Palin 2012!
George Carlin was moderately funny, but he wasn’t all that funny. I’d characterize his shtick as socially observant in a humorous way. I’ll miss him about as much as I miss John Candy.
Seems Charles Barkley likes to gamble too much and has publicly sworn off gambling for a couple of years.
Barkley said on the air during the NBA playoffs he wasn’t going to gamble for “the next year or two” after he was sued by a Las Vegas Strip casino in May for failing to pay $400,000 in gambling markers, or loans.
Nonetheless Barkley is to play in the “Ante Up for Africa” charity event.
It’s interesting that Barkley was sued in court for his bad markers. I guess someone like Charles Barkley you don’t send a couple heavies over to break a kneecap. Somebody could get hurt.
Hmm. I wonder if Chuck might know something about the NBA referee gambling scandal?
He didn’t lay hands on the little bitch, but it’s close enough:
“The story is Flags of Our Fathers, the famous flag-raising picture, and they didn’t do that. If I go ahead and put an African-American actor in there, people’d go, ‘This guy’s lost his mind.’ I mean, it’s not accurate.”
…
“What are you going to do, you gonna tell a fuckin’ story about that? Make it look like a commercial for an equal opportunity player? I’m not in that game. I’m playing it the way I read it historically, and that’s the way it is. When I do a picture and it’s 90% black, like Bird, I use 90% black people.”
Yeah, it’d be kinda like portraying a black astronaut in Apollo 13 or inserting a black guy in the flag raising at the WTC. Hey, maybe there was no black guy at the WTC flag raising because so many black people agree with the Reverend Jeremiah Wright and they couldn’t bring themselves to participate in symbolism contrary to their deepest held beliefs about this nation.
I dunno, but here is the money shot from Clint:
“A guy like him should shut his face.”
Read the article for several more good quotes. By the way, The Dirty Harry Ultimate Collector’s Edition box set is released on Monday
This is where Clint Eastwood should take a page from Kidd Rock’s book.
Spike Lee launched a bitter attack on Clint Eastwood yesterday
…
Lee said: “There were many African-Americans who survived that war and who were upset at Clint for not having one [in the films]. That was his version: the negro soldier did not exist. I have a different version.”
Yeah, ain’t America great? What is so sad that it is so painfully obvious that what Spike is really doing is using racism to pimp his new film. And if you go see Clint’s film and you don’t see Spike’s, you are a racist. Rumors are that Spike was looking to pick a fight with Tom Hanks because there were no negro astronauts in Apollo 13.
Applied to Spike Lee, bitter is the best one-word summary of a man I think there ever was.
Endgadget reports that premium HBO content is coming to iTunes so I’d expect to see the Amazon prices for Season Box Sets to drop. Even at the premium price of $2.99 compared to iTune’s previous standard flat fee of $1.99 it’s still a bargain compared to fifty bucks for a complete season on DVD.
I am not sure how many episodes there are, but I read somewhere there are eighty-five episodes of The Sopranos and at $2.99 that would be less than buying the complete season box set from Amazon.
But it’s too bad about the whole iPod restriction on playing media on other devices you may own. You can watch iTunes video on you TV… if you have an Apple TV or some such crap. I can’t believe people really buy into that scam but what do I know. For convenience and flexibility it seems like having the DVD would be worth paying a little extra.
Here’s the deal with me. I don’t want all this copy protection bullshit. I buy a movie I want to watch it whenever I want. I want to rip it to my computer, just like I did with all my music CD’s, and watch it from where ever I want, whenever I want. If I happen to be in Islamabad I want to be able to log onto my network from the hotel room and download Star Trek: The Wrath of Khan, or Mad Max, or Lonesome Dove, or whatever strikes my fancy. Why should I ever have to buy a movie from a hotel service when I have 500 movies in my personal library (I don’t have that many yet, but I’m working on it.)
