telescreen.org

Bob Novak went skydiving last week. But never fear...they included a parachute, and he landed safely.

Has Andy Kaufman returned? (And does he have a blog?)

What is it with the US attacking weddings?

Are they afraid there might be gay people participating?

In the beginning was the Word. And then there was the Copy Editor.

I would be remiss if I didn't offer the utmost congratulations to Randy Johnson. Wow. Like Jonmc, I've never gotten to see any real drama on the diamond -- a bunch of good games, but no real historic moments. (I miss getting 20+ free baseball tickets a year from my employer. Sigh.)

Which reminds me: I should go see some minor-league ball this year. I much prefer it to the majors, and all last summer I was meaning to check out the Brooklyn Cyclones or the Staten Island Yankees, but never got around to it. I'll make sure to rectify that, and give you a full report. (My heart, as ever, is with the Bulls.)

I wanna go car tipping.

LA Times editor slams Fox:

If Fox News were a factory situated, say, in Minneapolis, it would be trailing a plume of rotting fish all the way to New Orleans. . .

. . .What we're seeing is a difference between journalism and pseudo-journalism, between journalism and propaganda. The former seeks earnestly to serve the public. The latter seeks to manipulate it.

Right on, brother. The thing that irks me the most about Fox isn't that they're blatantly biased, or shrill, or overly simplistic, although they are all of these things. It isn't even that their newsgathering, reporting, and editing is minimal and slapdash, not to mention shoddy. It's that they say they're unbiased. They say they're "fair and balanced", when anyone with a single functioning neuron can see that they're not. It's okay to have a take, a bias, a slant -- but you have to acknowledge it. Those are the rules. If they changed their slogan tomorrow to "America's Conservative News Channel" or "Conservative TV" or even "Making Freepers Happy Since 1996", I wouldn't have a problem with them. But if you're a real journalist, you have to play by the rules. Period. End of story.

Fox isn't news. It's ideology. And they do all legitimate journalists a disservice as long as they mislabel what they do.

Tony Randall R.I.P.

Somehow my body clock has gotten out of whack. I couldn't keep my eyes open last night, and went to bed around 9:30. Woke back up at 1:30am and haven't been able to get back to sleep since. (Though, as I write this at around 7am, I'm starting to feel sleepy once again.)

Ah well. Might as well fill the time by recounting my weekend and giving you some linky goodness:

Harsh words of criticism:

"The arrogance, inconsistency, and unreliability of the administration’s diplomacy have undermined American alliances, alienated friends, and emboldened our adversaries."

"The current administration has casually sent American armed forces on dozens of missions without clear goals, realizable objectives, favorable rules of engagement, or defined exit strategies. Over the past seven years, a shrunken American military has been run ragged by a deployment tempo that has eroded its military readiness. Many units have seen their operational requirements increased four-fold, wearing out both people and equipment."

"The rule of law, the very foundation for a free society, has been under assault, not only by criminals from the ground up, but also from the top down. An administration that lives by evasion, coverup, stonewalling, and duplicity has given us a totally discredited Department of Justice."

"Sending our military on vague, aimless, and endless missions rapidly saps morale. Even the highest morale is eventually undermined by back-to-back deployments, poor pay, shortages of spare parts and equipment, inadequate training, and rapidly declining readiness."

Pinko anti-war lefty claptrap? Nope. How about the 2000 Republican Party Platform?

(via XQUZYPHYR.)

Here's a really interesting, thoughtful interview with Brother Guy Consolmagno, an astrobiologist who works for the Vatican Observatory. (via MeFi.)

Consolmagno also has an online archive of his talks.

Incidentally, I'd known there was a Vatican Observatory (and no, it isn't the same as L'Osservatore Romano), but I never knew enough about it until I read this and started poking around. Interesting organization...the Jesuits just seem to fascinate me.

Cute Japanese food. (via BoingBoing.)

Going to Italy? Don't speed on the autostrada, now.

Oval Office Space. (via MeFi.)

