I just read NPR’s summary of the Obama-O’Reilly interview. It was typical NPR “take no sides even when a child is stomping on frogs” sort of coverage. But one line really hit me, “To further his appeal to the all-important independents, Obama took the opportunity to underscore that while he’s been labeled by conservative critics an ultra-liberal, he’s really been more of a pragmatist.” I agree with that statement, but I just don’t accept its starting phrase. “All-important independents”? The Democrats lost in the last election because young progressives did not come out to vote, not because “independents” (whatever the hell that means) switched from Democrat to Republican. So this focus on the mythical “all-important independents” is madness. If Obama wins in 2012, it will be because the youth vote comes out again. That is the only story.
43-0
I’ve already written about this. This is a good take on it.
It was amazing to me to have just watched the Bill O’Reilly’s interview with President Obama. O’Reilly showed himself to be extremely ignorant, posing questions like, “Many people think you want to redistribute wealth…” This isn’t surprising. I expected the interview to have a little more substance, but I wasn’t shocked. What was surprising was how rude O’Reilly was to the President. He talked over him and dismissed Obama in the middle of answers with things like, “Yes, yes, I know…” as though O’Reilly was just sick of hearing the President’s lies. Had a Republican president received such treatment, the Right would have become unglued. Of course, what Republican President would ever have agreed to an interview with a progressive?
I wrote a very negative review of the film Idiocracy on Netflix, which you can read in my artcile Who is TB 152371?!. Last night Rachel Maddow discussed our modern day Idiocracy, also known as Faux News:
Robert Reich said in a recent interview that he no longer believes in keeping a balanced federal budget. Why? Because in general, Democrats are fiscally responsible and Republicans are not. Bill Clinton managed to balance the budget and leave to George W. Bush a federal government that was actually taking in more money than it was spending. And what happened? Bush went on a spending spree (admittedly, helped by a recession) creating the most unbalanced budget in US history. Why should Democrats save so that Republicans can over-spend on their pet projects: tax-cuts (especially for the wealthy) and wars? Thus it is with the issue of global warming. Why should all the rest of the world do something about global warming when the biggest polluter does nothing? And this, I suppose, is why I am glad I no longer work as a “global change scientist.”
What brings this all up is that my niece (to be accurate: the daughter of the sister of the husband of my sister) sent me Field Notes from a Catastrophe by Elizabeth Kolbert. The book is a fun read when it is dealing with scientists (which is most of the book). It brings back fond memories of what it is like to be part of a large nerd community. She does an excellent job of showing scientists as regular people—except for the nerd part. For example:
While I was at CRREL [Cold Regions Research and Engineering Laboratory], [Donald] Perovich took me to meet a colleague of his named John Weatherly. Posted on Weatherly’s office door was a bumper sticker designed to be pasted—illicitly—on SUVs. It said, I’m changing the climate! Ask me how!
It’s when Kolbert gets into the political side of the issue that it gets annoying. All the time that I was a graduate student and then a post-doc and finally a lowly assistant professor, I was highly skeptical about global warming. There were two issues:
There was more warming in the middle of the 20th century than there had been since—up into the early 1990s—and the climate models did a very poor job of explaining this.
The sunspot cycle alone seemed to do a pretty good job all by itself of explaining the climate we had seen during the 20th century.
From the mid-90s onward, climate modelers began to incorporate the sunspot cycle into their models. And as a result, everything came together. Once that happened (after I had left the field), I was convinced. As a result of this, I find the current denial of anthropogenic global warming (Or global warming of any kind!) extremely frustrating. It has become clear to me that those who deny the existence of human-caused global warming are exactly the same as those who deny evolution by natural selection. Their beliefs are faith-based; no amount of data or reasoning will ever convince them.
I repeatedly hear people make the same claim: “A lot of scientists don’t believe in global warming” or “A lot of scientists don’t believe in evolution.” In both cases, this is absolutely false unless our definitions of “a lot” are extremely different. What is true is that church groups recycle the same evolution non-believers to make it look like there is widespread dissent, just as conservative groups (like Faux News) do with global warming skeptics. There is, of course, much more room to question global warming than evolution. The problem is that most of those who do not want to believe in global warming do not have the slightest idea what the actual issues are. Instead of questions about errors in climate models, we get statements like those about how humans “create” carbon dioxide when they breathe—a statement that shows a literally laughable ignorance of the earth’s carbon cycle.
