Thursday, November 04, 2010

CC embraces a culture of death, or at least critical thinking

Remember how I mocked Keith Olbermann mercilessly when he ranted that the fake twitter feed in his name was the tool of a Republican conspiracy, and it turned out that the twitter feed was being written by his own network's publicists?

Yeah, that was funny.

Anyway, it is Glenn Beck's turn. My husband reads lots of web-produced comics written by big nerds. (The best of which, as far as I'm concerned, is XKCD.) A bunch of webcomic artists got together and wrote a book called Machine of Death about the personal societal impacts of a machine that can predict the method of an individual's death. And they publicized it on their comics, asking people to buy a copy on October 26, the release date, to see if they could get it to #1 on Amazon.

LOTS of people did.

However, October 26 was the release date of Glenn Beck's new book, and he was not happy to have been beaten by both "Machine of Death" AND Keith Richards' auobiography. He has turned this into a new rant topic, hinting at both a huge conspiracy and/or a sick society for his loss. Being beat out by a rock star I suspect he could have dealt with, but being beaten out by a dozen sci-fi-short-story-writing weirdoes was just too much for Mr. Beck's ego to take.

Now, Micheal Moore did essentially the same thing when "Canadian Bacon" flopped, with an even heavier dose of implied conspiracy, so I'm left with the conclusion that pundits are nuts and people should read the news for themselves and make their own decisions.

Which is, admittedly, what I thought in the first place.

CC

No comments: