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Fox Wimps Out on OJ

OJ

So after a planned semi-confession by OJ, certain prominent people, including the Goldman family and a few in the ultra-“moral” minority, were up in arms. And so Fox, the network who planned on airing the special and whose parent company planned on publishing his near tell-all book, chickens out and pulls the plug on both deals.

Shame on Fox for wimping out. And shame on those who made such a stink, for being so incredibly moral and feeling they had to “protect” the rest of the public.

Thank you, ultra-moral idiots. We had an opportunity to hear what could very well be the confession to the greatest crime of last century. We could finally put to rest one of the most evil murders in recent history, in which the killer has no doubt gotten off scott free. But no! This was too sensational to be morally correct. Now we must never know. Ever.

Thank you, BIll O’Reilly, You Who Are So Austere. You, Mr. Ipod’s-are-the-Tools-of-Terrorism. Thank you for threatening to boycott the company you work for, and every sponsor of the OJ Simpson special for because you were so morally offended. Hey, what ever happened to your li’l kinks? If a dildo company had been a sponsor, maybe THAT would be the impetus to kick your li’l uhh… habit?

Idiot governor forgets his voter registration card

Sanford

What an embarassing day to be a South Carolinan! It’s Election Day, in case you haven’t figured it out, and the governor of that fine state had the embarrassment of forgetting his ID caught on news cameras. Yup, with nagging wife in tow (“I told you to bring it!”) and all.

Imagine being in the awkward position of poll-worker at that voting precinct? Having to tell your own governor that no, sorry, you’re too stupid to vote this morning?

The Ultimate in Queer and Loathing

Haggard

Lately, Pastor Ted Haggard has been run- well, quite Haggard – by the press, over his alleged three year tryst with a male prostitute. Finally, Haggard came out over the weekend, and in the worst way. In a letter to his former congregation, the one-time powerful minister who had the faithfully-listening ear of the White House, admits to a “dark side.”

“There is part of my life that is so repulsive and dark that I’ve been warring against it all of my adult life,” Haggard said in the letter read by Pastor Larry Stockstill, a member of the board of overseers of New Life Church.

The events leading up tot this statement aren’t the true tragedy here. The real tragedy here is very telling in the pastor’s statement. The conservative evangelical right in this country is very ingrained with the idea that homosexuality is repulsive and abhorrent, so much so that we have people like this running the show. They themselves are gay or at least have homosexual tendencies, and they find this so sinful and repulsive that they work hard to banish it, and punish the rest of us who see no problem with this. It’s this bigotry through self-loathing and guilt that is the worst and most dangerous kind.

It also makes you wonder how many people in the Christian right are similarly “battling” such “demons.” We need not mention the spectre of Mark Foley, also once part of the Republican leadership. And I find the feeble comebacks of the right – that all of these allegations are coming out right before elections because they’re politically motivated – to not wash. So what if the allegations are politically motivated? This doesn’t make them any less true. In fact, I’d say that accusers would be doing a disservice if they waited for a less politically-charged moment, when voters can’t make a decision.

The Prehistoric iPod

RooPaq

You’re looking at what was the State of the Art in portable hard drive-based MP3 players, before Apple finally released the iPod in late 2001. Meet the Genica RooPaq. Essentially, it was little more than a 2.5 inch hard drive enclosure, with a USB interface, two-line LCD text-only display, a battery and the bare minimum chipset needed to play MP3 audio files. It came with exactly zero bytes of disk space; the idea was that you could open the unit up and install a laptop hard drive of “any size,” and you could then dictate how much space you wanted the player to have. The cost? $299 plus the cost of the hard drive.
It was released shortly after rumors began surfacing of Apple’s pending entry into the music player market, and I imagine its manufacturer wanted to get a head start in order to beat Apple at its own game. They probably thought they had a winner, too. Why would anyone pay $500 for an overpriced iPod when for almost a quarter of the price less you could have something that does the same thing?

And I agreed. A full summer before the original iPod debuted, I bought a RooPaq off eBay. It was a bit larger than a brick, and came about as close in weight. With the 20GB hard drive I installed constantly spinning when powered up, the player had a then-impressive 1.5 to 2 hours of run time between charges. There was no slick iTunes-like interface to manage content; the method of transfer was simple drag-and-drop of the files through a connected computer’s operating system. Yes, it was The Shit. And as I lugged this beast around with me, I too thought “what is Apple thinking? No one is going to buy an iPod when they can have one of these!”

Then I got to see an iPod on display. Marvelled at its tiny size and 10-hour battery life, stood agog at its elegantly simple yet effective interface, and realized that sometimes looks are everything. And I knew I had been robbed.

Well, not really robbed. No matter how great the interface was, I still fresh out of college and quite broke at the time. Barely able to justify the RooPaq’s expense, there was no way I could shell out $500 for a simple mp3 player, no matter how good the features. But I did save my pennies for the day when I could get one.