Sunday, March 18, 2007

A Note to Our Readers

Hey --

Sunday and we're kind of through. Kind of because we've got another illustration that, ninety minutes later, still isn't done uploading.


Here's who helped with the writing of this edition:

The Third Estate Sunday Review's Dona, Jess, Ty, Ava and Jim,
Rebecca of Sex and Politics and Screeds and Attitude,
Betty of Thomas Friedman Is a Great Man,
C.I. of The Common Ills and The Third Estate Sunday Review,
Kat of Kat's Korner (of The Common Ills),
Cedric of Cedric's Big Mix,
Mike of Mikey Likes It!,
Elaine of Like Maria Said Paz,
and Wally of The Daily Jot

We thank everyone above (that's not part of the core six) and we thank Rebecca for photo shopping illustrations and Dallas for being a soundboard, a link locator and so much more.

New content?

Highlights -- Mike, Kat, Wally, Betty, Rebecca and Cedric wrote this and selected the highlights. Thank you to them for doing that.

MyTV's Fascist House -- You wanted it, it's here. And guess what? We can do it less often. Ava and C.I. added the thing at the end and we asked them, "What's that about?" MyTV is crashing and bombing. They're reworking the schedule they swore they'd stick with and their "original programming" no longer airs five times a week for two hours a night. Translation? We don't have to do this feature as often. Seriously, this was a pain in the butt. The collage would not upload to Flickr. (We have another uploading problem, we'll get to that.) So C.I. ended up trying out a new program and that was time consuming. But we got it up and it's here.

Things you should catch if you missed them -- there were two radio programs that we thought were worth noting and on topics readers care about.

The Albert Gonzales Show -- when the collage was done, Kat and C.I. both pointed out that in it, where Alberto's standing and Bully Boy's carrying a purse and looking at him, it's like the opening of The Mary Tyler Moore Show where Mary tosses her hat up and that woman is staring at her. So we decided to cast this feature in that light. (Rebecca cropped the collage to zoom in on just that aspect of it for the illustration for this piece.)

About the under-reporting . . . -- remember there's one more illustration? It goes with this. We held this and held this and finally posted it without the illustration. As we type, that's still uploading. Correction, it's uploaded, it's in the process of factoring in different sizes and that's gone on for over half an hour. We'll put it in when we can (hopefully tonight).

2 Books, 10 Minutes -- The book discussion returns. Two books. This is our war resister piece for the edition. (A reader wrote in about last week's edition and noted we didn't even mention war resisters. Actually, we discussed Agustin Aguayo and the media coverage in the roundtable last edition.)

TV: The Road to Boyville -- Words I, Jim, never enjoy hearing from Ava: "Wait a minute, we're done with our TV review and we're still not ready to post?" (Ava and C.I. usually write the TV commentary at the last minute, when everything else is done or almost done.) Yes, Ava, that was true. On the plus side, they've written a really strong commentary and when I was reading it out loud to everyone, Ty said, "Oh, readers love it when they take on the Idiot Bellafante."

Editorial: Mushroom Cloud -- There are two paragraphs missing due to a link. We reconstructed it into about two lines. We didn't know the DN! link had wiped out two paragraphs until we went to copy and paste for the print edition. Hopefully, the illustration carries anything the words don't.

Truest statement of the week -- Norman Solomon offered words to live by last week. That's our selection for the statement you shouldn't have missed.

So that's it for us this week. C.I.'s checking to see if the illustration is done doing whatever it's doing and we can put it into the article. Nope? Okay, we'll see you next week.


-- Jim, Dona, Ty, Jess, Ava and C.I.