al gore

• Al Gore and his Live Earth concert plans are being questioned and criticized by Live 8 organizer Bob Geldof.
• This makes them my favorite couple of the month: Nicolette Sheridan and Micheal Bolton are moving to the country to raise horses!
  

Former presidential cadidate Al Gore will receive an International Emmy in November for his work in broadcasting, including Current TV, his cable channel featuring user-generated content, and his book and documentary An Inconvenient Truth, which examines the effects of manbearpig global warming. I'm not sure what the International Emmy has to do with his movie, exactly, but there you go.

Gore is actually receiving the Founders Award, which honors those who "touch our common humanity." More importantly, Gore needs more gold statues which he will melt down in order to create a solid gold island he plans to live on once global warming has turned the Earth into a aquatic wasteland. Gore will then elect himself king of the mer-people and begin the breeding process for this new race of Earth creatures, who will claim to adore him but ultimately elect someone else as their king.

No matter what I do to make my Oscar viewing experience bearable (parties, alcohol, hookers) I always end up wanting to put a gun in my mouth by hour two.

First, let me say that Ellen DeGeneres was very funny and did a great job hosting. Also the song by Will Ferrell, Jack Black and John C Reilly was the funniest thing I've seen in a while.

Now let me ask you this...how stupid were those dancers?

• The entire original cast is returning
• You'll find out some of Nibbler's secrets
• Al Gore is back

If you get Current TV, you might have seen the Flash-animated shorts called SuperNews, but if you haven't, you can check out a bunch of them here. I don't receive the channel, and only found these clips on the Current TV site recently via Cold Hard Flash. Obviously, given the channel that's airing these cartoons, they're going to have a liberal/democratic bias, but setting that aside and looking at them as just goofy satirical jabs at politicians and celebrities, a lot of them are pretty funny. Some of them also fall rather flat, which is why I recommend watching them online so you can skip the ones you don't like and watch the ones you do. The cartoons were created, written, and directed by Josh Faure-Brac. The "Oprah" episode in which Dan Brown, Tom Hanks, Mel Gibson, and Jesus Christ get in a tiff over Jesus' sex life is especially funny.

God must really want those kids dead. -- South Park

(S10E06) I'm like, totally cereal, guys.

If nothing else, last night's episode proved that South Park is still an equal opportunity offender. In this episode, Al Gore comes to South Park to warn everyone about Manbearpig (read: global warming), a creature who is half man, half bear, and half pig. Or possibly half man and half bearpig. No one really knows for sure because Gore is apparently the only one who believes he exists.

Most people know that public radio is a huge thing here in Minnesota. We are the home of Lake Wobegon, after all. Recently, Minnesota Public Radio filed a lawsuit against Al Gore's Current TV, claiming that internet users would confuse Gore's independent network with "The Current" a popular MPR-owned music station here in the Twin Cities. The lawsuit claims the radio station had already applied for a trademark of the name "Current" four months before Gore's new venture was changed from "INdTV" to "Current TV." Representatives from Current TV issued a statement noting that over 300 businesses use the word "current" in their name.

It's easy to dismiss this as just a frivolous lawsuit. After all, who's going to confuse a radio station with an independent TV network? What bothers me even more, though, is that public radio should be championing a TV network that eschews corporate news for citizen journalism. I would have expected MPR to support Current TV, not try to bring it down.