Category: Media

— Bill Maher has been exceptionally virulent on his misnamed “Politically Incorrect” lately, more the Overlord than usual, even, and full of rage at President Bush. This (ABC to End ‘Politically Incorrect’) must be why:

ABC will announce today that “Politically Incorrect,” its late-night comedy-discussion program, will go off the air in January and be replaced by a show starring the comedian Jimmy Kimmel.

Mr. Kimmel, who has been one of the hosts of the raunchy “Man Show” on the Comedy Central cable channel, will start up a more traditional late-night show with a desk-and-guests format, an ABC executive said yesterday. The show will also explore aspects of Mr. Kimmel’s home life, the ABC executive said. The news will be announced during ABC’s introduction of a new prime-time entertainment schedule to advertisers.

Unlike Maher, a Hugh Hefner-wannabe who hangs out at the Playboy Mansion and only dates women under 20 with two-digit IQs, Jimmy’s a family man. But more important for ABC is the fact that he’s actually funny, and not the crashing PETA-phile bore than Maher has become since leaving Comedy Central too many years ago.

— Konnecticut :: voodoo coding says some nice things:

Les articles de Bennett sont les plus intéressants et les plus dr?les (lisez les commentaires…), celui que je cite le moins ici est le plus riche: Is Instapundit over ? (Le contenu de l’article n’a rien ? voir avec le titre, rassurez-vous).

It’s often been observed that Americans lack humor, generally by Europeans inadvertantly stepping on earnest, Puritan toes. They have a point.

tr: Bennett’s articles are most interesting and funniest (read the comments…), this one is rich: “Is Instapundit over?” (the contents of the article have nothing to do with the title, so don’t go freaky).

— A few days ago, I described college blog Hoosier Review as “a project of Indiana U. students who didn’t make the cut at the school newspaper” following some unethical, churlish, and generally juvenile behavior in their quarters, already described in various comment sections here.

This characterzation was unfair, as some of the HR staffers are capable of making the cut at their school’s daily paper, even if others aren’t. I’ve learned that many, many Hoosiers love their Review, and the fact that all of them use the same computer to send e-mail from their various Hotmail accounts shouldn’t bias me against them, or her, as the case may be. So while the HR is nowhere near the caliber of the blogs I’ve listed for some time under my Blog U. section, it’s generally written in gramatically correct English and tends to be free of major spelling or punctuation errors. If they would simply drop the practice of publishing their dumbest rants under feminine pseudonyms, they might get on the road to acceptable. But the Hosers are young, and time is on their side.

— In the course of commenting on a bizarre bit of analysis by one pseudonymous “Hillary Carter” of the Hoosier Review website on something I wrote, I conjectured that the Review was “a project of Indiana U. students who didn’t make the cut at the school newspaper.” While that portrayal was less than flattering, it turns out the truth is even worse: “Hillary Carter” and “Rush Reagan” are staff members of the Indiana student paper, and star writers for the Review as well.

Since the Review’s stock in trade is grading the work of the student paper, we have the specter of writers pseudonymously reviewing their own work for the Review. Review editor Joshua Claybourn seems to think it’s OK to hide this relationship from his readers, but it raises serious ethical concerns about the Review that would certainly be troubling in any adult newspaper/web site relationship.

The Review also wants a permalink. I’ll let my readers decide on that question: leave a comment if you have an opinion about my permalinking the Hoosier Review.

— Failing to state the obvious is a kind of bias, according to Thurman Faulk, who comments on the outrageous lawsuit brought by the families of illegal immigrants who died in the Arizona desert because the US government didn’t leave milk and cookies out for them:

In self-conscious attempt to be “objective”, news outlets run stories like this one without even a hint of an opinion. They don’t report it as being outrageous, silly, or preposterous, they simply state what transpired, while taking care to pose themselves as being “objective” by not saying anything about it.

I’ve got an idea – if they can sue us for not facilitating their unlawful acts, can’t we charge them with something too? How about “littering.”

Yes, that was mean.

— Sgt. Stryker rebels against his stereotyping as token Army mechanic blogger and throws off his chains:

The Daily Briefing is no more. No more geopolitical crap, no more insights into the “military lifestyle”. If you want that, go someplace else. I’m sure there’s somebody out there who’ll be more than happy to provide you with fodder for supporting whatever ideology you’re trying to peddle and perhaps they’ll be better than I was at properly portraying the caricature of a military person, since that’s all most people seem to want.

Good for you, dude – be yourself and let the hits fall where they may. I’ve already commented on those who hastened the burnout; you know who you are.

— The Olsen family is divided on the Instapundit question. Wife Dawn questions his judgment in resurrecting Adam Curry:

What was Glenn Reynolds thinking when he resurrected this relic from the 80’s, who in his heyday was an uncool – disconnected from anything remotely cool, without one fucking ounce of coolness in him – helplessly rejected,
bad-hair-life-having, sphincter-plug?

