So in the spirit of ecuminical television, I had a brainstorm in what was an otherwise redundant meeting today. John Edward of Crossing Over and Aamer Haleem of Bands Reunited join forces for Bands Crossing Over. A show where your favorite 80's bands, some of whose members have crossed the ethereal plain, reunite for one night of music and seances.

INXS reunites with Michael Hutchence through the power of medium Edward and the persistant charm of Haleem.

Edward channels Jam Master J while Haleem dodges bullets to sign up Run and DMC for a spooky night of racially insensitive frights.

I'm in the wrong industry.

http://apnews.myway.com/article/20050301/D88IBJF00.html

While I can appreciate that this story leads off with the protests against terrorism, one sentece just does not do justice to what is a fairly significant event in Iraq. Instead the focus of the rest of the article is on the video of kidnapped French journalist Florence Aubenas. While sad and unfortunate and I hope for her safe return to France, ditto for most of Hollywood, this is not the way the tide is going now. Iraqis have found their voice now that they have seen a successful election. They realize they can speak their minds at the ballot box and now speak out against the true enemies of their future, terrorists. And not anonymously. That is amazing. This is a country that has toiled under the tyranny of fear that prevented the kinds of displays of outrage that happened today. Couple this with the resignation of the Syrian backed government in Lebanon and the protests in Martyr's Square over the weekend against Syria's occupation and you have to wonder how any respectable news organization could have it's head buried so far up it's, uih, buried in the sand. Could Bush have been right as some lefty European papers have been suggesting? And yet Katie Couric, dear Katie, what are you talking about on Today? Jeff Gannon. "Reporter." Katie Couric. "Talent." Remember CBS? Dan Rather? CNN's ratings? Lo but for the grace of God go thee...oh wait seperation of church and state, and all...huh, your screwed.

So, started visiting this new bar by my house recently with friends. They do Karaoke on Mondays. The bartender makes seriously strong drinks and cheaper than other bars. Anyway, I belted out some Neil Diamond and Elvis. Heres a pic of me with my new "personal lady friend" at said establishment. A hook-up through a friend that actually worked out. Smashingly, I might add. Who would have thought that I would meet someone in the PNW who not only knows who Milton Friedman, Thomas Sowell, and F.A. Hayek are but have read them and like and agree with them. And can you say Scalia? Yes that Scalia, as in Antonin. Hooray for my dirty liberal friends that hook me up with virtuous conservative hotties.

You can call me a partisan. Whatever, but the governors election in Washington is a debacle. It smacked of "count until our guy(or girl in this case) wins." More power to Rossi if he decides to take this to the supreme court of Washington, or the nation. I don't think he'll gain any polical points by doing so since most of the electorate is tired of the whole thing, but if it forces a change in election laws in this state then he's done more good then most elected officials. This whole things stinks. Election workers actually redid ballots that were rejected by the machines, devining intent on the part of the voter. Every vote should count, but if you aren't capable of such a simple system, yours' shouldn't. They continued to "find" votes in King County, ~1500 I think, throughout the recounts, a county that is heavily democratic and Gregoire won with ~60% of the vote. If this is payback for 2000, then the democratic party has a lot of growing up to do before they will ever be capable of captivating the mainstream electorate. Not only that, but Gregiore comes into office with a serious case of illegitimacy. She can try to pretend she was above thre frey, but that is disingenuous. She wanted to win this one at all costs. While it may seem hypocritical for Rossi to demand a revote, he is not alone in this. Former secretaries of state from both parties had put this on the table long before he did. A few suggestions for reform.: - Get rid of abscentee ballots unless you are legitimately not gong to be in the state on the day of the vote, Military, school, etc. If your too lazy to go to the polls, then you are probably to lazy to be properly educated on the issues/candidates. - No more hand recounts, they are inaccurate and prone to fraud. - No tallies from any precinct should be reported untill all precincts are finished counting. - If it wasn't counted the first time, then the votes should not be a part of the subsequent recounts. End of line, Dillinger.

So I was playing Halo 2 the other night and I had an interesting encounter. Now I fully realize that one can't expect the level of discourse to rise much above neanderthal, and conflict resolution is that much worse. That being said, one of the cool features of the game is the ability to boot people if the TK, or team kil,l you. This happened to me. I was TK'd so I booted the guy. Not 30 seconds later I recieved notification that I had recieved a message via Halo 2's Live messaging system. Apparently this guy didn't approve of my judge, jury, and executioner mentality and expressed as much sprinkled with such epithets as "Jew", "dirty", some choice explitives, and something about how I should never do that again. Hmm, I thought to myself, this could turn out to be really fun if I antagonized the mental wee child a bit. So I responded with a message of my own that was nothing more than condescending laughter. Wow, I opened pandoras box. What proceeded were 5-7 more messages in rapid succession, each a shining example of how much public education sucks and that this country needs a little more Jebus. Unfortunately, the messages are now gone, but next time this happens I will be recording them for posterity and will gladly share.

So about a month ago I discovered the joy that is RSS feeds. I am one lazy person and this just makes my web surfing far less taxing. If you aren't familiar with RSS check this out: http://www.xml.com/pub/a/2002/12/18/dive-into-xml.html. That said here are the sites I get feeds from: Anandtech - http://www.anandtech.com/rss/articlefeed.aspx Anandtech Price feed - http://labs.anandtech.com/rss.aspx Overlawyered - http://www.overlawyered.com/index.rdf Point of Law - http://www.pointoflaw.com/index.rdf Cnet News - http://news.com.com/2547-1_3-0-5.xml Slashdot - http://slashdot.org/index.rss Slashdot Games - http://games.slashdot.org/games.rss Mac OS X hints - http://www.macosxhints.com/backend/geeklog.rdf Wired Business - http://www.wired.com/news/feeds/rss2/0,2610,1,00.xml Wired Culture - http://www.wired.com/news/feeds/rss2/0,2610,2,00.xml Wired Politics - http://www.wired.com/news/feeds/rss2/0,2610,4,00.xml Wired Technology - http://www.wired.com/news/feeds/rss2/0,2610,3,00.xml Do you have an RSS feed you like/think others might? Let me know.