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For those (two) of you on my class agent list: you may rest assured that the money you give to Williams helps them stock the library with various media crucial to understanding ourselves and the world we live in... like season seven of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, call no. PN1992.8 H66 B8447. And I thought I was going to be bored tonight in Williamstown....
Hey, has anyone else noticed that it's REALLY cold outside?
The Karmella’s Game/Zolof the Rock & Roll Destroyer show at the Ottobar was, as expected, great. We arrived late, so I missed the first act and Zolof doing “Moment,” which was a disappointment. But I caught the new “Argh...I'm A Pirate,” worth the price of entry alone.
After their set (while the PA-based band June played) I ended up dropping way too much money at the Zolof table—buying both full-lengths and the new EP, which prompted a shocked Rachel to give me two free copies of the new Eyeball Records compilation. A bit much, yes, but as one of the only fans there with a full-time job (and who was able to order from the bar, for that matter), I felt I had to step up and support the scene. Plus, they’re adorably talented.
Speaking of adorably talented, KG were, as always, dressed to the parochial school nines (red cardigans for the boys, red V-necks and kilts for the girls, ties for all). I re-met KTO and Mandy, who were nice enough to email me the next day to thank me for coming out. Clearly, the band was having fun being the headliner, putting extra oomph behind their stage gyrations and doing an encore (“Not the End,” mentioned in PSXVII) for the small but insistent crowd.
All in all a great night, and since I'd brought a non-indie kid with me (a folkie, no less), I was psyched to find her enthusiastically impressed. (It's always nice to get corroboration that my musical choices are not just spawned from scenester groupthink).
Fridays are great days for looking at cool websites. Here are some:
Goat Farm Design has done a great job on both their own site and their clients’ (including KG, above). As my Design Director put it: “They go right to the edge of too much design, and pull back just short—really nice.” Play around here a bit.
Visual Thesaurus is a neat reconceptualization of how thesauri should work. The demo only lets you try three words (and PG ones at that), but it’s still worth a look.
Rums of Puerto Rico is just stunning—from the “Departures” intro right down to the smallest submenus, and the airport metaphor is surprisingly clever and cohesive. Gate 5 is a must-read for anyone who makes a cocktail—especially the tips on bartending etiquette.
Color in Motion: an MFA thesis that explores and animates the meaning of colors.
Finally, as anyone familiar with the military knows, the major enemy most soldiers fight is staggering boredom. Combating this insidious threat results in 213 Things Skippy Is No Longer Allowed To Do In The U.S. Army.
Building on my lengthy post below I'd like to add the following note:
Remember when Jib-Jab seemed funny? Or Wonkette seemed like a breath of fresh air? They both now just don't seem to get it: making fun of Democrats and Republicans is, indeed, a little funny. But take a hint from the Daily Show: one side had amusingly weird characters, like anyone who claimed to have "Joementum"; the other side has really screwed up individuals who want to bring this country to their knees. Equating the two, whether in silly song-and-dance routines involving Clinton being slapped (I mean, come on, why the hell is Clinton still in the damn videos?) or just silly Dick/Colin jokes, is not funny anymore. Sure, it's very "meta" to make inside jokes about ABC's The Note, but no one really cares anymore, okay? Got it? I think right after Wonkette took the Washingtonienne out drinking, I realized that it wasn't so much a snarky look at politics as it was a sex-obsessed look at, well, snarkiness. Perhaps my puritanical nature got the better of me. That was the end, though. And the latest Jib-Jab, a "funny" look at the next four years, is anything but. There's nothing amusing about getting screwed over for another election cycle.
To be honest, I don't even read Wonkette anymore...but I haven't got the heart to delete it from my RSS newsreaders. As for JibJab, well, let's just say I'm going to wait for us to win a few elections before I start watching them again.
Problem: My email server password has expired.
Why I Admit It’s My Fault: It had done countdown toward when my password was expiring, but I ignored it.
Mitigating Factor: Every other time I’ve had to change a password, the server has prompted me (“Would you like to change your password now? y/n”) so I was simply waiting for the prompt, which this time never occurred.
