So we’re a little closer to being a country where it’s OK to shoot an unarmed 110-pound eighth grader in the back of the head when, fleeing with a snatched purse, he refuses to HALT on command.
The Republican senators overwhelmingly support this nominee, the Democratic senators overwhelmingly oppose him . . . so there is a real difference here . . . but not a wide enough majority of Democrats supported filibuster to avoid cloture. I’m glad we tried.
IF YOU LIVE – OR TRAVEL – ABROAD
How cool is this? I am sitting in my hotel room in Europe watching – and controlling – my TV in the bedroom back home. And because it’s hooked up to my TiVo, I can actually watch ANYTHING any time I want . . . pause it, ‘rewind’ it, fast forward through the parts I don’t want to see . . . schedule new programs to record – the works.
Think of me as having a mechanical arm 4,000 miles long. Eyeballs that bulge out on transAtlantic springs.
Not working for you?
Okay: Think of me as having a Slingbox (noted here some months ago) and a friend smart enough to hook it all up for me (thank you, Bryan).
There are downsides: You need to watch on your laptop. The picture quality is so-so. It gets less-so as you enlarge it. And the response time of the controls is sluggish. You click ‘play’ or change the channel and it takes a couple of seconds to play or for the channel to change.
But with a reasonable broadband connection, you’re basically watching a small color TV set just fine. It sure beats watching Scrubs with the voices dubbed in German.
- If you have friends or relatives living abroad, how about letting them hook up a Slingbox to the TV in your guestroom, maybe even with the TiVo you let them buy you? Voila, monsieur! Jon Stewart every night of the week.
- Or how about this for a business? TiVo should offer this service to the millions of citizens of the world who might want to have the full range of American TV choices available to them. TiVo would provide you, the overseas subscriber, your own TiVo – picture huge farms of them – complete with cable or satellite subscription and your own Slingbox.
OK, so it’s pretty kludgy. And in twenty years, any affluent citizen anywhere on the planet will be able to turn to his wall and say “show me the ‘Bizarro Jerry’ episode” and there, seconds later, will be Bizarro Seinfeld, large as life, on the TV wall.
But in the meantime, this is really cool.
