As a few of you may know, I'm a fairly serious student of the martial arts.
a video of the style of karate I practice as demonstrated by a couple of my fellow students at their high school a few weeks ago. These are two *great* kids as well as great martial artists.
One has -- I hope only temporarily -- stopped training so he can earn money for college next year. The other I was just beating up on tonight (and for the record -- he was returning the favor .)
The video is a bit dark as it was captured on what is nominally a digital still camera (not mine).
I usually shoot stills but I was doing the video on their request.
For the record, yes, they really are going as hard and fast as they appear to be with real weapons and if someone missed a block it would definitely have hurt.
A friend of mine send this to me thinking I might recognize it.
I forward it to my family thinking they might.
Dan suggested I post it here. Enjoy.
If the embedded player doesn't work for you, go to the
| Q: On the one hand, we've got satellite radio and podcasts. On the other, the commercial wavelengths are homogenized to an extent. Are these good days or bad days to work in the non-visual medium?
A: It's never been better. There is freedom here that you won't find in visual media. I get to say what I want and if I want to talk about families and Lutherans and a small town in Minnesota, nobody can stop I don't have to shoot anybody or torture people.
It's lovely. When I was in college, all of the smart ambitious people in broadcasting were heading for TV and they sneered at radio, but it doesn't take much his mouth. Video, though it's gotten more manageable, requires a committee and sometimes a small army to create imaginative drama.
And things. To watch TV, you have to plant yourself in a small dark place I've been back in the newsroom for almost a month now, and I understand of what Mr. Keillor speaks.
Just translate video as newspaper and radio as blogs and you get the picture. All newspapers are, ultimately, bureaucracies, and I have never fared particularly well with bureaucrats, no matter how well intentioned. Because I am ultimately a highly unreasonable man.
| Are we actually paying attention, or are we just mourning along with everyone else?
The outpouring of grief we witnessed at the death of Princess Diana was astounding. Day after day it was all the media could talk about, and people were clearly moved.
While it seemed to some to be a little excessive, it was at least explainable: Diana had spent a great amount of time in front of the camera doing good works, she always had better PR than her husband, and she died in an incident that might have brought criminal charges. We sat up and took notice.
When Steve Irwin died, we had a similar response.
It didn't happen for as long, but it nevertheless generated multiple days of almost unceasing coverage. Irwin wasn't saving children from land mines, and some people thought him a fool, but he seemed, at the very least, to have good intentions. He also did generate awareness for environmental causes, and was honestly popular.
When did we start caring about Anna Nicole Smith?
She's been the headline on cnn.com for 24 hours.
They offer links letting people share their memories of Anna Nicole Smith, have image galleries memorializing the life of Anna Nicole Smith, even a poll asking whether she should be compared to Marilyn Monroe, and everyone is posting about what a tragic life this poor woman had to suffer through and how she inspired them at some point in their lives.
I'm sorry, I'm having a Simon Cowell moment. Are we talking about the same Anna Nicole Smith?
The woman who married a man 60 years her senior and then appeared shocked that her step-children thought it might be about the money.? The woman whose baby now has three men claiming may be the father?
The woman who made a spectacle of herself in a non-binding wedding ceremony less than three weeks after her son died? A woman of no discernible talent that made her livelihood first on her looks and then on scandal and celebrity buzz? It's only because of her obnoxious behavior that most of us know her as a celebrity at all.
Her death at the age of 39 is a tragedy, but it is no more tragic than the death of any other 39 year old mother, and it may (or may not) turn out that her lifestyle did her in. This is not news. This is not a death that deserves outpourings of grief on a national scale.
All this does is reinforce the idea that all you need for fame is a big silicone chest, a total lack of shame, and an obnoxious personality.
| Molly Ivins died last night at age 62. She was funny and brilliant and had an enormous heart.
Meeting her was a personal ambition from the time I got out of the Army and discovered her columns. Had I been single at the time, I'd have driven out to Texas and proposed on the spot.
