Lots of bloggers think it, I dunno. I do see it as a major lack of the whole “objectivity” thing, not sure on which side. Actually, I do have an opinion. I have an opinion! But let me explain what I’m talking about first.

War on Iraq. For years we’ve thought, gee, wish we could get rid of this Saddam fellow. Then someone says, “let’s get rid of Saddam” and suddenly the media is all very much against it.

I don’t care if its a good idea or not, what I can’t understand is why NO ONE on television, print, radio, whatever can put forth a good story on why we shouldn’t be attacking Iraq, oh, and also…maybe why we should? Cause apparently 70% of Americans would like to…and the news doesn’t want to admit it.

Instead of blaming it on a liberal bias that I just don’t see, I would look to what I learned last semester in Socolow’s great News on Screen class about how today’s press doesn’t like covering anything unless its being debated by politicians.

Basically, there is no “dissent” in the public (represented by the media) until a leader objects. War on terror? Unified as good. Until Tom Daschle comes out and says…maybe not so good. Then there are stories on that.

A few politicos said war, the rest called them warmongers, and there we go, easy way to slant the coverage. When every politician is saying its bad, and a few are saying its good, and no one is saying WHY its good, and a lot are saying WHY its bad, that is obviously what the news is going to report.

Neat how that works, huh?

Maybe some Republocrats should throw a big press shindig and talk about all the evils of Iraq and what we could do and why we’d do it and what it would accomplish. Might change the tone of the news coverage a bit.

And, as usual, Television Without Pity has deconstructed the last West Wing episode in such a way as to leave me completely cynical. Now I must rescind much that I wrote about it, and at the risk of seeming like I can’t trust my own opinions on things, but in reality becuase I’m pretty open to new ideas that are better then mine, I have to say that that ending sucked. But in a good way.

Well, in a cheap, rented, sentimental, can’t-write-anything-original, pulling-tricks-to-disguise-bad-writing, obvious-in-the-extreme, blatantly-false-and-simplistic, undemocratic sort of way.

Oh, well, at least Firefly looks promising.

I’ve only just now seen the end of this season’s West Wing.

I was disinheartened with the show for a while, and after September 11th it just seemed so petty. And then I got back into it, slowly, grudgingly, because I know that it can be good sometimes, and I really wanted some good politics. Like, politics that don’t infuriate me with their stupidity, but politics at their most important and most…touching. Government touches everything, changes things. And I was again getting very disgusted with our government, so I needed some relief.

Anyway, West Wing was getting pretty good again, and then they decided to kill Donovan, and boy was I pissed. They always have to kill someone, is that it? Have to ratchet up the drama a bit? No, by the end I realized it was useful. It wasn’t great. I liked that charater. It wasn’t fitting for him to die in that way, after we spent so much time demonstrating the superiority of Secret Service training. He didn’t see the second shooter? It rung false. But it was a good plot device.

Bartlet had to make the choice of assasinating a foreign leader who is also a terror kingpin. And the decision is clear, yet agonizing. And he has family too. And when people die, it affects other people, and it cascades. The writing was good at demonstrating this. One year later we begin a search for a replacement to Mrs. Landingham, a wonderful woman who died suddenly in a traffic accident on the eve of a big Bartlet decision. Then Donovan dies here. And, of course, in the first season we had our shooting as Roselin to end it all.

Maybe Sorkin can’t figure something else out. Dunno. Regardless, the issues raised were deep and powerful and well executed. My ideas of politics continue to change. And the George W. Bush impersonation who is Bartlet’s opponent is just so good. They don’t show him as an idiot, but certainly as a dolt (and no I don’t know where that line is).

I think the question really becomes this: when it is time to assasinate a foreign leader, to weigh a decision and execute it in accordance with your morals and with the good of your country, when you have to do something that really matters, not just politicking…

When a leader has to do that, make that choice, who would you rather have in office? And I personally would like someone well educated, even if it means I have to deal with some manner of elitism.

I’ve learned after much struggle that there is no reason to detest those who are smarter than me. Everyone has their own unique abilities, and sometimes someone is just right for president, and someone else is not. Me, for instance. Not president material, at least not yet.

So more than once, even before this kitschy anniversary, I’ve had to check myself and ask if the outpouring a year ago, the one I joined, had more to do with sentimentality and voyeurism and entitled naiveté — How could this happen to us? We’re Americans! — than genuine grief and horror at an outsized human tragedy. I’ve let myself wonder if I was duped: If Sept. 11 really wasn’t that big a deal next to Rwanda and Bosnia and Chile. But I resist such cynical accounting. If you can’t care about all of those horrors, you can’t care about any of them. And if we let grief and anger about Sept. 11 belong to the right, they win. The left can’t change America as long as it hates it.

It’s My Country and I’ll Cry If I Want To.

Aimee Mann on Boston:

I think that one of the reasons I wound up here is that Boston — because there are so many colleges there, it’s like a constant string of 20-year-olds. When you start reaching your late 20s you feel out of place, there isn’t a peer group for you.

