Elf Sternberg

You may have heard the following: "The Bush Administration's 2005 Inauguration Day only cost $42 million dollars; the Obama Administation's 2009 Inauguration Day cost $160 million."

When you hear that, remember this: you are being lied to.

The Bush Administration's 2005 celebration actually cost closer to $157 million dollars. The above figures were floated on the FOX morning show Fox and Friends, but they're a meaningless comparison because they're comparing the wrong tallies: the $42 million dollars is what the Bush Inaugural Committee said it spent; the $160 million dollars is an estimate based on what the Obama Inaugural Committee has said it raised from private donations, plus civil and security expenses FOX somehow "forgot" to add to the Bush Inauguration total.

The media, so long the lapdog of the White House, has already started to peddle the meme of "overspending Democrats," even before the new president has been sworn in, when what we really have is a better accounting, rather than a hiding of the receipts.

Eric Boehlert dismantles the nonsense.

This weekend, the kids were mostly interested in doing their own things. I tried a few times to get them involved in a game of Uno or something, but nah, they just wanted to play by themselves, so I subjected myself to a Masamune Shirow marathon: I watched the entire second season of Ghost in the Shell: Standalone Complex and Appleseed 2004. And I just gotta say: wow. Amazing wow.

GitS:SAC2 was a visual feast and, for transhumanists, intellectual dessert. The deliberate emergence of AIs, the transpositions of bioroid for android, the unification of ideas and memories and the questions about whether or not memories and reactions are enough to engender substrate indepedence, plus really good animation and excellent action sequences. Absolutely worth the eight-plus hours I put into watching.

And then there was Appleseed. I didn't like the animation quite so much; it was done completely in computer graphics, although the artists avoided the problems that plagued Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within by making the characters more manga-esque. The CG effects, though, provided for some eye-popping combat sequences that make the Matrix movies look like child's play. The fight scene where Duenan takes on two urban-terrain cybertanks with eight-barreled cannons is just astounding. The end battle, which in the original featured our heroes against a single megastructure cybertank, is much, much bigger and noiser this time.

And although the movie centered around macguffins similar to its predecessor (Appleseed, 1996), they could be forgiven in the context of the film and weren't badly handled. Duenan's relationship with Briearios is much messier than it was in the original, too, which makes it feel more honest. The animation's problem came during the dialogue; the mouths just don't move right and Hitomi's facial expression never changed. At least she's not a whiny drunk in this version.

All in all, given that I haven't watched more than an hour or two of TV in the past two months, I don't think this was too much of an overdose. And it was all good.

I will also mention that somewhere in there I watched the first half-hour of Revenge of the Sith and had a bad reaction to it. I really don't care what happens to Skywalker.