I only found out about her third relapse of breast cancer yesterday, and the vague reference to her serious condition told me time was short.
Sure wish I'd met her, or even just written her to say Thanks. Sure is sad to see her go..
.
Which of these two statements, if believed to be true, would make the world a better place?
1.
There’s no point in attacking and occupying another country because it never turns out well.
2. Sometimes wars of occupation turn out great!
I’m not asking which statement is true. I’m asking which situation would be a better world if people believed it.
I think that's a very interesting question explore, regardless of where you on the answer (or where you end up, even) or where you are on the Iraq war.
I would add that we should consider Post WWII Japan in the mix.
| The sad news here in Charleston is that 96 Wave, a once-great independent radio station, and syndicated morning shows.
But the truth is, I haven't listened to regularly since the late 1990s.
Reason? I thought the music it's been playing has been only slightly better than the crap aired on the corporate radio.
- Did my tastes fail to keep up with the creative evolution of modern popular music?
- Did modern popular music fail to meet the standards set by my not-too-refined tastes?
- Or did the interesting music just pack up and move to an entirely different medium ?
1 is entirely possible. I'm not a musician, I'm not hip, and any number of Xark readers and authors are certainly more sophisticated and knowledgeable. But assuming for the sake of argument that my tastes aren't entirely worthless, then what explains the overall triteness of current popular music?
Is it possible that there's a discernible cycle to popular culture -- at least as expressed in popular music? If so, then where does that cycle stand right now?
Pardon me for a bit of brief geekness, but this is something everyone should have at least a clue about.
..
Dewey's quick guide to good passwords.
1) Go ahead and write down your passwords. If you don't write them down you'll use easy passwords instead of good ones. I suggest using a program like to record them (it's encrypted).
Then you only have one password to remember. (Don't put a sticky note under your keyboard with your password on it.)
2) Don't use the same password in multiple places.
If you do that then anyone who finds out one of your passwords knows many of them.
3) Phrases and dates -- even when misspelled -- bad. First letters from each word in a sentence -- good.
Leet speak (s@m3th|ng l|k3 th|s) is pretty much useless.
4) Sticking on 123 or 1 or ! at the end doesn't make it any stronger, but it might get past a sites filter.
Putting in a random number or symbol in the middle is good.
5) Use minimum of 8 characters *before* you stick on your 123 or !
6) If someone who cares manages to take physical possession of your machine you're probably screwed no matter what kind of password you use -- because Windows (and Linux, and MacOS and most systems) will accidentally save a copy of your password in various places.
So, don't log in to your bank account from a public terminal.
If your curious about how these passwords are attacked you can check out . Be sure to wear your geek decoder ring.
(Summary: against some programs they can try 1 million password per second and they're very intelligent about how to guess.)
| Here's a meaningless milestone: On Feb. 18, 2006, I added to a free utility that would let me track traffic on multiple blogs from one screen.
Yesterday that counter rolled over to 100,000 page views.
In Xark's first week using the analytics our high point was 237 page views (our only foray above the 200 mark), and our maximum day for unique visitors was 114. Compare that to our most recent seven days: five of them had more than 500 page views (the worst day was 417) and we had more than 300 unique visitors every day.
So...
just a thanks to all the writers, readers and commenters who make this blog a daily pleasure for me.
| Well, . I really dug Fox Trot.
Only the good burn out. The just keep chugging along..
.
| It's time to write a fond epitaph for the Information Age.
Like it or not, we've entered the Data Age, the era in which we recognize that a glut of information doesn't make us smart, just like buying a One of the things on my mind lately has been thinking of ways to get people to contribute their own selective filtering of information to cooperative communities. Now let me put that in English: I want to benefit from everything that all of you read.
My favorite idea for this is to create a semi-structured database with a web interface, and I'm exploring that idea with some serious interest.
But for the time being, I've created
The idea is that if a group of curious people from multiple perspectives started organizing an annotated reading list, the result could be quite informative.
