If you grow as tired of those crappy cast-compilation discs as I do, you’ll welcome with open arms this entire first season of Saturday Night Live.
On the long list of releases I thought would never see the light of
Tuesday, this one ranked pretty high… just beneath anamorphic
editions of the unscrewed-with original Star Wars trilogy.
The argument against this title is staggering. An eight-disc release of
a show thirty-two years old that would require numerous musical
clearances and a likely high production cost? It’s not exactly an
attractive proposition. But now that the unthinkable has been thought
and before me sit twenty-two episodes of SNL, how does it stack up?

Feature

NBC’s Saturday Night (which would become Saturday Night Live
the next season) is a topical and zany sketch comedy show that airs
live on Saturday nights. Each show has a celebrity host who
participates in the sketches as well as a musical guest who performs
between skits. Now in it’s thirty-second season, the show has been
wildly successful, you may have heard of it.

The quality of the show varies with each season, ranging from painfully
unfunny to comedic genius. It’s currently quite painful, but public
opinion on recent seasons has always been diverse. I find that most
agree, however, that the show was best when it was new. Being a child
of the 80s, I wasn’t around when these were first aired, so this marks
my first experience with old-school SNL and I can now verify: the show really was best when it was new.

It takes SNL
a few episodes to settle in with a comfortable blend of zany sketches,
spoof commercials, fake news, movie parodies and musical numbers. The
worst episode in the entire set happens to be the second one, largely
due to Simon and Garfunkel performing eleven mind-numbingly mundane
songs and the cast only cranking out six short sketches. Lucky for us,
the musical guests are given less prominence in later episodes.
Arguably the finest cast ever assembled for SNL,
this first season features the original ‘Not Ready For Prime Time
Players’. This includes Dan Aykroyd, John Belushi, Chevy Chase, Jane
Curtin, Garrett Morris, Gilda Radner and Laraine Newman, each one a
comedic gem. Chase has the most screen-time, opening each episode with
‘Live from New York…’ and hosting Weekend Update. There’s ample
material featuring Aykroyd and Belushi with mostly everyone else
playing second fiddle to these three bad boys of comedy.

For the most part, the sketches are comedy gold. Much of this material
is every bit as relevant and funny today as it was when it first aired,
if not more so. George Carlin’s commentary on airport security measures
and military intelligence (which he believes to be an oxymoron) is
timeless. Similarly, Chase’s ‘Weekend Update’ ribbing of President Ford
feels very familiar, showing that the series hasn’t changed all that
much over the years – only the faces. Like most shows in their first
season, SNL is still a work-in-progress here. The episodes
are more hit than miss, but not every skit is worthwhile and some of
the musical numbers feel painfully dated.

The first season has episodes hosted by George Carlin, Paul Simon, Rob
Reiner, Candice Bergen, Robert Klein, Lily Tomlin, Richard Pryor,
Candice Bergen, Elliot Gould, Buck Henry, Peter Cook & Dudley
Moore, Dick Cavett, Peter Boyle, Desi Arnaz, Jill Clayburgh, Anthony
Perkins, Ron Nessen, Raquel Welch, Madeline Kahn, Dyan Cannon, Buck
Henry, Elliot Gould, Louise Lasser and Kriss Kristofferson,
respectively. Musical guest highlights include Billy Preston, Joe
Cocker (with John Belushi), Howard Shore (yes, that one!), Desi Arnaz and Kriss Kristofferson.

Video

All twenty-two episodes are shown in their original fullscreen aspect
ratio. The presentation is just as rough as you’d expect for something
thirty odd years old and shot for television. The video quality is
often soft and I did spot the occasional tracking line across the
top/bottom of the frame, but honestly, nothing so horrible that it
detracts from what’s happening onscreen.

Audio

The only audio option provided is a Dolby Digital 2.0 track. Like the
video, the audio quality is less than perfect, but does the job
satisfactorily most of the time. For the musical numbers, it sounds as
though the sound technician blindly tossed a single boom mic somewhere
near the action and hoped for the best. Luckily, the sketches often
sound better than the musical performances.

