Gayleen Froese

This is another example of me being behind the times, but I had no idea people did this.

For those who didn’t or couldn’t follow the link, it goes to a Wikipedia article about something called “complaints choirs.” People get together, list their vexations, and create songs they sing together in the hopes of reducing their stress.

For example, this choir. Or this choir.

I find this fascinating for a few reasons. One is that music and singing are sufficiently different from speaking, neurologically, that people who have speech difficulties sometimes find they’re able to sing fluently. Though the people in these choirs probably have no trouble talking, it is actually possible that singing is somehow easier for them–especially if they’ve been raised not to complain. Singing could bypass mental blocks.

I’m also interested because cursing is a big part of complaining, for myself and more than a handful of other people. Cursing and singing have this in common–they originate from a different part of the brain than ordinary speech. Cursing, in fact, has been shown to increase pain tolerance in people who are being asked to suffer while cursing, whereas ordinary words do not make this difference. And of course the fact that cursing is specialized speech is reflected in the tics of Tourette’s, where there tends to be an impulse toward using emotionally-charged and taboo words. You’re not likely to see a ticquer who spits out “armchair!” uncontrollably. (Fond regards, btw, to my ticcing brethern. I understand your disorder and my migraines have much in common, under the surface, to the extent that a few people think they may even be two faces of one condition.)

What happens when you curse and sing at the same time? Since singing isn’t quite like normal speech and cursing isn’t quite like normal speech, you’re mixing things up in an unusual way. Sure, it’s not unusual for you if you’re in a punk band or perform a cover of My Shit’s Fucked Up every week at the local coffee house. But it’s a combination of two off-kilter communication streams and I like that thought. It might even be uniquely satisfying to sing one’s complaints, on a physical, brain-based level.

Leaving aside neurology, I think another aspect of why complaints choirs are so successful is something Nero Wolfe says about my beloved Archie Goodwin: “By contriving one of your fantastically and characteristically puerile inventions, you made the problem itself absurd and so disposed of it. Admirable and satisfactory.”

The sheer ridiculousness, in other words, of making a song out of your bitching and then arranging it for a choir… followed by rehearsal and performance… would have to take the edge off almost any common grievance.

What’s your favourite way to complain? Does it give you relief or get you more riled than you were to begin with?

Do you have anything you’d like to sing about?

Current Bedside Reading: Robert Jay Lifton and Greg Mitchell, Who Owns Death: Capital Punishment, the American Conscience, and the End of Executions

Commentary: There’s not a lot of new information here but it’s a good overview of American attitudes toward capital punishment, and its history in that country.

My iPod Is Singing: “I’m carrying all the love of an orchestra.”

Of which I am a proud member.

I wrote this for their blog and figured I might as well share it as a post here, since it’s about writing. And guns.

Enjoy.

FedEx was embarrassed, recently, by this video, which has been turned into an animated gif and strewn across the interwebs. The company responded quickly with Twitter and YouTube statements to the effect that (a) FedEx considers this treatment of packages inappropriate, (b) action will be/has been taken to satisfy this customers, and ( c) this isn’t how FedEx employees behave. One bad apple, in other words.

The company has been praised for its PR work in this case and I agree that the first two statements–this was wrong and we will make it right–were good, standard PR. Also, responding to the incident where it occurred (on YouTube) was what is generally recommended.

The part that bothers me is the claim that this was, essentially, one bad apple. I’m not saying this is how most FedEx employees behave. I don’t know how most of them treat packages. What I do know, thanks to the interwebs, is this …and this, and this, including the eye-popping sight of the delivery person dropping a box marked “Moen” …. as well as–my favourite–this.

Again, I’m not saying this is–or isn’t–standard practice at FedEx. I’m going to leave my opinion of FedEx out of this. My question is whether it’s really good PR to take the one bad apple approach when you have been caught on video having several bad apples. And that’s just what’s on video. I assume, as I think most people would, that lousy delivery people are like cockroaches–for every one you see, there are hundreds you don’t.

The YouTube statement mentions that employees have been reminded that “every package is the most important one” but I don’t find that particularly reassuring since I’m pretty sure the FedEx shot put team has heard it before and didn’t care that time, either.

I don’t know the answer to this, in terms of running the company. Pay drivers more? Can the company afford to do that? Maybe yes, maybe no–I haven’t seen the books. Would better-paid drivers be less likely to pitch computer monitors around or leave things on the “balkon”? I don’t know that, either.

