Blogcritics The critical lens on today's culture & entertainment
Chad Orzel posted a super cool mix tape last week with comments (of course, this is Blogcritics) and one of the songs on the tape was Steve Earle’s “I Can Wait.” I was very disappointed with Earle’s latest, Jerusalem, but Chad’s post reminded me how much I love Transcendental Blues …
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When Harry Met Retail
Second Potter video flies out of stores: “Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets” worked its magic on the home video front, selling more than 6 million VHS and DVD combined units nationwide in its first day in release, according to several industry sources. While Warner Home Video executives declined …
Read More »JT Gets a Bridge
Pretty good symbol of James Taylor’s sophisticated bucolic appeal: A bridge over Morgan Creek immortalized in one of James Taylor’s songs soon will bear a plaque naming it for the singer. On April 24, the bridge built in 1987 on U.S. 15-501 South, a mile from Taylor’s boyhood home, will …
Read More »Property Values Up in the Shire
An Oxford house J.R.R. Tolkien lived in 85 years ago has sold for $1.1 million, $80,000 more than the asking price – dude has some FANS: Tolkien lived in the historical, seven-bedroom house with his wife, Edith, in 1918, while working at The Ashmolean, Oxford’s museum of art and archaeology, …
Read More »Sony Slaps Its Own Bad Self
Sony decides its application for a trademark on the term “shock and awe” for its PlayStation videogames unit isn’t worth the criticism: There have been press reports to the effect that Sony Computer Entertainment America (SCEA), a subsidiary of Sony Computer Entertainment Inc. has filed a trademark application for the …
Read More »Fake War
One of the complaints against media coverage of the war is that saturation coverage leads to a sense of impotence: all of this stuff is going on and I can’t do anything about it. The ability, or at least the simulated ability, to take action may explain the war game …
Read More »U.S. Network News for Iraq
We’ve been watching Iraq with microscopic intensity for the last month; now the Iraqis will be watching U.S. network news, as well as programming produced by Arab journalists in Washington and the Middle East, in a nightly news package funded by the U.S. government: “Iraq and the World” … will …
Read More »Bloodhound Gang’s Visual “Samples” Hearken to Cold War Era
Like any hip-hop band, the Bloodhound Gang uses samples in its music. Now they are using visual samples from the Department of Homeland Security site, combined with thir own special captions, to create a new line of t-shirts, ReadyWear. Frontman Jimmy Pop concedes he’s “always one to find humor in …
Read More »You Are Protesting What, Exactly?
The lengths to which people will go to avoid admitting they were perhaps mistaken can be truly astonishing: I remember novelist Alice Walker raving hysterically about the “500,000 dead Iraqi children” that would result from this war. Knock off four zeros for margin of error and you were right on …
Read More »CNN’s Sucking from the Totalitarian Teat
Is it better to have “access” and report a distorted version of the news from a totalitarian country such as the former Iraq, or is it better to withdraw, call the regime on its threats, and report the truth that you DO have? The only rationales for the former course …
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