Letters to the Editor
mattwa33186
Published Letters: 395 Editor's Choice: 41
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I live in Florida
[Read the article: Mike Bloomberg could buy the White House]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]and I voted for Gore, even though it made me sick to my stomach to do so.
Bush was obviously retarded. End of subject.
The Libertarians were so grossly inept that it was impossible to vote for them with a clear conscience.
So that left Gore, the new poster child for the media controlled election process. How he made it through the election process without a single person asking him where he stood on censorship given that his wife was the Susan B. Anthony of restricted speech is beyond me. He was (and is) a faux environmentalist, and his "I invented the Internet" statement showed that he was either an idiot or thought we were.
The idea of voting for Nader was laughable - the man is and always has been full of shit, inventing threats to the American public that only he could save them from. Sound familiar?
But given the dearth of options in 2000, and 2004, I can understand why 100,000 of my neighbors voted for Ralph. At least you have to dig a little to determine he's an asshole.
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Sucks is the wrong word
[Read the article: Start believin']
[Read more letters about this article: Here]They were accomplished musicians. Neil Schoen was a truly great guitarist underneath it all. Perry's voice was amazing, if somewhat generic (Journey was able to replace Steve Perry with someone who sounded even more like Steve Perry in short order) but he was completely unlikable, kind of like that guy from Styx that does the Liberace-type act in Vegas now. But above all, listening to that particular song makes me remember hearing it for the first time and thinking that it was (if you ignored the actual lyrics, just listened to the sounds they were making) impossibly perfect. And there is value in that. A lot of value.
And Tony sure as hell would have picked that song off the jukebox. For white people in North Jersey that kind of shit is soul music. It's uplifting. It defines optimism. It doesn't make you think too hard. It's catchy. It's everything pop should be.
But what I take objection to is mentioning Journey and the Ramones in the same sentence. No, the same paragraph. Hell, they shouldn't be mentioned on the same internet. Journey took pop and added a level of talent and polish that were rarely seen. The Ramones created perfection, in the sense that adding or removing a single thing, one note, one riff, one word, would have destroyed the song. The Ramones were perfect in the same way that great white sharks are perfect. Journey, by comparison, was just a bigger, prettier goldfish.
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Nader
[Read the article: Mike Bloomberg could buy the White House]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Do you remember how Nader got famous? Unsafe At Any Speed, which "exposed" the dangerous handling characteristics of the Chevrolet Corvair, the first rear-engined car from a major American manufacturer.
Unfortunately, the handling of the Corvair was no more dangerous than that of any other American car, or Japanese or European car for that matter. Nader simply took the formula of "something new and strange to people" + "inate distrust of Big Business" + "intelligent looking and sounding, harmless, nice guy" and ran with it. It worked very well for him, and has since been copied by Consumer Reports (Dodge Minivan), 60 Minutes (Audi 5000) and Dateline (GM pickup trucks), but calling him a consumer advocate is a lot like calling Al Gore an environmentalist or Jerry Falwell a born-again Christian - he is, in the sense that he makes his money and builds his reputation as presenting himself as one, but that's the extent of it.
As for Gore:
"During my service in the United States Congress, I took the initiative in creating the Internet."
Interview with Wolf Blitzer, 1999
Unless Al was elected to congress in the early 60's, there just isn't any possible way for this statement to be true. As late as 1990 he was lamenting the fact that there was no world wide network to connect computers, so apparently the man who took the initiative in creating the internet was unaware of its existence 23 years after DARPA started building it.
Gore, Nader, and Bush are equally full of shit.
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Something I noticed
[Read the article: Start believin']
[Read more letters about this article: Here]In much the same way as Journey found success in mimicking (and embellishing) the music of Styx, later REO, etc, hasn't our fearless music critic foumd his niche by mimicking Christian Bale's character from American Psycho?
Just a thought.
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Not quite the final cord
[Read the article: OMG, a wireless charger for your devices!]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]When every flat surface in the world is an inductive charger, so we can go to all day meetings or long creative sessions down at Starbucks without wondering where we can plug in our laptops, that will be cool. Of course that would make spilling your Coke a lot more exciting than it is now and we may all become sterile, but everything has a price.