Wallace and Gromit's latest adventure will premiere on BBC One at Christmas - but it will have to wait until 2010 to be eligible for an Academy Award.

BBC NEWS | Entertainment | Latest Gromit misses out on Oscar

Not so long ago, corporate giants with names like PanAm, ITT and Montgomery Ward roamed the earth. They faded and were replaced by new companies with names like Microsoft, Southwest Airlines and Target. The U.S. became famous for this pattern of decay and new growth. Over time, American government built a bigger safety net so workers could survive the vicissitudes of this creative destruction — with unemployment insurance and soon, one hopes, health care security. But the government has generally not interfered in the dynamic process itself, which is the source of the country’s prosperity.

Op-Ed Columnist - Bailout to Nowhere - NYTimes.com

Mitch Mitchell, the British drummer in the seminal 1960s band the Jimi Hendrix Experience, has been found dead in his US hotel room, authorities say.

BBC NEWS | Entertainment | Hendrix's drummer Mitchell dies

TODAY is the 90th anniversary of the armistice that ended the First World War, and it will be commemorated very differently on each side of the Atlantic and across the borders of Europe. It’s a reminder that not all “victors” experience wars in the same way, and that their citizens can have almost as much difficulty as those of the vanquished states in coping with the collective trauma of conflict.

For Americans, Veterans Day celebrates the survivors of all the nation’s 20th and 21st century wars. In France and Britain, by contrast, the mood is altogether more somber. In these countries, it is the dead who, since 1919, have been the focus of the ceremonies.

i've been wearing my poppy

Op-Ed Contributor - A Holiday to End All Wars - NYTimes.com

There are three words you will hardly ever hear a person in power use - "I don't know." Why is doubt, which most of us experience every day, virtually unheard of in politics, asks Michael Blastland.
...
Doubt seems a dangerous thing in politics. If possible, you don't admit it. Not about your values, nor your analysis, nor the policies that will magically bring about the change that you are certain is needed.

One response to the economic upheaval of the past few months might be to conclude that we know far less than we think we know, and pretending otherwise is rash and damaging. Yet while economic confidence evaporates, another kind of confidence still thrives - confidence in the power of our own analysis, of who is to blame and why, the strident confidence of politicians or business people in their preferred remedies.
...
Is this a general, but dangerous habit - that those in public life often drift through events of which no-one is the master, all the while pretending to a false confidence, or even certainty? Are our leaders incapable of saying what all should surely now admit, that often they don't know? Perhaps the wreckage from the past is all the evidence we need, for didn't they speak with certainty then too?

BBC NEWS | Magazine | Three little words so hard to say

I almost lost it Tuesday night when television cameras found the Rev. Jesse Jackson in the crowd at Chicago's Grant Park and I saw the tears streaming down his face. His brio and bluster were gone, replaced by what looked like awestruck humility and unrestrained joy.
...
I can't help but experience Obama's election as a gesture of recognition and acceptance -- which is patently absurd, if you think about it. The labor of black people made this great nation possible. Black people planted and tended the tobacco, indigo and cotton on which America's first great fortunes were built. Black people fought and died in every one of the nation's wars. Black people fought and died to secure our fundamental rights under the Constitution. We don't have to ask for anything from anybody.

Yet something changed on Tuesday when Americans -- white, black, Latino, Asian -- entrusted a black man with the power and responsibility of the presidency. I always meant it when I said the Pledge of Allegiance in school. I always meant it when I sang the national anthem at ball games and shot off fireworks on the Fourth of July. But now there's more meaning in my expressions of patriotism, because there's more meaning in the stirring ideals that the pledge and the anthem and the fireworks represent.

a personal reaction -- healing the wounds

Eugene Robinson - Morning in America - washingtonpost.com

xkcd - A Webcomic - Election

When Lewis Hamilton was eight and winning his first karting races he was tipped as a future Formula One champion, a prediction that came to glorious fruition on Sunday in Brazil. So what marks an eight-year-old as a potential champion?

BBC NEWS | Magazine | Ten ways to spot a future F1 champ aged eight

Reactions to Bristol Palin’s pregnancy have exposed a cultural rift that mirrors America’s dominant political divide.

Religion is a good indicator of attitudes toward sex, but a poor one of sexual behavior, and that this gap is especially wide among teen-agers who identify themselves as evangelical. Evangelical teen-agers are more sexually active than Mormons, mainline Protestants, and Jews. Evangelical Protestant teen-agers are also significantly less likely than other groups to use contraception.

For too long, the conventional wisdom has been that social conservatives are the upholders of family values, whereas liberals are the proponents of a polymorphous selfishness. This isn’t true, and, every once in a while, liberals might point that out.

From the last Presidential election cycle:

"Moral values."

By near universal agreement the morning after, these two words tell the entire story of the election: it's the culture, stupid.

There's only one problem with the storyline proclaiming that the country swung to the right on cultural issues in 2004. Like so many other narratives that immediately calcify into our 24/7 media's conventional wisdom, it is fiction.

If anyone is laughing all the way to the bank this election year, it must be Rupert Murdoch. The Murdoch cultural stable includes recent books like Jenna Jameson's "How to Make Love Like a Porn Star" and the Vivid Girls' "How to Have a XXX Sex Life," which have both been synergistically, even joyously, promoted on Fox News.

Red Sex, Blue Sex

When officials asked for the Welsh translation of a road sign, they thought the reply was what they needed.

Unfortunately, the e-mail response to Swansea council said in Welsh: "I am not in the office at the moment. Please send any work to be translated."

So that was what went up under the English version, barring lorries from a road near a supermarket.

BBC NEWS | Wales | E-mail error ends up on road sign