Mitt Romney’s PBS rejoinder¹ has quickly become the most talked about soundbite from last night’s Presidential debate. It seems as though everyone has a Big Bird joke or critique to share today, quipping that the avian celebrity has been fired or some other nonsense.

But let’s be serious about this. The PBS volley is a stunning bit of political theater; a calculated and workshopped line designed to do exactly what it has done: spread like wildfire. While the wonks break down his many dubious claims, Mitt Romney has thrown the rest of us some gristle. He fit a pop culture reference into a direct threat against the event’s moderator, Jim Lehrer. LOL!

Beneath the fun,² however, there is something very cynical and dangerous brewing. There is nothing funny about cutting subsidies to Public Broadcasting Systems. The comment that spawned a few comedic Twitter accounts should be seen as a signifier of the stark differences between these two candidates.

I believe in the arts and the media. I believe, with every fiber of my being, that no nation can become or stay great without investing in its most creative citizens. After all, without culture, what are we? Who are we?

So I find it baffling that politicians are constantly willing to put arts and media funding on the chopping block, but I find it more disturbing that we tend to get strong-armed into believing that they’re right. America is hurting, Mitt Romney tells us, therefore we shouldn’t be pouring millions of dollars into a puppet show. And people believe him because, with everything going on in all of our lives right now, they can’t bring themselves to tell him he’s wrong.

I find it highly unlikely that a Mitt Romney administration will actually be able to de-fund PBS or other endeavors that generally live in fear like the National Endowment for the Arts.³ It’s more likely that this rehearsed “zinger” is a feint intended to keep us abuzz with talk of how slick and collected the Republican contender looked and hope we don’t notice some of his more gross misstatements from the evening. Still, it’s indicative of the kind of cynicism we can look forward to if Romney is elected.

It’s true that the economy is weak. Many of us are out of work or underpaid. Benefits that we once enjoyed have shriveled up. States are barely getting by. There’s growing unrest in the Middle East and we still can’t get out of Afghanistan, troubles we all have to foot the bill for. But I’ll be damned if I let that get it the way of my support for publicly financed television. We have already given up so much; must we give up on Big Bird too?

Scott Eggleston (aka The Frugal Filmmaker) walks viewers through proper stinger¹ coiling.

The only advice I’d add is to never ever ever wrap a cable around your palm and elbow. Rookie mistake.

Dane Schiller for The Houston Chronicle:

In the final instant aboard the plane, Wright instinctively grabbed his iPad, which was sealed in a waterproof case.

In the span of mere minutes, he went from eating a bag of M&Ms at 11,000 feet to sitting in a wrecked plane in the Gulf. […]

Wright used the iPad, still in its LifeProof case, to record a brief video, a record of where they were and what was happening.

I caught these guys on The Today Show this morning. It’s sad that I can’t help but wonder if this isn’t all a viral marketing ploy from the makers of the LifeProof case whose brand name is getting dropped at every turn. Nonetheless, it seems the best best camera is still the one you have on you, even if you’re stranded out at sea.

Dave Itzkoff has a piece up at The New York Times today detailing new rules for the Best Documentary Oscar. Apparently members have too many (eighty, to be specific) damn films to watch. Steve James, director of Hoop Dreams and The Interrupters weighs in:

“Should it be about the way in which the public engages a documentary — films that they have seen at the theater, that have been hits on the festival circuit, that are going to have the best chance?” he asked. Or, he said, should it “throw open the doors to every single film that can wrangle a date in L.A. and New York?”

“You can’t have it both ways,” Mr. James said.

The truth is that documentary cinema has simply outgrown a single award. Moreover, the rules that govern what makes a great doc are very different from what makes a great narrative fiction film. For example, the new rule, per Itzkoff, is in part intended to “to weed out films that were made for television…” Why not cast an even wider net with more awards, or a second awards show? Or perhaps allow other voters to consider documentaries in other categories, like editing or, dare I say it, Best Picture.

For no good reason I decided to try blogging entirely from the command line. That meant firing up Vim on my server, which meant digging out this old link to keep me from losing my mind. And so I am sharing it with you, for the day when you too decide that the pile of text editors you have to choose from aren’t fiddly enough.

Scouting New York really is an awesome site. Just look at this excellent breakdown of locations then and now in Alfred Hitchcock’s North by Northwest. The best are the taxi shots (below). Can’t wait for part two.

