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AUGH! The jig and gig are up. Comedy Central knows the truth, and they’re out to stop us bloggers.
According to this item on ZDNet, YouTube™ is being forced to remove Comedy Central video clips. There are still plenty of Colbert clips online there, but for how long? Will they come after the cruddy bloggers?
Stephen Colbert is back from a week off. Last night he commented on last week’s shift in the Bush Administration’s characterization of its Iraq policy, and Rush Limbaugh’s comments on the Michael J. Fox commercial.
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As my father has pointed out many times, UK coverage of Iraq is quite different than it is here in the US. There is notably less attention paid to Elephant vs. Donkey racing, and many more non-American opinions.
[audio:http://www.dograt.com/Sounds/Wordpress/OCT06/BBC.mp3]Here are 8 minutes of the BBC call-in show “Have Your Say.” Brigett Kendall moderates between Georgetown U. professor Robert Lieber, and a caller in Iraq. This provides clear contrast between an academic expert and an actual resident; who, I should note, doesn’t want American troops withdrawn.
Boston NPR station WBUR produces a show called On Point. Fridays it usually has a weekly news roundup and commentary. Yesterday, one of the guests was GOP-aligned syndicated columnist Mona Charen. Listen to what she thinks is the top news story.
[audio:http://www.dograt.com/Sounds/Wordpress/OCT06/onpoint.mp3]She spins her reference to Iraq by calling it “The War on Terror,” but what really gets me is her comment about the upcoming election getting “bogged down in a lot of trivialities like people’s sex lives and perceptions of corruption.”
Stop right there. Perception of corruption was what led to the Whitewater investigation against the Clintons — a perception that was not substantiated. Further, Whitewater was a business dealing prior to Bill Clinton’s election in 1992. Contrast Whitewater with Tom Delay and with lobbyist Jack Abramoff, whose corrupting influence in the GOP is no mere perception.
And if you want to talk about getting bogged down in somebody’s sex life, that’s exactly what happened when Whitewater mutated into an investigation of Bill and Monica. There was a vote to impeach, based on this triviality!
Read this 1999 column by Mona Charen, for proof that she’s yet another hypocritical Republican apologist. Honestly, I believe these people have no agenda other than their own wealth and power.
This week’s Boston Sunday Globe had an article about The Massachusetts Bible Society’s struggle to survive in the Internet Age:
The Massachusetts Bible Society, a 197-year-old organization that distributed Bibles to seamen during the war of 1812 and welcomed 19th-century immigrants to Boston’s docks with free Scriptures, has sold its downtown building, is about to close its wood-paneled bookstore, and is trying to reinvent itself for a world in which the latest theological treatises are just a mouse-click away.
If the link above to the full article doesn’t work (registration may be required) click here. Hey, look at that. Comic-books are mentioned…
… and a now-missing set of 1940s Bible stories published by the editors of DC Comics, has for years been housed at the Boston University School of Theology.
As I explained previously in this blog, during college I was an Evangelical Christian. Or at least I tried to be. Although I am no longer a church-goer, that doesn’t mean I don’t read the Bible. But these days I read it online.
Another previous post was about my new SanDisk flash drive with U3 software. Recently, a U3 version of a free program called Bible Link Basic became available. There are add-ons that cost money, but I’m a relatively casual Bible reader.
Here’s a screen grab of the small toolbar that comes up when Bible Link is started. From the toolbar you can search the Internet or view local copies of two different versions of The Bible. Click the toolbar image to see a full-size copy of the Bible viewer. Additional translations are available for download at reasonable cost.
The reduced images of the viewer above show how you can navigate by dragging the numbers on the right; (1) for books, (2) for chapters, and (3) for verses. Another neat feature is you can either read just the New American Standard or King James version, or you can view both, one above the other.
So here already is another nifty U3 application for flash drives. I never quite saw the need for a PDA, but this approach to portable applications and data is making a convert of me.
The model for this blog is Mark Evanier’s News from ME. Ain’t no secret or shame in that. Swipe from your superiors, I say. Evanier is a successful writer of books, cartoons, comic-books and TV shows and, as Randy Newman sang, he loves L.A.
By clicking here you will see that Mark has mixed feelings about this TV ad being broadcast in Missouri, featuring Parkinson’s Disease sufferer Michael J. Fox.
If the area above is blank, blame YouTube™!
MJ Fox isn’t asking for money here, he’s asking for votes. And he’s right — sometimes the late Tip O’Neill’s maxim that "all politics is local" is only partly true.
