Archive for September, 2006
Election 2006: Five Weeks to Go
This year, the election will be close. It will be pivotal. It will fulfill all your wildest dreams and fantasies.
Okay, probably not. It’s close because it needs to be close because that makes for exciting news. If you’re a political junkie like me, then this election does matter. They all matter and not knowing the statistical advantage of either side (the fact that there are only two sides is a post for another time), makes it all the more exciting.
In terms of strategy, the Republicans are hoping that your fear of death will override your desire for privacy. I’m not shocked that they’re employing this strategy, but why not go with the silver bullet that helped them kick ass in 2004: Fight the Gays! If only a gay person would commit a terrorist act, that would be like Christmas to conservatives. Unfortunately, as the Iraq War continues to go poorly, the Republicans need to fight the Democrats pointing out that the Iraq War is going poorly. How to do this? Say that Iraq is going swimmingly! That it’s helping to fight terror! And evil! And bad breath! That’s what Democracy is all about! Things are going great (but not enough so that you should feel safe; remember, if you feel safe, the terrorists win)!
Republicans have been gaining ground lately with lower gas prices (NOT a conspiracy, as charming as that may be; the summer will always have higher gas prices) and the recent “compromise” over letting the President torture people (not personally, of course; that would be distasteful). The recent “compromise” (I’ll explain the quotations in a moment) with President Bush and Senators McCain (R-Ariz.), Graham (R-S.C.), and Warner (R-Virg.) was not so much an argument over whether or not it was okay to torture people, but really just a game of “Who Wants to Get Re-elected?” But I’m sure it will all end up alright. After all, no one ever harbored a grudge over being tortured.
The bill just passed the Senate by a vote of 65-34 and passed in the House on Wednesday by a vote of 253-168, with a handful of Democrats joining the GOP majority in both houses. This means that there are 318 elected officials who would be willing to revoke the civil rights of strangers for the chance of being re-elected. On the bright side, there are 202 who are going to take their chances.
The Lost Experience Loses Me
So today the ARG (Alternate Reality Game) of “The Lost Experience” finally came to a close. Along the way, we did learn the meaning behind the word “DHARMA” (Department of Heuristics and Research on Material Applications) as well as the meaning of the numbers (they represent core values which need to be changed in order to prevent the end of humanity).
However, tonight was the big finale of the experience and I’m just glad I didn’t invest more time and energy into this endeavor. After subjecting myself to DjDan’s live broadcast for the first and thankfully last time, I was led back to the ABC.com website where I got to see Rachel Blake’s (the female protagonist of this side-story) final video. Half of the video was the completed Sri Lanka footage already uncovered a few weeks ago. The other half was Rachel going to the home of Alvar Hanso, learning that he was not the big bad but rather it was Thomas Warner Mittlewerk. Rachel also learned that Alvar Hanso is her daddy. Awwww.
Unfortunately, this DOESN’T bring down the Hanso Foundation (although apparently Mittlewerk blew up the building in the middle of the podcast) nor does it really give us anything juicy about Lost itself. Granted, I wasn’t expecting a show-altering revelation, but at least something that may tie to one of our characters. How about Penny Widmore? She’s new. Give us a taste of her backstory. What about Henry Gale? Just a peek for people who have followed this quest all summer.
I’m not a big ARG guy (I feel only pity for the ilovebees.com followers of Halo 2), but do these things ever pay off? Does this roundabout marketing ever lead to a convincing sell or just a load of frustration?
Oh well. At least next week the real Lost experience begins as Season Three kicks off with the Jack-centric episode “A Tale of Two Cities”.
Leave LonelyGirl Alone
Okay, after the awkward seriousness of the previous post, let’s get back to the tasty inconsequential stuff.
Earlier this week, the New York Times reported the true identity of the videoblogger lonelygirl15, a.k.a, “Bree”. Some feel betrayed by this “hoax” and that they were “scammed”. To these people, I say, “why?”
First, let us all just admit the perverse pleasure we got out of the lonelygirl videos. Over 30,000 people subscribed to see a shy, pretty 15-year-old confess her inner-most thoughts and feeling to the entire Internet. The character was designed to appeal to a fantasy and I think some people are upset not that their fantasy was shattered, but that they realize what they’ve been fantasizing about.
Second, is this revelation all that shocking? I loved people who would point out things like “Look closely when she yawns! She has molars that are too developed for a fifteen-year-old!” or “She’s in a field with a type of flower that is indigenous to California! The plot thickens!” This isn’t LOST people. You have a teenager who never comments on the fact that she’s the most popular person on YouTube. There’s shy, there’s sheltered, and then there’s just plain gullability.
