Iyow - in your own words

Hee hee, if I could do it over again, I would want to be Tina Fey when I grew up… though it seems I’m already grown up.

Oh well.

Just last night, I caught a segment of Alive Day Memories, a documentary of ten soldiers and Marines who survived severe trauma accidents in Iraq – and lived to tell the tale of their ‘Alive Days.’

Regardless of one’s feelings about the Iraq War, “Alive Day Memories” brings into sharp relief the human cost of the war – the most jarring thing is seeing the videos of the young men and women prior to trauma, intact, confident, horsing around in their barracks; and after, missing multiple limbs, eyes, scarred faces. At the same time one is weighing the cost in lives – both American and Iraqi – the film elicits a contradictory feeling of pride in the committment and strength of the soldiers and their matter-of-fact optimism in the face of devastation.

The film also is visual reminder that though it’s reported troop survival rate in Iraq is higher than 90%, the injury and amputation rate are also higher because military surgery is doing a better job of saving people with deadly injuries.

The subject doesn’t need any added drama, but it’s produced and hosted by Tony Soprano! aka James Gandolfini, who does a fine, understated job giving center stage to the people who matter – the soldiers who fought for their country and survived.

My hometown SF’s Sixth Street is known more for the seedier side of life. Playbar’s Backlit Lounge is threatening to do some more damage, as ‘twas jumpin’ with musicians of electronic persuasion last Wednesday. Truly a pleasure, the commingling of earnest young bohemians with the earnestly unwashed.

In the spontaneous art culture that is SF, Backlit Lounge is stepping up an unsual committment to do it again every week, a treat for local denizens where the drinks are steep and the tunes are pretty.

The cost of the cassette to videotape a campaign speech: Two bucks.

The value of capturing and broadcasting your poltical opponent cheerfully referring to your American campaign volunteer of Indian descent as ‘Macaca’: Priceless.

(This clip is almost a month old – see Wonkette’s A-Big-Pile-of-Macaca for theories on what exactly Senate incumbent Allen meant – but who could resist getting to use the word macaca in a post headline? Really, I just like saying it as often as possible. Macaca macaca macaca.)

Blazin Hazen is the 80s pop star that never happened, the Dave Hasselhoff that never went to Germany. Love YouTube. Love love love YouTube.

This is much funnier than the original.

The lovely Amy Sedaris a-tumbling w/ Stephen ‘You Can’t Handle the Truthiness’ Colbert and Paul Dinello.

Spotted by Xtreme Cable TV Analyst Gen-E_FIR.

Check out this six-minute History of Dance, via YouTube. Brings a tear to my eye, sniff, watching this guy dance “Ice Ice Baby,” Chumbawumba, and N’Sync’s “Bye Bye Bye”in medley. That pretty much summarizes high school through my mid-20s.

Marc Lynch, blogger and author of Voices of the New Arab Public, points out something intriguing and disturbing: The open competition of the Internet is forcing mainstream media outlets to let go of any idea of content standards in favor of ratings.

In this post, Lynch argues that the common-denominator mentality must dominate because provocative, even exploitive, stories will receive mass Internet play, and as a result ratings-boosting stories such as the Jill Carroll video will flood all media outlets regardless of standards. Might as well get your share of the ratings and ad dollars.

Conversely, the lack of control over any media content even affects the types of videos that anti-Western jihadists put out to influence Arab moderates. Some are even claiming that beheading videos have been on the wane because jihadists don’t want them inadvertently picked up by large media outlets and alienating moderates unintentionally.

Anybody who’s tried to deal with all the varied plugins for video and media files for your browser knows that it can be a real PITA (or pain in the arse). In addition, many of us who prefer to use a browser more secure than Internet Exploder often have to do a little more legwork. That is, I did until I found this little plugin: Video Downloader by Javi Moya.

It’s great! If there is a video file or stream I want to view in Firefox, but I don’t have the correct plugins or software, it auto-detects and installs the correct piece. My one quibble is that it locally downloads the file or stream by default, whereas sometimes I’d prefer to play the file from the remote URL. But it’s easy enough to remove the file when it’s done, and that’s a small price to pay for the added functionality on one’s favorite browser.

Kudos to Boing Boing for first bringing it to our attention.