WNYW/Ch. 5

WNYW/Ch. 5 anchor Ernie Anastos is caught on live television saying “Keep f—ing that chicken” to weatherman Nick Gregory.

Welcome to prime-bleeping-time.

TV shows can get four-letter filthy after an appeals court ruling Tuesday declared the Federal Communications Commission‘s indecency rule unconstitutional.

The ruling, with provocative implications for evening TV, prompted cheers and jeers – and means the F-word might soon air on a network near you.

“The court says that dropping the F-bomb on prime time TV in front of kids is okay,” said Dan Isepp of the Parents Television Council. “The door has been kicked down.”

The group sided with the FCC and against six television stations, including FOX, ABC and CBS.

“I am shocked by such an anti-family decision,” said FCC Commissioner Michael Copps. “This decision gives them the unfettered ability to air whatever content they want.”

Nothing would change for at least 45 days as the FCC decides whether to appeal and – if the Supreme Court takes it up – until the case is ultimately decided.

The ruling only applies to broadcast TV in prime time and not to cable television.

If it stands, the decision would end the policy of fining broadcasters for foul language put in place after Bono used the F-word on the January 2003 NBC broadcast of the Golden Globes Awards.

“The FCC’s indecency policy is unconstitutional because it is impermissibly vague,” the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals said in a 32-page decision.

The ruling touched on everything from George Carlin‘s famous “Seven Words You Can Never Say on Television” to foul words by Nicole Richie on a Billboard Music Awards show – one of several cases that led to the decision. The decision was filled with words routinely bleeped out on television, from bulls— to d—head.

sshifrel@nydailynews.com

An “anti-family” decision? Let’s try for a “pro-parenting” and an “anti-television-as-babysitter” decision.

I want to know the content of the program and then let me choose whether my children watch it. If a program is supposed to be safe for kids and they drop an F-bomb, then I want heads to roll. Otherwise, the government needs to stay out of it.

The World Would Be Better If Everyone Watched This Video

If every person on our blue Earth watched this video, the world would be a much better place. At least for a few minutes. Listen closely to Carl Sagan’s words till the end. It won’t fail to get you teary.-JD

The spacecraft was a long way from home.

I thought it would be a good idea, just after Saturn, to have them take one last glance homeward. From Saturn, the Earth would appear too small for Voyager to make out any detail. Our planet would be just a point of light, a lonely pixel hardly distinguishable from the other points of light Voyager would see: nearby planets, far off suns. But precisely because of the obscurity of our world thus revealed, such a picture might be worth having.

It had been well understood by the scientists and philosophers of classical antiquity that the Earth was a mere point in a vast, encompassing cosmos—but no one had ever seen it as such. Here was our first chance, and perhaps also our last for decades to come.

So, here they are: a mosaic of squares laid down on top of the planets in a background smattering of more distant stars. Because of the reflection of sunlight off the spacecraft, the Earth seems to be sitting in a beam of light, as if there were some special significance to this small world; but it’s just an accident of geometry and optics. There is no sign of humans in this picture: not our reworking of the Earth’s surface; not our machines; not ourselves. From this vantage point, our obsession with nationalisms is nowhere in evidence. We are too small. On the scale of worlds, humans are inconsequential: a thin film of life on an obscure and solitary lump of rock and metal.

Consider again that dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it, everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you’ve ever heard of, every human being who ever was lived out their lives. The aggregate of all our joys and sufferings; thousands of confident religions, ideologies and economic doctrines; every hunter and forager; every hero and coward; every creator and destroyer of civilizations; every king and peasant, every young couple in love; every mother and father; hopeful child; inventor and explorer; every teacher of morals; every corrupt politician; every supreme leader; every superstar; every saint and sinner in the history of our species, lived there—on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.

The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena.

Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner. How frequent their misunderstandings; how eager they are to kill one another; how fervent their hatreds. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that in glory and triumph they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the universe, are challenged by this point of pale light.

Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity—in all this vastness—there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves. Like it or not, for the moment, the Earth is where we make our stand.

It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. It underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the only home we’ve ever known.

The pale blue dot.

This is an excerpt from Carl Sagan’s Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space. It talks about the photo of the same name, Pale Blue Dot, taken by Voyager I on February 14, 1990.

The short film was produced by David Fu. Thanks to our friend Alex Pasternack—from Motherboard—for pointing us to this amazing video.

It certainly puts a few things into perspective. How unique is our pale blue dot? Could there be other planets like it and we just don’t know because of the vastness of the universe?

I think it’s certainly possible.

A California company called Vivos offers the chance to go underground when the world ends in 2012

By Jeremy Hsu Posted 04.09.2010 at 4:30 pm

Doom Bunker Come on guys, there’s plenty of room Vivos

A doomsday bunker envisioned by California company Vivos can offer you, your family, and 4,000 other people the chance to escape the end of the world in a network of 20 underground shelters. Surely even the skeptics can’t resist the allure of scary music played over scenes of comfortable underground habitation, as NPR’s All Tech Considered reports.

The company claims to be a privately-funded venture with no religious affiliations, except perhaps to the gods of commerce. It certainly takes an agnostic view by listing all the possible reasons why you might want to pony up and help build those $10 million bunkers, including predictions by Nostradamus, the Mayans, the Hopi, and the Bible.

That’s not to say that we don’t like our apocalypse-survival equipment, but Vivos goes all out by promising a survival shelter stocked with power generation, water wells, filtration systems, sewage disposal, a year’s supply of food, security devices and medical equipment.

Of course, you’ll need all that if you believe disaster may strike at any moment because of a polar shift, super volcano eruptions, solar flares, nuclear war, and “even the return of Planet X (known as Niburu or Nemesis),” Vivos cheerfully states.

Did we mention that there’s a 2012 countdown clock on the company website?

We do have to appreciate the small touches, such as the Vivos logo on one of the communal dining room screens, because nothing cheers up post-apocalyptic survivors like a friendly reminder of the corporation that they paid to save them. Let’s just hope the grateful customers don’t get jealous of whatever mineshaft space Vivos has saved for itself, and go out looking to close the mineshaft gap.

Does the price include a Pipboy 3000?