What if you mounted cameras on all the trucks so you could monitor your employees? Who would watch those videos? I know someone who worked nights at a convenience store and once, when the store was empty, dropped trou in front of the cameras and danced because he was pretty sure no one was watching the tapes. He never heard word one about it.

I don’t have answers for them on that front.

All I know is that the company’s response irritates me because it runs counter to known facts. I’m sure FedEx knows about those other videos. It was probably the advice of the PR department not to mention them, because you don’t want to draw attention to them. The assumption is that there are people who haven’t seen those other videos and you don’t want to make those people aware the videos exist. This is also standard PR practice.

But we are dealing, here, with social media, which is about conversation. What happens if someone mentions, over dinner with friends, that FedEx left their package under their drain spout (hypothetical example, not known to be true)? Someone else will say, “They left a package for me in the dog house of the bitey Shar Pei next door and I had to distract the dog with a leg of lamb.” Then someone else will talk about where FedEx left something for their aunt, or a package FedEx lost.

On YouTube, people will link to videos of those incidents, or mention them in the comments. This is how conversation works. You don’t have to worry about drawing attention, FedEx. Attention has been drawn.

So what do you have to say about it?

 Current Bedside Reading: Lisa Genova, Left Neglected

Commentary: Genova is a neuroscientist whose first novel, Still Alice, was an exceptional, well-informed guess at what going through Alzheimer’s could be like for an intelligent, relatively young woman. It’s emotionally difficult but worth reading if you can bear it.

Left Neglected is her second novel and it’s about hemispatial neglect. That’s a fascinating topic and one Genova would know a lot about, so I was expecting another excellent book. Unfortunately, what I got instead was proof that Genova is not a novelist. Still Alice was based very carefully on Genova’s experience and patients and research. In Left Neglected, Genova gets more creative in putting together a family with other characters (or half-characters, in most cases) and in coming up with her own ending for a story that does not necessarily end in death. She does this clumsily and not credibly. The main character is interesting and easy to spend time with, but overall the book is trite and pat. I got the sense Genova thought she was making a brave choice in having the main character not recover fully from the accident that caused her neglect. I don’t think it was particularly brave but, if you want to give her that one, it’s the only brave choice she makes.

My iPhone is Singing: “Every night my teeth are falling out.”

Huh?

Whazzat?

Sorry. I was asleep.

You’re looking for a blog post?

I have nothing for you.  It’s solstice and I’m having a solstice coma break. Have a good time over the holidays, or sleep through the holidays, as you prefer. I’ll see you in January.

In the meantime, here’s a photo of cruelty to animals to warm your hearts:

The Book Depository has about 10,000 free e-books for download. Most are public domain works of the sort you’d find at the dear departed* Project Gutenberg. If you’re interested in adding some classics to your e-library, it’s a very simple way to get those books in PDF. I don’t just mean literature when I talk about classics, either. I downloaded Lippmann’s Public Opinion, Hippocrates’ On Epidemics, a couple of Jenner’s books about vaccination. Just as the DPCS has tattooed the formula for gunpowder on himself in case he accidentally goes back in time someday, I would like to know how to vaccinate myself against smallpox. I know the simplest thing is to get cowpox but I’d like to be sure I’m doing it right.

If you’re not interested in picking up classics, it’s still worth a visit. There are piles of books in this collection that society has since thought better of, as well as a number that are of entertainingly limited interest. I grabbed the following and expect to alternatively giggle and gape in horror at the lot of them:

Venereal Diseases in New Zealand

Criminals, Idiots, Women and Minors

A Discussion of Syphilis for Everyday People

The Eugenic Marriage: A Personal Guide to the Science of Better Living and Better Babies

Sex and Common-Sense

Aims and Aids for Girls and Young Women on the Various Duties of Life

Modern Women and What is Said of Them

Danger! The True History of a Great City’s Wiles and Temptations (which includes a chapter on “Street Arabs of Both Sexes” and another on “The Young Wharf Rats and their eventful Lives.”)

You really should give the site a browse.

*I’m told Project Gutenberg, contrary to other reports I’d heard, is still active. This is excellent news and of course you should visit Project Gutenberg as well.

