You're Just Jealous 'Cause I'm Young and In Love
Christopher Lydon starts the discussion of the transformation.#
Who is going to decode the Internet transformation of American politics?
Not, alas, the New York Times, the best inadequate old newspaper we have. The Times "Week in Review" piece on Sunday, "Howard Dean's Internet Push," signed by Glen Justice, was a head-in-the-sand classic. The big news, the story said, is that an Internet consultant's phone rings once a day now, not once a week or once a month. No mention that a huge base of small-sum Internet donors has demonstrated how to wipe the corrupting stain of money off democracy--a much more cleansing, practical, citizen-driven reform than the late, lumbering and maybe unenforceable McCain-Feingold legislation. The Times story was that Howard Dean has brought a new trick to the game, another fax machine, another new device "like direct mail, phone solicitation and events in restaurants" and so captured the Internetizens. Nary a hint of the more plausible counter-story: that free citizens online drafted Howard Dean and are carrying him like a hood ornament on their campaign. The closing line, ignoring the disruption of the Senatorial beauty pageant, began: "It's still the age of TV." Not once did the word "blog" appear in the Times piece. The whole thing reminded me of John Perry Barlow's generic Times headline: "Internet: Threat? ... or Menace?" It feels ironic, and all the more irksome, now that the Times online has a bigger circulation than the broadsheet.
More on this later today.
Jane deserves twenty hugs and then some.#
what do you do when you feel betrayed by one you once trusted?
How difficult not to rewrite the last several years, wondering if behind each instance of friendliness there didn't lurk an opportunism, a motive so deep I still can't see it? But it's fruitless to pick over the past like that. The question is really, what happens tomorrow?
Ryan P. Skadberg brings news about The Dark Tower.#
Stpehen King announced on his web site that the The Dark Tower series is DONE!
Book 5, Wolves of the Calla (The Dark Tower, Book 5) by Stephen King, Bernie Wrightson is available now. The next book, Song of Susannah will be out next summer and the final book, The Dark Tower, will be out next November. I guess I need to go pick up Book 5 some time soon. I never read book 4 because I wanted to re-read the first three, so maybe this will be the time to do it.
Ryan Overbey walks boldly in to the spotlight.#
When I gave the presentation on ScholarNotes to the generals meeting crowd this Sunday, one of my friends piped up with a noteworthy question. As you publish your own thoughts and notes for generals exam readings, those notes will have cheeky little observations. Some will even have serious challenges to an author's point of view. And sometimes those challenges are written off-the-cuff, on the spur of the moment, in an extremely informal style. What does it mean to make that stuff public?
It's a question that merits serious thought. My initial reaction is that I'm a scholar of Buddhism, but I'm a young and growing scholar as well. That's why every page on ScholarNotes is open for comment. If someone reads my notes and takes issue or disagrees, then they can comment, and we can hash it out. I can also update the file and make note of new developments in my thought. Indeed, the very point of all this is to encourage academic interchange, to alter our notions of private and public faces of scholarship, to route around the politics entirely. If our goal is to strengthen Buddhist Studies, to raise the collective bar, then why are authors taken to task behind their backs, and the only public criticism comes in the form of a review article by the de Jongs of the world? I say let's open this game up, and if a graduate students err in their criticism, then let someone persuade them of that before that seed blossoms into something even more problematic.
Strange Women Lying in Ponds has a great quote from an article by Steven Vincent about a taxi driver in Iraq.#
His comments began tumbling out one after another. First he criticized "Arab media — Al-Jazeera and Arabia TV. They only say bad things about U.S., only talk about bombs and killing Americans. Never about how things are growing in Iraq, getting better." Then he turned to the entire Arab world. "They fear Iraq will become a democracy, then every country will want to become democratic and the rulers will be in trouble-they only want people with one thought, one mind." As for Iraq's future, he had great optimism, provided that the new constitution included religious freedom for everyone — "Muslims, Christians, Jews, because Mohammad said 'Let there be no forcing of religion.' Mohammad said we are all brothers and to kill a man is to kill your brother."
By the time I reached my hotel, I had a Koran-sized lump in my throat. I peeled off a wad of dinars, but the cabbie refused to take the money. After I implored him to accept payment, he finally took the bills, slipped them in his shirt pocket, then took them out and handed them back to me. "You give me the money, now I give it back to you — a gift to my friend from America." Then, turning up the volume on the imam's sermon, he gave me a big missing-toothed smile and drove off in a cloud of exhaust. Watching him disappear into traffic, I had tears in my eyes, and they weren't from the Baghdad smog.
Jerome Doolittle reports on profiles in cowardice.#
The U.S. Senate, acting in pusillanimous secrecy, gave George Bush a blank check for $87,543,098,000 Monday to clean up the mess he made in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Only one senator out of a hundred, Democrat Robert C. Byrd of West Virginia, had the courage to oppose the request in public. The five other senators present in the chamber voted for it, which meant that the measure passed in a landslide.
The remaining 94 senators arranged to be absent during the voice vote, so that their votes were not recorded. Thus we will never know which of them would been cowardly hawks and which ones cowardly doves, but only that all of them are cowards.
This profile in courage rated page 11 coverage in yesterday's New York Times, with the eyecatching headline: "Senate Sends Spending Bill for War Costs to President."
The Yeti thinks about Kaye Trammell's post about sell-out blogs.#
Kaye Trammell, doesn't write that much about it, but evinces the general disgust we see with blogging, ads, and money-making in general.
Perhaps, as she says at the end, its defeatism about traffic. After all, it's easy to turn town $.10 a day, But $100 a day in ad revenues? Do bloggers have their price? I would think that most would blog for money, and blog on the side to recapture their credibility. Still selling out.
