Conservapedia usage stats: So visceral

Life just keeps imitating The Wire...

New York hitman Brother Mouzone, sending his reluctant henchman to gather intel at a gay bar: You're the perfect bait. They will view you as conflicted, your homophobia is so visceral.--The Wire, Season 3

Kieran Healy snatched the screen cap, above, from the Conservapedia statistics page.

I found these rankings current as of 11:31pm EST, 11/20/07.

Comments

[Chris O.]

Wow. Just, wow. I'll bet even gay people don't think about gay sex quite that much.

[aeroman]

And Rawls was there! And it worked! Oh, The Wire Season Three.

[wareq]

This made FARK.com .

[ytmnd]

Lewis Black mentions Conservapedia entry on Homosexuality on the Daily Show: http://youtube.com/watch?v=CJEeyLeqJHc

Case closed.

[mitchell porter]

Any web page which mentions any form of sexuality is liable to get a large number of hits. How many of those hits came from Conservapedia regulars, and how many from miscellaneous Internet users looking for porn, do you think?

[cfrost]

Suspicion confirmed. They really are self-loathing, closet-case wankers.

[chowderhead]

I think for now I'll file this information under the category: John Prine's "Its a big old goofy world"

[DrDick]

Hey, they are Republicans, what do you expect?

[M. Johnson]

"Conservapedia-" not sure what it means, but it sounds saucy. Think I'll take a look!

Sure, Mitchell Porter,
When I'm looking for gay porn I always find the HOTTEST sites by googling clinical, slang-free search terms like "Homosexuality," or "Homosexuality and Hepatitis."
[Heads-up: Conservapedia is a total buzz-kill if you're looking for the raunchiest Gay Bowel Syndrome sites.]

Note there are only 20% more hits for Conservapedia's MAIN page than it's "Homosexuality" page. Which makes me wonder: How many of THOSE hits came from Conservapedia regulars, and how many from miscellaneous Internet users looking for porn?!

[mudkitty]

Ok, a friend of mine is so nuts about the show "Wired" he just gave me the entire 3 seasons...I guess I should take the time to watch, eh? Should I do it methodically? Chronologically? Or just dive into the 3 season and let the pieces fall where they may?

Please advise.

[parse]

mudkitty, I started watching it on air in the middle of the season and it took me quite a few episodes before I wasn't completely at sea for a part of each hour--characters kept appearing who I'd never seen before, or didn't quite remember. Also, part of the fun of later seasons was characters who acted quite a bit differently than they did when they were introduced. A friend lent me the DVDs for season one and I started over, watching them in order, and really enjoyed it more that way.

[aeroman]

mudkitty: Chronologically. I watched Season 2, then 3, then 1, and it was great, but a lot of the impact would have been greater if I'd watched 1 first. Seasons 2 and 3 have a lot of developments that, while they're compelling in their own right, are especially exciting if you know the plot and thematic elements they're building on or contrasting or calling back to.

Seasons 1-3 have a definite arc, and if you can experience that arc in the right order, you should... but, once you have, if you have the time, someday you should rewatch Season 1, just to see all the seeds that were planted then to sprout up later.

[Lindsay Beyerstein]

Definitely, start at the beginning and watch all the way through. Earlier this month, I got my brother Loren season 1 for his birthday. He's already hooked. I have seasons 2 and 3. So, we're planning a Wire marathon when I get back to Vancouver for Christmas.

[mudkitty]

I asked for your advise, and I will take it. Chronologically, it is.

I just, generally, hate first episodes because I dislike heavy handed exposition.

[DJA]

Each season of a show like The Wire is like a 12-hour movie. Given the size of the cast and the complexity of the plot, a certain amount of exposition is necessary to set up all the pieces on the board. Obviously, this is especially true of Season 1 -- subsequent seasons assume you are already familiar with the core characters and concepts.

The Wire actually handles this setup process more elegantly than most -- if Season 1 Episode 1 strikes you as "heavy handed exposition," then my guess is you don't really enjoy long-form serial drama, period.

[mudkitty]

You would guess wrong...I just don't like exposition, much less, heavy handed exposition.

[DJA]

Not entirely sure how you propose to tell a complex long-form story involving dozens of characters without any exposition whatsoever. We agree that bad exposition is bad -- but what about the exposition in The Wire S1 Ep1 was bad?

