Spoonfed

That pine beetle we keep hearing about

In yesterday's Rocky Mountain News, there was an op-ed piece exhorting bloggers to ditch the anonymity. Since us bloggers are not held to the same standards as journalists are (thank goodness, since I more than doubled the number of horses in the apocalypse), it's that much more important for us to tell our readers who we are, what our background is, and what our biases are. And I can dig that.

The commenters on that article then demanded that journalists tell us their biases.

And, if you believe NewsBusters, a site devoted to exposing and combating liberal media, this might be a good idea.

Because the other morning, I  heard on Good Morning America the following statements, and you can read the transcript here.

• The pine beetle epidemic in Colorado and all the west is due to global warming.
• The pine beetles will wipe out all of Colorado's lodgpole pines in five years.

Now, I hear about the pine beetle problem all the time, and I hadn't heard those two assertions before. Is Sam Champion biased? Is this really true? Or is there more to the story?

Is our fate like British Columbia, where the beetles have eaten through all the trees and will now die off? Cause they don't seem so alarmist about it.

Hot Stuff

I was at the gym today trying to burn off some of those holiday pounds and watching Michael Chiarello's Easy Entertaining with the volume off, when something began to dawn on me.

There was Michael, perfectly coiffed, wearing a lumberjack plaid shirt, rolled up at the sleeves, tight little jeans, all happy smiles.

His guests? A bunch of muscled-up firemen in tight T-shirts.

They were drinking some frou-frou icy frothy blended drink out of martini glasses with super hot peppers and some green slippery things they were pulling out with their fingers and sucking on (jalapeno ice cubes, apparently). Like, "Whoa, put out my fire!"

I know it's not PC to speculate, but come on. Is this not the gayest fantasy ever??

And here's the kicker: the episode is called Hot Stuff.

| the good reality shows |

Project Runway starts on Wednesday, November 14!

| sinead |

The lovely Sinead O'Connor was on Oprah today talking about being a mother and an artist, her battles with depression and the diagnosis of bipolar disorder that saved her life.

She's still bald, still gorgeous, a little weathered (Oprah's crew got a lingering shot of her aged hand holding a cigarette as she brought out her stash of meds), and full of nervous tics (she kept picking at the back of her head), but she's got four beautiful kids (the oldest is 20, the youngest is under 2) and a wonderful new album.

And look: she got a bunch of headlines because of what she had to say about Britney. That's what news is in America.

But for the full comment:

"I think it's terrible what the media are doing to her here," Sinéad says. "I feel so sorry for celebrities in this country. It's absolutely impossible to live a normal life being followed around, poor girl. We all mess up, don't we, as moms. We never always get it right."

| whose path? |

We're flipping between Manning v. Manning and "The Path to 9/11" on ABC.

The movie has no commercial breaks. There are disclaimers that the information is based upon the 9/11 Commission report but that facts have been dramatized for narrative purposes, and composite characters were created, and etc. Who, we wondered, is sponsoring this? It's awfully slanted toward the Repulican version of events, and paints the Clinton regime as a bunch of wishy-washy bureaucrats who hesitate whenever they have bin Laden in their sights (or worse, spill the beans when attacks are planned); the FBI and CIA can't manage to find him, but an ABC reporter can.

After seeing the miserable performance Cheney gave on "Meet the Press" this morning, you have to wonder: if the Bush administration wants to try to convince Americans that this war in Iraq is somehow justified, a movie like this is a pretty smooth move. The ends apparently justify the means.

We found it interesting that, at 9:39, when the movie ended, the next 5 ads were all local Denver ads. I guess no major brands wanted to run just after the show, lest viewers think they had sponsored the movie.