Response of Staff: Send me to an FAQ—which I had already read—to fill out a form that does me no good, since it will only send a new password to a college-related address.
Rant: Yes, 90% of users are idiots who have the same question, so I understand why FAQs exist. But, being a reasonably competent person, I almost never get the answer I need from them, because my problem is too complicated. Plus, because most FAQs are about computer-related things, they’re written by computer people. This is a disastrous thing, because computer people don’t think like users! They organize, process, and transmit differently—often radically differently. Evidence of this is that a) an entire profession, technical writers, exists to translate from tech-speak to user-speak (if your average computer geek could write, this job wouldn’t exist), and b) the best programmers have borderline Asberger’s Syndrome. And so I'm stuck reading an FAQ that either does have the answer, but has it in a (to me) totally illogical or hidden spot, or doesn't have the answer because my problem doesn't fit within the writer's original universe of parameters.
Back To My Problem: I had explained in my email that I was an alumn, explained why I’d messed up (demonstrating I was knowledgeable about the problem) and asked for assistance. So a coherent, reasoned rely would have been nice. Instead I got reflexively rerouted to an answer that won’t work. And of course, I’ve emailed back to explain my problem again and heard nothing.
Side Note: Is it “a FAQ” (as in “a fack”) or “an FAQ” (as in “an eff-ay-cue”)?
werkz advice: go catch it in the theater.
The latest re-imagining of Assault on Precinct 13 is a great one. I remember seeing the original some time ago and thinking that it wasn't all that good.
In the new version, Carpenter's (and thus by extension, Hawk's vision is fully realized. The action is fast and furious, with almost no down time. Characters you assume will survive are snuffed out one by one until you become one with the survivors, hoping against hope, that they will hold out. It makes one realize that all the survivor-inspired reality shows in the world can't compete with a tight plot and well written dialog.
Finally, the movie features a powerful anti-drug message: don't do drugs, or you won't be able to shoot people quite as well as you would otherwise.
Seeing all these people in town the past few days is a little depressing. But while weighing different options to enjoy my day off, I came to the conclusion that nothing I could do would really make me feel any better about the Bush administration.
Two days ago as I walked through my hotel I realized a year before I'd been sitting in a freezing cabin with a bunch of college students who were telling a reporter that if Dean lost the primary, they'd move to Canada. I narrowly avoided smacking them and saying Stay on message, you idiots! Too much time in DC, you might say.
I think people judge politics too simply: they assume that those who shout loudly are more driven than those who do not. On the other end of thing, there are many people in DC who relish fighting only for periods of time, and who hate the apathetic worse than any person across the aisle. Kicking back at a capitol hill haunt with the enemy after hours seems perfectly acceptable to them, like visiting a hated rival's team during the off-season and living it up.
Both sides, I feel, miss the larger point. The kids in Iowa were wrong because they thought that a single battle could win the war, and equally naive, that a loss would end everything. Furthermore, their willingness to give up after such a defeat (in a Democratic primary, no less) seemed to betray everything we were fighting for. With the wind at your back, it's easy to pick up supporters. But you don't find out who has the true spirit until things get tough. Those kids didn't.
Of course, I'm not suggesting that I am better than them in that respect. My work for the DC primary, through the Iowa caucus, and eventually in Arizona could hardly be described as generous. I did help, but not nearly enough. I gave money, but it didn't help things change the way I wanted it to. But I don't view any of those moments as a mistake: they were battles we lost, yet the war continues.
And this is how I differ from many of the Dems here in DC. I too, decry the apathetic as worse than the Republicans around town. Unlike them, under my cynical shell, I truly believe the core of Republican ideals is evil. It promotes a selfish behavior. It helps the well off. It manipulates the weak. It hates those who look, speak or act different. It says government is bad. It tells us to fear each other, instead of to trust.
When I see criticism of Democratic ideals, it is always in the same form, a weird amalgam of selfishness and fear: why are you helping that guy who looks different than me? Those people have it so easy. Because you are soft on those people, they will hurt me and my family.
