I would like to apologize to CNN, MSNBC and Fox. I admit my guilt. I watched them on satellite TV. They told me not to. Every time I tuned in, they were advising me to visit their websites, visit them on Facebook, send them e-mails, join their chat rooms, post a comment, Twitter. Yada, yada, yada. I could even check when the polls closed in 49 states I don't live in, even though I voted early. I don't think it was sexual, but I grew alarmed every time Wolf Blitzer asked to Twitter me.
"I can't even take off my coat, and the man lies again!!!"
I go way back in the news business. I remember when newspapers refused to run TV listings. Why the hell should we help them out? It was like Safeway telling you about the specials at Kroger. Now I watch the news, and they tell me I'm in the wrong place. "Instant updates on our web site!" they say. "Become an iReporter and send in your cell phone videos!" "E-mail me at cafferty.com and see your e-mail and hundreds of others." Now why would I want to do that? Surely it can't be that much more entertaining than watching Jack Cafferty. As far as I can tell, he's employed full-time urging viewers to go somewhere else.
Some of the iReports from Hurricane Ike were terrific. Not so much the iReport about how four people in Shaker Heights got ballots with a missing page. The writer-producers get paid to whip this stuff together and feed it to the on-air people. Ideally, this should be an invisible process. Not lately. I'm watching and the anchor interrupts himself. "This just in! There's a breaking development! I just got an e-mail from my producer!" He swivels around and says, "Can you zoom in over my shoulder, Joe the Cameraman?" We see illegible dots on the laptop screen. "Looky here!" the anchor says.
"Who was Ross Perot?!"
It used to be a joke that anchors were only "news readers." Now we have to read the news ourselves. At least Cafferty prints out his messages and displays them on the screen. People our age enjoy something we can see, like a print-out. The young people today, they think paper is something they use in the smallest room in the house.
I checked out Twitter. This is the deal. People can Twitter you. You can Twitter them This can be done with your cell phone. "N line @ Safeway. How U think $'s are at Kroger?" I have a friend who says he mingles with 9,000 Twits. I would rather gnaw the ears off a dead moose. I visited Wolf Blitzer's page on Facebook. He spelled his last name wrong. He has some cute friends. That Daaneyal Khan got his or her chin cut off.
Oh, and I can get instant, instant!, INSTANT! election returns online. This is thrilling. I try to spot tiny red numbers changing. It's more exciting than watching a presidential debate where the CNN pundits award the contestants positive and negative votes. Wait! Did that used to be a 9? Did it just shimmer into a 10? With all their computers do you think they could provide a running total of pundit votes? Nooooo. It might crash their hard drive. It was fun when a GOP pundit went haywire and starting voting Democratic. Anderson Cooper called him on it. "I got the buttons confused," the guy confessed.
Senior Standing in 80mph Gusts of Wind Correspondent.
That Anderson Cooper, he gets around. One night it's Election Central, the next night he's testing the grass roots in Montana, then he's clinging to a tree in Galveston. He's like those Daily Show correspondents who are always the same, only their title changes. And don't get me started on John King and his Magic Map. Man, does he get excited by what might happen. "If I push Virginia and Florida and Rhode Island, see how the map looks! And then if you add in California and that single Nebraska vote, take a look at this!"
"Is CNN tentatively prepared to call this a potential landslide,
or did you cough on the map?"
I liked it better when they had Jeff Greenfield standing in front of the plain old wall map. When Jeff stuck a state with a thumb tack, you knew that state was nailed. I'm terrified that the usually remorseless John King will have an off night, brush a Swing State with his elbow and change the outcome. Wolf Blizter must be a slow study. He's been doing this for years, but he's still asking, "John, what do you think would happen if you tapped Montana? Could Anderson Cooper feel it?"
I just saw Ali Velshi bragging they've received 30,000 e-mails complaining about voting irregularities. They probably channel them to a call center in Bangladesh. "Hello? Ninth Ward? New Orleans? Louisiana? Joe Plumberji. I am calling you from right there in America! I am wondering if these vote fraudsters were wearing sport shoes? Nikes? I desire the New Balance. I am seeing your Ward Number Nine on telly, when you were having the Katrina. After our typhoon, I feel as if I am seeing Louisiana from my house!"
