videos

 My brother and his cohorts bring forth the funk:

For more about this performance, check out his post over at …nwood….  The tune they play is called “Sweetheart,” and is apparently unrelated to my friend Chelsea’s eponymous forthcoming book… except in my blogroll, baby!

Here’s one of those things that makes me straddle the fence between admiration and scorn. Still, it’s impressive either way:

I don’t claim to know anything about typical shark behavior, but… how could this guy know the shark wouldn’t head straight out to sea, or just dive deep?

On the other hand, for that much steak maybe the shark did owe him a little something.

It’s not just a cheesy painting anymore. Via Ed Miller’s blog:

Like the first commenter at Ed’s post, I can’t agree with Jilli-dog’s choices to call down this hand with an inferior flush draw. At the same time, her success in this hand makes me wonder if Yorkies could be responsible for some of the horrendous bad beats I’ve taken on PokerStars lately.

This has huge implications. All the poker world whining about amateurs and internet players seems a little silly now, doesn’t it? I predict that within five years, a dog will win the WSOP. You heard it here first.

Even in this era of with-us-or-against-us partisanship, I never cease to be amazed at the neocons’ mendacious, irresponsible, utterly illogical denial of the escalating environmental crisis. You can arm yourself with Coby Beck’s excellent syllabus, but what can you ultimately do about people who are shallow enough to play politics with the habitability of the planet?

I have beaten my head against this particular wall in far too many conversations, so today, I’m sending in the cavalry.

Who’s a puppet now?

About a year ago I wrote that punditry was dead. It seemed pretty final at the time, and it was. Punditry is still dead - in fact, it’s getting deader all the time.

How dead? I don’t mean to set off a panic, but I feel duty-bound to report that punditry have made a terrifying transition. No longer is it merely dead, it is more than that: Punditry is undead. Hollow-headed pundits roam our airwaves even now preying upon the uninformed, the ignorant, and the credulous. These unsuspecting targets are guilty of nothing more than having lost track of the remote, and for this they are damned to a netherworld of petty, bloviating irrelevance.

Think I’m nuts? Consider Exhibit A, a clip of the show that someone funnier than I aptly nicknamed The Oh-Really Factor, in which Papa Were-bear lobs a smear at The Daily Kos by way of the Hillary Clinton campaign:

I love how he literally ends up sounding like a parrot at the end. “Bill, The Daily Kos is one of the most heavily-trafficked sites on the web.”

“Squawk! Hate site! Squawk!”

The problem with having an insatiable thirst for ignorance is that you are what you eat. It’s one thing to be a little out of touch… but to still somehow be unaware that there are a lot of random nutjubs and lowlifes on the internet? That level of inattention is just plain freaky. To say that it’s inhuman doesn’t cover it - I mean, even my dog knows about internet trolls.

Compounding the indignity of getting served by Hillary Clinton’s campaign spokesman, our Faux News friend was subsequently undercut by his own legions. AMERICAblog’s John Aravosis pointed out comment threads on Mr. OhReally’s own blog that contained hateful rantings and death threats against Sen. Clinton. Well, knock me over with a feather. The essential detail:

…while O’Reilly holds others responsible for the words strangers leave on their Web sites, on O’Reilly’s Web site, he’s not responsible at all for the hate and threats his readers leave behind… and I quote:

“BillOReilly.com will not be held liable for any user activity on the message boards. We do not actively monitor user-submitted content.”

I’d wager that Bill O’Reilly himself doesn’t even passively monitor user-submitted content. Having demonstrated a knowledge of the internet roughly equivalent to Sen. Ted “Series of Tubes” Stevens (R-AK), it’s safe to assume that he scarcely, if ever, has monitored any part of the site that bears his name. Not that there’s anything wrong with that - most famous people hire lackeys to run their web sites. The difference is that most of them are sensible enough to readily admit doing so, and don’t claim to understand much about their sites. In other words, they can afford to pay someone else to be accountable for this part of their public presence, allowing themselves to remain blissfully ignorant.

For the pundit undead (or “pundead”), though, ignorance is not blissful. At least, not in any lasting way Ignorance is the virus that they exist in order to spread. And spread it they do - a quick flip through the TV or AM radio dials shows what a contagious little bastard it is. The good news is that you can defend yourself from the pundead and their orgy of ignorance. In a post (or maybe two) that will appear here at C&B in the next few days, I will provide practical information about how to identify the pundead when you see them, and about how to repel their attempts to ignoramucize you or others. Until then, just try to avoid televised news and AM talk radio.