Because they produce ridiculous quotes like this one, from the mayor of Arlington, TN, speaking about the President’s decision to hold a prime-time address to the nation to announce an escalation of forces in Afghanistan:

“Ok, so, this is total crap, we sit the kids down to watch ‘The Charlie Brown Christmas Special’ and our muslim president is there, what a load…..try to convince me that wasn’t done on purpose.”

No extra commentary needed. Mayor Russell Wiseman pretty accurately captured the sentiment of the nation with that comment. Which, by the way, he posted to Facebook.

$23 quadrillion. That’s how much a New Hampshire man was incorrectly charged for a pack of cigarettes he bought at a gas station.

Incidentally, that’s 2,000 times larger than the national debt. That sucks.

I saw this in the Wall Street Journal today.

Apparently a mining town in Guinea built a lot of mud huts during the recent commodities boom. But when the price of natural resources plummeted this past year, so did demand for the newly built mud huts. Now rows and rows of huts sit vacant.

It’s kind of funny, but then you realize the huts are only $6.50/mo to rent–if that’s a monthly expense people are being forced to cut out of their lives, think what else they must be cutting out…

When I picture my married life, I usually wander down the “well, what if I get divorced?” path (with half of all marriages ending in divorce, can you blame me?). And more often than not, it’s just as rosy as the “happily ever after” path.

Well of couse, we’ll live in one big house with separate wings for me and my ex, but we’ll all meet halfway in the middle. It will be perfect. That white picket fence will still be there. Very few changes, really.

Ariana Huffington, who split with her husband Michael (who later admitted that he is bisexual) twelve years ago, documents her post-divorce relationship with her ex on her blog in a post titled “Vacationing with my Ex”:

“Just like marriage, divorce isn’t easy either, and ours has been no exception. But even though we no longer had a marriage to keep us together, we had something even more powerful — our daughters. And, spurred by our mutual devotion to them, we have made a huge effort to work through all the difficulties and be friends.

This has included spending Christmas Day and both of our girls’ birthdays together as a family every year. And, little by little, with a lot of hard work, we’ve grown closer and closer. Indeed, a couple of years ago, on what would have been our 20th wedding anniversary, a magnificent bouquet of flowers that included twenty yellow roses arrived at my home. The card said, “Happy 20th Anniversary. We’ll always be the parents of two remarkable young women. Love, Michael.”

I think their efforts to preserve their family’s ties even after divorcing are laudable–it makes my white picket fence dream of sharing a two-winged house with my ex seem plausible. I hope one day, I get married and then get divorced and remain friends with my ex, just like the Huffingtons.

(Well, OK–I guess it would be nice not to get divorced. But Plan B goes something like Arianna describes…)

…that the top of the empire state building was supposed to be a dirigible docking station?

[sorry for the brief hiatus]

The original design called for a flat roof, but the building’s financier, John J. Raskob, thought that looked too boring. He commissioned a 200-ft. spire that not only served as a fitting crown for the building, it doubled as an airport of sorts for dirigibles, fit with a check-in counter and lounge on the 86th story.

But there was one problem–it was pretty difficult to dock a huge dirigible at the top of a New York skyscraper:

“No one worked out one other problem: wind. The steel-and-glass canyons of Manhattan are an airship captain’s nightmare of shifting air currents. Raskob and Smith were inviting the unwieldy craft to come in low and slow, over hazards such as the menacing Chrysler Building spire, and somehow tie up without use of a ground crew. Then, too, if the crew released ballast to maintain pitch control, a torrent of water would cascade onto the streets below. And once secured, a dirigible could be tethered only at the nose, with no ground lines to keep it steady.Passengers would have to make their way down a stinging gangway, nearly a quarter mile in the air, onto a narrow open walkway near the top of the mast. After squeezing through a tight door, they would have to descend two steep ladders inside the mast before reaching the elevators.”

Still, though–how sick would that be??

P.S.–does the word “dirigible” bother anyone else??

June 4th wasn’t just the anniversary of Tank Man, it was also the anniversary of the Killdozer, the best example of small-town politics gone sour I can think of.

On June 4, 2004, Marvin Heemeyer welded himself shut in a bulldozer and terrorized the small town of Granby, Colorado (population: 1,500). Heemeyer had spent the 18 months prior to this event outfitting his bulldozer with two semi-automatic rifles, a 9mm semi-auto pistol, several video cameras so he could monitor what was happening outside, as well as 12″ concrete and steel plated armor–making his bulldozer virtually invinceable to attacks from the outside. Even the National Guard couldn’t stop him.

After destroying 13 buildings and causing nearly $7Million in damages to the town, Heemeyer’s Killdozer lodged itself into the basement of one of the buildings he was plowing through, rendering the vehicle motionless. Heemeyer eventually shot himself before authorities could break into the machine.

I’m waiting for Amy Poehler’s homage to the Killdozer in “Parks and Recreation”–she better do it, that will be THE best episode ever.

P.S.: Thanks Allie for the tip–would you believe we almost let this anniversary pass us by??

This week (specifically today) marks the 20th anniversay of the Tiananmen Square protests, when student activists were joined by working class peasants to protest the communist government.

Students first started gathering in the square on April 17th to mourn the death of a party official who symbolized anti-corruption. But over the following weeks, unrest continued to spread, paralyzing the country. Martial law was declared towards the middle of May, and the army tried several times to put down the protests and retake control over Beijing. The final bloody assault began June 3rd and continued well into the night of June 4th. By the time morning came on June 5th, somewhere around 5,000 people had died (reports range from 2,600-10,000; the government claims 241 people died). Here’s a really good timeline of the events.

Anyway, there is an amazing documentary by Frontline which chronicles the events of 1989 and also discusses China’s evolution since then. The documentary is called The Tank Man, and I highly recommend watching it!

Here’s the intro–the rest other 5 chapters can be found here.

One of the most interesting parts of the documentary is when they show a picture of the “Tank Man” to Chinese university students–none of them know what this is a picture of (fast forward to 0:45 in the video embedded below). The Chinese government has done such a good job censoring the media that such an iconic picture in the West is unknown to the people who live in the country where it was taken. Just take a look at the side-by-side of Google image results, US vs. results when you do the same search in China–that’s how good they are:

University students unable to recognize the context of the Tank Man photo (starts at 0:45):

China decided to send a Taipei zoo two Panda bears as a gift. Zoo workers became suspicious, though, when the traditionally low libido-ed bears were unusually frisky. Turns out they were normal bears, China just spray painted them. before sticking them on a plane. What, like they won’t find out?? Foo real!!!

A response to this Huffington Post article.

Taking a middle of the road approach to the news doesn’t mean that you present a topic and have two unqualified people from each side scream at each other for five minutes with limited interruption by the anchor. That approach is something closer to having someone else do your job for you.

Just because CNN divulged itself from taking a political side doesn’t mean it should have divulged itself from journalism, which seems to be their approach. There will always be two sides (or three or four) to every news story, but just because there are doesn’t mean that each side merits the same amount of air time.

It is the journalists’ responsibility to investigate and present the facts behind a story. At that point, if the story merits a partisan response, only then should outside input be included. And the partisan responses should be included in a moderated fashion; no one gains anything when commentators are given a soap box to spew talking points, unchecked by the facts. If a journalists wishes to include outside remarks, they should be responsible enough to hold these commentators to the truth. It’s one thing to have someone else do your work for you; it’s another thing to ask an unqualified partisan to do your work for you.

I stopped watching CNN not because it became too middle-of-the-road but because they were so concentrated and obsessed with that middle that they failed to present the story effectively and truthfully.
More on CNN
Read the Article at HuffingtonPost