Category: Thoughts

Bush just let Libby out of jail. It’s not, technically, a pardon, but it’s enough to make me want to throw things. Can you say conflict of interest?

“Hey, Scooter! Thanks for obstructing justice when they were investigating my cronies and me– I can’t pardon you but I should be able to get rid of everything involving some kind of actual punishment for you.”

You want to talk about the obstruction of justice? I want Scooter to face justice, and by justice I mean I want him to join Paris Hilton and nonviolent drug offenders in making the US the country with the largest prison population in the world!

WSJ blog and Businessweek say that the French system, while not perfect, has a lot of advantages over the US, such as the fact that patients rarely die because they are too poor to pay for medicine.

Triumph has announced stats for the new Street Triple: 368 pounds claimed dry weight and 107 horsepower. Mmmmmm, dangerous, expensive toys.

The Cult Of The Amateur: In his view Web 2.0 is changing the cultural landscape and not for the better. By undermining mainstream media and intellectual property rights, he says, it is creating a world in which we will “live to see the bulk of our music coming from amateur garage bands, our movies and television from glorified YouTubes, and our news made up of hyperactive celebrity gossip, served up as mere dressing for advertising.” This is what happens, he suggests, “when ignorance meets egoism meets bad taste meets mob rule.”

Ignorance, egoism, bad taste, and mob rule have been the order of the day since at least 1945, and quite possibly longer. I don’t know what he’s complaining about.

It is a quarter past ten in the morning and I am in Burlingame, CA at the MeeVee offices. Three of us are sitting around a wide-screen TV watching an advance screener of televised trainwreck “Hey Paula.” I am shocked that I am watching TV at ten in the morning. Also I can’t sit still because Paula is so horrible. Everyone else loves it, but I am beginning to despair for all of humanity. At the end, Paula says “I’m tired of people not treating me like the gift that I am.” What kind of a gift is that, Paula?

See also: acquired situational narcissism.

Update: Here’s my review/commentary over at MeeVee. Yes, I get mean about it.

Who Wants To Be A Superhero?

Dear The Onion:

What’s with the right-wing, unfunny editorial cartoons? I could forgive the conservatism if they were actually funny, but they’re not. In most cases, they don’t even have an “editorial” point, like the farewell to the Sopranos. But mostly, they just seem to be illustrations of the ideas “I’m a grumpy old man who doesn’t get enough respect” or “won’t somebody think of the children?”

Perhaps most egregious is the one that says having kids home from school is like having terrorists in the house. That’s like some sort of foul-mouthed Family Circus drawing, and not in the funny way, either. It may be offensive and poorly drawn, but it’s not funny and it’s certainly not an editorial commentary in cartoon form.

Is the guy an investor’s relative or something? There’s no reason to put those up on The Onion otherwise.

Yours,
Aaron Weber

I’ve got a head-to-head comparison of “Top Chef,” “The Next Food Network Star,” and “Hell’s Kitchen” running over at the MeeVee blog, and it’s been deemed good enough to be picked up by Glitterati.

Also, I am proud of my review of the reviews of “Heartland,” in which I conclude that TV reviewers are overusing medical puns.

Someone has claimed they hacked the hell out of Harry Potter’s publishing house, and did it to stop “neo-pagan” propaganda. This is bizarre on so many levels I don’t even know where to begin. Neo-paganism? Industrial espionage for religious purposes?

When will people abandon their superstitions and move on to a proper late-capitalist secular humanism?

Via Wired’s Table of Malcontents: In 1960, a leading Japanese politician is assassinated during a live television broadcast:

Somehow this reminds me of the photo that won the 1973 Pulitzer Prize— the naked girl fleeing a napalmed village in Vietnam. That photographer, Huynh Cong Ut, is now a Hollywood paparazzo. I wonder if any of the figures in this drama are still around (not the main ones, of course: the politician died instantly and the swordsman hanged himself in prison) and what they’re up to now. Is the announcer now the host of a game show or beauty pageant?