Your market may vary, and maybe they’ll dream up some specials by the time Keith Olbermann shows up on air. But upgrading to a higher tier of channels for an extra $16.95 a month isn’t a priority for me, much as I like and admire Keith, so I hope the show is online or they don’t try to prevent fans from putting it online.
Later: Ha! Just realized I wrote “called Comcast” in my headline when I really chatted. Reminds me of my kids saying “Let me show you a song.”
Click on a column header to sort. Can you see what is going on?
A
B
C
Short
Red
Bright
Medium
Blue
Pale
Long
Green
Dark
I looked up how to sort data tables in HTML today, found some easy Javascript and practiced, learned enough to be able to do it for work, then took the opportunity to amuse myself.
Ever since Egypt’s President Mubarak disabled the country’s internet on Thursday, net buzz about a U.S. “internet kill switch” bill has revived. The “Protecting Cyberspace as a National Asset Act” was introduced last summer by Joe Lieberman and Susan Collins and would give the president the power to turn off critical systems in the event of a cyber attack on the U.S.
Like a lot of citizens I’ve had bi-partisanship and harmony in political discourse on my mind lately, so I took a browse around a couple of right-wing haunts this morning. I thought this surely must be one of those occasions when the political spectrum might bend itself into a cylinder and left and right libertarians could connect. I did see a little of what I wanted to see: comments like, “Well, for once I agree with the ACLU.” The American Civil Liberties Union and 23 other groups came out against the scheme in June. (Letter, .pdf file)
More frequent were remarks that dig in on the left-right stand-off. On Free Republic a commenter mentions that Susan Collins is a “full fledged socialist/marxist that sides with the enemy every time.” The crowd over there often seems to get more steamed up about RINOs than it does about Democrats.
Freepers in the thread are also kicking around the idea of getting into ham radio, which fits with the apocalyptic survivalist rhetoric about food stores, ammo hoarding and gold that you see in certain circles. Am I imagining things or is there often a hopeful, wistful tinge to worries about mass deprivation? If there is, I think I understand it a little; one of my kids loves post-apok fiction and movies, maybe as part of a yearning for a simpler world.
At Glenn Beck’s The Blaze site, the talk is scarier. I made a screen cap of this comment because you’d think it might come down once moderators show up for work.
Please remember a very basic truth, and utter constant in this world: “If you shoot a FEMA NAZI in the right place, with a U.S. Caliber .30 Bullet, that NAZI will fall over dead and won’t give you anymore trouble.”
WHEN, the FED-NAZIS do finally get their marching orders, they will face no less than 30 million rifles pointed at them from behind every blade of grass in this country. The “High Entertainment” will commence the very nano second that this Communist Monkey in the White House, or any other, shuts down the Internet, or makes any one of several other “Trigger” moves.
Blaze commenters are not quite sure what to make of making common cause with the ACLU. One comes right out and states that if the ACLU is against the bill, he is for it, while another is more open-minded, stating that if the ACLU is against it, he’s really against it.
On both sites, any accord between the liberty fighters and the liberties union is grudging. A freeper says the ACLU might be right but he feels sure it is unintentional! A Blaze commenter remarks that a broken clock is right twice a day.
Oh well.
(By the way, I never buy that argument that you can’t judge an issue by blog comments. Sure, you can’t hold a blogger responsible for the opinions of her commenters, but I think a scan of comments to gauge the sense of a sub-culture is every bit as legit as polling or focus groups and more scientific than “man on the street” interviews. Why else would Karl Rove follow so many people on Twitter. You gotta think he’s crunching that data somehow—and that social media sentiment analysis will play a big part in the 2012 presidential elections.
Update: In fact, the coming deluge of election coverage by blogs, reported yesterday in the NYTimes media section, could benefit from a smart analysis of net sentiment. Tech types could invent a whole new category of insight measurement to complete with old-fashioned polling. Product marketers already have a start on this. Instead, the political blog focus will be the horserace. “Great!” tweeted NYU J-school Prof Jay Rosen. (It was meant ironically.) It’s an opportunity for a web programmer/journalism partnership like Jay and Dave Winer talk about on their Rebooting the News podcast. You’d need a gifted web database type—somebody who can make APIs stand on their heads and who can fashion out-of-the-box queries to put Twitter’s simple smiley or frowny attitude switches to shame.)