He must have been given a nice deal. CNN’s online announcement is here. Nothing remarkable, except for the comments. The comments go a long way towards explaining CNN’s blatant slant. The only question is whether the audience is so biased because of CNN’s product or is the product biased because of it’s main audience?
The Wife got the movie and watched it; I took a pass. I caught small glimpses of the flick during walk-bys but they only served to reinforce my decision to pass.
But if you haven’t seen it and are curious, here is a Juno review from Cracked.com by Rod Hilton, creator of The Editing Room.
ELLEN PAGE guzzles SUNNY D as some obnoxious INDIE SONG blares in the background so that everyone knows that this is an intellectual, independent film.
If you are thinking about renting or buying Juno, read the review first.
Newsflash for Michael Scherer: The shift occurred many years ago.
Here is a basic shift that has occurred in the news business: Because of the Internet, you, the reader, no longer have buy information in pre-fabricated packages like “newspapers.” You can just go online and individually select the articles you want to read. And there are lots of websites and blogs to help you out. Every day, Matt Drudge, the Huffington Post, Yahoo, Google, Swampland, or a hundred other different bloggers, will pre-select articles for you and provide links. You choose your own adventure.
And though he thinks he has had an epiphany, he still don’t quite get it.
This means that the competition on the level of the individual story is more intense than ever before, and there is enormous pressure to distinguish yourself from the pack. Assume, for instance, that 12 news organizations do the same story on the same day about how Hillary Clinton has a tough road ahead of her to get the nomination. Which story is going to get the most links and therefore the most readers?
Jeez. Twelve different versions of the same “news”. There is something wrong with that picture. It really doesn’t matter who gets the most hits unless you are trying to sell some kind of “package”. Quit trying to “package” the news and you wouldn’t be thinking this way. Stick to actual news reporting instead of “actual news-making” and maybe a real light would go off as to how things are really changing in the media business.
Is it the one that cautiously weighs the pros and cons, and presents a nuanced view of her chances? Or is it the one that says she is toast, and anyone who thinks different is living on another planet?
What difference does it make when the consumer can have both? The best writer that people like to read the most will get the hits. Given adequate exposure, such as from Google PageRank, or a link from Drudge or InstaPundit, the market will make sure that the best product is consumed. If you are not in the clique and don’t get links from the A-listers, well, you can always buy a banner ad on the A-listers site. (That’s what this guy did. Too bad he spent all that money for a Drudge banner and then didn’t have anything interesting to say. All he did was give Sarah Marshall a lot of free publicity, which was probably the intent the more you think about it.)
The most dramatic aspect of the re-polarization is not simply that there is this new crew of reporters getting large chunks of the readership based on merit instead of as a result of working for some bloated rag (though that is a welcome change,) it’s that the little guy, people like me, can consistently have a thousand people a week hearing what I have to say. (If you are just some work-a-day Joe I challenge you to go out and rent a hall and try to get even a hundred people to come hear what you have to say every day for a week, much less hundreds and sometimes thousands of people a day for years and years running.)
People who don’t have to work and raise kids who can spend more than an hour or two a day on their blogs can easily increase their readership numbers by an order of magnitude, attaining a circulation comparable to a small daily. And there is no limit to the synergies created by a few talented people working together.
The biggest change brought to the media’s business model by the Internet is in the long tail. Here is a snippet from a rambling analysis I did on the topic several years ago:
As a result of this continual empowerment of the common folk, the established media will once again be forced to recruit talent instead of ideology in order to compete in the hit count seduction of advertisers. The alternative is to whither away and die. Either way they play it, America is better off.
Trying to figure out how to get the most hits for a news article is a waste of time. What a publisher should be concerned with is getting the most aggregate hits on a topic. Instead of assigning a story to one person, assign it to twenty.
Here are some other articles I’ve written on the subject:
If you watch Leno you have probably heard of The Fruitcake Lady. I don’t watch Leno and have never heard of her until today when a co-worker sent me a clip. I couldn’t uplaod that one so I found another one on the web to link for y’all. What a gem:
Danny Noriega, little freak boy, wants to be the next American Idol. After watching this masterpiece, I can’t wait to see the rest of his videos. Good thing it’s a singing contest.
