It’s a measure of talent for a musician to sound as good on television, live and stripped down naked with just an acoustic guitar, as she does on her CD. Color me impressed.
A little cuddly destruction does the soul well. Explode away!
John McCain:
I detest war. It might not be the worst thing to befall human beings, but it is wretched beyond all description. When nations seek to resolve their differences by force of arms, a million tragedies ensue. The lives of a nation’s finest patriots are sacrificed. Innocent people suffer and die. Commerce is disrupted; economies are damaged; strategic interests shielded by years of patient statecraft are endangered as the exigencies of war and diplomacy conflict. Not the valor with which it is fought nor the nobility of the cause it serves, can glorify war. Whatever gains are secured, it is loss the veteran remembers most keenly. Only a fool or a fraud sentimentalizes the merciless reality of war. However heady the appeal of a call to arms, however just the cause, we should still shed a tear for all that is lost when war claims its wages from us.
America must be a model citizen if we want others to look to us as a model. How we behave at home affects how we are perceived abroad. We must fight the terrorists and at the same time defend the rights that are the foundation of our society. We can’t torture or treat inhumanely suspected terrorists we have captured. I believe we should close Guantanamo and work with our allies to forge a new international understanding on the disposition of dangerous detainees under our control.
John McCain delivered a speech on foreign policy in which he appeared to move back to his recently abandoned positions on torture, and delivered a weighty appraisal of the cost of war. His assessment of the cost of war makes he belief that we can “win” the war on terror, as it’s embodied in our was in Iraq, even stranger given we’ve clearly learned at this point that Iraq was not invested in global terror on any large scale as we were led to believe prior to our invasion.
Boat cat (alt), originally uploaded by Orcinus O.
I’ve often thought how powerful it would be to have images from Good Friday and Easter - to see Jesus on the cross, his followers in despair, and then to see, perhaps, images from Mary when she saw the angel in the empty tomb. Not only would it be a powerful and moving visual narrative, but what a persuasive evangelistic tool, right?
In a recent New York Times article about Obama’s historic speech on race…
The Rev. Joel Hunter, senior pastor of a mostly white evangelical church of about 12,000 in Central Florida, described Mr. Obama’s speech, in which the Democratic presidential candidate discussed his relationship with the former pastor of his home church in Chicago, as a kind of “Rorschach inkblot test” for the nation.
“It calls out of you what is already in you,” Dr. Hunter said, predicting that those desiring to address the topic would regard the speech as a spur, while those indifferent to issues of race might pay it little heed.
Regardless of what photos, video or first-hand accounts of Christ on the cross we may have, they will never do more than call out of us what’s already there. Perhaps that means that to you, a good man was martyred that first Good Friday, case closed. Or perhaps to you, Christians reverse engineered history and proof is simply evidence of a vast conspiracy.
My belief is the third option - Jesus, the incarnation of God, died a horrible and painful (undeserved) death through torture.
Pictures would be nice, but they’d only confirm what I already know to be true.
(Photo of Trainwreck courtesy chubbywabi at Flickr)
Hulu went public today, offering free television shows streamed courtesy the major networks. The quality is decent, the interface is actually pretty slick and aside from some quirks (like removing episodes for some shows after a few weeks) it’s a great start on a single site to visit to watch all of your television online. Hulu’s been in private beta for ages, and it’s been steadily building a buzz for mostly the right reasons (and a few reasons that were just plain silly).
While the tv-viewing capacity of the site’s been widely touted, I was pleasantly surprised to by their “movies” section. Some of the fare is straight-to-video dretch, but amongst the few films offered are some enduring gems like Mulholland Drive, Requiem for a Dream, The Jerk and ¡Three Amigos! When I tried watching Sideways, I was hit with a warning that the film was modified to “fit this screen, to run in the time allotted and edited for content.” In that case, the film was apparently the version that airs 3p on rainy Sunday. Fullscreen, poorly compressed and awkwardly overdubbed it was less than stellar. But Titan AE looked pretty good with their hi-res version, in letterbox and played with no pre-buffer time. Of course, their hi-res version was only 480p which hardly counts as hi-res to me, but it’s a pretty remarkable achievement and far better than any other free streaming movie options around.
It’s still not as compelling as option as stage6 was, and the limited selection will be a deal breaker for many. But the iTunes store started with a limited selection and it’s doing alright, from what I hear.