Extras

On disc eight, you’ll find seven screen tests featuring Chevy Chase,
Dan Aykroyd, John Belushi, Gilda Radner, Jane Curtin, Laraine Newman
and Garrett Morris. Ranging from two to five minutes in length. These
are every bit as funny as the episodes that followed from them.
Clearly, this cast was hand-picked by God who then gave divine
inspiration Lorne Michaels. Following those lovely gems is a five
minute group-interview with Lorne and the cast on The Today Show
dated 9/27/75. Finishing out the set is a thirty-two page booklet is
included, chock full of fantastic behind the scenes photographs.

Overall

As it would turn out, this classic first season is just as great as
they say it is… (‘they’ being the elderly people who were around for
its original broadcast, such as my parents). As far as quasi-vintage
television goes, this release is well put-together set and I commend
Universal Studios for having the testicular fortitude to release an
entire season of Saturday Night Live. To even the most
casual fans, I say run, not walk, to the nearest retailer and grab your
own copy of this landmark first season. I’m Dustin McNeill and that’s
news to me.

DVDACTIVE

Here’s a great piece by Robin Good at MNM

Sooner or later, and maybe without even knowing the
technical terms required to communicate this to someone else, you will
want to subscribe and monitor web sites, information pages, or online
catalog sections on an ongoing basis.

You have heard about RSS, webfeeds, Atom and other apparently not
too clear tech terms describing something that did sound like what you
are really in need of now, but even with all of your best will you
wouldn’t how or where to start given that those pages you have
identified do not sport any orange colored button or icon hinting to a
proper RSS feed.

Can do you generate an RSS feed for a web page that doesn’t have one?

Can anyone do this on her own?

The answer to both is a resounding YES!

Today, thanks to new “html scraping” services
available to everyone, RSS feeds can be automatically generated for
just about any web site, no matter what kind of layout, coding or
language it is written in. In some situations, to create a standard RSS
feed from any web page that does not have one may take less than a
minute, while in other cases, where your needs for customization are
higher, you may need to spend a little more time.

Morale of the story: any web page today can be made
to generate a RSS feed automatically. By the owner or, as it will
increasingly happen, by someone else who wants to be informed in
near-real-time of any news and content updates made on it.

Here the details:

HTML scraping or the ability to automatically
generate a standard RSS feed from a HTML document (a web page) that
does not have one has been a new type service under increasing demand
for over 2 years now.

Early services (e.g.: MyRSS) that offered HTML scraping later
disappeared or were replaced by other more profitable ones. Creating an
automatic RSS feed from a non-RSS enabled web page enables a number of
truly useful potential applications and I am sure that such services
will enjoy soon greater marketplace rewards.

FeedYes

FeedYes is the latest entry in this small group of online services
which allow anyone to create/ generate automatically a RSS feed for any
web page. FeedYes, has really found a simple and truly effective route
to simplify this task while providing good enough a solution to satisfy
most needs.

While it is not perfect, it is damn good and fast
at doing what it does. It is alos rather simple to use, and once you
have gone through it once, creating a second feed for another site, may
take literally only a few seconds.

FeedYes is a three-step
process that involves a) providing the URL of the page out of which an
automatic RSS feed needs to be created, b) indicating among the dynamic
links found by FeedYes on the specifiied URL, which one is the first
that refers to the content section that you are interested in (all web
pages have different content sections in the same page, and you
probably do not want to create a feed for the comments section or for
the most recent articles appearing on the same site), c) indicating in
the updated list of links FeedYes will spit out the last relevant link
pertaining to your selected content section.

In this way, FeedYes isolates with good precision (you are the one
effectively guiding) the specific content section you are interested in
(say the Latest News) and creates an RSS feed for it.

Feed43

Feed43 is an online service that
converts standard web pages or XML documents to RSS feeds. Feed43 does
so by extracting snippets of text or HTML by applying specific search
patterns to the document from which the feed needs to be extracted. The
search patterns help Feed43 understand exactly which content to grab
from a page and which not.

This allows for a much more precise control of what
will be contained in a feed at the expense of the ease of use and
accessibility of the overall product itself. For technically savvy
users this is in fact an excellent and very reliable approach to RSS
feed generation but for non-technical users Feed43 may scare off lots
of users in a matter of minutes.