I knew I wasn’t the only one who has quit watching FoxNews. The testimonials in the comments should give pause to those in charge of operations at the news outlet.
JILLS GOT IT FIGURED OUT: Jill’s Next Record. And check out the tote board.
Here is another One Artist, One Label post I made several years ago.
UPDATE: As a matter of fact, any artist who follows such a business plan, I offer my Internet Web 2.0 dot net flashy Technical Services for a small piece of the action.
IN 2006 EMI, the world’s fourth-biggest recorded-music company, invited some teenagers into its headquarters in London to talk to its top managers about their listening habits. At the end of the session the EMI bosses thanked them for their comments and told them to help themselves to a big pile of CDs sitting on a table. But none of the teens took any of the CDs, even though they were free. “That was the moment we realised the game was completely up,” says a person who was there.
Old School:
“Uh, if nobody is going to take those can I have them all? You got something I can put them in? Cool!”
Then I’d rip them all to my music collection and put the backup copies with the rest of my CDs that are sitting stacked out in the garage covered with an inch of dust and an assortment of cobwebs and other bits of garage detritus.
It’s much faster to rip from a CD than to download that much music. I have almost 16 gig of music ripped from CDs. Currently in queue I have about three dozen CDs that were overlooked in the last big CD ripping session and a few current ones that The Wife has purchased or were received as Christmas gifts.
It’s quite remarkable, so I’ll do so: I can pull a device out of my pocket and play non-stop music for almost 12 days days without ever repeating a song. Most of it I would never choose to listen to and after I sample it I will never listen to again but there’s about three or four days of good music mixed in there too.
Inevitably, I want my DVD’s in a digital library too. Not a freaking Windows Media Center, thank you. I want something that I can drop my DVD into and in ten minutes watch it at any set top box I have a connection to.
Let’s say you and some friends rented a beach house for the weekend at the beach with all the kids when of a sudden a torrential downpour comes and lasts all day. No worries because you can just queue up the entire Pirates of the Caribbean series.
To store my photography, home video, music, and movies on a computer we are talking multi terabytes of data storage management. Will there ever be enough high-speed connectivity and storage miniaturization to provide always-on access to one’s entire digital library?
What I’ve Learned: Jack Nicholson
They’re prescription. That’s why I wear them…
If you think about those old shows, they all had puppets. And somehow I think, symbolically speaking, that has contributed to a generational lack of ability to accept personal responsibility. It’s why the baby boomers are such conspiracy theorists and I’m not. It’s why everybody thinks we went to Iraq to get the oil and I don’t…
I were an Arab-American, I would insist on being profiled. This is not the time for civil rights. There are larger issues for Americans…
A lot more at the link, including a naughty tidbit about Britney Spears.
more…
Check out the Knob Creek Whiskey ads on the Nicholson article. There is a little rollover spot that a reader pretty much has to hit on purpose that will expand the ad by about 50% and kicks off some nice flash features. Its like a mini web page. Brilliant.
I have been thinking about how the Blogosphere is dependant on the news-cycle for survival just as the shark sucker Remora is dependant on the shark. Here is a snippet from Lilek’s Bleat:
… Struggled with the column. Not because I didn’t know what to say, but because it’s been said 10 times all over the place. This is the challenge of writing syndicated pieces for newspapers: the blogs have accelerated the pundit / spin cycle, and what was once a stately procession of received wisdom doled out over a week is now the frantic banter that chews up the news in a day. So you take the grand overarching approach and aim your stuff at people who only read papers, and you end up looking like old news to the people who are already six news cycles down the road.
