Most newspapers still run free obituaries as well as paid death notices. But the free versions are generally limited in the types of information contain, and as newspapers have cut back on their size they've also reduced the amount of detail the obits contain. At the newspaper where I work, it's pretty much name, age, where the person lived and when and where the funeral is. (Some of the really big papers have eliminated the free ones altogether).
The paid death notices, on the other hand, function more like classifieds: You can write it any way you want, and you pay by the line or the word.
What most people don't realize, though, is that the funeral homes charge a hefty free even for providing the newspaper with the barebones information for a free obit. And some funeral homes do an appalling job. One major home in my city seems to pick the employee with the most God-awful penmanship to scrawl the information by hand; names are hard to read and details like place names are often misspelled. One of my first newsroom jobs largely consisted of fact-checking the info the funeral homes frequently got wrong (incorrectly putting two t's in "Paterson, NJ," stuff like that). Of course, the papers have pretty much cut all those jobs as well.
The documentary-style shaky camera thing goes back decades but got its first big exposure in prime time TV via "Hill Street Blues," more than 25 years ago. Interestingly, the producers of BSG have said they consciously sought to imitate the look and feel of Hill Street. IMO, it heightens the realism.
The coolest shot in the entire series might have been when the nuclear bomb went off on the Cloud 9 during Baltar's inauguration. One of the pieces of debris flew through space and hit the camera, spinning it around cracking the lens. It was a subtle effect but kind of brilliant -- it sent the message "yes, we really film this series in space."
Several voters who lacked the most basic intelligence in comprehending the shockingly simple instructions on a paper ballot voted in Florida. These voters submitted flawed ballots that, for example, had hanging chads which should have been removed to clearly indicate which candidate should receive the vote. Speaking as someone who actually voted in Palm Beach County in the 2000 election, as opposed to hearing about it on Fox News, that butterfly ballot was more than a little counterintuitive. The county had never used that design before, with the arrows pointing toward the center holes from both directions and the minor-party candidates' holes interspersed between the Democratic and GOP candidates.
Also, the way the punchcard and ballot booklet were loaded into the machine, the holes and the arrows didn't exactly line up. You had to guess which arrow was closest to the hole you wanted to punch. I remember thinking at the time how easy it would be to vote for Buchanan instead of Gore, although I had no idea how many people would fall for that.
I know I voted the way I intended because I held my punchcard up to the light afterward to make sure I'd hit the correct hole. But the elections office had never advised anyone to do that, and it wasn't part of the standard voting instructions. (Polling places also had prominent signs that said "No talking," which caused some voters to believe they couldn't ask questions.) Nobody had ever heard of the word "chad." I doublechecked the ballot only because it was so confusing.
If a person is so stupid that he cannot understand simple instructions, then his vote would likely not have been an informed vote: no vote is certainly better than an idiotic vote.
Hey, it's Florida. We have a lot of older people with bad eyesight and impaired mobility, plus people whose first language isn't English. None of this is synonymous with "idiotic" or "unsure of which candidate they want in the White House." Voting isn't meant to be a dexterity/logic puzzle; in fact, U.S. law specifically forbids literacy tests as a prerequisite for voting. All an election is supposed to do is to record the intent of the voter, preferably as seamlessly as possible.
My take on it is that Vader, believing the lie that he had killed Padme, lost his will to overthrow Palpatine and rule the galaxy -- without the woman for whom he sold his soul, what's the use? Plus his life now depends on this high-tech suit that the Emperor no doubt controls somehow (maybe a chip that can be switched off if he gets unruly), and Palpatine no doubt has some other Dark Side-related hold on to him. Also, Darth may not be strong enough to kill Palpatine by himself anymore.
So in the intervening 16-20 years, Vader channels all his rage, hatred, guilt and self-loathing into becoming the baddest ass in the galaxy.
Sometime between Eps 4 and 5, when Vader learns the identity of that protege of Obi-Wan's who destroyed the Death Star (hey, maybe the Empire should have been keeping a lookout for Skywalkers from Tatooine?), he indeed realizes that Palpatine had lied to him all those years before, and how much was stolen from him. That's when he renews his decision to overthrow the Emperor, but this time only if he can get his son to join him. Of course, he has to bide his time and make a big show to the Emperor of how willing he is to destroy his son.
It certainly helps explains why he was so murderously anxious to find Luke in Ep 5. I wonder if he also spent any time secretly looking to find out if Padme was still alive?