"God damn it, Barney, don't say 'yes' until I've finished talking!"
I watch a lot of CNN because they're trapped in the middle. For a break, I surf to Fox and MSNBC. Bill O'Reilly, what a guy. He invites Barney Frank on his show, and spends the whole time screaming at him. He could save satellite costs by renting an inflatable doll. Over at MSNBC, Keith Olbermann is always astonished. "What?? Bush is lying again?? You're kidding me!!" The next day, "What??? Bush is lying again??? You're kidding me!!!" And on Thursday, "What!!!!! Bush is...etc." He has an unending capacity for counterfeit astonishment. By Friday, I'm sitting at home shouting at the screen: "Keith! Keith! He did it again today!!!!!."
There may perhaps be a light at the end of the tunnel. We will never, ever, again, after this week, have to listen the endlessly chanted slogan, "The Best Political Team on Television!" To quote the saddest line in all of Shakespeare: Never! Never! Never! Never! Never! We won't, will we?
Footnote at 11:40 p.m,CST: I have been watching. I must admit CNN can make a plausible claim to have the best political team on television. I was so moved by Roland Martin's eloquence. I admit John King was the master of the map. Wolf Blitzer was a steady captain. David Gergen was the very soul of probity. Anderson Cooper and Campbell Brown were spirited but sane. And interviewing a hologram? How cool was that? As the great Canadian director Guy Maddin just e-mailed me: "Even Will.I.Am appeared confused tonight when Anderson told him he was a hologram. It's only going to get better with future elections -- the best reason reason to live to 106!" Will.I.Am plays Moto Moto in "Magascar: Escape 2 Africa," and now he's Obe Wan Kenobi. So okay, CNN, you may have the best team, but just stop telling me.
Boy, do I want to read you tomorrow.
Quick, how do I send this essay to my friends on "Twitter"?
Is Bill O'Reilly twittering in that picture?
Ebert: Being twittered.
I only get snippets of the US news channels as it is, but it does seem that they're eager to show how modern they all are :-) Last night John King's mixing up his map jabs and getting the wrong number was the best bit of all. I didn't stick around to see if he got to do it again.
I liked on "the Colbert Report" where he made a joke about how they labeled a swing state wrong by the wrong abbreviation on CNN. THis is a must see!... http://www.colbertnation.com/the-colbert-report-videos/189585/october-27-2008/mccain-guarantees-victory .
God bless Tim Russert and his dry-erase board. (Hint, hint, cable news networks!)
This presidential campaign has been very exciting. I was addicted to cable news coverage for most of the primary season. But eventually, I found myself wandering over to PBS or C-Span, where people don't scream at each other, the backdrops aren't filled with constantly moving animation, and I don't have to listen to noisy commercials every five minutes. There's too much coverage on TV of...everything! I couldn't even stomach the Olympics this year.
There's so much "look at me! look at me!" information-overload out there in the world. These days, I jealously guard my quiet hour on the porch, reading the evening paper with a cat curled around my ankle.
Twitter is the death of good, well thought out writing. If the point of blogging is to found an outlet for random, eloquently put commentary, Twitter the complete opposite. It's a way for people to narrate and compare their pointless lives to their pointless friends' lives.
"I'm in line at a hotdog stand. Taking forever."
"I'm at the drug store looking for Count Chocula. Do they still make it?"
That's why I love your blog, Roger. It's the complete antithesis of Twitter. You think about what you are writing, there is structure and consideration, and most importantly, there is a point.
These kids with their Twitters and whatnot--anything not written as a completeword is generally not worth reading. I prefer to get my election returns in the manner that Hunter S. Thompson might have back in the day--several TVs going at once and a bottle of Wild Turkey Rye within arms reach. (Alas, no controlled substances or firearms are on hand.)
However, I must note that it is at times like these that I miss Mike Royko more than ever.
