I miss Pee-Wee

I've been listening to They Might Be Giants a lot lately. They're a band for geeks and other people who don't listen to music for dancing purposes, which means they can experiment with the beats and the lyrics all they want. As with most experimentalists, much of their stuff is annoying (and there's a lot that's weird for the sake of weirdness), but the stuff they get right really stands out.

The thing that people who come to my house seem to most dislike about TMBG is the lead's voice, which is nasal and sounds like Pee Wee Herman. So, after overplaying `She's an angel', a sweet and tender love song about a girlfriend who may or may not exist, and may or may not be dead, I've had images of Pee Wee in my head.

Pee Wee was really the most creative, original show around. There are hundreds of shows that are isomorphic to each other: community of happy talking animals get into hijinx, superhero team meets a new enemy every week who's just like last week's enemy but can freeze things whereas last week's could burn things. What can we compare to Pee Wee? He obviously took off from other kid's shows, but was so clearly different.

By the way, this is also why I love the video game Joust, which is about knights on flying ostriches. Where did that come from? In an arcade full of realistic driving and fighting games, Joust is nirvana.

Oh, but we've all heard about the downfall of Paul Reubens. To remind you of the story, a policeman saw that he had a penis, the media jumped on it, and that was it for his career as the guy loved by millions of kids who thought an adult movie theater was one that showed dull British period pieces. I wonder what the journalists who picked up the story were thinking. After the fact, it seems so obvious that wide media exposure as a human with sexual urges would ruin his career. Did the journalists not get this and just think it'd be funny? Did they really think that he was a pervert needing to be, um, exposed? Did they stand by some naive principle that it's truth and the media are objective and the public can sort it out? Also, did people pull his show off the air and his dolls off the shelf because they were offended, or because they were afraid somebody next door would be offended?

Anyway, here's a Vanity Fair article which somebody else was nice enough to violate copyright on and make public, capturing Paul a few years after the event, which characterizes him as somebody shocked and traumatized but recovering.

But then came his second scandal, where he was arrested for allegedly posessing child pornography. Here's an article that goes into detail about what the fuzz found when they went to his house. It's not very surprising: a ton (907 kg) of kitsch, including vintage porn from back when people didn't feel particularly bad about showing naked kids.

This isn't the place to rant about how the child porn threat has been overblown, since that's been done to death, e.g., by this article. More than enough people have commented that the police have limited resources, and every million dollars spent on arresting people downloading nudie pix, or prosecuting people who took photos of breastfeeding their own kid is a million dollars not spent finding rapists and murderers. But the myth of child porn as a massive underground community waiting to take over the world continues to be told. Check out this site, whose ``statistics have been derived from a number of different reputable sources including Google...'', and which reports that ``Child pornography generates $3 billion annually.'' That's almost as large as the plastic fruit industry, which generates $3.4352 billion annually.

No, I'm not going to talk about that. Just lament the fact that Paul Reubenfeld was a really unique guy, and because he was unique, he was persecuted.