school board election

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At the moment the vice presidential debate between Vice President Mike Pence and Senator Kamala Harris is going on.  I’m sort-of listening to it, and for whatever reason tonight has me thinking back to the “debates” we had as school board candidates when sixteen of us were running for Rockingham County (North Carolina) Board of Education.  Though I did not win a seat, I have always been proud of my campaign and there hasn’t  been a single moment’s regret.  I had way too much fun throughout the entire process than to have been the least bit bitter about not winning.

So that sent me hurtling into the Wayback Machine(tm) of this particular blog.  Every step of the way during that run, I was chronicling it here.  And more than ever it strikes me that maybe this is a resource that others could benefit from.  I mean, there NEEDS to be ...

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At this point I’ve lost count. It’s at least the fourth or fifth time that my shenanigans have landed me on popular humor site Cracked.com.

Cracked.com, Christopher Knight, Rockingham County, Board of Education, Star Wars, school board, commercial, campaign, Viacom, DMCA, Digital Millennium Copyright Act, copyright infringement, hypocrisy, hypocrites

This latest appearance comes courtesy of an article titled “5 Famous Online Copyright Crusaders Who Are Total Hypocrites”.  With a title like that I just had to scan and tear it down and analyze it to see what I was doing that was so hypocritical… but I honestly can’t find anything about my own part in that very strange episode from the fall of 2007.  In fact, the entire article is about corporations – as Viacom did in that incident – who cry and crow about copyright laws protecting their assets and then steal and violate the assets of everyone else without giving a damn!!

Anyhoo, my situation, “Viacom Lays Claim to a County Board of Education Campaign Video”, made #2 on ...

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Behold the 8 Weirdest Real-Life Science Fiction Political Ads as assembled by popular geeky/techy website io9.

And yes, that school board commercial of mine from 2006 is on the list.

But check out this ad – also inspired by Star Wars – that West Virginia Governor Joe Manchin aired when he successfully ran for re-election two years ago…

Hey, Manchin shot a TIE Fighter out of the sky with a rifle! That’s a hella lot better shootin’ than the Imperial Stormtroopers ever did.

But John Waite of Spokane, Washington blows away everybody with what he did when he ran for city council. The comic book store owner campaigned while wearing a full set of space marine armor from the StarCraft computer game series! Nevermind Spokane City Council: we should send Waite to Washington D.C.: that whole town is overrun with worse than the Zerg ever were.

Blast on over to ...

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…it’s… me!

That was almost six years ago. I really am never gonna live this down, am I?

Well, it was a lot of fun running for school board. The entire experience, I mean! One that I would never trade for anything. I learned a great deal more about election laws and running for office than I had ever known before. I didn’t win a seat but that’s okay: it was a great run, I campaigned my own way and kept it positive, upbeat, and I wanted to present my beliefs in an enlightening and entertaining fashion. I wanted just ten people to vote for me, and wound up getting nearly forty-seven hundred.

But I didn’t for once believe that this commercial was going to grab any attention beyond Rockingham County… and much less still be going strong more than half a decade later!

Well anyhoo, Cracked.com has my Star ...

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Just a friendly reminder that if you want to meet the blogger/proprietor of The Knight Shift in person and you’re going to be in the Raleigh/Durham today, that you’re in luck!

I will be at Artspace, located at 201 East Davie St in Raleigh at 5:45 p.m. this afternoon during the filmSPARK track of SPARKcon: a grassroots-organized four-day festival celebrating individual creativity around the Triangle area and throughout North Carolina. This will be the fourth annual event and this year SPARKcon will be held September 17-20. I’ll be speaking about the bizarre “copyright infringement” situation that happened between Yours Truly and Viacom on YouTube two years ago.

Look! Event announcement!

The Dude Who Took Down Viacom: One Filmmaker’s Story
EVENT LOCATION
Artspace

EVENT DESCRIPTION
Meet North Carolina filmmaker Chris Knight, a.k.a. “The Dude Who Took Down Viacom”. In 2006, Knight made a campaign advertisement to help promote his running

...
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That commercial is going to haunt me for the rest of my life, isn’t it? 😛

SPARKcon is a grassroots-organized four-day festival in Raleigh celebrating individual creativity around the Triangle area and throughout North Carolina. This will be the fourth annual event and this year SPARKcon will be held September 17-20. And I’ve been invited to speak that Friday night about the very crazy situation that happened between Yours Truly and Viacom two years ago.

Look! Event announcement!

The Dude Who Took Down Viacom: One Filmmaker’s Story
EVENT LOCATION
Artspace

EVENT DESCRIPTION
Meet North Carolina filmmaker Chris Knight, a.k.a. “The Dude Who Took Down Viacom”. In 2006, Knight made a campaign advertisement to help promote his running for a seat on Rockingham County’s Board of Education. Knight did not win a seat on the board, but he did win some internet and media fame as his commercial was featured in

...
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I think… I think… that this should be safe to post. And I not only say that in light of how the Viacom situation was eventually resolved, but also because on this one I did take extra steps to illustrate how hosting this on YouTube is fair use under the Copyright Act of 1976, and that proper citation is given.

So that bit of peskiness out of the way, and especially for benefit of those who for whatever reason haven’t been able to see and laugh at this yet (‘cuz I sure have 🙂 here is the November 9th, 2007 edition of The Soup on E! Entertainment Television featuring the first commercial that I made for my school board campaign last year…

Here’s the original post about it from the night it started airing, by the way.

Thanks again to Joel McHale, the staff of The Soup...

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It’s 2:53 a.m. in the morning and I’m up making tea and working on a new website and some other stuff at this way late hour. Thought I’d make a post to chronicle the past few days developments…

Ever since Friday night a wazoo-load of e-mails and phone calls have been coming in from good folks who caught my school board commercial on E! Television’s The Soup. I’m still a bit overwhelmed by the attention the ad seems to have gained lately, now over a year since it ran (for only a week and a half on WGSR Star 39 in Reidsville). One neat thing that has happened because of it is that I’ve been hearing from a lot of people that I’ve somehow lost contact with over the years. I honestly had no idea that The Soup was so popular! I’d heard of it before but until now ...

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I’ve just learned that the first commercial from my school board campaign last year – the “Star Wars” one – is being featured on this week’s edition of the E! Entertainment Television series The Soup! I checked the airtime schedule and it looks like it’ll be running throughout this next week…

Friday, Nov 9, 10:00p
Saturday, Nov 10, 12:30a
Saturday, Nov 10, 10:00a
Saturday, Nov 10, 11:30p
Sunday, Nov 11, 2:30a
Monday, Nov 12, 6:00p
Monday, Nov 12, 10:30p
Tuesday, Nov 13, 1:30a
Wednesday, Nov 14, 2:00a

I’ll be checking it out later. And comment about it here. And if I can figure out some way to do it without getting hit with a copyright infringement again (E! isn’t owned by Viacom too is it?) maybe I’ll post the YouTube clip of it 😛 Thanks to Courtney Willis for the heads-up!

EDIT 11-10-2007 1:10 a.m. EST: I just saw ...

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Hard to believe that as of this morning it’s been an entire year since Election Day 2006, when I was on the ballot for Rockingham County Board of Education.

If you were reading this blog then, you’ll remember that throughout that day I was posting a series of “live reports”, to convey the sense of what happens in the life of a candidate on Election Day. It’s been a pretty neat thing, to have gone back over them in the last little while and reflect on that day and everything that led up to it and has transpired since. You can find them here on the school board articles archive, along with everything else that I posted here that was associated with my campaign.

You wanna know what’s one of the funniest things about my having run for school board? That in the entire year since the night of ...

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