothless financial reform legislation. Obama's Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner also is rumored to further water down the reform by exempting currency derivatives from transparency requirements in the legislation. Yes, government of the corporations, by the corporations and for the corporations shall not perish from the United States it seems.

In 1911, out of the ashes of the tragedy of the Triangle fire came reforms for workers, first in the state of New York, that laid the groundwork for FDR's New Deal when he became president 22 years later, reforms that politicians backed by rich businessmen seek to dismantle today as we've seen in states such as Wisconsin, Michigan and Ohio with more on the way.

Tovah Feldshuh narrates Triangle: Remembering the Fire and her calm voice serves perfectly as an invisible teacher. The Triangle Waistshirt Company was one of many businesses associated with the garment industry in the early part of the 20th century in New York. Co-owners Max Blanck and Isaac Harris had hit upon a new trend in ladies' fashion: basically, the blouse. For the first time, women were wearing separate tops just as men did. It made them rich and their company occupied the top three floors of one of downtown Manhattan's newest skyscrapers, the 10-story Asch Building at the corner of Washington Place and Greene Street. The building, now known as the Brown Building and part of the NYU campus, still stands and has been registered a National Historic Landmark and a New York City landmark.

With the huge demand for their product, the Triangle company workers tended to be on the job seven days a week for long hours and little pay and the people willing to be exploited this way did so because they had no other choice. They tended to be newly arrived European immigrants who had been fleeing famine and persecution. Not only did they not find the American dream in their work situation, most could only find living arrangements in tenements on the lower eastside. In the case of the garment industry, most of these virtual slaves were women, especially young women, some not even teenagers yet. To get as much production going as possible, the ninth floor of the Asch Building had been stacked to capacity with 300 sewing machines, leaving barely any elbow room for the workers inside. About a year and a half before the Triangle fire in November 1909, The International Ladies Garment Union Workers Union staged a massive strike demanding better working conditions for women. The 20,000 female strikers who took to the streets was unprecedented — and this was taking place more than a decade before women had the right to vote in the United States. It really was the first head-on clash between the tycoons of The Gilded Age and their corrupt political minions ensconced in Tammany Hall and the growing progressive movement. The strikers may have been women, but it didn't prevent Tammany from sending out police and hired thugs to arrest them and get rough. By the time the strike ended, the workers at Triangle returned to their sewing machines without any union recognition.

As we see today when the gap between what company CEOs make and the wages given to their average workers have reached startling disparities, similar differences existed at the time between company owners and the average Americans. For example, Triangle co-owner Max Blanck surrounded himself with servants and spent more than $100,000 to renovate his home, quite a contrast when the average American in 1911 only made $300 to $600 a year. Yet Blanck and other company heads didn't want to spring for the readily available sprinkler systems for new buildings or follow the recommendation of New York Fire Chief Ed Croker who, after a similarly tragic fire at a Newark, N.J., factory a mere four months before the Triangle fire had killed 25 workers, again mostly women, had suggested that buildings routinely practice fire drills. Company owners, always focusing on the bottom line, felt drills would affect work productivity and since no government regulations existed to enforce the sprinklers or the drills, they had no one twisting their arms to do the right thing.

What's so compelling about Triangle: Remembering the Fire is not just recounting all that missteps that led to the tragedy and can anger you a century later even when the event occurred long before you were born, but also the interviews with people related to both survivors and victims of the blaze. The filmmakers interview Suzanne Pred Bass who had two great-aunts who were in the fire, one who survived, one who didn't, presumably because they lost sight of each other in the smoke that quickly enveloped the ninth floor.

The cause of the fire has never been clear, but most believe a still-burning cigarette tossed into a trash can on the eighth floor quickly consumed the three floors. The switchboard operator on eight notified the 10th floor and the fire department immediately but in her haste, forgot to tell the ninth floor. Though the documentary doesn't confirm it as fact or legend, the story goes that of the two fire escapes on the ninth floor, they kept one locked so that when workers left for the day, they could be searched to make certain that they weren't stealing anything. Those who did survive from the ninth did so thanks to the heroics of elevator operator Joseph Zito who kept overloading his vehicle to get as many out as he could until it finally collapsed under the weight of the panicked who leaped down the elevator shaft to escape the flames. Most of the people on 10 were able to flee thanks to people in a neighboring building who got ladders across the space between the two buildings. Even though the fire department arrived two minutes after receiving the call, once they got to the Asch Building, the ladder trucks only reached to the sixth floor. Many of those who died were killed jumping to their deaths. At first, some bystanders thought they were tossing bundles of clothes out the windows to save them until they spotted the legs, arms and faces beneath them. Some hit the pavement so hard they crashed through glass plates on the sidewalk. In all, 146 died, 129 women and girls and 17 men. The blaze consumed all three floors in just 18 minutes from the time the blaze started and that 18 minute mark was when the last body hit the ground. Of the 146 deaths, 90 leaped to escape the flames.

