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Saturday, July 31, 2004


Reference Message Board 

1) It is silly to consider the article on Bush and the Cleveland Browns as bias compared with say, talk about Clinton.

a. Bush is running for president, Clinton is not.

b. Clinton is likely to be on Letterman promoting his book, and if you'll remember, there was a lot of talk about the political motivation behind the timing of My Life.

c. Is there really that strong of a specific Indiana/Letterman connection? That is does Indiana care that much more than other states who shows up on the Late Show?


2.) Bias is a non-issue.

a. Any news is going to be biased. There could be bias in the selection of what counts as news, what elements of each story that is selected are to be included, the writing style, tone, the list goes on.

b. And since everything is going to be biased the only work left is to figure out how something is biased and correct for it - by taking claims with a grain of salt, double-checking surprising "facts" offered, looking for commentary from a source with opposed biases.

c. Or, if you don't like how various news outlets report the news then simply don't read their news.

d. Whining doesn't accomplish anything. Starting your own news organization so that you can showcase your own biases (or supporting an organization that already does) may.

e. Yes, I understand that this is whining about whining. I at least am whining to/in view of some of the people doing the whining [though even if everyone I knew stopped whining about news bias it'd still be an annoying problem.] I guess I am also asking for commentary on what's wrong with looking at it as I have discussed here.

I gotta go.


UPDATE: I posted the following on the message board


Subject: I'm not gonna argue any more on if it's bias or not

Text:
For multiple reasons. [I still don't think it's any sort of specific anti-Bush bias but I understand that not everyone will argree with me on that.]

Something I meant to include with the blog post was an explilcit example using this article of why bias doesn't matter (real or no.)

1. If you don't want to accept offered political motivations, then don't. [In this case you don't let the bias have an effect on you.]

2. Alternatively one could use this to ponder political motivations of other politicians and their machinations (which you did, sort of, with an ex-politician.) [In this case you take the information offered and use it to form your own conclusions.]

posted by mountmccabe  # 7:53 PM (0) comments

Thursday, July 29, 2004


Minority Troopers 

Starship Troopers was on last night and something interesting occured to me.

I really like what Verhoven did with this movie even though it is not very faithful to the source material [and I like the source material, it's not the Moon is a Harsh Mistress but it's good stuff] what with the overall sarcastic tone and the fascist portrayal of the military/government.  [There were various other significant changes which amounted to dilutions of the value of the novel - cf. the Mobile Infantry of the book inspired things like Robotech, the MI of the movie were much more traditional foot soldiers - but that's not my main concern at the moment.]

See, I have ranted before on how I have no desire to see Minority Report again because of how much of a perversion of the source material it is [this isn't part of it but I find it hilarious that there was not actually a "minority report" in the film.]  But it looks I can't really say that my problem with Spielberg's movie isn't that he doesn't respect the source.

Following a tangent, I generally don't like movies based on books I've read; for example I was only mildly pleased with Cider House Rules, which is my favorite Irving novel.  [Irving wrote that the amount of time he spent on getting that movie made the way he wanted it was about the same amount of time he spends writing a novel.  To me (of course, whatever, it's his time) I'd much rather have had another novel (well, not The Fourth Hand, but....); to me it's not a reasonable application of resources.  It'll be like August 11th at the Marquee, Built to Spill are likely to play their extended cover of Cortez the Killer and sure, it's a great song, but I'd much rather hear Distopian Dream Girl, Time Trap, Untrustable or Big Dipper - or, really, all four of them since it would take the same amount of time.]

At any rate, what I realized is that I prefer Dick's The Minority Report to Spielberg's Minority Report because I prefer a 10 page bit of imaginative and original writing on determinism to a visiually stunning two hour movie on the beauty of Tom Cruise and free will.

posted by mountmccabe  # 8:45 PM (0) comments

Thursday, July 22, 2004


Is this still here? 

Ha!  It makes sense that there being two active leagues open would siphon posts from here.

I get to get my bottom wisdom teeth out tomorrow, meaning I won't be able to go see Modest Mouse at Celebrity Theater.  I wasn't thrilled that they were playing a seated venue but I then learned that it's still all GA so it still would be possible to get good seats.  Now I'll be done around 12:30pm and instead of heading over to wait in line I'll need to be driven home to rest.

Yesterday was Sonic Youth.  Opening were xbxrx and Wolf Eyes.

xbxrx reminded me of Hawnay Troof and the Locust and maybe a little Mooney Suzuki.  AMG lists them as having broken up in 2002 and mentions that their debut album was called "Greatest Hits, Vol. 2"  They were wild and noisy and wild and noisy and incoherent.  They lasted about 20 minutes.  One person near me (remember this guy for later) commented that he had seen a lot of bands but they were the worst ever.

Wolf Eyes were rather interesting, my mind wandered around several post-rock reference points, but the music was more post and less rock than anyone I've heard before.  There were three people up on stage, one eliciting mainly feedback out of a guitar - the other two working with synths, gongs, a sheet of metal, a saxophone, that sort of thing.  I got into the second song and was disagreeing with the guy from before who said, audible to everyone including the band, "You guys make the first band sound good, and they sucked!" [not an exact quote] but then after the third song they got fed up and just left.  They were scheduled to play from 8:45 until 9:20 but they only played for 15 minutes.  I'm not even sure what the big deal was.  There were a few morons who offered a few heckling comments but people clapped between songs and there were plenty of people nodding to the beat (when there was one) and such but just when I was starting to like them they left so I don't care what they sound like on CD.

So after that combined 35 minutes of music we had another 45 minutes to wait for Sonic Youth to come out (they didn't come on early due to Wolf Eyes giving up on us.)   I was right up front and it was fascinating to watch Thurston Moore and his guitar.  I am a huge fan of using white noise, feedback, distortion and so on within the context of a song, and for such a song I am rarely in a hurry to get anywhere so it seems like Thurston was auditioning for the position of my favorite guitarist [this has nothing to do with technical skill and everything to do with making a good variety of different and interesting and otherwise pleasing sounds with the guitar - the competition includes Jason Pierce, Andrew Prickett (no longer active), Doug Martsch, Mike Roe, Dave Lake and certainly many others I'm not thinking of right now.) Side note: wow, AMG needs to work out the bugs with their site redesign.]

As for the setlist they played just about every song from Sonic Nurse plus Schizophrenia, Bull in the Heather, Drunken Butterfly, another older, very familiar Kim Gordon song which I can't recall and Teenage Riot, though they played the extended version which means that they really closed with "Teenage Riot plus 15 minutes of guitars being rubbed/struck/rested upon/bounced over available objects."  It was beautiful (well, the occasional long stretch of random noise was less beautiful than the more tuneful bits but it was all pretty cool.)

I didn't think that I'd have the guts to wear the best shirt they had there: printed on the shirt was a picture of a girl wearing a Sonic Youth shirt.

The show was at the Marquee, which interestingly no longer deals with Ticketmaster.  This is imporant information to know because there's three great shows coming to Marquee, Built to Spill, Fear Factory and Face to Face.

posted by mountmccabe  # 5:21 PM (0) comments

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