A great commentary, as usual Mr. Ebert. While Olbermann 's show can actually make me laugh sometimes, it's usually when he's running a video of Palin saying something inane. This blog entry, however was fully lulz-worthy for its content and delivery. Have you ever considered "news reading?"
I hate Twitter, but a lot of this just feels like luddite rambling.
Technology doesn't make people idiots, it just facilitates them communicating. For every good use of technology there are a million ridiculous ones.
It's not the gear, it's the people on television being lazy and bad at their jobs.
I'm avoiding the election returns. This is not keeping my wife from running into the room every five minutes giving me the projected electoral votes tally. I haven't yet decided whether to break the news to her that I don't need the news broken to me.
If anyone is looking for me, I'll be out on the porch reading the evening cat with a paper curled around my ankle--or something like that.
So the last two posts on your blog had basically nothing to do with movies...and I loved every word. Great writing.
Here's a scary thought: I generally prefer to watch BBC News America on BBC America. Tonight they're doing eight hours of live election coverage, but, as much as I like them in general, I'm watching CNN for my returns. Why?
Part of it must have to do with all the bright lights and shiny things. I'd like to think I'm better and more discerning than that, but possibly not.
Oh, well. Commercial's over! Back to the magic wall!
Aside from the fun of reading this, the content of this blog entry wouldn't be very relevant if not for the sad truth that the Portuguese TV stations try their best, within the limits of their resources, to imitate the cacophonous style of American TV. Fortunately, we're poor. This is probably the only context in which the economic shortcomings of a country are a good thing.
Meanwhile, there's a pundit on right now - my favorite, not because of the quality of what he says, but because he will talk about everything, everything!, like he's the world's number one authority on the subject and everyone else is more or less an idiot - telling us about how complicated the actual act of voting is nowadays in the US. He was showing a card, handed out by the Democratic Party in, I believe, Chicago, back in 2004 with instructions on how to vote. It does seem a little too complex a process.
And like Joel Meza, I can't wait to read you tomorrow. People here in Portugal hadn't been this interested and excited about the United States in a long while. And according to what I’ve been reading, I think I can generalize and say this is true of Europe as a whole. I think we had come to think that Bush somehow represented the American voters, and that depressed us. I know it's not true, but it's a hard idea to escape. We haven't done any better at electing our leaders. Anyway, I don't remember people caring so much about the elections in the U.S. since Clinton ran against Bush I. As I recall, in the 2000 elections, there wasn't much interest here, and little more in 2004. Now, there's so much excitement - and the United States are obviously of such critical importance at a time when the world faces uncertainties that the Bush Administration is not innocent of - that it feels almost unfair that we can't vote too, dammit.
The only person I've ever subscribed to on Twitter is your pal Richard Roeper. And, quite frankly, I'd prefer if he just wrote a occassional extra Friday column instead.
Is Keith Olbermann an obnoxious idiot or what? I didn't think there could be anyone more annoying and grating than O'Reilly- but that was before I became aware of Keith's existence.
The man has ONE LONG LOUD LOUD LOUD BREATHLESS TONE OF VOICE that he uses to announce everything from Amy Winehouse's latest arrest to the election of the new President of the United States to the stats in the latest NBA playoffs.
The man seems to be incapable of forming a clear, understandable sentence with a brief pause at the end. He also seems absolutely incapable of speaking in two tones- just that one unchanging, unending, unvaried monotone. His diction is DELIBRATELY shapeless and graceless. My 7th grade English teacher would instantly flunk him after two sentences on a poem recital or reading your paper grade.
He's not a journalist or a commentator, he's a Sportscaster of the News. Before I knew that he was a former sportscaster, I could guess it.
The end result is just another example of the diminishing returns we are seeing as an information-based society: people talk a lot, but the sheer volume drowns out the message. In order to produce enough news to fill a 24-hour cycle, every particle of information is not only analized, but vivisected. The object is not to inform, but to create drama, and every newscast is a stage production. The question is one of ratings: Will the viewer be swayed by Bill O'Reilly's Shatner-esque characterization? Or will CNN's annoying digital effects prevail? None can say! Of course, the advantage of getting my news from the internet is that I can choose to go straight to the text and skip the shiny nonsense.
