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(02/09/11 12:23am)
____simple_html_dom__voku__html_wrapper____>News that the Huffington Post would be purchased by AOL for $315 million traveled fast, almost as fast as my interest in the site disappeared. I’ve been reading the Huffington Post for the better part of two years now, and the thing I loved most was the blog’s off-the-cuff, freewheeling style. It wasn’t really journalism; it was just a great place to find an interesting story. The site has an obvious liberal bias, but I probably found and read more stories about popular science and culture on the site than I did political articles. It was an excellent place to find interesting stuff. It wasn’t the highest form of journalism, but it was informative and enjoyable.Yet, I’m writing about it in the past tense. The site still lives, but it’s dead to me. By selling itself to AOL, the HuffPost has given up its mantle as king of maverick media. Obviously the site came into existence because of big money. Arrian Huffington wasn’t a company, and the site’s attitude reflected that. It was disjointed and rough. Sometimes it was blatant liberal propaganda and you could see that, but it was lively and fresh. It was the first mega-blog site to rival its print and broadcast competitors and that’s something.Now AOL, the king of the Internet dustbin, has used 40 percent ($315 million) of its cash to purchase the Huffington Post, a blog that makes $10 million a year. More than just being angry about the change of leadership, I’m upset that Arianna Huffington would take the deal in the first place. It’s not like the Huffington Post was a startup with no money. Huffington is on the Cleveland Show for crying out loud; she’s got plenty of money.When I read the HuffPost, there was an implication that I was reading something radical and untamed, something so very un-corporate. When I read that AOL had purchased the Huffington Post, I felt betrayed. I wanted to intern at the HuffPost, and now I’m not sure if I’d be getting the experience I wanted there. In an interview about the merger, AOL CEO Tim Armstrong called AOL “the anti-corporation.” Based on the recent New Yorker article that revealed 75 percent of AOL customers are continuing to pay for dial-up when they have no need for it, AOL sounds pretty corporate. The HuffPost ran so many stories that exposed corporations, I can’t imagine the AOL masters would be too happy with that. Without the edge and the sass, the HuffPost would be just another blog, and to Armstrong, the HuffPost is just going to be page views and cash flow.We’ll try to remember you for the things you were, HuffPost, and not the sad husk of your former self you’ll soon become.E-mail: thommill@indiana.edu
(02/01/11 10:15pm)
____simple_html_dom__voku__html_wrapper____>This week marked the start of one of my favorite parts of spring semester: IUSA elections. It’s not that I enjoy them, or even that I usually vote in them, but they provide an almost limitless supply of entertainment. What will kids who desire a title do to convince the rest of us to care? Last year we got a kid dressed up like a leprechaun with a megaphone outside of Ballantine. I can only hope that Btown United is going to have a gang of soccer hooligans roaming the streets on Election Day.I jest, but in my mind, IUSA is about giving the student body an advocate, a lobby if you will, and we haven’t really been getting that from our elected leaders. Our student government could take a stance in support of political issues related to students: Where was IUSA during the satellite voting fiasco? Isn’t it in the student body’s best interest to have voting available on campus? This is what I want to see: No more student body president-led executive branch and a real attempt at lobbying for students. Barrett Tenbarge was able to travel to D.C. and lobby to get a presidential debate at IU. Would it have been to much to ask him to say “IU students really support student loan reform” or “Thanks for letting us stay on our parents’ health care until we’re 26”? While controversial, these laws were made with students in mind and IUSA should be at least talking about legal matters that directly affect its constituents.As for getting rid of student body president, it’s just outdated. This year has been a bad example of the kind of strive that can emerge between the executive branch and its sister branches. What good did the student body gain from the power struggle over who could be an IUSA supreme court justice? We should trash the current system, which wouldn’t be hard since the IUSA bylaws and constitution are vague and unclear, and make a new IUSA that does nothing but push for student advocacy and innovation.E-mail: thommill@indiana.edu
(01/25/11 12:55am)
