A Note to Our Readers

Hey --
We are all tired. But I'll be damned if I let Mike beat me without putting up a fight! (Personal note to Mike: ":D")


Here's who helped out the 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 all of them. We also thank Dallas for all of his help.

Biggest problems this edition? Illustrations. Which is why you're only getting one new one online. When we had no luck repeatedly, we started searching for illustrations we'd used in the past that might work this time.

What else are online only readers missing? A lengthy feature that will be much sharper and focused when it goes up here next week. (We'll also be rewriting parts of it, not just editing.) That took forever and a day. After 3 hours, Ava and C.I. bailed us on to go work on their TV commentary. That was a long one for them. They rejoined us an hour later and Ava's first remark was, "You're still working on the same feature!" We were. It never came together to our satisifaction. We have hope for it next week -- after some sleep.

Two other features were also pulled. That was fine with Dona because it forced "Short Features!" (Her mantra.)

Content that made it online:

Truest statement of the week -- an obvious choice. Once Kat pointed it out.

Editorial: Who's failing? -- quit blaming students, the peace movement and everything else. Pin the tail on the ass: the media.

TV: The lows and the really lows -- Taking a deep breath because this is where Mike beats me every week! Ava and C.I. didn't think they had anything to write. We know, you've heard it all before. We have too. But they were on the road for the first half of last week, they really didn't have time to watch much. They had watched the CMAs at a friend's house while they were on the road. They had done a funny bit when they got back about the perverse Reba. When they kept saying, "We've got nothing," we suggested they write about the CMAs. The print version of this includes when they could no longer watch. The friend is in the country music industry and he told them about a closet case early on and they made a game of attempting to guess who it was. (Ava and C.I. note that Kenny Chesney has been accused of camp and high drama, they have not accused him of being gay. Kenny Chesney was not the man in question.) When they saw the man, they both exclaimed, "It's him!" How so? These are my words (they fear if they're quoted it will give it away and they're really not interested in outing anyone), when you don't want to be seen as gay, you don't butch it up, you rob yourself of every bit of personality you might have. (This is very funny in the print version but they weren't sure -- they didn't know or know of the guy until watching the awards -- if they were saying anything that would out someone.) As Ava and C.I. explained to their friend (Ava says we can note it's a music producer) how they were able to figure it out, they were all laughing so hard that even Reba in close up couldn't top it, so the TV was turned off. So there was there Reba bit. But they didn't see an entire commentary in that. This took them an hour and it was mainly in figuring out what to pair it with. When they decided to pair it with the networks' announced fall line ups they were finally able to begin writing. This is really a strong commentary that had us all laughing and Ava (who has not and will not read over it -- nor will C.I.) said that's just because it looked like there wouldn't be anything so our expectations were tremendously lowered. Not true.

1 Book, 10 Minutes -- The embargo is over. C.I. had agreed to wait two weeks before quoting from the book when some community members said they were going to purchase it when it came out. With Joshua Key's book, C.I. was quoting from it to soon for some book readers in the community. So C.I. said, "If you're serious, I'll wait two weeks. But I expect people to buy it when it comes out." So today we did the book discussion.

So you wanna be a war resister -- This is a piece C.I. has advocated for the last few weeks and we've never had the time to do it or remembered to do it. (C.I. notes, "It figures we would do it the week when we are all beyond wiped out." True.)

The Nation Stats -- We grab four issues.

Yo George -- Tori's new CD is out, please check it out. This was short feature number one.

Vote Vets says, "Whatever Kagan said!" -- We were trying like crazy to come up with things to fill the hole from losing the extremely long piece and 2 others. It was so bad, we had the chat & chews on. We saw Newt make a fool out of himself (to no one's surprise and felt Chris Dodd should have shot back, "By your logic, when you shut down Congress in the 90s, you were aiding America's enemies!") on Meet the Press. We saw Dianne Feinstein sport a new hair color (C.I. notes, "As described" -- C.I. was rubbing the eyes long before Face The Nation came on). And we saw this 'debate' on Iraq that didn't even qualify as a discussion. We went with that.

Listings -- We're going to attempt to do this weekly but probably won't have time every week. We had a new illustration for it (and it ran in the print edition) but we'll probably go ahead and stick with this illustration in the future.

Highlights -- Mike, Wally, Cedric, Betty, Rebecca and Elaine worked on this. We thank them for it.

And that's it. We're finally done. But let me give a shout out to my bud Mike who does his own version of this note at his site (usually on Mondays). "Kevin Zeese, Third Estate Sunday Review" was his note for last week's edition. Mike does a great job summarizing and frequently remembers and notes things I forget.

One more thing. Last week's "Nation Isle" came dangerously close to being the most talked about feature. (As always the honor went to Ava and C.I.'s commentary.) Some of this was due to the piece itself but it's also true that apparently a cruise ship to Alaska encountered problems last week. We hadn't heard of that except for C.I. who saw something in The New York Times on it (believes it was either Thursday or Friday, a photo of an African-American woman who had survived the cruise -- C.I. read the caption but wasn't interested in the article). If you're e-mailing about that this week, please tell us when the crash (or sinking or whatever) was. To the best of our knowledge, Katrina vanden Heuvel was not on board. (That last sentence was a joke.)

See you next week.

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