Of course, there is a problem on the other side. Most people who believe in global warming are ignorant—just not willfully so. Most could not explain why human exhalation of carbon dioxide is different from the carbon dioxide produced by octane combustion. (Hint: where does that carbon atom that we combine with oxygen come from? Perhaps a plant we ate, that takes the carbon atom away and spits the oxygen back into the atmosphere?) Books like Field Notes are slightly problematic because they depend too much an anecdotal evidence. It’s part of the whole, “Oh, what a hot summer! It must be global warming!” Or: “Oh, what a cold winter! There can’t be global warming! (To be fair, this book is not intended to be an argument that global warming is happening; it takes this as a given and there’s nothing wrong with that.)
Even knowing everything I know about this subject—which is a lot—the book is terribly frightening. I have no children, but I am young enough that I will probably see great human suffering due to climate change in my lifetime.
Book Darts!
The book my niece sent me was probably used in one or more college courses. It has at least three colors of highlighting! In case my niece is one of the highlighters, I have sent her a package of book darts, which, as anyone who knows me well knows, I think are the greatest invention since movable type.
The Vancouver Sun reports that the Dow Jones industrial average closed above 12,000 yesterday. This is a 50% increase from where it closed the last day of the Bush administration. I know, big deal. Except that Republicans continue to claim that Obama is not only anti-business, but the most anti-business president in history. One of my biggest complaints against Obama is how much he is in the back pocket of Wall Street and the banking industry. So it makes sense for me to yawn and even be angry that the Dow Jones industrial average has gone up 50% when the unemployment rate has almost doubled. But the Republicans should be dancing in the streets. (Maybe they are—they’re just private streets that I’m not allowed to walk on.)
One Thing About Egypt
I don’t have much to say about Egypt because I don’t know much about it. But I will say this: as best as I can tell, Bruce Cockburn’s lyrics can be used to describe the protesters, “In the flash of this moment, you’re the best of what we are.”
The Return of Edward R. Murrow in London in Cairo
I’ve had my doubts about Richard Engel in the past, but I was wrong: he’s the real deal. This is Murrow during the Blitz.
Tyler Cowen wrote an interesting article in the New York Times yesterday called, Innovation Is Doing Little for Incomes. In it, he talks about how much people’s lives changed over the course of the first half of the 20th century, but not so much the second half. (That isn’t the main point of his article, but it is is what I’m most interested in.) This has been on my mind for a long time. I’ve tried to make the argument (mostly to conservative- or libertarian-minded people) that life just isn’t getting any better for most people.
I like to use my older sister, Mary, as an example. She drives a car that is pretty similar to the car she drove twenty years ago. She eats the same food. She listens to the same music, although now she listens to it on CDs instead of records, cassettes, and 8-tracks. She watches TV programs that are generally of a lower quality than the ones she watched twenty years ago. Her life is pretty much the same as it has been.
For me, things have changed more, but not all that much more. I have a cellphone now that I didn’t have twenty years ago (but I had one 15 years ago). That hasn’t really improved my life, though. I listen to music when I am out and about on the MP3 player in my phone; twenty years ago, I listened to a Walkman. Big deal. The biggest change in my life has been the Internet (which I have been on since 1988, but I’ll let that slide because it is better organized and more useful than it was then). Even here, however, the Internet has not greatly improved my life. I still do the vast majority of my research offline—mostly with books. (And people are even better; I had a three hour lunch with Latin scholar Justin Shannon where I learned things about Roman, Latin, and Horace that I’m not sure I would have been able to learn any other way.)
So I think we have stagnated—and for good reason. For the last two centuries, we’ve been following the wrong path to happiness. Yes, it is important that we all have food to eat, places to live, and medical care. But once those basic needs are filled, we need things to laugh at, ideas to wonder about, and most of all, people to love (in the Greek sense of the word). The stagnated path we have chosen to follow has resulted in the path we should have been following stagnating.
Back in 1948, Don Callender started his business Marie Callender’s—named after his dear mother—to sell pies, wholesale, to restaurants. Eventually, of course, he turned it into a chain of restaurants and finally into some of the finest frozen food you can buy for less than two dollars. Indeed, Safeway has all of their Marie Callender’s dinners on sale for $1.89. I couldn’t pass up that deal, so I bought a couple. As I was microwaving this dining delight[1}, I noticed something: the picture of the woman and child cooking on the back.
