Art Machine
Just another former infatuation junkie

Another preview mash-up for you. If not for the out-of-place feeling of the Road to Perdition clips, I would rate this as one of my favorites. Still a very neat idea, tho.

These past couple of years, I’ve been working as a graduate assistant for a local university while working on my Master’s degree. One of the consequences is that I tend to be behind on the news.

Case in point: Yesterday was my last day as a graduate assistant. I spent eight hours in the office stuffing envelopes with brochures and sorting records on the college into chronological order. During my lunch break I checked my e-mail and my networking sites to see what was up. One of my MySpace friends had posted a bulletin with the headline “Ding Dong, Jerry Fallwell’s Dead.”

Now, I assign bulletins on MySpace about the same journalistic integrity as press releases from the ACRU – That is, not much. So it was this morning that I actually learned, for real, that Jerry Fallwell is dead.

BoingBoing is a nice central point for memories on Falwell. You can remember the stupidest and most hateful things the man ever said in a long career of stupid and hateful things. You can also see the mock interview from Hustler that prompted him to launch a landmark lawsuit, which he lost. And, finally, they’ll link you to a surprisingly kind eulogy from Larry Flynt himself.

My mother always told me that no matter how much you dislike a person, when you meet them face to face you will find characteristics about them that you like. Jerry Falwell was a perfect example of that. I hated everything he stood for, but after meeting him in person, years after the trial, Jerry Falwell and I became good friends. He would visit me in California and we would debate together on college campuses. I always appreciated his sincerity even though I knew what he was selling and he knew what I was selling.

After the BoingBoing memories, you can hop on over to Thud’s place where my brother has provided a stepping stone into blog reactions.

As for me, I never liked the man. He lived a life full of hatred and fear and his only solace was the inspiring of further hatred and fear in the people around him. The evil he did far outweighs the good. It seemed like every time he opened his mouth, he said something that would cause me to have a political and/or social apoplexy.

Even so, I offer up this traditional Irish blessing upon his passing: May ye reach Heav’n at least an hour before the Divil knows ye’re dead.

Some Guy with a Website considers a new step in automating the Church. He’s right that there’s something “oogy” about the profitable business of religion. There’s always been something “oogy” about it. After all, Jesus did throw the money changers out of the temple.

And I can’t help but think – hey! Yet another way to encourage people to use their Visa card! Why, at this rate the entire American public will carry no cash and a balance of $20,000 by the year 2010.

Over at Think Progress you can see Malkin summing up her political views in one off-hand comment.

“I have to tell you, in general, I’m skeptical of anything that has ‘Bill of Rights’ tacked on to it.”

Really? I never would have guessed.

Wolfgang Puck is progressive with regards to farm animal rights.

Interesting.

I love it when legislatures pass anti-consumer regulations that treat average people as criminals. Why? Because it means the war on terror must be over! Yay! Why else would we completely ignore real security gaps in order to track personal information on people who trade used CD’s? [link via BoingBoing] Oh. Right. Money.

New “pawn shop” laws are springing up across the United States that will make selling your used CDs at the local record shop something akin to getting arrested. No, you won’t spend any time in jail, but you’ll certainly feel like a criminal once the local record shop makes copies of all of your identifying information and even collects your fingerprints. Such is the state of affairs in Florida, which now has the dubious distinction of being so anal about the sale of used music CDs that record shops there are starting to get out of the business of dealing with used content because they don’t want to pay a $10,000 bond for the “right” to treat their customers like criminals.

Yes, more information is now collected and tracked when you resell CD’s in Florida than is collected and tracked when you get your driver’s license.

Supposedly, this will defend us from people passing off counterfeits and bootlegs as the real deal. Which is a real problem. I know that the other day I had to buy myself a ticket to Tokyo so that I could catch a train and go see the live Back to the Future show in Disneyland Osaka. So I bought a bunch of CD-R’s – jewel cased, not spindle-packed, donchaknow – for about $0.75 apiece. Then I burned a bunch of counterfeits of music I paid $9.99 for. I was surprised when the store didn’t bother to look past my laserprinter labels, which is good since I didn’t have a labeling system for the CD’s other than my Sharpie. Man, considering the paper and the CD-R (plus jewel case), that $0.85 they gave me made my initial investement totally worth it.

Hasbro and Visa have decided that what your children really need is training in how to drive themselves deeply into debt. [link via BoingBoing]

As if credit card-related debt wasn’t a big enough problem in the U.S., Hasbro and Visa want to fuel the fire. Hasbro is launching a new edition of The Game of Life called Twists and Turns that will replace play money with a Visa-branded card. Matt Collins, Hasbro’s vice president of marketing, said of the switch, “When we started to design a completely new edition of the popular game, we knew it was also time to reflect the way people choose to pay and be paid – and replacing cash with Visa was an obvious choice.”

They also changed the goal of the game from accumulating the most money to earning the most “life points.” Supposedly this a combination of wealth and life experiences, but it’s not hard to see parallels between “life points” and the reward points and airlines miles offered by certain credit cards.

At a certain point, words fail. Our society legitimizes and legalizes certain forms of loan sharking, our banks deregulate, and credit card companies are allowed to act more and more thuggish with our accounts, and Hasbro decides it’s time for our kids to learn how to pay for everything with Visa. Not for the kids to learn when to charge and when to use cash, but for kids to learn to pay for everything with the tiny plastic card that can wind up getting their kneecaps broken.

Is there anybody out there who is not an employee of Hasbro or Visa (or Mastercard, for that matter) who thinks this is really a great idea?