Stupid updates

[prog]

This is the Youtube thing I was talking about. It is not the related-videos postroll that they've been doing for years, and which at least three people seem to think I was referring to.

Regarding the Fahrenheit article: one of the weenies kept reverting my changes and making comments like "Bradbury wrote the book; he knows what it's about". My crankiness about this is quelled by the fact that one of the people whose text I first changed has taken my side in the talk page, and did a reasonable job striking a happy medium in the article.

If I cared more I'd go find references to Bradbury's earlier, conflicting comments and add them to the article's head, which currently implies that he's always held the interpretation he does now. But generally when I find myself getting angry with a non-core project like this it's time to walk away.

Comments

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

Getting back to what kahuna_burger said earlier, I agree that the theme of what mass entertainment media can do to people's heads has always been a theme of the book; I remember particularly responding to that when I first read Fahrenheit 451 in high school: my God, he's talking about the Walkman and MTV! And a lot of people flashed back to the book when they saw the all-network helicopter shots of O. J. Simpson fleeing in his white Bronco.

So that's an important theme. But the fact remains that Bradbury's also talking about a world in which government-sanctioned firemen burn books in the name of state stability, and I wonder if his current deemphasis of that has something to do with his enthusiastic advocacy of an American leader who asserts essentially unfettered executive power in the name of national security.

[bad-machination.livejournal.com]

Wikipedia; internet highschool!