____simple_html_dom__voku__html_wrapper____>It all started with an outburst in a classroom at a community college.After the heinous assassination attempt on Congresswoman Gabriel Giffords, D-Ariz., the media attempted to plot out how 22-year-old Jared Loughner went from weirdo to murderer. A step in that journey was getting kicked out of Pima County Community College for several in-class outbursts. That step has been replayed over and over on television, and in the wake of a Brooklyn College student being committed against her will by her school, it’s clear that students are living in a complicated time to be on campus. Because of Loughner’s social media savvy some have called for colleges to monitor their students’ social networking sites. This is a bad idea. No matter how much Facebook stalking the administration does, mental health can’t be monitored from afar.Imagine I post “I’m going to kill my professor lol.” Should I visit CAPS? What about “I’m going to stab my professor 57 times”? It’s more descriptive, and maybe that’s an indicator of my seriousness or maybe it’s nothing. For an academic administration to try and piece together the mental health of their student body based on the inane internet musings they post on Facebook is not only a threat to our student rights, it assumes that students wear their well-being on their sleeve. Last year IU junior Greg Willoughby committed suicide. Seven days later, somebody found him. There was no Facebook message, no YouTube ramblings, only the untimely death of one our best. I don’t know if anything could have been done to stop Willoughby from taking his own life, but monitoring his Facebook wouldn’t have given us a clue as to what he was going through. Few people lash out like Loughner did in his classroom. The stress of being a student is something everyone understands, but something most of us deal with on a personal level. Instead of pushing for colleges that can commit their students or monitor their social networking sites, we should be doing our best to create a less stressed academic environment. In high school my French teacher told me there was no direct translation for the word “stress,” it was a purely American creation. Wouldn’t we perform better in class if we weren’t worried about the lifelong consequences of every class, of every test, of every grade? Monitoring our web lives is a weak answer to the problem. We should be changing the environment in which we study. Students need less pressure and more understanding. I have a hard enough time explaining my life to my mother. I can only imagine how poorly IU could judge my mental health based on Facebook.E-mail: thommill@indiana.edu
(12/10/10 5:27am)
____simple_html_dom__voku__html_wrapper____>After a semester marked by displays of intolerance, IU will enter next semester with a renewed effort to promote unity on campus. The recent string of hate crimes against the Jewish community at IU has attracted a large response by the campus in general. For members of the Jewish community, dealing with anti-Semitism is nothing new.Between the start of the 2005 school year and the end of June 2010, 64 incidents of discrimination were reported against Jews. Against all other religious groups combined, there were only 27 incidents in the same period. Last year, 70 percent of religious incidents were directed at the Jewish community, which IU’s Helene G. Simon Hillel Center estimates comprises 10 to 12 percent of the student population, or 3,800 to 4,000 students. This year’s attacks have already matched the number of anti-Semitic incidents in 2007 and 2008, according to reports from the Student Ethics and Anti-Harassment Programs’ Incident Teams. “As a Jew you assume someone out there is anti-Semitic,” said Trevor Sheade, secretary of IU’s Beta Gamma Chapter of Zeta Beta Tau, the nation’s first Jewish fraternity. “It’s so prevalent.” He said anti-Semitism is one of the reasons why he wanted to join a Jewish fraternity. “Within pledging I always hear talk about Jewish kids who are being called ‘Jew something,’” said Sheade. “That’s why people join a Jewish fraternity — so they don’t get segregated.” Sheade said there is good coming from the attacks. “Kids who I’ve talked to, who I thought wouldn’t be interested, have wanted to take action,” he said. Eric Love, director of the Office of Diversity Education, said groups, including ZBT, have started making plans to raise awareness about the issue of hate crimes and discrimination for next semester. Love said that minority groups on campus have shown solidarity with the Jewish community. “I think there are some people who have a strong sense of social justice and who make a stance for gay people if they’re not gay, black people if they’re not black,” Love said. “Social justice is social justice, regardless who the target may be.”Love said it’s hard to determine what is a hate crime and what isn’t because, ultimately, it comes down to intent. Reports filed to the Student Ethics and Anti-Harassment Programs’ Incident Teams indicate that during the 2009-10 school year there were 121 reported incidents of harassment or discrimination on campus across different ethnicities, races, religions and genders, 14 of which targeted the Jewish community. “I think in light of the most recent incidents, this semester has definitely been worse than almost any that I’ve seen,” Love said. Hillel Center Student President Matthew Cohen said the response from the Bloomington community has been overwhelming in recent days. “We received hundreds of calls and e-mails,” Cohen said.All three men said that groups on campus have taken these displays of intolerance and used them as an opportunity for something positive. Cohen said negative events can do a lot to help refocus student attention to social justice on campus. “When things are status quo, it slips people’s minds,” Cohen said. “When things happen, people are awakened.”Both Sheade and Love said they hoped something positive would come out of these events. Love said events like the Unity Summit are parts of a conversation that will help make Bloomington a more tolerant place. “I think that more people should care about how our neighbors are treated,” Love said. “When we’re talking about religious issues, they’re not Muslim issues or Jewish issues, they’re societal issues. That’s when we start to change society — when everyone is involved not because they’re affected but because they care.”