Current Bedside Reading: Marjorie Caroline Malley, Radioactivity: A History of a Mysterious Science
Commentary: Thanks to Tiran for sending me a list of recommended science books, which included this one. It’s not the best I’ve read on the subject, but it does a good job of tying the emergence and progress of the science into the popular culture of the time–saying, for example, that it was really no wonder people were so interested in seances while the foundations of electricity and radioactivity were being laid. With scientists telling you invisible forces were everywhere, it wasn’t so crazy for someone who was new to that idea to think that these forces might include spirits.

My iPod is Singing: “What a letdown.”

I just finished reading Sybil Exposed by Debbie Nathan. The book is about something that’s hardly a secret these days–that the book Sybil, about the woman with dissociative identity disorder (multiple personality disorder at the time), was the literary equivalent of one of those kettles people used to hang over the fire and throw everything edible into, day after day.

“Sybil” was imaginative, suffered from untreated pernicious anemia (see how that can mess with your head), and was desperate to please the doctor she idolized. That doctor was ambitious, given to pumping patients to the gills with psychoactive drugs, fond of hypnosis, and obsessed with MPD. The author of the book was equally ambitious and willing to twist the already unlikely story twice–once for her own ideas about effective drama, and once for the editors who wanted her to punch it up even more. The story later fell into the hands of a successful and well-respected screenwriter who made even more changes before the book became a popular TV miniseries.

Nathan, along with some other researchers, feels that “Sybil”–actually Shirley Mason–never had alternate personalities. She had a physical disorder and some character flaws and could have managed quite nicely with both, particularly if she’d had the anemia treated.

So Sybil Exposed is a story about stories, in a way. How the Sybil story started and how it grew. Why the people who doubted it swallowed their doubts and went on to perpetuate it. Why so many people found it easy to believe.

For example, the screenwriter added a scene to the miniseries in which Shirley’s childhood doctor confesses to her psychiatrist that he noticed she was abused and did nothing. Viewers of the miniseries would cite this as proof that the story was real–a real doctor knew about the abuse. In truth, there was no such scene. The psychiatrist never spoke with the doctor in Shirley’s home town and he was dead before the writer went to the town for research.

All of that is interesting to me, of course, but I’m fixated on one detail from Nathan’s book that, frankly, sounds to me like the most disturbed thing Shirley Mason did for real. You see, she had a deal with the author and her psychiatrist in which she would get part of the royalties for the book and for derivative works. (Now considered unethical, you will be surprised to learn.)

Derivative works such as a miniseries, for example. Maybe a comic book or even a self-help book on reconciling the different aspects of your own personality. Ah, but here’s what Shirley Mason thought would be a Christmas gift craze: a Sybil board game.

I shit you not, ladies and gentlemen, and your inner ladies and gentlemen. If you haven’t read Sybil, you probably never took psychology in high school. Also, you might not know that it’s full of horrific stories of Sybil’s childhood abuse, most of which were born in Shirley’s drug-induced haze and expanded upon by her doctor and two creative writers. Almost literally the stuff of nightmares, worked up to be more dramatic.

Seriously, how does that game work? “Mother tried to suffocate you in a grain bin, lose a turn”? Even the things that really did happen to little Shirley (most likely, anyway) aren’t really fodder for family night. “”Seventh Day Adventist parents give you weekly enema. Rush ahead two spaces.” “Mother catches you masturbating with a hairbrush. Pay two dollars for a new hairbrush.”

Shirley Mason was clearly having her own troubles developing the game, as she reportedly worked on it from shortly before Sybil was published until a few years before her death. I can understand her having struggled with this, as I believe we all can, but it does bring up another question–why in the hell did she not realize it was a bad idea? Honestly, if Nathan’s book is accurate, this woman was neurotic but not psychotic for most of her life. She taught art at a small college for years. She wrote stacks of letters, week after week, to friends who thought her nervous but certainly not crazy.

As an aside, would you like to know where Shirley Mason lived while teaching art? Point Pleasant, West Virginia. Does that ring a bell? If not, you’re not as much of a freak as I am. Here’s the thing about Point Pleasant. Shirley taught art at the college near there starting in 1969, but actually started living there before that (possibly as early as 1966) because she was doing art therapy at a local asylum. This suggests she could have been there when the bridge collapsed. At the least, she arrived soon afterward. But wait–here’s the OTHER thing about Point Pleasant. If I had the stones, I would be writing a book about Sybil and the Mothman right this second.

