November 2, 2008
GOP on QVC (on SNL)
Who would have predicted the McCains would be funnier than Ben Affleck?
Makes up for Palin’s just-sort-of-showing-up appearance, I’d say.
November 1, 2008
Punking Palin
The Canadian comedy duo known as “The Masked Avengers” somehow cracked the impenetrable security of the McCain/Palin campaign and got in a prank call to Gov. Sarah Palin.
Pretending to be French President Nicolas Sarkozy, they get Palin to discuss hunting from a helicopter (and promise she’ll be a better shot than Dick Cheney), how hot Sarkozy’s supermodel wife is in bed and even the infamous Nailin’ Paylin porn movie produced by Hustler.
Listen below…
October 29, 2008
Bat-Manga!
Over at BoingBoing Cory Doctorow is taking a look at a new book about Bat-Manga – the explosion of Batman comic books created for the Japanese market during the 1960s, when the classic Adam West TV series was being marketed there.
The best part of the story? Apparently the Japanese man tasked with selling Batman to his countrymen thought the stories weren’t strange and outlandish enough to go over there and made Batman even weirder — adding robots, dinosaurs and villains that rise from the dead.
My thing is…the American Batman was never weirder than he was in the 1960s. He was already traveling in time, going to different worlds, fighting aliens and magical villains, disguising himself as other super-heroes and…you know, regularly battling one of the weirdest rouges galleries of villains in comic book history with some of the strangest gadgetry imaginable. And the Japanese thought that wasn’t enough? You’d have to seriously look at their manga and anime to truly wrap your head around that one.
The book, Bat-Manga!: The Secret History of Batman in Japan, is available now.
Check out more photos from the book (including weird Japanese Batman toys) here.
October 28, 2008
Christian Science Monitor to drop print edition
BOSTON (AP) — The Christian Science Monitor said Tuesday it will become the first national newspaper to drop its daily print edition and focus on publishing online, succumbing to the financial pressure squeezing its industry harder than ever.
Come April, the Boston-based general-interest paper — founded in 1908 and the winner of seven Pulitzer Prizes — will print only a weekend edition after struggling financially for decades, its editor announced Tuesday.
The Monitor’s circulation has fallen from a peak of 223,000 in 1970 to about 50,000 now, while its online traffic has soared. The newspaper gets about 5 million page-views per month, compared with about 4 million five years ago and 1 million a decade ago.
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I frankly don’t know whether to be relieved (this is where the industry has to go if it wants to survive and one of our best papers is leading the way) or horrified (the move from print is going to cost a lot of jobs and be an incredibly painful transition for the industry).
October 24, 2008
The return of Dualism?
New Scientist has an interesting piece about the resurrection of Cartesian Dualism as a weapon in the fight over creationism.
From the story:
“Schwartz and Beauregard are part of a growing “non-material neuroscience” movement. They are attempting to resurrect Cartesian dualism – the idea that brain and mind are two fundamentally different kinds of things, material and immaterial – in the hope that it will make room in science both for supernatural forces and for a soul. The two have signed the “Scientific dissent from Darwinism” petition, spearheaded by the Seattle-based Discovery Institute, headquarters of the intelligent design movement. ID argues that biological life is too complex to have arisen through evolution.
In August, the Discovery Institute ran its 2008 Insider’s Briefing on Intelligent Design, at which Schwartz and Michael Egnor, a neurosurgeon at Stony Brook University in New York, were invited to speak. When two of the five main speakers at an ID meeting are neuroscientists, something is up. Could the next battleground in the ID movement’s war on science be the brain? “
October 24, 2008
Andy, Opie, Ritchie and Fonz for Obama
See more Ron Howard videos at Funny or Die
So it IS possible to be amused, to have your heart warmed and to throw up a little in your mouth all at once…
October 23, 2008
Great review of the first Android phone
BoingBoing Gadgets has the best review I’ve read yet of T-Mobile’s G1 Android phone.
For those coming late: Android is Google’s new, open source operating system for mobile phones. It is being offered first on the G1 model smartphone and has been hyped in some corners of the Net as a possible “iPhone Killer.”
Reviewer Joel Johnson says not so fast on that one, but found much to like about the phone.
