aTypical Joe: a gay New Yorker living in the rural South
Wednesday, August 24, 2005
Sweet victory
I was just 12 years old. My family and I were on vacation in Virginia. My dad and I were watching television in our motel room. Jerry Falwell’s “Old Time Gospel Hour” was on. Reverend Falwell looked into the camera and, preaching against gay people, said, “Even animals don’t do that.”
That was the first time in my life that I ever felt unworthy of the love of God.
Click here to continue to fallwell.com to see why
Rev. Falwell is completely wrong about
people who are gay or lesbian . . .
Jerry Falwell’s sensibilities were injured by a site calling itself www.fallwell.com. The site clearly said that it had nothing to do with Falwell, and was critical of Falwell’s views—it also received only 200 hits a day.
After a district court found that the name was infringing Falwell’s trademark rights, and ordered the site to transfer its name to Rev. Falwell, the site owner bravely appealed. Today the Fourth Circuit acted with enormous sense, and issued an important opinion [pdf] striking down Rev. Falwell’s claims.
A sweet victory. On so many levels.
A liar too
As if Pat Robertson’s call for the assassination of Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez wasn’t enough, now he’s a documented liar too:
“I didn’t say assassination. I said our special forces should take him out. ‘Take him out’ can be a number of things including kidnapping. There are a number of ways to take out a dictator from power besides killing him. I was misinterpreted.”
Here’s the quote… and here’s the video. He later apologized.
Enhanced Lance again
Allegations surface again that Lance Armstrong (seen here riding past our student center in the Tour de Georgia last spring) took performance enhancing drugs, this time from a 2004 test of 1999 urine samples. For now I choose to believe it’s not true. But I continue to question our privileging “natural abilities” over those worked for, built, earned or acquired through whatever means.
Last time around I said I thought this kind of thing “the reasonable result of a system of coaches, trainers, scientists and businesses creating new drugs, and fans applauding the results of their use” and pointed to this Slate story which asks, If steroids are cheating, why isn’t LASIK?
A week ago, Tiger Woods was celebrated for winning golf’s biggest tournament, the Masters, with the help of superior vision he acquired through laser surgery. What’s the difference?...scores of pro athletes have had laser eye surgery, known as LASIK (Laser-Assisted In Situ Keratomileusis). Many, like Woods, have upgraded their vision to 20/15 or better. Golfers Scott Hoch, Hale Irwin, Tom Kite, and Mike Weir have hit the 20/15 mark. So have baseball players Jeff Bagwell, Jeff Cirillo, Jeff Conine, Jose Cruz Jr., Wally Joyner, Greg Maddux, Mark Redman, and Larry Walker. Amare Stoudemire and Rip Hamilton of the NBA have done it, along with NFL players Troy Aikman, Ray Buchanan, Tiki Barber, Wayne Chrebet, and Danny Kanell. These are just some of the athletes who have disclosed their results in the last five years. Nobody knows how many others have gotten the same result.
Does the upgrade help? Looks that way. Maddux, a pitcher for the Atlanta Braves, was 0-3 in six starts before his surgery. He won nine of his next 10 games. Kite had LASIK in 1998 and won six events on the Champions Tour over the next five years. Three months after his surgery, Irwin captured the Senior PGA Tour Nationwide Championship.
Would it be cheating if Lance’s cancer had resulted in the loss of a leg and he had a bionic leg now instead? Enhancement is a fascinating fuzzy subject worthy of deeper consideration.
Via James Joyner.
UPDATE: Lance responds.
Competing moms
The other day, after doing precisely this, Bill Kristol asked, “Are we going to now pull out competing mothers?” Today in Idaho, President Bush joined him:
Tammy has four sons serving in Iraq right now with the Idaho National Guard - Eric, Evan, Greg, and Jeff. Last year, her husband Leon and another son Aaron returned from Iraq where they helped train Iraqi firefighters in Mosul.
Tammy says this - and I want you to hear this - “I know that if something happens to one of the boys, they would leave this world doing what they believe, what they think is right for our country. And I guess you couldn’t ask for a better way of life than giving it for something you believe in.”
America lives in freedom because of families like the Pruitts.
Take that Cindy Sheehan!
First he goes to Republican stronghold Utah, now Republican stronghold Idaho. Is that really where the message is most needed? Still no sign of a call for shared sacrifice.
ALSO from Think Progress: Bush denies he’s on vacation. The reason for the Crawford stay? Renovation of the West Wing.
Goodbye network TV, hello networked TV
A household with 300 cable or satellite channels has access to 7,000 hours of programming a day, almost 3 million per year. That’s a lot, but it’s only a fraction of the 31 million hours of total annual programming. Every major cable company is making investments to allow TV to be distributed over the Internet, giving you access to each one of those 31 million hours. And then there’s this year’s 36-fold explosion in consumer-generated video on the Internet.
This onslaught is already turning the entertainment business inside out. More music videos are being watched on AOL than on MTV. Procter & Gamble is cutting down on pricey 30-second TV spots to beef up the online presence of its packaged goods. TV Guide announced in July that it would drastically cut the amount of space it devotes to listings, an acknowledgment that viewers now turn to the Internet and onscreen programming guides. And CBS is squaring off in a content-indexing smackdown with Google. Meanwhile, the guy down the block has turned his backyard into a back lot, his basement into an edit bay, and he’s landed a global distribution deal - with his ISP.
For its part, Yahoo! is working with SBC and Microsoft on an IPTV/fiber-to-the-curb initiative called Project Lightspeed that uses Yahoo! software to deliver video-on-demand, instant messaging, photo collections, and music. Meanwhile, chief executive Terry Semel, who spent 24 years as an executive at Warner Bros., has recruited a crew of network personnel in Santa Monica to crack open the contractual vaults containing 50 years of rights-encumbered TV and film archives. And Yahoo! has already become the Internet home of broadcast fare like Fat Actress and The Apprentice. “They’re clearly thinking of themselves as the fifth network,” says Jeremy Allaire, founder of Brightcove, a Net video distribution startup.
What about content by you and me?
[Bradley Horowitz, senior director of Yahoo!’s Technology Development Group] has figured out a way for micro-producers to get their video content indexed and seen. It’s a self-publishing protocol called Media RSS. Niche content creators syndicate their content with an MRSS feed, which includes metadata about the work. The information goes out to subscribers just like a blogger’s RSS feed and incorporates video and audio.
With the encouragement of Jeremy Zawodny, a prominent blogger Horowitz calls the company’s “inside outsider,” Yahoo! made sure MRSS was open and nonproprietary. Thanks to that hands-off policy, MRSS has caught on: Both Google and AOL encourage content creators to use MRSS to help their search engines identify and index video.