(11/11/10 1:29am)
____simple_html_dom__voku__html_wrapper____>Dacia Sachtjen’s grandparents want her to learn karate. They want her to be able to kill a man with her bare hands all by herself. Six months from now, Sachtjen, a junior and sergeant in the Army National Guard, will be deployed somewhere in Iraq. She doesn’t know where yet or for how long she’ll be there. She’s been told to act as if she’s not leaving, but it’s hard to pretend nothing is happening when you’re on your way to a war zone. Sachtjen’s grandparents are worried about her, but it’s not the insurgents they’re concerned about — it’s all of the male soldiers she’ll be surrounded by on base.When Sachtjen arrives in Iraq, she’ll follow in the footsteps of a new breed of veteran: the fobbit. Fobbits are soldiers who never leave their forward operating base; they’re the postal clerks and paralegals of the War on Terror. Hollywood doesn’t make movies about fobbits. Despite the popular depiction of modern warfare in video games and films, in reality the military is a big, slow-moving bureaucracy staffed by thousands of people whose jobs keep them on base to keep the American war machine moving. For a society with an increasingly inconsumable amount of media, there is a substantial lack of the fobbit in our popular perception of the Iraq War.“Honestly,” said SPEA graduate student and former Marine Corps Sergeant Jeremy Degler, “I feel that a squad of Marines going house to house, watching over a neighborhood, isn’t going to sell as much as far as a news story goes in terms of 20 people dying in a car bombing.” Soldiers do not roam outside the wire on their own similar to Matt Damon in “Green Zone” or Jeremy Renner in “The Hurt Locker.” They don’t make their own choices about how they spend their day, and unlike the video game series “Call of Duty,” most soldiers don’t spend their days moving from firefight to firefight. Although they might never see combat, the fobbits endure the same stress and pressures as their combat-seasoned peers, but there is never that cathartic moment of victory in battle. Degler said he has a lot of hostility toward the media for focusing on the horrors of war and not the day-to-day life of a soldier. In the seven years since the U.S. invaded Iraq, only 4,427 U.S. military personnel have been killed. Compared to the more than 50,000 U.S. soldiers who died in Vietnam and the 418,500 who died in World War II, the U.S. has had very few casualties for a war that has gone on for almost a decade. Even when combined with the death toll from U.S. forces in Afghanistan, the total number of U.S. casualties in the combined War on Terror is less than 10,000. Eric East was in Australia when 9/11 happened. He was among the first soldiers on the ground in Afghanistan, and now, years later, he said he thinks both the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are unjustified. “I spent seven years just researching the facts,” East said. “I’ve come to the conclusion that these wars are holy crusades.” East said reading information on the Internet influenced his thinking more than the time he spent in Afghanistan. Unlike their silver screen heroes, they were tasked with standing in guard towers and getting shot at. If they did leave the wire, they built schools or passed out teddy bears.Those who left the wire to fight, to go door to door looking for insurgents, found a war they couldn’t rectify with what Hollywood had sold them. There were no great battles, no beaches to storm. For some, it’s as if nothing changed about their lives except that at any minute that life could be ended by a stray bullet or mortar round.“We were fobbits,” former Air Force Sergeant Mike Mojonnier said. “Just the stress from that, having multiple mortar and rocket attacks a day, knowing that the mission you’re doing is dangerous, knowing that being over there is dangerous, and then on top of it, you have almost no way to relieve that stress. Guys would just bottle it up and take it out on whoever, whatever was next to them.” Mojonnier worked in what’s called “blue on blue” — he policed the soldiers on the base. When he got off work, he went home and played “Halo.”Despite the presence of Xboxes and gyms, life on a Forward Operating Base (FOB) is not life in the United States. Nobody notices this more than the women who serve overseas. “People figure hey, you’re deployed. It’s like Vegas,” sophomore Sergeant Stephanie Tremblay said. “What happens here stays here. So you never know what’s going to be lurking around that dark corner.” Along with the threat of sexual assault, soldiers deal with constant petty crimes such as theft and driving under the influence. Sometimes the pressure of living on the FOB is so great that soldiers turn to suicide. “You get a letter from home saying your wife is divorcing you,” National Guard member and senior Kayla Neir