Spot-On: Hot Spots

The New Yorker says it's long and tedious, the San Francisco Chronicle is beside itself with boosterish "Look it's San Francisco on the TeeVee" stories so it's hard to tell how good documentary maker Ken Burns' The War, which starts airing Sunday on PBS, will be.

Burns' blockbuster documentary, The Civil War was notable for one fine contribution: The use of little-heard, often obscure regional music that set a mood and tone and did much to capture the era the film portrayed. So today's HotSpot are streams for two songs that should jazz up this documentary, Count Basie's "Basie Boogie" and his "How Long Blues".

Posted by Chris Nolan at 12:32 PM | Permalink

The squabbling over MoveOn.org's "General Betray Us" ad is just the beginning of the bickering over who said what when and what - exactly - was meant, left unsaid, inferred or implied.

For relief, or something resembling sanity, we recommend you turn to the Washingtonpost.com's Fact Checker and it's "Pinocchio" rankings. It's today's HotSpot.

You remember Pinocchio, the nice wooden puppet whose nose grew every time he told a lie? So do we. Which raises a good election year question: Why can't life imitate art more often?

Posted by Chris Nolan at 12:16 PM | Permalink

Rick Smolan who's 24-hours-in-whatever books are always interesting, is at it again.

This week Smolan and his crew are asking - via the Internet, natch - Americans folks to take pictures of themselves at home and submit them for a chance to be included in his latest book, America At Home.

The details are here. The America At Home project is today's HotSpot.

Posted by Chris Nolan at 12:40 PM | Permalink

Sunday was the official Day For Dafur but, like many disasters, the work that needs to be done in the Western Sudan may never stop. So why limit your concern or your curiosity to one 24-hour period?

Today's HotSpot - and we'll leave this up for a while - is GlobeForDarfur, the relief effort that's trying to bring political pressure, attention and relief to the Sudan's sprawling and starving refugee population.

Posted by Chris Nolan at 3:04 PM | Permalink

Hmmmm. It may just be that the U.S. labor movement isn't dead. It's just been resting. For a long, long time.

One of the more recent signs to come our way is WorkingLife, a web site run by the Labor Research Association, an 80-plus year old pro-union organization started by "intellectual leftists." Executive director Jonathan Tasini has taken to blogging and his most recent post, on Democrats and economic fairness (which owes a little something to a recent Spot-on post) is worth a read.

WorkingLife is today's HotSpot.

Posted by Chris Nolan at 1:05 PM | Permalink

Tom Friedman call your office.

Naomi Klein's book, The Shock Doctrine:The Rise of Disaster Capitalism, is an argument against your "flat world" theory. That's bad enough. But it's also a film. Well, a short, really, taking the book's argument - free markets and free peoples are NOT the same - into a new medium.

Clever, eh? And guess who produced the film which was shown at the Toronto Film Festival last week? Alfonso Cuaron, the director of Y tu Mama Tambien and Children of Men. It's pretty amazing, as you might suspect. That trailer - a brief statement of the book's interesting and provacative thesis - today's HotSpot.

Posted by Chris Nolan at 1:10 PM | Permalink

We're not above a little nepotism here at Spot-on. So today's HotSpot is a shout-out to Emily Nolan Evans, recently re-elected member of the Nashville (Tenn.) Metro Council where, among others, she can count former Vice President Al Gore as a constituent.

After much bugging (on the part of her older sister...), Emily finally got someone (probably her kids...) to set up her blog which does (as you'd expect....) a great job talking about what's going on in and around the Nashville suburb of Belle Meade.

Posted by Chris Nolan at 8:55 AM | Permalink