Such sentiments are evil.
And this is where many Dems, across the spectrum, have failed in the past. Like Bush's nebulous "war on terror", we can never truly defeat the small, petty-minded among us who live in fear. But we must try. To give up is to admit that we are powerless against the stereotypes and myths of the past. Democrats have been fighting this fight for years and we must remember, that as bad as it is now, it can always get worse.
Sure, perhaps my exterior of jade conceals my beliefs. Perhaps my attempts to find common ground with people who appear Republican are all for naught. But my central idea, that the Republican ideal is corrupt, has a distinct corollary: that all Republicans are misguided. But we can win them back.
In Iowa, I had a conversation with a man who was convinced that "welfare people" were stealing money from his paycheck. Yet he was equally committed to increasing his child tax credit. And he was a Democrat! I tried to make my argument, but failing that, just had a conversation with him about his family. We talked about his son and how they were building a race car in their garage. He showed me the car, told me about how they'd modded it up. I left feeling like the guy was a decent guy, but one who had been infected with fear. I want to be able to win that guy back.
This is how the GOP operates: they spread fear. It's all too easy to give into that fear, to say to hell with it, to want to leave and go somewhere nice. But that would mean defeat. And I refuse to let this fear conquer my country. It's invaded, set up several beachheads, and taken over the government. Yet the people are still divided, and many still trust one another. The GOP wants us to fight among ourselves, to doubt our abilities, to just give up. Let's not let them.
I was on the metro, surrounded by folks in tuxes and gowns. All old. All white. Mostly ugly.
Dangerousmeta has some thoughts on the subject. Read them all. My fav:
“Is it the less dishonest to do what is wrong, because not expressly prohibited by written law? Let us hope our moral principles are not yet in that stage of degeneracy.” Thomas Jefferson to John Wayles Eppes, 1813.
More thoughts later...
Woodward writes up an interview with the Vice-President (the interview was for a History Channel special), in which the latter mostly talks about how much he's in favor of an imperial presidency. Highlights include evidence that among the provisions of the Constitution which the Vice-President hasn't read is Art. I Sec. 8. The Article reads: "The Congress shall have Power... To declare War...." The Vice-President instead produces a tortured reading of Art. II Sec. 2 (that Article reads in relevant part, "The President shall be Commander in Chief of the Army and Navy of the United States, and of the Militia of the several States, when called into the actual Service of the United States...") to support his contention that the President has sufficient legal authority to launch a war alone.
Cheney declines the invitation to be gracious toward Presidents Carter and Clinton. Carter (also interviewed for the special) holds his own by saying, "I worship the Prince of Peace, not the Prince of War. And to launch a war that [will take so many Iraqi and American lives unnecessarily,] based completely on false premises, does contradict my own standard of religious faith."
Further, Cheney says that History has been cheated by the reaction to the malfeasance of Watergate. How? "The investigations that have occurred over the years, the special prosecutors and so forth" mean that Cheney doesn't keep a diary, use email, or write letters.
Just a hint for the Vice-President: if you're going out of your way not to produce any written evidence of your thoughts and activities... it's probably because you're a criminal!
Since I'm leaving early today, I'll just leave a little white-as-snow related question for all parties:
How many gray hairs do you have?
This marks the second time in three months that someone has been making unauthorized charges on a credit card of mine. Oddly, the card in question has been sitting on my desk after new years. Did someone sneak into the 'werkz, steal my digits, and report back? Since I haven't used said card in years, it seems unlikely...the other card is the exact opposite, in that it is relatively new and has never left my sight since I received it. In both cases, the charges were all over the place, in Florida, Michigan and Kansas. Mostly gas stations though, which strikes me as odd. Normally a gas station would need you to provide a specific card, and since neither card has gone missing, I'm perplexed.
Remember those days when you sat in a classroom staring outside and hoping the snow would stick long enough to earn an early dismissal? Well, today is that day. And my office just announced it. Hooray! Only two hours to go!