Actually, corporations have been banned from directly giving to federal candidates since the early 1900s. Instead, the companies form political action committees that funnel "voluntary" contributions from their executives, officers and employees, along with their spouses.
So it's not Disney giving all that money to Senator Hollings. It's money that Mike Eisner's employees spontaneously donated out of their concern for the good people of South Carolina.
PAC's, of course, were a result of the last time Congress tried to "take money out of politics" in 1974.
But the RIAA is a heck of a lot more than Top 40, and you're subject to the fees if you play music from any RIAA-affiliated label. Sonic Youth and Stereolab are both on major labels in the U.S., hence are part of the RIAA realm (maybe they shouldn't be, you could argue, but that's another matter), yet I have never heard them on a commercial station. Maybe a college deejay wants to play Lucinda Williams, or maybe he/she wanted to play a bunch of Ramones songs after Joey died the other month. What then? What about George Harrison early-70s solo songs apart from "My Sweet Lord"? I don't see any royalty breaks for unpopularity in the Copyright Office's proposal.
That would place certain artists in a bind -- the commercial Top 40 crap stations *don't* play them, and the college/non-commercial stations *couldn't afford* to play them. There's a huge middle ground of artists between Limp Bizkit and East River Pipe that the mass market ignores. They shouldn't be barred from the web to boot.
Fuck that. Did you read the entire article? College and community radio stations -- the stations least likely to reach an "enormous" audience under any circumstances -- will be the first ones forced off the air by these fees (which you admit are outrageous). Not only that, but the RIAA is demanding fees from webcasters that over-the-air radio broadcasters don't have to pay. Where is the fairness there?
Yes, these stations could make "the conscious decision to just stop webcasting," but who would benefit then? All we'd be left with is an Internet filled with the same Clear Channel and Infinity stations that have glutted the airwaves with crap. And there's no reason for them to webcast, because they all sound pretty much alike anyway. (Which, incidentally, is why your N and L example makes no sense.)
This is precisely the time and place to bash the RIAA. I hope this time they get their heads handed to them.
Has anybody checked out an Internet radio called the iRAD? It looked promising but unfortunately has an even worse price-point problem than Kerbango -- they originally were selling them for $399, and now I think they're more than $100 higher than that.
I agree -- the radio dial is abysmal where I live, and while I enjoy listening to Internet radio on my PC, I find that the time and hassle of booting up, linking to the right web page, etc., sort of takes the spontaneity out of it. (Plus I inevitably have to check out my e-mail, then spend more time surfing and less time listening.) I really was looking forward to the idea of an appliance that I could turn on instantly and tune almost like a normal radio.
But this Kerbango gizmo seemed to have a bad odor about it from the start. It got lots of press a year ago when it was in the pure-vaporware stage; the original company kept pushing the release date back from last spring and would never disclose the price.
Also, it was originally supposed to be able to access the net using a 56K modem. After 3Com got ahold of it, it went the pure-broadband route, which knocked me and about 90% of the U.S. population out of the market.
Anyway, I'm sure someone will make a net radio that works.
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Most newspapers still run free obituaries as well as paid death notices. But the free versions are generally limited in the types of information contain, and as newspapers have cut back on their size they've also reduced the amount of detail the obits contain. At the newspaper where I work, it's pretty much name, age, where the person lived and when and where the funeral is. (Some of the really big papers have eliminated the free ones altogether).
The paid death notices, on the other hand, function more like classifieds: You can write it any way you want, and you pay by the line or the word.
What most people don't realize, though, is that the funeral homes charge a hefty free even for providing the newspaper with the barebones information for a free obit. And some funeral homes do an appalling job. One major home in my city seems to pick the employee with the most God-awful penmanship to scrawl the information by hand; names are hard to read and details like place names are often misspelled. One of my first newsroom jobs largely consisted of fact-checking the info the funeral homes frequently got wrong (incorrectly putting two t's in "Paterson, NJ," stuff like that). Of course, the papers have pretty much cut all those jobs as well.
The documentary-style shaky camera thing goes back decades but got its first big exposure in prime time TV via "Hill Street Blues," more than 25 years ago. Interestingly, the producers of BSG have said they consciously sought to imitate the look and feel of Hill Street. IMO, it heightens the realism.