From the review…
On beauty vs. utilitarianism:
“Call me shallow if you must, but I’d call myself human: we respond to physical elegance in people and in objects and the G1 is a lumpen, crooked, creaking slab. (That creaking comes from hinges on the flip-up screen that reveals the keyboard, which makes an altogether more appealingly solid clack.) And the ugliness extends into the operating system itself, which at a minimum needs to update its icon set. The colorful, rounded icon have never been Google’s most attractive corporate hallmark, but at least on the web they indicated a down-to-businessness that had a certain charm. On the phone, however, they just look chintzy.”
On websurfing:
“The web browser, while marred by the inexplicable lack of multitouch support in the touchscreen, is very good, rending most web pages like its real, grown-up desktop counterparts.”
On Google integration:
Integration with Google services, of which I am a heavy user, is excellent, as was instant messaging. (Although the G1’s IM experience still does not match that of the years-old Sidekick, it’s getting close.)
On the much hyped “Compass Mode”:
“My most anticipated feature, the “Compass Mode” that makes Google Maps’ Street View into a sort of augmented reality, did not work very well at all, operating too slowly and too imprecisely to serve as even a demonstration of the phone’s whizbanginess to friends.”
Overall:
“For now, the T-Mobile G1 is a solid, utilitarian phone, which I can recommend without question to those looking for a basic modern smartphone.”
We’ve all had our hearts broken by gadget hype — and Johnson does actually address the continuum of gadget love in the review itself:
“Products are not simply loved or hated, but appreciated over time on a scale which terminates with perfection at one extreme, failure to operate at the other. That scale can be broken down in any number of metrics, all of which are useless: what matters to the owner of a product is not where a reviewer, a single sample, has chosen to mark his opinion at an arbitrary point in time on the scale, but in what direction that point is heading. (And to a lesser and murkier degree, for how long that trend will continue.)
What’s lost in the review — the direction of love — is critical. Like romantic love, a slide towards increasing love helps us overlook flaws, remember only the best aspects of our products’ features, and gives the relationship between a product and its owner time to flourish and grow. Hidden delights will show themselves after a time, reinforcing the relationship, even as unaddressed incompatibilities might, after a measure, begin to tilt affection towards declination.”
October 21, 2008
Talking with McCain-Palin folks
Some video that Michael McQueen and I did at the Elon rally last week. The folks in the video are much more representative of the crowd than the guy who ended up kicking me.
And you even get a bit of the Hank Williams Jr. song “McCain-Palin Tradition” there at the end.
October 20, 2008
Hey, he got free gum
In light of last week, a couple of people have sent me this now:
WOODBRIDGE, Va. — As Republican congressional candidate Keith Fimian warmed up the crowd at an afternoon rally with Sen. John McCain, CNN’s Ed Henry was co-anchoring his network’s weekend political coverage live from the press risers. Fimian was speaking about his personal accomplishments as Henry quizzed Bill Schneider, who was standing at another camera position at the rally.
A woman towards the back of the crowd angrily turned back and started yelling at Henry, asking him to stop talking during Fimian’s speech. The woman grew so angry that she threw a pack of Dentyne Ice gum at Henry, which hit his back as he wrapped up his conversation with Schneider.
October 17, 2008
How I Became Joe Sixpack
Was at the Sarah Palin rally at Elon University today.
It was an interesting day and I’m glad to have had the experience. But now here I sit, sunburned and sore with a throbbing headache and an aching leg.
Why? Because a McCain-Palin supporter tried to kick my ass.
I know what you’re thinking.
But no, I didn’t have it coming.
What happened, briefly, is this:
After Hank Williams Jr. had finished his set of country standards (”I Walk The Line”) Country pandering (the theme from The Dukes of Hazard) and re-arranged original hits with new lyrics (”McCain-Palin Tradition”), Sarah Palin arrived to cheers, screams and adoration that rivaled Greensboro’s Obama rally.
“GOD BLESS YOU SARAH PALIN!” one man shouted.
But not everyone was overjoyed to see her.
Weaved in amongst the crowd were a what looked like a few dozen Obama supporters – some wearing Obama shirts, others in street clothes. As Palin got into her speech they began chants of “Obama” and screamed out rebuttals to the points in her speech. This angered some in the crowd — some responding with cursing, others chanting “U.S.A.” and “NObama” to drown them out. Eventually the cops came and escorted them off of the baseball field.
