Re: Jasper not the first Nursery Crime Writer?
Posted by:
Magda (---.med.umich.edu)
Date: July 08, 2003 04:02PM
Sadly enough, I'm told that American test audiences for "The Madness of King George III" actually did come out and say they enjoyed the movie, but thought they would have gotten more out of it if they'd seen the first two. Sigh. Sometimes being an American is embarassing.
What's truly depressing is watching the "Jaywalking" segments on The Tonight Show with Jay Leno. He goes out on the streets asking people (mostly younger than me) questions about history and current events, and airs the most ludicrous answers.
For example, did you know that Pearl Harbor was attacked by China in 1967? And I've got a mental block on when someone claimed Columbus 'discovered' America, but I believe it was some time after the American Revolution, and possibly even after the American Civil War.
From someone elses webpage:
Last week, Leno’s crew went to the University of New Mexico, where one student said the French Revolution was fought in England. Another knew that former Vice President Dan Quayle couldn't spell “potato,” but couldn’t spell the word either. Someone thought Sandra Day O’Connor was the first woman in space, while someone else thought she was the first woman to swim the English Channel (she is, in fact, the first female supreme court justice).
And from another page:
the feature where Leno goes out onto the street, in Burbank or on a college campus, and asks passersby elementary questions about history, government, and geography.
Invariably, people give answers indicating substantial ignorance about how the world works, who did, what, and why things are the way they are.
The Civil War was fought in the 17th century. Rudy Giuliani invented the radio. The Mayflower Compact had something to do with a moving van.
In this video village, everyone's the village idiot.
The segment is fun to watch in a bone-chilling sort of way, what with these people constituting a part of the electorate, and our economic fate turning on their ability to compete with the well-schooled populations of China, Germany, and India.
Part of the fun is the role Jay plays through it all, that of a responsible, erudite citizen, one who, along with the viewing audience, knows all the answers, because, come on, they are so fundamental. So the joke is between Jay and us, nodding at the stupidity of the people who step up to the microphone, and seem so unapologetic about their stupidity as they try to explain what continent Canada is on.
And from yet another page:
Jay Leno went Jaywalking during a now archived "Tonight Show" and asked an ordinary woman on the street if she knew how it happened that the faces of four of our greatest presidents were on the side of Mount Rushmore.
The unassuming woman said the faces on Mount Rushmore were caused by erosion. "Zillions of years of wind and rain."
She had no answer when Leno asked how the wind and rain knew to put a beard on Lincoln.
During another Jaywalking episode a man in his 20s claimed he read the Bible once and that Jonah built the ark but it went down in flames.
There was also a guy who insisted that Hitler did not have a first name. "He was just Hitler. Like Cher."
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"I've often said that the difference between British and American SF TV series is that the British ones have three-dimensional characters and cardboard spaceships, while the Americans do it the other way around."
--Ross Smith