firehose

Nerval's Lobster writes "Apple's developer Website offers a new, handy graph of iOS fragmentation — which, of course, highlights that the mobile operating system isn't fragmented much at all. A full 93 percent of iOS users are on iOS 6, the latest version; another 6 percent rely on iOS 5; and a mere 1 percent use an earlier iOS. Compare that to Google Android, which really is fragmented: some 33 percent of Android devices run some variant (either 4.1.x or 4.2.x) of the 'Jelly Bean' build, while 36.5 percent run a version of 'Gingerbread,' which was first released in December 2010 — ancient history, in mobile-software terms. (Other versions take up varying slices of the Android pie.) For years, Google's rivals have used the 'Android is fragmented' argument to hype their own platforms. But is Android's fragmentation really hurting the platform? Not as far as global shipments are concerned. According to recent data from research firm IDC, Android's market-share stood at 75 percent in the first quarter of 2013 — up from 59.1 percent in the same quarter a year ago. Meanwhile, iOS owned 17.3 percent of the market — compared to 23.1 percent in the year-ago quarter. Whatever the drawbacks of fragmentation (and people can name quite a few), it's clear that it's not really hurting Android device shipments or adoption."

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As it turns out, the apology that Paula Deen cooked up earlier today, though slathered in creamy publicist sentiment, still didn’t sit well with her increasingly dyspeptic employers, food pun food pun, etc., she’s fired. Deen’s longtime home The Food Network has announced that it will not renew her contract when it expires at the end of this month, ending a relationship that began in 1999 and continued to spread across several series dedicated to showcasing the myriad flavors of Deen’s home cooking, all of them starchy.

Unlike Deen’s recipes, there was no cushioning fat to the network’s statement—just a lean notice of termination, delivered without further explanation or PR sauce. Though of course, you can likely ascribe it to the Food Network not wanting their channel dedicated to the celebration of cooking to be tainted by a woman who treats it like ...

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Conclusive proof that Reggie’s Animal Crossing house is real

There was some question last week, based on the changed Mii and the overall ridiculousness last week, about whether the Reggie house distributed via StreetPass at E3 was really from Reggie Fils-Aime’s game.

Well, here he is walking you through his very own house! So it’s REAL. Reggie’s ACNL house really does have Reggie sheets. Some intern must have been laughing while creating that.

Showing us this house without including a Dream Suite code is ICE COLD, Reggie.

BUY Animal Crossing: New Leaf, AC:NL guide, upcoming games

redletterdave writes "A recent line of complaints from MacBook Pro users forced big box retailer Best Buy to finally issue a recall notice for 5,100 MacBook Pro replacement batteries after the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission advised customers to 'immediately stop using the recalled battery.' Both the CPSC and Best Buy received 13 individual instances of the MacBook Pro battery catching fire, with one incident resulting in 'a serious burn to a consumer's leg.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Today—on his 30th birthday, no less—Edward Snowden was charged with espionage by the United States for leaking information about government surveillance programs. It’s a crime punishable by death, though it’s rare that a prosecutor seeks the maximum penalty.

The US government has asked authorities in Hong Kong, where Snowden is believed to be located, to arrest him, according to the Washington Post. Update: NBC News is reporting that the charges against Snowden “were delayed because the United States and authorities in Hong Kong have been going back and forth to make certain that whatever charges the U.S. filed would conform to the extradition treaty with Hong Kong.”

While it’s possible that Snowden could fight his extradition from Hong Kong on the grounds of political asylum, taking his case all the way to Hong Kong’s highest court, he’s almost certain to lose. As an unnamed lawyer told the Wall Street Journal, “Hong Kong is the worst place in the world for any person to avoid extradition, with the possible exception of the United Kingdom.”