<%image(20110130-marie.jpg|350|243|Marie and Child Reunion)%>
Of course, it is kind of funny in and of itself. It is almost as though the makers are saying: this is the culture that we are proudly destroying with our products! But there is something more. I know from years of looking at models pretending to be Marie Callender, that the woman in this picture is supposed to be Mrs. Callender. That’s why it isn’t really funny that this frozen dinner has a picture of people actually cooking as opposed to mindlessly scooping potatoes out of a dish while they watch reruns of The Biggest Loser; it’s a picture of Callender doing the home cooking that we all are just too busy to do.
But let’s move in a little closer on this pretend mother of Don Callender:
<%image(20110130-mariecu.jpg|250|280|Close-Up of Pretend Marie Callender)%>
Note anything strange? The hair looks okay: sort of “active person’s gray.” But her face! She’s younger than I am! She can’t be more than late thirties! I guess it is no longer true that sixty is the new forty. Now eighty is the new thirty.
I am now determined to die old, just so I can get as ugly and old-looking as possible. If I get the money, I’m going to start my own old-person’s network where people look their age and don’t give a damn. And we’re going to stage demonstrations against Marie Callender’s and anyone else who pretends to be old. There are so many great things that go along with getting old. One of them is becoming knowledgeable. A world run by 80-year-olds wouldn’t need over a gram of salt to make frozen food taste better than cardboard.
Long live the old, and anyone under thirty is best neither seen nor heard!
1What was this dining delight? It is hard to say. I could read what it says on the box, but they are all pretty much the same. There were mashed potatoes, some kind of meat product thing, and then a vegetable medley that was mostly corn. And 1.09 grams of salt, which I think is your recommended monthly allowance.
I’m a little late on getting to this, but it’s been on my mind since I saw it in real time. During the State of the Union Address, President Obama said, “I know there isn’t a person here who would trade places with any other nation on earth.” Oh yeah! That’s because everyone in that room was rich and had health insurance. As I’ve said before, I’m grateful to have been born in the United States—most of the world is much worse. But that doesn’t mean that the United States is the best nation on earth. If you are at the top of the economic/power ladder, there is no better nation than the United States. If you are not, there is.
I have a quotation from Roger D. Hodge’s excellent The Mendacity of Hope that encapsulates the problem in the United States:
TARP participants were asked to fill out a simple two-page form, several orders of magnitude less complex and less onerous than an application for unemployment insurance or food stamps.
And that about sums up the United States of America. If you are at the bottom and you need a couple hundred dollars for food, the government will treat you like a common criminal. If you are at the top and you need a couple hundred billion dollars, the government will treat you like the leader of the Allied Forces in World War II who happens to have fallen on hard times. It might be that poor guy’s own fault that he’s hungry, but he isn’t making anyone else hungry. Those who took billions of dollars from TARP not only made themselves hungry—they made millions of others hungry. And for doing so, they were generously rewarded.
I watched the State of the Union Speech and even Paul Ryan’s response. They were both pretty pathetic. Obama didn’t say anything that was really offensive, but it left me wondering: how can we invest in the future if we can’t invest at all because we have to cut the budget deficit. The speech seemed like it was designed to make everyone a little happy and no one really happy. Of course, you can’t help but feel a little bit like Obama was talking out of both sides of his mouth. I wouldn’t say that it was downright lying; for that, you had to wait for Paul Ryan’s response.
Everyone in the so-called liberal-media claims that Ryan is a smart, knowledgeable, and serious, guy. He does seem to be fairly smart—not as smart as I am (even in my really stupid middle-age when I really have to concentrate to solve differential equations in my head), but still pretty smart. I can’t say about how knowledgeable he is, but I know he has a whole staff to research things for him, so we should count him as knowledgeable during prepared speeches. And serious? Well, at least he’s serious about making himself rich by further enriching his rich donors. He doesn’t seem too serious about that whole idea of equal opportunity, unless it is the opportunity to be rich and pay ridiculously low taxes. So I guess we can say that Ryan is smart, knowledgeable, and serious (about some evil things at least).