Anyone is free to add links and summaries, and honestly, the thought of being able to read a wiki with suggested links from people like Dewey Sasser, Tim Schmoyer, Paul Lukasik, John Sloop, Ad Ingle, Janet Edens, Pam Morris, hue, my mom, etc., is really pretty intriguing.
So I shoot another arrow in the air...
| Just read on CNN which rants about political correctness and I must say that I both enjoyed it and thought he had some seriously good points.
What is it about political correctness , anyway?
I'm going to try an experiment here: In the true spirit of cultural engineering, I'm going to co-opt existing terms and redefine them to push my private agenda.
I'm going use the existing connotations to cast unproven and possibly unsupportable negative implications on things I don't like.
When someone offers a culturally specific holiday greeting I believe it is CULTURALLY INSENSITIVE and BELIGERANT to respond NEGATIVELY to their well wishing. I believe you should INTERPRET their statement in the CONTEXT in which it was meant.
Someone who chooses to take offense at a well meant greeting or symbol is being CULTURALLY MONOPOLISTIC and DISRESPECTFUL of others and others beliefs.
AGGRESSIVE pursuit of neutrality results in a CLIMATE OF FEAR where people become unwilling to offer pleasant courtesy to strangers and is ultimately DIVISIVE.
So, if someone wishes you Merry Christmas with the intent to ridicule your (or someone elses) religion then by all means open up a can of whoop-ass on them.
However, if someone gives you a Happy Solstice in good faith and you go nutty, I hope a vigilante committee immediately gathers around you and bludgeons you with Gandhi quotes until you respect others beliefs as much as you want them to respect yours.
The third annual International Princess Day will be held this Friday, December 8, 2007. Also known as Wear Your Tiara to Work Day, International Princess Day is held each year to raise awareness of the thrills of being a girl, although you are not required to be one to participate.
Princesses do not discriminate on the basis of gender.
The idea for IPD originated from the observation that qualities of the feminine were seen as negatives in certain arenas by both sexes. (Plus Princess Carol and I had birthdays within days of each other in December, so it was convenient.
) It's always held the Friday before Dec. 11. This year, it falls on the feast of the Immaculate Conception.
Read anything you want into that.
It's a day to appreciate the things that are girlish, whether you like to wear pink, shop and eat chocolate, or can't stand any of those things. It's not intended to be another skirmish in the battle of the sexes, but it recognizes that there is tension between the masculine and feminine and devaluing the characteristics of one is bad for both.
IPD recognizes that to be equal doesn't mean we have to be the same.
To that end, celebrate International Princess Day with any activities, actions, purchases, indulgences or thoughts that let you enjoy being female. While no attitude is intended or implied, you are certainly free to have one.
As a representative of the underworld, literally, community I take some offense that Dick Army would . Really, the ACLU worthy of the name Satan? By those standards Katy Couric would rank as a minor evil deity.
I believe that this sham of a thought is illustrative of a much deeper issue. I believe what we are witnessing is nothing less than a plummeting of standards of evil excellence in the United States of America.
We freely admit that the United States has never really been an excellent and consistent producer of true evil.
We got more play out of Germany and Cambodia over the years. Russia on any good day can produce gigwatts more evil than the United States could in a year. Granted.
Yet, still we are left with the uncomfortable feeling that the United States has fallen even from this low pedestal to the ground many millimeters below.
For the purposes of illustration and not to belabor the point, I present George “What me worry” Bush. If you were to believe the liberals and the aforementioned ACLU you might be under the impression that Georgie was true evil.
They often say so outright. George admittedly gave it a quarter effort. He kinda invaded Iraq.
He kinda controlled the country. He sorta killed a few folks. Whatever.
When you compare such a trifling record to that of Uncle Joe Stalin, the Olympic triathelete of genocide, who sent 10 (20, 30, 40… ) million souls to oblivion you realize straight away that George is a piker. Is that really the best the United States could do? I mean really?
