HBO Imagine is a new website that aims to tell a story through interconnecting short clips as opposed to the linear format of today's TV show as well as different angles. And I mean that literally - you can change the camera angle of the clip and see "hidden" parts of the story. The more clips you watch, the more you unlock clips and clues.

onto more important subjects - the pats look like they are slowly coming together.  The defense is doing just fine thank you and Tom will eventually get his sea legs.  I think mid-season when Mayo and Welker return they will be a serious force to be reckoned with - not that they aren't already.

The sox... need to pick it up a bit.  Sure, they made the playoffs last night since the Rangers lost, but it would be much more encouraging to find out that the ace pitchers are healthy.  Going to the sox game tonight, doesn't count for anything, but I never turn down free tickets.

You may not intend a message but you are sending one:  that you want to be able to continue to watch and enjoy Roman Polanski's films without being bothered in your head with images of him possibly raping a 13 year old girl.  

Studio Ghibli has revealed its next project to be Taketori Monogatari, aka The Tale of the Bamboo Cutter which is one of the oldest surviving Japanese folktales and a first for Studio Ghibli to adapt a folktale.

This public plan option, at least as it's written in HR 3200, is a lame, failed, designed-to-fail public plan option. It's not available until 2013. When it's available, it's not available to people who get insurance from their employers. Those are healthy people. It's not available to people who are upper middle class or wealthier. Those are healthy people. So the public plan option is designed to attract the sickest, most expensive people. And when it fails in 2017 or 2018, by design, the insurance industry is going to point at it and say, "See, the government can't do healthcare." And it'll be the wrong lesson. And I just--this whole thing is being manipulated by the industry with our legislators being complicit in this process.

So, I guess the "What could go wrong?" question is taken care of.

Link

Last year he famously switched allegiance from Hillary Clinton to Barack Obama during the Democratic nomination process for president. Now, he reveals, he regrets his change of heart. How's Obama doing? "Dreadfully. I was hopeful. He was the most intelligent person we've had in that position for a long time. But he's inexperienced. He has a total inability to understand military matters. He's acting as if Afghanistan is the magic talisman: solve that and you solve terrorism." America should leave Afghanistan, he says. "We've failed in every other aspect of our effort of conquering the Middle East or whatever you want to call it." The "War on Terror" was "made up", Vidal says. "The whole thing was PR, just like `weapons of mass destruction'. It has wrecked the airline business, which my father founded in the 1930s. He'd be cutting his wrists. Now when you fly you're both scared to death and bored to death, a most disagreeable combination."

His voice strengthens. "One thing I have hated all my life are LIARS [he says that with bristling anger] and I live in a nation of them. It was not always the case. I don't demand honour, that can be lies too. I don't say there was a golden age, but there was an age of general intelligence. We had a watchdog, the media." The media is too supine? "Would that it was. They're busy preparing us for an Iranian war." He retains some optimism about Obama "because he doesn't lie. We know the fool from Arizona [as he calls John McCain] is a liar. We never got the real story of how McCain crashed his plane [in 1967 near Hanoi, North Vietnam] and was held captive."

Vidal originally became pro-Obama because he grew up in "a black city" (meaning Washington), as well as being impressed by Obama's intelligence. "But he believes the generals. Even Bush knew the way to win a general was to give him another star. Obama believes the Republican Party is a party when in fact it's a mindset, like Hitler Youth, based on hatred -- religious hatred, racial hatred. When you foreigners hear the word `conservative' you think of kindly old men hunting foxes. They're not, they're fascists."

Another notable Obama mis-step has been on healthcare reform. "He f***ed it up. I don't know how because the country wanted it. We'll never see it happen." As for his wider vision: "Maybe he doesn't have one, not to imply he is a fraud. He loves quoting Lincoln and there's a great Lincoln quote from a letter he wrote to one of his generals in the South after the Civil War. `I am President of the United States. I have full overall power and never forget it, because I will exercise it'. That's what Obama needs -- a bit of Lincoln's chill." Has he met Obama? "No," he says quietly, "I've had my time with presidents." Vidal raises his fingers to signify a gun and mutters: "Bang bang." He is referring to the possibility of Obama being assassinated. "Just a mysterious lone gunman lurking in the shadows of the capital," he says in a wry, dreamy way.

Vidal now believes, as he did originally, Clinton would be the better president. "Hillary knows more about the world and what to do with the generals. History has proven when the girls get involved, they're good at it. Elizabeth I knew Raleigh would be a good man to give a ship to."The Republicans will win the next election, Vidal believes; though for him there is little difference between the parties. "Remember the coup d'etat of 2000 when the Supreme Court fixed the selection, not election, of the stupidest man in the country, Mr Bush."

SNIP

Today religious mania has infected the political bloodstream and America has become corrosively isolationist, he says. "Ask an American what they know about Sweden and they'd say `They live well but they're all alcoholics'. In fact a Scandinavian system could have benefited us many times over." Instead, America has "no intellectual class" and is "rotting away at a funereal pace. We'll have a military dictatorship fairly soon, on the basis that nobody else can hold everything together. Obama would have been better off focusing on educating the American people. His problem is being over-educated. He doesn't realise how dim-witted and ignorant his audience is. Benjamin Franklin said that the system would fail because of the corruption of the people and that happened under Bush."

Two reasons.  One: The Bid Committee and other boosters are claiming the price tag will hit $4.8bn.  Anyone who buys that is stoned. Try twelve double-extra-large for 2016.  At least.  London 2012 is at £9.35bn ($14.8bn-ish) right now.  And this is Chicago.  Five guys, two shovels, and a smiling alderman.  Come the hell on.

Two: we got other problems.  Last week, a kid on the South Side got beat up by a bunch of other guys, right in the street.  Reportedly, he was just an innocent bystander.  The fatal blow apparently came from a railroad tie.  Novel.  Usually, it's a second-hand gun.

Look: one or two kids a week are getting shot.  There are square miles that are totally blighted out.  The CTA is perpetually within a few months of meltdown, or catastrophic failure, or both.  And so on.  Having the Olympics will paper over these festering problems, and many others, while spending desperately needed money on... a real estate development.

COME ON, RIO.  BAIL US OUT.  PLEASE AND THANK YOU.

Third, it does not strike me as an important public issue.