The juxtaposition of two videos I saw today is eerily representative of the current state of American affairs.
The national hero, Buzz Aldrin, speaking on the future of space travel. It all sounds great, unless you listen to more that five contiguous words and try to make a coherent concept out of them.
Obviously Xeni Jardin had a great opportunity to interview such an important man, and couldn’t let the footage go to waste. The inanity is somewhat like a bus wreck. A bus full of parakeets juggling crystal goblets. Shiny.
The other interview was Bill Moyers talking to Andrew J. Bacevich (includes transcript). I actually only heard the audio to this one, though the video snips I did watch made it that much more revealing.
This almost hour of discussion is one that every American should be required to listen to and ruminate on. But we’re much more likely to watch the first one and yell “Go, Buzz!” (Hey, despite the incoherence, I did.)
Such is America’s attention span, and such will be its downfall.
I think I may have to go back and listen to Bacevich again. He did such a good job of relating his points, and the discussion was thick with content.
[Edit: a few days later SciAm had a cogent interview with Buzz. Seems like Xeni just had the bad luck of catching him when he had brain overload – apparently he’s been on a publicity tour of late for several things.]
Neil Patrick Harris - Doogie, Kumar, Your Mother, et al.
Nathan Fillion - Firefly
Felecia Day - The Guild (and a math degree from UT!)
Josh Whedon - the creator
I have an over-large expensive 301 disc DVD/CD player. But it’s fairly old (no HDMI output). The Pioneer DV-F727 got slightly flaky before it stopped working all together.
Some investigation showed that the mechanism to spin the disc is what failed. With all the other moving parts I thought it would have been something else.
Of course, I have the 3rd season of Battlestar Gallactica borrowed and was in no state to be DVD-less (sure, no hot water still, but I can manage). I went to the Target, they didn’t have the one on the shelf I wanted (for $80), so I got the $50 RCA DRC277. It’s tiny. And it upscales for HDMI output, not that I’ll need it anytime soon - my receiver doesn’t manage that format, either.
After some cabling troubleshooting, I finished off the 3rd season. Now I have to wait till the current season is over and for sale.
Also, Pioneer wins over RCA for website customer support!
If neither Dennis Kucinich nor Ron Paul is your first choice in this year’s civic decision that you should be making, I suggest that one of them should be.
There is no doubt that democracy has been diminished for their exclusion from multiple debates. The reasoned arguments from the edges are what sometimes steers a ship of state in the right direction.
If you won’t support either of them, you owe your country at least to listen to them. You don’t have to agree with them. Ron Paul and Dennis Kucinich are voices we need.
And maybe when you listen, you’ll remember how media is supposed to work. An airing of ideas, not a lashing of tongues. It’s hard not to interpret the exclusion of candidates by large corporate “sponsors” of debates to be anything but silencing of voices of dissent.
This country was built on dissent.
I’ve put Bill Moyer’s Journal in my RSS aggregator, and the audio podcast in my iTunes. If you still prefer the cathode ray, they do allow him on the air waves, but only on a station funded by the public.
There are several other ways to expose yourself to real discourse,… if you choose civic responsibility.
What was the deal with Tim Russert asking UFO questions to Dennis Kucinich during a presidential debate? I certainly was asking myself that. So was Senator Mike Gravel who is also a presidential candidate but was excluded from that same debate.
What’s up with the Democratic Party for allowing a network to exclude one of the candidates?
So I'll put it bluntly. Human beings are free except when humanity needs them. Maybe humanity needs you. To do something. Maybe humanity needs me — to find out what you're good for. We might both do despicable things, Ender, but if humankind servives, then we were good tools.
– Ender's Game, Orson Scott Card, p 35
If you won’t support either of them, you owe your country at least to listen to them. You don’t have to agree with them. 