Anyway, my point is that she doesn’t seem to have been completely nuts by other measures… but how crazy would you have to be to think Sybil would be an excellent board game? Be quiet, Fantasy Flight gamers–I know you have macabre tastes. I play Arkham. This was the early 1970s, though, and Shirley was actually a pretty conservative middle-aged woman and I think she was going after the family market. Mom, Dad, Billy and Susie sitting around the dining room table exploring the horrors of Sybil’s past and then… what? Integrating her personalities? I assume that would be the goal. You lose two turns and fifty dollars if you go to Philadelphia for the weekend and don’t remember it. First player to not do anything they don’t know about wins.

And what does the board look like? How about the original paperback book jacket? That wouldn’t give poor little Susie nightmares, would it? The original hardcover image would also be just fine. (Why, yes, her face is cut up into puzzle pieces that look like scars. Good eye.)

Hey, though, as another aside, I was watching Boardwalk Empire the other day and they were playing a gorgeous board game so I did some digging and found out what it was. Round the World With Nellie Bly. If you go to that page, be sure to go through the seven images they have posted. Isn’t that something? It seems to have a pretty basic “Snakes and Ladders” sort of game mechanic, but it’s still a beautiful board and it must have been an inspiration to girls at the time, as Nellie Bly herself was. Isn’t that a nicer topic than Sybil? Can’t we stay here for ever and ever? No?

Very well.

I don’t know, you guys. Maybe the board game thing isn’t as wacko as I think it is. Maybe you see some way in which it could work. Part of my issue with the idea is that, though I don’t believe Sybil’s story to be Shirley’s story, it seems trivializing to make a board game of something. If someone else had proposed the idea back when the book came out, and if I had not been an infant at the time, I would have assumed the real Sybil (wherever she was) would be hurt and furious at the idea. In this case, though, Shirley herself came up with the idea. Was she trying to trivialize things for herself? There’s some reason to believe that she felt the book and its fame had gotten out of hand. Certainly they caused her to quit her job and move, since too many people had figured out she was Sybil. She stopped writing to most of her pen pals after the book came out, as well, since the ones who’d known her in childhood would easily have seen through the pathetic pseudonyms chosen by its author (Mattie to Hattie, for example.) Maybe she thought making a game of the story would magically make a game of the whole thing and she’d be able to go back to teaching art in a town where everyone knew her as sweet, nervous Shirley.

Neither of those ideas worked out for her.

I feel sorry-ish for Shirley Mason, who threw a great many people under the bus so she could hear a stately woman doctor call her “special.” She was a mess and I suspect she wasn’t a nice person in some ways, but it wasn’t her idea to spend a decade sky high on drugs that have since been pulled from the market. She was supposedly cured of what was probably never wrong with her, but her board game obsession suggests she was broken in the process and that was something she never got over.

And now, some questions:

Do you think a Sybil board game could have worked? If so, how?

What’s the craziest damned board game you’ve ever seen?

Current Bedside Reading: Calvin Trillin, If You Can’t Say Something Nice
Commentary: Lightweight but funny. It’s a collection of his articles, rather than his poetry (for which I have no use.) As with many articles written for periodicals, these seem unfinished. The sense is that the writer had a word count in his head and pretty much stopped when he got there. Trillin is a smart and amusing person, though–funnier on TV, actually, than on the page. See him in interviews when you can.

My iPod Is Singing: “We knew the world would not be the same. A few people laughed. A few people cried. Most people were silent.”

And you can’t have them, because I need them for Nanowrimo (Nanowrimo.org). I’ll be back in December. If you see me around G+, please tell me to get back to work.

In the meantime, come visit me. I’ll be participating in

Fictionistas in Saskatoon and Edmonton

November 24, Saskatoon
City Perk
801 7 Avenue North

November 25, Edmonton
7:30 pm
The Queen of Tarts
10129 104 Street NW

Good luck to those of you who are also doing Nanowrimo this year.

This really pisses me off. It pisses me off so badly that I am breaking my “no posting during Nanowrimo” rule.

And it can’t be legal, can it? I mean, technically it’s just a reproduction of an object that does not show the whole object, but the effect is incredibly misleading in a downright irresponsible way.

What am I talking about?

Oh, this:

So, what that looks like, when you just see a photo, is a photo of a Skoal “smokeless tobacco” (aka dipping tobacco, aka moist snuff) tin. Actually, it is a photo of a cardboard disc with a Skoal tin printed on it. But only the part of the Skoal tin that you see. What you’re looking at in that photo is the entirety of the cardboard disc, sent out as an advertisement and meant to represent the product as a whole.

