So you don’t have money for Netflix or iTunes but you really want to see the latest episode of Gossip Girls and you’re not “a computer person”. I feel your pain. I do.

I am not about to scold ye pirates or preach morality, but the phenomenon that is quickly becoming the norm for most college students may not be as necessary as common perceptions decree. Whether you belong to the Robin Hood school of thought or the folks that wouldn’t steal a purse, there are many FREE and LEGAL ways to watch your favorite TV shows and movies. Most of these simple and easy to access tips tend to be faster and safer than downloading random files to your computer or buying DVDs off the local street corner.

The best and fastest way is to go to the network’s website and watch it via streaming video while only suffering through minimal commercials if any (the best I’ve seen so far is ABC). The shows are typically available about a week after they initially air, and many sites now even have old seasons of current shows for your viewing pleasure.

Another way is through third-party websites that use advertising to pay for the show or movie that you’re enjoying: check out Hulu or its cousin ShareTV. Or enjoy concerts at the one of the up-and-coming Archives.

For free music mp3 downloads, you can check out websites like download.com and discover some incredible talent before the rest of your friends. You can take this one step further with Pandora, where you create your own customized channel and relax to songs that are found for you based on your taste. If you’d rather just create your own radio station then a very simple one to use is Yahoo’s free service LAUNCHcast.

If you have your own favorites, I’d like to hear.

Good luck and happy procrastinating.

By now, we all know about Clinton’s 3am ad — I have even written about it! — that rhetorically asks, “Who do you want answering that late night phone call?”

My answer? McCain. And for once, I think NBC might agree with me. Check out this spoof of the Clinton ad that makes both Democratic contenders look like idiots:

So I thought to counter-balance that negative Nancy hit list post, I’d share a heartwarming story about a ditzy blonde and a former Soviet Union nation.

And here I was, thinking the U.S. had good taste when I found out ye good ole Americans snubbed our favorite down home Goldie Locks. I am shocked and appalled that Jessica Simpson’s new movie, “Blonde Amtition” went straight to DVD, except for making like five bucks at the handful of Texan theaters it was shown at. However, my first reaction to this devastating news was HOLD OUT FOR THE UKRAINIANS, JESSICA! Not all hope is lost!

And boy was I right! This shit opened #1 and made $253,008 at the box office its opening weekend. The Box Office Mojo tried to explain this miraculous windfall, saying, “The former Soviet nations have a sweet tooth for straight-up comedies. When these comedies have big name celebrities like Jessica Simpson’s, that’s all that’s needed to sell the movie. Russian and Ukrainian audiences have an even bigger urge for escapism than Americans. So, films like “Blonde Ambition” will gross more than “No Country for Old Men.”‘

Hot damn. The Ukrainian department of Tourism but be shitting itself right now. “Escape to the Ukraine! The land that nobody wants to live in!” Seriously, that really insults the Ukrainian I.Q..  At least compare “Blonde Ambition” to a movie that wasn’t Oscar-nominated to make it a fair comparison. Also, they should not advertise that they’ll buy anything or you know Paris Hilton is going to build herself a Polly Pocket palace up in there and sell some more perfume and a translated autobiography and they’ll regret every having announced their love of awful C-list movies.  Also, I’m no geography expert, but isn’t the Ukraine pretty damn close to Russia, aka the land that invented Vodka?!  Cross the border for some escapism, guys!  It’s what underage American kids do!

Tyra Banks–

First of all, I think the most obvious question is if they are all throwing out their bras, why aren’t they doing this topless? The second question is, Tyra—learn more about feminism before you open your cave-like trap! Wait, that’s not a question. That’s because Tyra is an idiot and is just perpetuating the inaccurate myth that a group of women protesting the 1968 Miss America competition burned their bras when in reality, they symbolically threw a bunch bras and other constricting underwear in trashcans. So way to go, Tyra! This just makes me violently dislike you even more than I did before! See, I originally hated you because of your terrible Oprah-wannabe, fake-hair-slinging attempts at interviews. A sample Tyra interview would go like this:

Tyra: So, you lost both your parents in a brutal murder scandal when you were just eleven years old, right? Didn’t that make you feel awful and lost and vulnerable? (bats fake eyelashes at camera)

