It’s a very rare occasion that I watch televised news. It’s outdated, frustrating and a more often than not a waste of my time. In my line of work, we like to say that print is dead. The thirty to sixty minute TV news show format needs to have a steak pounded through it’s heart.

Chances are, by the time something airs on television, I’ve already read it to death online. I’ve no patience to wait through an news hour for that 1-3 minute bit that I’m interested in, when I can get the same (and usually more and many different versions of) information from my computer. I can even watch televised news online, neatly chopped up by some diligent YouTube user into bite-sized, relevant segments without all the bullshit buildups, the “stay tuned” and “when we come back” crap that sucks you into watching the whole damn thing, even though you could care less about what Paris Hilton is eating in prison.
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I, for one, am completely sick of it.

Yes, it sucked—more than I’m going to bother to try and convey.

I was (and still am) in NYC. I had to live through that day, walk through that day (all the way to Brooklyn) and deal with the next few weeks of absolute discombobulation (which, to me, was the worst - that’s when everything sets in) as to what’s safe anymore.

I had to go to work the next day, convinced I was going to die. I rode the subways every morning and for the first two months, every time the train stopped in the tunnels, a cold sweat would kick in and I was hardly the only person.

It was horrible. I wish it hadn’t happened. It did and it’s certainly affected me, my decisions and how I view things.

But it’s been five years.

Still, every time I watch the news, there it is. 9/11 is invoked left and right. I see the plane crash or at least the smoking buildings in the media every day. It’s no longer a tragedy. It’s been co-opted as a tool for politics and media. It makes me sick.

This morning, I was reading an article about a CBS interview with “Tuesday’s Children“, a group to support and represent the children who lost parents that day. The reporter was asking how they felt now and the biggest complaint, round the room, was the constant barrage of imagery from that day. A quote:

The kids [..] told 60 Minutes some of the worst memories don’t fade because the media won’t let them. [CBS Reporter Scott] Pelley got an earful about showing those pictures of 9/11 over and over again.

“Even when you’re just sitting down like eating dinner and watching TV, you’ll just have a nice conversation and then all the sudden you’ll see like pictures of 9/11. You can’t escape it. It’s just like everywhere you go its always like you’re always reminded of it somehow even in the littlest thing,” explains Amy Gardner.

“They’re showing my dad’s death and everyone else here. It’s just really offensive. Every time I see it, it brings up so much and it actually really hurts,” says Erik Abrahamson.

That pretty much sums it up for me. Here’s the link that has video and a transcript.

9/11 is now a political tool. It’s a ticket-selling, ratings-boosting tool. It’s a tool for bloated, flag-waving idiots to show how patriotic they are to everyone else. It’s disgusting. It’s sad. It’s infuriating.

Happy 9/11, everybody.

On any given day, I might bounce around three different computers and use usually two to three operating systems. One thing that drives me crazy about this is managing my RSS feed subscriptions&8212;of which I have quite a few. I’ve tried various readers like Sage, Bloglines, Firefox’s live bookmarks and my personal favorite, KDE’s Akregator. It’s always the case that while one RSS feed has one necessary feature, it lacks another. So, I keep trying new aggregators. Enter Newshutch.

Right now, my biggest peeve is keeping my feeds synced with where I happen to be, so that news I’ve read on one computer with one aggregator won’t show as unread on another machine. I really hate it. As I mentioned above, I’ve played with Bloglines, which is web-based and was about to give it another try when I heard about Newshutch. In all honesty, it’s really no different from Bloglines in functionality except for some fancy Ajax action. I like the look of it and appreciate the 21st century feel Ajax brings. There’s no notifier apps/extensions to use, which is a downer and feeds update every thirty minutes. I uploaded my OPML file, importing my feed list and am willing to give it a try for a couple weeks.

Someday, someone will make the better aggregator. One that’s either web-based or synchronizable between computers, has a decent notification system where the user can tweak individual feed update schedules and delivers feeds attractively or at least lets you edit a CSS file to display them with. Someday.

Addendum
After using Newshutch for a couple hours, I’ve left it behind and am now back using Bloglines. Newshutch is too damn clunky and slow for any real usage, unfortunately.

I fired up my usual slew of news sites this morning and just about spewed coffee everywhere when I saw this gem (highlights and “D’Oh” are mine):

My first mental picture was the eight Canadian citizens being slaughtered, Aztec-style as penance for George Bush’s inability to reign in the foul language when on the microphone. Hail Satan!

Anyway, what was obviously an editorial screw-up was fixed in a matter of minutes, but not before I had the presence of mind to take a screengrab.

What with my recent switch to KDE and Kubuntu, I’ve been playing around with the host of new programs available at my beck and apt-get. True I could easily have run many, if not all the KDE oriented programs I wanted under Gnome, but since I was all up in that Gnome-ness, I never really bothered even looking.