That said, Snowden’s case is not entirely hopeless. There is always the possibility that Chinese authorities will deem him too valuable to give up. As Jake Maxwell Watts wrote for Quartz earlier this month:

What if Beijing wants to know what Snowden knows? It may not want to turn away an NSA contractor who is an intelligence gold mine, especially one who claims that he had access to “the full rosters of everyone working at the NSA, the entire intelligence community, and undercover assets all around the world, the locations of every station they have, what their missions are and so forth.”

Of course, if Snowden decided to trade his knowledge for asylum, the charges against him probably wouldn’t remain merely espionage for long—and the penalties for treason are even harsher.

Today, an old man went on television and complained about video games. Then someone proved him horribly wrong.

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Man of Steel is by no means a perfect film. It’s written by David Goyer and directed by Zack Snyder, for example. There are going to be problems built-in:

Goyer: Exposition heavy. Bad dialog. A sense of fun that is almost entirely mean-spirited in nature.

Snyder: Bad Pacing. Overindulgent. Emotionally stunted.

There are examples of the above littered all over their filmographies. Man of Steel is no different. The film’s forward progression is wobbly; it lurches forward like a newborn fawn wearing jackhammer boots. Almost none of the people actually sound like people. Combine that with its overtly sci-fi feel, and hopefully you’ll understand why I refer to the film as “Easily the best of all the Star Wars prequels.”

I don’t mean that as a negative, however. The spectacle is fucking spectacular. The characters may not sound like people, but there is humanity in them. The emotions evoked are, more often than not, legitimately earned by the actors, and Snyder does manage to tease out some honest feelings in and around the film’s city-spanning pummelings.

But the narrative that’s unfolded in the week since its release focuses on one feeling in particular: Betrayal. It comes in different shades and flavors, but the two main tastes are these: Superman betrayed humanity, Goyer and Snyder betrayed Superman.

There are multiple articles that intelligently give voice to those viewpoints, and while I mostly disagree with them, I understand where they’re coming from; well, except for the end of Mark Waid’s review, where he describes going into a fugue state in the theater and falling out like a Southern belle who caught the Vapors. But I figure that’s just dramatic license on the part of the man who wrote the definitive origin of the 75-year old superhero. He’s more than allowed.

But I’m increasingly feeling like Mugatu when I read these articles as they come pouring out of blogs and entertainment news sites.

Specifically, the betrayal seems to be pinpointed to the climax of the film, where two things happen (and from this point forward, I will be dealing with plot spoilers, fair warning):

General Zod successfully manages to flatten about 8-10 square blocks of Metropolis with an intergalactic dubstep death machine.

Superman snaps General Zod’s neck.

The latter makes sense as a wellspring from which tears of betrayal can flow. Previous incarnations of the character have put a high premium on protecting Earth and its inhabitants. The world has adopted him, and he will do whatever he can to return that favor. That’s a vein many of Superman’s hundreds of writers have tapped in one form or another. So seeing a new incarnation of him basically commit Kryptonian genocide by killing Zod is pretty jarring in that context, there’s no denying that.

But the former is sort of maddening, to me. The focus on collateral damage above almost everything else has become the critical crowbar of choice to swing at the kneecaps of Goyer, Snyder, and their Clark Kent/Kal-El. And it seems unfair, to me.

For example, there’s this much shared article from Buzzfeed, an exclusive breakdown of the fictional damage incurred by imaginary aliens on a make-believe city that doesn’t exist. The article boasts some pretty huge numbers when it comes to casualties and property costs: two trillion total butcher’s bill, and about 1 million people dead or wounded. The report has been written as if LexCorp commissioned it, which is pretty clever, doubly so once you see it being used as a source of vindication for those who feel betrayed. Leave it to Zack Snyder to turn a decent chunk of the film critic sewing circle into grassroots supporters of Lex Luthor.

Could these criticisms have been quelled had Snyder simply inserted a line or two of ADR’d dialog from military officials or police, stressing that most of the city surrounding the dubstep machine had been successfully evacuated? Should there have been a line or two from Clark overtly stating his intentions to get Zod off the ground and into the sky so he can’t keep wreaking havoc on Metropolis? To both answers, the answer is "most definitely."

