Time for the latest edition of Adam Comments on What Everyone Else has Already Commented On.

You know Juan Williams of NPR? He got fired for saying, and I quote, "All Muslims are trying to kill us all the time, and I think we should just nuke the Middle East, gas chamber the shit out of Muslims, and live on in a peaceful world free of the Muslim scourge."

Or he might as well have, the way NPR's knee jerked him out of a job and into right-wing hero status. What he actually said was "Sure, when I see someone in Muslim garb on a plane, I get a little nervous, BUT OBVIOUSLY NOT ALL MUSLIMS ARE TERRORISTS."

It's just that the last little bit of information there was left off of basically all the reporting. This is similar to the Shirley Sherrod thing a while back when she got fired immediately after it was reported that she said she didn't help a white farmer because he was white. In that case, they left off the entire rest of her message, where she realized she was wrong for that, and used the story as a message of racial tolerance.

When I was a kid, I always thought it would be funny to edit together clips of people saying words and making them say ridiculous things. If you can find a clip of someone saying "I hate black licorice," and one of them saying "Hanukkah is a Jewish holiday," and one of them saying "People like to dance," you could make them say "I hate...Jewish...people." But now that this is ACTUALLY happening on the news, it's not nearly as funny.

Oftentimes to make a point in a debate, you have to show common ground with your opponent. I recently volunteered at a food bank, helping people get their government subsidized food to their cars. Right-wingers say government should not do this, and they often point to lazy minorities who have babies and collect government checks and don't look for work. Having seen what I saw, I would say "Yes, there are young minorities with six kids in tow picking up their free food, but the majority of these people were older, often foreign people who didn't save enough money or just need some help to get by, and I would hate to see these decent people punished because of a small number of government assistance abusers."

If that were shown on the news, my statement would be "There are minorities with six kids in tow picking up their free food."

This is not responsible journalism. I suppose there are a few hyper-enlightened individuals who can walk through the inner city past groups of dangerous looking teenagers without their heart rates increasing. I suppose there are a few people who, on September 13th, 2001, could get on an airplane with a Muslim guy and not think, "Well that's off-putting." But I'd wager that most of us are like Juan Williams. We can admit that, though it's wrong, we do have preconceived notions about people and things. His point was, though, that we can feel like that instinctively, but our rational brains can override those feelings.

NPR didn't think rationally, they just instinctively fired the guy for a misconstrued half-statement. For a news company that pretends to be the rational one, that move was not very impressive.

I have made a movie. Rated PG-13 for content, F- for quality. Enjoy!

Kelly hired me to make her a poster to advertise a hoop class she wants to put on. The result, as you can see, was worth every penny.

Concerts are an interesting thing. Most of the concerts I've been to in my life are of the punk rock variety. I've been to a couple of hip hop concerts, and I've been to a couple of bigger, mainstream concerts. Last weekend I went to a Muse concert at the Pepsi Center. This is my review.

The Pepsi Center is not a good venue for music. There's a reason its main purpose is to house Nuggets and Avalanche games. Both of the concerts I've seen there have sounded muted and echoey. I have a feeling the acoustics in the venue are to blame, not the sound engineering, but it could be a combination of both. I realize that in downtown Denver there aren't many places capable of holding enough people for these bigger concerts, but unless the tour is something I'm not willing to miss (such as the Weezer/Foo Fighters tour a couple years ago), I don't think I'll be heading back to the Center anytime soon.

The opening band, Passion Pit, sucks. Their album, Manners, was reviewed very positively, which isn't surprising considering how much people are into synthesizers again. But, for all the fancy terms given to them by critics, they play nothing more and nothing less than disco music. Their stage presence is nonexistant, as they have up to THREE synthesizer players standing on stage, a drummer who I assume is there for show, since they have a drum machine in almost every track, and the world's most boring bass player. I was pleased to see that not many people in the house were really digging them, but their fans were hardcore, singing along and white-girl dancing (it's all in the arms!) to every song.

Muse came on with an elaborate stage set that had them all standing on elevated columns that also played video clips. It was kind of cool, but the stage also made everything seem too rehearsed for my tastes. It was almost robotic. Now the singer will move to the elevated left part of the stage for this song. Now they will move off the columns for two songs. Now they will move back on, and the columns will go back up. They sounded as fine as they could have. Vocals were unclear, but the instruments were rockin. The crowd loved the shit out of them. I don't know that much about them, but they played every song I wanted to hear. A guy screamed in my ear so loud constantly throughout the show that I thought I was going to pass out.

So, in conclusion, big concerts are fun, but I really prefer smaller shows. I don't like to be half a mile away from the band. I don't like the premeditated nature of the bigger concerts. I understand wanting to see a "show" when you go see a show, but I prefer to focus on the music. I like to see everyone on stage together, just playing music, and not making a full-on production out of it. And rap shows are just weird.