Category: News
Republishing of exerpts from news sources.
Sorry Dean
I’m smarter than you.
I can’t stop watching!
This made me laugh so hard today! I have watched it over and over and over. Tommy Chong! You’re my hero!
Jazz from Hell has some additional words and the original MSNBC interview with Contessa Brewer regarding Paris Hilton to put this in perspective.
Update: For those who have’t watched the original MSNBC interview, Colbert’s very direct question to Chong is mocking Brewer.
Watered to death
A woman drank so much water trying to win a Wii for her 3 children that she died. The coroner’s office called it "water intoxication." A radio station had a "Hold Your Wee for a Wii" contest. I wouldn’t believe this bizarre story if it was by anyone other than the Associated Press (and I still have my doubts). Strangely, the 28 year old woman’s name was Jennifer Strange. Nothing on Snopes yet.
Your Happy Meal Just Got More Expensive
Minimum wage has been increased from $5.85 to $7.25!
The vote was 315-116, with more than 80 Republicans joining Democrats to pass it.
The bill would raise the wage floor in three steps. It would go to $5.85 an hour 60 days after signed into law by the president, to $6.55 a year later and to $7.25 a year after that.
[Source]
That means someone working a minimum wage job for 40 hours will get $290 instead of $234 or a week’s worth of work. Of course federal and state taxes must be removed as well as social security and medicare.
Do you remember your first minimum wage job? I think mine was $2.35 an hour. I seem to also remember a $2.85 per hour figure. One of my early jobs paid $3 per hour under the table and I remember being thrilled with it because it was over minimum wage.
Jobs I did prior to college included baby sitting and yard work of course. I also worked for a construction guy. He would have his high cost labor just leave debris all over the job site and then on the weekends I would come in and move trash to the dumpster. He (Steve Garvy) would also pay me for odd jobs like once he paid $85 for me to take a machette to a quarter acre of over grown land. The weeds were 12 feet tall. I washed buses (the small shuttles although there was one about 3 feet shy of a city bus). Too young to drive, my friend and I drove them anyway. Our duties expanded to include maintenance including repairing a defective car phone (yes it was wired in), checking fluids, and changing tires (yes, I bent the frame on a bus with the jack). I also slid one sideways in a snowy parking lot for fun. I worked at a Wendy’s for 2 months. I also worked at a K-Mart as a cashier, cashier supervisor, toys department, electronics department, floor supervisor, and night stockman (nothing more fun than playing dodgeball in a Kmart at 2am!). My favorite pre-college job was selling flowers outside of an Amish market in New Jersey.
LOST Cometh!
So, how far will the producers go to promote LOST?
MAKASSAR, Indonesia (AP) — An Indonesian jetliner that vanished with 102 people onboard did not issue distress signals or report any mechanical problems, a top aviation official said Thursday, adding to the mystery surrounding its disappearance. [Source]
Person struck by car at Bearden Middle School
News status: Unconfirmed. Ambiguous. Second-hand.
I just received a phone call saying someone (non-specific…may or may not be a student) was struck by a car at Bearden Middle School.
Fenced-in Irony
A Southern California fence building company hired to build some of the fence (stupid! Waste o’ money!) between the US and Mexico has been caught employing…wait for it…illegal aliens!
Homeschooling seems like a better idea
For reasons like suspending a 4 year old for sexual harassment, er, hugging (btw, that story pushed our little E TN news webpage onto Reddit.com). The child’s hugging is appropriate for continued emotional development.
Emotional Development
Most children aged four to five will:
- Still rely on caregivers, while no longer needing or wanting as much physical contact with caregivers as they received in infancy and as toddlers
- Continue to express emotions physically and to seek hugs and kisses
- Socialize with peers, begin to develop relationships, and learn to recognize some peers as friends and others as people they don’t like
- Have more opportunities to interact with peers, either through school or recreational activities, and will play with other children
[Source]
Today I get the pleasure of having a meeting at Noah’s school. I requested a meeting with one teacher and I ended up with a meeting with all his teacher’s and the vice-principal. This kind of ridiculousness makes me regret not homeschooling Noah this year.
Update: The meeting ended up being 5 women and me. The teacher and vice-principal were only interested in rhetoric and bureaucracy taking exactly the defensive posture I tried to get everyone to put aside. Btw, the meeting was called because at the beginning of the year my son lost a $9 book that my wife offered to replace and it was never replaced so while the rest of the class had books they could write in, my son had to do all his work on a loose leaf paper using a borrowed workbook. I found out about this last week. Absurd statements rolled from the primary teacher’s mouth such as "from the meeting with your wife I gathered the only reason your son is in school is to be a safety." She is a hateful person and I have less respect for her after my meeting than I did before.