But this is a sci-fi film about an alien invasion, and it seems weird to me that we’re only now, decades after such imagery has become somewhat commonplace, suddenly giving a shit about the imaginary people in the computer generated buildings that are being destroyed by the bad guys. Weirder still are the suggestions that Clark should be taking into account a rough dollar estimate as he’s being thrown through buildings and having satellites kicked into his face, as if he’s one of the faceless police from THX 1138, breaking off their pursuit after a set dollar amount has been hit. Even weirder, the destruction caused by the bad guys is being hung almost entirely on Clark’s shoulders. Even when that LexCorp report assigns almost 90% of the damage in Smallville to the US Military’s efforts, some writers are choosing to not only inflate the level of collateral damage even further than the film shows it to be, but frame it as all Clark’s fault, as if he’s complicit in the actions of the villain as opposed to openly fighting them.

There is no credit given to Clark Kent for having successfully saved the world in this movie. Which he actually did. Yes, he effectively destroyed one, too. Or the potential for one. But when given the choice between saving his adopted people or allowing for a successful genocidal alien invasion, he chose us.

Seems pretty heroic, to me. A darker shade of heroism, yes, but still heroism. Arguing against that by pointing to the fact he got thrown through a building or punched someone into a train feels like missing the forest for the crumbling, flame-engulfed parking structure trees.

People are upset that Clark was given that choice to make. Or more accurately, they’re upset that Goyer and Snyder didn’t write him a way out of making it. And once they found out that Christopher Nolan was initially not on board with that ending, they became really upset.

But to me, this is all part of the point of rebooting the character. They wrote Clark into a Kobayashi Maru. A lot of his previous writers have done this, they just come up with a reason to for Superman to ace it somehow, like James T. Kirk did. Except Kirk only grew as a character, only really acquired a third dimension, when Nicholas Meyer didn’t let him cheat his way out of it.

And it’s hard to deny that—whether you come down on that choice positively or negatively—it has a palpable effect on audiences. It had a palpable effect on Clark, too. Many have speculated that the end of the film sees us, as the audience, witnessing exactly why his “no-killing” rule is established in this cinematic universe, because when he makes the choice to kill, it hurts this bad. He drops to his knees, lets out an anguished scream, and clutches at Lois Lane like the wounded, damaged person he is.

At that point, it's been a trying couple of hours for Clark, really: He meets his dad for the first time, and loses him shortly thereafter. Then he almost instantly gets in the first fight of his entire life, against two genetically-bred–for-war superhumans, and about five fully-loaded warplanes and a couple of helicopters. And less than a couple hours after that, he gets in his second fight ever, the stakes of which are the survival of all humanity. We’ve not seen this version of Clark Kent before. So I understand people being jarred by the decision not to adhere to Clark’s “true character.”

But Clark Kent isn’t a real person, of course, so appeals to his “real nature” or his “true character” don’t make much sense to me. Superman is a brand, and his character is whatever his current writer says it is. It’s why people are, in making their points/counterpoints, pulling up panels from John Byrne’s run, or screencaps from Bruce Timm’s animated movies, or clips from Richard Donner’s version of the superhero, the one that has, more solidly than any other cemented itself (thanks to John Williams’ theme and Christopher Reeve’s performance) as the uber-incarnation of the Superman.

I do agree with critics on this aspect: This Superman isn’t really Superman. Much in the same way the Batman we saw in Batman Begins wasn’t really Batman, either. Looking at that Nolan/Goyer collaboration, you can see how those two essentially used Begins as a template for Man of Steel. Some elements and concepts are remixed, but the endings are pretty much one to one:

Batman essentially lets a city go to hell before crashing a train into a building, killing his enemy, and then we cut to about a month later, when he’s showing up on a roof, ready to do his job.

