Re:Generator Magazine

Now that Tiger Woods has promised to never enjoy sex again, his hiatus from the game of golf is over. The PGA couldn’t stay angry at its number one money maker forever.

B-sides and outtakes where he’s stoned out of his gourd, recordings of him peeing in front of children for a laugh, and music so bad fans will be thankful King Michael ruled against releasing it. Whether you like it or not, Jackson’s estate isn’t letting him fade away. It’s reached a deal with Sony music enabling the release of ten more albums over the next seven years. Sony got off easy only having to pay $200 million for the loot the general public’s nostalgia and sadness will bring in.

Children of the world, we’ll do it
With song and dance and innocent bliss
The soft caress of a loving kiss
We’ll do it

Even as the mainstream media of the United States has moved on, having gorged themselves and their audience on all the sadness they could handle, Haiti is in a battle against time as the hurricane season looms. Far from dithering, a group of Haitians and international experts have drafted an ambitious reconstruction plan:

Haiti has unveiled the first draft of an ambitious reconstruction plan that calls for 11.5 billion dollars to help rebuild the country after January’s earthquake. Prepared with the help of several countries, it focuses on the massive long-term economic and governmental challenges the country faces. … It gave a new death toll in Haiti of 222,570 and put the total damage from the 7.0 magnitude quake at 7.9 billion dollars. – a massive 120 per cent of Haiti’s gross domestic product. More than 70 per cent of these losses were sustained by the private sector, with 4.4 billion dollars worth of damage to schools, hospitals and transport infrastructure.

The first step outlined in the plan is to relocate an estimated 218,000 from makeshift camps to safer shelter… before June.

It’s been a long, meandering road to health care reform in America. The pressure to do nothing was fierce, the opponents were loud and the compromises Democratic lawmakers made were legion. The public option died and was resurrected in a gridlocked Congress a half a dozen times, but in our heart of hearts, advocates of reform knew it would never make final passage. Obama expended a great deal of political capital, but forgot the art of bending the stick, not starting from universal health care and bargaining down, instead starting from lowered expectations and lowering them further. There was always a but.

Now, though, the fiercest opponents of health care reform appear to be resigned to its passage. As the Tea Party protesters gear up for one final bout of great white catharsis, FreedomWorks honcho and former House Majority Leader Dick Armey is predicting Democrats will pull off what they’ve been trying to do for a year. All the screaming and outright lies and conspiracy theories and gruel-thin defenses of an unchecked health insurance industry from Dick Armey’s dick army, and health care reform will limp across the finish line?

Is this really the end? Why do I feel less elated, and more like a survivor of the bombing of Dresden?

If you use the Nexflix instant streaming queue like Sam and I do, you’ve got more movies to watch than can be finished in one standard human lifetime. You also find it a bit difficult to keep up on which movies and television shows are set to expire, and which will soon be streamed. That’s where FeedFlicks comes in handy. Because they’re probably paid to do it, and most definitely anal-retentive, they keep track of what’s happening so you don’t have to. I fully expect to be watching Julie & Julia, Inglorious Basterds, A Huey P. Newton Story, Gojira, Moon, Rocky & Bullwinkle & Friends, The X-Files, The Riches, Better Off Ted, Arrested Development, Buffy, Angel, Firefly, Dollhouse, Blackadder, Duck, You Sucker, Hook, The Alligator People, Garfield’s Pet Force and something like a hundred thousand VeggieTales movies on my XBox 360 in no time.