Money!

I was up in the Catskills over the holiday weekend with the extended family, so I wasn't able to sit around long enough to catch much of it, but I did see some of the footage from Live 8 re-broadcast on ABC that night. If I hadn't already seen "The Girl in the Cafe" on HBO, I would have no idea what Sir Bob was urging the G8 to do (and why not use Live 8 to raise some money to buy vaccine to immunize kids in Africa, or anti-viral medications for people with HIV/AIDS on that continent? Billons of people watched the concerts, so they should have used this incredible opportunity to help solve some of these enormous, but solvable, problems.)

And just when I thought American crassness had already bottomed out with a summer of new reality shows to distract us from the ongoing carnage in Iraq and the bid to turn the Supreme Court into the puppet of the religious right: after watching devastating images of emaciated Africans on the giant video screens on the Live 8 stages, ABC breaks away to commercials for Trimspa diet powder! And, incredibly, this happens several more times during the broadcast!

Don't you think that some ad sales guy at ABC should have told the Trimspa folks that this might not be the most...um...optimal way to advertise their product?

Ah, but then there is our all-consuming worship of Mammon and cold hard cash...

Another weird thing: David Gilmour of Pink Floyd now looks just like my father-in-law!