Category Archives: Social Commentary

Business, Social Commentary, Space, Weird

Vital Research On The ISS

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The space station finally earns its keep:

Compounds of unmatured malt were sent to the station in an unmanned cargo spacecraft in October last year, along with particles of charred oak.

Scientists want to understand how they interact at close to zero gravity.

NanoRacks LLC, the US company behind the research, has said understanding the influence of gravity could help a number of industries, including the whisky industry, to develop new products in the future.

And those silly people say that space research is a waste of money.

Science And Society, Social Commentary, Weird

Coregasms

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Everything (OK, well, not everything) you wanted to know about exercise-induced org@sms:

Because I first began org@sming from exercise at a young age, not to sound cocky, but I have perfected it! I know when my body is about to coregasm, I know what exact workout to do to achieve that feeling. I have also perfected my face so that if I do have a coregasm in the gym it doesn’t look like I am. I have never been embarrassed about coregasming at the gym because my coregasms are never unexpected or unplanned.

Now whenever I see a woman exercising, I’m going to wonder: is she or isn’t she?

Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Social Commentary

The “Inadvertent” Editing At NBC

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I have some thoughts on NBC’s bias, and media bias in general, over at PJMedia.

[Update a while later]

Similar thoughts over at Breitbart.com.

[Update early afternoon]

Matt Welch: When losers write history.

[Update later in the afternoon]

A commenter at my PJMedia piece has recreated the editing process:

Original quote as heard on the 911 tapes:

ZIMMERMAN: This guy looks like he’s up to no good, or he’s on drugs or something. It’s raining, and he’s just walking around, looking about.
911 DISPATCHER: Okay, is this guy, is he white, black, or Hispanic?
ZIMMERMAN: He looks black.

I guess some unknown NBC ‘senior producer’ was told the quote was too long to include in the broadcast segment and it needed to be cut to no longer than 5 seconds in order to fit time constraints.

First Round: Obviously the first thing to do when trimming a Zimmerman quote to fit the time allotted is to cut out anything that wasn’t said by Zimmerman;

ZIMMERMAN: This guy looks like he’s up to no good, or he’s on drugs or something. It’s raining, and he’s just walking around, looking about.
ZIMMERMAN: He looks black.

Nope, it’s still too long, we need to cut more.

Second Round, of course, reprising the weather report for that night is Sanford Florida is unnecessary and might be confusing to viewers who don’t live in Central Florida.

ZIMMERMAN: This guy looks like he’s up to no good, or he’s on drugs or something. He’s just walking around, looking about.
ZIMMERMAN: He looks black.

Still too long, we obviously need to cut more.

Third round: We take out the passive ‘stage direction’ parts of Zimmerman’s dialog that really don’t contribute to the action that we need to hold viewer’s attention.

ZIMMERMAN: This guy looks like he’s up to no good, or he’s on drugs or something.
ZIMMERMAN: He looks black.

Fourth round: It’s closer but the quote is still a little too long to fit into the time slot.

Now Legal gets into the act and tells the editor that an on the air accusation that someone might be on drugs, even in a quote from a third party, might expose the station to a defamation lawsuit and they want the offending words removed .

ZIMMERMAN: This guy looks like he’s up to no good, or something.
ZIMMERMAN: He looks black.

Fifth round: Now we’re almost there; just a couple of more words to trim and the quote will fit into the 5 second window allotted.

Running the remaining text through the NBC Writers Style Guide shows that without the ‘on drugs’ direct action object that Legal had removed, the words ‘or something’ are duplicative and softens the narrative line established by ‘up to no good’ action group and weakens the emotional impact of the entire quote.

ZIMMERMAN: This guy looks like he’s up to no good.
ZIMMERMAN: He looks black.

Sixth Round: Now we’ve almost got it. All we need to do now is take out the dead air blank caused by removing the Dispatchers unnecessary comments from the quote and we’ve got our 5 second quote.

ZIMMERMAN: This guy looks like he’s up to no good, he looks black.
Yeah!! We did it and we only had to go to Legal Once@!!

/sarc off

The frightening thing is, it’s entirely plausible.