Something Requisitely Witty and Urbane

The Answers

I have a new online timewasting addiction.

Yahoo! Answers is so simple, but it's just kinda genius.

Basically, people ask questions, and people answer.  Over time, by answering questions and voting on other people's answers, you earn points.  These points gain you nothing, but you continue to climb to new "levels" which also gain you nothing but you feel strangely compelled to aim for anyway.

The best part of it, though, is the "Best Answer" portion.  The person who asked the question that you answered votes on which answer they felt was the best.  If you receive the best answer, you get ten points, thus giving you motivation to ACTUALLY answer the question well.  If the asker doesn't vote on a best answer, then the voters do and the answer with the most votes wins.

It's all so pointless, but all so addicting.

The Wright Amendment Compromise

So, I'm not fully versed on the intricacies of the Wright Amendment (and this may be interesting only to those who have a vested interest in the DFW Metroplex), but let me see if I can explain it.

Sometime in the 1960's, it was determined that Love Field, the main airport in Dallas at the time, wasn't good enough for commercial use.  This law led to the creation of DFW International Airport, which is part of both Dallas and Fort Worth.

Southwest Airlines was created and based themselves out of Love Field based on the idea that they could provide cattle-car style rides to Houston, San Antonio, El Paso, Austin, etc.  The flights were cheap and popular.

As Southwest became more successful and as the federal government deregulated airline travel, Southwest began trying to expand their operation.

Fort Worth, upset that the airline business which was supposed to be shared with them, was now sending an disproportional amount of airline money to Dallas, got Jim Wright to get a law passed in Washington (in rather fly-by-night fashion) which would not allow Southwest Airlines to fly to destinations outside of Texas or directly adjoining states.

Anything I've missed, you can check out Wikipedia for.

At any rate, Southwest has been trying for several years now to get the Wright Amendment repealed, to no avail.

This week, American Airlines (based out of DFW) and Southwest (based out of Love Field) have come to a compromise that they are presenting to Congress tomorrow.  This compromise, although I'm sure there are many details I don't know, has the Wright Amendment being repealed in 8 years.

This seems to me to be a good thing.  Southwest is the second most successful airline in the state (and you could argue it is one of the top five nationwide -- It is really the only major airline who wasn't affected by 9/11).  This will allow them to grow, which can only mean more money pouring into Dallas AND Fort Worth (as Southwest will begin flying into DFW as well).

Eight years is also a long enough period of time for the interested airlines to begin their transition modes.  Plus, I'm pretty sure Herb Kelleher wouldn't have gotten the Wright Amendment repealed on his own in less than that time.

This seems like a win/win for the DFW metroplex, a win/win for Southwest, and a tie/lose for American Airlines.  I'm ok with that.

Unloading

Over the past couple of months, I've come across too many blogworthy items to list in one post, but have waited to long to spend a whole lot of time on them.  Slowly over the next week, I'll unload a few of them at a time here.

Ann Althouse - The silent strategy of the holdout in the Moussaoui case. This is really a pretty fascinating look at silent civil disobedience.  The reason the jury didn't sentence the 20th hijacker to death was because one person continually voted, by secret ballot, against it while never revealing their own identity.

Siskel and Ebert behind the scenes.  Seriously... go check out these videos that show, almost simultaneously, how much the duo hated and loved each other.  Some really funny stuff.

The Top 500 Modern Rock songs of all time.

More later... Off to school.  I've got some interesting stuff to fill you all in about from la universidad also.

Jon Stewart: The Enemy of Democracy

Or so says Richard Morin's column in the WaPo today.

Based on a study by Jody Baumgartner and Jonathan S. Morris of East Carolina University. 

To test for a "Daily Effect," Baumgartner and Morris showed video clips of coverage of the 2004 presidential candidates to one group of college students and campaign coverage from "The CBS Evening News" to another group. Then they measured the students' attitudes toward politics, President Bush and the Democratic presidential nominee, Sen. John F. Kerry (Mass.).

The results showed that the participants rated both candidates more negatively after watching Stewart's program. Participants also expressed less trust in the electoral system and more cynical views of the news media, according to the researchers' article, in the latest issue of American Politics Research.

"Ultimately, negative perceptions of candidates could have participation implications by keeping more youth from the polls," they wrote.

The age group he mentions is "college-aged", whatever that means anymore.  Aren't these the same people who turned out in fewer numbers than most older age groups before Jon Stewart showed up and started poisining patriotism?

But seriously... Isn't this a chicken/egg argument?  Don't most people my age dislike politics because of the politicians, not because of what Jon Stewart tells us about the politicians?

