Canned following his appearance in a TV spot 

Amy Goodman on why CBS fired General Batiste: "Generals, it seems, are analysts when they agree with the war plan, and advocates when they oppose it."

An odd kind of convergence 

I've heard about people seeing big-screen HDTVs at other people's houses and realizing they're in the stone age. It happened to me this weekend when visiting my parents, who have a 46-inch Panasonic plasma. Maybe 42, but it's big. I never even thought about how neat it might be to watch an old black and white movie on a big TV. My dad and I watched Twelve O'Clock High yesterday and the fine-grained old B&W film looked great on the display.

It feels a lot like when my family saw my Grandpa's color TV for the first time in 1965 or so. The Rose Parade was on. We were all blown away, went home and decided to start a family piggybank campaign, and had a color set within a few months.

What's kind of crazy is my folks (in their late 70s) are also getting into a weird kind of media convergence. They bought a digital camera just recently when they started noticing it was hard to find film in stores, and because they remembered their TV has an SD card port.

But they don't have a computer, so is that convergence? I think so. They wanted updated photos of my kids, and thought it was pretty cool that I was able to scour the kids' Facebook pages for pics, save them to my laptop and transfer them to their SD card to view on the TV. I also figured out how to display on the TV quick little crude .avi movies taken with the Canon, and that seemed pretty magical to them, too.

I got my dad a WebTV settop box 7 or 8 years ago, which he loves for ordering used books from ABE, and sending e-mail. He's replaced it three or four times. I think the platform is going away, though. More and more, website makers won't stoop to making things simple enough for WebTV, and many sites are unusable for them. For example, they can't use the forms on the NetFlix site, so my dad is slowly coming around to the inevitability of needing a computer one of these days. My mom actively fights the idea. She's just holding her finger in the dike, we tell her, and she scoffs.