NewsUndies 20090219
Buffalo, NY-area TV mogul Muzzammil Hassan apparently has no sense of irony. According to this story on CNN.com, Hassan started Bridges TV, in part, to dispel Muslim stereotypes. Wow. Physician, heal thyself.
All across America, people are lining up to hand-write a verse of the NIV Holy Bible to be used in a new re-print of the NIV Holy Bible. This story on CNN drops a few names and so on, but doesn’t really go too deeply into the story… It turns out that Zondervan, the publisher which commissioned the NIV translation, is the outfit sponsoring the tour (which has a hell of a tour bus), and the outfit that will reap the financial rewards on the backs of these poor people. With over 300,000,000 copies of the NIV sold, worldwide, it’s fair to say they’ve made back the cost of the initial translation. Zondervan owns the NIV. Like Microsoft owns Windows, or George Lucas owns Star Wars. Like that. In the “all rights reserved” sense of “owns”. Perhaps the tour’s slogan should be reworded as, “31,173 verses, 90 cities, 1 motive”. This would be like if Microsoft had a bus driving around, which allowed each person to hand-write one line of source-code for Microsoft’s first product, Altair BASIC, then aggregated all the hand-written bits together and published them in a book to commemorate the 35th anniversary of the release of Altair BASIC. The book, of course, would be published through MicrosoftPress, with Microsoft collecting every penny, on the sale of a novelty item, based on some obsolete pile of text they still own the copyright to. So at least in the case of the “New International Version”, the Holy Bible isn’t God’s word, so much as it’s Zondervan’s word… and you people are writing it for them.
In other news, Al Sharpton has suddenly lost his mind. The Feb 18, 2009 Delonas cartoon in the New York Post depicts the freshly-shot chimp from the recent “chip eats woman’s face” attack in CT, with one cop saying to the other, “They’ll have to find someone else to write the next stimulus bill.” Sharpton claims that the dead chimp in the cartoon is intended to represent President Obama. If so, it is an astonishingly poor representation. Look at the cartoon, then look at a photo of U.S. President Barack Hussein Obama. Report any striking similarity. Sharpton says it is racist. Bullshit. Take a look at this: http://images.google.com/images?hl=en&q=george+w+bush+chimp&btnG=Search+Images&gbv=2. Is that racist?
With all the news that shouldn’t be news, I’m Paul Tourville.
Special thanks to Pru for the heads-up on the first 2 stories!