Competition Among the Friendly Skies

While everyone is watching the presidential race the current administration is trying to push through an experiment that could reduce flight delays around the nation.

Bush administration officials are racing to get the plan in place before they leave office in three months; airlines and airports are sprinting to court to stop them.

Transportation Secretary Mary Peters announced final rules Thursday to begin auctioning takeoff and landing “slots” at the three major New York-area airports: John F. Kennedy, LaGuardia, and Newark-Liberty. Under her plan, the auction winners would be announced Jan. 12, about a week before George W. Bush leaves office.

Federal authorities are focused on New York’s airspace because roughly two-thirds of flight delays around the country are caused by backups at those airports.

Proponents of the experiment feel that along with unclogging skies it will reduce airfares and allow for small businesses to be able to compete.

AP Google, 9 October 08

Critics think it will have the opposite effect.

“We’re strongly opposed to the auction,” said Bill DeCota, the Port Authority’s director of aviation. “Despite this alleged process of taking broad public input, the DOT and the Federal Aviation Administration continue to ignore all the concerns expressed by us and the people who have joined us. They’ve taken action that we don’t believe will do anything to reduce congestion.”

We Have High-Def TVs but the Shows Aren’t Colorized

There’s not many ways to catch positive images of minorities on prime time television.  You can tune into episodes of Grey’s Anatomy, Ugly Betty, or Psyche.  You can check out episodes of reality television (depending on the show representations can be iffy).  If it won’t make you feel too old you can watch TV shows geared to Generation Y like the New Beverly Hills 90210, Lincoln Heights or Geek. 

Or you can watch the Presidential Debates, although the season finale of it will be coming up in two weeks.

The majority of the shows debuting on network television this fall are headed by white characters.  The one exception is an upcoming cartoon on the Fox channel called Cleveland Brown which is a spin-off of the Family Guy.  The supporting actresses/actors voices are African American but the lead character is voiced by Mike Henry, a white actor.

It promises to be funny, but it ain’t the Boondocks.

Almost 10 years after the NAACP ripped the four major networks for the dearth of people of color on their shows the networks are doing better but not by much. 

On many shows minorities are the sidekicks or the sassy best friend like “The New Adventure of Old Christine“.  Or they are integral parts of ensemble casts like “Heroes“.  Rarely are they the lead character or have the main storyline.

“It is an oversimplification to say TV has integrated. It is still white-controlled and people of color are woefully underrepresented,” Darnell Hunt said.  Hunt is the professor of sociology and director of the Bunche Center for African-American Studies at UCLA.

“Many examples such as ‘Ugly Betty’ and ‘Grey’s Anatomy’ do a good job of presenting an integrated cast, but often these are exceptions to the rules.” Hunt added.

Grey’s Anatomy producer and creator Shonda Rhimes sees progress but still thinks there is room for improvement.

”Do I want to see any more shows where someone has a sassy black friend? No, because I’m nobody’s sassy black friend.” Rhimes said.   “I just want to see shows in which people get to be people and that look like the world we live in. The world is changing, and television will have to follow.”

Many commercial networks won’t give minority focused shows a chance because they don’t think they can pull outside the base audience.  The last show on television with a predominant minority cast with a large white audience was the Cosby Show. 

Cable networks have had shows with minorities who have more a dominat story line or are the bulk of the show’s cast .  In previous years cable has taken a chance on shows like Soul Food, Resurrection Boulevard, The Wire and The Chapppelle Show. 

If you are looking for new shows with a more diverse cast cable TV again is stepping up with offerings such as Cleaner starring Benjamin Bratt on A&E.  Next week Chocolate News with David Alan Grier debuts on Comedy Central.  Comedy Central is also in production with Mad TV’s Bobby Lee to work on a pilot.

Lee’s untitled project will explore culture and race through the prism of African Americans and Korean Americans.

Which of course I’d be very interested to watch.  A show doesn’t need to have elements of my own life to get me to watch but it helps.

Nobel News

Eight years ago when Eduardo Kac commissioned the creation of a fluorescent rabbit I thought, “Hey, that’s the kind of science I can get behind.”  It’s science + art; what’s there not to like? 

Although I’m sure it makes night life hard for green glowing bunnies.

Today, three U.S based scientists were awarded the Nobel Prize for chemistry because of their work with the fluorescent protein that comes from a jelly fish.

Three scientists-Osamu Shimomura, Martin Chalfie, and Roger Tsien-will share this year’s Nobel Prize in Chemistry for their work on green fluorescent protein (GFP), the Nobel Foundation announced today.

The discovery and development of GFP has also allowed scientists to study animal cells without having to take them out of the body, “putting us on the brink of being able to treat diseases that decades ago we thought it wouldn’t be possible to treat,” Frangioni said. “We use the technology to study cancer and how it metastasizes, how genes are turned on and off and how proteins in a cell behave after stimulation.”

~Scientific American, 8Oct08

Trying to study and treat cancer is noble work, to be sure, but something tells me there’s a business man out there trying to hustle this discovery into making a line of neon pets.  You’ll never lose your kitty again.

Maybe I’m just too American in my outlook which is probably why I’m not in the running for a Nobel Prize for literature (that and I have yet to finish my novel).  But I’m not alone, Phillip Roth and Joyce Carol Oates (who writes all the time; she has a book come out every year) won’t be getting a phone call tomorrow either.

“Europe is still the center of the literary world,” Horace Engdahl, the permanent secretary of the Swedish Academy said.   Engdahl believes that American writers are “too sensitive to trends in their own mass culture.”

He added: “The U.S. is too isolated, too insular. They don’t translate enough and don’t really participate in the big dialogue of literature. That ignorance is restraining.”

Perhaps our economic outlook extends globally but when it comes to our outlook on the world maybe we are too parochial.

Or maybe it’s them.