And husband Eric kisses-up, calling me a troll for using the Professor as an example of the limits of manual indexing:

Bennett’s statements there pretty much confirm the troll nature of his post: he asserts that the post wasn’t really about Reynolds at all, that Glenn was merely the “hook”

Like Del, Eric relies on Glenn’s summary of my post, and not on the post itself.

Reading comprehension seems in short supply in the Blogosphere, which probably says something about the importance of intepreters and indexers: they don’t just tell us what to read, they tell us what we read.

— Joanne Jacobs, bless her heart, has a very good book review in today’s Mercury News: Rage, not logic, fuels Dworkin’s feminism

Andrea Dworkin would hate me. I’m not perpetually enraged at those child-raping, porn-peddling, woman-beating brutes (men), nor am I one of the childlike victims (women) looking to Dworkin for salvation. That leaves one category: traitor.

Probably the most significant part of the review, in the local context is this: “Rita Simon uses crime statistics to show that men — not women — are the most frequent victims of male violence,” because it undercuts a message the Mercury News has sent relentlessly for the last decade. Good piece of work, and on Mothers’ Day no less.

— Kevin Deenihan at CalStuff is angling to take Rachel Klein’s Sex on Tuesday column now that the kitten has graduated. Toward this end, he pens a sample column:

Engineers don’t take Fluid Mechanics for the credits. (Well, yes they do, but it still applies.) These are men with a greater understanding of forces and weights than anyone else at Berkeley. Tired of being crushed by a too-heavy lover? Just murmur ‘Mass times velocity’ to an Engineer and he’ll understand instantly. Let him experiment; it’s what he does best. After he gets over his shyness and is given freedom to roam, you’ll be surprised by his imagination. But make very clear the parameters and expectations. EECS don’t expect projects to work correctly the [first] time, but they’ll try again if they need to.

Sign the boy up, and give him star treatment on the web.

— Del Eastman, a neighbor and fan of Glenn “Instapundit” Reynolds, feels that my musings on the future of the web inadvertently trampled on his hero:

REF INSTAPUNDIT.COM. I HAVE GLEN BOOKMARKED. I DON’T HAVE YOU BOOKMARKED. I CHECK GLEN’S SITE TWICE A DAY. I DON’T THINK INSTAPUNDIT IS OBSOLETE. IF HIS SITE IS OBSOLETE WHY DID YOU USE HIM AS A HOOK TO GET PEOPLE TO LINK HERE? AND NO, I DO NOT AGREE WITH GLEN ALL THE TIME. MAYBE ABOUT 60-70% AND I STRONGLY DISAGREE ABOUT SOME THINGS. BUT HE IS MOSTLY FAIR AND VERY INTERESTING. I’M A BLOG SURFER AND I DO NOT KNOW GLEN PERSONALLY BUT I THINK I DETECT SOUR GRAPES HERE. I WON’T BE COMING BACK TO YOUR SITE. THANKS FOR THE CHANCE TO RESPOND. DEL/BARTLETT, TN

Del left some additional comments 8 hours later, having a hard time staying away. Another one of Glenn’s fans offended by my asking the question about his relevance was the pseudonymous “Hillary Carter” of the Hoosier Review, a project of Indiana U. students who didn’t make the cut at the school newspaper. Hillary’s response was to post a picture of herself, which looks hot according to That Guy. Dawson had the nerve to say that he likes Glenn but doesn’t care for his site; I hope that doesn’t result in a Howell Raines treatment. The man’s brave.

Instapundit’s response to this post was the most disappointing of all, because he misread it. Recall that I asked if Instapundit was over, examined some trends, and concluded “not yet.” Insta spun this conclusion 180° and claimed I was asserting his irrelevance, which brought out the Clone Army in my comments section. That’s sad.

As to the trend I predict, consider this analogy: once upon a time, Yahoo set out to index the web manually, establishing a system of categories and assigning as many web sites as they could find into their respective slots. At one time, people relied on Yahoo to help them find content on the web. As the web grew, Yahoo hired an army of monkeys to index the exploding web, and couldn’t keep up. Then along came Alta Vista, with a high-speed automated approach to web indexing that was much more complete, had less personal bias, and returned a lot of junk. Nonetheless, Alta Vista destroyed Yahoo as a search engine, only to be destroyed itself by Google which took the novel approach of ranking sites by the number of links in instead of a simple content analysis.

The blogosphere is at the stage the web was at when Alta Vista knocked-off Yahoo, and I’m looking forward to the time when we have a Google for the Blogosphere.

These things happen, and just as Yahoo found a way to remain relevant as a shopping, news, and messaging portal, I have no doubt that Reynolds will find a way to remain relevant when his indexing skills are no longer needed.