Well, it appears that another large group has decided to flex their muscle and create a wacky standard under the guise of "good intentions".
If search engines are inflating their results based on comment spam...shouldn't the search engine algorithms be altered? I still fail to see how another abuse of the anchor tag constitutes a valid solution for the millions of links out there. But I guess when you combine Google with Dave Winer you get Another Crappy Idea instead of something useful. Yeah, I'm talking to you, stupid atom/rss people!
The end result will be a variety of weird extensions to existing standards that serve only a limited purpose. Why I should re-code my software to prevent google's rankings from being altered is beyond me. I just want to put my data on the internet.
The simple solution? Just lock down your comments. Like this site.
It's snowing this morning, fairly hard. In the time I spent on the Metro, it went from flurries to white sidewalks and rapidly graying streets. I can hardly keep my eyes off my window at work.
Yes, I suppose we now know the age-old question to how many firefighters does it take to put out a fire in DC. The answer appears to be close to a hundred, not counting EMTs and various ambulance/police personnel who just wanted a closer look.
More pix of the fire here. I captured them on my way to work yesterday.
This reminds me greatly of the time Brad and I were in line to get some chicken at Popeye's. We were in the drive through waiting to order and the line was moving slowly, or not at all. After ten minutes (the line was only three cars long) both of us discussed simply going inside to order. That's when we noticed the cops.
Two cars pulled up in front of the building and all the officers went inside. A few minutes later, another police car pulled up and five minutes after that an ambulance and a firetruck rumbled by. At first I thought that maybe someone inside had suffered a heart attack. By the time the firetruck arrived, I had no clue what was happening. All the customers inside seemed to be acting nonchalant. Eventually, two cops came out of the bathroom with a homeless man. Yeah, total civic presence required: 8 officers and firemen. All for one homeless guy. Just as I thought "I wonder if a building is burning down somewhere or if some guy is getting mugged nearby" I noticed that the homeless guy was gone, but that all the officers were staying to order food.
It took another ten minutes to finally be able to order and eat. It wasn't as if we'd have left after waiting all that time. Ever since then I've realized that there must be a wall somewhere with a complex formula for determining police/fire/rescue response:
- Homeless Guy = 6 Police, 2 Rescue, 2 Firefighters
- Burning House = 60 Firefighters, 30 Police, 10 Rescue
- Guy Getting Mugged = 0 Police, 0 Rescue, 0 Firefighters
- White Guy's Car Getting Bumped in G-Town: 15 Police, 0 Rescue, 1 Firefighter
- (My all time-favorite) Fight in the 'Morg: 2 Police, 4 Secret Service, 0 Follow-up
I'll see if the fire-scarred house is still standing today...
werkz advice: a darkly funny drama-comedy. good on the big or small screen.
Wings was a funny series...but my favorite characters happened to be the two that haven't disappeared from pop-culture, namely, Thomas Haden Church and Tony Shalhoub. Church went on to be underappreciated in the hilarious show Ned and Stacey. Shalhoub went on to be appreciated in the hilarious show Monk.
Church's latest film, Sideways revolves around a wine-country road trip with Church and co-star Paul Giamatti. The two encounter a series of hilarious incidents, with Giamatti's fading life gradually becoming worse and worse. The film is mostly dark and brooding, but the funny moments are truly inspired.
When I went to see this film with Leto, I thought it was going to be darker than it was, but each time things seemed bleak, something happened to make me laugh. This isn't a guy-gets-horribly-embarrassed film in the Ben Stiller mold. Instead, it's a comedy that doesn't suspend disbelief. It's reality with a Hollywood twist, done well because Church basically plays himself. Well worth seeing from start to finish.
Chris Dodd is killing Condi. Wow. Must-see tv.
"I think you should talk to Senator McCain about this..."
I'm turning down the chance to see all of the prospective DNC chairs tonight, because of my previously mentioned engagement. That and, of course, I don't get to vote on the DNC member. And I'd back Dean, anyway, for reasons I'm not going to get into right now.