Aimee Mann on LA:

You can encounter a lot of people who are really misguided or really disturbed or really sort of awful. But you can also encounter people who are desperate to meet other people who are creative. There just aren’t a lot of natural meeting places. You can go run errands, go to the dentist even, and literally not see a single person. It’s a very weird feeling.

Quotes from Aimee Mann on her new album.

…it is the day that they cancelled Farscape.

I found someone who has a much more incisive analysis then I want to write right now. So I’ll post that.

I Predicted This!(Score:3, Offtopic)
by Geckoman on Saturday September 07, @12:30PM (#4212451)

My theory for the past 10 years has been that there is an inevitable tendency for any given TV network or channel to become exactly like all the others. New, focused channels may pop up, or old ones may refocus, but those are momentary spikes, and the general direction will remain unchanged.

Remember when MTV actually had music? Or when VH1 did? Now they both mostly have crappy reality shows and cheesy documentaries.

Remember when TNN was The Nashville Network? Even if you weren’t a country fan, you had to respect the attention they gave to their target demographic, with “Dukes of Hazzard” and “Dallas” marathons, NASCAR, outdoor shows, and the Grand Ol’ Opry. The first bad sign was when they started showing Star Trek. Nashville? Huh? Now they’re the “National Network,” and last time I checked there were no fishing shows or overalls in sight.

CNN used to be all news; now it’s mostly talk shows that are vaguely news-related. Fox and WB used to be hip and edgy, and now they could give CBS a strong challenge for the snooze market most nights. Heck, even the Weather Channel has shows now!

And soon we’ll all pine for the days when Sci-Fi actually had science fiction. I’ll go out on a limb and predict that they’ll soon change their name to “SF,” then shortly thereafter start pretending that it stands for something completely different, like — I don’t know — “Serious Favorites: The Best Shows Everybody Likes!”

When we were told we’d have 500 channels of programming, nobody ever bothered to mention that they’d all be showing reruns of Law & Order and Friends.

The comment is on Slashdot.

Thanks to pajor for this one:

“The growing and dangerous intrusion of this new technology,” threatens an entire industry’s “economic vitality and future security. [It] is to the American film producer and the American public as the Boston Strangler is to the woman alone.”

That was Jack Valenti, head of the MPAA, testifying before Congress. He wasn’t talking about DVD pirating. He was talking about videocassettes. Good thing the Supreme Court disagreed.

And 2,000 years from now when they look back at the destruction of America into a politically correct soccer mom haven, they will say, it all began with one small word.

Teacher reprimanded for not being niggardly enough with the dictionary and the comments on it, which are great.

…but I’m not really sure how to categorize it exactly. A couple lived in a tree for 12 years, and now they’re being evicted.

And so I return to the blog. What’ve I done lately? What insightful things do I have to tell? Well, German looks like it’ll be great, Jerry Cohen’s class is right up my alley and looks to be very interesting (its the science fiction one), Socolow’s news class will be interesting. I hear Mary Davis is a great professor and people were clamoring to get into her AMST class, but its a lecture class and I had the unfortunate problem of…um…falling asleep in it. As in, literally falling asleep and waking up to find an empty room. So needless to say I was very embarrassed and did not go by her office as planned to finish filling out my major declaration form.

In the classes where there is a lot of interaction I’m fine, but when I’m not exercising my mind I find myself getting more tired…I knew this over the summer but there were always interesting things for me to occupy myself with so I would stay awake. At Maintex when I was doing interesting work I was okay, at home when I was doing something stimulating I was fine. Even TV was usually enough. But lecture classes, apparently, are not. That combined with the warm weather and crowded classrooms and surprisingly I’m finding it very easy to fall asleep…even in Jerry Cohen’s incredibly interesting class. I really don’t know what to do about this, what vitamin or nutrient or whatever I’m not getting that is causing this. Because I KNOW I’m getting enough sleep….

Strangely I’ve been waking up early, around 7AM, regardless of when I go to sleep, and then getting tired later on. Today I tried sleeping in till my first class at 11 and, while I barely made it, I was awake all day, or at least up until this point. But I hate wasting so much of the day sleeping.

Our suite is looking very nice and pretty and we keep getting more plants and decorations. I’ll post pictures shortly. Sally has been hanging out a lot and doing puzzles. I finally got around to hooking up my TiVo but have watched only one TV program so far in my time here, and only 1/2 of a DVD (Lord of the Rings). I guess I need to cancel my NetFlix membership…

Still haven’t gotten my packages from home. Strangeness.

Oops, better go get my laundry. That’s all for now.

Is it bad to sleep through the first class on the first day of school? When the class started at 11AM?

Marc Andresson states that “All of the technology underneath the Internet is hitting critical mass, at the exact point when people expect nothing. That’s a prescription for the next boom. But I don’t know when.”

Scott Rosenberg agrees. And you know, it makes a lot of sense. Why didn’t I think of that? 😛 Anyway,this makes me very happy.

