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Just got Team America
I just picked up the DVD, only the 5th non-instructional DVD I’ve ever purchased,and I have to say, it was as good as I remembered. It was as vulgar as I remembered too. Actually it was the most vulgar movie I’ve ever seen, and I’ve seen Bad Lieutenant. There were only about 5 minutes of deleted scenes, and I’m not sure why they deleted some of them (though many were understandable to get the R rating). -
Post Secret
Post Secret just freaked me yesterday, it’s clean, weird and creepy. From their description:
PostSecret is an ongoing community art project where people mail-in their secrets anonymously on one side of a homemade postcard.
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It’s odd
That no one has discussed the similarities and differences between the current Newsweek fiasco and the Valerie Plame affair. Both were anonymous sources, both were damaging and both were very political.
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And please join me in welcoming….
Leland-Nation to the blogosphere.
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Saw Revenge of the Sith
Mark and I saw Revenge of the Sith, and unlike many of the reviewers I liked it quite a bit, I hadn’t seen the previous two but this one stood on it’s own quite well. Eric was supposed to meet us but had car problems.
While walking back to the car Mark and I saw this bumper sticker (which was pretty good)
And this car, which is hilarious, inspired by the Napoleon Dynamite movie evidently.
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The worst job ever
The worst job of all time is dead body smell tester. In Israel the IDF is training their search and rescue people to do their jobs in the presence of dead body scent.
Could you imagine the product testing for this? The article says that they
Rescue and medical professionals, who are familiar with the stench from personal experience, tested several chemical and organic substances before finding the exact “smell of death
That must have been awful couple of days. “How about this one? Too alive This one? Too dead. This one, that’s perfect, its smells just like death!”
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While I’m waiting
For the hosting data center to “reboot to fix latency they call it”, I’ll share this link on media self-absobrtion by Claudia Rosette. It’s the best article I’ve read so far about the Newsweek debacle. Money grafs”
But the chief victims to date have been the rioters themselves, some of whom died as the violence escalated. A Washington Post report Monday quoted an Afghan dry-goods salesman, Del Agha, who joined one of the riots, as saying: “We wanted to have a peaceful demonstration, but the demonstration was like a car and some people who are the enemies of Afghanistan took the steering wheel and turned it in the wrong direction.”
As recounted in the Arab News, an English-language newspaper based in Saudi Arabia, Afghans angered by the Newsweek story “have lashed out in fury in all directions. The fact that not only government and UN buildings were burned, but even mosques shows the depths of their rage. The same level of public anger has been reported from Pakistan, Indonesia, Egypt and many other Muslim countries.”
Let’s pause right there. We are hearing that Muslims, infuriated by a report of blasphemy, went on violent rampages that resulted in . . . dead Muslims and burned mosques. Meanwhile, not only is Newsweek apologizing and retracting, but the U.S. government is regretting the loss of life.
What’s really going on here is two stories. One involves Newsweek and the ups and downs of U.S. journalism. The other involves a swath of the Islamic world in which anger, fueled by years of gross political misrule, is a chronic feature of life–seeking to acquire a target. What produced these particular riots was the intersection of Islamic-world furies and that brand of U.S. self-absorption in which no subject is more fascinating to the American media than any possible misdeeds of the U.S. itself.
One media flaw that this (and every other article I’ve read) misses is that the media will not acknowledge that there are large parts of the world that are unreachable to them, yet it acts like it’s giving you the whole picture. It will not admit ignorance.
While we’re awash in celebrity stories, and the white house press pool will devote considerable time to getting their affectations right, we hear very little about the hundreds dead in Uzbekistan, and next to nothing about Darfour. Yet one never sees Peter Jennings saying “we have no Central Asian news tonight because the government won’t allow us in. Now J-Lo and P Diddy are back together….”
The two points are not entirely related but I thought I should get them on paper.
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The classics never die
I came across this again today, suffice it to say, the classics never go out of style.
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Thoughts on the media
First is this article from Virginia Postrel,
Some people say they want “just the facts,” and fault reporters for introducing too much analysis. Others complain that stories do just the opposite, treating all sides in a conflict as equally valid. The news-buying public seems to want contradictory things.
But one person’s contradiction is another’s market niche. Those differences help answer an economic puzzle: if bias is a product flaw, why does it not behave like auto repair rates, declining under competitive pressure?
In a recent paper, “The Market for News,” two Harvard economists look at that question. “There’s plenty of competition” among news sources, Sendhil Mullainathan, one of the authors, said in an interview. But “the more competition there has been in the last 20 years, the more discussion there has been of bias.”
The reason, he and his colleague, Andrei Shleifer, argue, is that consumers care about more than accuracy. “We assume that readers prefer to hear or read news that are more consistent with their beliefs,” they write. Bias is not a bug but a feature.
In a competitive news market, they argue, producers can use bias to differentiate their products and stave off price competition. Bias increases consumer loyalty.
I’ve always though that the media should admit to having a side instead of pretending that they follow some conceptually impossible standard of objectivity.
The other is this very cool map of where all the news is coming from, called Buzztracker.
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Things that annoy me, part million and four
The headline “Jane Fonda Film Banned From KY. Theaters” caught my eye immediately, and I started wondering if some combination of veterans and film critics had seized power in a subtle coup in order to have the power to ban a movie.
I then read the article and I find that a theater owner isn’t showing the movie. Some ban. Why won’t newspapers let words mean what they’re supposed to? I suppose I’ve blacklisted the movie by not seeing it. It being a small world, all of this happened in Elizabethtown (near Fort Knox), ancestral home of the French clan.
