Today's Celebrity Sighting 7.30.08

Comedy Central in the house! Thomas Lennon at the Hold Steady concert and Rob Corddry and Ed Helms hanging at the Frolic Room.

Bias Bullshit and $500 Shoes

Despite the whining from McCain and his camp, a recent study by The Center for Media and Public Affairs at George Mason University found that, in fact, the media has been predominately more critical of Obama, rather than the reverse.

Nooooooo kidding. I'm a hardcore DVR addict, but lately have been wandering around the tube and watching Fox. Truly, truly scary. Honestly, it's so biased it's reeediculous. I know I'm about 7.5 years late on this revelation, but coming face-to-face with it and the recent Hardball interview where Scott McClellan told Chris Matthews that the White House would leak leads directly to Fox, has really brought this into focus. So, if the real media is at BEST balanced (but, actually tougher on Obama) and Fox and all the right wingers are unethical and massively slanted, how can the Dems even compete??? Cue the holier-than-thou, bathroom foot tapping, economically hypocritical, homophobic Republicans. And to my final point, and a window into the balance of political analysis, I turn to John McCain and a pair of $520 loafers and who cares? From Christopher Hayes at The Nation:

If I were a right-wing blogger, and I found out that Barack Obama was wearing Ferragamo loafers that cost $520, I would spend about 50% of my waking hours making sure everyone knew this. I would mock him for being an out-of-touch elitist and make jokes like, "If you think that's a lot, you should see how much his purse costs " I would send the link to Drudge and wait for Instapundit to pick it up, and then watch gleefully as Fox News ran segments about how Barack Obama's $500 loafers vitiate his entire economic platform. But of course, I'm not a right-wing blogger. And the $520 shoes belong to John McCain. And frankly, I don't think how much his shoes cost matters one whit for how he'd govern the country.

Better, Faster, Stronger, Vocal

Here are two quick things to prove the unassailable appeal of genre-crossing.

Earthquake

An earthquake rattled LA this morning. In my office on the 25th floor there was a large smash and then some serious swaying. It's pretty unsettling when you look out the window and see the earth moving from 300 feet up.

More from CNN,

LOS ANGELES, California (CNN) -- A magnitude-5.4 earthquake has struck just east of Los Angeles, according to the U.S. Geological Survey.
Officials say there are no immediate reports of damage or injuries. The epicenter was 3 miles west-southwest of Chino Hills and 28 miles east-southeast of the Los Angeles Civic Center, which is in downtown Los Angeles, the USGS reports. The epicenter was about 8.5 miles deep. In general, earthquakes closer to the surface produce stronger shaking and can cause more damage than those farther underground. It was felt from Los Angeles to San Diego and across the border in Tijuana, Mexico. The quake struck at 11:42 a.m. (2:42 p.m. ET), according to the USGS. Kate Hutton, a staff seismologist at Caltech, said 11 aftershocks followed, with 3.8 being the largest and the only one felt, the Los Angeles Times reported.

No major aftershocks so far. Whew!

Jetpacks!

Dreams are coming true for thousands of scifi and geek grownups and kids this week. A totally amateur inventor from New Zealand has gone public with his personal jetpack. Plans are to demo it in more depth at an airshow in Wisconsin this week, but the NYT reports,

With the startling power of its twin rotors and its 200-horsepower engine behind my shoulder blades screaming like an army of leaf blowers, it felt almost as if I were doing the lifting myself, with muscles I did not know I had. It felt like living in the future — and, even better, the future we imagined back when it was something to be hoped for rather than feared.

Needless to say, that is awesome. The story continues,

The current iteration of the product, the 11th, weighs about 250 pounds and provides 600 pounds of thrust. It includes safety features like a so-called ballistic parachute with a small explosive charge for rapid deployment in case of an emergency, like those used in some small airplanes. The pedestal that forms the main support for the device has a shock absorber like a pogo stick to soften landings. The weight of the engines and body of the flier sits lower than the rotors to create a pendulum effect that discourages the contraption from tipping upside down and creating what might be called the lawn dart effect.

