"I hate Illinois Nazis"

I came across this article via a friend of the blog's FB posting. Apparently, there's an idea to make the Blues Brothers into a TV show. Click HERE if you're interested in the short article.

Way to hammer while the iron is hot, TV execs! Excellent work. You're worth all that money you get paid. Jeesh...

This is absurd. That classic movie came out in 1980 when I was, gulp, nine years old. And now in 2010 they're spinning a TV show off of it?

When I teach argument-based writing classes, we discuss and analyze the varied argumentative moves that people use in spoken and written communication. And one such move is to "argue from sign." And this sub-argument is everywhere in our culture, especially morons who denounce global warming as a "hoax" because, say, central Illinois is cold right now in late February. The stronger argumentative move is that scientists, people who publish in peer-reviewed scholarly articles and sport actual scientific degrees in rigorous disciplines, look at lots of factors, lots of signs. And one important sign is the average worldwide temperature and how it's drastically risen, not the current temp at this moment in Mankato or Dallas.

For entertaining satire of this foolishness by The Daily Show, click HERE.

So what am I driving at with this rant about arguing from sign? [tangent averted with the overused trope of the rhetorical question]

There are lots of signs that TV is creatively bankrupt, which we could talk about in detail, but the fact that it took people three decades to capitalize on the Blues Brothers movie is certainly one.