Out of all these new applications, one that has immediately become one of my all-time favorites is Akregator, the RSS feed aggregator for KDE.

Akregator is hands down the best damn RSS app I’ve ever used. For the past couple of years, I’ve been eschewing desktop programs for the Firefox extension Sage due in main part to the fact that none of the apps I ever tried out had usefulness that warranted running a separate program to browse feeds. Sage was simple, light and worked well at what it was supposed to do. It also worked from within Firefox. The downside was that Sage did not automatically fetch feeds. I had to manually check them, which I didn’t like. If I have to manually check, I almost might as well just visit the site.

Akregator sits in my task bar and I’ve set it up to check all my forty of fifty feeds every three minutes. Feeds can be prioritized, and customized with special notifications, archiving—all kinds of wacky, mind-bending shit. It’s just about everything I’ve ever wanted in an RSS aggregator.

If you can manage running it, get it. When you do, you can subscribe to this site’s RSS feed and die happy.

After three years of not having any pets, I’ve sucked it up and adopted two cats. Pictured to the left is Gracie, a six year old attention whore who was rescued from a kill shelter in East New York. If you’ve never been to that part of New York City, just know that whenever it’s reported on the news that someone’s been shot, fifty percent of the time it’s in that neighborhood, the rest of the shootings are spread out all over the city. It’s a bad place and was no fucking fun at all visiting. Gracie’s a good cat, perhaps she realizes that she was basically on kitty death row due to her not being so young and everyone wants a kitten. Gracie hit the kitty lotto. Condemned to death, she’s been released to a fat life of good food and more attention that she’s probably ever had. She’s quite happy.

This little guy doesn’t have a name yet, well actually he does. When I picked him up, his adoption sheet said his name was Mazda. I’m pretty sure the people at the shelter name them as they bring them in. He most certainly will not be keeping that moniker but I’ll hold off naming him until he’s become a bit more social. The little bugger is a five month old stray that was found with his sister. Yesterday, he had his balls chopped off and is a little disoriented. He’s friendly and tame, but a little freaked out as anyone would be after being separate from family and testicles. He spent much of last night hiding under dressers and crying, but I’m certain he’ll come around soon.

I look forward to the next few weeks, spent searching for cat shit and desperately trying to coax the little bastards out from under furniture. It’s worth it. They’re both good cats. They’ll be acclimated soon and all will be well. I’ll admit to being a slave to gratuitous kittie porn and will likely be flooding my flickr account with gobs of photos. Here’s some I have already. Go ahead, get your cat porn fix.

I can’t say I didn’t see it coming. Michael Jackson was acquitted and while he didn’t exactly moonwalk out of the courtroom on the backs of naked little boys, he certainly skated away scot-free, back to Neverland. It’s good to know surreality has a physical form on the planet, but don’t think for a second that I feel like he deserves this get-out-of-jail-free card.

I don’t know Michael Jackson. I’ve never met him. Yes, I owned “Thriller”. Yes, I am embarrassed about this fact. No I did not fetch the Vaseline for him, nor did I see him behave inappropriately with someone else’s child. I am not a lawyer. However, I still think he’s a pedophile.

I have my reasons, which I will list shortly, as to why I hold this belief. While I think he should be in jail, I acknowledge that the case against him was in large part utterly pathetic. You have to wonder what Tom Sneddon was thinking when, after amassing the evidence and witnesses, he decided he had enough to connect the dots and get a conviction. The accuser’s family, especially the mother was just straight-up shady, unreliable and seemingly pretty unstable. Even with a truckload of serious evidence, showing Michael Jackson to be a confirmed child molester, it doesn’t mean shit unless you can prove that he molested the specific child that he’s charged with touching. The fact that the kid has a mother who’s crazy and the whole family has a prior stain of being grifters is going to really fuck things up. Blame really has to fall to Sneddon for rushing this case to reality on such shaky ground. This trial was about whether or not Michael Jackson molested a 13 year old cancer survivor. I have to say, I can’t blame the jury for acquitting him. I think it’s believable that he did not molest that boy. Do I think his sexuality, whether internalized or externalized, is wrapped up in underage boys? You fucking bet I do.

Perhaps I’m jaded but I just can’t accept this “saintlike” painting that’s been put forward concerning Jackson and children, that he’s childlike and a “pure” person who’s love for children is all-encompassing and unconditional. His behavior, his mental state, lifestyle, company (as in children), his reclusive habits and the fact that he lives in an amusement park and models himself as a real-life Peter Pan all point to an obsessive interest in children. When was the last time you saw a photo of Michael Jackson with a little girl? If you stripped away the fame and the name and then asked anyone to look at the details of this man’s life, who wouldn’t come to the conclusion that there’s something seriously wrong going on in Neverland?

