When I stayed up late last week watching the drama unfold in the U.S. election, I was keeping up with the opinions of people that weren’t holograms by seeing what all the Americans that I follow on Twitter were saying. It was a fun way of gauging the zeitgeist in America at the time, I think that all but one of the people that I saw tweets from were Democrat/pro-Obama, so naturally they were pretty excited. One thing that I did notice was that when John McCain gave his concession speech (which was admirable considering it was way past his bed-time) lots of people commented on how gracious his speech was, and all of a sudden he’d managed to elevate himself above the negative campaigning that had kept his campaign wading in the mud for the past few months.
It was in that moment I realised that if we had been watching ‘McCain the loser’ for the past year that a lot more people might have wanted to vote for him. For me, we were seeing the real John McCain in those few minutes for the first time in well over a year, the John McCain that I actually thought would actually make a pretty good candidate (and a pretty good President) when I saw him on a few Daily Show interviews and also in a couple of articles I read online. That McCain was a man that I could respect because of the content of his character and the way that he held himself, after he sold out his own beliefs it felt as if I was being forced to respect him because he is a war hero (respect he obviously deserves, but I did feel it was rammed down our throats somewhat).
It made me wonder who would be President elect right now if McCain had stayed true to himself throughout the campaign rather than pandering to the interests of people that he wouldn’t have necessarily seen eye to eye with a few years ago. I understand that the fine art of compromise is all part of the political game, but if you bend over backwards for everyone then it becomes pretty obvious, pretty quickly, that you don’t have too much of a spine, and if I know Americans, that is not a quality that they particularly care for. Hopefully now that the election is over the McCain of a few years ago can return and do some good, not as much as he would have achieved if he had become President, of course, but I’m pretty sure he didn’t want all of that “saving the world” pressure that Barack’s under now anyway.
Of course, I’m pretty sure that if JM had spent a little more time thinking up his pick for Vice President beyond “oh, she looks nice” then things would have been a bit closer, but it sure as hell wouldn’t have been more interesting.
[That baby put a smile on your face, right?]
Okay, I’m bored of being depressed, just because stocks are slumping at rates not seen since the Great Depression doesn’t mean it should get me down, so this weeks Friday news roundup is going to be upbeat. Obviously, I need to scour the entire damned world to find stories that alleviate the doom-factor that has been pervading the news, my thoughts, my conversations, and what I read on the internet, so you’ve got to trust me when I say that this article took a lot more research than the average article I write.
1. A man that had a double arm transplant is ‘doing well’! A German man called Karl Merk who lost both his arms in a combine harvester accident (I bet that was nasty) spoke this week of his joy after becoming the world’s first ever recipient of a double arm transplant. The operation, which lasted 15-hours and was carried out by “40 surgeons, anesthesiologists, nurses and other support staff,” was actually carried out in late July, but I guess that when you’re given two new arms (well, technically they were used) it takes a while to get used to them and declare the operation a success. These arms are actual real arms, not the robotic ones that we’ve seen in the past, I can’t decide which I find more impressive, being able to build arms out of metal, wires and servos that can be controlled by a persons mind, or taking the arms off one persons body (presumably deceased), reattaching them to another person and then those arms actually working again, in a fairly limited way at the moment, but still. You know what, one doesn’t need to be better than the other, they’re both pretty awesome.
2. There’s going to be a suicide net on the side of the Golden Gate bridge! Yep, my upbeat news roundup is about to deal with suicide. A plan has been approved to build a suicide net along the sides of the famous bridge in San Fransisco, although it is subject to further review and study before the steel net is installed. Obviously I’m happy that the chances of people dying by flinging themselves off the bridge are going to be diminished, but is a net really the answer? Apparently it will cost $40-$50 million, for that price you could employ people to patrol the bridge 24/7 for many years, trying to help people mentally rather than physically. Also, what’s to stop them jumping off the edge of the net?
3. Damn, that wasn’t particularly upbeat, how about this? I turned 24 yesterday! Sure, it’s not that exciting for you, but it was pretty fun for me!
5. There are sites dedicated to good news! This is the perfect antitode to all the bad stuff that’s going on in the world at the moment. They are often trying to find the silver lining in almost everything though, I wouldn’t be surprised if they were to start reporting that the current financial crisis means that its a great time to get into the repossession business.