Need to simulate an injury? This is the company for you. Their catalog is frightening, including such products as DermaCrisp, SimPox, and Insta-Blister. Really. (via this Wired News article.)

Being something of an aviation geek, I enjoy the various flight tracking pages that have sprung up around the 'Net. If you're about to go pick someone up at the airport, it's pretty cool to log on just before you head out the door, so you can see if they're going to be late.

I mainly use the Cheaptickets flight tracker to track specific flights, but for sheer visual geekitude I'd have to hand it to this one that I just found. The three major NYC airports plus Teterboro! Real-time displays of every flight in the vicinity! Clickable ID tags to tell you altitude and aircraft type! You can replay old tracking data at faster-than-real-time speeds! Very cool.

(and yes, it's a miracle I have a girlfriend.)

ADDENDUM: Ayelet pointed me to this page, which has all the AirportMonitor airports listed...not just the Port Authority ones.

10 Phrases That Sound Like They Could Be Catchphrases From 80s Cult Movies, Except They're Not, With The Names Of The Movies They're Not From, And The Characters Who Didn't Say Them.

From this AP article:

En route to Iraq for a surprise visit Thursday, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld told reporters traveling with him that administration lawyers oppose releasing the photos on grounds that would violate a Geneva Convention stricture against presenting images of prisoners that could be construed as degrading.

Seems to me like it'd be more important to not actually do degrading things to prisoners in the first place. ('Cause, y'know, that violates the Geneva Conventions too.)

Sometimes I hate the gods for making me work late. Laura Cantrell (of "Radio Thrift Shop" fame on WFMU), is performing tonight at 7 at the Winter Garden. For free. Accompanied by Marshall Crenshaw and John Wesley Harding.

*cries into his editing equpment*

Famous Folks who are Unlikely Fans of Your Favorite Artist. Who'da thunk Jennifer Aniston was an MC5 fan?

By the way, I'm totally digging this. Japanese cowboy harmonica rap. So catchy it should be outlawed in Utah. (Click on the Shakkazombie link.)

I'm feeling a bit of the writer's block lately (even though I have this sneaking suspicion that it's really overstating it to think of myself as "a writer", and wonder if I can even legitimately lay claim to their attendant problems.)

The weather is hot, and I'm wilting till I get used to it. The news pisses me off, but not in an engaged, ranting kind of way -- more a quiet, head-shaking "what the hell is coming NEXT?" kind of way that leaves me bereft of any kind of intelligent (or at least intelligent-sounding) take on events. I'm just lethargic in general...my place is a mess and I have to clean it up for my friend visiting this weekend. I have e-mails that have gone un-returned for way too long. Sigh.

Ah well. On the subway to work yesterday, an empty Snapple bottle rolled around the floor of the car for the entire ride. It rolled to and fro, bumping into peoples' feet as it went. It was fun to watch the varied reactions. One man jumped with a a start when he felt the tap against his shoes, then glanced down, identified the intruder, smiled sheepishly across the car at me, and resumed his reverie. One woman glared at the bottle angrily each time it rolled into her, but didn't make a move to kick it away. One guy did nothing but kick it away each time it only got near him, kind of the way you used to kick a pebble down the sidewalk when you were a kid. Other commuters conscientiously raised their feet each time it rolled past, as if it were a janitor at the end of the line, cleaning under their seats.

It didn't roll over to my side of the car, so I wasn't sure what I'd do if it reached me.

Rumsfeld's Rules.

It's not as important as Dong's return, but I thought I'd give you a Stockstock status report. I got my tape of footage in the mail on Saturday (which was fast...I registered on maybe Wednesday, and they're in Seattle while I'm in New York), and today I'll be transferring it to other tape formats so I can see what I've got and try to figure out how I'm going to use it.

It's not quite as cool as Dong coming back, but check out Musicplasma. It's a very interesting "visual search engine" for music -- enter in an artist and it'll display a music map that you can navigate. (via BoingBoing.)