Like I said, it's a mistake to think of the episodes as discrete, complete-in-themselves entities. The season is the work, not the episodes. If you were watching a 12-hour movie, it would seem reasonable (to most viewers, at least) to include more expository screen-minutes than if you were watching a 90-minute movie.

[mitchell porter]

The latest at Crooked Timber suggests that those page-view statistics result from enemy action, with New Atheist script kiddiez who have a thing for Conservapedia homophobes rounding out the love triangle.

[mudkitty]

As a writer, it's hard not to notice exposition, but I find it interesting when done well; when it's organic to the characters and the plot. I'm looking forward, after the holiday, to starting with episode 1 of The Wire.

*****

I confess, however, that I'm the sort who sometimes skips to the end of a book, and then goes back, and have even been known to read backwards and forwards, meeting in the middle, which is hardly an author's intention for a reader. But I'm compelled to do it, because I read soooo much, that if I didn't do it, traditional forms would get tedious, and start to warp my brain. I won't do it, of course, if it an O'Henry type of lit. Does anybody else have this problem? Also, if a book doesn't get me in the first chapter, forget it. Life's too short to read a bad book.

[Dave M]

OMG I love the Wire. Naturally one must begin at the beginning, but I see that issue has been resolved. I just saw season 3 on DVD, so the line Lindsay quotes is fresh in my mind. And that's an example; you really need to know the history between Omar and Brother Mouzone if their actions in S. 3 are to make any sense. You feel me? Oh, and season 4 is out soon!

Also, w/r/t Conservapedia, one must always take it with a grain of salt; there was a lot of parody/hacking going on a while back. Still, those stats are striking, aren't they?

[dan]

season four ships December 4, amazon tells me. I preordered it months ago.

Seems like the issue has been resolved, but I've been blog-delinquent lately, and I did a wire marathon of my own a couple weeks ago, so I have to pile on. Chronologically. Absolutely. And frankly, I much prefer the immersive experience of watching it on DVD. I tried watching season four in real time, and even I, as devoted a fan as you'll find, found it frustrating. One hour on, 167 off just doesn't do it.

oh, one more thing--I thought season one, episode 1 had a really heavy-handed, awkward, terrible bit of exposition--the flashback to the trial, at the very end of the episode, in case we didn't recognize the corpse. Quite awkward, quite amateurish. And I'm pretty confident they never compromised like that again--can't think of a single similar instance. They made the mistake once, and learned the lesson.

[Lindsay Beyerstein]

After finishing season 3, DJA and I started watching the first season again, this time with the the commentary. The flashback to Gant's testimony was awful. In the commentary on Episode 1, David Simon explains that HBO forced them to insert that flashback. Simon notes, with evident pride, that Gant on the witness stand is the only flashback in The Wire.

The the first episode of season one isn't gripping. In some ways, there's not enough exposition to make episode one stand on its own. You get introduced to about 30 characters in an hour. There's no voiceover to explain who's who, you just have to watch and learn. Just figuring out which cops are from homicide and which are from narcotics and why this matters is confusing enough, let alone the various roles and distinctions among the drug dealing characters. I found it was hard to understand every word of the dialog at first, which also contributed to the confusion. After a couple of episodes, I got the hang of it.

The first time around, I was unclear about why McNulty was going to see Judge Phelan and why this created so many problems. I didn't get what was going on with Bunk and the decomp in the abandoned apartment until I watched the commentary. (Nolan's squad was supposed to take that call, but Bunk jumped on the case when he heard there was a dead guy inside a house--according to Simon, there's a 50% greater chance of solving a murder if the body is found inside than outside because you can connect the body to a building which has a title, known residents, etc. Unfortunately for Bunk and McNulty, the dead guy turned out to be decomposing in an abandoned apartment in a housing project, a likely murder that was going to be nearly impossible to solve.)

[DJA]

according to Chase

Simon. David Chase is The Sopranos. Too many guys named David creating HBO dramas, I tells ya.

[DJA]

N.B. HBO, please ignore what I just wrote and give David Lynch a goddamned HBO show already.

[mudkitty]

Every Tom, Dick, and Harry's name is David!