something fishy...

Guess who got a digital camera with a fisheye lens? This is just a hint of the fun that's in store for all of us!

what wine goes best with crow?

For the eight years of the Bush presidency (those dark days before Obama won the election and appointed a unicorn secretary of state and a leprechaun secretary of defense and everyone in Washington started pooping rainbows) I've wondered HOW people could believe the lies spread by the right-wing media.

Today, I have my answer:

Because they wanted to.

And do you know how I know this? Because, faithful readers, I have been HAD, but I was complicit in my own...hadding (remember I said that, it's going to seem really funny about five paragraphs from now).

I believed the Fox news report that Sarah Palin did not know Africa was a continent. I read it on the Huffpo, was intrigued enough to watch a related clip on YouTube, then happily referenced this "fact" several hundred times during the next week.

Until a friend pointed out to me that a) it was really unlikely Palin thought Africa was a country (my argument had been it made sense, because what she can't see from her front porch, she can't know) and b) it was odd that I was believing Fox News now, after eight years of dismissing the entire network as an affirmative action program for congenital liars.

And the answer, of course, is that I believed it BECAUSE I WANTED TO. And I still want to. Oh how I want to. But I do not think, in all honesty, that I can.

It turns out it was an elaborate hoax

Now, on a seemingly unrelated note, I, for reasons I actually cannot explain, I also recently watched a clip from an Oprah interview with Jennifer Aniston (so much for that little dinner party trick where I pretend I've never heard of either of them and ask people to 'hum the theme to Friends to see if it jogs my memory,' or explain why anyone would want to announce the results of a paternity test on national television).

Having laughed and laughed and laughed at Sarah Palin for her inability to complete a coherent sentence, I watched these two high-profile Obama supporters with some embarassment. This (my god, what won't I do for you people?) is a (reasonably) accurate transcript of about 2 minutes of the Oprah (O)/Aniston (A) interview:

O.…that I thought, this time last week everyone was talking about the election, now it’s WHAT JENNIFER SAID

A. Yeah

O.…on the on the cover of Vogue.

A. Well…

O. And what you said was what Angelina did was very uncool

A. I didn’t say that exactly…But you know what? That was, unfortunately, so not en vogue in my opinion, but…you know, the the the cover line does not even come i…the contents does not reflect the cover.

O. It’s really a wonderful story. Okay, well I will say, Jonathan Van Meter …ah…he…he’s

A. He's great.

O. He’s a great interviewer…I love the story… but you…is this out of context? You did say what Angelina did was very uncool? You did say that, you just didn’t expect it to be on the cover.

A. Well, no …ah…you don’t expect…He asked me a question and I basically just answered it as honestly as I could. You know I don’t … I don’t go there. You know what I mean?

O. Yeah, yeah.

A. Cause it’s a hundred years old, for chrissake.

(Audience hoots, cheers, claps)

A. It’s true.

O. But okay, since it’s…you know…

A. And a hundred, to be exact.

O. And a hundred an’…but since it’s what all the pundints (sic) or newspeople were talking about this morning

A. Yeah

O. What you’re saying was uncool was a statement that Angelina had made earlier, saying that ..uhhhh… it would be nice, later on, to have their children look at the film of them falling in love. That’s what you were referring to, right?

A. Su…Somethin’ like that.

O. Yeah, the that…that it was very uncool.

A. You know…d’I don’t know…by it’s that’s just me

O. Okay, so…ahhh…

A. What else did they say? What else they talkin’ about?

O. They actually didn’t go into cause you know, what you go into in this article with Jonathan Van Meter in Vogue I thought it’s so good

A. Yeah

O. This whole oh oh poor Jen

A. Yeah

O. Sh-she’s dating. Is she dating? Is she not?

A. Yeah

O. How’s she doing?

A. Yeah

O. You seem to be doing pretty good, to me. Pretty well.

A. I know, but you know what? I got (hoots, cheers, applause)

O. And even

A. I think that that

O. Okay

A. The the you know the the the unfortunate reality is that good news just isn’t as interesting and I think that, you know, especially at a time when there’s such positivity in in the collective of what’s going on, negativity is still what sells.

Okay, I'll make it stop. (The real interview went on considerably longer and they may both have become more eloquent... but I doubt it.)

Now, Aniston is an actress, so can be forgiven if, when without a script, she wanders away from the rules of standard English like a steer that's just found a hole in the fence. But Oprah runs a MEDIA EMPIRE. She talks for a living. AND she prefaced this interview by saying it was going to be about what Jennifer SAID, implying that the things Jennifer says are of some import. Yet, if you boil down what Jennifer says in this interview, it basically amounts to, "Yeah."

And suddenly, I have to at least give Palin credit for trying to talk about serious issues even though the results were very, very sad.

Then again, had Katie Couric used her time with Palin to discuss the Aniston/Pitt breakup, I'd probably still be laughing.

Instead of doing what I'm doing now.

Pass the crow, please...

[Pictured, above left: Jonathan Van Meter. You didn't really think I'd post a picture of Oprah or Jennifer Aniston, did you?]

i have seen the future baby, and it's murder

Man sits down in front of a computer and types a question: "When will you be able to do everything I can do?"

Computer whirrs and clicks (it's MY computer) and types: "That reminds me of a story..."

All by way of introducing my musings on artificial intelligence. When computers can do everything humans can, it's going to be a nightmare. Mark my words.

Say you get a parking ticket (I don't have a car, so the chances of my getting a parking ticket are slim; in fact, my getting a parking ticket would probably be the start of a low-rent, modern-day version of 'The Trial,' but that's why I said "YOU" get a parking ticket, to keep this in the realm of the possible).

Anyway, you get a parking ticket, and when you go to pay it, the clerk at the DMV (you were doing your funky freestyle parking in Canada, did I mention that?) calls up your file, which the computer obligingly presents but, because it now thinks like a human, it realizes it has access to all kinds of other information about you and it can't resist taking a peek, and having peeked, it can't resist the urge to share, so it adds an aside about the state of your liver or your credit rating or the Ann Rice boxed set you bought from Amazon last month. All prefaced, of course, with "I hate to say it, but..." or "I'm not judging, but...," or "You know what they say - today parking tickets, tomorrow unpremeditated homicide..."

And that's assuming computers are sharing the FACTS about you. A computer that truly thought like a human being would eventually get too lazy to bother checking its actual files, and just take a stab at it - or better still, MAKE SOMETHING UP. (I will admit right now, I am imagining a computer that thinks like ME, and I just went to the optician for new glasses and took a stab at my dioptics, got them wrong, and must now choose between calling the store and confessing my stupidity or getting a pair of glasses that would have given my 13-year-old self the gift of 20/20 vision).

WHY would I want my computer to think like ME? Instead of being arranged alphabetically in neat folders and subfolders on my hard drive, my files would suddenly be strewn willy-nilly all over my desktop, where there would (somehow) also be dirty coffee cups and remotes for DVD players that no longer function.

No, I like my computers the way I like my presidents - black.

And smarter than me.