Archive for the ‘Reading Response’ Category
As if to prove once and for all that mandates of popular entertainment and less-popular religion on opposite sides of the issue do not preclude idiocy, this video makes its rounds throughout the Internet.
At the very least, bad public relations on the part of the gay marriage advocates, even if they were very slightly, very passively provoked.
Thanks to an incident involving Country Time® Lemonade Mix — 40 Percent Less Sugar than Soda! — an appropriate amount of water and the keyboard of my laptop, entries in the near future will be sparsely worded, if posted at all. Today’s entry should be one of the more egregious examples of that.
The Onion covers a certain national election:
African-American man Barack Obama, 47, was given the least-desirable job in the entire country Tuesday when he was elected president of the United States of America.
In his new high-stress, low-reward position, Obama will be charged with such tasks as completely overhauling the nation’s broken-down economy, repairing the crumbling infrastructure, and generally having to please more than 300 million Americans and cater to their every whim on a daily basis. As part of his duties, the black man will have to spend four to eight years cleaning up the messes other people left behind.
The job comes with such intense scrutiny and so certain a guarantee of failure that only one other person even bothered applying for it.
Said scholar and activist Mark L. Denton, “It just goes to show you that, in this country, a black man still can’t catch a break.”
I blame the job market.
For laughably posh election coverage, we turn to the laughably posh BBC. It’s like CNN, but with an avuncular, almost grandfatherly anchor, production values roughly equivalent to The Onion News Network and, of course, cheeky accents.
In introducing the electoral college, the anchor couldn’t help but suffuse some charm, even in his stern disapproval. Carefully, he explained:
Red for the Republicans, blue for the Democrats — I know it seems confusing if you’re used to red for Labour and blue for the Tories.
Their John King doppelganger fumbles around with a touch screen as he bumbles through an explanation of the electoral college. Consistently, he mislabels Greenwich Mean Time with Eastern, and vice versa.
As if in stern disapproval, the white-haired anchor tilted his head down, looking at the camera over the top of his eyeglasses. He pushes the glasses to the top of his nose.
It’s rare to see computer graphics stick to the bottom third of the screen, rarer even to see undramatic lighting and economically sized sets. The BBC brings all of it.
Sparing quite a lot of expense, their highest-profile American on the panel was a disgruntled Ted Koppel, looking like he’d rather have been back on Nightline but wasn’t wanted back. Koppel left after a half hour, well before our anchor referred to the polls closing in “North Hampshire.”
I don’t blame him — I’m sure this kind of stuff is more fun to watch than to experience.