said. “And sometimes soldiers take their service rifle into the port-a-john and kill themselves.” Among all of the firefights, the mortar rounds, the sexual assaults and the suicides, there are video games and war movies. And in contrast to the fobbits, there are the grunts. “We didn’t play Xbox or anything because we lived in a big warehouse with just rows of bunk beds,” said sophomore Tim Whitson, who was deployed to Iraq with the 82nd Airborne. “But we would go there, and someone who does live on the FOB would yell at you for putting your hands in your pockets or wearing something you’re not supposed to wear. That kind of raises the amount of spite that you have towards them.” Whitson spent most of his tour walking around Baghdad with night vision goggles and bolt cutters, raiding the houses of suspected insurgents. He slept on concrete floors with no electricity. They had to burn their bodily waste because they had no running water. When he came back to the FOB, it was like a completely different planet. Despite having to survive in much rougher conditions than his fobbit counter parts, Whitson said he misses doing what most people only see in the movies. “When you’re running through Baghdad with night vision goggles hunting insurgents, there’s a cool factor to that,” Whitson said. “I miss that sometimes.” Whitson was hit by a mortar round during his tour of duty. He was on patrol, and he saw the first mortar round near his position. “It blew my ear drums,” Whitson said. “Just like in the video games, when everything gets muffled and sounds far away. That’s exactly what it sounded like.”Soldiers called up from the reserves and the National Guard entered the War on Terror with only hours of film and video game experiences to tell them what modern war was. The generation that enlisted after 9/11 grew up with “Saving Private Ryan,” “Band of Brothers,” “Halo” and “GoldenEye.” When they arrived overseas, many of those who served complained of boredom and restlessness. The struggles they do face, the constant stress and unrelenting boredom, lack the romance of the war stories from their grandfathers’ generation. “I was watching ‘Saving Private Ryan,’” Mojonnier said. “And my buddy just looks at me and says, ‘That’s the war I want to fight.’”
(11/09/10 12:04am)
____simple_html_dom__voku__html_wrapper____>Dacia Sachtjen’s grandparents want her to learn karate. They want her to
be able to kill a man with her bare hands all by herself. Six months from now, Sachtjen, a junior and sergeant in the Army National Guard, will be deployed somewhere in Iraq. She
doesn’t know where yet or for how long she’ll be there. She’s been told
to act as if she’s not leaving, but it’s hard to pretend nothing is
happening when you’re on your way to a war zone. Sachtjen’s
grandparents are worried about her, but it’s not the insurgents they’re
concerned about — it’s all of the male soldiers she’ll be surrounded by
on base.When Sachtjen arrives in Iraq, she’ll follow in the
footsteps of a new breed of veteran: the fobbit. Fobbits are soldiers
who never leave their forward operating base; they’re the postal clerks
and paralegals of the War on Terror. Hollywood doesn’t make movies about fobbits. Despite
the popular depiction of modern warfare in video games and films, in
reality the military is a big, slow-moving bureaucracy staffed by
thousands of people whose jobs keep them on base to keep the American
war machine moving. For a society with an increasingly
inconsumable amount of media, there is a substantial lack of the fobbit
in our popular perception of the Iraq War.“Honestly,” said SPEA
graduate student and former Marine Corps Sergeant Jeremy Degler, “I feel
that a squad of Marines going house to house, watching over a
neighborhood, isn’t going to sell as much as far as a news story goes in
terms of 20 people dying in a car bombing.” Soldiers do not
roam outside the wire on their own similar to Matt Damon in “Green Zone”
or Jeremy Renner in “The Hurt Locker.” They don’t make their own
choices about how they spend their day, and unlike the video game series
“Call of Duty,” most soldiers don’t spend their days moving from
firefight to firefight. Although they might never see combat,
the fobbits endure the same stress and pressures as their
combat-seasoned peers, but there is never that cathartic moment of
victory in battle. Degler said he has a lot of hostility toward
the media for focusing on the horrors of war and not the day-to-day
life of a soldier. In the seven years since the U.S. invaded Iraq, only
4,427 U.S. military personnel have been killed. Compared to the
more than 50,000 U.S. soldiers who died in Vietnam and the 418,500 who
died in World War II, the U.S. has had very few casualties for a war
that has gone on for almost a decade. Even when combined with
the death toll from U.S. forces in Afghanistan, the total number of U.S.
