The News,

Last night I watched the third instalment of Frontline's series on the future of news. Frontline and Now are two shows I try to never miss on PBS. They both are way ahead of the game. If you want to see what the major news networks will be reporting on in a couple of months watch these shows. It seems really wrong that PBS should be so far in front of the major news networks, but after watching this series I can see why.

Every night I try to watch the evening news, usually NBC. However I usually get frustrated and flip to the other channels only to be frustrated by them and sometimes find myself watching German news on PBS. The two big things that frustrate me so are;

1. The Weather; very rarely is weather national news. Katrina is probably the only major news story recently, sometimes tornado's or hurricanes do deserve some recognition but not a leading story or more than a minute. I don't care if there is a foot of snow in New York, Kansas or Colorado. Hell if I don't have to shovel my driveway I really don't care at all. Local news is the place for the weather.

2. Unproven Research; at least once a week they do a piece about some research that shows promising signs that some medicine is going to cure cancer or some other disease. If you watch these shows you would think that cancer has been cured by now. They show these studies and don't release any of the other information involved and make people think something is happening soon, but really if the research pans out results are still far off.

About once a year they release some poll that shows that people are more familiar with X (the last one I see was the seven dwarfs) than the supreme court justices (or there congressmen, governor...). I think this poll is a direct result of shoddy news coverage. If I ran one of these shows every night we would tell you what happened in the Supreme Court, on the Congress/Senate floors and what the President did that day. It doesn't need to be deep coverage just a mention of what was going on. If they were on vacation, had a holiday or where just in meetings we would say that. It probably wouldn't take more than a couple of minutes. At least it would be much more informative than it snowed a 1,000 miles away from where I live or a drug that might (and I stress might) cure some disease thirty years from now.

Babel,

I watched Babel on J.M. day and was very disappointed. This movie got a lot of praise and was even considered by some to be favored to win the Oscar last weekend. Luckily a far superior movie won. Babel was three movies forced together with very little connection, at least that I could tell. The Japanese part of the movie was so loosely connected and it was such a minor part of the story that it could of been easily dropped. The other two stories were a little more connected, but were about such different things it felt like I was watching two movies at the same time. I guess the name does describe the movie, but do you want to watch two and half hours of babel? There was some good acting, although not by the big name stars. In the end I think they would of been better off just making three different movies. They probably would be better than Babel.

Today I went and watched Breach, that was very good. Chris Cooper is such a good actor.

Support the troops,

Here is a petition to sign saying we need better health care for the troops.

Dumbasses,

1. If you are going to rant about something, especially if it is about people being stupid, you better have your facts straight. I got a email from IAVA about the revelations at Walter Reed's building 18. There was a link to a interview with Chris Matthews. In the interview Chris keeps going off subject and ranting about what I assume was a poll in a previous piece he did. Watch the piece and keep in mind Presidents day is a combination of Lincoln's birthday and George Washington's birthday. Washington's real birthday was a couple of days later.

2. This Alamo argument is pretty good; Olbermann, The Daily Show. TDS clip is a little longer and deals with more.

3. Meet the Press for Idiots.

Results,

Only 7% showed up to vote on Tuesday. That makes me sad. Although I should say I barely went. Linda Clifford is who I voted for and she won, but it looks like the other person is favored to win the general. Hopefully the unions can turn out some more votes. Like I said before I don't like her opponents endorsements.

Voting against endorsements,

I went and voted today. So now I can say I am part of the projected 10% who did. I mostly voted because the Chamber of Commerce and the Club for Growth are heavily advertising for a person. These are two groups that I know don't have my best interest in mind. Luckily the Change to Win sent me a email pointing me in the right direction. It is so hard to follow these small races.

VD, FD and SBA day,

While most people were celebrating Valentines Day last night, I was celebrating FD Day. And how does one celebrate that day; by watching movies of course.

First I watched Infamous. This is a recent version of Truman Capote researching and writing of In Cold Blood. Maybe this movie might of been alright if a tremendously better movie about the exact same subject wasn't made just the year before. I'm sure there is some reason for this piggy backing, but during the whole movie all I could think is "I wish I was watching Capote instead."

Then I watched Lost and thought it was the best episode in a long time.

After that I watched Half Nelson. It was a pretty good movie. I laughed out loud at the beginning of the movie when they put the rating up. Below the rating they list the reason why the film deserves it's rating. You should make it a point to read these they can be pretty funny. Last night it was "Drug Content Throughout". Now was that "throughout" necessary.

Now tonight I will celebrate SBA Day with an episode of The Office and the final instalment of PBS's "The Supreme Court".

For the record I know that wikipedia says that Frederick Douglass's birthday is the 17th, but my calender says the 14th. I didn't fact check my calender, so I might of celebrated the day early. But in looking around the web I haven't found any confirmation of either dates just giving a generic February. So probably like much of the history of slaves the facts are unfortunately a bit cloudy. Either way I am using him to defend a pretty lame Valentines Day.

Arrested Development,

I have been watching my Arrested Development DVDs lately. I won't get the third season until the end of the week. It is a damn shame that probably one of the funniest shows ever to be on TV was canceled. Listen to David Cross's rant;

My stupid congressman,

I needed to get caught up on some of my other reading since I have had my nose in books so much lately. As I was paging through a issue of the local labor newspaper I came across an article about my embarrassing congressman James Sensenbrenner. I think somewhere in the past I wrote about how after the last election he blamed the gay marriage amendment for Republican losses. The article that I read although they didn't disput that fact they made the point that it wasn't just that, but also the extreme far right agenda being pushed by Sensenbrenner that also chased people away from his party. I found it interesting and rarely reported, that he was denied any major appointments on any committees this year. The article also suggested that he may face a strong primary challenge in the next election from Scott Walker. Granted this is a union newspaper so it should be taken with a grain of salt, but I still find it interesting. I am hoping to be out of the fifth distract by the next election so it won't matter much to me anyways, but I would be much happier with Walker over the embarrassing Sensenbrenner.

