Thursday, May 19, 2005
Countdown, Part II
by Tom Bozzo
Note that even though my colleagues and I who will attend are salaried, we won't be part of the lost-productivity cost of the event: our schedules are merely flexing to accommodate the screening.
An observation from Star Wars product tie-in land is that the LEGO shop web site says there's a limit of five units per customer on the forthcoming Death Star II set (3,441 pieces, at a $269 introductory price). I want to find out who's getting more than 5 of those and be that person. (*)
Meanwhile, Joe Malchow says he liked the film a lot over at Dartblog, and offers the non-surprising observation that the flap over the film's politics is overblown.
One nit to pick with Joe: while I don't think reasonable people in the U.S. equate dissent with treason, that is not to say that unreasonable people aren't doing so. Apart from the popular support for various abridgements of constitutional freedoms that public surveys periodically show, throwing around the T-word is a sadly common blogiverse foible — one which Joe has admirably avoided, I should add.
See, e.g., Roger L. Simon's post on the Eason Jordan flap, entitled "Is This Treason?" (no); this LGF post related to a Seymour Hersh exposé entitled "The Media Are the Enemy" (again, no); Glenn Reynolds himself calling the failed Senate effort to turn some Iraq reconstruction grants into loans (that is, loans to be repaid by someone other than the U.S. taxpayer) as "near-treasonously stupid and destructive" (once more, not in the grander scheme of things), which I found among 29 search returns for the word "treason" at instapundit.com. For that matter, Keith Olbermann's use of "treasonous" to describe the White House's efforts to bully the press via the Newsweek controversy was perhaps malapropos (mainly if used unironically, which I don't think was the case), though an official effort to stifle dissent by bullying the press is a very serious matter meriting strong language (say, "un-American").
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(*) The limit is probably meant to stifle the ambitions of people who resell individual parts on the 'net.
Sith watch: twenty hours to go, plus the duration of previews and other advertisements.
Note that even though my colleagues and I who will attend are salaried, we won't be part of the lost-productivity cost of the event: our schedules are merely flexing to accommodate the screening.
An observation from Star Wars product tie-in land is that the LEGO shop web site says there's a limit of five units per customer on the forthcoming Death Star II set (3,441 pieces, at a $269 introductory price). I want to find out who's getting more than 5 of those and be that person. (*)
Meanwhile, Joe Malchow says he liked the film a lot over at Dartblog, and offers the non-surprising observation that the flap over the film's politics is overblown.
One nit to pick with Joe: while I don't think reasonable people in the U.S. equate dissent with treason, that is not to say that unreasonable people aren't doing so. Apart from the popular support for various abridgements of constitutional freedoms that public surveys periodically show, throwing around the T-word is a sadly common blogiverse foible — one which Joe has admirably avoided, I should add.
See, e.g., Roger L. Simon's post on the Eason Jordan flap, entitled "Is This Treason?" (no); this LGF post related to a Seymour Hersh exposé entitled "The Media Are the Enemy" (again, no); Glenn Reynolds himself calling the failed Senate effort to turn some Iraq reconstruction grants into loans (that is, loans to be repaid by someone other than the U.S. taxpayer) as "near-treasonously stupid and destructive" (once more, not in the grander scheme of things), which I found among 29 search returns for the word "treason" at instapundit.com. For that matter, Keith Olbermann's use of "treasonous" to describe the White House's efforts to bully the press via the Newsweek controversy was perhaps malapropos (mainly if used unironically, which I don't think was the case), though an official effort to stifle dissent by bullying the press is a very serious matter meriting strong language (say, "un-American").
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(*) The limit is probably meant to stifle the ambitions of people who resell individual parts on the 'net.