I don't know how a News channel can call itself the "Best political team on Television".
I don't know that we could do that. I would have saved all the trouble of writing exams and declared myself the "Best student in the Country" back in the college.
I am seriously thinking of claiming this title at my office. "Fair and Balanced and Best worker in my Company".
Any other suggestions for me ?
Vijay
Bill O'Reilly is an extremely disagreeable man. I don't think I've ever tuned into Fox, and not seen him, temper flared, screaming at whoever was unlucky (or maybe lucky) enough to be on his show.
All these numbers and "predictions" are confusing, can't we wait until the numbers have been tallied and then make the announcement? American's and our T.V.'s, we really are something.
Be careful, you could (or did) become addicted to these programs. You’re the first liberal I’ve seen criticize Olbermann, was it the treatment Hillary got or his deceptive honesty?
Ebert: Aw...I like him okay. I was just funnin',
OMG! This just in: John King sneezes, California goes Democratic. No further questions.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=22yd2efX9SY
The American election is great theatre, but I don't know if I'd want to live through it as a candidate or as a voter. I mean, you have this huge computerized - *thing* you have to figure out just to vote, and just now I saw Wolf Blitzer talking to a correspondent on CNN via hologram.
The last time I voted (which was last month) I used a pencil and paper to vote and learned who won via the radio. I feel positively antediluvian.
Well said.
Opinionated talking heads and 24-hour punditry are some of the worst developments in news in the last four decades. I think the Fox News is largely to blame for it because they introduced the idea that 24 straight hours of opinion somehow qualifies as news. Because their ratings were so high, the other cable news networks followed suit, sometimes with conservative populism, like Lou Dobbs, and at other times with center-left counter-programming, like Keith Olbermann.
Conservative or liberal, every single one of these people are annoying blow hards. I'm much further to the left than any well-known commentator on cable news, and even I get tired of the shrill opinions of liberals. I dislike the rightists at Fox the most, but everyone one of these personalities are horrible, obnoxious people with little or no credibility, other than degrees in broadcast journalism.
We need to get back to deep, substantive and more or less objective coverage. Editorials need to stay on the editorial page. I've gotten to the point where I can only watch CBC and BBC news. Everything else I have to read.
I'm slightly annoyed that I didn't come up with people using twitter 'twits' on my own, maybe being a part of the internet generation really has been detrimental to my attention span. I really like it though, I'm going to appropriate it.
The desperate attempts by television stations to get a web presence is so bizarrely counter-productive. I was reminded of Jeremy Paxman's comments on user generated content (http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=xVaZwJn-ZcM) shared live on national television here in the UK.
Also proves yet again that CGI is over-used, and far too cheap. When adverts can use it to make anything happen, suddenly they all look fairly pointless. And live CG on news reports is all well and good, but again is overused and overcomplicated so that audiences don;t get bored with the lack of anything flashing on screen for more than ten seconds.
Which brings me to the incredible pointlessness of 24 hour news. Yes, on 9/11 and during the Election as it happens, it has a purpose, but the rest of the time rolling news is just restating facts endlessly while reporters stand outside closed doors. These same reporters cannot get any facts in the field, because, of course, the doors are still closed. So we have the ridiculous situation of an anchor who knows the facts asking an reporter who doesn't about the generally insignificant facts.
Apologies for the rant-like nature of this post. Got a bit carried away.
okay, i just want to say--I am very,very,very happy! I am not crying yet. But, I wish I was in Grant Park!
I've just enjoyed my instant update of your blog... My browser has tabs open for Yahoo!, Facebook, Defective Yeti, Indecision 2008, the New York Times, and, of course, you. However, my TV is tuned to AMC, which is currently showing "Rocky." He just drank the eggs. Last week, when I got back to the rim of the Grand Canyon (from the bottom), I did the Rocky dance. Not related to your blog entry at all, but I'm free associating now. Reading "Ellington Boulevard" right now. Good, so far. I like paper, too. My kids will be readers, damn it. Wolf should chastise the staffer who wrote his facebook page, then allow CNN to misspell his name on the pop up for the remainder of the year. O'Reilly and Olbermann are entitled to their opinions, even though they will likely never acknowledge that mine is just as good as theirs, and is likely a good deal less obnoxious. I hope... Mick's going on about balance, now, so I think I'll stop typing and watch. G'night, and see you when there's a new Illinoisan President-elect!