After spending most of yesterday finding, purchasing and assembling (courtesy my new patty-making-machine) a series of hamburgers, I realized it was too cold today to actually reify the Tuesday-hamburger-salon idea I had intended. The hours I spent weren't wasted, but the fruits of said labor now live solely in my fridge, anxiously awaiting a future Tuesday with warm enough temps to light the firepit and enjoy the garden.
Thus, a change of plans. We're moving indoors.
A free flow of ideas, spirits and milk-based-products should be the natural result. Interested? You should be.
Over the weekend several items on the site were broken due to my webhost altering some configuration files. As soon as I noticed what had been changed, I ssh'd in and set everything right again. But it took a bit of coding, so if I missed something, please tell me.
Along those lines, a few bits of coding goodness to pass along. Or badness, as in this first case, namely that Technorati sucks. What, I suppose you ask, am I referring to? Well, namely to the new technorati tags that were introduced recently. What's wrong with them? Well...
- Instead of being true meta-data, they are specific to technorati. If another service wanted to provide the same level of functionality, they'd either have to use the technorati tag format, or get the existing users to add/replace their current system.
- Rather than just parsing existing data, the t.t. system requires users to alter the data itself. This means that in the future, all changes would need to be made to the data to ensure proper tagging. It also means all the data in the past would need to be altered. Imagine if google required every page that wished to be indexed to add a meta-tag saying "index me google" to them. Obviously, few would comply.
- Along with #2, this system seems like a simple rehash of the meta-tag system, which was abused to death by many. The tag system could just as easily be a meta-tag system.
- Anchor tags? Anchor tags? The use of anchor tags to introduce meta-data seems to be a bad reading of what meta-data is actually for. The rel attribute, for instance, is supposed to describe what an anchor link is linking to. This doesn't seem to be doing that.
- The tags themselves seem to be yet another attempt to alter existing meta-data systems without any hard work.
The semantic web is not here today. But systems like technorati tags don't help matters, because they don't create machine readable data that is open and not tied to one source or enterprise. Instead, the tag system just helps people share data with technorati, not with each other. Grr.
On the other hand, a technology that will help build the semantic web has just been enhanced, namely, SPARQL. The new protocol details were released on the 14th.
SPARQL isn't tied to one group or body. It lets machines search rdf data. What could be better for the growth of the semantic web than that? For semantic web searching, everyone should go check out swoogle.
Obviously, not everyone agrees. Some people seem to think that ontologies that are definited by smaller bodies will "evolve" into a larger more useful ontology. These user-created "folksonomies" are therefore a stepping stone to a more useful ontology. I just think this is the wrong approach: we should be working on building information that can be evaluated independently of any particular author. If I write a web piece that I claim is about network technology but seems to be a bildungsroman in actuality, I would hope that
- The human reading it would "get" it.
- The machine reading it, if programmed properly, would also "get it".
We're not even at the first state, where humans can agree on what certain works "mean". So why don't we just skip to step #2 instead of doing more arguing about #1? Or, to put it another way, if the current search engine algorithms ignore the meta-tags I insert into my description field because they tend to be easily skewed (by nefarious porn providers, no doubt!), why should I keep inserting that information? Instead of requiring humans to constantly classify our words into different taxonomies, can't we just get a machine to automate it? The less humans in the equation of the semantic web, the better, in my mind.
so over the long weekend (who am i kidding, i'm keeping track of time by listening to my stomach growl from not enough beer in a while. 24 hours and no football - bad!) i was trying out a little voip with adriana in kabul, and some standard glitches put a wrinkle in the plans.
see, she didn't bring her headset home, so i'd talk on my 'set, and she'd type back. obviously this was not doable in the long term (unless i had a ton of beer) but for about a half hour, it was kinda wierd. right up there with a nine on the crazy chart, not just because of the finger speed lag, but mainly because it's odd to sit and talk to nobody, and then switch to reading. like an unfunny bob newhart kind of deal.