The horror of what happened led Al Smith, a Democrat thick in Tammany Hall politics who would later lose the presidency to Herbert Hoover, to shake off the cronyism and lead the fight for reforms. New York led the way for proper workweeks and pay and, most importantly, safety conditions for its citizens. It even began to set up a pension system for those too old to work any longer, all ideas that Franklin Roosevelt would bring nationwide in the New Deal. The tragedy showed the need for strong unions and for the government to be for the people, not the corporations, and it is frightening to see the backpedaling that is happening today. Blanck and Harris eventually did face criminal charges for the deaths of their workers, but they were acquitted by an all-male jury and since they had lots of insurance, the fire didn't do much damage to them at all. Because many of the bodies were charred so badly, six couldn't be positively identified but in a separate feature, Triangle: The Unidentified, available only on HBO OnDemand, co-producer and historian Michael Hirsch uses research and genealogical techniques unavailable 100 years ago to give names for the first time to those resting in a mass grave in the Evergreen Cemetery in Brooklyn so now when the names of the dead are ready every year, those unidentified six can now join the other 140.

Triangle: Remembering the Fire premieres tonight at 9 p.m. EDT and PDT / 8 p.m CDT. You owe it to yourself to watch.

Top Ten Cloves ... Charlie Sheen is so winning that...

By J. Thomas Duffy

News Item: Charlie Sheen: As American as Apple Pie

10. The tsunami that hit Japan asked his permission first

9. He gave LeGone James the talents to take to South Beach

8. When he goes on Twitter, system gives him as many characters as he wants

7. The protesters didn't push Hosni Mubarak out of office, a simple, short-and-sweet phone call from Charlie did it

6. He gets full-functionality, 4G iPhone service with just two Dixie cups and a string

5. He's the only person Keyser Söze fears

4. When he goes swimming in the ocean, sharks can only smell winning in the water and leave Charlie alone

3. Spilled milk cries, but only if it's Charlie who spilled it

2. He gives ice cream  brain-freeze headaches

1. He can get Superman to deliver Kryptonite

Nathan Heller: He may be winning, but we're losing.

Ken Baker and Brandi Fowler: Charlie Sheen's "Violent Torpedo of Truth" Targets America and Beyond

Steve Greenlee: Charlie Sheen: Live in Boston

Charlie Sheen’s ‘Winning’ T-Shirts

(Cross-posted at The Garlic.)

"I'll take boring for $500, Alex"

By J. Thomas Duffy

I've been on the DL the past few days and didn't have a chance to weigh in on the -- if you want to believe the Technology Geeks -- the greatest event since sliced bread, that being the Jeopardy - IBM Watson Computer hose job.

So now I am...

BORING!!!!!!

One night would have been more than enough, but they dragged this thing out over three nights.

And the annoying graphic, showing the three most-likely answers the computer is considering...

BORING!!!!!!

But the Tech Geeks all got woodies, as evidenced by the L.A. Times tech blog:

After a "Jeopardy" viewing party at USC's Gateway Pass dormitory Tuesday for the second episode of the man vs. machine match with $1 million at stake, USC research associate professor Eduard Hovy spoke with the Technology Blog about the successor to Watson, which may or may not make future TV appearances. The viewing was hosted by IBM and USC's Information Sciences Institute and School of Cinematic Arts.

"USC didn't have a direct role in Watson -- no other institution did," Hovy said. "Now we're working with IBM, and with others, to build the successor to Watson, a new program that does deeper reasoning and inference and intelligent sort of question-answering -- and the system is called Racr."

[snip]

So we asked the computer scientist the question that has been burning for many of the Technology Blog's readers and commenters -- are Watson and Racr steps toward the doomsday scenario of Skynet in the "Terminator" films, or will this lead to computers that make our lives better and potentially lazier such as in "The Jetsons"?

