The Lewis Show

I would be lying if I said I wasn't a tiny bit choked up watching this evening's local news. Anchor Gene Cox had his last broadcast tonight before heading to retirement. Of course reporters got to leave short messages for him and poke some fun at him one more time before going off the air. Thinking back and growing up in Warsaw, I remember watching Gene do the evening and I think at one point the morning broadcasts. I used to have a tiny portable TV that I kept by my bed growing up and it would work as my alarm in the morning. I can remember the TV would come on every morning with this God awful Tuffy (repair shop) commercial. On the commercial a mechanic turned into the devil and laugh maniacally at overcharging some poor woman to fix her car. It used to scare me every morning. But despite the terrible local commercials, I spent the first part of every weekday keeping up with local and world events thanks to Gene's professionalism and tact. I think in this new digita...

Most of my readers may know this about me, but at one point I did take religious studies. My knack for teaching lead me to take these studies to help others. I've long since shelved that part of my life, but this week has seen a lifetime's shared in religious discussion locally and on the social networks. I thought I'd put in a quick word from The Word. I always say before doing any study in religion or philosophy with anyone, do not go by the words of any man or teacher, study and learn life and meaning for yourself. I never attempt to impose my beliefs on anyone, so take anything said with a grain of salt, so to speak. For those that do believe, we only have ourselves to answer for one day. For those that don't, that's the beauty of free will. With that said, recently, false prophet Harold Camping made an educated guess as to when the clock would begin for the end of the world. Using calendars and tomfoolery, he predicted that the rapture of Christians would...

Last night while mindlessly watching last week's Kitchen Nitemares, I thought I'd see what was going on with my twitter stream. I didn't expect to see the explosion of tweets and news that Osama Bin Laden, Al Qaeda mastermind had been killed. My timeline erupted in cheers, gratitude for our troops, and speculation about what happened. News today is more instant than the internet itself regardless of the weight of each story, but it was sure good to see people and firefighters (above) taking to the streets in New York and DC after hearing such sweeping and greatly overdo story. But I will say even after hearing the news on Twitter, probably like most, I turned on the TV to catch the never ending cycle of reporting that is cable news. I think that's what most do these days, get instant news from social streams, then turn on their televisions for that visual fix, then to blogs and newspapers for in depth analysis. I think all sources of media like this can work tog...

This is a big time feel good story for me. I've always felt envious about the Silicon Valley and New York City where a vast majority of tech companies call home. I never thought that Richmond would be home to anything remotely close to new tech, social networking, etc. Tumblr has announced that they are going to open a second office here in Richmond. Tumblr is a great micro blogging platform which has great social features. I have a couple pages, but mostly I've used it for feeding information. That may change now that there's a possibility that I can now support a local company. I think this is exciting news! I hope more companies see the rapid growth of the social space in central Virginia, the lower taxes (compared to NY and CA), and an active community ready to embrace this new media. I think I'm going to have to re think how I use my own Tumblr account now. If you're on there, let me know who you are. Here's a shot of the inside of the Corrugated Bo...

We've all seen the devastation in Haiti which is still reeling from a massive earthquake earlier this month. The loss of life has been unimaginable and the lack of basic needs for the survivors is still an urgent priority. There are several charities that are helping the people and infrastructure in Haiti, but with any crisis, I always suggest people to donate through the Red Cross. They have means through their website and even by texting now to donate and help out. Regardless, help out anyway you can. We are reminded in this time to help our neighbors out whether they live down the road, on the other side of the country, and even small decimated islands in the Caribbean.

I came home tonight with the full intention of posting about recent celebrity deaths. I open up Google, I look for images to use, then I make an outline of what I'm going to post. Afterwards, I put up a title then post.  I'm pretty sure that's what most bloggers do, but not tonight. I was sidetracked when I noticed the volume of celebrity deaths in June . It wasn't that I was blown away, I just figured, there are many people who have contributed a lot to society that would not get mentioned. I have heard over and over that 'these things happen in three's', but they don't, they just get noticed in three's. We mourn their loss not because we know them, we mourn them because we feel a part of our childhood passing away or we feel a chapter in our lives closing. I remember watching Cannonball Run as a child. I thought it was hilarious. I wasn't surprised to hear about Dom DeLuise passing, but I was sad because I remembered not having a care in th...

As I posted a couple months ago when talking about the signifigance of services such as Twitter, Youtube, Flickr, etc in this world in getting news out quickly, the social internet comes through again. As we know last week, elections were held in Iran with predictable results, but instead of the young men and women of their country accept those obviously rigged results, they began to take to the streets. With those services at their disposal, with an educated and engaged youth culture, and with the desire for equity and fairness that I know every Iranian posses, we saw the protests grow. But we did not watch the protests on traditional news services. They had very limited coverage with what was going on in Tehran and surrounding areas. And what can be better than this? They're young. They're really freaking young. The next generation is not a waste, they may save us all! People got to see the struggles and inspiration of these people through services such as Twitter from ...

Another protest against the Church of Scientology. I just enjoyed the non marching marching band. Happy Birthday Mr. Hubbard?

My feeds over the past two weeks have been flooded about posts related to protests being held worldwide against The Church of Scientology by a group that calls themselves Anonymous. Sunday, thousands of people showed up and picketed their churches. This is a victory for free speech, expression, and the power of the internet. Way to go, Anonymous. I was cracking up at this video shot at the London protest. There's nothing like getting Rickroll'd! I don't ever want to be Rickroll'd.

