If you’ve already got a HoorayMovies account, you can see which movies from your collection are available to watch right this second, and we’ll keep you posted about new releases as they become available. And if you don’t already have an account, what the hell is wrong with you? You know I’m going to keep pestering you until you join.

See our official announcement here…

BEN: Yeah, we’re actually from Texas.

SF: EW! Oh man, that is terrible.

BEN: It’s actually really nice there and most people are very frie…

SF: Yeah, nice for cows and Republicans!

BEN: Well, actually…

SF: Oh, but you live in Austin, so it is ok… A tiny ocean of blue in a giant sea of red!

BEN: Sigh.

Well, take this, you pretentious jerks! Not only is Austin blue, but so is Houston, Dallas, San Antonio, El Paso and Corpus Christi - that’s every single large city in Texas! And look at the gulf coast! Democras are up almost 6% since 2004. Sure, we didn’t turn Texas blue, but you had better believe there are a lot of rational, progressive-minded folks here in Texas who want the same thing for our country as the glitterati in San Francisco do.

Graphic from the New York Times

For comparison, here’s California:

Next time I talk to someone in California, I’m going to say, “Oh, it must be so hard living on that little peninsula of blue in that big sea of red!” For the full context and to see just how surrounded by red that little slice of California blue is, you should really take a look at the county maps of Nevada and Oregon.

PS. No state income tax in Texas either!

I am extremely excited that Bryan, the web’s original wunderkind who lived for a while in a make-believe apartment located on my couch, is making HTML again.

The long-running, internecine baby boomer cultural feud just isn’t that relevant to Americans who came of age after the civil rights, gay rights and feminist revolutions. Even many younger evangelicals are broadening their agendas beyond abortion, stem cells, school prayer and gay marriage. And just as younger Protestants found JFK less threatening than their parents had found Al Smith, younger whites — even in bright-red states — don’t view the prospect of a black president with great alarm.

Peter Beinart in the Washington Post via The Daily Beast’s Cheat Sheet

The politics of your generation is giving way to the politics of mine. The WORLD of your generation is giving way to mine, and the one my children will live in.

Courtney Skott from a letter she wrote her parents to convince them to go Obama.

And while I’m embedding videos, check out the Aphex Twin Windowlicker video, one of the best music videos ever made. (Aphex Twin made all the other best videos too.) Via Ectoplasmosis:

And here’s one of Amy Sedaris cleaning Todd Oldham’s vagina. via Jenn Frank

And,finally, here’s video of voter fraud IN ACTION! As a software engineer, this video proves to me without a doubt that electronic voting machines are 100% broken.

Rosa sat so Martin could walk. Martin walked, so Obama could run. Obama is running so our children can fly.

Inspiring!

Using the Twitter search, I went back a few hours into the archives and noticed something potentially interesting. It’s 10pm here, and people only just started furiously quoting the NPR piece roughly 5 or 6 hours ago, probably right about when All Things Considered aired.

However, the quote was tweeted a few times before the NPR piece, and it seems like most of these were retweets from one source. The first person to tweet this quote, according to Twitter, was kharimosley, who tweeted it 4 days ago, way before the NPR piece aired!

The NPR piece itself says that the source of the quote is “a text message he got from a friend.” I wonder if that text message was kharimosley’s original tweet?

Google found this Democratic Underground forum post with the quote too from about the same time, also from NPR. In that forum, someone suggests changing “Martin walked” to “Martin marched”.

There’s also this slightly different version of the phrase in this music forum from early this morning:

Crispus Attucks, a black man became the first to fall in the Revolutionary War: Crispus fell, so Rosa Parks could sit. Rosa Parks sat so Martin Luther King, Jr. could march. Martin Luther King, Jr. marched so Barack Obama could run. Barack is running so our children can FLY! ~author unknown

Interesting twist.

20 hours ago, Google found this page with the phrase, that links to this PowerPoint hosted on Ning named “RosasatsoMartincouldwalk.ppt” It only has one slide in it - pictures of Rosa Parks, Martin Luther King, and Barack Obama, above the quote and “SAVE THE DATE 11/4/08.”

So someone is making a get out the vote poster in Powerpoint and blogging about it on their dating network profile 15 hours before the phrase is broadcast on NPR. Where did it come from?

The earliest mention I could find on Google was from this MySpace journal page from a dude named Brandan, way back on June 5, 2008. Coincidentally, he used the “Martin marched” version, which, in the light of the NPR-quoting, seems to have been beaten out in favor of “Martin walked.”

I emailed Brandan to see if he could tell me where he heard the phrase. I’ll post an update if he gets back to me.

Update

Twitter user Razorfizh tells me that this quote originated with Senator Cleo Fields at the State of the Black Union event in February 2008. I looked it up and was able to find this press release from Tavis Smiley who moderated the event, which includes the original, slightly less grandiose phrasing:

Rosa Parks sat down so we could stand up. Martin Luther King marched so Jesse Jackson could run. Jesse Jackson ran so Obama could win.

It looks like Senator Fields originated this phrase, but he did not include the final clause about our children flying.

My new MySpace friend/Detroit hip hop MC Brandan replied to my questions and said, “The phrase came from a conversation with a friend where I said ‘Martin marched so Obama could run.’ Then I was going to use it in a song I was writing. I thought about Rosa Parks sitting and attached that. My mother added so our children can fly. The children can fly line seemed a bit much but I kept it. I made a couple of videos and added the phrase in all of them.”

From New Orleans in February to Detroit in June to NPR in October to Twitter minutes later…