It is possible that Michael Jackson is not sexually active with children. His deviate leanings could be very well separated from his actions. While he can’t resist surrounding himself with young boys, he may be sane enough to understand that while he is sexually attracted to them, touching them is verboten. While it would be fortunate that he could control himself, it doesn’t make it okay for him to surround himself with boys and sleep in beds with them, however platonic.

However it may work out in his world, what it boils down to is a extremely rich man (regardless off his current debts you see in the news, Jackson still has major bank) who is very ill, mentally and is surrounded with people who are enabling his behavior instead of controlling it. It makes me wonder where his family’s and especially his employee’s motives lie when they allow him to pursue his interests with young boys. If you had a relative who is mentally ill and could possibly be hurting young children, would you stand back and allow him or would you assume as much control as needed to keep him from hurting himself and other people? That’s what stands out to me. This is a guy who is most definitely not self-sufficient. He requires handlers, employees and his family to oversee and run his little empire. What were they thinking and why aren’t they culpable as well?

A small part of me feels sorry for Michael Jackson. His private life was just dragged out and trashed for all the world to see. It really has to be hard to moonwalk a mile in his shoes. But the pity I feel quickly dries up when considering the dearth of evidence, much of it disallowed from the trial that makes it near impossible not to come to the conclusion that Michael Jackson’s sexual identity and history involves underage boys. A pedophile is back at his amusement park compound, essentially free to continue molesting children. Whether he or his handlers are going to be smarter about it in the future remains to be seen, but one thing is for certain, pedophiles do not have an off switch. He’ll do it again.

Yet another sign that America as we know it is going to moral and litigious hell. What kind of country do we live in where you can’t even sue a bitch for busting your jammy? WTF?

Bringing William Gibson books and the Matrix just a little closer to reality, Sony nailed a patent for beaming sensory information directly into the brain.

That’s right, you geeky fucks. You don’t even need surgery to get the jack implated into your head (you would have done it anyway, daveb sympathizes).

The technique, achieved by shooting ultrasonic pulses at specific areas of the brain to induce “sensory experiences” such as smells, sounds and images has a variety of applications outside of the video game and entertainment industry, not that you really cared.

Since the sensory data is beamed directly into the brain, images could be sent to the blind from cameras they’d wear. What the cameras were streaming would bypass their dead eyes and hit their brain directly, effectively making them no longer blind. The same could apply to deaf people and other such impaired individuals.

Sony researcher Thomas Dawson described it as “The pulsed ultrasonic signal alters the neural timing in the cortex. No invasive surgery is needed to assist a person, such as a blind person, to view live and/or recorded images or hear sounds.”

Is that some cool-ass shit or what? Daveb will be first in line once that shit is mass-produced. It damn well better be during his lifetime, too. He’s a big Matrix Online junkie (sever:”linenoise“, name:”deepnutz“), but fuck that, he wants the real thing!

You know, as much as Saddam Hussein is a dick, daveb was a little disappointed when he saw the news of his capture, bearded and hiding in a shallow pit. All that build up for nothing. He figured, c’mon, this is Saddam “gas me some Kurds and pop me some crystal” Hussein! Fucking Iraqi gangsta shit. You’d think he’d roll up on a convoy, strapped to the teeth with WMDs, blasting Americans to high hell before hitting paradise with all it’s attending virgins. But no, he was caught hiding in a hole with a briefcase of cash. Fuck that. Saddam, what happened kiddo? Where’d the balls of steel go? Why’d you go out like a bitch when it could have been a blaze of fucking glory?

But wait! Daveb read this morning, an account by a former marine that Saddam Hussein’s capture was bullshit. The marine, who was present at Saddam’s capture said the hidey-hole scenario on the news was a total fabrication, staged a full day after he had been apprehended. As part of a 20 man team, this guy encountered Saddam and a few of his baddies held up in a house.

“We captured him after fierce resistance during which a Marine of Sudanese origin was killed,” he said.

He said Saddam himself fired at them with a gun from the window of a room on the second floor. Then they shouted at him in Arabic: “You have to surrender. … There is no point in resisting.”

“Later on, a military production team fabricated the film of Saddam’s capture in a hole, which was in fact a deserted well,”

You go Saddam. That’s more like it. Evil dictators need to keep the standards up. If you’re going to be a tyrant, go out like a tyrant should go out. If this is true, Saddam, you’re a bastard, but you get props for keeping it real.

Now why the whole capture was falsified, who knows? Probably to paint the picture of him as a coward and thief, fleeing his country with the cash instead of defending it. That is, assuming this story is true. If it is true, what’s going to keep it from being mentioned at his trial?