This meeting also reinforced my belief that we made a mistake not homeschooling Noah for the fifth grade. One approach some friends used with their children was to home school only in the fifth grade. This gave the child some one-on-one time with the parent at a non-critical year. For instance, to do the one year in the sixth grade would potentially harm the child’s social opportunities through middle school. I think Noah would have learned more this year and had a better time at home. A home schooled child can have plenty of time for social interaction through community activities/sports, home school social networks, and home schooled group classes (that’s right, homeschooling does not imply a child locked away in a closet).
Let Them Feed!
In more breast ignorance, a woman was kicked off airplane for breastfeeding baby.
Amanda, re-boomed
I was an Amanda Congdon fan since Sept 27, 2005 (See?). Upon her departure, Rocketboom lost its appeal and I switch ed to watching Ze Frank’s The Show. It appears that Amanda is returning to video blogging! The twist is that she’s gone mainstream media and is on ABC’s online news channel with a 5 minute format.
Congdon, 25, will regularly appear on ABC’s online news channel, ABC News Now, and will host a weekly five-minute video blog appearing on ABC.com. Congdon, who will primarily provide news analysis and commentary through the network’s online channels, says she also expects to occasionally pop up on Good Morning America, Nightline, and other ABC news television programs.
…
She’s working to develop a show for HBO’s on-air and on-demand channels.
[Source]
This should be an interesting development in the video blogging world. I need iMovie!
Ah! Generic pills means generic machines
So we make cheaper pain medicine by using inferior equipment?
WASHINGTON – A major manufacturer of acetaminophen sold by Wal-Mart, CVS, Safeway and more than 100 other retailers recalled 11 million bottles of the widely used pain-relieving pills Thursday after discovering some were contaminated with metal fragments.
…
The contaminated pills included metal fragments ranging in size from “microdots†to portions of wire one-third of an inch long, the Food and Drug Administration said. Perrigo discovered the metal bits during quality-control checks after realizing the equipment it uses to make pills was wearing down prematurely… [Source]
Videoblogging for money
Here is a little hint of what is to come. Google has announced that it will pay videographers $5 for every 1000 times their video is viewed on Google Video. This is not YouTube! This is Google’s answer to Revver which appends an advertisement to the end of user’s videos then pays the video maker 50% of the ad revenue every time it is clicked. Popular shows like Ze Frank’s The Show use Revver for revenue. He also sells candy. The Mentos guys made a bundle on Revver.
Grobe and Voltz, for instance, pocketed $35,000, their share of the ad revenue paid to them by Revver, for their first Coke-and-Mentos video back in July. Now, the pair could earn big bucks from Google if the latest video is a hit. The two are also hosting a video-making contest sponsored by Coca-Cola, which paid them an undisclosed amount. [Source]
I have been dying to try video publishing but I don’t feel I have the time (Ze Frank spends 6 hours creating his show of roughly 3 minutes; Rocketboom uses a staff and an entire day to produce a 3 to 8 minute show) or the tools (I really think a Mac makes video editing easier) to do it right. Maybe I should do it for the money instead of fun!
See also a similar articlea similar article now located on Tech Consumer (thanks Bob Caswell) and C|Net discussing Revver.
Stupid Lawyers DMCA Comedy Central Clips on Youtube
Colbert joked about needing a check for $700million since roughly a third of all movies on YouTube were from the Colbert Report at the time of YouTube’s $1.6billion sale to Google. "Jon Stewart and Daily Show Executive Producer even encouraged viewers to watch the show on the Internet."
I received a couple of emails from YouTube this afternoon (see below) notifying me that a third party (probably attorneys for Comedy Central) had made a DMCA request to take down Colbert Report and Daily Show clips. [Source]
When will the lawyers and the RIAA et al realise that the distribution of clips on mediums like YouTube only create benefit and popularity for the program, artist, album and so forth. Can old dogs like Senator Stevens just not learn these new tricks.
Today’s Irony
Nearly one million bank workers in India are on strike…wait it for it…because they don’t want their jobs outsourced!
The unions are against outsourcing of bank work and a government proposal to merge 27 state-run banks to compete in the global economy. [Source]
This tidbit brought to us by Knoxviews and Michael Silence.