I received a pack of three of these discs in the mail today. Don’t ask me why. I sign up for a lot of free samples and I’m sure it’s related somehow.

What’s illegal about sending people a photo of your product, you ask? Nothing, in the abstract. In the execution… maybe still nothing, but what Skoal has done damned well should be.

Look at the bottom right of the photo. What you see there is a black on white message from Health Canada–referenced by name on a similar black on white message atop the tin. So, right there, you’ve got a connection–Health Canada is telling you what you’re reading on the top of the tin, and what you’re reading on the side of the tin.

That’s even true.

Now read what it says on the side of the tin. The letters you can make out are:

THIS PRODUCT

A SAFE ALTERN

TO CIGARET

Ask any literate English-speaker to fill in the blanks and they will naturally come up with, “This product is a safe alternative to cigarettes.”

Which, everyone, is NOT true. Sadly, there are people who believe it to be true and don’t learn otherwise until they’re losing a jaw to cancer. Skoal calls these people “customers.” Since snuff comes in more candy flavours than Rain-Blo bubble gum, another word for these people might be “children.”

It is true that snuff doesn’t subject others to secondhand smoke, but it is far from a safe product.

How can Skoal get away with putting that on their tins, looking like a Health Canada notice? The answer is simple. They can’t and they don’t.

Here’s the part that really pisses me off, and that I would hope would piss Health Canada off as well:

Do you know what that label on the side of the package actually says? Take a guess. That’s right: THIS PRODUCT IS NOT A SAFE ALTERNATIVE TO CIGARETTES.

But Skoal has come up with an advertising tactic that uses Health Canada’s own message to give the opposite impression and make it seem as if Health Canada is saying it. Amazing. And evil. Not in a cute, “Oh, what a scamp some devious creative director is, cleverly and naughtily skirting the rules” way. In a “Some douche deserves to have his (or her, but probably his) jaw torn off by starving hogs” way.

Please feel free to let both Skoal and Health Canada know what you think of this.

Current Bedside Reading: Debbie Nathan, Sybil Exposed
Commentary: More on this book in a future post. For now, I simply recommend it.

My iPod Is Singing: “What happens on the day when I forget?”

I was joking the other day that I thought my standard poodle had finally had his water moment, as when Helen Keller realized for the first time that words meant things and signed “water” back to Annie Sullivan.

When I got Dashiell, I think he’d been mostly an outside dog. He didn’t pay much attention when people spoke around him. He paid attention to things I did, such as getting my camera (my dogs all react when I get my camera out because I usually use it outside and bring them along.) He watched people. He just didn’t listen.

Now he seems to listen for words that interest him, such as walk and park and feed. He certainly reacts to words now in a way he did not when I got him. And he watches my face when I speak to him, which he did not do when I first got him.

He’s also put together the receive command-execute command-receive reward sequence, which my Eskie Rai never managed to do. She knew some words that she would interpret as commands (sit and stay were two of them) but would only execute them when I sounded genuinely scared, not for a treat or other reward.

But, words… I really wonder what Dashiell makes of them. There’s that old Far Side cartoon about what dogs hear when we speak, which is blah blah blah (their name) blah blah blah. That’s probably true, except it would be more like, “Blah blah Dashiell, out, blah blah, Spenser, Archie, blah blah door, come, blah.” My question is, what does he think of the blahs? Do they sound like individual words to him, or like a long mushy string of sounds punctuated by words he knows? And does he understand that these are words, just words he doesn’t know… or does he completely disregard what he doesn’t know, not even thinking about it, and pay attention only to what he does know?

My papillon, Archie, who is much smarter than my poodle (statistically unlikely, I know, but true for these individual dogs), seems to get the concept of words. He listens, looking puzzled, when people say things he doesn’t know. Papillons are known for trying to imitate human sounds and even learning to say, for example, “eh-row” as a greeting, so I think it’s possible Archie does understand that what I say is all words–just words he knows and words he doesn’t. Spenser might understand this, too, since he is a bright boy who pays attention. I’m not calling my poodle dumb, exactly, just dumb for a poodle and not as smart as my other two dogs.

I don’t know for certain, though, what any dogs get from my speech.