casualties in the combined War on Terror is less than 10,000. Eric
East was in Australia when 9/11 happened. He was among the first
soldiers on the ground in Afghanistan, and now, years later, he said he
thinks both the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are unjustified. “I spent
seven years just researching the facts,” East said. “I’ve come to the
conclusion that these wars are holy crusades.” East said reading information on the Internet influenced his thinking more than the time he spent in Afghanistan. Unlike
their silver screen heroes, they were tasked with standing in guard
towers and getting shot at. If they did leave the wire, they built
schools or passed out teddy bears.Those who left the wire to
fight, to go door to door looking for insurgents, found a war they
couldn’t rectify with what Hollywood had sold them. There were no great
battles, no beaches to storm. For some, it’s as if nothing
changed about their lives except that at any minute that life could be
ended by a stray bullet or mortar round.“We were fobbits,”
former Air Force Sergeant Mike Mojonnier said. “Just the stress from
that, having multiple mortar and rocket attacks a day, knowing that the
mission you’re doing is dangerous, knowing that being over there is
dangerous, and then on top of it, you have almost no way to relieve that
stress. Guys would just bottle it up and take it out on whoever,
whatever was next to them.” Mojonnier worked in what’s called
“blue on blue” — he policed the soldiers on the base. When he got off
work, he went home and played “Halo.”Despite the presence of
Xboxes and gyms, life on a Forward Operating Base (FOB) is not life in
the United States. Nobody notices this more than the women who serve
overseas. “People figure hey, you’re deployed. It’s like Vegas,”
sophomore Sergeant Stephanie Tremblay said. “What happens here stays
here. So you never know what’s going to be lurking around that dark
corner.” Along with the threat of sexual assault, soldiers deal
with constant petty crimes such as theft and driving under the
influence. Sometimes the pressure of living on the FOB is so great that
soldiers turn to suicide. “You get a letter from home saying
your wife is divorcing you,” National Guard member and senior Kayla Neir
said. “And sometimes soldiers take their service rifle into the
port-a-john and kill themselves.” Among all of the firefights,
the mortar rounds, the sexual assaults and the suicides, there are video
games and war movies. And in contrast to the fobbits, there are the
grunts. “We didn’t play Xbox or anything because we lived in a
big warehouse with just rows of bunk beds,” said sophomore Tim Whitson,
who was deployed to Iraq with the 82nd Airborne. “But we would go there,
and someone who does live on the FOB would yell at you for putting your
hands in your pockets or wearing something you’re not supposed to wear.
That kind of raises the amount of spite that you have towards them.” Whitson
spent most of his tour walking around Baghdad with night vision goggles
and bolt cutters, raiding the houses of suspected insurgents. He slept
on concrete floors with no electricity. They had to burn their bodily
waste because they had no running water. When he came back to the FOB,
it was like a completely different planet. Despite having to survive in
much rougher conditions than his fobbit counter parts, Whitson said he
misses doing what most people only see in the movies. “When
you’re running through Baghdad with night vision goggles hunting
insurgents, there’s a cool factor to that,” Whitson said. “I miss that
sometimes.” Whitson was hit by a mortar round during his tour of duty.
He was on patrol, and he saw the first mortar round near his position. “It
blew my ear drums,” Whitson said. “Just like in the video games, when
everything gets muffled and sounds far away. That’s exactly what it
sounded like.”Soldiers called up from the reserves and the
National Guard entered the War on Terror with only hours of film and
video game experiences to tell them what modern war was. The generation that enlisted after 9/11 grew up with “Saving Private Ryan,” “Band of Brothers,” “Halo” and “GoldenEye.” When
they arrived overseas, many of those who served complained of boredom
and restlessness. The struggles they do face, the constant stress and
unrelenting boredom, lack the romance of the war stories from their
grandfathers’ generation. “I was watching ‘Saving Private
Ryan,’” Mojonnier said. “And my buddy just looks at me and says, ‘That’s
the war I want to fight.’”
(03/31/10 5:53pm)
____simple_html_dom__voku__html_wrapper____>I feel cheated. I’m listening to a new Dillinger Escape Plan album and the word that’s coming to mind is “boring.” I’ve never been a huge fan of the band’s grindy mathcore, but the experimentalism perfected on 2004’s “Miss Machine” and 2007’s “Ire Works” elevated the Dillinger Escape Plan out of the hardcore ghetto many of its peers have found themselves stuck in.But on “Option Paralysis,” the group has decided to be a metal band, and the results are disappointing. For a band that’s spent the last 10 years saying they’re never going to make another “Calculating Infinity,” “Option Paralysis” is pretty close. It features five songs of totally forgettable mathcore and five that feel like “Ire Works” b-sides. The band seems comfortable rehashing a bunch of its old tricks for the majority of the album.
