The Stew

I’ve got to say, I’m super-confused about the Rev. Jeremiah Wright dust-up. I’m saying this stuff through an Obama-colored lens, I’ll admit — but in no particular order:

• Obama didn’t say any of this stuff, his preacher did. Compare and contrast this with the Bosnian sniper fire incident that Hillary Clinton seems to have gotten away with. Since when does guilt by association trump actual guilt?
• Wright said 9/11 was caused by American foreign policy. Pat Robertson said it was caused by Internet porn, allowing secularism and the occult to appear on TV, abortion, and the U.S. judicial system. Jerry Falwell said pagans, abortionists, feminists, homosexuals and the ACLU were to blame. Who’s crazy?
• For the record, I don’t believe that AIDS was intentionally introduced by the government, as Wright does. Where in the world would a Black man in America get such an idea?
• Apply the Wright standard to each of the candidates running for president. Look for outrageous things said by the supporters of each. Anyone come out unscathed? I think not.

Folks, there are two wars raging and the economy is in shambles. If your vote is influenced by superficial crap like this, you’re giving it up cheap.

Since Best Buy changed their Reward Zone program for the worse, I’ve been shopping at Amazon.com a lot more. Since I’m cheap, I like to use their free shipping option when I can, which utilizes the United States Postal Service as a carrier.

I don’t know if you’ve ever tried tracking a package at the USPS site, but I’ve found it to be little more than a joke. There are plenty of times when the site will say that there’s no shipping information yet, but please check back at night because that’s apparently when the USPS likes to do its paperwork. You can check back to your heart’s content, but every now and then there will be absolutely no tracking information available even on the day that the package shows up on your doorstep.

Even in cases when they actually decide that there really is shipping information, it can be spotty at best. Check out the picture above and you’ll see that Amazon told the USPS to come get my copy of Casino Royale on Blu-ray on April 15. Instead of picking up the package, it was magically transported to St. Paul on the 19th. On the 21st, it showed up at my door.

Compare that tracking information to what you usually get from UPS, and it’s night and day. UPS will let you know when the package was picked up, when it entered their processing facility, when it left their processing facility, when it ended up at another processing facility, when it left that processing facility, when it got on a truck and when it was left on your doorstep. It’s more of what you’d expect when you “track” a package.

So imagine my surprise when the slackers at UPS decided to hand off my Lounge Brigade CD to the USPS for final delivery. The top two thirds of this graphic shows the usual UPS thoroughness — but check out the bottom third. Granted, the USPS only had to move the package within a single city, but that’s a lot more information than I usually get out of them. Too bad I had to go to the UPS site to get it.

Take a look at the last item in this image, and you’ll see one of my complaints about the state of the news media in the U.S.

A long time ago, in a Midwest city far, far, away, I was a journalist of sorts. I worked at a real daily newspaper, writing and editing real news stories. Things were starting to change even then in ways that I thought were for the worse. The O.J. Simpson trial was in full swing at that time, and our newspaper consistently found a way to get information about the many-month trial on the front page. At an editorial meeting, I made mention that the true ”news” about the trial would have been when Simpson was indicted, when the trial started, maybe when the defense started, and when the verdict was read — which makes, perhaps, four incidents that would have warranted front-page coverage as opposed to 143. Everyone in the room looked at me like I was from Mars.

I understand that media companies are for-profit organizations, but frankly all this pandering hasn’t proven to be a bottom-line feeder so much as just an intellectual bottom-feeding. I don’t know if reporting actual, useful news would mean big profits for media companies — but if you’re going to go down anyway, you may as well go down swinging.

The most recent Democratic debate on ABC has been a last straw of sorts in this vein for some media critics. I’ve never seen such harsh words thrown at a TV news outlet: “shoddy” and “despicable,” two words used by the Washington Post TV critic Tom Shales to describe the event, were actually two of the nicest adjectives I heard.

For example, Barack Obama was asked by moderator Charlie Gibson to answer a question presented via video from Pennsylvania resident Nash McCabe:

I want to know if you believe in the American flag. I am not questioning your patriotism, but all our servicemen, policemen and EMS wear the flag. I want to know why you don’t.

