30
Sep 08
For my friends in the Chi:
Bruce Elliott has gone one step further than most. He’s taken off her clothes.
Elliott, whose wife, Tobin Mitchen, owns the Old Town Ale House on Chicago’s North Side, painted a nude portrait of the Republican vice presidential nominee and hung it above the bar.
…
“I find her bizarrely fascinating, even though I pretty much despise everything she stands for.”
But because no story about Palin would be complete without a profoundly unsettling detail…
His daughter, who looks a little like Palin and does a great impression of her, served as model for the governor’s body.
Discuss.
Link: Chicago tavern hangs nude Sarah Palin portrait (the BS)
29
Sep 08
Some more news on the McCain/Palin juggernaut.
This quote from the Ed Schultz Show gets the ball rolling…
Capitol Hill sources are telling me that senior McCain people are more than concerned about Palin.
The campaign has held a mock debate and a mock press conference; both are being described as “disastrous.” One senior McCain aide was quoted as saying, “What are we going to do?” The McCain people want to move this first debate to some later, undetermined date, possibly never. People on the inside are saying the Alaska Governor is “clueless.”
More…
28
Sep 08
If Kyle Orton outplays Donovan McNabb, it will cap a Sunday of football that has cost me $30 thus far.
And he just threw a pick in the end zone. Keep hope alive!
Update: Dear Andy Reid,
I guess you forgot, but you actually did not trade Donovan McNabb to Chicago. Yes! That is your stud Pro Bowl quarterback lined up at the 1yd line, so how about a play-action bootleg or something? I know he’s 64 and has arthritis and osteoporosis and shit, but some of us had money on this game. Jackass.
26
Sep 08
It’s pretty damn hard to imagine the perma-stoned rapper Lil’ Wayne getting all buddy-buddy with the monolithic, inanely-PC entity that is ESPN, but that’s what’s happening. He gave a pretty engaging interview on ESPN.com a while back, revealing his love for athletics (particularly the Packers and Red Sox), his fantasy football team name (the South Beach Sloths), as well as this gem about stadia playing his songs:
ESPN: When you’re writing, do you think about what the songs will sound like at a sporting event?
Wayne: Put it this way, I don’t write anything that I don’t expect to hear in a stadium, so yeah.
The first post in a series of blogs is up on ESPN.com, and it’s about as wide-ranging as you’d expect: lots of NFL (I want to see Wayne’s dreads cascading out the back of a cheesehead), fantasy football, memories of playing fullback at age 10 (probably wasn’t much shorter than he is now), and he cares about Rafael Nadal more than about 93% of America.
HT: Pitchfork
Links:
Lil’ Wayne ESPN interview (mostly baseball)
Lil’ Wayne’s ESPN blog (mostly football)
25
Sep 08
The RIAA’s witch hunt suffered another loss today, as a Minnesota court concluded that making music files available in a shared folder doesn’t violate copyright law, and rejected the RIAA’s asinine attempt to redefine copyright infringement.
From the judgment:
The plain meaning of the term “distribution” does not including making available and, instead, requires actual dissemination.
…
If simply making a copyrighted work available to the public constituted a distribution, even if no member of the public ever accessed that work, copyright owners would be able to make an end run around the standards for assessing contributor copyright infringement.
What I’d forgotten, but still remains mind-boggling, is the punishment assessed in the original trial:
The damages awarded in this case are wholly disproportionate to the damages suffered by Plaintiffs. Thomas allegedly infringed on the copyrights of 24 songs—the equivalent of approximately three CDs, costing less than $54, and yet the total damages awarded is $222,000—more than five hundred times the cost of buying 24 separate CDs and more than four thousand times the cost of three CDs.
…
Thomas acted like countless other Internet users. Her alleged acts were illegal, but common. Her status as a consumer who was not seeking to harm her competitors or make a profit does not excuse her behavior. But it does make the award of hundreds of thousands of dollars in damages unprecedented and oppressive.
…
The Court would be remiss if it did not take this opportunity to implore Congress to amend the Copyright Act to address liability and damages in peer-to-peer network cases such as the one currently before this Court.
The EFF has the rest of the story here.
