Put Your Business on 'Internet TV'
Republican National Committee Chairman Michael Steele *said* he wanted to bring more Hip-Hop to the party. So I helped — along with unwitting accomplices Gene Weingarten (Wash. Post columnist) and cool Miami hop-hipper E.Grizzly - myspace.com/erikgrizzly
Before he went into the communist dictator business, Fidel Castro wanted to be a baseball player. So it was an obvious move to use CrazyTalk to have him “sing” the 1908 Edward Meeker version of ‘Take Me Out to the Ball Game.’
Oh, my! When he’s not busy terrorizing, it seems Osama bin Laden enjoys reciting poetry, in this case T.S. Eliot’s ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.’ And he has a strangely effeminate voice, too. (Or maybe the actual reading was done by Jane Aker and I used the pseudo-animation program CrazyTalk to make it *look* like Mr. bin Laden is doing the reading. Next CrazyTalk project = getting more lifelike eye-blinks and other movements…)
Hey - I couldn’t let Rush Limbaugh have all the fun. So in this experiment with the Crazy Talk mouth-animation software I had Barack Obama sing the same song — to Hillary Clinton.
Rush apparently does reggae karaoke on his days off. Who knew? 
(Actually, I was playing with a program called “Crazy Talk” that sort-of animates faces sort-of in synch to speech or music. It’s better with speech but not as much fun.)
According to a Sarasota Herald-Tribune article this event drew about 2000 people. Here’s what some of them said about their reasons for being there:
Shots of a moderate spring shower, with a bit of wind, at the Fair Lane Acres mobile home park in Bradenton, Florida, taken with a Sony HC-1 in a flexible weatherproof housing. Need Florida B-Roll? I can do it, fair weather or foul.
I’m not talking about Republicans here. They’ve decided to become a shrinking minority party, and their de facto leader, Rush Limbaugh, has allied himself with Kim Jong Il, Osama bin Laden, Hugo Chavez, and other nasties who want to see our president fail. So forget the Republicans.
I had a revelation one evening at a Walgreens Drug Store in Bradenton, which I suppose is as good a place to have a revelation as any. It was about Jesus, Passover, and Easter. In a flash, I suddenly realized why Christianity is popular and Judaism is not. (Note: I wrote this piece in 2006, but decided it was worth running again for those who may have missed it the first time around.)
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We all know how a newspaper is supposed to look. But today, newspapers are forgetting their proud traditions and letting electronic computers ruin their appearance, not to mention upsetting well-established newsroom and pressroom traditions.
Doing page makeup in a type case is an art, and it’s one readers appreciate. Every time they pick up their newspapers, they subliminally hear the “clunka–clunka” sound of a Linotype machine, the “thlick thlack thlick DING” of a reporter’s typewriter, and the combination of hums and clanks a two-story-high web press makes as it rolls a continuous stream of paper over the printing mats.