Fridays seem like a good day to do a roundup of stories from the news, its the end of the working week, so it just feels right to try and tie off a few loose ends before we start fresh on Monday, and when I say fresh, I mean bleary eyed after spending far too much of my weekend fighting what will surely be a losing battle with a bar (the battle is trying to drink the whole bar by the way). Let’s kick off this news round up!
1. Apparently there was some kind of a debate between Joe Biden and Sarah Palin? I’d forgive you for not knowing about it since the media don’t really talk about the upcoming election all that much. Apparently, it was actually the most watched vice Presidential debate ever, drawing in 70 million viewers, which was actually more than the amount of people that watched the debate between the two men going for the top job, as Obama and McCain could only manage 52.4 million, although I guess that since they’ve been on debates before people know what to expect when they see those two, whereas Biden and Palin are a rather more unknown quantity, Palin especially. I get the feeling that most people tuned in just to see yet another locomotive crash into the train wreck that her media exposure has been so far, and whilst she was by no means an inspirational orator, she didn’t mess up, she read from her note cards and added in folksy sayings to prove that “she’s a real person,” which is probably the best that the Republicans could hope for. Side note: what’s the deal with this ‘real person’ schtick, why on Earth would anyone ever think that the best person for the job would be someone ‘normal’ that could easily be their neighbour? Don’t they want someone that’s well qualified, intelligent, and would actually be a good candidate for the position?
Oh, and once again, Pop Vulture does not officially endorse one candidate over the other, even if its really, really obvious what I think.
2. Russian President Dimitri Medvedev is of the opinion that the current “financial crisis should be taken as a sign that America’s global economic leadership is on the wane.” I’m not quite so sure how right he is there, the US certainly seems to be leading the world through extremely stormy economic seas at the moment, and earlier this week when the bailout was rejected it looked like they were steering their ship towards the Cape of Doom, and Russia is hardly one to wag the finger, they’ve had to shut down their stock markets three times in the last month (including today), and on September 16th their markets plunged more than 17% in a single day, aren’t you glad that the world doesn’t revolve around Russia?
3. The $700 billion bailout bill was passed at the second attempt. From what I understand, it will actually only end up costing $100 billion, but I still don’t know whether the bill itself is a good thing or a bad thing, so let’s just move on before you realise once again what little grasp I have upon economic concepts.
4. The music industry and Apple, the makers of the most exciting thing in my pants (my iPhone), are at loggerheads over what royaltys musicians should be getting from digital downloads, most of which are done through Apple’s iTunes service. Each track costs 99 cents, and from that, 9.1 cents goes to the artist, the same amount as when an artist sells a track on a CD. The music industry believes that the artists should get 15 cents per track since its much cheaper to distribute things digitally since there are no packaging and shipping costs. Yeah, I can’t work out that logic either, surely the artist gets paid for the song, not the medium its packaged in, otherwise bands would have probably started selling vinyl records that had been dipped in gold so that they could claim the music was more valuable and therefore they deserved more royalties. Yes, that example makes no sense, but then again, neither does the record labels position.
Time to a look at a couple of stories that have piqued my interest this week.
Did you guys watch Yves Rossy today? Yves, better known as Jetman or Fusionman, strapped a wing and some jet engines to his back today and flew across the English Channel (or ‘La Manche’ as our French friends like to call it) in less than ten minutes. I know that a lot of people just think he’s some kind of madman, but I think he’s an inspiration to people everywhere that have a dream. He wanted to be a bird, and since people can’t fly naturally (unless they’ve been ingested some very powerful hallucinogens, and even then your flight is likely to end in disaster), he’s spent a lot of time trying to come as close to that as possible, and as he soared across the surprisingly blue sea with the even more surprising appearance of the sun beating down upon his wing, I think that its fair to say that he achieved his dream. I think its also fair to say that a lot of people would have seen him during the historic flight and thought “holy crap! That’s the coolest thing I’ve seen since Andy wore a homemade Tron suit last week!”
The Republicans finally let Sarah Palin talk again. She didn’t say a lot in terms of substance, but she did do quite a lot of deflective talking, much like an ice hockey goalie (i wonder how much she’s regretting the ‘hockey mom’ self-classification now?). In an interview with Katie Couric she was asked about why she didn’t get a passport until 2006, her response?
“I’m not one of those who maybe come from a background of, you know, kids who perhaps graduated college and their parents get them a passport and a backpack and say, ‘Go off and travel the world.’ Noooo. I worked all my life. In fact, I usually had two jobs all my life, until I had kids. … I was not part of, I guess, that culture.”