(02/10/10 6:21am)
____simple_html_dom__voku__html_wrapper____>The Indiana Lt. Governor has more constitutional and statutory duties than most other state number-twos in the nation.After spending the past five years addressing responsibilities as Lt. Governor, Republican Becky Skillman said Tuesday she might run for Governor in 2012.Working with Indiana Gov. Mitch Daniels, Skillman has spent her time presiding over the state Senate and working on some of the state’s most important policy issues.Skillman said she has thought about running for governor but she said it’s no easy task. Skillman has 28 yearsof experience in public service and currently oversees seven state agencies.“Right now, I’m leaning toward running,” Skillman said. “I never said I wouldn’t run.”When the Obama administration provided stimulus funds to Indiana, Gov. Daniels tasked Skillman with appropriating the funds. Skillman’s desire to protect small businesses earned her the nickname “Guardian of Small Business” from the National Federation of Independent Business in 1996.Skillman said it’s still too early to know if the business expansions will improve unemployment rates, citing that she was not a fan of the stimulus. However, Skillman said she was willing to cooperate with decisions made in D.C.“9.8 percent unemployment is nothing to be proud of,” Skillman said.Skillman said though Indiana is struggling with rising unemployment rates, there are positives as well. Indiana has the lowest unemployment rate in the Midwest and is one of the few states with a balanced budget.“We are holding economically and fiscally,” Skillman said. “We are showing numbers of hope and promise in the growth of business expansion.”Skillman said education was also a priority for Indiana despite the fact that tough decisions were made to cut funding.Skillman said the formulas used to allocate funds for schools K-12 is so complicated that most Indiana legislatures don’t completely understand them, which is part of the reason Indiana education funding distribution is a hot topic.A native of Bedford, Ind., Skillman said some of the most important issues to her are rural affairs, agriculture and small business.
(01/19/10 3:02am)
____simple_html_dom__voku__html_wrapper____>Living in a home of her own was a fantasy for Angel Montgomery.“I keep waiting for them to say ‘We found something. You’re not getting a house,” Montgomery said. “But they haven’t. This is really happening.”Montgomery spent most of her adult life renting, but when a friend was accepted into Habitat for Humanity she decided to apply. Montgomery, along with all the other partner families living in a Habitat built house, had to spend time helping others before the organization would build them a house of their own. Habitat partner families have to meet three requirements in order to receive a habitat home: an ability to pay, a need for housing, and a willingness to partner. Habitat requires families to volunteer 250 hours building the homes of others and eventually their own home. When they volunteer their time the families are called “partner families”. Megan Neise, director of marketing communications at Habitat for Humanity-Monroe County described a need for housing as anything from not having basic necessities like insulation and plumbing to cramming six people in a one-bedroom apartment, something she said was common in the Monroe county area.The Saturday before Martin Luther King Jr. Day was another weekend ‘on’ for the partner families and habitat volunteers. Montgomery and other Habitat partner families spent Saturday touring Habitat homes currently under construction. “These are hardworking people,” Neise said. “We’re focused on giving them a hand up and not a hand out.” Chuy Vidaurri and Lalo Vidaurri worked alongside their father and Habitat volunteers to put insulation in their future home. “We’ve got 25 families on an 18-month waiting list” said Neise. “We’ve definitely seen an increase in need and I think that has to do with the climate we live in economically.” Neise said that during the school year, IU students frequently volunteer. For many, she said, the experience was eye-opening.“Everybody is out here doing their best,” said Adrian Starnes, a Construction Site Supervisor with Habitat for Humanity of Monroe County. “It’s amazing what people who come together and don’t know a thing about building a house can do on a Saturday with just a few people leading the way.”At the end of the day Montgomery stood outside a partner family home and watched as the volunteers worked to finish the home. “God is good,” Montgomery said. “That’s all I can say.”
(12/09/09 8:46pm)
BoD: Brad Sanders and Tom Miller discuss the decade in metal.
(11/17/09 10:58pm)
____simple_html_dom__voku__html_wrapper____>“Halleluiah, Halleluiah” Flyleaf lead singer Lacey Mosley sings during “Beautiful Bride,” deftly anticipating the first words out of my mouth after the band’s newest album “Memento Mori” finished boring me to death. “Memento Mori” sounds like Nickleback hired former Evanescence chanteuse Amy Lee to front their band, and the results combine the worst of both acts – which is really, really bad news for listeners. Songs like the aforementioned “Beautiful Bride” and “Again” make full use of every cliche alternative rock trick in the book – the silly riffs, loud-soft dynamic and a guitar lead that covers its blandness with a phaser effect.“Memento Mori” doesn’t get any better when the band switches to their softer side. They’ve got some of the shallowest and most uninspired Christian lyrics of the year, and songs like “Arise” and “Missing” frequently sound like Breaking Benjamin doing misguided Circa Survive covers. The album is produced and mixed well, but that’s the only nice thing I can say about “Memento Mori.”
