14 November 2007

Freerice.com combines smugness about words with donating to the UN World Food Program.

Just watched Lions for Lambs. It's fairly good watching. The thing that's barely keeping it from being self-righteous "liberal" polemic is that it still speaks as if the nation state is the relevant unit for self-actualisation, for engaging with the world and for identity. So it turns out (who knew!) that news media organisations in the US are subject to considerable commercial and political pressures which limit their ability to function as part of a healthy democracy. Dissent gets drowned out by patriotism - or something. So American politics is bad for America. It's like a fragment of national discourse couldn't find a forum and got displaced, years later, into a movie with a lame title.

3 comments:

  1. freerice.com is a clear successor to
    www.thehungersite.com, but smugger, as you say.

    What bothered me about it was that, as with the SAT and other standardized tests, the definition of some of the words is sometimes wrong.

    Haven't seen Lions for Lambs. Why watch that when I can wait a week and watch Hitman?

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  2. Dissimilar words, true that.

    I've just watched the trailer for Hitman. Nice. And, film of a videogame - can't see anything going wrong there.

    Will there be a remix of Ave Maria on the soundtrack? It wants bass.

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  3. Wants bass? It needs base. I believe it's not actually called Ave Maria though.

    It's true that I can't think of a good film based on a computer game, but I figure that means we're about due.

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