In Feed43 the set of steps required to create a custom RSS feed for a web page that has none are as follows:
a) Identify the web page from which to generate a RSS feed.
b) Create a RSS feed on Feed43 pointing to that web page.
c) Define search patterns required.
d) Specify output templates required.
e) Generate the new RSS feed.

All feeds created with Feed43 are “public”, but optionally Feed43
also allows you to protect any newly created RSS feed with a password.
The service is free.

FeedFire

FeedFire is the oldest of these HTML-to-RSS services allowing anyone to automatically create a RSS news feed for any Web site that does not have one.

You simply register at FeedFire, input the URL of the page and
FeedFire dos the rest for you in the fraction of a second. All that’s
needed is a FULL URL to the page you would like to have made into RSS.
All bandwidth costs to host the new RSS feeds are absorbed by FeedFire.

FeedFire also allows to sponsor newly created RSS
feeds. this can be done by anyone like me and you, who are not major
corporations but people who are looking for a clever, considered and
comprehensively featured service that allows them to add extra reach,
exposure, visibility and unique content to others and/or to THEIR own
web site.

RSS feeds created and sponsored with FeedFire can also be made
private, and used for creating intelligence reports or RSS learning
objects or RSS newsmastering channels containing information otherwise
inaccessible to others.

Sponsored feeds can be further filtered by allowing the sponsor to
select only news items that “include” or do not have specific keywords.
It is also possible to customize the number of news items displayed in
the sponsored feed, the number of words per news item and even the
title and the description of the newly created RSS feed. The varying
levels of sponsorship have increasingly higher levels of features and
customisation.

Find out more.

Robin Good’s Latest News

 

By ROBERT BURNS, AP Military

Pentagon officials undercut the intelligence community in the run-up
to the U.S. invasion of Iraq by insisting in briefings to the White
House that there was a clear relationship between Saddam Hussein and
al-Qaida, the Defense Department’s inspector general said Friday.

Acting Inspector General Thomas F. Gimble told the Senate Armed
Services Committee that the office headed by former Pentagon policy
chief Douglas J. Feith took “inappropriate” actions in advancing
conclusions on al-Qaida connections not backed up by the nation’s
intelligence agencies.

Gimble said that while the actions of the Office of the Under
Secretary of Defense for Policy “were not illegal or unauthorized,”
they “did not provide the most accurate analysis of intelligence to
senior decision makers” at a time when the White House was moving
toward war with Iraq.

“I can’t think of a more devastating commentary,” said Armed
Services Committee Chairman Sen. Carl Levin (news, bio, voting record),
D-Mich.

He cited Gimble’s findings that Feith’s office was, despite doubts
expressed by the intelligence community, pushing conclusions that Sept.
11 hijacker Mohammed Atta had met an Iraqi intelligence officer in
Prague five months before the attack, and that there were “multiple
areas of cooperation” between Iraq and al-Qaida, including shared
pursuit of weapons of mass destruction.

“That was the argument that was used to make the sale to the
American people about the need to go to war,” Levin said in an
interview Thursday. He said the Pentagon’s work, “which was wrong,
which was distorted, which was inappropriate … is something which is
highly disturbing.”

Rep. Ike Skelton (news, bio, voting record), D-Mo., chairman of the
House Armed Services Committee, said Friday the report “clearly shows
that Doug Feith and others in that office exercised extremely poor
judgment for which our nation, and our service members in particular,
are paying a terrible price.”

Republicans on the panel disagreed. Sen. Jim Inhofe, R-Okla., said
the “probing questions” raised by Feith’s policy group improved the
intelligence process.

“I’m trying to figure out why we are here,” said Sen. Saxby
Chambliss (news, bio, voting record), R-Ga., saying the office was
doing its job of analyzing intelligence that had been gathered by the
CIA and other intelligence agencies.

Gimble responded that at issue was that the information supplied by
Feith’s office in briefings to the National Security Council and the
office of Vice President Dick Cheney was “provided without caveats”
that there were varying opinions on its reliability.

Gimble’s report said Feith’s office had made assertions “that were
inconsistent with the consensus of the intelligence community.”

At the White House, spokesman Dana Perino said President Bush has
revamped the U.S. spy community to try avoiding a repeat of flawed
intelligence affecting policy decisions by creating a director of
national intelligence and making other changes.