Pol Pot he ain’t.
But in the best tradition of ‘when in doubt lower the bar’ we now hear from our perches in Hades that the ACLU is now taking up the banner of evil. What?
Is ExxonMobile bankrupt? Has Union Carbide run out of people to gas? Has Altria forgotten how to roll a good one?
What is going on up there?
We’ve been waiting to have that nice conversation with Osama Bin Laden concerning the 72 virgins for a few years now. George has been promising to send him our way for some time now.
Nothing yet. Nadda. We have a condo waiting for him down here devoid of Osama.
Why did we even bother with the HDTV? Might as well rent it out to Cheney when he comes around which wont be long given his ticker but we are digressing so we will make our point and get back to watching the massacre in the Darfor.
We think your definition of evil needs to be ‘tightened-up-a-bit’ as they say on the press floors.
Let’s leave it at that.
Post Script: Give our love to Ahmadinejad.
The memory of loving a hotdog is kind of like that of a charming but alcoholic ex-spouse.
Sure, you know they were bad for you, but O When Things Were Good, They Were Great.
So it is with the all-the-way dog at Yum Yum, the ice cream and hotdog joint on Spring Garden Road in the College Hill section of Greensboro, NC. I spent six years growing up just a few blocks away in the 1970s, and a Yum Yum dog with an RC Cola remains one of the most pure memories from my childhood.
Here's why they're different -- and for my money, better -- than any other hotdog on the planet: The Yum Yum all-the-way is a fusion of dog, chili, slaw, onion AND BUN into an enigmatic culinary unity, an elemental combination inexplicable by deconstruction into its original component parts. It comes wrapped in plain paper, two to a white paper bag, and each sells for just $1.50.
And so far as I can tell, the only thing that has changed about this meal is the RC Cola. Today it comes in a plastic bottle instead of a glass one.
Has anyone ever seen some article about how those evil Hackers are trying to break into your computers?
Hackers broken into bank, steal accounts , hackers did this or that.
Once upon a time, before the Internet was common knowledge, the term hacker was a compliment amongst computer types. It meant someone who could do really cool stuff with relatively little work.
Specifically, they could well.
Now, when I slip and tell someone outside the industry that I've been hacking they think I'm breaking into something. sigh/
A hacker is someone who thinks outside the box.
It's someone who discards conventional wisdom, and does something else instead. It's someone who looks at the edge and wonders what's beyond. It's someone them.
A hacker is someone who experiments with the limitations of systems for intellectual curiosity.
There are good hackers and bad hackers, just as there are good electricians and bad electricians. Hacker is a mindset and a skill set; what you do with it is a different issue.
So next time you read an article about someone hacking an ATM machine, don't think of me. Hacking an ATM machine is no longer interesting -- it's been done :)
| Just because I need to read this stuff every now and then, and because I was looking for a quote I still haven't found, here are some choice words from the great :
Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.I wish I could be so brilliant. I wish I could visit the neighborhood of such brilliance.
Liberty means responsibility.That's why most men dread it.
Independence? That's middle class blasphemy.We are all dependent on one another, every soul of us on earth.
by yourself as a mighty one.
ceases to be serious when people laugh.
The nation's morals are like its teeth, the more decayed they are the more it hurts to touch them.
support of Paul.
which I have got hold of for the moment, and I want to make it burn as brightly as possible before handing it on to future generations.
- The Welsh, who pray on their knees and their neighbors;
- The Scots, who keep the Sabbath and anything else they can lay - The Irish, who don't know what they want but are willing to die for - And the English, who consider themselves a race of self-made men, thereby relieving the Almighty of a dreadful responsibility.
than to consume wealth without producing it.
more useful than a life spent doing nothing.
| Due to my recent surgery, I am forbidden to play in storm coverage, but being who I am, I can't just sit on the porch.