Given this, we must assume that Paul Ryan is a liar. Paul Krugman has already called him to task on equating us to “Greece, Ireland, the United Kingdom and other nations in Europe.” But it is much more than that. Ryan is clearly smart enough to understand that we have high unemployment because demand is low, not because there are hundreds of thousands of employers out there just itching to hire new workers if only they were sure what their future regulations would be or that their taxes would be low.[1] Ryan cannot possibly believe these thoroughly debunked notions are true. (See Mike Konczal’s amazing and insightful article, Last Redoubt of Structural Unemployment: Policy Uncertainty.) But just in case—hey, Paul Ryan: Employers are not hiring because they already have enough workers to make the stuff they are selling; they don’t want to make excess stuff because then they’ll just have to pay to have it stored. The issue is demand not supply. If he doesn’t accept this, he is either a fucking idiot, or a liar. I choose to think the best of him and call him a liar. But if he wants “Fucking Idiot” as a moniker, I can live with that.
More on Ryan
TimesDaily’s beternU writes in Paul Ryan—friend of the rich:
Paul Ryan—the darling of the right wing budget hawks, has a “roadmap for reforming the tax system. “The Ryan Roadmap raises taxes on Americans making between $20,000 and $200,000 while slashing taxes in half for the wealthiest Americans.”
Sound like an exaggeration? It’s not.
[1] Workers’ pay is a business expense and thus is not taxed.
For the past few weeks, I have been in a life-and-death struggle with TB 152371 on Netflix. Let me explain. I had given up writing “reviews” on Netflix, because I found the voting unfair. No one seemed to actually read the reviews; they just clicked “helpful” or “not helpful” if they agreed with your rating. For example, “3 out of 29 members found [the following] review [of Idiocracy] helpful”:
I made the mistake of thinking this movie was co-written by Ethan Coen of The Coen Brothers fame (he has been known to write without his older brother). It is actually co-written by Etan Cohen of King of the Hill fame. Directing and co-writing is Mike Judge, the creator of such gems as Beavis and Butt-head and King of the Hill. So if you are looking for a movie that pretends to be intelligent, but is really just an excuse for countless fart jokes, go for it. If not, insist upon being paid to sit through this tiresome stink-bomb. It is interesting, however, that Mike Judge decided to make a film noting the dumbing-down of our culture when he has been such a big part of it. I give it two stars because the film is not completely without merit—few films are; two stars usually means I hated a film about as much as I possibly could. And that is certainly the case here. (As for the review above about people not liking this film because they are idiots and don’t get it: satire is a hard business. I doubt anyone missed the satire in this film—it simply wasn’t well done. Also: the film is certainly not a statement about our future but about our present; see, for example, the ending of the movie where the whole process is starting over again. Regardless of all this, I find it offensive that a reviewer would claim that [1] this film is worth 5 stars—right up there with truly great films like The Gold Rush, It Happened One Night, His Girl Friday, The Bicycle Thieves, Mr. Arkadin, Dr. Strangelove, The Conversation, Videodrome, and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind; and [2] that anyone who doesn’t agree with his opinion of this movie is an idiot. On one point I will go with Idiocracy—a film as much about intolerance as stupidity: it is well on display in some of the reviews here.)
Add to this, the fact that the top three vote-getters are always listed first and you can see that your review rating is based almost entirely on when you wrote it and how closely your opinion comports with other viewers. I can accept the former problem, but not the latter because my reviews are usually pretty clear in helping people decide if they will like a given film, regardless of how I feel. Take, for example, my review of The Gin Game—a movie that most people don’t like very much, but which I gave five stars:
This is a very strong production of The Gin Game. The acting is superb: not necessarily better than the Cronyn and Tandy Broadway original (not available on DVD at this time), but different. In particular, Dick Van Dyke’s Weller has a fragility that Cronyn’s did not; I think it is Van Dyke’s best work. D. L. Coburn did a good job of expanding his play into a movie. In particular, he added a touching dance scene that deepens the characters and theme. He also added some scenes outside the sunporch that, while somewhat sentimental, add much welcome ambiance. In terms of the technical aspects of the film, they all work in the service of the script and acting. The description of the film provided here (and the DVD cover photo) will give those who are unfamiliar with the play a very skewed idea of what to expect. This is not an extended episode of The Dick Van Dyke Show. It is a serious, thoughtful, adult drama. It is most definitely not light entertainment (even though it is quite funny at times). Despite having read and seen the play before, this film put me through the emotional wringer—but without pandering. It is deeply affecting.