Ledger, probably best known for his role in Brokeback Mountain was found dead today at the age of 29. What a shame. Information has been put together quickly thanks to the folks at Mahalo . With Batman slated to be his last major release, Ledger is bound to live in infamy amoung other Hollywood actors that had their lives also cut short. My heart goes out to his family, what a shame.

I think most of us have heard that expression, "Bad things always come in threes." I remember tragedy would always strike like that. This has been a very weird news day, and I just felt I should try to recap for the sake of remembering days like this. The day started as you can see from my last post with the announcement of Kevin DuBrow's passing in his Vegas home. I also found out that Redskins safety, Sean Taylor is in critical condition after being shot outside his Florida home. As much as I decry the Redskins as a poor excuse for a football team, I was touched to see everyone coming together in prayer and support for Sean. My thoughts go out to him too and I hope he recovers quickly. Reading around on the news wire I see that Joran Van Der Sloot is still behind bars under suspicion for manslaughter in the case of missing teen Natalee Holloway. I'm sure this is not news to most people, but it looks like there might be a break in this case and we might discover that...

Hopefully as I do this monthly review of the news items I saved on my Google Reader feed, I can evolve it into something halfway entertaining. Let me try this again this time with pictures and links. Of course you can always skim through my news items on my Reader feed in the sidebar. Internet worms are back and they are worse than ever. Reports came out last week of two really nice bugs that came from emails disguised as e-cards and the other is a destructive mp3 killing worm! That prompted me to back up all the music that's on my hard drive, but it also prompts me to remind people to keep everything up to date, especially Windows users! Windows Update is your friend! Is Barry shooting up on roids ? From what I see there is yet to be any evidence that he is. Obviously the man has bulked up a lot, but I don't see any test results saying he's loaded..not yet anyways. I celebrate the man breaking Hank Aaron's home run record. I challenge any motormouth sports pundit to...

It's that time of the week again. That time where I look at some news items and say a lot of nothing about them. For links, and to see what the heck I'm talking about, check out the sidebar for my live google reader feed. You're going to want to look at that for any of this to make sense! I've posted both in my blog here and in my Tumblog recent footage from festivals in Europe such as Download and Graspop. These videos are so much better in quality. Hopefully gone are the days of crappy recordings. Even better, I can pull these videos from youtube and put them on my iPod. How nerdy is that? Speaking of internet content, I found on digg a great list of social music networks. As most of you know, I frequent last.fm, but there are many sites out there and there is definately something for everyo ne. It's a shame the recording industry seeks to shut this medium down. I've discovered so many bands through these networks not to mention myspace and other social sites...

I was reading news on Digg and saw that Chris Benoit and his family were found dead in their home. That's just mind blowing. He was one of my favorite wrestlers.. One of the last pure style pro wrestlers remaining. My heart goes out to the surviving members of their families and I hope the authorities get to the bottom of what happened. That's just sad. RIP Crippler

I know I haven't been on in a while. There's nothing really blog worthy going on. So make sure you keep up with my twitter posts! And now, my news of the week: American Idol over here is a competition for pop stars. It's funny how the rockers never really make it to the finale, I don't think that's by accident, but in Finland, their Idol winners are heavy metal singers who turn out pretty decent albums. Maybe we should just try that..one year. Hell, that Doughtry guy has been killing the charts. Think about it.. I never have watched the Sopranos, nor am I going to spoil the ending, but people are pretty ticked off about how it ended. I'm convinced there has to be a movie now. Here's news. A socialist leader is asking people to give up freedoms and luxuries. First they lose freedom of press, now every day freedoms. Hugo Chavez is just being plain predictable now, and boring. I've posted before Janine's interest into being an ocularist. I'm probabl...

Playing around with RSS feeds can be a bit tedious. I am going crazy, however, over Google Reader. I've even put a widgit in my blog that will highlight stories that I read over the course of the day. Once a week, or so, I'm going to comment on those stories, if anything to explain why such things would fascinate me. Over time, I'm even going to start my own podcast highlighting those stories. And away we go! (I"m not posting hyperlinks, go to my sidebar and click them yourself) Google is rumored to plans for purchasing FeedBurner for 100 million dollars. Google is freaking everywhere now as you can see they pretty much own my daily internets. With FeedBurner, Google is sure to jump head first into the podcasting market and pretty much every local and corporate podcast runs through Feedburner. Kudos to Google! iPhone is going to ship at this point on June 20th. A phone that runs Apple software. A year ago I would have laughed, but now I know for sure that Apple, Inc, i...

Living in Virginia, we had all become accustomed to watching school shootings unfold in other parts of the country. We are, however, not immune to violence here in Virginia. Between Richmond and Washington, DC, this part of the world has a bad reputation for murder. Even recently, there was a man who drove to Richmond to fly out of the airport here only to end up dead along with his two sons. Today, a new page turns in our history as 1 (still possibly 2) gunmen killed 33 people on the campus of Virginia Tech. I had visited the campus a few times when I was living in Lynchburg, but I never had any attachment to any of the people there. My heart does go out to the people affected by today's shooting. No matter what the motive may be, it's all in vain. People did not have to die over this person'(s) vindetta. This all makes me very sad. This is really a nice state. There really are nice people here. I hope people believe that.

Recent studies have shown that southpaws have a quicker reaction time, have better ability to handle multiple functions, and are more agile at certain sports. But I always knew that. Take that uppity right handers! The link and article are up in the title, but my left handed friends already knew that. If it wasn't for 2 cruel teachers telling me basically I was retarded for not using my right hand to write or eat, I think I'd be a full on lefty and would probably be on my way to world domination by now. This just makes me feel good despite the studies that show that left handed people don't survive as long as rightys in this right handed society. Ha. Ha. Ha. Genius.