In an interview with a blogger from Politico, co-moderator George Stephanopoulos actually defended such questions as being important to voters.

Dumb voters, maybe. Jingoistic, superficial voters, definitely. Is that the voice we want our news media to use in its interactions with newsmakers?

The media has seriously dropped the ball in the last decade, which is part of the reason why the Bush administration has been able to get away with everything from spying on Americans without probable cause to starting an ill-advised and unjustified war. Yes, the media is actually complicit in these despicable acts — both by refusing to examine the administration’s claims and by distracting Americans by talking about things like flag pins.

The media needs to get smarter. They’ll have no incentive to do that if we keep clicking on stories about Martha Stewart’s dog. So, long story short, don’t click on stories about Martha Stewart’s dog. Don’t let debate moderators get away with asking idiotic questions. Demand better.

I did something I swore I wouldn’t do. I’m not particularly proud of it.

I bought a Blu-ray player.

Put down the pitchforks — it’s not totally evil. It’s an HD-DVD player as well.

Actually, in many ways the Samsung BD-UP5000 is a better HD-DVD player than my first-generation Toshiba HD-A1 is. It’s faster to load DVDs and HD-DVDs, the upconversion of DVDs is clearly superior, and… um… it also plays Blu-ray discs.

It’s not perfect. Dolby TrueHD is limited to 2-channel sound for the time being (Samsung promises a firmware update to correct this by May), and HD-DVD menus are a little slow. I’ll live with the slow menus, and while I’d be happier if I were getting lossless 5.1 sound on discs with TrueHD, I’m — on the whole — pretty pleased with the unit.

As for the Blu-ray discs, finally having a player has confirmed in my mind that the wrong format lost the war. The picture on my three (so far) BDs is fine and dandy, and the sound is pretty good to boot. But the menus and extras are, for lack of a better word, “primitive” compared to those on most HD-DVDs. I’m one of those crazy people who likes extras, and being limited to having a really stupid trivia track on The Fifth Element makes me a little sad. Here’s hoping that the Blu-ray folks get their cool Java-based stuff working sooner rather than later.

As unbaked as it is, Blu-ray is clearly the wave of the future. I’m on board — at least until downloads rule the HD world.

I recently got a Blackberry 8830 for work. There are some things I like about it — the full keyboard, the multimedia features (enhanced by a cheap 4-gig MicroSD card), and the voice dialing software, to name a few. There are some things I don’t like about it — the battery life, the Web browsing experience (which is both slow and clumsy… buying some stuff on Amazon today was a painful experience), and the button that activates the voice dialing feature. I can’t help but hit that stupid button nearly every time I put the Blackberry back in my pocket. It’s embarrassing during a meeting for your phone to loudly demand, “Say a command!”

But the thing that truly chaps my behind is the phrase in the title of this post. “You are not currently in an area that can handle data communication.” I get that warning screen all the time when I’m surfing the Web. “Oh really,” I say, incredulously, to my PDA. “Well goddamn it, I WAS in an area that could handle data communication three seconds ago, and I didn’t move!”

There are times when I get that warning that I can see, from the little arrows in the upper right corner of the display, that my Blackberry is sending and receiving data. How can I be in an area that can’t handle data communication when I’m clearly communicating data?

Earlier this month, Johan Bergendahl, the CMO of Ericsson, said that Wi-Fi hot spots will one day be like phone booths of yore — because, you see, wireless broadband is where it’s going to be at. I want what he’s smoking. Today, I can sit in any of a variety of coffee shops and surf the Web very quickly and pleasantly on my iPod Touch via Wi-Fi. That experience is light years ahead of surfing the Web on my Blackberry, even when I’m not staring at the “you are not currently” warning.

Those of you with other PDAs or service companies that aren’t Sprint can let me know whether I’d have a better experience with another device or another carrier. If I didn’t have to have the Blackberry for work, I’d probably never have bought one.

