"reality has a well- known liberal bias"...

feeling good today. excited about the weekend.

i have a basic morning routine: i'm up by about 8:30 every day, and my wife usually has already made coffee. i grab it and a bowl of honey bunny cereal [yes, there actually is such a thing... and it's delicious] and head to my office. and then comes my favorite moment of the morning: the online information onslaught. i fire up the ol' macbook, put on kqed, and in one fell swoop up comes the ny times page, google news, salon, slate, and the huffington post*, like old friends dropping in for a chat.

i'm a current events fucking junkie. i need it, it's like a drug. i gotta know what's going on with the 2008 campaign. i gotta know what's going on with the bushies. i gotta know what's going on [or, more often, what's not going on-- talking to you, speaker pelosi] in congress. i gotta know what's going on in iraq. i gotta know what's going on with movies about iraq. i gotta know what the fuckin' crazies on fox are saying about the movies about iraq. it goes on and on.

i'm sure i'm nowhere near alone in this, and probably don't even have it half as bad as some people [maureen dowd, for instance, has said she reads about ten newspapers a day and three news magazines a week]. people i know-- my wife included-- think i'm ridiculous, but i don't care. their argument is always something between, "what's the point" and "it just depresses me". and that's fine, it's just not the way i was raised. the henderson's were a news family. 60 minutes on sunday night. christ, my dad worked for cnn for something like ten years [albeit in sales]! and since the advent of fox news, forget about it. my parents' television hasn't left the fox news channel since the elian gonzalez debacle. dick cheney watches less fucking fox news than my parents**.

it's important, i think, to be kept abreast of what's going on in the world***. i think, for instance, that if the general populace were better- informed day- to- day, it wouldn't take something as terrible as hurricane katrina to wake them up to the fact that the bush administration has really been the worst thing to happen to this storied republic since the civil war****.

"reality," stephen colbert reminds us, "has a well- known liberal bias."

have a fantastic weekend and stay tuned for l.l's.d.p. tomorrow!

~lee.

*salon and the huffington post are definitely my two in- depth favorites. it's a better and more palatable mixture of entertainment/ pop culture and hard news for me, rather than the mostly stuffy grey lady or the droll, math-y rss feed of google news. slate is an afterthought for me most days, the stepchild that isn't as good at sports, isn't as funny, and doesn't get the kind of grades that my real kids get. still, they're at the table every night for suppertime, and you have to feed them.

**god bless 'em.

***the fear and loathing of fox news does not count as anything but opinon- based pablum, always aimed below the belt at people's most baseline psychological ticks. it's yellow journalism at its worst, and watching it gets you no closer to being an informed member of society than watching animal planet. but you probably knew that.

****i've told myself that i want to be more or less apolitical here on woolgathering, dear readers, but i just think that needed to be said. and it's true.