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NPR News Better than Corporate Media News?

For years I have used NPR (Radio) and BBC (Internet and TV) as excellent news sources because most corporate owned “mainstream” media news sources in the U.S.A. have become lame at best (CNN, NBC, CBS), and outright neo-conservative propaganda machines for their corporate owners at worst (FOX, ABC). About the time the tyranny of Bush and his corrupt oligarchy began pushing for war in Iraq, I had to switch to CBC (Internet), Deutsche Welle (TV), and Pacifica (Radio) for reliable news as even NPR and BBC temporarily became soft on the Bush and Blair administrations during the war.

BBC became pretty reliable again once their funding was renewed, and NPR started being more reasonably critical of Bush after the capture of Saddam Hussein; so I slowly drifted back to my old habit of relying on BBC and NPR for my news. Now I have to re-think that.

Last night’s NPR coverage of U.S. Attorney General Alberto Gonzales’s talk at Georgetown University only mentioned briefly that a “few” students stood and turned their backs on Gonzales, then allowed him several minutes of air time to spread his misleading lies and attempt to justify spying on Americans. I was annoyed at the time, but this morning I am shocked to find out what else they omitted; check it out for your self on BoingBoing and Insomnia’s LiveJournal.

photo of protesters with banner that reads: those who would sacrifice liberty for security deserve neither
(picture taken from BoingBoing to burn my own bandwidth instead of theirs)

2006 01 25 snolan News
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Caught the Crud

Well, I caught the crud that’s going around. I perpetually have stuffed and useless sinuses the last few years, which is a shame because I used to be known for a shockingly keen sense of smell, though certainly not anytime recently. image of the CD from Amazon

Wednesday morning I awoke at about 3 am with a dry and pasty tongue from breathing through my mouth only, tried to work a few hours to give my sinuses a chance to drain. Thursday morning I awoke around 4 am with the same conditions, but also with mildly sore ears and throat, so I figured my allergies must have developed into a full blown infection. I managed to get an appointment with the doctor at 2 pm, who agreed with me and prescribed Rhinocort and Clarinex and a general antibiotic. I skipped dance practice Thursday night as I was not feeling up to it. That turned out to be wise, as Friday morning I began spiking fevers and felt much worse. I tried being out sick, but ended up working from home most of the day between cat naps. I can’t stay warm, then I break a fever; that has cycled several times. I am beginning to suspect I caught the crud (virus) though I probably was weakened by the infection. Sigh. At lease Anne was wonderful enough to send a Bossa Nova & Samba: The Gold Collection boxed set with Erci last night, it is cheering me up. Thanks Erci and thanks Anne.

2006 01 20 snolan Music
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Judge Alito? No thank you!

Here is an interesting editorial from the New York Times about what Judge Alito has revealed in three days of hearings. The democracy is already at stake without this puppet of Imperial Presidency on the bench, we need to stop this appointment now. Please contact your senators (yes both of them) immediately.

2006 01 12 snolan Politics Comments (0) Permalink

Where are our delegate’s priorities?

So in their first days in session for the new year, Virginia’s legislature decided to prioritize new bills to address Virginia’s biggest problems first, right? Wrong. Instead our elected law makers spent the a day debating the merits of amending our state constitution to ban gay marriage. Why? Gay marriage is already illegal. Do we really need to waste time making it a constitutional amendment?

Any amendment to the state constitution must be passed by the legislature, the senate, and the voters. That means there will be an expensive ballot question to track and vote on for an issue that is already closed. Like our law-makers don’t have any other pressing problems to solve.

A. Barton Hinkle wrote a nice piece in the Times Dispatch about Delegate Marshall’s disregard for fundamental rights and how strange it is that his fellow delegates don’t chastise him more often.
Thanks goes to Waldo for pointing out that some folks in the media are finally paying attention to Delegate Marshall’s lunacy. We need to write to our delegates and encourage them to make a stand and stop coddling this lunatic and clearly state if they stand with him or against him. None of his bills make any sense, we need to get the Republicans to clean their own house.

2006 01 12 snolan Politics
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WordPress vs Blogger

Amazing! WordPress imported my entire Blogger web log in around 25 seconds. I have not been able to get the same themes working in my WordPress blog yet, and I am concerned about backing up the MySQL database behind my new blog (one of the side benefits of publishing in a free service, but pushing back to my own domain is built-in redundancy). Once I figure those issues out, I’ll probably commit to switching from Blogger to WordPress. I’ll also have to figure out how easy or hard it is to publish to both LiveJournal and WordPress from MacJournal like I do now (with Blogger and LiveJournal).

2005 12 28 snolan Blogger
Blogging
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Toyota Prius

Well, Erci went and beat me to it. We picked up her Barcelona Red 2006 Toyota Prius this evening. It is very, very nice. I want one too. I balked at the non-negotiable prices earlier this fall, and I am glad I waited because the 2006 models will play MP3 encoded CDs and alarm when a tire pressure is low, but I am now thinking I want to replace my Saab 9-5 Wagon. AT-PZEV rating and 50+ MPG are calling me.

