“A dark time for America” is one of the phrases I keep hearing slung about by the anti-Bush folk, but until now I was pretty sure it didn’t really fit. Now I’ve got a reason to use it. You want to know what “a dark time for America” really is? When American press is so filled with chicken-shits and brown-nosers that Michael fucking Moore has to be the one asking the tough questions and tackling the tough issues. If that isn’t dark, I’m not quite sure what is. Has our press sunk so far that Moore has to fill in for the lack of Woodwards and Bernsteins and independent oversight in modern America?
In case you haven’t guessed, I ‘acquired’ and watched Fahrenheit 9/11. Ironically, this is exactly how I ended up watching it; I had pretty much decided I wasn’t going to watch it, but when given an opportunity to watch it out of the blue, I simply couldn’t resist. I’m very glad that I did, because I learned a lot of things I didn’t know.
Continue reading “Where the fuck are our investigative reporters?”
Ever since I can remember, I’ve been bugging my mom to get rid of some of the bushels of random crap that they have stored around the houses. After I moved to Moscow and discovered the wonderful value in having almost no stuff, I have been positively asshole-ish about it. My procedure for getting rid of stuff has constantly been either (a) throw it away; or (b) find a local second-hand store/charity that actually gives back to the community (like the Salvation Army) and give the excess shit to them. Unlike me, however, Mom decided to get rid of her excess crap through that great American tradition: the yard sale.
Continue reading “I knew it, I’m surrounded by assholes”
Seriously, the only thing I really miss about cable TV is The Daily Show, because The Daily Show really is the best news on TV.
On Monday Night’s show, Jon interviewed Stephen Hayes, the guy who wrote “The Connection,” a book that’s basically constructed around one memo by Douglas Feith (Bush’s undersecretary of Defense) detailing the connections between Al-Queda and Saddam Hussein’s government. As you might imagine, one memo doth not a connection make, and in classic Stewart style Jon makes his point about the weakness of Hayes’ book perfectly clear (while still not managing to insult the man in the process.) Jon’s got style, man.
From Lisa Rein (who is quickly becoming one of my favorite people on earth for archiving TDS clips and interviews)
Since I’ve had a lot of free time lately, I’ve been doing a lot of thinking. Philosophizing, or as close as I get to it. The industry has changed a lot since I was a little kid reading Computer Shopper. In many ways, these changes are good and beneficial - from a technical standpoint, storing thousands of CD’s worth of music on one hard drive is phenomenal by itself. Many of these changes are bad - the mass adoption of Windows Media as a file format (for HD-DVD and music) means that within ten years, if present trends hold, doing things like freely moving music to a portable player or watching your DVD in three different players will likely be a way of the past.
Adding to this laundry list of good and bad, Comdex Las Vegas, the one event that I always wanted to go to since I was a kid, was cancelled this year. Yeah, I know that Comdex is really for IT guys and industry sellouts, but when I was a kid Comdex was it, man. Comdex was where everybody was. If you were anybody, you had a booth at Comdex. Of course, that’s when Peter Norton was still involved with Norton Utilities and Compaqs were solid machines.
I guess it’s part of the ongoing trend of specialty conventions - E3, Comicon, Assembly, H2k4, none of these things existed when I was a kid. Now, I’ll grant you, given the choice between Assembly or H2k4 and Comdex I would drop Comdex like a hot rock. But Comdex as an industry event has been around for a long long time.
God, I’m old.
I happened to have occasion to purchase a new case lately. The last case I purchased was my Antec SX1030 almost three years ago. It’s an amazing case, and its downside is that it’s rather large and really fucking heavy. I wanted something more compact and something a little lighter. So I started looking at the Antec Super Lanboy. It’s light, aluminum, has a fair amount of drive space, comes with extra fans and a Gear Grip-style carrier. So I googled it and read pretty much every review on the first three pages. I read the reviews (few, but still) on Newegg. I figured, hey, it’s Antec, they make quality shit.
I got the case today, and based on what I’ve seen, one of these two things must be true:
A. Most hardware reviewers are fucking worthless and dumb as posts;
B. Antec is paying everybody off.
Continue reading “Is every hardware reviewer smoking crack?”
