Linkstew

On Man Dates and Print Media - Don't let the title of the post sway you: this is actually a pretty quick and interesting observation about the problems newspapers are having in the face of blogs and cable news and so on.

Oh my god, they've reached a verdict in the Michael Jackson trial! He's ... oh, just kidding. The news is just that they've reached a verdict, not what the verdict was. It was news pre-release announcement and now they've tricked everyone into refreshing news homepages every 5 seconds. What a fabulous waste of 30 minutes of America's time. Thanks, the media!

DNC: [Ted Koppel has] A serious interview with Jon Stewart

Stewart seems pretty keen on reminding people that he's fake news. I wonder if it's because he realizes what Koppel was saying about people turning to Stewart as an actual news is true, and Stewart is ... maybe afraid of the responsibility?

At some point in the last month, the Washington Mutual billboards switched from saying

"Reject Fake Free Checking."

to saying

"If your bank has a direct deposit requirement, you have fake free checking."

What, did people not understand what "Fake Free Checking" was? I can't wait to see the next iteration of Washington Mutual billboards that say

"If your bank is Bank of America or Wells Fargo, you have fake free checking."

(This is a very poorly worded and misleading headline:) GameCube production halted

I mainly post this because of the awful headline which is going to give rise to more rumors and bad word of mouth for the GCN's reputation than I can count. Why couldn't they have made some clever play on words involving the fact that production is "paused?" No, instead they use a word as final as "halt," when it's anything but. Hey, wait a minute, this article is on MSnbs... Blah. Stupid media.

Uh, US 'plans new nuclear weapons'? Why the hell is there no mention of that on the front page of any major US news site I can think to look at? Seriously, this is just as important as all the Iraq stuff to US citizens, but the media chooses to focus on Iraq. I suppose this is just a reminder that the media is not on the people's side.

My mom and I had a conversation about my post about The Monkees the other day. The first thing she brought up was that back in the day, bands had "fan magazines" so that folks could keep up on what the band was doing. And once I was reminded of that, I remembered that even TMBG did something like that up through the mid-90s.

But her more interesting remark was that "People want more information these days." This struck me as a profound observation, but I think there's still a question of causality. Is an increasing demand for information being met by an increasing supply? Or is more information being made available because people will consume it?

And that raises another question: Are people being given the information they want, or are they just consuming the information the information they're given? Is it demand driven or supply driven? That is, is the mainstream media covering what people actually want to know, or are they covering what will get ratings?

Unfortunately, for now all I have are the questions without any good answers. But I do have a funny quote from my mom: "I know more about Paul McCartney's life now than I did back then." Hopefully that distracted you.

In all that time that my sister was totally into The Monkees when I was a kid, I never really knew when The Monkees were from. I mean, I knew that the TV show wasn't current, because even my young eyes could tell that the shows were old, but it never even occurred to me to ask how old they were.

And for that matter, in all the years since, I never bothered to really find out much about them. But all of that changed tonight, when, while going through my CDs, I ended up reading the booklet in my copy of The Monkees Anthology.

And once I found out that the group started in 1966 and had a big 20th anniversary thing in 1986, a lot of things clicked for me all at once. The timing of my sister liking The Monkees made much more sense. All of the things my sister said about "Michael not being part of the group" (That's how I remember what she told me. It's probably not what she actually told me. Hell if I remember. I was six.) as though it were current news now makes sense, because michael not touring with the others for 20th anniversary was current news.

Of course, that news currency question was another question that I didn't ask then, but which only occurred to me years later. In fact, one evening while letting my mind wander about the Internet and the impact it's had on how quickly information is disseminated these days (and in particular, I was thinking about news about the music business and how easy it is for me to check up on TMBG at any given moment), I got to wondering how my sister got current information about her favorite bands when she was a kid. And my mom before her, for that matter. I jokingly wondered to myself (not knowing then about The Monkees' 20th anniversary shindig) if my sister had been reading my mom's magazines from when she had been a teenager and passing the content off to the unsuspecting six year old as news.

(And now that I've typed that, I somewhat sheepishly realize that my sister had early MTV to feed her news, while my mom before that had the radio. For some reason neither of those options really occurred to me in my thinking about the internet that night, and I instead only thought about the internet of today versus magazines back then. Probably because they're both text based mediums with a rich dose of color for good measure. Meh, I stand by the joke as written.)

