Matt Marks Music

Now that I’ve got all my bitching out of the way (hopefully!), I’ll focus on what was productive.

Kennedy had a nice opening:

I thought Hillary’s speech did what it had to do. It seemed to lack passion, but I don’t find her the most passionate speaker. But hopefully she’ll smackdown the batshit crazy Dems who are actually considering voting for McCain.
This was a nice point:

I want you to ask yourselves: Were you in this campaign just for me? Or were you in it for that young Marine and others like him? Were you in it for that mom struggling with cancer while raising her kids? Were you in it for that young boy and his mom surviving on the minimum wage? Were you in it for all the people in this country who feel invisible?

But I was pretty blown away by Michelle Obama’s speech. I never realized what a great passionate public speaker she is, actually rivaling her husband. She brought a sense of heart to the convention – which it sorely needed – and livened it up, not just with her charisma but with her beautiful words. I’ll admit it was a little sappy at times, but I was kind of a sucker for it, especially when she would talk about her mom and they would show her mom looking proudly from the audience. I think that made a lot of people cry. Funny that it got more criticism than Hillary’s speech, but I think that it was mainly from analysts who by the nature of their profession do not allow themselves to be emotionally swayed. Hillary’s was definitely more functional, but Michelle’s more affective in my opinion.

PS. Props to PoliticsTV for posting all of these videos.

Here’s that creepy prayer from last night’s Democratic Convention:

Here’s the text:

“Father God,

This week, as the world looks on, help the leaders in this room create a civil dialogue about our future.

We need you, God, as individuals and also as a nation.

We need you to protect us from our enemies, but also from ourselves, because we are easily tempted toward apathy.

Give us a passion to advance opportunities for the least of these, for widows and orphans, for single moms and children whose fathers have left.

Give us the eyes to see them, and the ears to hear them, and hands willing to serve them.

Help us serve people, not just causes. And stand up to specific injustices rather than vague notions.

Give those in this room who have power, along with those who will meet next week, the courage to work together to finally provide health care to those who don’t have any, and a living wage so families can thrive rather than struggle.

Hep us figure out how to pay teachers what they deserve and give children an equal opportunity to get a college education.

Help us figure out the balance between economic opportunity and corporate gluttony.

We have tried to solve these problems ourselves but they are still there. We need your help.

Father, will you restore our moral standing in the world.

A lot of people don’t like us but that’s because they don’t know the heart of the average American.

Will you give us favor and forgiveness, along with our allies around the world.

Help us be an example of humility and strength once again.

Lastly, father, unify us.

Even in our diversity help us see how much we have in common.

And unify us not just in our ideas and in our sentiments—but in our actions, as we look around and figure out something we can do to help create an America even greater than the one we have come to cherish.

God we know that you are good.

Thank you for blessing us in so many ways as Americans.

I make these requests in the name of your son, Jesus, who gave his own life against the forces of injustice.

Let Him be our example.

Amen.”

Yeah, it’s tame. But a political convention supposedly bringing many different types of people together is also really not the place for it. It’s exclusionary and kind of offensive.

For the last, oh, 6 months or so, my BlackBerry has been in the most pathetic of states. I've gradually lost control of the "pearl", which for my phone is the central navigation tool. It started getting really bad around the time the warranty on my phone expired (how funny!), so I've been stuck with this increasingly dysfunctional phone, making my life a living hell, as my iPhone jerk friends multi-touch to their heart's content. It's kinda like being stuck in traffic and watching people zip by in the carpool lane, in fact I had been developing some serious "phone rage" of late, which I'd offer as a serious competitor of road rage.

I tend to divide people into two camps based on a fictional scenario I invented:

You are walking down a path and you encounter an obstacle – let's say a chair. Do you climb over the chair or do you move the chair out of your path before proceeding?

Think about it.

I am the type of person who would climb over the chair and proceed down the path without a second thought.

