ExposureBlog

Far as I can tell, there’s no federal regulation listing the threshold limit value (TLV) to Internet spam.  If there was, I’m sure this site would be way overexposed.  Each day I have to put on the respirator and gloves, grab the baggies and flush out junk spam from this site.  If there were effective, enforceable regs against spam in this world, I decided that the perps at the San Francisco outfit bebo.com would be doing other things.  Like selling real estate.  Then I got Viagra spam from twosixtypress.com.  Twosixtypress?  In fact, the email for this stuff seemed to be from from my editor just a few doors down.  I opened it up and, sure enough, it was hawking Viagra.  I usually don’t talk about Viagra with my editor, so I figured something else must be going on.  I opened the email and looked at the site: “intuitionthick.com.”  That phrase fairly screamed ”China Spam” and when I went to Whois, sure enough, intuitionthick was a China operation.  Seems this pill factory is named Shittongtong, and is operating out of Jianshi, China (look it up on Google Earth).  There is an email listed as shitongtong(at)26.com. But don’t bother sending any email. It’s bogus. The phone number 86-0796-28850266 may be bogus as well.  I know, it’s tempting to thing there’s four or five smart, twenty-something Chinese grad students trying to pull in serious yuan from Viagra-deprived American net surfers, but. . .what if Shitongtong is a legit company that’s been scammed by a pack of thugs in, say, Moldavia or Marie-El?  Fact is, no one knows.  I sure don’t.  So every day, I clean out junk labeled bebo.com and glee.com and thenget back to working on exposure info where I know the client and the case and have a good idea of the facts.  Nothing like the Internet these days.

Mountain flying.

There’s not much toxic or nuke exposure portrayed on television.  The one’s that got it absolutely right–The Day After and Special Bulletin come to mind–are are usually so right that it scares everyone out of watching them.  Which, sociologically speaking, is probably worth talking about—but some other time.  This post is just going to set the stage a little bit, as it were. 

Back in 1989 when I was in the then-USSR, officials there told me that The Day After was instrumental in forming Gorbachev’s position vis a vis the U.S.  As for Special Bulletin, if you want to know what terrorists can really do with even a small nuke, this is your film.  The writer and director should have been given emmys for this one.

Maybe they did get emmys, I forgot.  Anyhow, Special Bulletin was written by Marshall Herskovitz, who seemed to have a knack for getting the emotions right in his screenplays.  Among his other projects, 1976’s Family and 1987’s Thirtysomething.  Special Bulletin was directed by Herskovitz’ pal Edward Zwick who had a hand in the aforementioned Herskovitz projects as well as the great 1990’s series “My So-Called Life.”  It lasted one season.  Like Special Bulletin, maybe a little too realistic.

Which is perhaps why the current scriptwriters add that little dose of unreality to the program so that viewers will know that it’s all well, make believe.  Take that new CBS show scheduled for the fall lineup–Jericho.  From the press release it’s about the citizens of a small Kansas town who witness an explosion that resembles a nuclear test and because of it’s remote location (the town, not the explosion) the citizens have difficulty figuring out what to do next.  Sort of like Lost on the Great Plains. Or maybe not.

The fact is, I like CBS, mostly because Dan Rather and Fern Orenstein work there.  But, as a guy who knows a mushroom cloud when I see one, the cloud in the promo needs serious work.  It actually looks worse than the one in the really sensitive and too-cleverly-titled Desert Bloom, that old Jon Voight movie about coming-of-age and nuclear testing. 

But back to Jericho: there’s the problem with the terrain—there are mountains visible on the horizon.  I grew up in the Midwest and having spent a lot of time in Kansas I can assure you that Kansas is awesomely flat.  In fact, it has actually been mathematically proven to be flatter than a pancake.  I’ve been all across that state and I know of no place in KS where there are mountains as tall as are depicted in that promo.   Colorado, yes.  Southern California, suspiciously, yes.  Kansas?  No.

So, Fern–remember me?  I was the guy sitting next to you on the plane to San Fran—you were wearing that black MGM tee shirt. 

Place a call to CBS Television Marketing. Ask if the ”tweak” designer on that team has ever spent any time in the Midwest.

Jericho sounds like a great script, one of those shows that could turn out to be another Lost—but those mountains in that promo have got to go.