but the point was, it made for one hell of a turing test. which was going to be the title of this piece of refuse, but i refused to allow a straight up posting title, cause that would suck. needless to say, it'd be tough for a machine to impersonate adriana, but i bet that somebody could program a box to talk like me in under a hundred lines of code. not that i'm completely predictable, but if they did it right, then people would get pissed off pretty quick, as most don't ever make it to see my non-linear mind start warming up the turbos.
which naturally led to the question, could somebody turing up the other 'werkz writers. i could easily do dwight, especially if i had some sort of random band name generator (there must be a lacan-spawned hell where people come up with emo-group names...) because he just does the music scene, but the others would be more interesting.
wrote this at two thirty, and now dwight's thrown me a loop - figures!
well, maybe not ed. throw in some coding refs, a story about how hard it was for him to get fast food, and maybe a link to something he scoped out on slashdot and then spoonfed to the rest of us. anyone else got any suggestions?
bess!
Q: Where to start?
A: Miyazaki. Miyazaki. Miyazaki.
The Walt Disney of Japan, Miyazaki’s films are simply the best anime films out there. I’m not going to deluge you with facts and figures about him. Instead, I direct you to the latest (1/17/05) issue of The New Yorker, which has an excellent article about him, along with supplemental material online (read it now; they change the page frequently).
Which Miyazaki film to see? Edward will probably tell you the Oscar-winning Spirited Away. I disagree, especially if you’re a first-time viewer—while beautifully crafted, SA is a fairy tale, and as such, is uneven and a bit all over the place.
The almost-as-famous Princess Mononoke is my bet. Set in a mythic late-medieval Japan, it is about a young prince, tainted by a dying god’s evil, who travels to find the source of its cursed hate. In the process, he comes across a guerrilla war between forest spirits and flintlock-toting city dwellers and tries to make peace between them.
This is the most “action-packed” of the Miyazaki films I’ve seen, and here Miyazaki’s (very laudable) environmentalism doesn’t feel ancillary or shoehorned in, but rather is integral to the story itself. Also, there are no easy answers in this film—the “villains” are sympathetic and real—which should prepare you for the ambiguous (and often utterly villainless) nature of his other works.
All in all, a stunning, moving, complicated, brilliant film.
Our Manifesto:
I like anime. Edward likes anime. Forrest (though I am loath to speak for him…because he’s a big guy, and he’s good with knots) likes anime. And, I suspect, so do many of the other readers of The Dredwerkz.
But we’re not anime fans…or rather, we’re not fanboys. If an animated Japanese film is released, we’re likely to see it the first week or so. But we don’t use words like kawaii (apparently it means "cute") or write fanfiction or go to conventions, and only one of us (me) thinks girls in cat ears are enticing. We don’t want to spend a lot of time watching grainy fan-subtitled bootlegs or hunting down imports. We don’t want to argue—much—about dubbing vs. subtitling (it comes down to preference: dubbing preserves your focus on the image, but can be clumsy; subtitling always you to hear the intended tonalities and original voice-casting, but is distracting). We just want to watch good movies and televisions shows that happen to be animated in Japan.
So, if you don’t want to spend ¥¥¥ at conventions…if you don’t know any Japanese…if you just want to know if an anime movie is good or not, this is the place for you. Edward and I (and hopefully Forrest) will watch movies and tell you if we like them. And if we do, you might like watching them, too. That’s it.
I had scads of things I was looking forward to dropping on you all last Friday regarding both the pop culture and D.C. twenty-something scenes—including a fun mediabistro.com-sponsored Happy Hour where I had a great chat with Hemal of DCist, among others. Unfortunately, as Edward mentioned, due to the rain I managed to introduce my car's tires to a curb in a rather unfortunate fashion. I’ll spare you the gory details, but suffice it to say I owe Ed and his housemates for the save, and I’m going to have a lot more trouble setting up my Roth IRA this month. On the plus side, before the incident Edward and I mapped out a new project that you’ll be seeing the first fruits of within a day or so…
I suppose in the lightning-fast blog world the exigence is no longer there to still be talking about HFS, but DCRTV is where to go for more details on the decline and the aftermath, including links to some nice Post articles and photos of fans protesting the loss of their station.
