The Daily Show with Jon Stewart

Came across an interesting comment in his bio on IMDB:

"On September 24, 2004, the online "Campaign Desk: Critique and analysis of 2004 campaign coverage from Columbia Journalism Review" published what they called "A Campaign Desk Honor Roll, of Sorts," offering "a short list of reporters who consistently rise above the superficial to do original and often insightful work". #4 on the list of 20 journalists was Jon Stewart and "The Daily Show" (1996) on Comedy Central - coming in ahead of many writers for The New York Times, the Washington Post, and other highly rated periodicals and newspapers."

I do like his news.

Comedy Central: "Distraction"

It's a game show that is rather unique. They take the standard "answer questions, score points" and mix it up by adding distractions while they're trying to answer the questions. They ran a two-hour block Monday night/Tuesday AM and I watched it all. And quite liked it! Russ came in for the second hour and also enjoyed it.

Sample distractions:

Clothespins. While answering questions, they're applying as many clothespins on their face as possible. They score one point per question, with five bonus points for the person with the most clothespins on their face.

Pole Dance. Answer as many questions as possible while getting a lap dance.

Leapfrog/sack race/wheelbarrow. This was a second round feat, so they were down to three contestants. All three parts require a partner, so they brought in three nudists. It was digitally 'fuzzed'. One woman, a middle-aged man, and a rather overweight man. The woman had some really artistic tats, unfortunately you didn't really get a good view of them.

Downing shots of hot sauce. This was a final round between the two remaining. Answer a question correctly, and down a shot glass of hot sauce. And they were sweating! First one to answer five questions correctly and down five shots. Oh, and the round started with downing a shot. Oh, and if you were the winner, you down a double. If you keep it down, you win a new car.

Being shot by a paintball gun. Also a final round, if you fail to answer a question correctly, you get shot by a high-velocity paintball gun. In the nuts, in the breasts. And they were not wearing multiple layers of clothing like you'd normally do when you're playing. Definitely ouch!

The Tinkle Buzzers. None of the buzzers are conventional. One first round had all four contestants in gold lame go-go shorts and the buzzer was on a belt on their butt, so they buzzed in by slapping each other's butts. I find the tinkle buzzer much more amusing. The contestants have to drink two gallons of water before the show without going to the bathroom. They bring out four toilets in stalls. The contestants buzz in by "making a little wee".

Now the nasty part of the show is the end -- after the person has won the car (three of the four shows that I saw the grand prize was a car) they have a final round of questions. If the winner fails to answer a question, either a big black man called 'Tiny' mutilates the car with a sledge hammer, or the previous contestants who had lost on that show get to do the honors. I saw two brand-new Mustangs lose their headlights and windshields, one of them also had paint spilled on the roof. The third car, a Mazda 6, the winner was the first person in the history of the show (I have no idea how long the show has been on) to answer all the questions correctly and escape with an undamaged car!

The last show of last night had a great ending. The winner won: a Vespa Scooter, an Apple laptop, a digital camera combo with a printer and something else, I don't recall. They were all behind bullet-proof sheeting. An additional item in the enclosure was 18-lb turkey. Each item in the enclosure were rigged with explosives. And next to the contestant were five plungers. Each missed question he had to press a plunger and blow something up. He missed two -- the first blew up the digital camera set, the second blew up the turkey! It had multiple cameras on it and was quite something to see.


Anyway, a very good show. Very enjoyable, and the contestants, though surprised, seemed to really enjoy the show. The MC is a Brit and a very clever wit.

Lawsuit over evoting machines in NC, and Diebold news

The Diebold news is easy: their CEO, Walden O'Dell, resigned. He is most famously known for publicly stating that 'he would deliver Ohio for Prez Bush' in 2004. And Ohio voted for the GOP. The full article is here. there's also a Slashdot thread over this here.There's been a tremendous amount of press over their voting machines and the utter lack of openness of their evoting systems to assure the public, or at the least the portion that wanted to know, that their machines were fair, accurate, and the results could not be manipulated by either hackers or anyone else.

And Diebold is also the reason for the second story.

North Carolina. In 2002, in the state’s primary, in two counties evoting machines totally lost 400 votes. Gone. Kaput. Fell into the bit bucket. Sent to /dev/null. In 2004, in the Presidential election, a different vendor’s machines lost 4500 votes. Neither of these vendors was Diebold. The State passed a law requiring all companies providing evote machines to give the state Board of Elections the source code to their machines. It further required the state to examine the source code and ensure that it was safe. They also had teeth in this law: violations could be fined over $100,000 per incident.

Diebold won’t do it. They use Windows CE to power their machines, a modified version at that, and Diebold says they don’t have the right to release the source code in such a fashion and can’t/won’t do it. At one point Diebold threatened to pull out of NC and not sell machines there, but apparently that was a bluff. Then Diebold went to court to get an injunction against the state so that they wouldn’t have to escrow the code, the court sided with the state.

Oh, and in case you're not familiar with the product, Windows CE Is The Most Secure Operating System Ever Made And Is Totally Immune To Hacking, Not To Mention Cannot Ever Crash. EVER. *removes tongue from cheek*

In the end, Diebold didn’t do it. A second company, who originally said they would escrow their code, when they saw Diebold not doing it decided they wouldn’t do it either because their systems used Adobe Acrobat and they didn’t have the right to escrow the code.

Here’s the good part: the Board of Elections blinked and approved both companies as vendors.

Here’s the best part: the Electronic Frontier Foundation has filed suit against the Board of Elections and the Office of Information Technology Services for “certifying voting machines in violation of state law”.

It’s important because NC had the toughest bill in the country to force vendors to prove their machines are honest.

To compare it with a slightly better known parallel, all electronic gambling machines that accept and pay money in Nevada have to have the source code and the physical machines on file with the NV Dept of Gaming. If they detect anything manipulated, they can launch an investigation that is most serious indeed, and these guys carry guns.

Anyway, the article on the NC lawsuit appeared in Wired

Love it! Ford backpedals, will advertise in gay magazines!

Jon Stewart had a lot of fun at Ford's expense last night talking about ads for wealthy gays who like expensive cars with constant electrical shorts.

I wonder how long before whatever Fundi group that got them to yank their adverts starts blathering about a boycott of Ford.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20051214/pl_nm/autos_ford_ads_dc