The desperate attempts by television stations to get a web presence is so bizarrely counter-productive. I was reminded of Jeremy Paxman's comments on user generated content (http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=xVaZwJn-ZcM) shared live on national television here in the UK.
Also proves yet again that CGI is over-used, and far too cheap. When adverts can use it to make anything happen, suddenly they all look fairly pointless. And live CG on news reports is all well and good, but again is overused and overcomplicated so that audiences don;t get bored with the lack of anything flashing on screen for more than ten seconds.
Which brings me to the incredible pointlessness of 24 hour news. Yes, on 9/11 and during the Election as it happens, it has a purpose, but the rest of the time rolling news is just restating facts endlessly while reporters stand outside closed doors. These same reporters cannot get any facts in the field, because, of course, the doors are still closed. So we have the ridiculous situation of an anchor who knows the facts asking an reporter who doesn't about the generally insignificant facts.
Apologies for the rant-like nature of this post. Got a bit carried away.
Ironically, tonight while watching CNN, I asked my daughter, "Why do they keep trying to send us to the computer?" As you can tell - since I'm here reading your ALWAYS entertaining writings - they got their wish.
Plus, they were beginning to grate my nerves like cheddar.
Okay, Roger. I have to go find some tape. I think I strained my ribs laughing. I'm trying not to disturb Clara, so I internalized a lot of it, but I really think I felt something go twang.
Joe Plumberji. I can see Louisiana from my house. If I wake her up, she'll kill me. I must go smother gleeful cackles with a pillow.
Mike
I switched to Comedy Central for Jon Stewart's and Stephen Colbert's coverage. What rhymes with rimrock ride? Oh, right... LANDSLIDE! Not related, but amusing: Colbert's MacBook Air has a huge "C" around the apple, and, in reference to CNN's holograms, he may not be there, but he's scratch and sniff. Mr. President-Elect Obama, congratulations, aloha oval office, and mahalo for running! I finally voted for somebody who won! We're part of history!
I switched to Comedy Central for Jon Stewart's and Stephen Colbert's coverage. What rhymes with rimrock ride? Oh, right... LANDSLIDE! Not related, but amusing: Colbert's MacBook Air has a huge "C" around the apple, and, in reference to CNN's holograms, he may not be there, but he's scratch and sniff. Mr. President-Elect Obama, congratulations, aloha oval office, and mahalo for running! I finally voted for somebody who won! We're part of history!
The slight irony here is that we're not exactly reading this on page 47 of tomorrow's bird-cage liner. I haven't held an actual Sun-Times paper since I left Chicago 10 years ago, but thanks to those tubes of the internets bringing us the S-T website, well, here we are.
In truth, there's no comparing the inanity of twittering to this blog, but I'm just saying...
"Joe the camerman"! HaHa..great line!
I don't believe in "live" election coverage. It is not a dynaic situation. Once the votes have been cast, there is nothing to do but wait for the final tally. Speculations and projections from the day before are as good as any they'll come up with on election night. Watch a good movie instead. Clear some DVR backlog. Hell, watch the new episode of "90210". The "ongoing" coverage and "updates" are useless chatter.
And they still haven't got the final final total for my state, so, again, watching last night would've been useless anyway. Turn it off. Turn it off. Turn it off.
As a supporter of public television, my wife would only let us watch election coverage on PBS. Not that I am complaining--you must know when to pick your battles--but the coverage in comparison to the other networks was quite low-rent. No fancy graphics, no fancy election night sets, no fancy high octane pundits (with the exception of a phone-a-friend to Michael Beschloss). They didn't even make their own exit polling projections, opting to instead report when another network had made a projected win. Perhaps they decided to save a buck or two on the exit poll subscriptions and consultant costs.