Then it happened again, elsewhere in the crowd.
N&R political reporter Mark Binker and I were on different sides of the crowd – but we both got the same reaction from Palin fans as we craned our necks to see what the disturbance was.
“That’s not the story, the story’s up there on the stage!” someone yelled at Binker.
“Ain’t nothing to look at and don’t you write about it!” I was told.
To her credit: Palin stopped the speech to suggest that maybe the security shouldn’t escort the protesters off — maybe they should “stay and learn something.”
Not so very to her credit: she did not actually instruct security to let them stay.
After the speech was over I was walking around getting peoples’ reactions to it when I wandered into several clusters of sign waving Obama supporters outside the stadium area. They were surrounded by McCain-Palin folks and both sides were yelling at each other.
I sidled up to one of the Obama supporters and asked why they were there, what they were trying to accomplish.
As he was telling me a large, bearded man in full McCain-Palin campaign regalia got in his face to yell at him.
“Hey, hey,” I said. “I’m trying to interview him. Just a minute, okay?”
The man began to say something about how of course I was interviewing the Obama people when suddenly, from behind us, the sound of a pro-Obama rap song came blaring out of the windows of a dorm building. We all turned our heads to see Obama signs in the windows.
This was met with curses, screams and chants of “U.S.A” by McCain-Palin folks who crowded under the windows trying to drown it out and yell at the person playing the stereo.
It was a moment of levity in an otherwise very tense situation and so I let out a gentle chuckle and shook my head.
“Oh, you think that’s funny?!” the large bearded man said. His face was turning red. “Yeah, that’s real funny…” he said.
And then he kicked the back of my leg, buckling my right knee and sending me sprawling onto the ground.
From my position there I saw the bottoms of a number of feet almost accidentally stomping me to death as the two political camps screamed back and forth, the music continued to blare and some of the Obama crowd moved the large bearded man and his friends away. When I was helped to my feet the bearded man was walking away quickly.
For a moment I considered running the bloated, twelve-sandwich eating prick down and beating the living hell out of him…and then I remembered that I’m a reporter, how much I enjoy being gainfully employed and how hard it would be to keep my job if I got into a fistfight with a guy at a political rally.
So instead I limped off to try to find a security guard or cop.
When I did the guy was nowhere to be found.
“He’s this big fat guy with a brown beard and he’s wearing a McCain-Palin shirt and hat,” I said.
And then felt like an idiot. I was surrounded by people who fit that description.
So I simply limped to my car fuming.
On the way I passed comedian D.L. Hughley, who I’d interviewed a little earlier.
He’s got a new CNN show premiering at the end of the month and was there to tape a segment.
He was standing on the corner with a camera crew as the crowd passed him, saying: “Hey…are you Joe Sixpack? Joe? Joe Sixpack? I’m looking for Joe Sixpack. Joe? How about Joe the Plumber? Joe? I’m looking for some Joes…”
He gave me a wave and said: “Hey, Joe! Are YOU Joe Sixpack?”
I waved, shook my head and smiled.
But I was thinking: “Well, I may be tonight…”
When I get home I’ll start with one and we’ll see how it goes.
October 10, 2008
Designer Condoms?
Proper Attire condoms are, apparently, a new brand of condom catering to people who don’t feel traditional condoms are “stylish” enough.
The brand’s slogan: “Proper Attire: Required for Entry”
From their website:
Old stereotypes about who should buy condoms are so last season! PROPER ATTIRE® condoms are the “must-have” accessory and were designed with sexually active, stylish women in mind.
The fashionably chic PROPER ATTIRE design helps ensure that now you can feel completely comfortable buying condoms and carrying them with you. With 5 trendy styles — Basic (regular); Color (colored); Dots (studded); XL (extra large); and Proper Attire’s Yigal Azrouël Sheer (ultra thin) — PROPER ATTIRE condoms are a safe yet fun way to protect yourself and your partner and do it with style!
While I’m populist in many ways I’m not the kind of guy who shakes his head at brand preference and tells you that it’s all the same stuff. There are a number of brands (including condom brands) to which I’m loyal. But the idea that prophylactics just aren’t stylish enough is pushing it a little far, isn’t it?
