According to the BBC, Mike Huckabee has won the Iowa Republican caucus.
[tags]mike huckabee, iowa caucus[/tags]
Month: January 2008
"No one wins. One side just loses more slowly."
There was a great article about the upcoming final season of The Wire in last Saturday’s Wall Street Journal. It talks about th…wait, where?
In the post-“Sopranos” world, “The Wire” is more central to HBO’s strategy than in years past. The network’s looking to the series to retain subscribers at a time when many in the industry say it’s on shaky ground. In many ways “The Wire” is HBO’s closest cousin to “The Sopranos” — they’re both gritty dramas and they’re loved by critics. (Slate’s Jacob Weisberg has called “The Wire” “the best TV ever broadcast in America.”) It doesn’t hurt that the season will be premiering in early January, against other lineups weakened by the writers’ strike — much of what’s being scheduled is reality television and reruns. “The stakes are higher this time,” says Brad Adgate, a media analyst with ad-buying agency Horizon Media. “The golden age of HBO is over, back when they had ‘Sex and the City,’ ‘Six Feet Under’ and ‘The Sopranos.’ ”
Named for the wiretap that a special police unit uses to listen in on members of a Baltimore drug ring, the show’s title doubles as a metaphor for viewers’ experience of listening in on worlds they’re not usually privy to. When the show first aired in 2002, it focused on a police investigation. In the four subsequent seasons, the program’s scope has spiraled out to include the stevedores’ union, local politics, the school system and the media — in short, it’s a portrait of a struggling American city.
I can’t say it often enough: if you’re not watching this show, start. What with the writer’s strike right now, there’s no better time to pick up the best show on TV today.
[tags]the wire, wall street journal[/tags]
"Hence I am cautiously optimistic."
Interesting stuff found via Brijit, both of which relate to the book I’m reading right now: The Shock Doctrine by Naomi Klein.
From The Washington Post: A Chance to Defend Themselves (Thomas B. Wilner)
More than 300 prisoners remain at Guantanamo. Most have been there almost six years. We now know that the great majority were not captured on any battlefield. They were not even captured by U.S. forces. Rather, as the National Journal reported last year after an exhaustive study into government records, many were simply “innocent, wrongly seized noncombatants” who were “handed over by reward-seeking Pakistanis and Afghan warlords” in exchange for bounties.
From the New York Times: What’s Your Consumption Factor? (Jared Diamond)
The population especially of the developing world is growing, and some people remain fixated on this. They note that populations of countries like Kenya are growing rapidly, and they say that’s a big problem. Yes, it is a problem for Kenya’s more than 30 million people, but it’s not a burden on the whole world, because Kenyans consume so little. (Their relative per capita rate is 1.) A real problem for the world is that each of us 300 million Americans consumes as much as 32 Kenyans. With 10 times the population, the United States consumes 320 times more resources than Kenya does.
The outlook of the second article is more encouraging than the first, which at least ends with cautious optimism from the author, but its central issue is no less troubling.
[tags]brijit, naomi klein, guantanamo, jared diamond, consumption[/tags]
"Thundercats are go!"
I’ve watched far too many movies lately to describe them all in a lot of detail, so here’s the nickel version of each:
- Sicko (imdb | rotten tomatoes) was typical Michael Moore: silly, biased, irreverent and more than a little frightening.
- Hostel Part II (imdb | rotten tomatoes) was rubbish, lacking what tiny scrap of appeal the original had.
- Breaking and Entering (imdb | rotten tomatoes) featured a philanderer played by Jude Law, which must have been a stretch for him. Oh, and I don’t care how old Juliette Binoche is, that woman is sexy.
- No End In Sight (imdb | rotten tomatoes) was a very slick documentary about just how fucked the Iraq situation is. In case you weren’t already aware.
- Juno (imdb | rotten tomatoes) was about as twee as a movie can get, but it was also very, very funny and impossible not to like. Great acting from a great cast.
- Atonement (imdb | rotten tomatoes) was supposed to this sweeping, romantic, epic tale. It was. It was pretty much just like every other sweeping, romantic, epic tale I’ve ever seen. It was decent and unremarkable and that’s probably what makes it so broadly appealing.
I’d say that Juno and No End In Sight were great films; Sicko was very good, and the rest go downhill from there.
[tags]sicko, hostel part ii, breaking and entering, no end in sight, juno, atonement[/tags]
Skirl | Dan Dickinson 