Sunday, May 25, 2008

Media Bytes - Get together edition

By Libby

Song in my head. This is just a soundtrack with endless footage of crashing waves. Bonus link for actual Youngbloods fans is this live appearance on Hollywood Palace that starts with an interesting remix of the title song. I feel nostalgic this afternoon about those days. It wasn't that they were better days but they were simpler times and it was easy then to believe that love could change the world. Of all the things I've lost along the long road of life, my youthful idealism is one of the things I miss the most. But on with the show.

In today's reading Dan at Pruning Shears notices the surveillance state is slowly solidifying around us while Congress is asleep at the wheel. Hart Williams discovers he's clairvoyant, delivering a rant a full day ahead of the events. And McCain can't decide which base to pander to. He lost John Hawkins with his latest flip on immigration.

In other campaign news, the guy at Five Thirty Eight, who has been uncannily accurate so far in his predictions on the primaries, used his modeling system to speculate what would have happened if the primary in Michigan had been held as a normal election. His model shows Obama would have won by 4%. This suggests to me that the proposed compromise of seating the delegates by giving Hillary and Obama a split that favors Clinton, is more than fair to her.

The bright spot of the week is that Missouri rejected a photo ID voting law.

The dark spot was news from Belledame who discovered that sunscreen is killing the coral while it's protecting us from skin cancer. I never trusted that stuff. I rarely use it myself. I always thought of it as a systemic poison.

For gossip lovers, Exposed, a profile of ex-Gawker blogger Emily Gould was featured in Sunday NYT magazine. I read the first page and was already bored senseless by her self-absorbed whining so I didn't finish it. Apparently a lot of people are reading it all the way through though. I hear there's a lot of sex in the later pages. TMV has a roundup of reactions, none of them positive.


Moving on to the lighter bytes, I loved this tool. Walkscore rates any address for walkability of the neighborhood. My old digs in lovely downtown Noho had a score of 92. My new digs here have a score of 12. You can see why I've had trouble adjusting.

For your video viewing pleasure, I'm going to repost The Real McCain in case you missed it or forgot to pass it on.

Crinchpin has a new hilarious Gravel ad, Soldier Boy. I think it's a parody but it captures his style perfectly.

And John Cole unearths one of my favorite clips of all time, from WRKP in Cincinatti, Les Nessman in I swear, I thought turkeys could fly.

Finally, moving on to the eye candy of the week, I'm coveting Hecate's herb garden. It reminds me of one of my favorite places, Parc Guell in Barcelona.

You can see Gaudi's work in many of the buildings there, including of course the famous Casa Batllo but the Park is especially splendid.

I heard you were supposed to drink water from the fountain for good luck but I blessed myself with it instead and just tasted a drop from my fingers. And I especially loved the bench. It's hard to find a good photo of it. This was the best I could do, but you get a better idea of how big it is from this video.

The video is not bad. He covers a lot of the spaces, including the inside of the house that Gaudi lived in. He didn't think it was worth paying to see, but I thought it was. Then again I'm a big fan of Gaudi's work.

It's funny looking for pictures of places I've been on Flickr. It seems like everyone takes the same shots and they're not the ones I would taken. My own shots, taken before digital cameras were common, were lost long ago.

Oh, and Happy Towel Day.

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5 Comments:

Blogger expatbrian said...

One of my favorite songs, as well. I tried looking at the video as I loved WKRP, but it won't stream outside the US. Maybe I can find it on YT.

7:06:00 PM  
Blogger Capt. Fogg said...

Walk score? According to this largely useless thing, my house is in a bad neighborhood because everywhere I might walk there's mostly parkland, nature preserve and beach.

I suppose it would be oh so much better "for my health" as they claim, if I had a couple of malls and Starbucks and McDonalds around.

If I had a hog, this would be a good site to wash it with.

11:19:00 AM  
Blogger Libby Spencer said...

Oh I hope you can find Brian. It always makes me laugh.

LOL Fogg. The tool is designed for people who want to live in the city and give up their cars. It doesn't account for quality of life in the country.

11:47:00 AM  
Blogger Mark said...

Libby:
Totally OT, but I wrote about something the other day that is much more up your alley than mine. As far as I know, the story itself flew completely under the radar- I don't even know of any local media coverage. Would love to hear your take on it. The link is here:
http://publiusendures.blogspot.com/2008/05/disturbing-admission-by-camden-nj.html

Money quote:
"Detective Cruz did not speak with the officers in order to clarify these indeterminate findings or clarify the contents of their reports. When asked during her deposition why she did not speak with the officers and relied exclusively upon the contents of their reports, Detective Cruz replied that "that's the way that we do it."

4:18:00 PM  
Blogger Libby Spencer said...

Hey Mark, Sorry I didn't see this until now. I'm off to the hospital or I would have blogged it. All I can say is this is so common and it's why most lawyers won't bother to sue cops. Usually it's the ACLU that will make an issue but they rarely win.

8:25:00 AM  

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