2005 12 28 snolan Cars
Environment
Hybrid
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Move to DreamHost

Well, after weeks of shopping around and days of fiddling with RedHat 9 and Centos (linux distributions) I decided to host my personal website at DreamHost. They have an excellent deal allowing you to host several domains on one account for only $9.95/month ($7.95/month if you sign up for 2 years), and that includes a free domain name registration for as long as you are paying them.

So I moved my home pages and Blogger web log to scottnolan.org and scottnolan.org/blogger.html and copied all the files off Erci’s vampyr.org servers at Interland. Erci will be moving her site and blog over to the DreamHost systems soon too. Interland had great support and connectivity, but their billing was per domain, and as we are adding more domains soon, it was getting expensive. We’ll talk to the folks at La Belle about moving too, but they are paid for quite some time at Interland, so there is no hurry yet. We’ll be standing up a few new domains too (Arthur Murray DC and SGI Fortune District).

One of the other nice things about the DreamHost accounts is that they let us do imap/webmail with SpamAssassin protection and Mailman mailing lists (it’d be really nice to finally get the La Belle and Fortune District mailing lists set up properly for a change). They also have one button installs of things like WordPress, Drupal, TextPattern, MySQL, and phBBS – which will make our lives a lot easier.

2005 12 27 Scott Nolan Blogging
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Pastafarianism

Wired magazine has a pretty interesting article about the Passion of the Flying Spaghetti Monster online right now, it mentions the upcoming Gospel of the Flying Spaghetti Monster book (expected in March) and has a short interview with Bobby Henderson wherein he mentions that proceeds from the book and Venganza website are funding the construction of a pirate ship! I want to take a vacation on the Pastafarian Pirate Ship! Ahoy me lasses, would you like to storm the tropics with me? picture of flying spaghetti monster noodling a man
2005 12 25 Scott Nolan Pastafarianism
Politics
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Anime Earthsea?

Random web surfing last night led me to the Studio Ghibli website, and it looks to me like they may be working on an Anime version of Ursula K. LeGuin‘s wonderful Earthsea Trilogy, or parts of it (my Japanese is rusty). The author has nothing about Ghibli on her website as of this writing, but this could be really, really cool. The Sci-Fi channel’s miniseries on Earthsea was horrible, but Miyazaki’s crew at Ghibli might be able to do this story some justice.

picture from Ghibli website

The flash based background on their website certainly looks promising! At first I asked myself why they’d use Flash for a simple background, but resizing the browser window makes the reason obvious, very cool.

Does anyone know more about a potential Anime version of Earthsea? I can read that something is happening in July of 2006, but not a lot more.

Update: Twitchfilm.net has a discussion about the Ghibli project, it is apparently Hayao Miyazaki’s son Goro who is pushing the project, and it is probably going to be interesting, but may get mangled too. Reading a bit deeper on Ursula LeGuin’s website, it appears she may no longer have control over the film rights to Earthsea, which would be very sad.

2005 12 21 Scott Nolan Anime
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Sexy Saturnalia To You!

There has been a lot of hoopla raised by the usual goof-ball rabble rousers (mostly that coward Bill O’Reilly over at Faux-News and the so-called American Family Association) about some supposed war on Christmas. At first I thought this was some sort of joke, and that the goof-balls were just ranting out of sheer spite, but I see Neely Tucker has an excellent article about this in the Washington Post. Be sure to read it to the end, it is very interesting.

Basically I think Neely has this pegged on the nose:

  1. many Americans are concerned about the over commercialization of Christmas
  2. most Americans are not concerned about wether a store has “Happy Holidays” or “Merry Christmas” on their posters
  3. most healthy Christians are not offended by the phrase “Happy Holidays“
  4. most non-Christians are not offended by the phrase “Merry Christmas“
  5. the few people who are concerned, are really more concerned that they no longer control the public holiday, the family, the social compact, and the center stage than they are about the true meaning of Christmas
  6. the last week of December is probably not the anniversary of the birth of Jesus, that is more likely to be sometime in September, though we probably will never know
  7. the last week of December is the proper time to celebrate many holidays, but especially Yule and Saturnalia, so let the parties begin!

The date many Americans celebrate as Christmas was first set in 395 by an early Christian Church that desperately wanted more converts. They figured that by setting a major Christian holiday amid the widely popular pagan celebration of Saturnalia, conversion would be easier for them to attract converts. It also coincided with the traditional Northern European celebration of Yule, which has to do more with the darkest days following winter solstice. Puritans did not celebrate Christmas because they were horrified by the free use of clearly pagan symbols (holly, drinking heavily, gift exchange).

2005 12 20 Scott Nolan Christmas
Holidays
Politics
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