Yes:

“In 1984, when the drinking age was raised in the United States, Congress enacted the National Minimum Drinking Age Act. This law basically held states hostage by saying 10% of their federal highway funds would be taken away if they did not enforce a legal drinking age of 21. There has been controversy ever since. The most basic argument against the raised drinking age — and for lowering it –is the most opined: If we can marry, drive, and go to war at 18, why can’t we legally drink?”

I agree. We should lower the drinking age back to 18. I hope this becomes a campaign issue.

Fascinating account of disarming a 15-year-old girl in Iraq strapped with explosives for a suicide bombing.

Great pictures from the protests at the DNC convention in Denver.

My Conversion to Digital Television

A friend asked me for a little more info on my recent conversion to Digital Television, so let me expound upon it for all of my 12 loyal readers.

First off, my television is about 8 years old, so I can’t receive these new-fangled digital signals through my regular antenna. I ordered two of those converter box coupons so I wouldn’t have to pay for one. Unfortunately, the coupons expired after 90 days. So, I bought a converter for $50 — it plugs into the cable port in the back of my TV.

I didn’t buy an antennae, so I just stuck a speaker wire in the back of the converter box. This worked amazingly well. I hung the wire on the wall and picked up about 10 different channels from my suburban Atlanta home. The picture quality was incredible and the digital signal made it crystal clear — none of those static-riddled pictures I picked up with old rabbit-ear antennae.

One night while watching the Olympics, my family balked because the signal had weakened. When this occurs, the picture freezes and pixelates, just like watching Dish TV when it rains. Therefore, I made haste to The Wal-Mart where I picked up a digital antenna for about $30. The antennae plugs into a cable port on the back of the converter box and into the wall outlet. That’s right, it’s an electric antenna.

The antennae immediately cleared up the Olympics signal and I pulled in about three more channels. Now, I have about 12 or 13, not counting the bevy of religious channels in the UHF range. When flipping channels, we lovingly refer to that stretch as the “God Gauntlet.”

When I’m in the mood for something else besides broadcast television, I can hook up my PC to my computer. I bought a “S” cable that goes from a PC port to the television via those red, white, and yellow audio and video cables. I can then play content from Hulu.com on the television. Despite the fact that the video is streaming over the Internet, the picture quality is incredible. And, Hulu rarely pauses to buffer. Here’s a store where you can buy all this stuff, or just check out the widget below.

So, I’m saving about $700 a year by ditching cable and I’m really not missing much of anything about it. Perhaps the one drawback is the disappearance of my Digital Video Recorder. But, with so much ready for viewing at Hulu, I haven’t really noticed.

In conclusion, you’re a sucker if you’re still paying for cable.

Academic research shows that NBC sexed up its coverage of women’s volleyball:

“More than 20% of the camera shots were found to be tight shots of the players’ chests and just over 17% of the shots were coded as buttock shots, which,” note Bissell and Duke, “leaves viewers with lasting memories of players’ bodies rather than of memories of athleticism.”

In case you were wondering.

Allvoices bills itself as “the first open media site where anyone can report from anywhere.” Sounds like an interesting idea — except I wonder who’s going to take the time to generate a news reports (written or multimedia) without getting paid.

According to this electoral prediction, McCain will win the presidency.

Pretty amazing prediction given Obama’s position a couple of months ago. I talked to a friend yesterday about this. He conjectured that Obama lost his mojo in a variety of ways. He pointed specifically to Obama’s refusal to take up McCain’s offer to do a series of townhall meetings. I hadn’t thought too much about that — but, yes, a bunch of loosely constructed discussions over a variety of topics would have been refreshing political discourse. Instead, we’re still getting more of the same. Not really the message of hope and change, eh?

Michael Phelps is taking flak for signing on to promote “Frosted Flakes”:

“I would not consider Frosted Flakes the food of an Olympian,” said nutritionist Rebecca Solomon of Mount Sinai Medical Center.

“I would rather see him promoting Fiber One. I would rather see him promoting oatmeal. I would even rather see him promoting Cheerios.”

The announcement yesterday that Phelps, 23, winner of a record eight gold medals at the Beijing Olympics, would grace Frosted Flakes and Corn Flakes boxes instead of the traditional athlete’s choice of Wheaties left many perplexed.

Frosted Flakes has three times the amount of sugar as Wheaties and 1/3rd the fiber.

This doesn’t matter much to a virtuoso swimmer who consumes 12,000 calories a day.

Still, in a country where childhood obesity is an alarming issue, Phelps’ iconic image sharing space with Tony the Tiger sends the wrong message, experts say.

“For a guy like Michael Phelps who isn’t worried about obesity because he’s burning thousands of calories as an athlete…eating Corn Flakes and Frosted Flakes every so often is not an issue,” Solomon said.

I agree with the health experts, Frosted Flakes do taste better — unless you coat Corn Flakes with six tablespoons of sugar.

Here are five sayings from former football coach Lou Holtz:

1)A bird doesn’t sing because it has an answer. It sings because it has a song.

2) A lifetime contract for a coach means if you’re ahead in the third quarter and moving the ball, they can’t fire you.

3) It’s not the load that breaks you, it’s the way you carry it.

4) Life is 10 percent what happens to you and 90 percent how you respond.

5) No one has ever drowned in sweat.

Good stuff.

Holtz, of course, is the father of Skip Holtz, the coach of my alma mater’s football team. East Carolina opens up the football season this year with games against Virginia Tech (#17) and West Virginia (#8). I predict an early-season upset for the Pirates.

This is mind-boggling:

Now Dr Gerald Cleaver, associate professor of physics at Baylor, and Richard Obousy have come up with a new twist on an existing idea to produce a warp drive that they believe can travel faster than the speed of light, without breaking the laws of physics.

In their scheme, in the Journal of the British Interplanetary Society, a starship could ‘warp’ space so that it shrinks ahead of the vessel and expands behind it.

By pushing the departure point many light years backwards while simultaneously bringing distant stars and other destinations closer, the warp drive effectively transports the starship from place to place at faster-than-light speeds.
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All this extraordinary feat requires, says the new study, is for scientists to harness a mysterious and poorly understood cosmic antigravity force, called dark energy.