Current event bloggers–a.k.a. political bloggers, web pundits, humor sites, you name it–check the major news outlets to get their stories as does the local news and radio stations. The major news outlets all get the majority of their “programming” from the news sources like AP and Reuters. Each day, all the media in all its forms spew the same stories right down to the final cute item of the day. Even a comrade in arms such as Lileks calls the blogger’s product “frantic banter” vs. the old-style “stately procession of received wisdom.”
Ninety percent of the Blogosphere would cease to exist without the “news-cycle”. There is very little original material out there.
The problem with all this of course is that the major media is still controlling the context of the political discourse, even if not the content. While wresting the monopoly of the content from the established media is great progress, leaving the overall context in the hands of the liberals still gives established media the advantage. In other words, the current scenario still allows the liberals to push stories off the front page. Joe Wilson would be the latest example. They are trying to disappear the Sandy Berger treachery. Routinely do they ignore good news from the war front while highlighting the setbacks and the death of American soldiers.
I am not trying to say that other bloggers do this and I don’t. I have fallen into the same rut: scanning the links to the right looking for something to make a post out of. Obviously I am speaking in general. There are many fine bloggers out there who keep fire to feet on issues the media have tried to squash. As well there are many fine blogs dedicated to bringing good news from the war zone. But in many cases we tend to spend all our time rebutting the insanity of major media instead of looking at answers to important questions of the day.
The liberal shills trolling through the comments of popular political bloggers with flame bombs serve to focus the discourse on the more insane assertions of the left, marginalizing both the commenters and the site as attack wackos, or right-wing fanatics, or right-wing conspiracy, or nutty bloggers, or something.
* * * * *
OK, I am having second thoughts about over generalizing this issue. Instead of just wiping out what I was trying to say, which is still valid to a large degree, I am going to just continue with the thought process.
Obviously combating the everyday propaganda from the left is of the utmost importance. Otherwise I wouldn’t write so much about it. Just as the New York Times and LA LA Times is important to the enemies’ war effort, the Anti-Propagandistas of the Blogosphere are vitally important to America’s war effort. The sheer volume of spewage being ejected from the P.C. bastions of bilge like the NY Times and LALA Times, as well as ABCCNNCBSMSNBCPBS, requires the combined resources of many individuals to effectively rebut.
What I have noticed as a result of this constant daily pressure to rebut the idiocy and the outright lies of the left is that a lot of anti-prop bloggers flip out, or more accurately become disgusted and tune out. Just as Lileks said, I have plenty to say about today’s events, its just that a jillion other people are all talking about the same thing. I dont like crowded spaces; never have.
The timing of this continual propaganda attack from our enemies is obviously suspicious. They are trying to wear us all down by making us recite the same old rebuttal mantras so that by Labor Day we are all disgusted and tuned out. Right in time for the general public to start paying attention to the liberal propaganda. Of course the libs never tire of spewing their bilge. It runs in their veins.
* * * * *
Now I want to get back to who controls the context of public discourse without blaming me and my cohorts. Important stories that are a detraction to the liberal’s crusade for power are still pushed out of the news cycle.
I have been touching on this theme in recent articles. The major media will eventually be forced to acknowledge that no one is fewer and fewer people are reading their publications and that more and more people are reading the independent essayists and pundits and humorists of the Blogosphere. Marketers who pay a lot of money to expose their products to as many consumers as possible will force this issue. Internet advertising is not new of course, but aggregated, independently verifiable metrics are. As more and more high-tech gadgetry is made available to the common people, the more this phenom will increase–by orders of magnitude according to Groves Law.
As a result of this continual empowerment of the common folk, the established media will once again be forced to recruit talent instead of ideology in order to compete in the hit count seduction of advertisers. The alternative is to whither away and die. Either way they play it, America is better off.
America and the world is changing in ways that will make civilization unrecognizable from today in just twenty years. Many will try to stop it. As long as there are free people, the future is inevitable. It might can be delayed, but it is inevitable. Right now the Blogosphere is playing a vital role in wresting the control of information dissemination away from an elite few. When we succeed in luring their real customers–the advertisers–away from them, we can put this issue to bed.