Jon Stewart doesn't make us more cynical of politics.  Politicians make us agree with Jon Stewart.

Tense

Andrew Sullivan, on today's Chris Matthew's Show, is missing an important point:

AS: My view is that Americans don't vote on the past.  They vote on the future, and the mistake the Democrats are making is by rehashing the past, which I think most of us will agree was screwed up in this war, nevertheless Americans are like, "Look.  We're here.  What do we do now?"  Are we going to pull out?  Are we going to turn this into another Afghanistan or are we going to stay the course.  On that argument, Bush and the Republicans are stronger.

CM: But let me recast it another way.  Suppose the question is, "Who do you trust to make the big strategic decisions for our country: the people who made the mistake in Iraq or the people who's hunch was it was the wrong decisions?"

AS: Well, there will be nobody who was in the Bush administration running in 2008, so they won't be able to run against that...

First of all, 2008 isn't the focus right now... it's 2006, Andy.  So much rests on if the Democrats can take back the House and/or the Senate because real, honest to God investigation will happen.  The Republicans most devious actions haven't always been the overt mistakes they've made but the covert way they've disallowed any real finding of fact by sweeping oversight under the rug.

But secondly, Andrew misses something when he makes his past/future argument.  Iraq isn't just something that happened in the past or something that needs to be dealt with in the future.  It is also our present predicament, and as short-sighted as Americans are, they aren't so short-sighted that they forget what's going on at this very moment.

Surfacing

I'm coming back... I just need a couple more days.

I have a test tomorrow in Spanish, y yo deseo hacer muy bien, so I'm going spend tonight and the morning. It's also press week at the paper, so I've been busy writing there too... Some interesting stuff, I hope.  Broke my record and had 6 items for this paper.  I'm told the front page of this issue will be a Dylan Biles monopoly.

But I have a shitload of links to unload of things that I've been reading (yes, I promise, I've still been reading) and then I'll get back to a normal routine of blogging.

Until then, bow your head, have a moment of silence for the once great and now disappointing Dallas Mavericks, and ponder how one 20 year old kid can single-handedly defeat the deepest team in the NBA.  Oh, and while your at it, ask if it might have anything to do with the losing team's MVP deciding not to show up.

Adios.

Juice

I gotta tell you... I have the biggest rhetorical man crush on Bill Simmons.

He's known as The Sports Guy, and he writes for Page 2 on ESPN's website, and he's just the funniest, freshest writer out there.

Lately, they've been rerunning some of his articles on Page 2 that have slipped behind ESPN's Insider paywall, and I ran across this gem from two years ago about the 10th anniversary of the OJ murders:

Marcia Clark, so confident and cocksure at the beginning of the trial, became more and more harried as things dragged along. At one point, after the Enquirer published revealing photos of her, she actually broke down in court as Darden shielded her from the Court TV cameras. By the middle of the trial, Judge Lance Ito was treating her with open disdain, which was funny because he was such a joke in his own right (thanks to his Art Shell-ian clock management, the jury was sequestered for more time than any jury in the history of California). Meanwhile, Darden was self-destructing like John Starks against the Rockets, unable to stand up to boyhood idol Johnnie Cochran. As Cochran gleefully pushed his buttons, snidely questioning his competence and experience, poor Darden became so flustered he would actually turn away from the judge's desk and rock back and forth like Leo Mazzone. You really had to see it. There were at least four different times during the trial when it seemed like Darden would snap and either have a nervous breakdown or kill everyone in a 25-foot vicinity. It was like watching one of the roommates slowly lose his mind over the course of a "Real World" season. Simpson's defense team rolled through Clark and Darden with ease. Scheck blistered holes in their DNA evidence, sneering in contempt at every witness, like he couldn't believe they would bring something so moronic in front of a jury. He was like James Mason in "The Verdict," crossed with a Rottweiler. And Cochran was so polished, so righteous, so likable ... it almost seemed like an actor was playing him, as if the defense team had hired Morgan Freeman for the duration of the trial. Johnnie could throw anything out and you would believe it.

Anyway, as a self-confessed OJ trial junkie at the time, I resonated with a lot of what he said.  Go read the whole thing, if only for the stunningly proficient prose.

Snoochie Booches

This journalism thing is really starting to pay off.

It's not set in stone yet, but tomorrow I will most likely be seeing a press screening of Clerks II...

... but it gets better...

... On monday, I'll be interviewing the man himself: Kevin Smith.

Needless to say I am totally stoked.  Details when I get them.

It's so... so angry!

Bill O'Reilly absolutely throttled by Olbermann, who's becoming enough of a reason to tune into MSNBC.  Crooks and Liars has the video.