It’s hard enough being a young guy buying condoms for the first time without worrying that your date is going to think your condoms are “so last season.”
October 8, 2008
Berkley Breathed ending “Opus” comic strip
Pulitzer Prize winning cartoonist Berkley Breathed is ending his popular Sunday comic Opus, which often swings from weird and whimsical to bitingly satirical.
He says he’s “destroying the village in order to save it.”
Breathed tells the L.A. Times: “30 years of cartooning to end. I’m destroying the village to save it. Opus would inevitably become a ranting mouthpiece in the coming wicked days, and I respect the other parts of him too much to see that happen. The Michael Moore part of me would kill the part of him that was important to his fans.”
Breathed seems at once eaten alive by cynicism and playfully hopeful.
“With the crisis in Wall Street and Washington, I’m suspending my comic strip to assist the nation,” he told the L.A. Times. “The best way I can help is to leave politics permanently and write funny stories for America’s kids. I call on John McCain to join me.”
October 8, 2008
Liz Phair does “Exile in Guyville” live
NPR has posted one of the concerts in which Liz Phair performs her breakthrough album Exile in Guyville in its entirety.
You can listen here.
Contains strong language, of course — cause, you know, it’s Liz Phair.
October 8, 2008
Entertainment Weekly (sorta) likes Oliver Stone’s “W.”
Entertainment Weekly calls Oliver Stone’s biopic of the sitting president “unusual and inescapably interesting”.
But reviewer Todd McCarthy also says the film “is unable to achieve more than a sort of engaging pop-history pageant and amateur, if not inapt, psychological evaluation, due to the unavoidable lack of perspective and a final act that has yet to be written.”
Sounds about right — but I still think I’m going to see it.
What about you guys?
October 7, 2008
Where they torture the denim
Having recently lost some weight, I’m down to one pair of jeans that aren’t so big I have to hold them up with my belt pulled to its last hole and the denim scrunched up around my waist like I just arrived at Ellis Island.
So, I went shopping for a new pair of jeans this week. And found that it’s almost impossible to buy a pair of jeans these days that haven’t been distressed, specially washed or rinsed or treated during their dye process to give them some unusual look or feel. Beyond that, there are so many “cuts” from which to choose that it literally gave me a headache.
In the end the winner was… Levi’s 501’s.
Now I’m ready to escape from a chain gang and be chased through the woods by dogs and guys with shotguns to the terrifying sounds of Nine Inch Nails…
Even these aren’t made the way they always were — and my pair says the venerable American icon is now manufactured in Mexico and Egypt. But still – their simplicity wins the day.
Here’s an interesting photo essay from NYC photographer David Friedman’s trip to a denim distressing factory in Kentucky.
It’s weird and wonderful to see how these high-end jeans get beaten up.
Why is still beyond me. I like breaking a pair in myself.
October 7, 2008
Bizarre “I’m a PC” commercials made with a Mac
I know I’ve posted about the new “I’m a PC” ads from Microsoft before — but now that I’ve seen this one with a solo Pharrell Williams I’m just…puzzled.
Nowhere in this ad does Pharrell or anyone else make any arguments for a PC being better than a Mac — not for music, not for art, not for anything that Pharrell could actually speak to with authority and passion. He just talks about loving music and says that he uses a PC.
All right…and?
They’ve seen the actual “I’m a Mac/I’m a PC” ads, right? It’s true that the Mac guy looks cooler…but he also makes an actual argument for what’s so great about Macs in each commercial. This is what makes the commercials so great.
These things…they just makes me feel sorry for Microsoft. It’s like they’re the kid who never learned how to debate intelligently, who just starts rambling and screaming. “Am not! You are! Oh yeah? Well, hip musicians and music producers use me too, you know…”
October 7, 2008
My hero, Jerry Seinfeld
How did I never see this clip of Jerry Seinfeld saying what I’ve always wanted to say to Larry King?
King seems never to know anything about his guests or what they do — even the big ones. He hides behind this “Well, I’m just asking questions the viewers may not know” thing, but it’s patently obvious that he just does little or no prep for most interviews.
Watching this is glorious.