Superman arrives after a decent chunk of the city has been wrecked, saves it only after getting thrown through some buildings and killing his enemy, then we cut to about a month later, and look at a Clark Kent ready to do his job.

And a lot of the arguments people are having now, were arguments people got caught up in back around 2005: Batman doesn’t kill. The action is too frenetic. The score isn’t as cool. There’s not a lot of fun. Somehow, people got used to it, and eventually, they allowed for that to be a legitimate version of Batman, just like people allowed for the crazy, fireplace poker-wielding, gleefully murdering version Michael Keaton played.

Begins’ sequel, The Dark Knight, helped sell that legitimacy a whole hell of a lot. Maybe Man of Tomorrow, or whatever it might be called, will do the same thing. Granted, it’s unfair for the filmmakers to answer legitimate questions about this movie with “Wait ‘til the next one, we got you,” but I really do wonder how much of this pointing at fictional property damage comes from being shaken from the idea that the guy wearing that big red S should automatically behave like the Superman we’ve got stored in our heads somewhere, whether he’s Mark Waid’s, Kurt Busiek’s, Grant Morrison’s, Richard Donner’s, Mark Millar’s, or any combination thereof. But there's no montage of Superman figuring it out. No evidence that he's got it locked in. He's a Clark Kent who's been wearing intergalactic under-armor for about four hours tops. It's not that easy. It probably shouldn't be.

The movie’s got problems, and it’s not as well executed as Batman Begins, since I’ve drawn that direct comparison. But I don’t see it as a betrayal of the character at all. Definitely not a betrayal of the Clark Kent we’re shown in this movie. It’s yet another recontextualization and reinterpretation of a polyglot character that we’ve been sold and re-sold over and over again for the better part of a century now. It doesn't break its own rules, nor does it kneecap Clark's characterization as the movie progresses. This Clark still has hope. Still wants to do good. It's just not the same simple sort of four-color hope that we're used to from Clark Kent. It's a hard fought hope, a bruised optimism that he carries around with him. That this Clark has his hope constantly tested doesn't mean it's not there.

Do I wish the movie was a little more classically hopeful, considering the symbol stuck to Clark’s chest? Of course. Do I wish that children who piled in on opening weekend had something a little more geared towards their sensibilities? Yes indeed. I’m a firm believer that adapting superhero stories to live action is a surefire way to handicap their potential. The Incredibles is the best superhero movie ever made, and neither DC nor Marvel seem at all inclined to follow that particular leader, which is disappointing.

But looking at the movie I did get, as someone who is familiar with Superman’s history, I’m willing to let this interpretation play out, because what’s being done is interesting to me in ways Smallville wasn’t, in ways the New52 can’t be, in ways the Animated Series couldn’t get at. Maybe it ends up being embraced after time, like Bale’s Batman. Maybe time erodes what initial goodwill there is, like with Routh’s Superman.

It’s not as if the character won’t endure. He survived Superman IV. He survived Superman: At Earth’s End. For some reason people celebrate the Death & Rebirth of Superman arc as if it wasn’t a cynical, mean-spirited, confused mess. There’s enough good in this version of Clark Kent that I’m willing to ride out whatever bumps there are in this introduction to him. Basically, the fact he got thrown through a building or two isn’t enough to throw me.

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It's the first full day of summer and, as police have feared, gang activity is rising with the temperature.

According to numbers released today at a meeting of the Gang Violence Task Force, officers have seen 12 gang-related attacks in the last two weeks alone, and 15 for all of June, making a total of 49 on the year. Portland Police Lt. Art Nakamura worries the city could break a standing record of 18 gang attacks in a month.

"We're back to where we were in 2012," Nakamura told the task force this morning., referencing last year's historic violence. "What's shocked us is the amount of people injured this year. It's kind of staggering."

He added: "Hopefully we don't break any records. I'm tired of records."

UPDATE: I've spoken with members of the Gang Enforcement Team who say there have actually been 13 gang-related attacks this month, making the total number 47. Nakamura may have misspoke at the task force meeting.