Spenser knows his toys have different names, but does he know that nubby ball and spangly ball are both balls? Or does he hear nubbyball and spanglyball as individual, unrelated words?

He understand categories. When he was a puppy, he saw the DPCS and I eating popcorn and wanted some, so he begged… and got nothing. So he brought us his food dish. We still gave him nothing. So he went to the kitchen and got a people bowl and brought that to us, obviously thinking, okay, people food, people bowl. We still said no, so he went back to the kitchen and brought a different bowl. He tried that a few times, each time with a bowl. Never a plate or cup or fork, even though people eat with all those things and food could be put on or in them. So I believe he has a category in his head for “bowl.”

He also sulks when we take a dryer ball away from him… as if we’re taking something away unfairly, counter to the household rules. He really doesn’t tend to take things that aren’t toys, in general, yet he always goes after the dryer balls. I believe that, in his head, balls are a category and balls are toys.

Does that mean he can, and that he does, apply a word to a category? Round, bouncy things are balls, and nubby and spangly are the names of those balls? Dogs are dogs and Archie and Dashiell are the names of the dogs he lives with?

Certainly smart dogs can learn hundreds of words. Rico and Betsy, in particular, have shown that.

Rico’s behaviour suggested that he knew words were words in the sense that, if you presented him with an object he knew the name of (say, a ball) and an object he didn’t know the name of and then told him to get (strange word he did not know), he would get the new object, on the grounds that (strange word he did not know) was not “ball”, so he couldn’t have been instructed to get the ball.

But did Rico know that our speech was entirely, or at least mostly, made up of words? I’m not sure how one would test for that sort of thing, but I’d love to know.

What do you think your pets make of words? If you have a talking bird, does the bird seem to both pick up phrases and understand words within phrases–for example, would your bird learn to call something “red block” and then apply “red” to other red things? Alex did, but he was taught to deconstruct language in a way that most birds aren’t.

Also, can you think of a way for me to test what my dogs make of language in general? I can think of how to figure out whether Spenser knows that “ball” means “ball”, but I don’t know how to determine what he thinks of words he doesn’t know. I guess Rico’s test of picking up an unfamiliar object sort of gets to that point, but not entirely… because he was hearing those words in a “command” scenario in which he knew what was being said had meaning because it was a command to him (as in, “Go get the doll.”, where it would all be presumed to have meaning because he was being told to do it.) What about casual conversation that happened around Rico

Thoughts? Words?

Current Bedside Reading: Nassir Ghaemei, A First-Rate Madness: Uncovering the Links Between Leadership and Mental Illness

Commentary: Ghaemei has a thesis, all right. He believes (a) that certain world leaders had specific mental illnesses and that (b) these illnesses made them good leaders in times of crisis, though not necessarily good leaders at other times. I think there’s something in that–for example, Ghaemei cites the idea, now fairly well-established, that depressed people have a generally more realistic opinion of their chances of winning a lottery or getting cancer or having a car accident than mentally healthy people do. Mentally healthy people generally think things will go better for them than for the average person. They also, per Ghaemei, think Hitler can be reasoned with and that their military enemies aren’t as smart or good as they are. And so they are in for nasty surprises that would have been anticipated by depressives.

On the other hand, he first attributes hyperthymia to JFK and then analyses how it affected his leadership. Calling JFK hyperthymic may be fair comment, actually, but I’m not convinced hyperthemia is a disorder rather than a personality type and, if it is a disorder, I’m not sure where one crosses the line between energetic extrovert and hyperthymic person.

It’s an interesting book with some fair points, particularly about what “mentally healthy” people do and do not handle well, but I got a bit tired of Ghaemai confidently and forcefully stapling disorders to people and then driving ahead to his foregone conclusions.

My iPod Is Singing: “If you’re normal, the crowd will accept you. But, if you’re deranged, the crowd will make you their leader.”

“What kind of animal could do this?”

Good question, Grimm. What kind of animal could write something as terrible as your pilot episode? Certainly not a smart one and perhaps not a very nice one, either.

The writing in the pilot episode of Grimm both is stupid and assumes its viewers are stupid, which means it’s a special kind of stupid–the kind you get when dumb people write down for people who are dumber than they are.

Think I’m exaggerating? I’d say watch the episode for yourself, but that would be cruel. Instead, I’ll point out just some of the crap therein. For those who care, know that there are spoilers below.