Neat idea: Whitehouse.gov is hosting an “enhanced video” of the live State of the Union speech tonight. Charts and things, I gather.
I may try watching it that way, if only to distract me from watching the VP and speaker. Congress can re-seat itself, that’s fine, but what I really wish they would change is the camera angle or the presence of those two players immediately behind the president. I can never help but watch them deciding when to applaud, and when to really show approbation by standing up to applaud. Drives me nuts.
I’ve been thinking for years that TV shows owe it to fans to properly wind up a story, and I don’t really care how they do it. John Milch could have sent me an e-mail explaining what was going to come next in Deadwood and John from Cincinnati. A radio play would be nice too. Comic book, any medium, really.
Fringe, one of only two shows I make sure to watch every week, will be moved to Fox’s death slot next month, so it doesn’t look real good for a fourth season. Pity too, because Walter is one of the most unique characters I’ve seen on any kind of screen for a long while—a brilliant crazy scientist in his sixties who still loves recreational drugs.
In the case of Fringe they already have a comic book series made mostly to explicate character backstories, so they really should use it to tell us anything at all they have in mind about the future storyline, whether or not they make an attempt to wind up the story in the spring.
Speaking of story, with whatever amount of time they have left, I think something more must be said about Walter’s ownership of Massive Dynamic. He’s one of the wealthiest, most powerful people in the world now, yet he carries on pretty much as he always has. Let’s see some wild spendthrift behavior by Walter. I’m talking islands and towns, space shuttles and zoos.
This morning WaPo’s The Fix remarked on John McCain’s statement yesterday that voters were divided on Ronald Regan just as they are on Sarah Palin, bringing up a key difference when it comes to comparing the two politicians.
“There are basically no Palin Democrats. And given the passions she evokes, it’s hard to see how such a group would form,” the bloggers point out.
They make a great point, but I think she does more than EVoke passions, she actively PROVokes them with her continual cheerful sneering at libs. In fact she’s painted herself into a corner. Anything she says to attempt to appeal to Dems will turn off her base because they love love love it—and her—when she gives voice to their resentments about elites, cityfolk and booksmart pencilnecks. It’s kind of a sweet sharing-bonding thing she has with her fans.
And some of her most supportive camps are way, way out there: over on Free Republic they’re saying Karl Rove is a liberal; and some of the Christian groups in 2008 were praying God would smite McCain so their Sarah might achieve her destiny.
If she doesn’t win the nomination she still will want to keep that base (which might be better characterized as a market).
You know how blogs, news sites and entertainment sites put “Sarah Palin” in a headline (which often also puts the words in the URL) to rack up page views? Liberal, conservative, small blogs, big media—it works for everybody for different reasons.
Well, there’s a fair chance I am completely full of shit, but I think the TLC Channel’s new supplemental site for the Sarah Palin’s Alaska show is purposely courting controversy. The site provides four blogs and a podcast to serve as a newer-media add-on to the traditional network show site. One of the blogs, called Not Taking Sides is the place to talk about politics, because, even though the TV series is non-political, politics are going to come into it, the inaugural post sort of explains.
It makes sense for TLC to do this from a marketing perspective. It’s true that the show is going to be political no matter how it’s positioned so why shouldn’t the very entity that’s creating the buzz get in on some of the discussion action? Negative comments about Palin are not scrubbed, and call me cynical, but some of them almost look like seed comments—they’re too well punctuated and use proper capitalization rules.
Head blogger for the politics section will be Matt Gagnon, Deputy Director of Digital Strategy for the National Republican Senatorial Committee. He’s busy working on a recount, they don’t say whose—maybe Joe Miller’s? So he will show up later.
It’s a funny old world out there in new media land, when commercial interests get in the game and the genuine might be genuine, or it might be a hustle, or might be a little of both.
You have to wonder, though, if Sarah is down with stirring the pot. Admitting there is a political angle runs counter to every description she has applied to the show. She might be OK with it, since the environment is somewhat controlled.
I’ve been thinking for years that TV shows owe it to fans to properly 
