Bill Clinton on the Republicans’ “feigned outrage” over MoveOn.org’s attack on General Petraeus:
These are the people that ran a television ad in Georgia with [former Sen.] Max Cleland — who lost half his body in Vietnam — in the same ad with Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein. That’s what the Republicans did,” he continued. “And the person that rode to the senate on that ad was there voting to condemn the democrats over the Petraeus ad.
In the whirlwind of soundbites preceding the 2004 election, CBS news anchor Dan Rather was ill-equipped to defend himself when questions of authenticity arose about documents showing Bush had never completed his Texas Air National Guard Service.
But something funny happened on the way to Rather’s becoming a punchline for Limbaugh republicans: no one ever actually proved the documents were fakes. Indeed, the Bush administration never denied the essential accuracy of Dan Rather’s story. Apparently, that’s because it was true. It didn’t matter. Rather was fired, and disgraced to boot.
Well, Rather’s a very rich man with a lot of free time. So he’s bringing a law suit that will set the record straight and embarrass an awful lot of people. Because unlike a political campaign, lawsuits take an awful lot of time to sort out. Too long, in fact, for idiots like Limbaugh and O’Reilly to shout them down. Salon has the story:
In making his case, Rather will certainly establish beyond reasonable doubt that George W. Bush never completed his required service in the Texas Air National Guard. Moreover, Rather’s suit will seek to demonstrate that the documents used in his “60 Minutes II” piece were not inauthentic and that he and his producers acted responsibly in presenting them and the information they contained — and that that information is true. Indeed, no credible source has refuted the essential facts of the story.
Most cases of this sort are usually settled before discovery. But Rather has made plain that he is uninterested in a cash settlement. He has filed his suit precisely to be able to take depositions.
Tonight, I updated the blog to Wordpress 2.3. What does this mean for you, our loyal readers? Well, for starters, let me know if you notice any glitches. These things don’t always run so smoothly.
I’m sure you’ve probably noticed the new layout, including the welcome return of our beloved, if poorly designed, cassette-tape logo. I think it’s prettier, and a bit more in line with the purpose and goals of this site. Which is to say the design isn’t quite so “pro blogger” style.
Now, you should also notice a couple of new features. First, I’ve converted our unwieldy categories to tags. For you readers, that probably won’t make much difference, excepting the obvious tag “cloud” in the right-hand column. For the writers, it’s now a bit easier to tag our posts. Basically, adding tags works just like posting to LiveJournal now.
The bigger news is that I think the upgrade finally solved a problem that’s been bugging the hell out of me. Since I started the blog, I hadn’t been able to publish the full RSS feed. It was only publishing the truncated feed. This means that people accessing our blog through a feed reader weren’t able to see the full post without clicking through to our site. Since I personally hate sites that don’t have full feeds, this annoyed me to no end.
Well, problem solved (I think). Wordpress 2.3 supports Atom feeds. So long as you’re accessing our feedburner feed you should be getting the full feed now! You should even get pictures and video! If, for some reason, you aren’t accessing our feed, click on one of the new icons to your right to add our feed and try one of our recommended feed readers. I personally use Google Reader, but the other options ain’t bad.
Anyhoo, most of the other technical stuff is pretty boring. Just tell me if you see anything funky. Especially tell me if you start getting our old, busted feed. Either leave me a comment or post something in our message board.
So I’m pretty sure everyone has seen this ad for Halo 3:
But I bet most of you haven’t seen the virtual fly through of the entire diorama! Halo 3 “Fly Through”
Check out all of this “making of” stuff, the ad campaign they interview all the survivors and veterans of this war that takes place in the future, it’s pretty amazing. Halo 3 “War Stories”
Interview with the creators of the commercial (and diorama): Halo 3 “Making Of”
An excerpt from one of the interviews:
“Tell me about New Deal, Stan Winston and MJZ director Rupert Sanders’ work on the diorama.
SD: You have to understand that for the diorama, it turned into becoming the focus point for this campaign. We wanted there to be a museum where the diorama would just be a part of the museum. Rupert Sanders orchestrated this whole thing. The vision for us was to make this story come to life with real figurines on a real set and a massive diorama. It was time and cost-prohibitive to say the least, but Rupert just wouldn’t take no for an answer. He teamed up with Stan Winston and New Deal Studios in making this thing come to life completely—30 feet x 40 feet, 900 figurines or something like that and every weapon and vehicle.
MH: Those figurines are based on scans of real people.”
In one episode where they are showing “Creature from the Black Lagoon” there are these two guys clowning around a backyard kiddy pool that looks like it was shot in the Heights. And they even recreated the “Baby Ruth bar in the pool” gag from CADDYSHACK. (That was the “revenge of the creature.”) When they feature a puppet, you can see the arm, and the mic boom drops in all the time. I have no doubt it’s intentional, at least most of the time.
They are sponsored by Party Boy warehouse, and apparently get all their (rather crappy) costumes and props there.
And right now they’re showing several classic Universal monster movies.
And they have a website, a MySpace page and videos on YouTube.
http://www.countpelicula.com/
10:30 Saturday nights, Channel 55.
It’s not really very good, but I just love the fact that someone is still doing this kind of thing.
If you’ve ever tried to explain a Web site to your folks (or a dense pal), you know how difficult it can be to include both the nuts and bolts of how a site works and why a site is useful in the first place. For social bookmarking sites like del.icio.us or Magnol.ia, the problem is more difficult because the benefits aren’t as obvious as they are with YouTube or Flickr.
This video does an excellent job explaining the how and why of social bookmarking and del.icio.us. The dude’s voice is a bit annoying, but it neatly simplifies one of the most useful, exciting applications the web has to offer.
