Losing is a disease… as contagious as polio.
Losing is a disease… as contagious as syphilis.
Losing is a disease… as contagious as bubonic plague…
…attacking one… but infecting all.
But curable.
Now, I want you to imagine… you are on a ship at sea…
Gently rocking.
Gently rocking.
Gently rocking.
–The Natural
This New York Times story wonders if Jon Stewart is the most trusted man in America?
“When Americans were asked in a 2007 poll by the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press to name the journalist they most admired, Mr. Stewart, the fake news anchor, came in at No. 4, tied with the real news anchors Brian Williams and Tom Brokaw of NBC, Dan Rather of CBS and Anderson Cooper of CNN.
Offices for “The Daily Show” occupy a sprawling loftlike space that combines the energy of a newsroom with the laid-back vibe of an Internet start-up: many staff members wear jeans and flip-flops, and two amiable dogs wander the hallways. The day begins with a morning meeting where material harvested from 15 TiVos and even more newspapers, magazines and Web sites is reviewed. That meeting, Mr. Stewart said, “would be very unpleasant for most people to watch: it’s really a gathering of curmudgeons expressing frustration and upset, and the rest of the day is spent trying to mask or repress that through whatever creative devices we can find.”
After reading the full story I took a moment to try to come up with some public figure I trust more… and coud not.
I might be the last person to figure this out but, based on this trailer, Stone appears to tackle two questions: “How in the hell did George W. Bush ever become president of the United States?” And, “What happened to him before he got to the Oval Office that made him so inept once there?” Or maybe that’s one question.
I wanted to believe the new X-Files movie would be a good follow-up to the first movie and the TV series. I was a fan of both and had high hopes for the new film which Barb and I watched last night. What a stinker.
This is where I’d insert a spoiler alert but I just don’t think there’s anything to spoil. But I’ll give you my fuzzy understanding of the plot after the jump.
The magazine cover has nothing to do with the new film. I just wanted some kind of reminder of Scully and Mulder when they were still hot.
Watched the first installment of the new HBO mini-series, Generation Kill last night. Had very high expectations for this series because it was written and produced by the same team that gave us The Wire. I was disappointed. I thought much of the dialogue was lame. And I was bothered by what felt like ham-handed anti-war propaganda. On a deeper level, I hope it was propaganda. Because the alternative is pretty scary. I think I have to watch the entire series before forming an opinion.
[Quick Google search]
From SeattlePI.com: Perhaps the acid test was last Wednesday night on the eve of HBO’s presentation to TV critics at the ongoing press tour. The producers and cast screened part of the miniseries for several hundred Marines at the Southern California base of Camp Pendleton.
Technical adviser Eric Kocher, who served in the First Recon Battalion and appears on screen in the miniseries, said what he heard most often was that “the dialogue is excellent. It hits exactly the way Marines talk, and then the atmosphere is visually what you see, what you hear in the background. Everything is it. It hits Iraq.”
Well, there you go. I think maybe I expected some kind of Band of Brothers/The Wire mash-up. Different war, different time, different part of the world.
I took a tour of the Missouri State Penitentiary in Jefferson City, before the inmates were moved to a new facility in 2004. KETC (St. Louis) producer Patrick Murphy took a tour and produced this excellent video.
By 1935, the penitentiary it was the largest prison in the United States with 5,000 inmates. I can’t explain my fascination with prisons, but as a result of my tour of the prison here in JC, I created MissouriDeathRow.com.
“In the history of filmmaking, there is only one movie that Marines like, and that’s the first 20 minutes of Full Metal Jacket,” Sgt. Eric Kocher says, slicing into a medium-rare steak in a midtown New York restaurant. “After that, it all goes to shit.”
A veteran of the Iraq invasion in 2003, Kocher is a muscular 28-year-old with an intense stare and the word psycho tattooed inside his lower lip. For the past year, he has served as the senior military adviser on Generation Kill, a seven-episode miniseries about the early days of the Iraq war that premieres on HBO July 13th at 9 p.m. Based on the book of the same name (which began as an award-winning series of articles by journalist Evan Wright in Rolling Stone), Kill follows the Marines of 1st Recon, who were at the vanguard of the American invasion in 2003, blitzing ahead of the U.S. forces in Humvees. A team leader on the real mission, Kocher was there to make sure the filmmakers stayed true to the story. “If Eric hadn’t been there, it would have been Generation Lame,” says Wright. “He forced an authentic point of view.” [Rolling Stone]
You know I loved The Wire. Probably best series ever. And Band of Brothers gets my vote for best mini-series of all time. We won’t be taking evening calls for those seven nights.
“Billboards are, for the most part, still a relic of old-world media, and the best guesses about viewership numbers come from foot traffic counts or highway reports, neither of which guarantees that the people passing by were really looking at the billboard, or that they were the ones sought out.
Now, some entrepreneurs have introduced technology to solve that problem. They are equipping billboards with tiny cameras that gather details about passers-by — their gender, approximate age and how long they looked at the billboard. These details are transmitted to a central database.
Behind the technology are small start-ups that say they are not storing actual images of the passers-by, so privacy should not be a concern. The cameras, they say, use software to determine that a person is standing in front of a billboard, then analyze facial features (like cheekbone height and the distance between the nose and the chin) to judge the person’s gender and age. So far the companies are not using race as a parameter, but they say that they can and will soon.
The goal, these companies say, is to tailor a digital display to the person standing in front of it — to show one advertisement to a middle-aged white woman, for example, and a different one to a teenage Asian boy.” [New York Times]