(11/11/09 5:48pm)
____simple_html_dom__voku__html_wrapper____>“The Men Who Stare at Goats” is an exercise in the absurd. Everything from George Clooney’s performance to the film’s supposedly true plot is almost believable – almost.The film follows Bob Wilton (Ewan McGregor) as a down-on-his-luck reporter who vows to prove his journalistic merit by covering the Iraq War. He has a chance encounter with Lyn Cassady (Clooney), a “Jedi Warrior” in the Army’s psychic warrior program, which sets off a “Pineapple Express”-style romp through the desert. How you feel about putting LSD in the water supply of a base in Iraq, stopping a goat’s heart with your mind and using the “Barney and Friends” theme song to torture insurgents will greatly affect your opinion of “The Men Who Stare at Goats.”Like a rash of other recent movies (“Taking Woodstock,” “Pirate Radio”), “Goats” is directly aimed at aging baby boomers looking to relive parts of their youth. It gives us the obvious hippie references, the classic-rock soundtrack and the nostalgic drug references, which leads me to wonder: Does anyone do LSD anymore? The film’s ending would fit right into an Abbie Hoffman discourse. With enough psychedelic drugs, even war can be a total trip, dude.The movie’s biggest problem is that it only kind of believes in itself. At some moments it’s hilarious, and at others it’s a little too earnest. When the film actually believes that “Now, more than ever, the world needs Jedi,” it falls flat on its face. It’s this awkward blend of dark humor and hippie idealism that holds the film back from being really entertaining or even cohesive. “The Men Who Stare at Goats” wants to be "Catch-22" of the modern era: hilarious, touching and a tad depressing. Instead, it’s a poor mishmash of dark comedy and earnest idealism that makes the film neither edgy nor entertaining.
(11/03/09 9:54pm)
____simple_html_dom__voku__html_wrapper____>“Battlestar Galactica” ended its run as one of the most critically acclaimed sci-fi shows in recent memory. To fill in some of the mythology blanks and tide fans over until the premiere of sister show “Caprica,” the SyFy has given “Battlestar” fans “The Plan.” The movie presents key events from the perspective of two Cylon leaders. For anyone not completely familiar with the overarching plot of the series, “The Plan” makes little to no sense. None of the characters are introduced nor are any of the events given any context.After the movie finished, I felt like I had just seen two hours of disjointed highlights from four seasons of television. I don’t know how many times the movie faded out to black only to cut to some unrelated event. Perhaps if I had faithfully watched each season, “The Plan” would answer some burning plot questions. But without full knowledge of all things “Galactica,” watching “The Plan” is a painful experience.
(11/03/09 9:37pm)
____simple_html_dom__voku__html_wrapper____>“Misdirect” is a great word to include in the title of the new Between the Buried and Me record.Though it follows the same direction as 2007’s widely acclaimed “Colors,” “The Great Misdirect” is six songs of progressive metal that veers wildly from one genre to another on every track. Between the Buried and Me have forged a career out of these genre-hopping shenanigans and thankfully that continues here. Lead single “Obsfrucation” opens with a proggy guitar intro that gives way to some chuggy riffing, a synthy chorus, more riffing, more synths, a death metal riff and probably 50 other parts I don’t have space to describe. Every song on “The Great Misdirect” is crammed with as many parts as possible, and not every riff is memorable. This is particularly true of the band’s more metal moments, which can sound tried and cliche, but overall the “The Great Misdirect” has a good blend of styles, and the musicianship is almost always top notch.
(10/28/09 8:14pm)
____simple_html_dom__voku__html_wrapper____>After 20 years, Converge is still pissed off. Few bands in the current metal scene have been as influential as Converge or as consistently unflinching in their sound. Converge’s newest, “Axe to Fall,” is 11 songs of discordant, noisy hardcore driven by speed-metal drums and two songs of spacey atmospherics. It may seem like an odd pairing, but that makes “Axe to Fall” one of the better metal albums of the year.The title track is classic Converge, a short sub-two minutes blast of vocalist Jacob Bannon’s nearly unintelligible screams, dense drop-tuned guitars and a second break down. After 30 minutes of pummeling hardcore, we get “Cruel Bloom” and “Wretched World”, two songs that sound like Radiohead in an insane asylum. “Axe to Fall” is definitely not for everyone, but for fans of abrasive, noisy hardcore, there hasn’t been a better record all year.