I don’t know if its a cultural thing, or because I live in Europe and therefore I can travel to quite a lot of different countries in relative ease and relatively cheaply, but I do think that Palin gave that answer to make those of us that have actually left our borders feel awkward, possibly even a little bit ashamed for having the privilege of leaving their home country to see other places. Its not a particularly good answer either, it covers why she didn’t travel when she was younger, and that she couldn’t travel before she had her kids because she was working one or two jobs at a time. That’s fair enough, but she had Track and Bristol in 1989 and 1990, respectively, where’s the explanation for that almost 20 years sticking in the good ‘ole US of A? Of course, quite a lot of Americans don’t have a passport, in fact ‘only’ 74 million Americans actually have that magic little book, so I guess her not having a passport actually made her more like a ‘normal’ person, which is the angle the Republicans have been pushing all long. So instead of asking Sarah Palin why she never left America, maybe Sarah Palin should have been asking Kaite Couric why she’d want to leave, does she not care about America?
There’s nothing that puts a smile on your face like a hypocritical blowhard like Bill O’Reilly being cut down to size, just a little bit.
Last week, the Republican nominee for Vice President had her personal e-mail account hacked, and some of the contents were posted onto websites like Gawker (a gossip blog that covers more than celebrity upskirts) and Wikileaks (a wiki site that is “of assistance to peoples of all countries who wish to reveal unethical behavior in their governments and institutions.”). The hacking was initially attributed to a group called Anonymous, the guys that stand outside of Scientology churches wearing V for Vendetta masks, but their site now has a big sign on it that says “this site had nothing to do with the Sarah Palin e-mail hack,” and its written in red letters, so it must be true! Its still unclear who the actual hacker was, though the FBI have their suspicions.
I’m on the fence about the hack, on the one hand, it is her personal e-mail and I’d be pretty horrified if someone hacked into my e-mail, even though I use it more for work than personal stuff. On the other hand, there had been reports going around that Sarah Palin was using the her personal e-mail for some government business, as it would not be archived as it isn’t subject to laws about retention of government records, and that’s something that people need to know about.
As you would expect Bill O’Reilly weighed in on the story with his typical measured take, and by measured I mean nonsensical and oblivious to the law (he wanted people who posted and shared the e-mails to be prosecuted, despite a little thing called the First Amendment, which is funny since he must hide behind it all the time). As part of his rant against… the internet, I guess, he said that “The Web site [wikileaks] knows the law and says, “you know, I’m going to do it anyway because I’m daring you to come get me.” By ‘come and get me’ he meant the websites posting the information, but it would seem that some hackers decided that he was actually daring them to hack him. So they did.
As proof, Wikileaks posted a screenshot of the BillOreilly.com administrative interface that showed the names, email addresses, passwords, and home town of 20 subscribers of the website. In all, information belonging to 205 subscribers was intercepted, according to Eric Marston, CTO of Nox Solutions, the company that maintained the website.
I don’t like that they published all that information about people that have little to nothing to do with this blossoming feud, but anything that knocks Bill O’Reilly down a peg or two has to be a good thing if it will knock that smug, unexplainably-satisfied grin off his face for just a second before he returns to his deluded bubble of self-importance for another swipe against whatever has outraged his this week that didn’t a few months ago.
Whilst I’m on the subject of Bill O’Reilly (and most other political discussion shows), I think he needs to have a referee on his show, that fact-checks the things he says during his show and then he corrects himself on the next show, and perhaps the referee could cut his mic every so often like he does so often to people that he invites onto his own show. Its always bugged me that when I used to write essays and articles at university that I had to put in references and footnotes to explain and prove my ideas and discussion points, whereas people on TV can say what they want without having any burden of proof put on them.
Pop Vulture Tshirt
The continuing financial woes around the world are really dominating all the news channels on TV, taking up a lot of column inches in newspapers, and what I assume to be quite a large amount of bytes in blogs. To be totally frank, its depressing, so let’s do the responsible thing and talk about celebrities!
To give this article just a little bit of credibility, I’m going to return to one of my pet peeves of celebrities discussing politics, except this time I’m not pissed off, I actually think its kinda funny. As you’d expect, a few left leaning celebs have put forth their opinions on the Vice Presidential nomination of Sarah Palin, on account of her being an almost laughably poor choice for VP. Matt Damon made me laugh when he described the idea of her being in charge of America (he believes that the chance of McCain dying in office is 1 in 3…) as being “like a bad Disney movie.”
