Abba Zabba

Now that everyone's got high-speed Internet, there's a trend towards putting more multimedia content on web sites. (Note: I can't say the word "multimedia" without feeling like it's 1995 and I'm reading a Time article about the Information Superhighway. But I still feel like more of a tool when I say "podcast", one of the dumbest words ever invented.) And I don't like it.

I like text. It's easy. It's convenient. Podcasts and videos are neither. With text, you can start reading, then switch away to something else, and come back to read more later. I guess you can pause a video or audio file, but it's harder to scroll back and remind yourself of what just happened. I read very quickly; I can definitely read faster than people can comprehensibly talk. I can skim text briefly to look for interesting parts, which is impossible with video files. Some streaming audio/video sites are blocked at work, so I can't access that content at all. And when I'm on the Internet at home, I have the TV or music on. I can listen to the TV and read something, but I can't watch two videos at once.

I know that some people prefer multimedia. They want to see or hear what happened. And that's fine. But that's no reason to take away my text! Big sites like the New Yorker (which inspired this rant) can certainly afford to pay an intern to transcribe their audio and video pieces. That way the cool kids can podcast and vlog and do whatever they want, while I sit here and read.

A few months ago, I complained about the band Stuck Mojo. Or, more specifically, about their new fans. They released an anti-Muslim song, and all the anti-Muslim bloggers declared them the greatest band in the history of the universe. At the time, I called it just a conservative phenomenon.

Turns out I was wrong. Rosie O'Donnell is getting fired from The View. Naturally, I don't care. And I'd assume that other intelligent Americans (ie, not fans of The View), also don't care. But I overlooked the fact that there are as many wackos on the left as on the right. See, Rosie likes to talk about politics on her show. She's said repeatedly that she thinks Bush should be impeached. And on at least one occasion, she said that the official 9/11 explanation is a conspiracy, because fire can't melt steel. As a result, she's widely praised among certain leftists. (Such as the ones on the site that inspired me to write this article.)

The people are making the same mistake as the Jihadwatch crowd did for Stuck Mojo. It's possible to admire what someone says without admiring the person for saying it. Rosie O'Donnell is annoying. She's always been annoying. She was a loud, mediocre stand-up comic, then one of the most obnoxious TV personalities of the 90s. And now she's on a crappy morning show for housewives and the chronically unemployed, yammering about celebrities and fashion. The fact that she occasionally throws in a standard Noam Chomsky point along with the discussion of Britney's new hairdo (or lack thereof) doesn't make her a hero. If anything, it makes her into even more of a caricature, and makes it easier for the mainstream media to ignore the left.