So I was watching CNN’s news while eating lunch today when they toss to some chick in another studio showing off their new weather center set. You know, just in case there might be a hurricane this year to interrupt the constant updates about shark attacks or missing white women or Christiane Amanpour interviewing angry Muslim Arab after angry Muslim Arab (with the occasional self-hating liberal Jew born in Israel who’s too ashamed to call himself Israeli).
Anyway, she’s sitting at a desk holding a large tethered remote, grinning like a madwoman and showing off about half a dozen large flat-panel monitors suspended with dual aluminum pole struts.
Oh, and a robotic pedestal camera roaming around the set like some big-eyed Dalek. Not that this robotic camera is used for the main desk shot, since that appears to be a fixed location she sits in.
Oh, and an overhead shot to show the whole set with all the monitors at a resultion where you’re guaranteed not to be able to see anything.
So she shows off the remote… nothing new.
Feeds from around the world… nothing new.
A telestrator with various icons she can dot over the landscape… nothing new.
A few temperature maps… nothing new.
A monitor feeding back to the CNN anhcor set… nothing new.
NOAA projections overlaid on a Google Earth map… okay, slightly new, but they’ve shown this stuff before.
All in all, nothing new. And on top of that, she has to get up and walk around to show most of it off.
But then, she saves the most impressive part for last: a freestanding curved display monitor. She’s got the standard temperature map up there for all to see highs for AN FRANCISCO and OS ANGELES (apparently, it would cost a few thousand more bucks for a monitor wider enough to show all of the Left Coast).
But she is pointing right at the freestanding display, and mentions that there’s no chroma-key there. It’s a real monitor, she can look right at the map along with us, no need to use “guide” monitors on their side of a chroma-key display. No, you can watch the back of her head and she looks for various highlights to point out to us.
(THE VOICE OF EXPERIENCE: The weatherpeople I knew would not only lay out their single-display slideshow, preferring to use the on-set displays as office equipment and not presentation platforms on-air, but they’d have the teleprompter display changed to a live feed to they could see a mirror-image of themselves as a guide if they didn’t want to use the guide-monitors on either side.)
So, for all this junk in a studio in CNN’s Atlanta Headquarters, the hundreds of thousands of dollars spent on equipment and design and wiring and manpower, the array of monitors she has to get up and walk around to dramatically… there’s only one thing CNN achieves by doing all of this…

Continue reading ‘This is CNN’ »

John Hawkins compares my satire editorial from yesterday to Richard Cohen’s serious editorial today.
Should I sue for plagarism?
UPDATE: Come on; this could mean real plublicity. I sue Cohen from stealing from my satire to make serious liberal commentary. If don’t fight this now, where will this end?
Any lawyers out there want to take this?

Michelle Malkin mentioned that it would be a good thing to get more conservatives on Digg. I didn’t read all she said since she used a lot of words, but I remember once getting a lot of traffic from Digg so I added links to vote for IMAO articles (just go register at Digg which takes like half-a-second).
Apparently Blackfive and others are also putting up links for being submitted to Del.icio.us which I’d never even heard of. How much of this crap do I have to keep track of just to get more freak’n traffic?

Why is our government so slow in getting stranded Americans out of Lebanon?

Continue reading ‘Riddle of the Day’ »

All the superhero movies as of late got me so curious that I finally decided to do something that was a big part of many people’s childhoods but not mine: read some comic books.
Now, there’s no way in God’s green earth that I’m going to set foot in a comic book shop, so I went to an online site to subscribe to some comic series. Now, I already get Aquaman, of course, which has been really cool since the reboot of the series a couple issues back (and also coming out pretty infrequently; don’t comic makers have due-dates?). I decided I’d also get the comic series for each of the main superheroes: Superman, Batman, Spiderman Spider-Man, and X-Men.
It wasn’t that easy. Do you know that there are like eight or more different series for each of the main superheroes (while Aquaman barely has one)? Do I want Uncanny X-Men or Astonishing X-Men or New X-Men or X-Men: First Class or just plain old X-Men?
I decided to go with whatever was the longest running series for each which meant Action Comics, Detective Comics, Amazing Spider-Man, and Uncanny X-Men to go with my Aquaman: Sword of Atlantis.
Well, I got my first shipment, and was actually kinda excited to read a Batman comic. SarahK is mad, though – not because I’ll be spending all my time reading comics (once you take out the ads, they’re like six pages each) but that I’m spending near $20 a month on these (how do kids afford them?). Plus, if I keep this up, think of the clutter? Do I throw them away? I mean, some will eventually be worth good money, but I ain’t gonna wait that long.
Anyway, it was Detective Comics #821 (if they come out about once a month, how long has that series been around?) which I read in bed since here in Florida I lacked the appropriate basement to read it in. I was a bit worried with these new comics I’d be jumping in the middle of some story and have no idea what was happening (that was true when my boss at work – tired of me making fun of Aquaman – bought me an Aquaman comic from an earlier series which had about twenty million things happening in its six pages – none of which I understood). Luckily this issue of Detective Comics was a self-contained story written by a name I actually new – Paul Dini who is famous for writing for the Batman animated series. Previously, I didn’t even know comic books had writers – I figured people just drew a bunch of pictures of people beating each other up and then some words were added to the slow parts. Now, it seems kinda difficult: How do you fit a whole story into such a small space? One Batman comic is basically equal to one act of the animated series. Still, there was a full story here with – true to the title – actual detective work.
Luckily, the first image when opening the comic was a car ad (“See, sweetie! This isn’t just for little kids!”). The next part had Batman beating up a mugger and throwing him in front of subway car. That stopped me dead. This is Batman, no the Punisher. Then I re-read that part (well, I re-looked at the series of pictures; is there a word akin to “read” for that?) and realized that the mugger stumbled in front of the subway and the hand I thought was throwing the mugger to his death was actually trying to stop him. The drawing were so stylized, it’s a bit confusing. Anyway, the very next panel was Commissioner Gordon telling Batman cavalierly that they identified the guy by his finger prints and I was like, “Hey! Commissioner! A masked character just beat up a guy that resulted in his death! Shouldn’t you at least investigate that a little?” I’m no liberal judge, but you can’t just have anybody throwing people in front of subway cars without at least checking out the circumstances.
Anyway, the story centered around an unknown villain that was targeting the upper-society, so much of story was Batman staying in his Bruce Wayne persona to smoke out the thieves. It was actually pretty interesting and realistic – until the final confrontation with the perfunctory masked villain with an over-elaborate deathtrap. Oh, and Robin stopped by. I don’t know which Robin; there are at least three. I know the second one was killed by the Joker, and I actually had read the comics (bought by my brother like most comics I read in my youth) where the third Robin was introduced which had to well over a decade ago. Whoever this Robin was, I didn’t like him. Here is Batman being all serious and brooding, then Boy-Wonder shows up. And Batman didn’t even like him and was annoyed by his intrusion. I think the Joker should kill all the Robins.
Well, I have more comics to read later; I’m pretty curious what stories they throw at Superman (how do you challenge the man who can’t be killed by anything and has the superpowers of every other superhero – except Aquaman since he can’t talk to fish). I probably won’t bother to bore you with the details unless anything interesting springs up (are comic books targeting our youth and adult slackers with liberal propaganda?).
Be honorable, ronin.
Hey! They should do a comic about a samurai! Anyone ever think of that?