I’ve been sequestering myself recently absorbing all five seasons of The Wire. I would venture to say that it is the greatest television drama ever created. It delves into some painful truths about urbran life, corrupt bureaucracies, and addiction. It forces you to rethink old stereotypes that you may have held.
On the surface, the series covers the Baltimore City Police’s crusade to bring down a local drug kingpin. But there are no true good guys or bad. Every character is flawed to some degree. In fact, the most consistently ethical character throughout the series is a gay drug stash stick-up man and murderer named Omar…
Now, obviously I’m not talking about the asshats who kidnapped Captain Phillips in last weekend’s widely publicized story.
But, as it turns out, the Somali Pirate movement was started as the “Volunteer Coastguard of Somalia,” in response to major EU countries dumping nuclear waste and other toxic chemicals on the shores of the recently collapsed nation.
Apparently EU dickheads have been abusing the coastal areas off Somalia for years, illegally overfishing the waters when their own fisheries became depleted and dumping waste that could not be cheaply disposed of otherwise.
Unfortunately, once the opportunity for profit came into the equation, more of the seedy elements emerged that make up most of the “newsworthy” pirate stories of recent note.
But, just like the pirates of old, their inception was just as much a reaction to tyranny and abuses of power as it was to profit motive.
So… Yo Ho Ho, and stick it in your craw, EU. Let’s give these brave boys their due.
Earlier this week in front of his weekly board meeting in the San Diego office, AP chairman, Dean Singleton, cried foul.
In complaining about the unlicensed use of AP stories all over the blogosphere, Singleton actually conjured up the old Network tagline: “We’re mad as hell, and we’re not going to take it anymore!”
Well, let’s visit the original context of that quote for a moment…
I’ll fully admit I’m not a House fan (though I am a fan of Hugh Laurie)–pretty much anything which goes out of its way to be gross at all costs isn’t likely to be a must (or ever) watch for me. But this story cracked me up. Apparently this guy:
Where the hell is Harold?
…is on House, or was (I just know him from the White Castle stuff). He’s killed himself off, you see, because…um…well…the actor is going to work for Barack Obama.
Yeah. Pretty much that’s it. Evidently Kal Penn, who plays the character Kutner on Fox’s mega hit, has been hired to be an associate director in the White House Office of Public Liaison–which Penn describes as continuing dialogue between citizens and their government and which actually means continuing the Re-Elect Obama 2012 campaign. (Hey, I love Obama–was honored to vote for him, have mostly been impressed with him as president thus far–but let’s call a spade a spade, folks.) I’m not sure what’s so tremendous about this job, but hey, working for the prez is a cool gig, I guess. So Penn told the show’s producers about it, and they decided to handle things by having the character kill himself, utterly out of left field. They even called it that:
In the Summer of 2006, Congress passed the Internet Gambling and Prohibition Act. To the chagrin of tens of millions of online poker players, the bill sought to restrict banks from allowing their customers to buy in to their preferred online poker sites.
Even though the bill didn’t impose any penalties on the individual poker player, it did seem to imply that the online poker player was doing something wrong, and possibly illegal. Major poker providers like Pokerstars continued to operate under the logic that the bill only outlawed games of chance. Poker, they argued, was a game of skill, and therefore not subject to this new ban.
Master of the hilariously offensive, Sacha Baron Cohen’s new movie, Bruno, was found so objectionable by the MPAA that it is going to receive an NC-17 rating. In other words, we have now, as a society, recognized “comic porn” as a form of entertainment.
And so, without further ado, the newly released Bruno trailer.
UPDATE 3/28: Hi there. Welcome to our little podcast/blog project. Due to last night’s BoingBoinging, we seem to have a lot of new visitors. So after you read about our shot across the bow of AIG, you might wanna check out some of our other features, like one of our 100+ podcast episodes. Here’s a good sample to start with.
Anyway, thanks for visiting. Feel free to leave comments and feedback and let us know how we can improve the Emu. END UPDATE