“I think what he has said is that he took responsibility, and that
the intel was wrong, and that we had to take measures to revamp the
intel community to make sure that it never happened again,” Perino told
reporters.

Defense Department spokesman Bryan Whitman denied that the office
was producing its own intelligence products, saying they were
challenging what was coming in from intelligence-gathering
professionals, “looking at it with a critical eye.”

Some Democrats also have contended that Feith misled Congress about
the basis of the administration’s assertions on the threat posed by
Iraq, but the Pentagon investigation did not support that.

In a telephone interview Thursday, Levin said the IG report is “very
damning” and shows a Pentagon policy shop trying to shape intelligence
to prove a link between al-Qaida and Saddam.

Levin in September 2005 had asked the inspector general to determine
whether Feith’s office’s activities were appropriate, and if not, what
remedies should be pursued.

The 2004 report from the Sept. 11 commission found no evidence of a
collaborative relationship between Saddam and Osama bin Laden’s
al-Qaida terror organization before the U.S. invasion.

Asked to comment on the IG’s findings, Feith said in a
telephone interview that he had not seen the report but was pleased to
hear that it concluded his office’s activities were neither illegal nor
unauthorized. He took strong issue, however, with the finding that some
activities had been “inappropriate.”

“The policy office has been smeared for years by allegations
that its pre-Iraq-war work was somehow ‘unlawful’ or ‘unauthorized’ and
that some information it gave to congressional committees was deceptive
or misleading,” said Feith, who left his Pentagon post in August 2005.

Feith called “bizarre” the inspector general’s conclusion that
some intelligence activities by the Office of Special Plans, which was
created while Feith served as the undersecretary of defense for policy
— the top policy position under then-Defense Secretary Donald H.
Rumsfeld — were inappropriate but not unauthorized.

DON’T INTERRUPT ME, DON’T INTERRUPT ME!

Rep. Chris Shays is a real class act.

Here’s
the pride and joy of the 4th District repeatedly admonishing Katy
Helvenston-Wettengel (who was only trying to answer Shays questions
within his endless and shameless rant).

Who
is Katy Helvenston-Wettengel you ask? Well, she just happens to be one
of the relatives of the four American contractors who providing private
security in Iraq that were ambushed by a mob and their bodies dragged through the streets of Fallujah.
Helvenston-Wettengel, and three other relatives of the victims,
testified before the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform
about the outrageous conditions the contractors were forced to deal
with while in Iraq (i.e., lack of body armour, lack of amour ed cars,
no maps, etc).

After
these individuals fought back tears testifying about the recounting how
the contractors, were sent out into the meat grinder called Iraq
without the protective equipment they were promised, the Republicans
wasted no time and doing what they do best…attack the messenger.
Shays grilling and belittling of Helvenston-Wettengel was so offensive
that Rep. Henry Waxman apparently had enough of the 4th District
Congressman and pulled the plug on him.

Watch and puke.

ConnecticutBLOG

The Libby Tapes

Joe Lieberman: A Horse’s Ass

Doug Mills/The New York Times

Senator Joseph I. Lieberman, center, an independent, with two
Republican colleagues Wednesday: John McCain, left, and Lindsey Graham.

By KATE ZERNIKE

Published: February 8, 2007

WASHINGTON, Feb. 6 — It came as little surprise that when Senate Republicans
blocked debate Monday on a resolution that would have opposed President
Bush’s plan to increase troop levels in Iraq, Senator Joseph I. Lieberman, erstwhile Democrat, sided with them.

Skip to next paragraph

But Mr. Lieberman also went
further, accusing Democrats of giving strength to the enemy and
abandoning the troops, and arguing that an alternative resolution that
he and many Republicans backed was “a statement of support to our
troops.”

That was too much even for one Republican member, Senator John W. Warner of Virginia, a sponsor of the bipartisan resolution against the president’s policy.

“I
forcefully argue that ours is in support of the troops,” Mr.
Warner said tersely. “And there is no suggestion that one is less
patriotic than the other.”

Defeated last year in the
Democratic senatorial primary in Connecticut but then elected as an
independent to a fourth term, Mr. Lieberman has kept a promise to
caucus with the Democrats, giving them a majority of only 51 to 49 and
earning for him a designation as “the most influential man in the
Senate.”