A funny side note; I tried to find the article online to link to. I did a search using the title of the article "Even the GOP seems to have shelved Sensenbrenner" the article wasn't there, but in a funny, somewhat ironical twist Google asked me "Did you mean: even GOD seems to have shelved sensenbrenner", maybe I did Google maybe I did.

Book, Book/Movie, Movie

I have been doing a lot of reading in the past couple of weeks. The latest book was Assasination Vacation by Sarah Vowell a soft history look at the first three presidential assassinations. It was a good read on the quirky NPR side like one would expect from a Sarah Vowell. It did remind me however of one great Saturday night when I watched a panel of authors on C-SPAN talk about our presidents who have been assassinated. I wrote down the titles of all there books because I found the topic immensely interesting, however I have forgotten about it. I will have to see if I can find that list of books again.

I have also recently listen to an audio version of Anthony Swofford's Jarhead. Much like other soldier accounts of the current war (Jarhead is about the first gulf war)I have read I really enjoyed this book. When the movie came out I went to the theaters to see it and was disappointed. I still gave it four stars on netflixs, but I was expecting a little more. After reading the book I moved the movie up in my queue to watch it again. I was surprised with how much liberty they took with his story. That doesn't seem like something you fuck with, but I listened to Swofford's audio cometary during the movie and he seemed fine with it so who am I to say.

This weekend I also watched a movie called Iris. The netflix description made me think that the movie was about an author who is succumbing to age reflecting back on her life. I was expecting the movie to be mostly flash backs, however the movie was mostly about the author suffering from Alzheimer's with her husband trying to take care of her, but he was starting to drift away too. With my experiences with dementia from my grandparents and the fact that I live alone this movie made me so uncomfortable I had to fast forward to the end. I know I am a long way from that, but it still was unpleasant to watch. I am really starting to not trust netflix's descriptions of movies.

My bad,

This is from a post a little ways down. While looking through my post I see I fucked up the link. I feel the need to correct it because the way it was makes me feel a little silly with the way I left it.

I have always accepted the stories of soldiers getting spit on coming back from Vietnam. This always seemed to be a blow to the antiwar movement, but maybe it isn't true.

Success,

While drifting through You Tube I came across this funny video of Michael Cera. He played George-Michael on Arrested Development,

What's next,

I had a rare visitor last Wednesday, so I missed the second season opener of Lost. I set up my VCR to record it, but somehow that didn't work. Like most people I only watch DVDs now, so I bought the VCR for the sole propose of recording the shows I watch, when I can't watch them. Somehow I never seem to set up the recording properly and end up missing the show anyways. Usually I figure out what I did wrong, but last night as I was search the tape for Lost (how ironic) I couldn't figure out where I went wrong. As frustration filled me I decided to check the Internet to see if I could watch the show from the Lost website. I could and did. This is the first time I have watched a show like this and was quite impressed. The thought accrued to me that this could very well replace the need for a VCR. Then I started to wonder how long until our Internet will be hooked right up to our television. I think all this new technology (TIVO/HD-DVD...) will be short lived as an online entertainment system takes over. Netflix could be replaced with an iTunes type of movie rental. I especially like this idea because I am very displeased with netflix right now.

Anyways here is to tomorrow.

Who is the dumb, weak party now,

Before the last election there was always the thought that the Democrat's were the party that would screw every chance they had up or they wouldn't stand up for there convictions. This whole nonbinding Iraq resolution was starting to look that way. The Democrat's were putting forward a bill so watered down and weak that it was essentially pointless. So much so that two anti Iraq war Democrats were going to vote against it; the great Russ Feingold and Chris Dodd. Now the Republicans voted to prevent a debate on the most important issue in America. In a move that seems completely stupid as Kos writes in this post;

Republicans are so far gone on the issue, that Warner and Hagel voted to prevent debate on their own resolution.

Seriously these guys voted to against debating their own bill! How many back flips are they going to have to do to make a lick of sense out of that move. As Kos points out in his article this will have huge consequences in 08. Looks like the Republicans are the party that doesn't know how to win now.

Meanwhile Feingold swings his big brass balls around some more here and follow the link to Crooks and Liars.

Divided we beg,

I have a hard time understanding the lack of understanding amongst my coworkers for the working cause. I had to listen to a guy last week blame the UAW for the faults of the auto industry. Granted his point that janitors clearing fifty grand a year is probably a small part of Detroit's current dilemma, but that doesn't mean they should be reduced to a wage that only a illegal/legal immigrant would work for. I understand there is a point there, but how is it not obvious to this working man that a much bigger problem is how these companies are being run; astronomical CEO salaries and retirement packages that could feed a small country, plus the complete lack of foresight (who would of thought that an administration full of oil men would cause a spike in gas prices) seem to carry much more blame than a janitor. Maybe I should of spoke up, but I am very unconfrontational at work.

In the fall of 2003 at the lunch table the foreman was talking about some stock he had that had boomed during the 90's and was now falling apart on him. He said something like it seems every time the average person gets a little ahead they take it away. I should of told him maybe it is because every time the average person gets a little ahead he forgets that he is just an average person.

Prediction,

My Superbowl prediction is; I will watch the first quarter, get board and then start to watch something else.

I missed it,

Last Tuesday, January 23, my blog celebrated its first birthday. I blame my stupid job for missing it, that should be ending real soon. Here is my first post. I think I did pretty good sticking to my goals and keeping it active. Work got a little in the way, but whacha ya gonna do. Anyways I'm happy with 192 post in a year.

Onward,

Jon