Stephen Colbert takes a look at what the NSA is up to in the virtual worlds of World of Warcraft and Second Life, while the FBI spies on people through their computer webcams. It is easy to see how the people doing this might have started out justifying it as a way of fighting terrorism but that it acquired a life of its own and became an addiction. Like World of Warcraft and Second Life, in fact. [Read more…]
Stephen Colbert has some thoughts on the season and how Fox News’s Bill O’Reilly and John Stossel view the spirit of giving. [Read more…]
Hugh Laurie (as William Shakespeare) and Rowan Atkinson (as his theater manager) debate about what to do about the length of Shakespeare’s new hit play Hamlet. [Read more…]
There are some film characters who are so indelibly linked to the actors who created them that it is almost impossible for someone else to take it over. One case is Peter Sellers as Inspector Clouseau in the long running Pink Panther franchise that consisted of eleven films. Sellers acted in five of them that were the most successful. Other efforts, even with extremely good actors like Alan Arkin, Roger Moore, and Steve Martin fared abysmally. [Read more…]
… as measured by its repetition on local news channels. Conan O’Brien has the scoop. [Read more…]
Remember when you were a child and were having a silly fight with your siblings or friends and the best part was when the other person became so sensitive to the smallest slight that all that it took to get them riled up about something was to make the slightest gesture (like a look) without even having to actually do anything substantial? [Read more…]
Congressional districts are required to be redrawn after every census that occurs every decade. They have to be contiguous and to represent a limited range of numbers of people but beyond that the process is pretty much up for grabs. Whoever has the power to draw the lines can do so to achieve their own goals, such as to create safe seats for one party or to unite (or disperse) a particular ethnic or racial group, and so on. [Read more…]
On Tuesday morning, the news headlines on the radio that I listen to while having breakfast mentioned that president Obama had shaken hands with Cuban president Raul Castro at Nelson Mandela’s funeral. I immediately said to myself that this would be treated as a huge story in our shallow media and I was not disappointed. [Read more…]
The Daily Show gives a summary of all the assurances we were given about what the NSA was doing that turn out to have been false. [Read more…]
Role reversal can be a useful gauge of when something is unfair, but not always, and it has to be used judiciously. Take the case of racism. One occasionally hears complaints that minorities or people of color can say things that would be condemned as racist if others did it, and this is labeled as a form of ‘reverse racism’. [Read more…]