But on Iraq, the issue that made the last year the
most difficult of his political life, he has moved farther and farther
from the party, winding up to the right of many Republicans who now
embrace what six months ago was almost solely a Democratic position on
the war.

Mr. Lieberman’s enthusiasm for the troop
increase has become a talking point for Republicans trying to shore up
support for the president’s plan. It infuriates the bloggers who
first tried to defeat him. Some of his best friends on either side of
the aisle take issue with him publicly. But given his importance as the
lawmaker who ensures Democratic control of the Senate, members of the
majority say there is little they can do.

Joe Lieberman, independent, sees himself as Joe Lieberman unchained.

“I feel liberated, free somehow,” he said during an interview in his office.

“As
I look back,” he said, “I have always tried to do what I
thought was right, regardless of where a majority of members of my
party are. But there’s always pressure on you. I just feel free
of that pressure. And I think my Democratic colleagues know that
I’m not going to do — on this, of all questions which I
think is so important to our country’s future, to our success in
the war on terrorism — I’m not going to do anything here
just to be a good member of the team.”

His forays across
the aisle have begun to extend past the Iraq debate. When he was asked
on Fox News recently which Democrat he would support in 2008, Mr.
Lieberman, the party’s vice-presidential nominee in 2000, offered
instead that he might vote for a Republican.

“I would not have said that three years ago,” Mr. Lieberman said. “No chance.”

Even
Democrats who have come to expect his siding with the president on the
war thought this was going a bit far. “Did you see that?”
one Democratic senator asked, incredulous. But he, like others,
criticized only privately. “The bottom line,” the senator
said, “is we need him.”

To those who supported Ned Lamont, the victor over Mr. Lieberman in the Democratic primary, this is an “I told you so” moment.

“He
was re-elected because he fooled enough people into believing he really
was against the war and not for an escalation, but I think this is his
true colors,” said David Sirota, a Lamont consultant who recalled
that during the campaign, Mr. Lieberman said he wanted to bring the
troops home “as fast as anyone.”

“It’s
everything Ned Lamont was saying: that you can’t listen to this
guy’s words, you have to watch his actions,” Mr. Sirota
said. “I think it shows a disdain for the public. It’s like
the public to him is just a nuisance, an obstacle for him doing what he
wants to do.”

Mr. Lieberman’s talk of supporting a
Republican in 2008, Mr. Sirota said, suggests that he is still toying
with the idea of switching to the Senate Republican Caucus.

Mr.
Lieberman could always prove to be an unpredictable ally for the
Republicans, too, as when he suggested last Thursday a “war on
terrorism tax” to make Americans understand the sacrifice that he
said the fight demanded.

Still, Republicans have missed few
opportunities to embrace his support. Mr. Bush said in a recent speech
that he was acting on “the good advice of Senator Joe
Lieberman” in proposing a bipartisan Congressional working group
on Iraq. (Democrats scoffed that the president had already had plenty
of ways to consult with Congress and had never shown much interest in
doing so.) The president and Vice President Dick Cheney also quote Mr. Lieberman in arguing the White House’s view on the troop increase, and the Senate Republican leader, Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, repeatedly notes how happy the minority is to have Mr. Lieberman’s backing.

“I wish I were being quoted by some Democrats, too,” Mr. Lieberman said.

But he does not seem very worried about appearing cozy with the other side. When one Republican, Senator John McCain of Arizona, squabbled with Senator Carl Levin
of Michigan, the chairman of the Armed Services Committee, at a hearing
about the troop increase, Mr. Levin abruptly walked out. Mr. Lieberman
walked over and chuckled with Mr. McCain, patting him on the back.

At
hearings on Iraq, Mr. Lieberman frequently leads witnesses to testimony
in support of the president. Isn’t it true, he asked Gen. George
W. Casey Jr., the departing commander of American forces there, that
over all, the policy in Iraq has been a success? Doesn’t Mr.
Bush’s strategy offer “a higher probability of working than
any other plan?”

Such arguments have prompted friends like Senator Susan Collins,
a Maine Republican who opposes the troop increase, to challenge him
publicly. Still, Ms. Collins said in an interview, “the fact that
he takes a position that’s contrary to the vast majority of the
members of his caucus I think speaks to his strong principles.”

