Like MST3K - but with song!

Please, sweet baby Jesus, stop the freak show

Anyone else disturbed at this "outpouring of love" over Michael Jackson? He didn't have a face and he was a child molester. I say good riddance.

The insanity is reaching heights no one thought possible (note the guy in drag(?) playing the damsel in distress):



At least the fact that nearly every goddamn TV station is parsing every single aspect of his life 24 hours per day gives me a reason to keep the TV turned off. Mother Eff.

"Change"? "Hope"?

Indefinite detention goes against our fundamental American beliefs. It is shameful that we are continuing to do this even if the threat from these detainees is real.

Our founding fathers supported freedom and liberty - enshrining those values in our Bill of Rights - despite the risk involved in giving people "too much" freedom. As a country I thought we abandoned the Bush era perspective where national security trumped civil liberties?

I'm sure there will be more court battles and Supreme Court decisions, most certainly placing limitations on Obama. Time will tell.

True Blood Season 2!

I get to watch the premiere tonight at a friend's house. Yippeeee!

True Blood

Delicious. I love this show already.

One of the characters said "you're dumber than a box of hair!" - They had to hear that one from Suzie!!

Happy June!

Summer is here (it's 100+ degrees daily now) and it's looking to be a good one.

I finished all five seasons of The Wire and plan to go back and re-watch them again. If you haven't seen The Wire, check out this video with the show's creator, David Simon. They show some clips from the show but nothing too revealing plot-wise.

Since finishing The Wire, I started reading the Harry Potter series (2 down, 5 to go) and watching True Blood - which I already love. Wowsa, vampires are HOT. I can almost tolerate the Southern accents because this show is already so good (I've only seen 2 episodes).

Today is the first installment of the David Lynch Interview Project, an online video series with new episodes released every three days for a year.

Last but not least, I'm going to start writing about places to chow in Phoenix (since I can't talk about my job, other than saying that I love it, which I do). Such post forthcoming!

Some more light reading

... regarding the torture debate: here is an essay written by a former military interrogator who worked at Guantanamo. He offers some strong counter-arguments to Cheney's support of torture.
A snippet:

... the former vice president never mentioned the Senate testimony of Ali Soufan, the FBI interrogator who successfully interrogated Abu Zubaydah and learned the identity of Jose Padilla, the dirty bomber, and the fact that Khalid Sheikh Mohammad (KSM) was the mastermind behind 9/11. We'll never know what more we could have discovered from Abu Zubaydah had not CIA contractors taken over the interrogations and used waterboarding and other harsh techniques. Also, glaringly absent from the former vice president's speech was any mention of the fact that the former administration never brought Osama bin Laden to justice and that our best chance to locate him would have been through KSM or Abu Zubaydah had they not been waterboarded.

This American Life

You already know how great this show is, but in case you've missed either of these programs I highly suggest downloading the podcasts:

"Bad Bank" (#375 from 3/1/09): Where the economic crisis is explained in layman's terms. One very poignant moment came when Columbia business school professor David Beim stated the following:

What is happening to us is something that goes way beyond toxic assets in banks. It's something that has little to do with the mechanics of mortgage securitization, or ethics on Wall Street, or anything else. It says the problem is us. The problem is not the banks, greedy though they may be, overpaid though they may be. The problem is us. We have over-borrowed, we have been living very high on the hog. Our standard of living has risen dramatically in the last 25 years and we have been borrowing much of the money to make that prosperity happen.

"Scenes from a Recession" (#377 from 3/29/09): Where they focus on odd stories stemming from the recession, including how condo owners are banding together despite the problems caused by vacancies in their building (like feral cats, sinking foundations and leaking roofs) and how the FDIC takes over a bank.

I was able to catch up on all of these during my road trip from AZ to CA. Listening to a bunch of them at the same time can be overwhelming, but they are so well done that they often build on themes raised in other programs creating a multi-layered reflection on current events.