We waited for an agonizing 5 seconds of silence while Jim Lehrer sipped tea for his hoarse throat. When my wife left the room, I flipped over to NBC to see a rotating, Neo-Classical set with Ann Curry in the middle elaborating on animated polling data displayed on a central computer-generated cylinder like the God from Tron.
I have avoided the various cable news outlets for years. The reporting on PBS by the NewsHour team was insightful and thorough, with three separate commentary panels, all of them excellent, consisting of a couple of columnists, a few historians and a couple of pollsters.
Seriously, I love this blog. I love it in obnoxious Caps. Yes, I LOVE IT!
Seriously, I love this blog. I love it in obnoxious Caps. Yes, I LOVE IT!
I agree with Tim. I've become quite a fan of Jim Lehrer and his group. Jim does a good job keeping things moving and they appear (at least to me) to be fairly even-handed. Not the rock-you with fancy holograms and funky maps (Jim intimated more than once last night that he loathed the maps).
Interestingly, I kept one eye on PBS and the other on MSNBC.com (and the other on CNN.com and the other on Facebook... yes, I have that many eyes). You really learn a lot about your 'Friends' by their comments/posts on election night.
Also, Roger, this is the second time in three blog entries that you've used saddest line in all of Shakespeare. Is this just a phase or can we expect more?
This discussion makes me ponder on Jay Mariotti's tactless delaration that printed news is dead. That's an absurd idea, but I wonder if the more appropriate to speculate if TV news is growing extinct. I followed all the election coverage via the internet this year; I followed all the polls and pundits' views through their websites, I hit the "refresh" button to see who was winning, and I watched both McCain's consession speech and Obama's victory speech online through the wonderful streaming application. And I'm not alone - the university where I worked didn't even bother to set up TVs this year as they did in 2004 to watch the election results; everyone simply turned to their computers. CNN, Fox, et al have become so efficient in the worldwide web that we don't need to reach for our remotes anymore; only our keyboard.
But is that responsible news? I'm reminded of George Romero's recent zombie opus "Diary of the Dead," in which characters film the increasingly apocalyptic events and upload them onto Youtube, and then marvel about how many hits they get in just a few minutes. Someone in the film (or perhaps it was Romero in an interview, I don't remember) points out that we used to have only three stations to give us the news, and now everyone is potentially their own station due to all the information avaiable on the net. In a world (sorry, I can't help but use a movie-trailer voice for that line) where we all are our own networks, and where we can view everyone online based on our own biases, what will become of responsible journalism? Not really a complete thought here, I guess, but it does get the mind working.
Remember the CB radio craze of the 70's? Betty Ford's handle was "First Mama". Welcome to Twitter. Does the same fate await? Stay tuned...
Thank you for finding Twitter as utterly pointless as I do. I may be 18 and may be up-to-date with all of the new Internet services, but that doesn't mean that most of them have absolutely no purpose in my day-to-day life. Seriously, why does anyone find Twitter worth having? When we've got MySpace and blogs and, hell, even texting?
There is no excuse for Twitter's existence.
I'm going to take a wild guess, but was it Rick Sanchez who did that? I bet it was Rick Sanchez.
God I hate Rick Sanchez. Most anchors speak to the camera as if all their viewers are five-year-olds, but he's the worst of the worst. And no one's impressed with your Twitter board, dude. Okay? No one. "Look! You see this! Can we get a shot of this Twitter we just got, guys? [Camera zooms in on Twitter board] You see that there? [He highlights the text] You see it, right there? This guy just Twittered us to say, 'Rick, I agree with that thing you just said.' YOU SEE THAT? THAT JUST HAPPENED!"
But I must agree, CNN far and away seemed to have the best coverage last night. And if nothing else, it was worth watching just to see the delightfully insane on-screen descriptor, "Will.i.am via Hologram."
One thing I don't really like but don't see any sign of disappearing are the polls that were being shown. I think I saw CNN monitoring the same polls 5 times in one hour. When I heard them say "we will be monitoring these polls 5 times in the next hour"....I don't know, I didn't even want to go vote after that thinking,okay Obama won this thing, do I even need to vote for him now?