Orphan girl: (tears welling) Yes, I did. And yes, I felt aw—

Tyra: –I am right there with you, girl. This reminds me of when I was 16 and I was just starting out my hugely successful modeling career. My agency sent me to Paris for six months and I had to live on my own and didn’t have my mommy with me and it was really hard. But you know what, I perservered and here I am today, a giant supermodel and I LOVE MY BODY! WOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO! (does an uncoordinated booty shaking dance)

And that, my dear friends, is why I hated Tyra yesterday. But today I have a whole new slew of awesome reasons to hate her. But I also love her because she gave me something to write about…

On a final note, on last night’s premiere of America’s Next Top J.C. Penny Model, Tyra crowned herself Homecoming Queen and cried fake mascara tears while maniacally waving and doing this high-pitched screaming thing only other dogs could hear.  Recreating an empty childhood much, Tyra? God she really scares me.

It is often said – by PlayStation salesmen and teenage boys alike – that video games have a propensity to take over your life. I am here to tell that that just isn’t true. Only your social life. Your brain remains perfectly in tact.

With an indefinite postponement of The Office’s antics, I had to look elsewhere for entertainment. Turns out, I didn’t have to look far away from the mind-numbing cable box to discover what I had assumed to be an anti-intellectual replacement: video games. I didn’t know how wrong I was.

I was never what one might call a “gamer.” My family didn’t have a game console in our house, so my only exposure to the craft at all was playing MarioKart in a friend’s room. I occasionally played computer games over our own home network with the rest of the Cohler Klan, but I considered these games in a different league.

Age of Empires was a particular favorite in the Cohler household, home to versions I, II, III and the spin-off Age of Mythology, plus expansion packs. The historically-based, strategy game had substance–

think RISK, but dorkier — unlike the Nintendo64 games I had witnessed elsewhere.

But eventually, Age of Empires became too easy. Sure, there are cheats to make levels more interesting – and really, who doesn’t want to shoot arrows and enemy combatants in the Stone Age while riding around in a PT Cruiser? But even that got mundane after a while. So, for me, at least, electronic recreation became a thing of the past.

Until this Christmas, when a Wii console and an Xbox360 entered my life.

To my own surprise, the video games I encountered were anything but mind-numbing. These were not the games I had seen in my middle-school days. They more closely resembled the beloved Age of Empires, which I believe is single-handedly responsible for peaking my interest in computer science. (And look at me now, an Online Editor. Whodathunkit.)

Tomb Raider obviously was not created for silly boys alone whose only reason for the purchase was the ability to electronically scan 270^o around an Angelina Jolie look-alike, although the designers of the game did make it far too easy to accidentally zoom in on her butt or the two protuberances on her chest.

If the game were simple, there needn’t be detailed instructions illustrating how to navigate each level – and avoid dart traps –

easily accessible with a simple Google search. Tomb Raider is really a series of puzzles: a game you have to be mentally engaged in. 

Half of the game is figuring out what the hell you’re supposed to do and then somehow trying to implement a game plan that enables you to do just that. Let’s say that you’re trying to navigate your way across a wide pit. You can’t walk around it – You tried that. You fell. You died. – but there does appear to be a tall pole in the center. Can you jump to it? No. It’s too far away. Hmm. Wonder if you can move it. How? Well, you can look for a series of ledges that eases you into the chasm. A-ha! To your left. Now groove on down there and push that long pole a little closer to you so you can jump to it and leap to the other side. Nice job.

Not all video games employ violence as their main attraction. A good number of them involve the employment of deductive logic. And those in which gore is more central to the premise of the game can still make you think.

Take the game Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End, for example. There is one scene in which a single player must simultaneously switch between controlling Captain Jack Sparrow and Half-As-Sexy Will Turner.

However, if the gamer remains as one character for too long, the other one dies. (Did I not mention the entire royal navy is attacking you? Sorry about that.) So, you have to monitor the health of both characters, leaving one to fend for himself while the other sneaks away and climbs up walls, pulls levers, and dances around cannons being bombarded at his person.