Original post: The tone of this morning's task force meeting was decidedly more on-edge than the past several, with cops indicating they'll crack down on East Portland hotspots in coming days and asking the collected clergy, social services workers and others to spread the word.

"We're going zero tolerance right now," said Lt. Vince Elmore of the Portland Police Bureau's East Precinct. "You're going to see people on their knees with their hands over their heads, because people are hurting each other."

The violence that's erupted in recent weeks has largely played out in East Portland, where cops say gentrification has increasingly pushed gang activity. A list of recent incidents rattled off at today's meeting included gun battles in broad daylight near 158th and Burnside, drive-by shootings, and a baseball bat beating in Holgate Park. Strikingly, police had no suspects for many of the attacks, a common problem in gang crimes where victims can be reticent to cooperate with police.

"That's ridiculous," said Deputy District Attorney Eric Zimmerman. "I know for a fact that someone knows who some of those unknowns are."

The uptick is unwelcome, but not completely unexpected. Buoyed by months of relative calm, the people working to curb Portland's gang activity had voiced concern in recent weeks altercations would ramp up this summer. Beyond the increase in crime that always seems to accompany summer break, officers have braced for a rash of imprisoned gang members being released in coming months.

But the violence is disappointing, too. At a gang task force meeting on June 7, officials had expressed hope the various suppression and intervention efforts in and around Portland would lead to a sharp drop in gang incidents this summer. With the latest round of reports, that seems unlikely.

"It's pretty scary out there how much they're talking about how afraid they are," said Kate Desmond, community justice manager at the Multnomah County Department of Community Justice, which supervises gang offenders. "I can't understand how busy we are."

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Here's a little bit of levity on a terrible couple of days for Portland journalism, what with Twitter and Facebook and news reports disgorging the names of fired (and venerable and talented) Oregonian newsroom staffers. The daily's bosses have apparently decided to backtrack on the cringe-worthy name of their planned PDF paper, "MyDigitalO."

As one of our commenters SO DELICATELY phrased it yesterday:

Publisher N. Christian Anderson III, answering some pleasantly tough questions about the gutting of his newsroom on Think Out Loud this afternoon (check it out here), awkwardly chuckled when host Dave Miller inquired about the origins of MyDigitalO. Then he claimed they'd planned all along to change it. Right.

It's unclear if the paper will still own the URL. But if so? they should totally sell it! To a fetishist! Who will pay the paper at least enough to save someone's job. Right?

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Saké Fest PDX returns for another triumphant year in the town that consumes the most of its namesake rice wine per capita in the entire country (that's us, Portland). Hosted in the Heritage Ballroom at the Governor Hotel and benefitting the Japanese-American Society of Oregon, the event will take place Thursday, June 27, from 6:30 to 9 and feature over 100 samples of saké, plum wine, and beer. A $50 advance admission cost buys you unlimited tastes of featured beverages in addition to entertainment from The Dennis Caiazza Trio and Portland Taiko (which gets LOUD, fair warning). Food pairings will come from Japanese-influenced restaurants including Biwa, Saucebox, and Masu... and also Sizzle Pie, 'cause why not? Anyway, the event is a blast, so buy a ticket here OR...

E-mail us for a chance to win two free tickets! Send both names to the eternally unbiased Steve by 5 pm Friday with GIMME SAKE in the subject line, and he'll pick a random winner by Monday, June 24.

Kampai, Blogtown!


The Governor Hotel is located at 614 SW 11th.

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Legislation could help those discharged for their sexual orientation access benefits.