I hate to admit I share your take on Keith Olbermann. But I would limit my agreement to Keith's behavior and on-air demeanor for the past 3-4 months.
A couple of years ago, Keith was the only voice in news directly attacking the Bush administration, and I was thrilled to see - finally - that I wasn't the only voice crying in the wilderness at the craven and illegal conduct of the Bush-Cheney team. However, in the past few months, as his ratings have gone up, and as the administration becomes more and more toothless, Olbermann's level of outrage seems excessive. Keith has bought into his PR machine, and the quality of his show and his reporting has declined as a result.
I find Rachel Maddow's show much more entertaining, kind of like Keith's show used to be.
Twitter is great for people who are self-absorbed and lazy. However, its 140-character limit cuts you off just as you are getting to the poi
Lol at the whole "Stop telling to go somewhere else" thing. I'm a journalism student myself and have to trying to figure out where I can fit into the future of news, but you make a great point with what your saying. I never really thought about it that way, good point.
I like the fact that you're email buddies with Guy Maddin. But that's the Canadian in me. It's cooler than if you were email buddies with Egoyan or Cronenberg or Lepage.
Sorry.
But I watch CNN simply because Fox and MSNBC are both premium cable channels on Canadian cable, and I will not fork over extra money for them. Now that we're actually getting HBO,though, I might reconsider. I watch Keith and Rachel highlights on the MSNBC website.
The reason the 24-hour cable news networks hit us with their online content so hard is that they know that for eight hours out of the day, most of us are stranded at our jobs without television. Most of us, however, have the Internet.
we can't wait for the new Will.I.AM song/video, but nothing yet as of 11/6-
http://www.musicnewsnet.com/2008/11/vote-today.html
That Will.I.Am, that Will.I.Am,
I do not like that Will.I.Am.
Well do you like green eggs and ham?
I do not like them, Will.I.Am.
I switched over to Comedy Central's Indecision 2008 at 10 o'clock. But CNN was more engrossing, so I went right back.
I've been on the internet's cutting edge since before the boom started in the mid-90's.
You're old school from Compuserve days, so you know all this, but for the benefit of your younger or non-tech readers, here's a little history:
Now here we are in the age of Facebook, MySpace, and Twitter. I admit at this point that I don't get it. What's their appeal? How are this systems like this even popular? Say I want to catch up on my favorite imaginary band The Flying Monkeys. I can go to www.theflyingmonkeys.com. Why in anyone's mind would I rather go to www.myspace.com/theflyingmonkeys?
I have email, chat, blogging, ad nauseum already. Do I want to firmly encamp myself in one company's ungodly mash of it all? And mashed poorly in most cases I might add.
Twitter at best seems like a mini-blog - minimalist and for the scatterbrained. It's got a sort of RSS feed for its members, collating the latest abbreviated entries from fellow members that you identify as friends. Not only do I not have time to twit, no one I care to associate with would either. I suppose it has its uses though - maybe in a highly interconnected yet dispersed team environment for sales or project development.
Twitter's web site states:
I never had to worry about my quiet times before, so thanks Twitter!
Re: Twitter. For sale: Baby's shoes. Never used.
This is an old post. Just reading it now.
"He has an unending capacity for counterfeit astonishment"
Which I suppose would make him kind of like Porter Hall! You quoted yourself and no one caught it. :)
Ebert: I love to sneak in things. Nobody has ever ID'd "from time immemorial," which my Mac Spotlight says I've used in 49 reviews. Not that it's unique to one work or anything, but it sounds the perfect note on the first page of a great work of fiction.
Roger, so true, I'm tired of such anger on TV. Anger followed by "News" What news? They take any issue however small, invite 6 panelists on and discuss it from every single angle, pointless angles with pointless bantering about it. Less is more is a forgotten virtue
Next time you watch, look out for what I call "the panelists double" its something most panelists do to just waste time and talk more, an example would be: "So how did Sasha and Malia like this?" and the panelist starts with "Well, Sasha and Malia are of course the Obama's daughters..." We know, what other Sasha and Malias would they be referring to? Examples of this abound.