All the while you have to avoid the omnipresent blitz of bullets, commandeer some cash, pull down posters identifying Will Turner as a pirate, and search for health and other mystical, magical goodies that enable you to steal souls that you will later trade to Davvy Jones.

Yes, there are cannons and all maters of unforgiving metal being hurtled at you at all times. And sure, you get extra points for doing fancy fencing moves as you thrust your sword through your opponents’ torsos, but really –

Pirates is so much more than violence.

Which brings me back to my original thesis: For Columbia intellectuals or the prurient-minded, video games are just too much damn fun. 

 I’m convinced that Rashid Khalidi is one of the smartest people on campus. While his colleagues thrill to spectacular, publicly embarrassing displays of anti-academic bombast–all while touting Campus Watch files of positively Tolstoyan thickness–Khalidi has quietly crept his way to the threshold of mainstream American intellectual discussion.Indeed, Charlie Rose is no Tim Russert, but he is still as intelligent and as legitimizing a figure as any in network broadcasting. You could never imagine Hamid Dabashi appearing on Charlie Rose to deny that Israelis have souls, or Joseph Massad emerging from that trademark black background to argue that Zionism is an especially insidious form of anti-Semitism. Wouldn’t happen.

But unlike the aforementioned–both of whom harbor the post-modernist’s paradoxical belief in a cosmopolitan, egalitarian future predicated on the moral and intellectual fluidity of all previous modes of thought–the dapper Professor Dabashi is an unabashed cynic. He talks grey and dresses even greyer than he talks; speaks with unreserved bitterness about the very movement he once represented (as a negotiator during the Madrid process in the early 90s), and deftly orients discussion towards an objectively bad human rights situation rather than stumping for Utopian idealism. Khalidi isn’t sucked into the ideological trap that dooms the Massads and Dabashis of the world to the distant, intellectual periphery. After all, lives are on the line. 

Khalidi’s analysis never strayed into particularly radical territory. I’m not sure what he meant when he said that we’re about to move past the possibility of a two-state solution, especially with the likely evacuation of Jewish settlers from the West Bank within the next couple years (I think Olmert will begin dismantling settlements in order to strengthen Mahmoud Abbas’s ever-uncertain political standing, and because Israelis will reject a unilateral pullout if it means handing control over to a tenuous and as-yet nonexistant Hamas-Fatah unity government). But one shouldn’t confuse pessimism with principle: Khalidi isn’t speaking in terms of who deserves to rule Palestine based on abstract historical or political calculations. He’s speaking in terms of a real-world outcome following real-world events. And while his analysis is a bit cloudier than mine (and, might I add, Martin Indyck’s), it’s tough to be optimistic when this is the closest thing to reassurance Haartez has offered me this week.

So what should we make of this? Unsurprisingly, Khalidi identifies America’s simultaneously fawning and overbearing treatment of the Jewish state as a source of continued conflict, and says that it is inevitably up to the Israelis to demonstrate a willingness to make peace. But Khalidi–who, I’m guessing, is as much as a Zionist as Dabashi or Massad–implies that an uneasy, ethnically-determined partition is a feasible solution even if, for one or even both sides of the conflict, it isn’t completely fair. And after watching this, one wishes Khalidi’s colleagues similarly understood the necessity of compromise.

The puritan US Federal Communications Commission (FCC) has fined ABC Television Network $US1.4 million for broadcasting some female buttock on NYPD Blue.

According to the Washington Post:

“…television stations are prohibited from broadcasting “patently offensive” material of a sexual or excretory nature from 6 a.m. to 10 p.m., when children are most likely to be watching… “We find that the programming at issue is within the scope of our indecency definition because it depicts sexual organs and excretory organs — specifically an adult woman’s buttocks,” the FCC wrote in its ruling.”

The agency then replied that “the buttocks are not a sexual organ”, completely forgetting that the buttocks still fall into the “excretory organ” criterion. And I mean, c’mon, a bit of bum never hurt nobody? Children flaunt their own like nothing else. If anything, this lady’s buttocks may put a spoke in their wheels.

And as for those fuddy-duddy FCC prudes, stick your little statutes up your buttocks.