So I feel that I have often been wronged by the Netflix community (and Netflix itself, which has created the rules and continues to monkey with their user interface, making it worse each time); they have not shown themselves to be worthy of my keen insights. Just the same, I am an attention hog and when I find a movie that few have reviewed, I can’t help myself. This leads us to a fateful date: 20 December 2010. This is the date when Netflix made four episodes of Mystery Science Theater 3000 available via Instant Watch only: Devil Doll, Devil Fish, Robot Monster, and Ed Wood’s Bride of the Monster (all four are available as Mystery Science Theater 3000: Vol. XIX [Limited Edition]). Thus, there were no reviews on four episodes of a show that I’m a big fan of (Crow T. Robot is one of my heroes). I immediately watched the episodes and wrote reviews. I think I was the first person to review all of them except for Devil Doll.
Devil Doll
This episode of MST3K is from the eighth season and so features the final cast: the Pearl crew. Two hosted segments involving “not the devil: a devil” (played by writer Paul Chaplin) are particularly funny, as is Tom Servo’s soul being transfered into a toaster strudel for the entire last act of the movie (you have to see it). The riffing is also very strong. My one complaint is that the movie, Devil Doll, is actually rather good and I found myself drawn into it and missing a lot of the riffing. It deserves a second viewing for this reason. Overall, this episode is up to the highest standards of MST3K. It isn’t the best (I think Devil Fish, for one, is better), but it is very good.
This episode of MST3K is from the first cable season when Josh Weinstein played Tom Servo and Dr. Erhardt. In general, it is better than most of these early episodes. Just the same, it is weaker than later seasons. I figure there are half as many gags (or riffs) as there were during the later years (with TV’s Frank and beyond). Robot Monster is the classic “alien in a gorilla suit with a diving helmet” movie, which is beloved by bad-film buffs everywhere. As a stand-alone film, it is far harder to get through than any Ed Wood film—even though Wood’s films are almost all longer. Because of its short length, this MST3K includes two episodes of “Radar Men from the Moon.” The riffing on these is substantially better than it is on “Robot Monster.” The hosted segments are much better than usual for MST3K during this period. Overall, this is quite a watchable episode, especially for this period.
Bride of the Monster
This episode of MST3K riffs on Ed Wood’s Bride of the Monster as well as the first part of a GM training short, Hired! (The second part is on the MST3K Manos: The Hands of Fate.) Overall, the riffing is about average for this period of the show: very good. It is even better if you know a bit about Ed Wood. The hosted segments are weaker than usual, with the exception of a light opera inspired by Hired! that Joel and the three bots perform. At the end of the episode, CamBot re-edit the end of the movie and although it isn’t really funny, it is indeed a great improvement. What is most striking about this episode of MST3K (although probably irrelevant to most viewers) is that this print of Bride of the Monster is exceptional—the best I’ve seen. In the end, this is a better than average episode—well worth spending an hour and a half watching.
And that’s when I met her—TB 152371. As soon as my reviews showed up (it takes Netflix a couple of days, not only to process a review, but to even process a “helpful/not helpful” rating), similar reviews of the same episodes written by TB 152371 also showed up. It was scary. First, she is actually beating me in votes for our Devil Doll reviews and she’s nipping at my heals on Devil Fish (thankfully, I have a substantial lead on the other two). Second, her reviews are so much like mine. She says, for example, “The movie ‘Devil Doll’ is pretty fun and we get to see Tom Servo as a toaster strudel, so that’s awesome.” Of Devil Fish, she says, “The riffing provided some real laugh out loud moments and the host segments were also pretty funny, including the Pearl/Bobo/Brain Guy storyline which I normally can do without.” And she even takes special note of the Hired! light opera, “The ‘Hired’ musical during the host segments is one of my favorite songs[1] of the whole 10 year MST3K series, so its a definite highlight of the episode.” Who is TB 152371?!
So I did a little research on her. She lives in Burlingame, California—where my older sister lives. She has been a Netflix member for over seven and a half years. And here’s the kicker: she has reviewed 34 films—all of them Mystery Science Theater 3000 episodes! I was immediately smitten. (Of course, I don’t have crushes like other people; when I find a woman—or man—who is interesting, I don’t want to date them; I want to interview them! So if TB 152371 finds out about this article: please contact me; I really want to do an interview. Really.)
