It blows my mind that professionals with college degrees, in the year 2006, will still end an email like this. Adding insult to injury, this came to me from a PR firm, who’s only function as far as i can tell is to have lunch meetings and except absurdly large checks.
It’s not good, cute, correct or witty. Nor does it inspire me to ruminate over your poorly composed communiqué. People who do this should be made to go live in Dallas or something equally horrific.
I know this is everywhere, but I think it should be everywhere. The mainstream media is a disgrace and here Bill Clinton gets to call them on it. I hope Chris Wallace’s dad is thoroughly ashamed of him.
Update: Again, just pounding the drum here, this clip of Keith Oberman talking about the interview is almost as important as the interview itself. (Both this and the Fox Video are getting hard to find because of various take-down notices being volleyed by fox’s army of lawyers.)
Update: The Daily Show follows up the follow-up coverage.
I re-enterd Plano for the first time in about six years this weekend. It was for a good cause, but to be fair, even some of my friends were a little shocked – “Dude, your going to make Wade eat lunch in Plano, is that really a good plan ?”
No problem, really. For one, I am a champion…no stupid little suburban hell-hole is going to ruin my day. Also, I’ve developed some very effective coping mechanisms.
So I survived the reorganization at work and oddly enough have now been given some additional authority over certain projects. Go me.
It’s really odd though – I’ll be in a meeting, the conversation will pause and all these director types will turn and look at me. Oh, they want my opinion.
And suddenly, to my surprise, I’m speaking. I don’t have a damn clue what I’m actually saying, although somewhere in the back of my head, the bullshit meter is off the scale. Although apparently the subjects and verbs are all agreeing, because people are nodding and responding as if I’m being coherent…which itself is pretty weird.
This is apparently what they call ‘management.’ Whoa.
…to have a music festival when it’s this hot.”
Yes we are. But it’s not that hot (well not as hot as it could be) and you’re wearing jeans and some strange New yorker garb (sorry Kendra). Cool points will also be deducted for poor use of expletive ‘freakin.’ ?
Enjoy the balmy fields my friends, we only erect temples to music in the park once a year.
Read about life and times at the Austin City Limits Festival in the much ignored music section of the site, and see the pretty pictures here, and better pictures here.
So this year there were no weddings, hurricanes or both to prevent us from attending the festival. This thing is really well done. First, the sets are just long enough to hold my attention, the variety is impressive, and the logistics are pretty damn well thought out – free water, miles and miles of port-a-cans, ample food and beverage (at almost reasonable prices), and even some ok stuff to buy.
I also never realized how many tourists come in for this event. There are a lot of out of town people… they’re the ones in heels and jeans (I’m totally serious here, no sarcasm).
Anyhow, here’s the lineup we’ve partaken of :
Day 1
Tristan Prettyman
Stars
Nickel Creek
Gnarls Barkley – Check your thesaurus for overrated, these guys are there
Gomez
Ray Lamontagne – A suprise, awesome live show
Van Morrison
Day 2
Centro-matic – damn fine live show
Phoenix – frenchies who rock out, and good
Galactic
The Shins –
They were probably really good, but seeing as there were so many people there (half the damn town) and that we had an incident with some inconsiderate youths who weren’t aware of some of the courtesies involved in festival going (like don’t walk on our blanket and don’t talk shit to my wife), we bailed a little early. So I almost punched a 17 year old, so what.
Moving on…
Calexico
What Made Milwaukee Famous
Explosions in the Sky – Oh, hell yes.
Willie Neslon – From so far in the back I could barely make out the jumbotron, but hey it’s Willie. (And no, i didn’t take the picture)
Day 3 – In which we are tired, but still walk alot. And we discover the chicken cone.
Jack Ingram – meh
Patrice Pike – hello L.A. rockstar
The New Pornographers – the Cd was better
Sonvolt – Always great
The Flaming Lips
Ben Harper – that hippie has gotten angry
G-Love and the Special Sauce – yeah, rad
Tom Petty – from at least half a mile away, as the first thunderstorm in six months rolled down out of the hill country.
Get more perspective on the fun times here.
Breaking ranks from the likes of Yahoo! and Google, Wikipedia’s founder Jimmy wales refuses to censor the Chinese version of it’s online, collaborative encyclopedia.
