| Last Night’s Viewing and Other Afflictions
I counted about six, culminating, I kid you not, with a dump truck tipping back and unloading its contents. Which somehow seems an appropriate segue to Wednesday's night's CNN/YouTube Republican presidential candidates' debate. You'll recall that in July, the Democrats (in deference to our president, I personally prefer to call them the Democratics, but it's your call) participated in the first YouTube debate. Viewers from around the country submitted their questions via videotape and computer. It was an entertaining, freewheeling evening, as robust and energetic as an old-fashioned town meeting in a beer garden. There were queries about just about everything, from a range of interrogators that included a gun nut and a computer-generated snowman fretting over global warming.
The Year in Year-End Specials
Tanisha made a very good show of getting all up in Darlen's face. (She was held back by Lyric, whose biography notes that she "has been arrested, stolen from her friends and fired from many jobs"). Darlen later defended herself to the audience by invoking linguistic relativism of a sort that might impress Stanley Fish: "If I said it, I didn't mean it, like, 'She's a fat bitch,' like I don't like the girl. No! She's fat, and she's a bitch, OK?" The Bad Girls Club's one structural contribution to the boozing-and-brawling subgenre of reality TV is that such interpersonal explosions lead to a numbing volume of chatter and confession as the dust settles. Insofar as these girls have adopted morally reprehensible personae, they are indeed bad, but they've still got feelings, and those need to be talked about, preferably in the hot tub.
They gotta believe
Bush has squandered through unilateralism and his pursuit of the war on terror.
It's dangerous to read too much into the vote in Iowa. The state is small, its caucuses complex and singular. And issues, ultimately, do matter. Health care, economic security, terrorism, immigration, Social Security, climate change and breaking the nation's oil addiction are all critical.
The urgency of those intractable challenges - and the worrisome sense that our current politics can't produce solutions - has energized the campaigns of candidates, such as Obama, Huckabee and Democrat John Edwards, who appear sincere about trying new ways. That's what enthusiastic young voters and the growing ranks of independent voters appear to want.
The candidates left standing will have to put flesh on the bones of their specific proposals.
Music's Rocky Marriages
Many icons of music and movies die young Jim Morrison, Marc Bolan, Jimi Hendrix and James Dean. But Joy Divisions front man Ian Curtis didn't die in a tragic accident like the many before him he took his own life at the tender age of twenty three in 1980. Anton Corbijns new movie Control looks at the early days of the band Joy division as well as the turbulent relationship he had with his wife. .
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