So this was a response to the Oklahoma City Bombing which I copied this out of the Bakersfield Californian back in 1995. It's basically not at all applicable to current events, but I figured now would be as good a time as any to post this since Oklahoma City has been coming up repeatedly in the news. I did not write this.

One day a bomb exploded and people began asking, "Why did this happen? Who is responsible?"

"Not me," said the taIk show host. "Words don't hurt people. Ideas and dissent must be protected. It's our First Amendment right."

"Not me," said the media: "We just report events as they happen. We're just a mirror that reflects society as it is."

"Not me," said the gun lobby. "Bombs don't kill people. People kill people. If we would put away criminals, they wouldn't be waIking around our streets doing this."

"Not me," said the justice system. "We don't have the time or the money to deal with every criminal. We need more prisons, more courts."

"Not me," said the Hollywood crowd. "We just give people what they want: gangsta rap, television violence, killings and gore on the big screen. It's just entertainment. People know the difference between real life and fantasy."

"Not me" said thes politicians. "We need more legislation so this won't happen again. Those responsible must be punished. Let's have a bipartisan effort."

"Not me," said the suspect, and he did not say any more.

Since no one was found to be responsible, life went on all the same.

--Randall Bergquist - Bakersfield

this is a nice diagram about the start of the new Millennium. Well, as nice as a news publication can be, because it has to dumb down the content for stupid readers. Boy it must have been cool to have been alive in the 19th century; What with so few people being able to read, newspapers probably didn't have to bother with dumbing things down. There was probably such a disparity between those who would read a newspaper and those who wouldn't that it wasn't necessary to make the thing stupid for stupid people to understand.

I just read this article about Bush's appointment of Colin Powell, and the first sentence struck me as odd. That sentence reads "The appointment of Colin Powell as Secretary of State, with his cross-party appeal, is being seen as an important move for unity in the aftermath of the election." Now, isn't it amazing how, in retrospect, the appointment of Colin Powell, which Bush would have done even if he'd won with a 90% majority, is being viewed as a healing attempt?

Speaking of which, I'm really sick of all these news headlines talking about healing and mending and unity.

So I'm sitting here on the couch watching Voyager, and I've seen a lot of video game commercials. Let's see... There was San Francisco Rush 2049, which had nice clean graphics, but didn't like the sort of game I'd dig. I get my racing fixes between Mario Kart 64 and F-Zero X. Sure, Rush 2049 got pretty high scores, but Next, there was a preview for Diablo II. The ad was unusual compared to the others I saw in that I didn't notice any game footage. However, the commercial got me a little more interested in the game, though I'm still not going to bite. I don't think the game would have sufficient story to be interesting, and I don't have sufficient online time to give it.

Next, there was a commercial for Ready 2 Rumble Boxing: Round 2. The graphics looked really really good, but it's again not the kind of game I'm into.

Then there was Final Fantasy IX, with a lot of footage from the first hour of the game (everything I saw in the commercial, I've already seen in the game), and it conveyed a very hopeful mood which made me very much want to go play the game, making the commercial a success in my opinion. A little later, I saw a second commercial for the game, which I didn't think was good. It was a little more confused and a little less clear as to exactly what was going on. It probably would have still been enough to win me over if it had been, say, a commercial for another game.

And finally, there was Shenmue, with a very funny commercial. Very, very funny. It also made me want to play the game even more, actually, making it another success.

Also, I just noticed a couple of games that IGN has recently posted reviews for. First, there is Mechwarrior 4, which, while it looks really good, is probably a game I'll never play. I haven't been much of a pc gamer these days. Back on the console front, however, is Lunar 2, which is the sequel to the excellent Lunar. Though I feel a lot more nostalgia for the Mechwarrior Series than for Lunar, Lunar 2 is a game I'm much more likely to play through and enjoy.

And then I saw a commercial for Dungeons & Dragons the movie, which kind of counts as a video game if you squint. I actually thing the movie looks like it will be in the spirit of Dungeons & Dragons reasonably well. At least, in the spirit of my D and D. I'm looking forward to seeing it.

And, uh, wow, after all of that, I saw an amazon.com commercial which was just plain scary. So very unexpected. Um. And then there was a Jack In The Box Holiday Ball Commercial which was also very, well, disturbing. What's with commercials these days? Are they trying to scare people away?