Let’s start with the opening scene: a girl goes jogging and we can hear Sweet Dreams on her iPod as she runs. She spots a figurine of a little girl set on the path and reacts as if she has found a child’s shirt with a mysterious red stain–she stops, looking upset and confused, actually looks around to see who might be watching her, and finally, nervously, picks it up. Unless it is later revealed in this show that this town has a serial killer known as the Doll Planter, there is no reason for a normal human being to react with such distress to a little plastic toy. I’d say the character had read the script, except that, in that case, she wouldn’t have gone down that path in the first place. Mind you, I would also assume any actress who’d read the script wouldn’t have taken the role, but it’s a tough business and needs must.

I suppose I should get back to the show.

Naturally, having stopped (and been TRICKED!), she is attacked by a monster of some kind. We don’t hear the music anymore, though we (the camera) are no farther from the character than we were when we could hear it. The iPod falls to the ground. We hear the music again. Script, reality. Reality, script. I wish someone had introduced you strangers a long time ago.

A bit later, police officers find the iPod. It is still playing Sweet Dreams because (a) this is the only song on the entire iPod or (b) it’s on repeat or (c), they just happened to show up exactly as the playlist looped back to that song. Regardless, it must be this way, else how would we know this was the same iPod. And of course we need to hear Sweet Dreams again because it establishes with subtle cleverness that this is a dreamlike show in which mystical things happen, and also that there are things waiting to abuse you. In case we do not get this, one of the cops names the song, notes that it is by the Eurythmics, and then sings some of the lyrics. I am not kidding. This show is that dreadful.

Later on, when we see the killer–and it is obvious that he is the killer as he is in possession of the kidnapped child they have already established has been kidnapped by the same person who did the original murder–he is, no shit, humming Sweet Dreams. Just in case someone’s goldfish is watching these show and having trouble keeping up. And then, when the cops show up, he does it again some more so that the cops, too, know he is The Bad Guy.

I won’t get into the ham-fisted scary music building to cuts to, oh, doors being slammed so there’s a loud-noise-and-you-jump bullshit, or the fact that they’re using a colour palette that has been so overused for the last twenty years that it is a target of mockery, because that’s just garden-variety stupid and this show offers so much more.

For example. here’s something a character says:

“Sometimes I mean to do something and I assume I usually have.”

Explain how this is language. Get rid of “usually” and you’ve got something that makes sense, but the script is so terrible that I assume the writers can’t see the difference between the sentence with that word and without it.

“Still haven’t found her yet?”

Oh, Christ. Not that someone wouldn’t say that, because people would, but I’d put money on the writers not knowing that a word could be cut from that sentence, nor which words would be the candidates.

The ending… oh, the ending, in which a fake nurse is trying to kill the lead character’s aunt, who is in the hospital, but the lead character happens to be there, so she incapacitates him and then… leaves. LEAVES. And tells her compatriot, who meets her outside, that she couldn’t kill the aunt because HE was there. She does not mention that he was lying on the floor, incapacitated and unable to stop her from leading a conga line across his face if she so chose. On any other show I would think she must be secretly on the side of good, but this is Grimm, so it’s probably safe to assume this was just plain old bad writing.

Ah, but all this stupidity, vexing though it is, means nothing compared to the set up in which a beautiful young woman is shown to be secretly a monster, and then an older woman with a bald head is presented with scary music and other accoutrements such that we are supposed to assume she is evil… and then the script turns the tables! You probably think women who’ve had chemo look like monsters, don’t you, and now we’ve shown how shallow your assumptions were, because she’s good and the pretty girl was bad! It’s opposite day!

What’s that? You don’t think women who’ve had chemo look like monsters? You say cancer’s unfortunately common and everyone knows people who’ve been through it and you’d have to be some kind of cave person or, more likely, a complete asshole to think of cancer patients that way? What, then, are we to make of the writers, who assume everyone thinks pretty people are good and bald women are evil? What in-fucking-deed.

I usually give new shows two or three episode before passing final judgment, as pilots can be rough, but Grimm and I are through.

Current Bedside Reading: Candice DeLong, Special Agent: My Life on the Front Lines as a Woman in the FBI

Commentary: My main take-away from this book is that I’m not that interested in the Unibomber, as it’s mainly about him and I had a hard time staying involved. It might be a better read for other people.

My iPod Is Singing: “It went down like a bad card table.”