"The man drove up to a Hell's Angels clubhouse near Munich, wearing only a pair of shorts and carrying a puppy."

"He dropped his shorts and threw the dog, escaping on a bulldozer from a nearby building site."

The news from Europe, as reported by the BBC.

"The case against inviting the BNP to appear on Question Time is a case for censorship..."

"... the case, in other words, that (in the opinion of those who make it) the BNP's policies are so abhorrent and so liable to sow hatred and division that they should be excluded from this form of public discourse altogether.... [I]t is unreasonable and inconsistent to take the position that a party like the BNP is acceptable enough for the public to vote for, but not acceptable enough to appear on democratic platforms such as Question Time. If there is a case for censorship, it should be debated and decided in parliament."

A hot debate in the UK. 

More here.

"Will the BBC save Jack from falling down the hill, find Little Boy Blue's sheep and keep unhygienic Goosey Goosey Gander out of my lady's chamber?"

I think all those nursery rhymes seem too gruesome (or filthy) for children. Kudos to the BBC for protecting us from the despair that is Humpty Dumpty.

"TV is starting to feel waaay too slooooow."

Michael Parsons writes:

The complex fractal circular time-shifted way in which my media habits now play out – hear about Tina Fey doing a Saturday Night Live impression of Sara Palin on an RSS feed, watch the clip at work on YouTube, then go home to watch the same clip being shown on The Daily Show, and then read online about what happened on the daily show via an RSS feed – means that my experience of the election had a multithreaded, always-on quality I’ve simply never experienced before. ... [M]y home network went on the fritz at 2am on election night, leaving me with only my handheld Twitter and the TV. I felt positively unplugged....

The advantages of web technology here are clearly to do with intimacy, connection, and immediacy. Twitter is a great way to consume huge amounts of information when you’re trying to understand a complex real-time process.... However, I was also struck by a much bigger, tonal difference. The BBC ‘s snooze-making election coverage was shamefully poor, and seemed to consist of a sleeping Dimbleby and a bobbing Vine, along with a few other B-grade pundits who gave the evening all the drama and insight of a minor English by-election. Broadcast TV, with its narrow tone, its low-brow certainties, just felt hopelessly out of date....

Yeah, well, that was England. We had holograms. And Parsons knows that -- perhaps because the flashy high-tech junk on American TV was mocked on the first segment of "The Daily Show" the day after the election. (Watch it here, starting at 2:48.)

You can tell TV has a sort of blurry panicked fear that the web is eating its lunch. Something Must Be Done. This is why TV presenters used daft gizmos – swingometers, touch-screen displays, even in CNN’s case, holograms, to try and stay down with the tech kids. This is like trying to be an opera singer by putting on weight, mistaking an unrelated symptom for a fundamental cause.

IN THE COMMENTS: Meade says:

"This is like trying to be an opera singer by putting on weight..."

TV: Wait! It's not over until the fat lady sings.

Us: But she can't sing, she's just fat...

It's over.

AND: XWL says the holograms were a lie:

[T]he so-called holograms were simply 2D images superimposed onto the TV broadcast.

The images were in fact tomograms, or images captured from all sides - in this case by 35 high-definition cameras set in a ring inside a special tent - reconstructed by computers and displayed on the screen.

Tomograms!

Finally, a post about Georgia.

(Via Wonkette.)

I'll have a post on Pakistan when Musharraf eats an article of his clothing on camera.

"It would be absurd to say that you can’t stick something under the fingernails, smack them in the face."

Antonin Scalia lets slip a quote that will enhance the loathing among those who loathe him but that others will easily guess comes from a discussion of the "ticking time-bomb" hypothetical.

The whole context, with audio and transcript, is at the link. Scalia is making the point that Bill Clinton, among many others, has made:

BBC: It’s a question that’s been raised by Alan Derschowitz and other people — this idea of ticking bomb torture. It’s predicated on the basis that you got a plane with nuclear weapons flying toward the White House, you happen to have in your possession — hooray! — the person that has the key information to put everything right, and you stick a needle under his fingernail — you get the answer — and that should be allowed?

SCALIA: And you think it shouldn’t?

BBC: All I’m saying about it, is that it’s a bizarre scenario, because it’s very unlikely that you’re going to have the one person that can give you that information and so if you use that as an excuse to permit torture then perhaps that’s a dangerous thing.

It's an old problem, and I've heard it discussed many times, and frankly what surpises me is not what Scalia said but how smart and articulate the BBC interviewer is. (Here's the whole interview, and you can see the interviewer's name is Clive Coleman.)

It's not just the classy British accent — which so often befogs the minds of Americans. It's the fast, articulate speech, the way he's unfazed when the Supreme Court Justice strikes at him with a question, and his instant formulation of a pithy and cogent response. The typical American journalist would harumph something about who's the interviewer and who's the interviewee.