"I think if you're afraid of technology this is the path to Skynet," Hovy said. "But if you look and you say, 'You know, technology is there to serve us and it makes our world better. It's better to have a motorcar than a horse carriage. And it's better to have a computer and run your banking affairs than no computer and doing everything very slowly through humans and so on. It's better to have an ATM machine than having to stand in line' -- I think this is a big advance for us."

Advances for the greater good of humanity, sure...

One gigantic, three-night infomercial for IBM, spare us.

And in the "How-Gullible-Do-They-Think-We-Are" Department, while is was viewed as an error, Watson blowing a Final Jeopardy question question, I think was a sandbag, a "let the human win one" and that the computer (or its programmers) tanked it:

To the credit of IBM engineers, Watson almost always did know the right answer. Still, there were a few bloopers, such as the final Jeopardy question from yesterday (paraphrasing): "This city has two airports, one named after a World War II hero, and the other named after a World War II battle." Watson's guess, "Toronto", was just laughably bad -- Lester Pearson and Billy Bishop fought in World War I, and neither person is a battle. The right answer, "Chicago", was pretty obvious, but apparently Watson couldn't connect Midway or O'Hare with WW II.

Give me an f'ing break!

One of the panelists on yesterday's NPR radio program, Wait Wait... Don't Tell Me offered that, when the day comes that computers start hunting us down, we should all go to Chicago, as the safest city, since Watson will be sending them to Toronto.

Ken Jennings, the formidable Jeopardy champ, offered in his piece "My Puny Human Brain":

Indeed, playing against Watson turned out to be a lot like any other Jeopardy! game, though out of the corner of my eye I could see that the middle player had a plasma screen for a face. Watson has lots in common with a top-ranked human Jeopardy! player: It's very smart, very fast, speaks in an uneven monotone, and has never known the touch of a woman. But unlike us, Watson cannot be intimidated. It never gets cocky or discouraged. It plays its game coldly, implacably, always offering a perfectly timed buzz when it's confident about an answer. Jeopardy! devotees know that buzzer skill is crucial—games between humans are more often won by the fastest thumb than the fastest brain. This advantage is only magnified when one of the "thumbs" is an electromagnetic solenoid trigged by a microsecond-precise jolt of current. I knew it would take some lucky breaks to keep up with the computer, since it couldn't be beaten on speed.

Adrian Chen at Gawker, also not impressed, had some fun with it:

Now that computers are better than humans at Jeopardy, we must quickly replace all human contestants on Jeopardy with computers. It should just be computer-vs.-computer. Maybe a special episode could be a Blackberry duking it out with an iPhone. This will free humans with freakish trivia minds from having to spend thankless hours preparing for and appearing on Jeopardy. They'll be able to use their talents in more fulfilling ways, like impressing women at parties, or helping to build even more advanced Jeopardy-playing computers.

Why stop there? IBM's next task should be developing a Jeopardy-hosting computer. (That is, if Alex Trebek isn't already a computer; it's hard to tell sometimes.)

[snip]

Next, IBM AI scientists should develop Jeopardy-watching computers to replace human Jeopardy fans. This should be easy, as it will essentially be a dumber version of the Jeopardy-playing computer, disinterestedly calling out answers that are mostly wrong.

[snip]

If IBM is successful, we may some day look back in horror at the days when humans were involved at all in the thankless tasks associated with producing and consuming game shows. This will be a good day.

What I don't fear is more computers on Jeopardy!.

We should groan at Jeopardy!'s greed, in whoring itself out to IBM for three days, and it'll do it again.

What say the Florida Citrus Organization decides to pony up millions of dollars so that Jennings, or some other champion, can stand next to a giant orange smiley face squeezing out the questions to Jeopardy!'s answers?

Oh wait... wait...

Even better, Budweiser pays millions to get, what else, "The King of Beers" to take on other breweries, placing the classic tall brown bottle in the middle against its competitors, hauling in even more millions for Jeopardy!.

Maybe make that one competitor, with the third player being SNL's Sean Connery-on-Jeopardy character, to torture Alex Trebek.

Bonus Riffs

They've Got To Give It HAL's Voice!

(Cross-posted at The Garlic.)