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Looking for Comedy in the Chinese New Year

January 28, 2006 at 12:19am By: Mr. T Posted in Mr. T's Den

What a way to kick off festivities leading up to the New Year shortly. Tonight I have agreed (reluctantly) to play the role of “designated driver” and shuttle some karaoke idol drunkards back and forth around Lincoln tonight and maybe even to Omaha. God. Most of them I don’t even know. And in my experience karaoke singers are - 75% of the time - pretty bad (esp. when inebriated). But hey, I’ll do anything for art…and steamed sea bass. Happy new year!

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Vietnam and the Presidency

January 15, 2006 at 12:45am By: Mr. T Posted in Mr. T's Den

A conference featuring a historic lineup of individuals was recently announced by the JFK library:

Among those participating in the historic two-day conference will be General Alexander Haig; Secretary of State Henry Kissinger; Special Counsel to President Kennedy Theodore Sorensen; Special Assistant to President Johnson Jack Valenti; Senator Chuck Hagel; New York Times columnist Bob Herbert; Ambassador Pete Peterson; professors George Herring, Robert D. Schulzinger, and Marilyn Young; journalists Steve Bell and Dan Rather; Pulitzer Prize-winning authors David Halberstam and Frances Fitzgerald; and historians Michael Beschloss, David Kaiser and Jeffrey Kimball. Former President Jimmy Carter will speak via video and NBC Nightly News anchorman Brian Williams will moderate all of the second day’s sessions.

This looks like a great, educational event, hopefully to be carried on CSPAN or podcasted so that members of the public at large can follow. I hope Halberstam will give a better speech than the one he did here at UNL recently! Also, I do wonder why they didn’t include a Vietnamese perspective on the White House (or for that matter Cambodian or Lao). Surely someone could have been available? What a lost opportunity.

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The Biggest Losers

January 14, 2006 at 2:10pm By: Mr. T Posted in Mr. T's Den

The other day a prominent international NGO released its Top 10 most underreported humanitarian stories of 2005.

According to Andrew Tyndall, publisher of the online media-tracking
journal The Tyndall Report, the 10 stories highlighted by MSF accounted
for just 8 minutes of the 14,529 minutes on the three major U.S.
television networks’ nightly newscasts for 2005. Natural disasters like
the south Asia tsunami and the war in Iraq dominated international
reporting. But in a year that Tyndall said had an unusually high amount
of international coverage, only 6 minutes were devoted to DR Congo and
2 minutes to Chechnya. The remaining stories highlighted by MSF were not covered at all. The AIDS crisis received 14 minutes of coverage, none
of which, however, was devoted to the lack of R&D.

For a list of the winners, check here.

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The Other KFOR

January 11, 2006 at 1:39am By: Mr. T Posted in Mr. T's Den

Today the Council of Europe came out with one of its few major public statements about the status of detention centers maintained under KFOR jurisdiction. The story has been bubbling for a few months in European media but the recent disclosures stateside about alleged CIA prisons in Europe (and culpability for European host governments) have blown the whole thing wide open, both for harms caused by failing to secure munitions, as well as alleged abuses of detainees in detention, by NATO.

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Succesful iPod Surgery

January 8, 2006 at 12:13am By: Mr. T Posted in Mr. T's Den

I took apart my mini today because I need to change the battery. After a little over a year the playtime on my 1G iPod was only lasting about 4 hours. Getting it out was actually easier than putting it back in! 

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