One Foot On The Platform

• Random Pop Culture:
• Nothing much to do today, so I decided to hit Dupont Circle and scout out the Real World: DC house. Here's the picture; the house is really cool. I like that the twitter feed devoted to following the cast members around DC re-tweeted my picture without giving credit.
• By the way, the house is on a block with no other residences. It's a very small block and has the backs of a couple of stores. There seemed to be maybe four or five parking spots reserved in front of the house (you can see the covered meter in the picture) and another spot or two on the other side of 20th. Hardly the disruption that some are making it out to be.
• I stayed up very late last night because I happened to stumble across the beginning of The Terminator (yes, that's the actual name of the movie) on the Independent Channel. Conventional wisdom says that T2: Judgement Day is one of the rare movies that's better than the original. After watching the original last night, I disagree. When you take into account the low budget and, even more, the fact that it had to create its own mythology rather than the various sequels expanding on it, I don't think it's even much of a question. The Terminator would have been just as great as a standalone movie with no sequels.
• Random Hatred and/or Love:
• The Internet gave us e-mails that convinced a significant number of people that Barack Obama was a Muslim. It gave us e-mails that convinced a significant number of people that Bill Gates would pay them a dollar for every time they forwarded an e-mail. It gave us a number of legitimate news organizations that re-printed stories, without checking the facts, from the Onion. So why, all of a sudden, are we supposed to trust everything on Twitter or blogs that is said to be coming from Iran? There are already reports of some fake stories. The video is certainly irrefutable, but the stories of torture or specific people being killed? I just don't know. On top of that, we know a large number of Iranians voted for Ahmedinijad, but we aren't hearing anything from those people? There have to be two sides to the story, especially in a democracy, right? Every awful thing could be true, but I don't want to trust it blindly the way so many people on-line seem to be doing. A New York Times article I read today makes some of these points.
• Blistering Fools:
• I know I've had a lot of music videos lately, but I'm on a video-watching kick and a lot of them are worth sharing. Even cloudy, it was still one of the nicer days of the last couple of weeks and, driving down Conn Ave. toward Dupont today, this song came on the radio. With some soul-searching, I could maybe claim that it's my favorite rock and roll song. Certainly in the top five or ten. From 1964, Eric Burton and the Animals, here to burn it up.