* Check out this short “video” which I guess is supposed to advertise a new TV. Actually, I probably shouldn’t have quote marks around that word, because this is a digital video at 30 frames a second, but it’s really more of a technical acheivement than a short film. Basically, it’s “bullet-time” on red kryptonite.
* Health care reform without a public insurance option=the German model. Money quote: “Finally, premiums for children are covered by government out of general revenues, on the theory that children are not the human analogue of pets whose health care should be their owners’ (parents’) fiscal responsibility. Instead, children are viewed as national treasures whose health care should be the entire nation’s fiscal responsibility.”
* Seven year old boys prefer store-bought lemon-lime soda to the homemade variety.
* On NPR this morning, the father of Roxana Saberi, the journalist sentenced to 8 years in prison in what appears to be an Iranian kangaroo court, has been trying to make waves by telling people that his daughter was tricked into confessing to spying. According to him, they promised to let her go if she admitted to the crimes, which he thought was illegitimate. I hope someone explains to him that this happens in the U.S.A. all the time–the teenagers wrongfully convicted in the Central Park “wilding” case were nailed because of exactly this tactic, and that the FBI wanted Richard Jewel to confess to the Olympic bombing as part of a “training video.” While the Iranian government is deeply fucked up and in desperate need of reform, there’s no point in criticizing them for doing the same thing we do.
* I don’t have whatever cable channel showed THE WIRE, but I know it has a lot of fans. If you’re interested, here’s the original pitch and series bible. (Warning, that’s a .pdf file) I haven’t looked at it myself, because I plan to watch the series someday.
* Finally, putting my wife on a bus for her second day at her conference pretty much wasted my writing time today. My son is up, too, and once that happens I’ll have no time to focus on the book at all. Which sucks, but hey, that’s what family is about. Now we’re off for our Saturday library run.