Finally, you didn’t get “scammed”. Did anyone pay to see the lonelygirl videos? At any point was anyone asked to send money to Bree or her friend Daniel? Did Bree put a lot of product placement in her videos? No, and if anything, the kids who put this together should be applauded, not condemned. They embarked on an artistic project that would get them professional attention and did so by utilizing new technology and combining it with a charming teen drama done in cinéma vérité style.
Personally, now that it’s been confirmed as fake, I can just enjoy the story, which is just starting to get interesting. Bree is rebelling more and she still has this weird ceremony coming up. I’m going to enjoy the story as a story, strange as that concept may seem.
As for those who continue to whine about someone pretending to be someone they’re not, Welcome to the Internet.
"We Do Not Torture"
Bush went on to say “Other than people and logic. We torture the shit out of them.”
In a press conference on Friday, George W. Bush continued to demonstrate his belief that stubbornness and narcissism are strong qualities. While I think John Kerry was one of the worst choices the Democrats could have made in Presidential nominee (“If only Al Gore was taller and could scare more children…”), he made a good point in one of the debates when he said “It’s one thing to be certain, but you can be certain and wrong.”
Some Senate Republicans are finding President Bush to be certainly wrong regarding the issue of torture. I agree with them, and I haven’t even been tortured like Sen. John McCain (R-AZ). First, I have trouble believing that torture is the most effective and efficent way of uncovering terror plots. As Chris Penn said in Reservoir Dogs, “If you fucking beat this prick long enough, he’ll tell you he started the goddamn Chicago fire, now that don’t necessarily make it fucking so!”
Second, advocating torture as well as expanded surveillance powers makes you wonder what kind of ass-backwards democracy we’re trying to spread to the world. They don’t hate us because of our money or our religion or our free speech and so forth (although they’re not super fond of those). They hate us because of shit like this. Who wouldn’t? Those who torture rarely come off as the good guys. Unless they’re Jack Bauer.
Also mentioned in the press conference was Bush’s refusal to go and search the nation of Pakistan for Osama Bin Laden. The reason? We can’t go in without an invitation because Pakistan is a soverign nation. Soverign. Meaning “Independent”. Technically what Afghanistan and Iraq were before we invaded (with Afghanistan, rightly so; with Iraq, wrongly so).
But even if we wanted to go in to Pakistan, where would we get the troops? It’s a shame the President never studied basic economics, although I suppose that doesn’t come up a lot when you never have to worry about money. For instance, no one told him that if you increase spending (war) while decreasing revenue (taxes), you will go into debt. Apparently he also missed the lesson about why it’s important to budget a limited supply. You see, we have a limited supply of troops. Mommy and Daddy can’t just give him more when he runs out. That’s why when you use them, you have to make sure that they go to what you really need. If you spend all your money on baseball cards and blow, you won’t have any money for food. Food is more important than baseball cards and blow. While El Presidente may have wanted war with Iraq, we didn’t need to go to war with Iraq. Now we don’t have the power to check out Pakistan, a nation that probably harbors Bin Laden (didn’t we used to have a problem with places that harbored terrorists?) and we don’t have the power for the final issue, Darfur.
Darfur is one of the big issues I care about. I’m not an issue whore. I have lots of opinions, but there’s a short list of social issues where I will continue to put money in the jar until the problem is solved. Darfur is on the short list. Does Darfur pose a threat to us? No. Does Darfur need the help of the largest military in the history of the planet? You bet. Every second that the horrors in Darfur continue is another second where anything we try to say about spreading freedom and democracy is complete and utter bullshit.
http://www.savedarfur.org/
Revenge!
AM – Stingrays slaughtered in QLD
Because it’s more fun to avenge someone’s death than to actually honor their life.
When there’s no more room in hell…
Last week, there was an uprising on Facebook about the added features of news-feed and mini-feed. While there is a slight privacy infringement, your privacy was still in your control and as another blogger said (I apologize for not recalling who), if Facebook had made this standard from the beginning, people would get pissed at its removal.
But now there’s a real reason to let Facebook know you’re pissed: Facebook will basically turn into MySpace. That’s right: now ANYONE can join. Sure, there are fictional characters on Facebook, but the service isn’t over-run with spammers, ads, and sexual-predators. And hey, there are times that I wish I could reach friends who don’t have access to Facebook, but that’s why there’s MySpace.
If anyone can join, then it’s clear that Facebook is definitely trying to compete with MySpace, both in popularity and in revenue. Be on the look out for annoying ads, crappy profile music that plays automatically, atrocious personal pages, and basically the complete breakdown of Facebook’s nice clean layout.
I believe a new fight is coming to Facebook. This one matters so show up (unless you don’t belong to Facebook in which case, I hear some emo kid wants to be in your top 8).
The Real Tragedy of Steve Irwin’s Death
People who went for the cheap laugh by shouting out “Crikey!” in response to the Crocodile Hunter’s death. There’s a special circle of Hell for you and it will be filled with the writers of the Scary Movie franchise.
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