Tomorrow (Tuesday, 1/18/05) Karmella’s Game and Zolof the Rock & Roll Destroyer are going to take the Ottobar by storm. MD/DC/VA natives owe it to themselves to make the trip to Baltimore—this is some of the best keyboard-driven punk you’re going to hear.
Everybody loves the “hit” off the Game’s What He Doesn’t Know Won’t Hurt Him, “Coming Going Leaving,” so I don’t feel much need to promote it. Instead, today’s Track You Should Be Listening To Right Now is “Not the End,” the EP’s third track. A song about lost friendship and/or love, at a lower volume this track would be termed “plaintive.” As it is, it’s a savage crying out against an old mistake, missed opportunities, and irrevocably lost time: “Years can be wasted on this / Come again / You shouldn’t treat me like this / My best friend.” And the refrain’s insistent repetition—“It’s not over / It’s not over / It’s not the end / It’s not over...”—wails against what is likely…and, to my mind, tragically…a lost cause. The instrumentation supports this reading, with the keyboard keening like a robotic bean sidhe. Meanwhile the guitar and drums are willing to punk out, yet at the opening and closing they slip into march tempo, as if to usher this relationship to its end. Still as long as the singer belts her vocals, there’s hope…and sometimes, that’s enough.
(Listen to “Not the End” and “Coming Going Leaving”—and check out some landmark website design—here or request it here. Also, I did a spotlight on both of the above bands and The Virgin-Whore Complex—mentioned in PSXII—this week on The Drama Continues. Until Thursday, 1/20/05, you can download the first and second hours. Tracks by Zolof the Rock & Roll Destroyer: “Moment”—hour 1, minute 10:45; “I Owe You”—hour 2, minute 12:33; “How Bout It”—hour 2, minute 48:59. Tracks by Karmella’s Game: “Coming Going Leaving”—hour 1, minute 13:30; “Not the End”—hour 2, minute 5:31; “Knocked Flat in the First Round”—hour 2, minute 50:55. Tracks by The Virgin-Whore Complex: “Frustrated Playwright”—hour 1, minute 21:10; “Free Association”—hour 2, minute 18:27; "Casey"—hour 2, minute 25:22; “Coldest Night of the Year”—hour 2, minute 55:00.)
Yay! Work is sending me to DC for a weeklong seminar. I'll be in town from Feb13-20. Yeah, I know, V-Day, but Heath and I don't do V-Day, so it's sort of irrelevant. So, I hope people will want to entertain me (or be entertained by me.) What say you, Brad? Time in your busy schedule to pop down to DC for a classic 'werkz reunion?
So the blogosphere is awash today in recriminations following an odd post from Zephyr Teachout which led to an absurd news story in the Wall Street Journal which led to Markos defending himself and Jerome pointing out the absurdity of Z's claim.
Zephyr later clarified her position and I commented on her blog there. (Ugh. Blogger. Bad choice there, Z.)
The problem with what Zephyr did is that she managed to take a story about the excesses of Armstrong Willams and turn it into a critical piece about a bunch of lefty bloggers who were, in fact, innocent of the charges she hinted about.
Zephyr's larger points about a "culture of blogging" are equally misguided. Her desire to have "credentialed bloggers" promise not to write about the people who are funding them seems short-sighted: many excellent bloggers are good precisely because their area of expertise is their employer, or friend, or co-worker.
Ultimately, most bloggers get their news from accredited news organizations like the NYT or the WaPo. They blend opinions and fact. And they don't have a reliable revenue stream. All of these should help drive home the fact that bloggers are useful precisely because they have an odd symbiotic relationship with the organizations they pick apart.
What Zephyr and others need to focus on is transparency because that's the one thing that does affect how people view a blogger. I don't care if you work for Richard Mellon Scaife so long as you say so loud and proud on your blog. That way I won't bother reading it.
The images on the site aren't loading properly. Through in a bad router that kept me off the internet most of the day and you've got a recipe for an annoyed Edward. In the immortal words of Mr. Bat, "Grr."