Kyle Buchanan for Vulture:

AMPAS just announced emcee duties for Seth MacFarlane…

Some predictions for this year’s telecast:

• The theme will be old-time Hollywood glamour and also farts.
• MacFarlane will open with a musical number in which he schizophrenically spews the voices he’s built an empire around.
• There will be a lot of winking and nodding to remind us that MacFarlane isn’t a churl (like Ricky Gervais) but a company man dutifully panning his pals with kid-gloves.

I don’t mind MacFarlane’s ubiquitous output, but I don’t get his current on-camera omnipresence. What’s the attraction? More to the point: what’s the endgame? Is this media blitz to launch the next act of his career? Or is it just another way to sell Family Guy box sets? It can’t be because audiences like the guy, can it?

David Sparks and Brett Terpstra wrote a book together. Nerds, rejoice. Buy it here and I’ll get a few pennies.¹

Adrienne LaFrance for Nieman Journalism Lab:

For many, more devices means more news, according to the study. Pew found 43 percent of tablet owners say they are getting more news now than they were before they got the device, and 31 percent say they’re adding new sources into their information diet.

File under “Duh.”

I’ve never been very organized about watching movies. There’s a heap of films I know I should have seen by now but haven’t yet. I want to see these films, but it never occurs to me to seek them out. Rather, when it does occur to me that I have a gaping hole in my viewing history, I have nothing to do with that information but let it fall out of my mind. I’m trying to change that, though.

One of the use-cases I cooked up for PlainTasksOF was keeping track of films to watch. A static, plain text list could serve as a sort of dumping ground for films I need to check out someday. I’ve been experimenting how I’ll use this on a daily basis, and while I was messing around with it today, it occurred to me that it would be cool if I could quickly get to more information about the films on my list.

Enter Brett Terpstra’s recently updated Lucky Link service for the Mac. Brett’s service hooks into Google’s search API, allowing you to quickly create an inline Markdown link with whatever Google’s top hit is. Since it’s a Mac Service, you can link a keyboard shortcut to it, say ^⌥⌘L, and invoke it over highlighted text. That way, the candler blog can be turned into [the candler blog](http://candlerblog.com) in one tap. Neat.

Initially I thought I would want to create inline IMDb links on my list of movies when I realized that I had no use for keeping an IMDb URL in my document. PlainTasksOF only works in Sublime Text 2 which doesn’t currently support clickable hyperlinks, so if I added the URL it would just be dead plain text. Lame.

I modified Brett’s Automator workflow to open up the film page of the selected text at Goodfil.ms. All I did was add site:goodfil.ms to the search string, removed the Markdown formatting (so that the shell script only returns a URL) and added an action to open the page in the system default browser. Now, anywhere in OS X I can invoke the service to get more info about whatever film is currently highlighted as text, be it in a text document I’m working on, a web page, a tweet, a chat window, a PDF, etc.

Goodfil.ms seemed like a good fit for this service for a few reasons. IMDb, by far, returned the best results of any service I tested and has the added bonus of returning results for names. However, there wasn’t much one could actually do from an IMDb page. While the Amazon subsidiary is diligent about linking to Amazon Instant Video pages, it doesn’t really give you too many other options. The most complete service for seeking out ways to watch a film is Canistream.it. Unfortunately their search results are the most inconsistent of any of the sites I tried.

Goodfil.ms returned generally accurate results.¹ The real secret sauce is that if you sign into Goodfil.ms you can not only manage a film queue on the site, but you can sync it to your Netflix account. Even better, Goodfil.ms does a great job of prominently displaying when a film is available on Netflix Watch Instant or for rent on iTunes. And if that’s not enough, each film’s synopsis features links to IMDb and Wikipedia.

I enjoyed using it enough today that I thought I’d share it. Of course, this was all time that I should have used to watch a few movies. There’s always tomorrow…

Installation

1. Download and unzip “Open at Goodfilms.zip”
2. Move “Open at Goodfilms.workflow” to ~/Library/Services/
3. Open System Preferences.app
4. Navigate to “Keyboard” and select the “Keyboard Shortcuts” tab.
5. Select “Services” in the left panel. In the right panel scroll to Text > Open at Goodfilms. Make sure the check box is checked. You can also set a Keyboard Shortcut from this window.
6. Once complete, the service should be available when right-clicking on text or from the Services menu in each app.