As my BlackBerry steadily degraded in quality, I simply developed a series of workarounds. Luckily my phone doesn't rely wholly on the pearl, it just makes you jump through a hundred fucking hoops to get anything done without it. After each successive loss of functionality I would cringe and then figure out a sufficiently annoying way to, for example, look at the picture I just took, which would take about 10 times the length of time as before.

Eventually though, especially in the last couple weeks, almost every function was lost, as I lost pretty much all control of the pearl – basically allowing me to make calls and answer. I'm paying 20 bucks a month data! I needs muh google maps and shit!

My partner in crime also owns the same model of BlackBerry as I, but hers just simply didn't turn on one day, so she shunned the information age completely and bought an old Samsung (which she loves). For months her old BB sat on her dresser, a relic of a more complex time.

So last night I sat in bed, subjecting her to another one of my "my BB sucks – the world is out to get me" talks. She casually offerred up this suggestion: "why don't you try replacing your pearl with my old one".

It was like that scene from Coffee and Cigarettes with Jack and Meg White. I was like: "No… Um, well maybe actually… Yeah, that just might do it. Hell yeah!!"

It totally worked. I'm mobile blogging again on my vintage BlackBerry (which may or may not be good news for you Dear Reader…). Yay! Its alive!

See, Melly's not the type to casually climb over that chair in the path. Some chair appears in her path, girl is gonna pull out a bazooka and OBLITERATE that shit.

Sent via BlackBerry from T-Mobile

Um, I just flipped on the end of the convention and caught the tail end, just enough to catch the PRAYER. WTF?? Hello, separation of church and state? Some douche named Don Miller asking “our father” “in the name of Jesus Christ” to bless the Democratic Party or some shit? Come on guys. Quit sucking up to the evangelicals. It just looks fake and pisses off the rest of us who prefer our politics and religion as far apart as possible.

Please God make it stop:

Can’t. Take. Self-righteous. Celebrities. Any. More.

Seriously. This corny Hallmark bullshit isn’t going to change anyone’s mind. On the contrary, I think it turns the people on the fence against Obama. The tone is so smug, so condescending, so sappily idealistic. As Wired Listening Post notes, it’s like a ‘We Are the World’ for the 2000s. No more. All done.

Thanks.

Ok. I’m sorry. Disregard that last post. Immediately after posting MSNBC’s attempt at rockin’ my world with their awesome headlines I headed over to CNN and came across the grandaddy of them all:

Cheerleader skirts too tiny for school

Um… There is NO WAY a straight guy can see that link and NOT click.

Wow, MSNBC.com Video is really taking a crack at overshadowing my CNN Headline of the Day series.

Check out these gems:

Turtle born with 2 heads, 6 legs

Fake Rockefeller fuzzy on past

Wiener dogs race

Two-headed turtle stolen (unrelated to other 2-headed turtle story)

Georgia Aquarium houses giant manta ray

Barbie fishing pole hooks a winner

Sizzling summer dishes

Stunning weight-loss secrets

Secrets of a makeup master

To be fair, there are a couple serious headlines. Um, here’s an example:

Mo’ houses, mo’ problems for McCain

Cool.

Ugh… please, can we have no more of these celebrity Obama videos? I really have no idea who these are aimed at, aside from the celebrities themselves. And this one isn’t even a halfway decent song, at least the Yes, We Can song was kinda unique. There is just something so sickening to me about smug, self-assured celebrities smiling and nodding at me in black and white – it really makes me want to hide back into my non-voting anarchist hole again. Can they honestly think that swing voters have any interest in seeing a bunch of Gap ad-ass motherfuckers condescendingly inviting viewers to join them in the exalted enlightenment of the Obama team? It’s bullshit, and it’s the kinda bullshit that plays right into this argument:

I was on Fandango looking up movie times and I came across a film whose trailer I wished to watch. I clicked on the ‘Watch Trailer’ link and prepared to watch. I then was subjected to an ad to watch before my trailer, of another trailer. Ummm… a trailer is an ad. I just watched an ad for an ad.