This all came to mind because of the movie itself, Parts: The Clonus Horror. It is about clones that are being created to serve as organ donors for the rich and powerful. I know what you’re thinking: isn’t that what that awful movie The Island is about? Indeed it is, and that is why the producers of Parts sued the makers of The Island, pointing out 103 similarities between the films. The Island was a clone of Parts, why couldn’t TB 152371 be a clone of me? The evidence, it turned out, was in the review itself. First, let’s look at TB 152371’s Parts review (you may not be able to see this if you aren’t a Netflix member):
My mom would always tell me about this episode of MST3K and how it was her favorite (it aired during the Sci-Fi Channel era of the show after it left Comedy Central, I had already left for college and didn’t have cable any more). I finally watched it and mom knows best, because this [is] probably one of the funniest episodes of the whole series. Solid, hilarious jokes throughout the whole movie. And normally I don’t really find the antics of Pearl, Bobo and Brain Guy funny, but even their parts were good in this. The film itself is about a facility called Clonus where clones of carefully selected people are created in case they ever need replacement organs. The poor clones have no idea unfortunately and when it is time for them to be harvested they are told that they are going to “America”. Somehow Peter Graves and Dick Sargent got involved in this disaster too, so this episode is an opportunity to see them at the low points of their careers.
I would never have written such a review, and I would certainly be highly disappointed if any clone of mine had written it. Although I agree about not generally finding the antics of Pearl & Co. funny, I disagree that this episode is an exception. In fact, I find them more annoying than usual. What’s more, TB 152371 attacks the base film, calling it a “disaster” when it is actually a rather good movie. She falls into the common trap of judging a $200,000 movie (Parts) by the standards of a $100 million movie (The Island). But no one’s perfect; I still think she is an excellent judge of MST3K episodes. However, she cannot be my clone.
But is she anyone’s clone? Not if we are to believe her generally very believable reviews. She claims to have a mother, which we all know clones do not have. But the question still remains, as TV’s Frank would put it, howling despondently, “Who is TB 152371?!”
I just noticed another Netflix member: Flak Magnet. He has reviewed 820 films. I started looking through them and I noticed that he was often the top rated review. But I noticed something else: his “Helpful” scored tended to be right around 18. So if the film he reviewed hadn’t been reviewed much, he was at the top. If it had, he would be buried—with roughly 18 “Helpful” votes. What’s more, his vote totals have gotten significantly lower since the Netflix “Friends” feature was removed. This got me thinking: Flak had about 18 friends on Netflix; when he reviewed a movie, he told his friends and they all voted it helpful. Once you get a head-start like this on Netflix, it is almost impossible to lose your lead. So maybe it wasn’t such a bad idea for Netflix to get rid of its “Friends” feature.
On the positive side, Flak Magnet has reasonably similar taste in movies to me (that is: good) and his reviews are, on the whole, pretty informative—far better than usual for Netflix. He’s put together his own blog called The Movie Distillery that seems to just contain his short reviews. It ain’t Frankly Curious, but it isn’t without merit.
[1] It just so happens, I have my own favorite MST3K song. It is Tom Servo’s Super Agent Super Dragon—I wish I had the single. And look at the duds Crow’s wearing!
Keith Olbermann is leaving MSNBC. According to the Los Angeles Times, Olbermann’s leaving has nothing to do with the upcoming Comcast merger; this is based upon an MSNBC email announcement. Others say differently. TMZ reports that, “Sources connected with the network tell us … Comcast honchos did not like Keith’s defiance and the way he played in the sandbox.” If this is a case, it is a huge mistake. Olbermann is MSNBC. He is the reason that MSNBC has turned around over the last several years. I really like Lawrence O’Donnell, but If MSNBC really thinks that O’Donnell can fill Olbermann’s shoes, they are crazy. People watch MSNBC because of Olbermann; they watch O’Donnell, Ed Schultz, and yes, even Rachel Maddow because of him. If Olbermann moves to CNN, his viewers will move with him. Bottom line: this was a stupid move on MSNBC’s part. They should have done everything possible to make Olbermann happy. And if they are happy about his departure, it only goes to show that highly-paid executives owe their jobs to something other than intelligence and competance. MSNBC is a brand only in so far as Olbermann is a brand. Good-bye MSNBC! Maybe if you ask real nice, Phil Donahue will come back.
For the past few weeks, I have been in a life-and-death struggle with TB 152371 on Netflix. Let me explain. I had given up writing “reviews” on Netflix, because I found the voting unfair. No one seemed to actually read the reviews; they just clicked “helpful” or “not helpful” if they agreed with your rating. For example, “3 out of 29 members found [the following] review [of