Here is my class schedule for the new semester:

	Monday	Tuesday	Wednesday	Thursday	Friday
9:00 AM		amst-149a Olin-Sang room 101			amst-149a Olin-Sang room 101
9:30 AM
10:00 AM
10:30 AM
11:00 AM	ger-10a-1 Shiffman room 123	ger-10a-1 Shiffman room 123	ger-10a-1 Shiffman room 123	ger-10a-1 Shiffman room 123
11:30 AM
12:00 PM
12:30 PM
1:00 PM	jour-120a Brown room 316		jour-120a Brown room 316	jour-120a Brown room 316
1:30 PM		amst-100a-2 Brown room 316			amst-100a-2 Brown room 316
2:00 PM
2:30 PM

UPN’s “Buffy the Vampire Slayerâ€? was rated the worst show in prime-time, with the PTC condemning it for graphic violence and sex, and an element of the occult.

Ooh, the occult! How inappropriate! Wouldn’t want children to see the occult…do these people even watch the show?

In all fairness, the strong sexual content, and, to a much lesser extent, the violence in this last season make the show not very appropriate for young viewers. But…the occult? WTF?

My flamebait title aside, the article is very illuminating. Basically, a lot of prominent warmongers in Congress and the current administration never had to fight in one…and the people who did have to serve are often a bit more…restrained:

Jack Kemp, Dole’s running mate in 1996, was unfit because of a knee injury, though he heroically continued as a National Football League quarterback for another eight years; Pat Buchanan had arthritis in his knees, though he soon became an avid jogger.

How the warhawks evaded military service

anyway, Maintex’s server (mop.maintex.com) should be back for good now…so hopefully the same holds for AgBlog. While there are lots of things to report, I can’t think of any of them off hand, so I’ll just put up a very nice quote I found: Do I contradict myself? Very well, then, I contradict myself. I am large, I contain multitudes. — Walt Whitman, Song of Myself

Well, maybe a bit dramatic and over-personified, but still. Very very interesting story.

I’ve started checking over the new Salon blogs, particularily Scott Rosenberg’s site, and I’m incredibly impressed at the level of discourse there. I have seen many kinds of blogs, but I’ve never really found a site I’ve liked as a starting point for blog discussions until now.

The most important problem is the age-old problem of “information overload.” I’ve generally been able to avoid this problem as I shy away from traditional media and television news and focus primarily on web and magazine journalism, the web for its tendancy to break new ground and new ideas months before the old media picks up on it, and the mags for their interesting in-depth reports on issues I wouldn’t otherwise see.

Salon is the best blend of these two things, and with Salon’s blogs as a starting point I’m finding myself increasingly without time to do all of the reading I’d like to. It used to be that information overload was about trying to process what you took in and paring it down to the important bits — now there is so much useful and important and well-thought out information and opinion that its very hard to manage. I feel like I’m missing out every day I don’t check in with all of my cyber friends.

When blogging was in the hundreds it was fringe, it the thousands it was a curiosity, in the hundreds of thousands it is becoming an overload, and in the millions I don’t know what we will do. There are only so many stories you can read, and only so many you will want to spend time on. And with so much churn there will inevitably be more and more and more rehashing of previously discussed ideas.

Scott Rosenberg snaps at the New York Times to picking up on a story his magazine covered months ago. I feel like we are increasingly backtracking and covering the same ground over and over and over. I’m sure Google Blog Search is coming, and that’ll probably help, but I dunno…there is so much great new informaton, and there is so much crap that is being recirculated and rebreathed and redigested. A Wiki web is perhaps what we need. A Wiki web combined with Everything and a rating system of Kuro5hin and a trust-metric. What a web that would be…

I always watch a movie all the way through. I stay until the last credit, until the final copyright, until the harsh theater lights snap back on. And I generallly use the time between the end of the movie and the end of the credits both reflecting on the grandeur of the cinema experience and solidifying my thoughts on a particular film.

So right now I’m stumped.

I watch movies, I get meanings, I think about connotiatons and symbols and plot-shaped things. I think about analysis, and over-analysis, and surface meanings and permutations. And I can generally pin down why in my gut I like or dislike a movie.

With Signs it is different. I love this movie, and I have no idea why. I sit here, in the parking lot of The Block contemplating, and I’m drawing a blank. Why do I like it so? Certainly having Macauly Caulkin 2 as a main character was a turn-off. Certainly the resolution, once we got to where we got, could never live up to the rest of the movie. Certainly the style is neat…but why do I love this movie?

The story is simplistic, yet powerful. It truly is all about the journey. What does it mean?

Those going to see the movie should watch for the M. Night Shyamalan cameo as a guy who sleeps too much…

A final thought: this movie succeeds brilliantly at describing things to the viewer without showing them. What we can imagine is much more real and scary than anything that could be put on screen, and Shyamalan understands this. The wonderful blend of showing and telling really makes this movie work. And it probably had the added benefit of saving on the effects budget.

There we go. I’m starting to analyze. Now I’m getting somewhere…

But do I really want to understand this movie?