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I was irked that John Kerry wasn’t releasing his military records, but he fixed that. The difference between Bush’s definition of releasing and Kerry’s definition of releasing (original) is pretty substantial. Kerry put his military records up as PDFs on his web site, and anyone can see them. Bush showed his records to reporters and gave some of them 20 minutes to review some medical exams. In all fairness, I don’t see Kerry’s military medical records on his web site, and I think they should be there. I still believe there’s a difference between handing your records out to a small group of reporters and making them available online for anyone to see. Someone at the Kerry campaign gets the Internet.

“You wanna know what it takes to write mashups? It takes brass balls to write mashups.” Yeah, it’s all about Glengarry Glen Ross this week, and don’t you forget it. It’s a movie about desperation. It’s really brutal. It’s really good. I’m gonna mash it up. It’s not gonna be exactly work-safe.

Mention Count: 2. In Angel, characters have Drama Points, which can be used for a number of quasi-narrative purposes. PCs get either 10 or 20 at the start of the game, depending on how powerful they are otherwise. (Think of the difference between Angel or Buffy on the one hand and Xander or Wesley on the other hand.) They have five uses, as follows: Heroic Feat, which gives you a +10 bonus on any one roll; I Think I’m OK, which instantly heals half the damage a character has taken to the point it’s used; Plot Twist, which creates a “lucky break” for the characters; Righteous Fury, which costs 2 Drama Points and gives a +5 bonus for all rolls for one fight; and Back From The Dead, which allows a character to come back from death. ...

I don’t know how to listen to Live365 stations easily on my Mac, but I am fairly certain that someone reading this will be happy to know that there is a 24/7 Muppet music radio station out there.

Justin suggested (original) the Titanic as a mashup subject, and that seemed like a pretty good idea to me. I’m not going to use the movie as source material, since I’ve never seen it, but don’t let that stop you.

In Pennsylvania, Pat Toomey (original) is running against Arlen Specter in the Republican Senatorial primary. Toomey is a hard-right conservative who currently serves in the House of Representatives. Specter is a center-conservative Senator who fails many hard-right litmus tests, most noticably by being one of the handful of prominent Republicans who supports abortion rights. Both Bush and Rick Santorum have endorsed Specter. This is one of those wedge issues — Bush’s hard-right supporters can’t be pleased that he endorsed someone so centrist, particularly since he differs with the Republican Party on such a hot button issue. Run, Roy, run!

Now, this feels good. It is my great pleasure to — well, let’s be honest, to brag — that I will be in Austin, Texas on the weekend of December 5th to attend Butt-Numb-A-Thon 5. It’s a 24 hour movie marathon, programmed by Harry Knowles. I made it to the second one after reading the report on the first one, and I had a hell of a time. I was sad to miss number 3 and I was mournful about missing number 4. ...

From an interview with Matt Wells of Gigablast (original): “Another major feature of Gigablast is its ability to index Web pages almost instantly, Wells explains. The network machines give priority to query traffic, but when they’re not answering questions, they spend their time spidering the Web.” The more things change, the more they stay the same. His comments on the reasons for Google’s success are dead accurate, by the by. PageRank was not as important as size and freshness.

Sadly, Kwame lost, but it won’t hurt his career. Which is good — I think he’d have been a better hire than Bill, although I’m sure Bill will do a good job for The Donald. On the other hand, Bill certainly did a better job on the final task than Kwame. Kwame was stuck with Omarosa no matter what, but he should have at least tried to sideline her. Even given that he’d kept Omarosa, he might have had a chance to win if he’d defended himself in the boardroom. I’d have used the situation as an excuse to trot out the “I always hire people who are smarter than me” line, which has the advantage of being true. I’m pretty sure Kwame’s management style works better when he’s had the chance to build and/or mold his own team rather than inheriting a bunch of subpar workers. ...

Movable Type 3.0 beta testing starts this Monday, April 19th. You can apply to be a beta tester now.