“I
enjoy seeing him in this position of power, given the very difficult
political year he’s gone through,” she said. “I think
he’s enjoying this.”

The midterm election, Mr.
Lieberman argues, was a call to bipartisanship, and his mandate is to
get Democrats to look beyond party lines.

Yes, he concedes, the
election was also a call for a change in Iraq; he just believes the
president’s plan offers the best chance of that.

“I’m
a feisty, happy warrior,” he said. “And I’m going to
continue to fight for what I think is right for the security of our
country.”

New York Times

“Once Upon a Time”
with your host Arthur Silber:

The Trouble with Propaganda — Part 11,243

The trouble is that it works:

Many
adults in the United States believe their country will enter a conflict
against Iran, according to a poll by Rasmussen Reports. 57 per cent of
respondents think it is very or somewhat likely that the U.S. will be
at war with Iran within the next year.

Note these other numbers from the poll:

How likely is it that Iran will soon develop nuclear weapons?

Very likely 42%

Somewhat likely 33%

Not very likely 11%

Not at all likely 2%

“Soon.” Note that the word is very helpfully left undefined. In addition, no evidence whatsoever
has been presented, publicly or privately, that Iran is in fact
pursuing the development of nuclear weapons. To the contrary, all
knowledgeable experts agree that any “Iranian threat” continues to recede farther into the future. Well, never mind. We have a wider war to get started. No time to lose.

So more than half of Americans believe we may be at war with Iran within the next year, and three-quarters of them think Iran will “soon” develop nuclear weapons. Yet public life goes on in its uninterrupted stupor. As I recently wrote:

[T]he
war chants rise once again, this time directed at Iran. If we should
attack Iran in the near future, much of the world will treat us as we
will fully deserve: as a barbarian, pariah nation, which no one can trust and which will join the most monstrous countries in history.

Is
there a massive protest from Americans about the route we may follow?
No. Are the Democrats who now control Congress at least trying to avert this catastrophe,
which may be the last? No — because they fully share the belief in
American “exceptionalism” and in our “right” to worldwide hegemony. Is
there even one prominent voice in America regularly explaining the horror of what we have already done, and what we may still do? No.

If this remains unchanged, and if we launch another war of blatant, unforgivable aggression,
we will deserve everything we get — and more. Historians, if there are
any in the years to come, will see what we were and what we did, and
they will judge us accordingly.

It’s as if the last five years never even happened.

Remarkable. Horrifying. Stupefying. Utterly unbelievable.

And unforgivable.

See: Becoming a Barbarian, Pariah Nation: What Are You Waiting For?

Morality, Humanity and Civilization: “Nothing remains…but memories”

The Missing Moral Center: Murdering the Innocent

Time Has Run Out — and the Choice Is Yours

Alan Smithee

01/01/07 – 01/31/07

February 5, 2007

…from an Improvised Explosive Device…

…when an improvised explosive device…

…when an improvised explosive device…

…when an improvised explosive device detonated…

…when an improvised explosive device detonated…

…when an improvised explosive device detonated…

…when an improvised explosive device detonated…

…came in contact with enemy forces using small arms fire…

…when an improvised explosive device detonated…

…as a result of a road traffic accident…

…came in contact with enemy forces using small arms fire…

…a vehicle-borne improvised explosive device…

…a vehicle-borne improvised explosive device…

…a vehicle-borne improvised explosive device…

…vehicle rolled over…

…following a road traffic accident…

…a non-hostile cause…

…when an improvised explosive device detonated…

…in contact with enemy forces using small arms fire…

…sustained during route security operations…

…enemy forces using small arms fire…

…when an improvised explosive device detonated…

…enemy forces using small arms fire…

…when shot by small arms fire…

…when an improvised explosive device detonated…

…when an improvised explosive device detonated…

…improvised explosive device detonated…

…when an improvised explosive device detonated…

…when an improvised explosive device detonated…

…when an improvised explosive device detonated…

…when an improvised explosive device…

…came in contact with enemy forces using grenades…

…in a non-combat related incident…

…when an improvised explosive device……

[More]

Blog