Patshit crazy

It's been an interesting week, and at the Senate confirmation hearings for Sonia Sotomayor's nomination to the SCOTUS our nationwide discussion on race has become an open shouting match. A lot of people watching the proceedings are calling some senators racist. Senators and a lot more people watching the same proceedings are calling Sotomayor racist. When the hearings go into recess for the day, the talking heads are talking their heads off. And more often than not, they're talking about race.

On MSNBC, Pat Buchanan just about got into a fight on air with Eugene Robinson Wednesday during Hardball. And on Thursday he and Rachel Maddow talked. Well, she talked. He's in full-on rant mode. I'm surprised he didn't stroke out.

This is a long clip, more than 11 minutes, and it's disturbing.

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Yes! Yes, yes, yes!

Honda announced today that they'd be taking their CR-Z hybrid 2-seater into production, and models will be rolling efficiently off the assembly line in 2010. The CR-Z has been positively compared to the CR-X 2-seater from a generation ago since its first appearance as a concept car at the Tokyo Motor Show in 2007.

It's a good move from Honda's new CEO, Takanobu Ito, who designed the all-aluminum chassis of the groundbreaking NSX. I hope that the car's description as "sporty" isn't simply a description of its appearance but that it can get up and go as well.

I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that it won't be a true sports car replacement for the sadly-discontinued S2000. But if it's the first performance-oriented hybrid and it isn't flimsy and annoyingly noisy like the new Insight, it's a step in the right direction. I hope I can afford the future.

The audacity of crops

Photo by Dario Gambarin
Italian artist Dario Gambarin created a giant portrait of Barack Obama in a field in Mena' di Castagnaro, near Verona in Northern Italy, with a tractor. Gambarin worked over some 27,000 square meters without marking or tracing on the field, for 90 minutes on July 5, 2009. The artist said he wanted to create a message of "respect" for the land. Obama is currently in L'Aquila, in central Italy, attending the G8 summit.

And that's the way it isn't

I'll let up on the Sarah Palin posts soon, honestly. As soon as she stops being crazy entertaining. Or entertainingly crazy. Both. But until she stops tweeting random quotes and Snapple-bottle-cap aphorisms I just can't take my eyes off this particular train wreck.

Thursday night she posted the following:

Full disclosure: the above image has been Photoshopped. I cut out and swapped the positions of the two tweets in order for them to be read the way Palin sent them. If I had not done that, the last part of her statement would have been displayed first. And it would have made even less sense.

Anyway, she decides to pimp an upcoming radio appearance in Squarebanks by saying she likes that medium more than newspapers. Perhaps it's because us newspaperfolk know the difference between "anxious" (the word she uses) and "eager" (the word she likely means to use), which makes her uncomfortable. Nah, I doubt that. The rest of her tweet explains that she obviously feels newspaper peeps are more liberal and therefore... I don't know. But apparently that's bad to her. She uses a quote from Walter Cronkite to support this.

Too bad for Palin then that Cronkite, who sadly is near the end of his life, didn't mean what she thinks he meant. Here's an exchange from a Time Magazine interview with Cronkite in 2003:

YOU HAVE BASICALLY COME OUT AND SAID YOU'RE A LIBERAL. HOW DO YOU RESPOND WHEN CRITICS SAY, "AHA, I KNEW REPORTERS WERE LIBERAL, AND THIS IS WHY THE MEDIA IS BIASED"?
I do not consider a liberal necessarily to be a leftist. A liberal to me is one who--and it suits some of the dictionary definitions--is unbeholden to any specific belief or party or group or person, but makes up his or her mind on the basis of the facts and the presentation of those facts at the time. That defines what I am. I have never voted a party line. I vote on the individual and the issues.

Damn newspapermen and their facts. They always get in the way of a good half-baked talking point. Weird though that she has such disdain for newspapers since as we know she reads "all of them."

Gone fishin'

Sarah Palin just tweeted about that famous Alaskan work ethic. You know, because of how they are all such hard workers who never give up and everything.

"Advancing in another direction"

When Sarah Palin announced her resignation today, she said a lot of very curious things. One day universities may offer degree tracks in trying to figure out what she means when she speechifies. But in the meantime I'm focusing on a few choice lines. The following is from a transcript of her speech.

"...Only dead fish 'go with the flow.'... Productive, fulfilled people determine where to put their efforts, choosing to wisely utilize precious time... to BUILD UP."
"And there is such a need to BUILD up and FIGHT for our state and our country."
"You can choose to engage in things that tear down, or build up."

All this talk of building. It must be much on her mind these days. I understand when she and Todd want something built, they go to Spenard Builders Supply. Not a big-box store, they're known for their personal service. Just sayin.'


There's oh so much more to this. The weather in Wasilla is cloudy with a 90% chance of the other f-me boot dropping.

Stars of CCTV

No, not these guys. Different stars of CCTV. An unsigned band from Manchester, The Get Out Clause, performed in public, in front of a bunch of surveillance cameras. They then used the Data Protection Act (similar to the Freedom of Information Act in the U.S.) to get copies of the tapes of themselves. Which they then edited into the following video, currently going viral.

I'll keep my Hard-Fi, thankyouverymuch. But with this hype, The Get Out Clause won't be unsigned for long. And also, CCTV cameras in cabs? Serious?
Thanks to Wilson for the tip via Garagespin.

30-year-old retro tech confuses, disappoints boy

To commemorate the launch of the Sony Walkman 30 years ago, the BBC Magazine asked Scott Campbell, 13, to trade in his iPod for a portable cassette player for a week. British muted hilarity ensues.

Scott found the Walkman to be huge and clunky, unattractive, hard to use (it took him three days to figure out that the cassette had two sides) and limited in its capacity (12 songs!). Worst of all, it elicited mocking from his schoolmates and nostalgia from his parents and teachers.

Put me in the "nostalgic" column. I worked at a camera store when the first Walkman models came out, and we sold them. At lunch time I would pull the display model from the glass display case, slip a cassette in, put on the orange foam headphones and walk around the mall. Ahh, suburbia. And ahh, musical me-time. It may not have been an iPhone but this was before we had personal computers, cell networks or wi-fi. So our expectations were lower. The simple act of making music personal and portable was groundbreaking enough.