On the Greatness of The Wire

This excerpt from Margaret Talbot’s profile of David Simon, creator The Wire, explains why the tv show is one of the greatest ever made:

Simon makes it clear that the show’s ambitions were grand. “ ‘The Wire’ is dissent,” he says. “It is perhaps the only storytelling on television that overtly suggests that our political and economic and social constructs are no longer viable, that our leadership has failed us relentlessly, and that no, we are not going to be all right.” He also likes to say that “The Wire” is a story about the “decline of the American empire.” Simon’s belief in the show is a formidable thing, and it leads him into some ostentatious comparisons that he sometimes laughs at himself for and sometimes does not. Recently, he spoke at Loyola College, in Baltimore; he described the show in lofty terms that left many of the students in the audience puzzled—at least, those who had come hoping to hear how they might get a job in Hollywood. In creating “The Wire,” Simon said, he and his colleagues had “ripped off the Greeks: Sophocles, Aeschylus, Euripides. Not funny boy—not Aristophanes. We’ve basically taken the idea of Greek tragedy and applied it to the modern city-state.” He went on, “What we were trying to do was take the notion of Greek tragedy, of fated and doomed people, and instead of these Olympian gods, indifferent, venal, selfish, hurling lightning bolts and hitting people in the ass for no reason—instead of those guys whipping it on Oedipus or Achilles, it’s the postmodern institutions . . . those are the indifferent gods.”

 

Acts of Volition Radio: Session 30

Acts of Volition Radio: Session Thirty

With winter in the air, Acts of Volition Radio is back with eight great songs.

Eight great songs. Recorded Sunday, October 15, 2007 by Steven Garrity. Run time: 45min.

Session Thirty Playlist:

  1. Wintersleep – Weighty Ghost
  2. The Weakerthans – Utilities
  3. John Vanderslice – Karma Police (cover)
  4. Lassie Foundation – I Can Be Her Man
  5. Jill Barber – Hard Line
  6. Feist – 1234
  7. Silversun Pickups – Lazy Eye
  8. Jimmy Eat World – Big Casino

For more, see the previous Acts of Volition Radio sessions or subscribe to the Acts of Volition Radio RSS feed.

Acts of Volition Radio
Acts of Volition Radio
Acts of Volition Radio: Session 30
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CNN and The Onion Quiz: Spot the Satire

Sign of the end-times: CNN is syndicating The Onion on their home page and The Onion is syndicating CNN on their home page.

On any given day, you could read a selection of headlines and I wouldn’t be able to tell you which of the two sites they came from. CNN has walked from being bad news into the world of farce (and it has nothing to do with The Onion).

Here’s a quick quiz – which headlines are “real” (CNN) and which are “satire” (The Onion). Click the links to see the answers:

Surprise, they’re all from CNN – all from one day.

 

The Silent Majority (of laptop users)

I’ve often wondered how it is that Apple remains in the single-digit percentages of market share, while any computer-related event I attend (even open-source software related conferences) seems riddled with MacBooks (and PowerBooks, though to a less extent these days).

Who’s the other 95% of the market? Well, I am, for one (a happy ThinkPad user running Linux). However, I couldn’t figure out who the other 94.99999% were.

Then, I piggybacked into the fancy-pants Maple Leaf Lounge at the Toronto Airport with a friends’ membership. Side-note: the Maple Leaf Lounge is where rich people wait in the airport for Air Canada flights – free food, magazines, wifi, etc.

Here I found the other 95% and he/she is the Business Traveler.

The lounge was riddled with laptops, but there was but one MacBook (proudly carried by the good Rob Patterson, in this case). The rest were a slurry of Dell, Compaq, HP, IBM, and mystery-machine models.

Note: The market share percentages I’m using here came out of my “derriere”, so don’t bother correcting me. I do suspect Apple has a larger chunk of laptop sales than desktop.