Elementary School Musical

The sad tale of Michael Jackson grows sadder as his “friend” Sheikh Abdulla bin Hamad al-Khalifa is suing Jackson for breaching a $7 million contract.

The 33-year-old sheikh - son of the king of Bahrain - alleges that Jackson took millions in advances from him but failed to deliver on contractually agreed projects, including an album, a “frankly personal” autobiography and a musical.

The album I understand. But what is up with the autobiography and the musical?

Maverick Was Taken

Who doesn’t love code names? The Secret Service agrees that code names rock.

John McCain may have been a self styled Maverick, but Barack Obama’s Secret Service code name is Renegade.

Wow! But how do they decide these code names in the first place? Do presidential veto powers extend to code names? What if the Secret Service tells a president-elect that his/her new code name is something silly like Puffball or Scumbag?

Windows Vista SP3, I Mean Windows 7

I read about the pre-beta (isn’t that usually called… “alpha”?) details for Windows 7, and I like the direction of this OS. Basically it sounds like Vista with a smaller footprint and a few UI tweaks (most of which you can already simulate on Vista). Vista was truly a botched release combined with poor PR, so the decision to drop the name and just call it Windows 7 is a good one. I also like what I hear about all Vista-compatible programs running well under Windows 7. I wonder if I will be getting the 64-bit version for my next OS; I figure I will be due for a new computer by the time the next OS ships and gets the initial bugs ironed out!

Mirror Image

PITTSBURGH – A McCain campaign volunteer made up a story of being robbed, pinned to the ground and having the letter “B” scratched on her face in a politically inspired attack, police said Friday.

Ashley Todd, 20-year-old college student from College Station, Texas, admitted Friday that the story was false and was being charged with making a false report to police, said Maurita Bryant, the assistant chief of the police department’s investigations division. Police doubted her story from the start, Bryant said.

I had serious doubts about this story when it first came out, although it was exciting that it happened in a nearby neighborhood. Why would someone beat her up and give her a backwards B on her face? The area she was in is not super-safe, so you would expect her to have either been shot or just robbed. Sometimes robbers will force you to get into the trunk of your car around here, but that is neither here nor there.

Todd, who is white, told police she was attacked by a 6-foot-4 black man Wednesday night. She now can’t explain why she invented the story, Bryant said.

Why 6 foot 4? That’s pretty tall… Oh, I see what you did there.

She said he continued to punch and kick her while threatening “to teach her a lesson for being a McCain supporter,” police said. She said he then sat on her chest, pinned her hands down with his knees and scratched a backward letter “B” into her face with a dull knife.

I always worry about tall, dyslexic Obama supporters when I am roaming around Pittsburgh. Fortunately, they don’t have any sharp weapons. It’s interesting that in the story the guy didn’t just want to rob her, but he also wanted to make a political statement (and yet he didn’t slash her tires, perhaps because the knife was so dull). I bet everyone at the Pittsburgh Post Gazette and KDKA was also loving this story.

Cutting No Slack

I always wondered how doctors saw the pseudo-science in House. There is actually a blog that reviews the episodes and points out inconsistencies! Personally, I prefer the soap opera-esque portions more anyway, and I don’t really care that much about the patients. Fortunately, I am not a doctor.

Gotcha

I bet Katie Couric thought this series of interviews with Sarah Palin would be good, but there is no way she could have imagined they’d be this good. Not only is it hard to get SP in an interview, but when you do she offers up some real gems.

Couric asked Palin what newspapers and magazines she read regularly before becoming McCain’s running mate “to stay informed and to understand the world.”

Here is her response, according to a transcript provided by CBS:

Palin: I’ve read most of them, again with a great appreciation for the press, for the media.
Couric: What, specifically?
Palin: Um, all of them, any of them that have been in front of me all these years.
Couric: Can you name a few?
Palin: I have a vast variety of sources where we get our news, too. Alaska isn’t a foreign country, where it’s kind of suggested, “Wow, how could you keep in touch with what the rest of Washington, D.C., may be thinking when you live up there in Alaska?” Believe me, Alaska is like a microcosm of America.

Are you serious? It’s like Katie was getting ready to launch into a tough gotcha question only to have Sarah falter on the setup. Do you think after the interview Katie was skipping around high-fiving all the producers? Comedians worried about Bush’s presidency coming to an end suddenly were re-energized, I’m sure.

I wonder where Katie was going to go with the question. Was she hoping Sarah would name a periodical with a certain political tendency? Was it to show that Sarah only read local newspapers? Whatever the case, I doubt Katie expected to find Sarah unable to name a single newspaper. Isn’t Associated Press a safe choice (as Reuters is British)?

I don’t like to be political on this blog, but these interviews have been really uncomfortable to watch. At the same time, you’ve got to be pleased if you are a Katie Couric fan. She was just getting hammered before, but now she looks like a freaking intellectual crossed with a rock star. Katie doesn’t even have to be mean to get these amazing responses. It’s been such a train wreck, that you know any other Katie-Sarah interviews will get awesome ratings.