Dirty Dishes	Dirty Dishes Archive

Dawn confesses to watching entirely too much television. Often the tube serves as visual muzak, ignored and registered at only a subliminal level. But occasionally, an insight into pop culture is afforded from TV viewing, frequently from the commercials (not the filler programming designed to frame real television­ i.e., the ads).

Recently, Dawn saw a commercial featuring the MSN butterfly, Microsoft's marketing mascot. MS's CEO Bill Gates (the unjailed criminal who's made billions by illegally squashing competition and ripping off consumers) evidently wants us to believe that flitting around the wwweb is made easier on the wings of an insect. Dawn would worry that any Microsoft bug (and there are so many!) might lay e-eggs specially bred to devour anything not Microsoft, but others apparently do not worry so.

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In any case, the Butterfly was touting MS's "parental controls" whereby parents can rest easy, knowing their kids can access only sites approved of by the coalition of whacked out fundamentalists MS hires to pabulumize the Internet. Dawn was, of course, already familiar with NetNanny-type filtering, but Dawn did learn that MS offers parents a chance to track all of little Timmy's web visits­ sort of like the way Attorney General John Ashcroft keeps tabs on where all his American "children" browse. The commercial in question showed one diligent Mom carefully reviewing Timmy's recent wwweb visits; she even offers a knowing smirk, suggesting that Timmy may have been naughty (in need of a spanking?).

Dawn wonders how many mommies use parental controls as a way to gratify their own prurient sexual interests; when snooping into their kids' browsing histories, they can reassure themselves that protective concern motivates their spying, when in reality they're eager to imagine teen libido unleashed in the wwweb's cornucopia of e-carnality.

A dear friend of Dawn reports her 14-year-old son (who is not subjected to silly 'net restrictions at home) sometimes forgets to clear the family computer's cache, making it easy for her to track his tastes in porn. She's laudably upfront that such conduct reflects badly only on herself; she, like Dawn, appreciates that one of the wonders of the wwweb is allowing kids access to porn they previously had to steal....