(10/13/09 9:08pm)
____simple_html_dom__voku__html_wrapper____>HORSE the Band’s “Desperate Living” would be nearly indistinguishable from the sea of metal releases this year if it weren’t for the band’s obsession with "Nintendo." All 12 tracks on “Desperate Living” are awash with keyboards that sound straight out of Super Mario World. The synthesizers have a certain novelty, but when it wears off “Desperate Living” doesn’t have much else to offer.More than the obnoxious keyboards, the biggest problem with “Desperate Living” is its production. Even on a nice pair of headphones, the album sounds thin and weak. The guitars have no bite and are often just background noise. “The Failure of All Things” exemplifies everything wrong with this album: Every decent riff that appears is immediately run over by an unnecessary Nintendo moment. If the keyboards weren’t so annoying and the production was better this album might have been one of the better metal releases of the year, but as it stands “Desperate Living” is a muddy, obnoxious mess.
(10/06/09 9:49pm)
____simple_html_dom__voku__html_wrapper____>As a band, Alice in Chains has been through a lot, chiefly the death of its lead singer, grunge god Layne Staley in 2002. After Staley’s death, there didn’t seem to be much of a future for the rest of the band. Yet here we are with a new Alice in Chains album – one that is possibly the best record the band has done.“Black Gives Way to Blue” is dark, but Alice in Chains no longer lives under the shadow of Staley’s drug addiction and suicidal musings. New vocalist William Duvall matches Staley’s vocal power and gives the album its emotional lift. “Blue” is the comeback story of the year, maybe decade, in rock music. It’s hard to think of another band that has fallen so hard and then released such a strong album like this. “Black Gives Way to Blue” was released under the shadow of Staley’s death, but it will be remembered as a record about the triumph of life.
(10/01/09 2:52am)
____simple_html_dom__voku__html_wrapper____>“Pandorum” stars Dennis Quaid and Ben Foster as two astronauts stuck inside a dying starship in deep space and a plot that dies even quicker.The ship’s onboard nuclear reactor needs resetting and like any good starship, it must be done manually. Foster can’t remember much, but he does know the ins and outs of the reactor, so Quaid stays back and Foster ventures into the ship, alone of course. The film’s opening borrows elements from “Alien” and “Event Horizon”: The hero plods along through dark corridors, surrounded by growls and gasps, with only his flashlight to guide him. Then we see the creatures prowling the ship, and the film devolves into a series of increasingly ridiculous fight scenes between the survivors and the monsters. Although the film ends with a few smart plot twists, it’s not enough. After the scene where the monster awkwardly tosses a lead pipe to a survivor before their fight, I pretty much stopped taking “Pandorum” seriously.
(10/01/09 2:23am)
____simple_html_dom__voku__html_wrapper____>Season Two of “The Sarah Connor Chronicles” follows the world’s most badass single mom (Lena Headey) as she tries to protect her son, the world’s future leader, John Connor (Thomas Dekker). Following a similar formula as the “Terminator” movies, the Connors are protected by a terminator, this time a female robot named Cameron (Summer Glau). When the show was on the air, several of the story arcs seemed to disrupt the season’s flow, but being able to watch episodes back to back keeps things moving. Although the main focus is on Sarah and John Connor, it’s the supporting characters, like terminator Cameron and Derek Reese (Brian Austin Green), who really make the show stand out. Unlike the “Terminator” films that are known for their gorgeous and abundant special effects, “The Sarah Connor Chronicles” lacks any really impressive visuals. If you’re a fan of the films or just looking for some sci-fi, you could do worse than “Sarah Connor.” Just don’t get too attached because Fox terminated the show in May.
(09/24/09 1:23am)
____simple_html_dom__voku__html_wrapper____>“New Junk Aesthetic” is Every Time I Die’s fifth release, and it sounds pretty similar to their first release. And their second. And their third. You get the idea. Once again, vocalist Keith Buckley delivers hilarious one-liners and witty lyrics. This time we get gems like: “If my hands find themselves another body, well, you can’t blame them for trying to keep warm.” The rest of the band does their best to get the songs over with as fast as possible, with many of the songs clocking at just three minutes. Every song sounds like it was cast from a mold: some southern riffing, a break down, lots of screaming, a pinch of singing and a tiny bit of guitar noodling. Though this is the same formula that the band has employed since their first effort “Last Night in Town” came out eight years ago, it still works well. “New Junk Aesthetic” is a fun record that ends before you get tired of it, but there’s still nothing new to be found.