Minn. can’t bar kids from violent games

Basically, the legislature here wanted to keep kids (that would be those people under 17) from buying or renting games rated M or AO by the Entertainment Software Rating Board. A three-judge panel said the state couldn’t do that because it couldn’t prove that such games are harmful to minors, so the First Amendment’s cuisine reins supreme.

Talk about some mixed feelings.

I watched a dad pick up a copy of Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas for his pre-pubescent son at a Best Buy a few years back. I remember being really sure that he (the parent) was an idiot. Not your standard run-of-the-mill “Iraq attacked us on 9/11″ idiot, but a true idiot nonetheless. Still, it’s a free country, and if pop wants sonny to beat up some virtual hookers after school, that’s his right. But do I think sonny should be able to save up his lunch money and pick up a copy himself? Not really. The content isn’t appropriate for his age group. I don’t think he should be able to pick up Hustler, watch South Park or listen to Limp Bizkit either. Honestly, nobody should be listening to Limp Bizkit. Fred Durst is such a worthless punk.

That’s one side of the coin. On the other side, I don’t think violent video games are harmful to the psyche. I got into an argument with one of my grad school professors about this. He had the gall to refer to first-person shooting games — my personal fave — as “murder simulators” that clearly lead to bad behavior. I replied that there was no credible evidence showing that such games are harmful. I also pointed out that people like Charles Manson, long before Doom arrived, didn’t need anything more than a Beatles song to go on a killing spree. Was it equally as clear that Beatles songs lead to bad behavior?

I think there’s only one way I can reconcile these two ideas: First, government, don’t tell us what we can watch or play. Secondly, parents, don’t be idiots – and monitor what your kids are doing.

Man hits woman on way to anger control class

Just in case you want to catch a few of these upcoming shows, I thought you might want to know what the tickets are really going to cost you. Thanks, Ticketmaster! 

It makes some odd kind of sense that the cheaper the ticket, the more you get screwed — but there’s plenty of screwing to go around at all price levels.

I am no knee-jerk liberal. Don’t get me started on immigration, a topic that, as a legalized American citizen, I’m slightly to the right of Pat Buchanan on.

This is about the Berkeley, California, City Council, and a measure they passed last week to urge Marine recruiters to leave town. Fine, said GOP lawmakers in Washington — if that’s the way you want to play, then no earmarks ($2 million worth) for you! One year!

It doesn’t happen often, but I’m with the GOP on this one, and I think my fellow Dems are missing the boat by not issuing a well-deserved round of condemnations. Those of us against the Iraq war have been able to hold a high ground that eluded the protesters of the Vietnam war: We’re against the war, but for the troops. We’re not spitting on them when they come home. We’re not discriminating against them in job searches. In fact, we’re actively attempting to improve the lives of soldiers by making sure they get adequate physical and mental care when they get back — something the GOP doesn’t seem all that interested in.

Now comes Berkeley, spitting on the troops. This is both unnecessary and unproductive. It’s a fundraising daydream for Republicans, and it turns off other reality-based folks who would like to see the war end.

I’ve been amazed by the ability of Democrats to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory — and if you want to see a scenario in which this is possible in November, look no farther than Berkeley.

I’m employed again. Well, I will be next month, anyway. In the meantime, now that I know there’s going to be steady money coming in again, I replaced the wife’s defunct iPod Mini with a new Nano, and I picked myself up a Touch while I was at it.

I haven’t been this pleased with a piece of technology since my Xbox 360. It’s a true marvel, and I know I screwed myself over by buying version 1.0 of this thing — but I don’t care. I’m getting plenty of use out of its WiFi connection and YouTube module, I’ve loaded it up with pictures of the baby and I’ve found a host of useful mobile-friendly Web sites. Oh yeah, and it plays music, too.

The interface on this thing is incredibly elegant. Being able to select and move items by touch is completely natural. So natural, in fact, that when my not-quite-2-year-old daughter saw me moving pictures around with a flick of a finger, she came over to investigate and was able to move the pictures as well. The funny thing is that when she then saw pictures on either my wife’s Nano or on my computer monitor, she made no effort to touch the screens to select new pictures. She somehow knows that the Touch is something special, and the rest of the world doesn’t work that way. It probably should.