The coolest shot in the entire series might have been when the nuclear bomb went off on the Cloud 9 during Baltar's inauguration. One of the pieces of debris flew through space and hit the camera, spinning it around cracking the lens. It was a subtle effect but kind of brilliant -- it sent the message "yes, we really film this series in space."
Also, the way the punchcard and ballot booklet were loaded into the machine, the holes and the arrows didn't exactly line up. You had to guess which arrow was closest to the hole you wanted to punch. I remember thinking at the time how easy it would be to vote for Buchanan instead of Gore, although I had no idea how many people would fall for that.
I know I voted the way I intended because I held my punchcard up to the light afterward to make sure I'd hit the correct hole. But the elections office had never advised anyone to do that, and it wasn't part of the standard voting instructions. (Polling places also had prominent signs that said "No talking," which caused some voters to believe they couldn't ask questions.) Nobody had ever heard of the word "chad." I doublechecked the ballot only because it was so confusing.
If a person is so stupid that he cannot understand simple instructions, then his vote would likely not have been an informed vote: no vote is certainly better than an idiotic vote.Hey, it's Florida. We have a lot of older people with bad eyesight and impaired mobility, plus people whose first language isn't English. None of this is synonymous with "idiotic" or "unsure of which candidate they want in the White House." Voting isn't meant to be a dexterity/logic puzzle; in fact, U.S. law specifically forbids literacy tests as a prerequisite for voting. All an election is supposed to do is to record the intent of the voter, preferably as seamlessly as possible.
My take on it is that Vader, believing the lie that he had killed Padme, lost his will to overthrow Palpatine and rule the galaxy -- without the woman for whom he sold his soul, what's the use? Plus his life now depends on this high-tech suit that the Emperor no doubt controls somehow (maybe a chip that can be switched off if he gets unruly), and Palpatine no doubt has some other Dark Side-related hold on to him. Also, Darth may not be strong enough to kill Palpatine by himself anymore.
So in the intervening 16-20 years, Vader channels all his rage, hatred, guilt and self-loathing into becoming the baddest ass in the galaxy.
Sometime between Eps 4 and 5, when Vader learns the identity of that protege of Obi-Wan's who destroyed the Death Star (hey, maybe the Empire should have been keeping a lookout for Skywalkers from Tatooine?), he indeed realizes that Palpatine had lied to him all those years before, and how much was stolen from him. That's when he renews his decision to overthrow the Emperor, but this time only if he can get his son to join him. Of course, he has to bide his time and make a big show to the Emperor of how willing he is to destroy his son.
It certainly helps explains why he was so murderously anxious to find Luke in Ep 5. I wonder if he also spent any time secretly looking to find out if Padme was still alive?
I think you meant this.
So it's not Disney giving all that money to Senator Hollings. It's money that Mike Eisner's employees spontaneously donated out of their concern for the good people of South Carolina.
PAC's, of course, were a result of the last time Congress tried to "take money out of politics" in 1974.
That would place certain artists in a bind -- the commercial Top 40 crap stations *don't* play them, and the college/non-commercial stations *couldn't afford* to play them. There's a huge middle ground of artists between Limp Bizkit and East River Pipe that the mass market ignores. They shouldn't be barred from the web to boot.
Yes, these stations could make "the conscious decision to just stop webcasting," but who would benefit then? All we'd be left with is an Internet filled with the same Clear Channel and Infinity stations that have glutted the airwaves with crap. And there's no reason for them to webcast, because they all sound pretty much alike anyway. (Which, incidentally, is why your N and L example makes no sense.)
This is precisely the time and place to bash the RIAA. I hope this time they get their heads handed to them.
Any idea what Phillips will sell its radio for?
I agree -- the radio dial is abysmal where I live, and while I enjoy listening to Internet radio on my PC, I find that the time and hassle of booting up, linking to the right web page, etc., sort of takes the spontaneity out of it. (Plus I inevitably have to check out my e-mail, then spend more time surfing and less time listening.) I really was looking forward to the idea of an appliance that I could turn on instantly and tune almost like a normal radio. But this Kerbango gizmo seemed to have a bad odor about it from the start. It got lots of press a year ago when it was in the pure-vaporware stage; the original company kept pushing the release date back from last spring and would never disclose the price. Also, it was originally supposed to be able to access the net using a 56K modem. After 3Com got ahold of it, it went the pure-broadband route, which knocked me and about 90% of the U.S. population out of the market. Anyway, I'm sure someone will make a net radio that works.