Pamela Anderson, who I will remind you is Canadian, though I guess she’s been in the US for so long that she’s probably a US citizen by now, was rather more blunt about it, saying that “I can’t stand her. She can suck it.” Finally, its about time that someone stopped ‘analysing’ policies and ‘judging’ Sarah Palin on her ‘merits’ and just went with the gut!
Lindsay Lohan called Sarah Palin a “media obsessed homophobe” on her MySpace. I can imagine that pretty much every celebrity magazine editor in America collectively exploded with excitement when this story hit the wires. A Hollywood starlet who recently embarked on a lesbian relationship with Samantha Ronson commenting on a political issue, calling someone a homophobe, doing it in a vaguely new media way, and using poor grammar in the process? I’m pretty surprised that US Weekly didn’t run a special commemorative 16 page pullout!
Making fun of Lindsay Lohan is pretty easy, we’re more used to seeing her downing shots of tequila than taking shots at political figures, but, and I hate to admit this, she actually makes some pretty good points. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t expect to see her to be on a panel on CNN telling us what Barack needs to do to pick up working class voters in the South, but it does look from her blog that she’s tried pretty hard to read up on the issues, which at least means I can’t accuse her of being ‘yet another uninformed celebrity.’ Jeez, I’m going soft on the celebs nowadays, I must have lost my rage… or maybe its just because Lindsay Lohan is really hot, after all, I am but a man…
Can you believe that my last post was about how I’m a bit of a political pushover, consciously knowing that I put too much value on aesthetics and showmanship rather than integrity, personality, voting record and policies, and then the Republicans went and picked Sarah Palin, a woman who is definitely not ugly, as their pick for Vice Presidential nominee?
It’s almost as if the Republicans were huddled in a dark room last week and started to get a bit desperate choosing their VP, a bored intern started surfing some blogs and someone shouted across the room from behind a glowing LCD screen “hey, there’s a British guy that doesn’t care about whether the candidate is actually any good or not, he’s only interested if the person looks and sounds good.” With that, it was decided, Sarah Palin, despite not being the most experienced candidate in the world, was picked as a Vice Presidential candidate. Yes, in just a week of blogging for Pop Vulture, I have managed to change the American political landscape forever, obviously there’s no way to prove that, but similarly, there’s no way to not prove it, so let’s just assume that I’m the cause of this nomination. Imagine what I’m going to achieve next week (Madonna tour cancelled due to poor tickets sales perhaps? *Crosses fingers*)!
I don’t actually know that much about Palin, everything that I see on the net and hear on TV seems to be gossipy and often irrelevant, her 17 year old daughter is pregnant, she came second in a beauty contest, she doesn’t know what a Vice President does (although I’d presume that she probably does now), she might be a computer hacker(!), she enjoys eating caribou burgers, and she goes for midnight runs. I got all of those news stories just by searching for ‘Sarah Palin’ on Google News, and they were severely outnumbering the amount of ’serious’ stories that would teach you about the woman politically rather than just giving us some trivia. It’s frustrating, but there are websites out there that will help you find out what you need to find out about her (and lots of other politicians) to help you make the decision for yourself. Mashable, a blog that usually deals with Social Networking and media, put together a post about 7 resources you can use to help you learn about Sarah Palin that are more apolitical than more sources. And of course, you should also check out Sarah Palin ‘Facts’, which provides you with vital information like this, “Sarah Palin once bit the head off a live Osprey snatched from the air as it tried to fly off with a fish she caught.”
I almost feel sorry for her in a way, being a woman in politics means that there are so many more expectations of her. She needs to appear to be a good wife and family woman, yet strong and independent, able to make tough decisions on her own. Since she’s now regarded as being a ‘hot politician’, or, if your mind is stuck in the gutter, a ‘VPILF’ (I’m not going to tell you, Google it if you’re confused), she has to make sure that she never has a hair out of place, but that she doesn’t spend too much time on her looks, otherwise she’ll just be giving more ammo to the pundits that believe she’s all show and no go.
I know that Obama, Biden, McCain and Palin are all going to be walking on a tightrope for the next couple of months, trying to balance out every aspect of their lives so that they can appeal to as many people as possible, but I think that’s Palin’s rope is going to be an awful lot thinner than everyone elses.
Entries (RSS)