“People come up and go, ‘Is it safe?’ ” Mr. Martin said. “Safety is a relative thing. We think we have done a lot to make this by far the safest jetpack ever built.” But, he acknowledged, “It’s not a high bar.”

More, including video here.

Irrefutable Proof: People, with no souls!!!

After years and years of raging debate, despite attempts to humanize people like Stalin, Bush and Hitler, the results are in, courtesy of... Wall-E and the New York Times.

I saw the film last night in a funky Koreatown Theater (with Korean subtitles... which appeared even when EVA and Wall-E were speaking gibberish when they first meet, but that's another story) and was completely, constantly enthralled, laughing, feeling, amazed et cetera. Waking up this morning, I circled back to st the Times said about it, and was shocked, then amazed, then mad, then shocked again to see the discussion thread. Here are some highlights:

If I didn't know better the person who came up with this story line had something against "overweigh" people. come on now, the first thing my neice said was Auntie they are all "fat" and floating in chairs sipping on shakes. Isn't that awful.

"The press loves WALL-E because of its environmental preaching. As I sat their eating my Large Popcorn and Large Soda as did practically everyone else in the movie only to be chastised by this presumputous film. Using a future where the world is a trash heap abandoned by humans who have become to fat and lazy to move by themselves and where robots have more emotion than humans, the producers and designers try to brainwash youth to believe that consumerism is a wasteful evil and that obese people are undesireable. This kind of trashy film could only come from the glutonous hypocrites in hollywood who stack their piles of money on the same consumerism that they so self-righteously attack as evil and world destroying."

And my personal favorite:

"This 'movie', and I use the term loosely, is nothing more than an overpriced commercial for all the liberal think-tanks and their false propagation of enviornmental awareness. I certainly would not have paid to see it had I known it was such blatant propaganda. Wall-E is pretty and that is about all that can be said for it. There is nothing subtle about the message this film purports to get across to the viewer. It wasn't funny or interesting enough to hold my attention. Even the ridiculous notion of evolution gets its due in this farce. This is, by far, the worst Pixar movie ever made. Robots with a soul? Really? Come on, Pixar, give us a little credit for having some common sense. It is really too bad that this film will probably program some young children to actually worry that humankind will someday burn themselves up with global warming or make the earth uninhabitable from their own actions. What a bunch of garbage!"

Wow. "False propagation of environmental awareness" How can a person simultaneously produce a relatively complex sentence like that, yet believe themselves all the same? How could a person not be warmed over by this amazing film? No soul.

Not to go on too much, but this begs at something I've wondered for a while about a fundamental difference in people. Thought provoking:

In the experiment college students across the political spectrum were instructed to tap an M whenever it appeared on a computer monitor and to ignore a W that appeared about 20 percent of the time while an electroencephalograph recorded brain activity. Data showed that students who identified themselves as liberal scored higher for accuracy and were almost five times as likely to show activity in brain circuits associated with conflict, suggesting a strong capacity for dealing with change and novelty. Meanwhile, conservative students were better at blocking out distracting new information which may lead them to favor structure and tradition.

Banksy uncovered

According to the Daily Mail reported by Time, they have uncovered the man behind the street personna Banksy. Read more here.

Airborne Toxic Event Concert Poster

See you guys there.

Stalemate

Mr. Maze, my own very stale mate, and I have recently been locked in a epic battle of Scrabulous, approaching a stalemate. Yes, that's how it's spelled, though it looks weird. I think it indicates something about the subconscious tendency to make words in a certain direction, but either way it has eerily crop-circled it's way into the formation of an E!

A Shipping Container of Bass

Leave it to dumb audio guys to call it the Matterhorn, but it's technically the largest subwoofer in the world. I'm not sure what I would do with myself if I were to visit it. Maybe crap my pants and go deaf (at the same time).