Wales said censorship was ‘ antithetical to the philosophy of Wikipedia. We occupy a position in the culture that I wish Google would take up, which is that we stand for the freedom for information, and for us to compromise I think would send very much the wrong signal: that there’s no one left on the planet who’s willing to say “You know what? We’re not going to give up.”‘
These guys are going to save the world. Seriously.
Link to coverage in the Guardian
Link to BoingBoing
Link to donate to Wikipedia.
To the Tall Hippy Who Almost Killed Me In the Gold’s Parking Lot on Saturday:
Look man, I wanted to apologize.
Clearly you were in a hurry as you slammed your junker 1985 Red honda into reverse out of it’s parking spot, directly into my state mandated right-of-way. And clearly, I should have figured out some other less abrasive way to avoid hitting you than coming to a screeching halt on my moped. I mean locking up both wheels was a bit over kill. It must have been really hard on you.
However, I don’t think my laying on the horn and giving you the finger was entirely unjustified. You obviously disagreed, as you were able to break away from whatever life-changing, world-altering mission you were on to bring the aforementioned honda to a screeching halt ( A lot of good tires were unnecessarily wasted this day ), jump out of the car and begin lobbing F-bombs my direction. I think we’ll just have to agree to disagree on this one.
It was quite a funny scene really… you with your hippy-fro and chacos yelling at me on my wee moped with giant helmet and chacos. We had common footwear and we couldn’t get along…this makes me sad.
In hindsight, what I really regret here is that I didn’t use my state-mandated, impact resistant uber helmet to test the padding of your previously-mentioned goofy ass hippy-fro. Like say, as i ran you over with the wee scooter. Which wouldn’t really be painful so much as just extremely humiliating for you. Of course with your haircut, your probably used to that feeling.
So maybe it’s better the we just went our separate ways without trying to solve our problems like rational humans.
But like i said – My bad. My sincere apologies to you. I hope you got where you and your manly honda needed to go, without further hinderance from traffic of the two wheeled varietal.
Knock knock- Saturday morning, 10 a.m.
Picture me, 6’1” red polk-a-dot boxers, beerland tee-shirt, hair sticking up in that special pre-coffee way that it does, answering the door. On the other side is a well dressed hispanic gentlemen (with really creepy dental work) in suit with an assistant behind him who i can’t quite seem to focus on.
Keep in mind here that the only person who ever knocks on our door, especially at this hour is either the dog, or someone escorting the dog to her proper place in the world ( on the couch watching soap operas, eating ice cream). So right away I’m skeptical of these folks, who got up so early and took the time to dress up to come and visit us without canine-base motivation.
“Uh, yeah ?” I say.
“Hello young man, are your parents at home ? “ says the dapper dude.
This gives me pause. There’s a lot I could work with here, but the fact that I haven’t been asked this question in about ten years throws me for a loop.
“Actually, We own the place…” I say.
“Ah well, congratulations on your youthful appearance.”
“ok…”
“I was wondering If I could talk to you about the role of religion in your life….”
(Oh crap, Goose punch us out, I can’t reach the handle…)
“Ah, no thank you.” I say and shut the door.
I can’t believe I let them off this easy…no comments like – “Actually I practice voodoo, you want to see my collection of dolls and shrunken heads ?” or “Oh yes, religion is very important in my life, we’re about to sacrifice some virgins in the back yard this evening, want to stick around ?“
Damn them, they caught me uncaffeinated, and thus unwitty. Clearly, I’m slipping in my old age despite my decpetive youthful appearance.
So is there a housing bubble ? From my perspective, prices seem pretty inflated but according to the mainstream media types, this is just a minor adjustment. However, for the past week-and-a-half the department of doom and gloom, (i.e the Internet) has been a rumble with various peices about the severity of the potential downturn. Here’s a few:
Newspapers earn money from advertising placed by Realtors®, so papers have a strong motive to publish the Realtors’® unrealistic forecasts. Worse, Realtors® have a near-monopoly on sale price information, and newspaper reporters never ask Realtors® hard questions like “how do we know you’re not lying about those prices?” The result is an endless stream of stories which minimize or just ignore the crash.
From patrick.net, an intresting and well documented read on the SF Bay’s role in this.
The hell with liquids on planes, Bush, Inc. should be looking at ways to spin this to scare people into voting for them.