Having recently become inducted as the Steve Jobs of babies, Kanye West innovated baby names this week by christening his newborn daughter “North West.” And, as with all of Kanye’s output, Internet reaction was swift, mixed, and inescapable, as the world rushed to be the first to make jokes as easy as taking candy from a baby, while snickering, “Hey baby, nice name.” The effects rippled throughout the world: Buoyed by the populace’s collective sneering derision being momentarily lifted from his own shoulders, Lebron James was able to sink five three-pointers to win the NBA title. Throngs of people flooded Brazil, chanting, “HEY, DID YOU SEE THAT AWFUL ROB REINER MOVIE NORTH, WHERE THE KID DIVORCES HIMSELF FROM HIS ASSHOLE PARENTS BECAUSE THEY’RE TOO WRAPPED UP IN THEMSELVES? WHAT AN AMUSING PARALLEL” in Portugese.

Elsewhere, Illuminati conspiracy theorists noted the day and time in their ledgers, anxiously ...

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I must say. I love Paula Deen's defense. It has the benefit of being both ridiculous and perhaps something her critics could actually agree about. According to the Wall Street Journal, "A representative for Paula Deen says that the 66-year-old celebrity chef used the "N-word" because she has roots in another era." Or as you might translate this, 'Look, she's on the old side and pretty racist.' Which sounds about right and sort of like the criticism rather than the defense.

Another thing it made me think about though is that these days, in 2013, if you're in your 60s, you really didn't grow up in the 'Old South'. More like you grew up in the Civil Rights Era. Paula Deen was born in 1947. So she was 8 or 9 during the Montgomery bus boycott, sixteen for the March on Washington and twenty-one when Martin Luther King was assassinated.

It's worth remembering how ingrained these words were for whites from the South from a certain era, not only for people who were fierce opponents of civil rights but even from some of their greatest advocates. The words signal the mental world of Jim Crow.

I'll always remember this story told by Roger Wilkins, who was a young attorney in the Johnson administration, but also then and later a civil rights leader, historian, journalist and more.

This is back during the bleeding, breakthrough years of the Civil Rights Movement, with a President who is pushing through the big epochal legislation that changed the face of the nation but also helped wreck his presidency (in electoral terms) and tear the Democratic party apart for a generation. Notably, for Johnson, he did all of this with his eyes quite wide open.

I've read many things about Johnson in this period and it's really human, almost Shakespearean stuff, because you've got this guy raised in the Jim Crow South, who's gotten religion on the civil rights issue and is pushing the stuff in spite of the politics. And yet at some level he's still an old school guy from Jim Crow Texas and can't make sense of why after he's been part of pushing through this landmark legislation and putting the presidency on the side of right that African-Americans aren't more grateful to him. On thr contrary, the country starting to tear itself apart with riots in the big cities and young African-Americans and many non-young African-Americans not at all satisfied with the post-Civil Rights Act status quo.

In any case, Wilkins - then in his early thirties - saw all of this up close and clearly loved and admired the guy at a deep level and understood and breathed the historical context of all he was accomplishing and yet saw his limitations and how he was actually totally lost in the racial politics of the 60s.

Back to that anecdote, Johnson's there with a bunch of aides in Oval Office, Wilkins included, and in a moment of frustration he slips into using the word 'nigger'. This is from an American Experience documentary. It starts with the historian Robert McCullough talking and then Wilkins comes in ...

McCullough: [voice-over] It was called "the Golden Chalice", the marriage of the President's younger daughter, Luci Baines Johnson. One reporter said, "Nobody was invited except the immediate country." It was August 6, 1966. There was war in Vietnam and riots in the streets, but there was still more Johnson hoped to do. What he wanted was time -- time to build his Great Society. "We can't quit now," he told an aide. "This may be the last chance we have." But time was running out.

Over four long, hot summers, riots had become a brutal fact of American life. Johnson looked helplessly on as more than 150 cities went up in flames. Detroit was the worst -- 43 dead, 7,000 arrested, 1,300 buildings destroyed. Johnson dispatched army paratroopers and prepared to send his own task force to investigate. As part of the task force, Roger Wilkins was there as the President issued his final instructions.