Texas T-Bone in the comments:
Money isn't the root of all evil, the love of it is. However, I'd love to see a little more come my way. I'm not blogging for a higher purpose other than to clear my brain of some of the words floating around.
"Selling out" to me would be not having standards about how I'd make blogmoney. For example, I'd never host an ad for Kerrey. I'd never do anything illegal. I would let my readers know I'm making some money off my efforts.
Richard links to an interesting interview with Britney Spears from Neil Strauss.#
The interview with Ms. Spears was a mixed one, perhaps tellingly so. Half her responses seemed innocuous, programmed; the other half suggested someone trying to emerge from a sheltered life. In the most interesting moments, Ms. Spears discussed her own writing, spirituality and soul-searching — although never on the record. At other times, however, she did not recognize the names of producers she had worked with for her new CD.
Ms. Spears is someone who lives more in the world of feelings than facts, which is one reason she can be a difficult interview but blossom on stage or in the studio. In some ways, her challenge is not growing up, but backtracking, trying to capture some of the experiences she missed out on while living out the fantasy (and nightmare) of being the world's favorite teenage girl. As a member of her entourage said later, she is just now going through a delayed emotional puberty.
Richard writes about the idea that not many read weblogs that Halley wrote about.#
Halley: "I keep reading statistics about how there are more and more blogs being written and no one is READING blogs. I think that's completely silly and not true. I read a lot of blogs."
First, that's a straw man argument. Halley—who understands blogging—could have provided one link one study that said "zero people are reading weblogs", and then, by pointing to herself as the example, could have easily have proven the study false. But I contend that there is no such study. I contend that people are saying—quite correctly—that the percentage of people regularly reading weblogs is a very tiny fraction of those who are regular web users. The highest rated website (Yahoo!, CNN and the like) get on the order of millions of hits a day, whereas the highest-rated weblogs (Winer, Kottke, Slashdot and the like) get in the order of tens of thousands. That's chump change in Internet readership terms. A lot of people are regularly reading weblogs (and more and more of them are starting weblogs of their own), but as a percentage of Internet users, us readers and writers are a tiny minority.
Dave Winer posts a new essay about presidential candidate blogs.#
When people say they want the candidates to blog, they're not stating their wishes accurately. What they really want is to know the candidate as well as they know their favorite bloggers. If one writes publicly without editing every day for a few years, people get an idea of how your mind works. This builds trust, the kind of trust a candidate just can't build in a couple of months of stump speeches. So unless Glenn Reynolds declares for President, forget about voting for a blogger for President in 2004.
Candidates should use weblogs instead of becoming one. Hire one or two people to run a public information router for you, pointing to all relevant stories about the candidate and the competition. Treat bloggers like press, publish advocacy guidelines and your schedule and everything else about the campaign, and have the candidate speak about the democracy.
Stirling Newberry writes about a Clark event he was at.#
The Keene event was an unqualified triumph - well prepared and staged it bore the clear marks of a well organized event - and into the light stepped Wesley Kanne Clark - the Wesley Clark who shot to prominence as a news anchor, and then dominated interviews through the spring and summer. Every question received an answer, a strong answer, even when it was a tough answer. What most people did not see was the enormous effort needed to make the event come together - combining resources, as one campaign aide said, "we needed the experience of the professional staff, and the passion of the Clark movement." People spoke at the event of having received last minute calls to get turn out. The event was moved to a larger room, it overflowed the room, it went to the balconies, it overflowed the balconies.
Even after an hour of give and take, there was still not an open seat in the hall.
What is happening in New Hampshire is Leadership. Not merely having leaders, but in the creation of people who create leadership. Leaders make other leaders - leadership such as displayed by Eric Massa who was every where, answering questions, boosting energy, not with empty statements, but with specific answers - leadership that was visible all the way down to the button wearing student already politicking friends while walking away from the town hall style question and answer period.
Joey deVilla post about his life as Joey.#
Summer 1982
Tennis lessons. I learn that I should not be playing tennis. Meet cute girl, however, although nothing happens. I have not yet learned schmooze-fu.Summer 1983
The girl from tennis school has appendicitis, and I visit her at the hospital and we have an amazing eight-hour conversation. Once she's better, I ask her out. Painful coming-of-age hilarity ensues. Will someday be blogged.September 1983
Weird Adventure, meet Joey. Joey meet Weird Adventure. The beginning of a lifelong partnership.
LOUISVILLE, KY—Five weeks after the death of her 26-year-old hipster son Kent, Enid Lowery announced that the family faces a difficult task in figuring out what to do with his many unusual possessions.
"I just can't believe how much stuff Kent collected over the years," said Lowery Tuesday. "There's a poster for some movie called Urgh!, stacks of empty Quisp cereal boxes, at least five old lamps that don't work, and a slew of little plastic toys. Obviously, all these things meant something to Kent— but what? And why?"
A part-time English tutor and bassist for the local band Extra Moist, Kent died in a car accident Sept. 27. Overwhelmed with grief, his family members in nearby Bedford only mustered the strength to visit his apartment last week, where they were overwhelmed once again, this time by Kent's dense accumulation of miscellany.
ORLAND PARK, IL—For the third uneventful day in a row, members of the Poison Ninjas Club awaited the invasion of their tree house, sources in the backyard of 1740 Sumac Road reported Monday.
"We spent all day Saturday making dirt bombs and dragging buckets of pine cones up into the tree house," said 10-year-old club president Carrie Williams, her eyes trained on the southern border of the lawn. "When the enemy attacks, we'll be ready. Actually, we've been ready for, like, three whole days."