The Funny Farm
Where life is beautiful all the time and I'll be happy to see those nice young men in their clean white coats...
Adventures of a Basic Force For Good in Our TimeTM
... and I happened to listen to her show this afternoon, I feel like I must take Randi Rhodes to task for a few things:
- I have repeatedly tried calling Randi, only to be hung up on by (one of?) Randi's phone screener(s). I was even trying to plug my fellow bloggers over at Sadly, No! (basically because there was a blog entry that Randi was asking to look at on the air, and I wanted to tell her about it...) once, and got the information to that level, but of course it went no further. I tell ya, don't even think about talking to the stars until you can convince the gatekeeper to let you through.
- She just made mention of my fellow Wild-Eyed Coalition member Don Waller. Don is a man of many talents and many aliases and has had his hand in a number of ventures out here on the Fashionable Left Bank of BlogistanTM. A while ago, he joined forces with a guy known as Symbolman, and formed Take Back The Media (TBTM), one of the bastions of the alternative online media.
Randi made it sound like Don was the entirety of TBTM, sounding like she was not aware that that website is a group effort.
- She then claimed that Don made a Flash movie just for her, with a split screen, showing the Chmperor pretending to read about his pet goat while the Towers burned. I am somewhat familiar with Don's Flash animations, and I don't remember him putting something like that together. I do remember seeing something similar to what she described, but I can't find it over in Don's Flash zone over at TBTM.
She also mentioned classical music being played in the background during the flash animation, and a timeline showing how badly the Torturer in Chief froze while the Towers burned. I think she might be referring to this flash animation by Don's partner over at TBTM, Michael Stinson (aka Symbolman). It fits most of the elements of what she was talking about - although that Flash animation showed stills of Putsch with stills of the Towers in a split-screen format.
- and of course she lost me as a listener because I went off on a snipe hunt trying to justify (with mondo linkage) calling her out on this based on my remembrances on the topic she was (ahem) misremembering on the air.
So, Randi, I'm calling you out. You're better than this sort of thing. You probably have forgotten more about Take Back The Media than most of us have ever known. Give credit where credit is due - Symbolman is the guy to give props to in this case for the awesome 9-11 Flash animation* asking questions about the bunnypants in the headlights, and Take Back The Media is the combined effort of Michael Stinson aka Symbolman and Don Waller of Blah3.com.
Although I also have to say that while you were showing your lack of knowledge in the case of TBTM, Don (from Guam?), and a most awesome flash animation that's been around for a long time (blogistically speaking), Randi, you were also putting my disappointment with Fahrenheit 9-11 into words. I thought that I would have handled that whole part of the movie differently, showing a split screen for all of the time devoted to 9-11. I would be willing to consider something along the lines of what was done in the film for that side of the screen, but show me film of the Usurper in Thief getting out of the cavalcade and walking into the school while the first tower is burning, cut to and play him sitting there when the second plane hits, then show him sitting there reading that frelling book for seven minutes while the rest of Mike's montage plays on the other side of the split screen. Which was pretty much what you saw as one of the flaws of the film, too. Just take a minute and give the right people kudos for their work, Randi. And maybe try not to let your aides ruin your show for some of your listeners. Some of the voices are having problems being heard. Even the ones who have been faithful fans of yours for some time now (not to mention Your Humble Narrator or anything like that).
It coudn't hurt to give a little plug to their weekly radio show, either. They interviewed Janeane Garofalo before she became the Queen of the Evening EarWaves over there on that liberal radio thang, after all...
* - which we have mistakenly had sitting in a linkrotted condition down at the bottom of the Links Zone to your left. At least creating this waste of bandwidth awesomely infotaining mind candy blog post got me to fix that before somebody called me on it.