Capsule Review: How Now, Brown Bureaucrat? [2ACV11]

Eric Sansoni: The first Futurama by writer cable/cameo comedian Bob Odenkirk goes to extremes to be funny, but doesn't show the classical Groening well-roundedness. The characters are closer to joke-telling machines than to human, or lobster beings. Some jokes are quite good, and Nora Dunn is excellent, sexual fetish humor notwithstanding. But instead of developing Hermes' conflict as an emotional center, the emphasis shifts to the theme of bureaucracy and how many jokes it's possible to make about it in 22 minutes. This hasn't been cutting edge humor since the 1980s, when for example Douglas Adams wrote his PC game Bureaucracy. I prefer eps more like Douglas Adams' PC Game Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. (B-)

-Eric S. ([email])

"I stand still, the conclusions jump to me." -Bill McNeal, Newsradio, 1998

In article , [email] wrote:

Neither were PC games. They could be called microcomputer games, but that would just be anal; calling them just games would be best.

PC stands for personal computer, which is the perfect way to categorize the games. Calling them just games would be hopelessly vague to people not familiar with them. To some people PC may be synonymous with "IBM-PC", but that's not the strict definition of the term. Besides, you could purchase those games in IBM-PC format if you wanted to. In fact, you could have purchased an original IBM-PC copy of Bureaucracy last week on eBay if you wanted to:

In article , [email] wrote:

prefer eps

I know 'PC' stands for 'Personal Computer', but it is generally used to mean an IBM compatible machine, and when convention comes up against logic in language, convention usually wins.

Plus, it isn't just for personal computers. They, and all other Infocom-format games can be run on anything from a mainframe to a programmable calculator. I personally have HHG on my Newton and my Mac, neither of which would fall into the widely used meaning of PC.

Well, you're right that these days PC is used to refer to IBM computers usually. I never really got used to that, and can't guess how that began, because I personally always call them IBMs, even when I'm only discussing the two common kinds, IBMs and MACs. I don't really say PC all that much to refer to computers in general, but it makes a convenient abbreviation for personal computer, which is a pretty descriptive term. And whether "PC" implies "IBM" to people or not, I would expect they still understand what the letters stand for.

Well, that's not really a fair argument. I could say Futurama isn't really a TV show because I can go to a web site somewhere and view the episode on my computer as an MPEG file. That doesn't make it a "web show," I think, because it was originally intended and marketed as a TV show. Similarly, if Beavis and Butthead The Movie airs on TV, that doesn't make it a TV show either. And just because Toy Story started out as some kind of computer video file, we still can agree that it is a movie, even when it airs on TV.

Technically, you mean "good health." ;-)

-Eric S. ([email])

"I stand still, the conclusions jump to me." -Bill McNeal, Newsradio, 1998