No, I’m serious. This thing, a non-descript black box committed to the stylings of that dusty piece of electronics your grandfather can’t bring himself to throw away, is in disguise. On the surface, they’re pitching it as a “media hub”. They say that it is an all-in-one device into which you funnel your existing bits of tech, but I’m going to call them out on the bullshit. There are marauding Greeks inside this console, just waiting to sell your personal information and creep on your family.

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I’d be pissed if I cared about cycling in the slightest. You go back and look at all the commercials he made, all the tv spots he did, all the times that he denied the doping and pretended to be the Golden Boy of athletic success. He promotes everything you’d expect in an American Poster Child, the easy choice to slap on a Wheaties box and tell kids to emulate, yet we’re still suprised that he embodies everything that you’d EXPECT in an American Star: the Fakeness, the Bravado, the Unabashed Lack of Scruples, and Hypocrisy. “Drugs” is a gimme but with Armstrong’s particular fall, he brought the rest of us with him.

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“Events like this … if they are influenced by anything, are influenced by news programs. It becomes a media event. Cable news drops ordinary programming and goes around the clock with it. The story is assigned a logo and a theme song; these two kids were packaged as the Trench Coat Mafia. The message is clear to other disturbed kids around the country: If I shoot up my school, I can be famous. The TV will talk about nothing else but me. Experts will try to figure out what I was thinking. The kids and teachers at school will see they shouldn’t have messed with me. I’ll go out in a blaze of glory.”
– Roger Ebert (http://boingboing.net/2012/12/15/roger-ebert-on-how-the-press-r.html)

I feel like the news media machine giving 24 hour coverage of the event is largely at fault for propagating the tragedy, and making the shooters’ work famous. But I don’t feel like this is solely their fault. Since there are so many of these happening in the last few years, schools are part of the problem as well.

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Well, that was…. unexpected. The immature brat in me screams an appropriately melodramatic Episode III Vader “Noooooooooooo” while the thoughtful (though admittedly smaller) voice in me gives pause to contemplation. Is Mickey Mouse really the worst thing to happen to the Star Wars franchise? Could it be any more devastating than the canon fodder of having Jar Jar Binks unknowingly resigning the known galaxy to an oppressive Empire? A Lucas Metaphor? WWJJD?

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So, I heard that the general public is now convening every four years to compare unreasonable expectations and misinformation in their bid to tout a singular person to represent complicated issues with either the color red or the color blue. Crazy as it sounds, I encourage this sort of behavior because not only does it embiggen a sense of individual empowerment, but it gives people something to root for in the off-season of the [popular athletic team].

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