News roundup

• I haven't really written anything about this whole "Tar sands kills wildlife" story because my first reaction was to scream at my monitor. Specifically, I wanted to scream, "WHAT THE FUCK DID YOU THINK WAS HAPPENING? DO YOU THINK THESE ARE THE FIRST CREATURES TO DIE FOR TAR SANDS OIL???!!!" Come to think of it, I don't really have anything to add.
• Nope, still not writing about the primaries. Feels pretty good, actually.
• If you're going to object to Grand Theft Auto 4 on feminist grounds, this is the wrong way to do it. Especially when there's way more substantive grounds, such as the tightly interwoven themes of prostitution and female characters who are either duplicitous or stupid throughout the GTA franchise. But to say that GTA4 is misogynist because you shoot women in it misses the point that, in the GTA games, you shoot everyone.
• And speaking of bullet-riddled games with the number "4" in them, I installed Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare on my computer two nights ago, and boy that's a misnomer. "Modern Warfare" has shockingly little to do with... modern warfare. Aside from the fact that it apparently involves killing lots of brown people. An alliance between Islamic terrorists and Russian ultra-nationalists? You may have noticed that, in fact, Russian nationalists of the non-ultra-variety still find plenty of reasons to hate on the Muslim. In little-known places like "Afghanistan" and "Chechnya". Actual Russian ultranationalists have a multiculturalism policy that needs to be translated from the original German. For a game that obviously put huge amounts of research in to weaponry and so on, an even-somewhat-more-plausible plot would have been nice. Still. Awesome friggin game.