Roger Wilkins, Attorney, Johnson Administration: And he started in a low key. "I don't want any bullets in those guns. You hear me? I don't want any bullets in those guns! You hear me, gentlemen? I don't want any bullets in those guns. I don't want it known that any one of my men shot a pregnant nig -- " and he looked at me and his face got red. I was the only black in the room. "Well, I don't -- I just -- no bullets in those guns." But he was clearly embarrassed, and everybody in the room was embarrassed. So then he told us to go home and pack and get an Air Force plane to go to Detroit.

And as we're leaving, he called me and he said, "Come in here, Roger," and I went into his office with him. And he didn't say anything. I mean, I knew he wanted to say, "I didn't mean to say 'nigger'," but he meant to say 'nigger'. And I knew he wanted to say, "I apologize." He didn't know how to say it.

And so he walked me over to the French doors that went out to the Rose Garden, and it's the area where Eisenhower had his putting green. And he looked out, and he looked at me, and he looked down, looked out, looked down. There were pockmarks on the floor where Eisenhower's golf shoes had hit the floor. And he finally looked at me, and he looked at the floor, and he said, "Look what that son of a bitch did to my floor!" And then he patted me on the back and said, "Have a nice trip." And that was his way of apologizing. It was very human, I thought.

Not to state the obvious, but Lyndon Johnson was born in 1908.

It's not proven from the deposition - but the nature of the plaintiff's deposition combined with Deen's 'defense' in her deposition makes it pretty clear that Deen speaks like this ... today, pretty much all the time. And far more than 'talks' like this, it seems pretty clear that she thinks that way too.

That's why I think it's a good thing when this stuff comes out. Because it shakes us up from the comforting denial that that there aren't a lot of people in the country still living in the Paula Deen world, which it would be nice to think is the world of the 1920s but in fact, for a lot of folks, is the world of 2013.

“I have never seen a moving van following a funeral procession.”

– Pope Francis, in a homily about the worthlessness of worldly riches in eternal life.

The post Quote of the Day: Pope Francis appeared first on Religion News Service.

 

This is exactly the kind of sticker you should have on the back of your car when

you’re toting around 3 children. Forget the little stick figure family. This is where it’s at.

Hudson, NH

 

The responsible part of me knows I should work on my sculpture for class

But the other part of me wants to watch Dexter’s Lab on Netflix.

WHY IS LIFE SO HARD?!

The broadcast TV networks have long chafed at the FCC's decency regulations, arguing that the rules are vague, and restrict the networks' First Amendment rights. They won a battle in 2010, when the FCC began allowing "fleeting expletives" in live broadcasts. But they've taken a new tack this year, arguing that it doesn't matter if they show objectionable material because no one is watching.

It's well-known that network TV's audience has declined precipitously over the past two decades, but this may be the first time the networks have proudly trumpeted that fact, arguing there's little danger of kids being exposed to nudity, shows with curse words in the title, or other risqué material, because they're too busy looking at stuff on the Internet, which fortunately contains no objectionable material whatsoever.

Naturally, the Parents Television Council objected to this stance, because it falls under ...

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If you jog your memory enough, you may remember that time so many minutes ago when we asked our writers what song they'd want played at their funerals. Josh Modell couldn't quite make up his mind, and wished someone could just mix together Joy Division's "Atmosphere," Leonard Cohen's "The Guests," and, obviously, Boots Randolph's "Yakety Sax." 

Lucky for him, we can all look forward to a bitchin' funeral thanks to Ted Kindig, who created the aptly titled "Funeral Mashup" and tweeted it at us. Kindig also just so happens to be the winner of our 2012 Parameter contest. 

Listen to our dearly beloved's impending doom below.

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raptorific:

can’t this show just be nothing but data training cats

Zachary Gibson

Earlier this week, DC announced a new comic titled Superman & Wonder Woman. On one hand, cool, it's the first time Wonder Woman has headlined a comic beyond her solo title in forever. On the other hand, it appears the comic will be all about WW being Supes' girlfriend and them having superheroic sex.

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