Go Democrats!

And now to more important things: YouTube & Hamsters

From the Wall Street Journal:

Coming to Your TV — Homemade Hamster Videos?

Web sites like YouTube have vaulted into the vanguard of Internet entertainment by providing a medium for people to post videos of practically any imaginable activity, from bizarre pet antics to teenagers riding shopping carts into walls.

Now some of the country’s largest telecom operators, including Comcast Corp. and Verizon Communications Inc., are trying to determine if there’s a business in putting such videos on television.

On Monday, Comcast launched a trial version of ziddio.com, . . .

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I hope everyone who can vote is voting today. And I hope you vote for the good guys. I’m swinging wildly between optimism and pessimism from minute to minute, to the point that I may soon need a hamburger / some drugs to calm me down. Time to go to Burger King.

• U.S. Cops Sue Over Drug-Spiked Burgers

Meanwhile, here’s a good news / bad news round-up for election day:

• Republicans closing gap as U.S. votes.” 
• Democrats concerned about races they thought they had in the bag.”
• In better news from Virginia, Jim Webb . . .

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Sufjan Stevens, Illinois (2005)

Talkdemonic, Beat Romantic (2006)

Victory at Sea, All Your Things Are Gone (2005)

Young People, All at Once (2006)

First off, I should say that this post is several years past its expiration date. It’s like I see a requiem for indie rock in some magazine or another every year, so I shouldn’t annoy anyone by adding my voice to the chorus now. But the sheer mediocrity of three of my recent CD orders left me with no other way to review them than by clustering them into a . . .

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Campaigns are getting dirtier and dirtier — I thought some of the Minnesota races’ ads were bad, but Senator Allen’s staff here literally stoops pretty low, wrestling a constituent to the floor. With a headlock.

As you may have heard in video above, CNN reports that Mike Stark, the guy with the backpack who was roughed up, was a “protester.” Mr. Stark, in a letter to a local news station here, identifies himself as a “law student at the University of Virginia, a marine, and a citizen journalist.” You might know him better as . . .

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It’s a pirate movie, and that’s it.  Anything you saw in Pirates of the Caribbean, you could pretty much see here first.  But despite its lack of ambition, Cutthroat Island is nowhere near bad enough that it should have ended Geena Davis’s career.  It keeps its feet firmly planted in B-Movie Land, whether with the incongruously lipsticked British governor-general or with the immortal line of Marion-Berry-esque dialogue, “Bitch stole my map!”  Which is delivered with a perfect poker face by Frank Langella, who doesn’t seem to care that he’s in B-Movie Land. 

Davis, by contrast, doesn’t seem to . . .

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