You just have to love Minnesota-North Dakota winter weather, though. When I left at 10 A.M. yesterday, it was over 35 F and the sun was shining. When I crossed the Red River, it was still a beautiful day. Within 40 minutes of home, there was steam coming off of the asphalt on the interstate. Finally, I was driving around town last night and there was ice everywhere.

I hate winter.

1. Does the song stand on its own? There are songs that aren’t musically strong enough for me to listen to without a video to keep me interested. In other words, a good video can usually make a mediocre song worth listening to.
2.Does the video complement the song? If so, how? Some videos convey the song’s lyrical meaning through visual images and themes, while other videos have nothing to do with the song at all and are more for “fun.”
3.What does the song mean to me personally? To me, a good video brings out another level of thoughts and emotions that the song alone might not have achieved otherwise.
4.Does this artist have any other songs/videos worth checking out? Some artists are one-hit wonders, or their music isn’t strong enough without the video. I’ll give examples of other works by the same artist that are worth listening to, if there are any.

The first video is “Prayer of the Refugee” by Rise Against.

Does the song stand on its own? Yes. I listened to this song repeatedly before the video was made. If it was about anything else, it would still be a strong musical performance.

Does the video complement the song? Most definitely. The thing about Rise Against is that Tim’s lyrics aren’t usually in-your-face with specifics. If you read the song’s lyrics, they tell you that somewhere there is a problem. You’re not sure what or where it is, exactly. But then you watch the video and see Rise Against performing this song is a big superstore (any RA fan knows how those guys feel about Wal-Mart), along with the images of people in other countries making the items on those same shelves. I see the dirty little kid making the expensive shoes in a sweatshop, and think “Oh, THAT’S what they’re talking about.”

What does the song mean to me personally?Every time I watch it, I think about the companies who have their products made overseas in order to save a buck, and majority of Americans (myself included) who go out and buy expensive and often unnecessary crap without thinking of the human being on the other end, along with the conditions they live and work in.

Does Rise Against have any other songs/videos worth checking out? If you liked this, then pretty much everything Rise Against have ever put out is worth giving a list. You can read the complete list of their discography here.

Tomorrow’s video: Weird Al Yankovic.

How would the governments of our planet
Prepare 6 billion people for the end of the world?
They wouldn’t.
But the Institute for Human Continuity will.
Survive 2012. Join the lottery now at TheIhc.com.

So I did some research, thinking this couldn’t possibly be serious. After checking out the IHC’s website, my gullibility lessened and my disbelief grew. The statistics and facts given were far too general, and the website seemed too…flashy (both literally and program-wise). So I gave the organization the ultimate test.

I looked it up on on Wikipedia.

Proper college research completed, I discovered the whole thing was just slick advertising for the movie 2012, coming out sometime this year.

Wow. Dumb moment of the day achieved, and it’s not even 10:30 in the morning.

Anyway, I started this a little early. Today is the day we are actually supposed to start blogging, so this is just a post that Professor Morgan is having us to to make sure we’re all on the same web page.

“Practice” link.

Television – a medium. So called because it is neither rare nor well-done.
— Ernie Kovacs

A funny thing for an actor to say. However, I believe Mr. Kovacs acted mostly in films, which is more of an art form than its smaller-screened counterpart. Neil Postman says in his book Amusing Ourselves To Death that the best things on television are junk. So Dr. Postman was saying was that watching “Family Guy”, “American Idol” and “The Hills” is better than watching the evening news?

According to my interpretation, yes.

But how is this possible?

Easy. Television is an entertainment medium, not intended for deeper issues or serious discussion. Really, how can one take anything on TV seriously? Even the news is laughable. A few weeks ago I happened to be sitting near a TV while it was tuned to Fox News, and the talking heads barely took up half the screen. To the right was the time, date, weather conditions, and the stock market; at the bottom was the scrolling news ticker moving by fast enough to give any speed-reader decent practice.

You might say, “But Adam, how can you criticize the news? We need to know all of this information!”

It’s a decent point. Obviously, keeping track of current events is not a bad thing, and the stock market is important enough to keep tabs on as well. But all at once? You mean to tell me that your attention span is so horrible that there must be at least three separate topics taking up your screen in order to keep your brain fully occupied?

Of course we do. And television did it us in the first place.

More on this later. Right now I need to get some food before I go to class.

However, one thing stood out for me over the past couple of days, and that is the Flight 1549 crash-landing into the Hudson river on January 15th. You can call it skill of the pilot, or you can call it a miracle (I would personally say both), but either way it’s just plain nice to see something good happen. Perhaps it was a way to further uplift the American spirits right before President-Elect Obama’s inauguration. Or something like that.

Anyway, kudos to Captain Chelsey Sullenberger on an amazing landing. You can see a video of the landing/rescue here.

Oh, on a further note, I just picked up the Jurassic Park trilogy on DVD last night. The films bring back good memories, from a time when movies could be suspenseful and show violent character death without over-the-top, blood-on-the-camera mutilation we see today.

*sighs contentedly*

Well, now that I’ve checked my Facebook and got my daily dose of The Adventures of Dr. McNinja, I better get to my American Short Story Cycle class. The room fills up pretty fast.