I'm at home on northern Rutledge Avenue with three of the four kids just seeing what I can see. I'm just up the street from British-blogger-gone-stateside Geoff of , incidentally, who is blogging Ernesto as a hurricane-hit-zone newbie. Check it out.
My neighbors are often on the porches eyeing things too. Our main complaint? Morons who drive through the flooded intersection at 35 miles per hour, thereby causing tiny tsunamis to crash over our sidewalks and brick coping.
Thanks, idiots. I favor a lower speed limit altogether and certainly a slow-down warning at the intersection at Simons and Rutledge, when it floods. It was flooded just last Thursday and is flooded today.
But people still roar through the intersection regardless. Today's high point was watching the huge Charleston Storm Water truck drive through without stopping. Twice.
For most, I guess the storm is an annoyance. Waiting and watching for just wind, rain and flooded streets. But I like a good thunderstorm and I'm quite happy to have a show of natural forces without much damage.
We're pretty fortunate to live in a techno world where we know what's coming. Imagine not knowing it was going to be bad until you were in the middle of it. I'll take a few days of anxious, obsessive weather-report checking for a nothing storm over riding out a Cat 4 in my bathtub.
| From our friend Ellen, who teaches journalism down yonder:
Overheard in a convenience store in Duck Hill, Mississippi:Amen to that, sister...One of the attendants was sweeping up and talking to a customer seated at a table. They were discussing someone who had died.Then he went back to drinking his coffee, and she went back to sweeping.
It's what they call a 'memorial service' It will have a big picture of her there.the attendant said.
Won't be no open casket? the customer said.
No, the casket won't be there. It's still in Jackson.
The customer continued to ask questions about the burial until the woman sweeping up dropped her dust pan, straightened up, put her hand on her hip, and said loudly to him:
Well, she can't be buried without her head, now can she?
Nope, I guess not, the man said.
Eudora Welty always said that to be a writer in Mississippi, you don't
have to know how to write, you just have to know how to listen.
| OK, so this is Snake in the Grass instead of Snakes on a Plane -- best I could do.
This little guy caused a Daddy, Daddy, come see! at home one afternoon.
He's part of my collection.
| Two offerings from our friend Becky, aka Detroit Dixie. First, the latest in catblogging.
..
And you know, it just might be...
Does your cat look like Adolf Hitler?Do you wake up in a cold sweat every night wondering if he's going to up and invade Poland? Does he keep putting his right paw in the air while making a noise that sounds suspiciously like Sieg Miaow ? If so, this is the website for you.
Anyway, moving on, Double-D's other find was this promo.
When I opened the e-mail (SUBJECT: You've got SNAKES!!
!), it loaded a personal audio message from actor SAMUEL L. JACKSON to ME!
Sam (we're tight now) points out that Snakes on a Plane might just be the best motion picture ever made, and instructs me to leave my job working in the media and go see the premiere.
If you wanna live, do what I say, and you don't wanna mess with me on this, because I WILL come after you!By the way, the site plays a song, apparently the movie's theme song, and judging by the chorus, the title appears to be So Kiss Me Goodbye.
Folks, if the snakes don't get you, this pop ballad might.
| I usually try to say something intelligent sounding (at least to me) about someone's post, but just spoke to me as is.
(OK, I'll cave -- his physics metaphor is a bit fuzzy.
)
| I've never participated in a blog meme before, but from Notoriously Nice Mike:
List five songs that, when you hear them now, transport you back to a specific place and time. You can explain why, or not.I could probably do a hundred, but I'll do the first five that come to mind and leave it at that:
1.
Thunder Road, Bruce Springsteen. I was 18, on a road trip with a governor's school buddy to see a third GS buddy, and we had just left a cheap-beer road house on the Albemarle County line in the middle of the night. I'd never heard the complete Born to Run album before that night, we were riding with people we'd never met before, and when that song came on the three of us looked at each other and had a big old drunken howl.
I remember it because it still seems like the exact moment my adult life began.
2. Baker Street, Gerry Rafferty.
Later that year (1981) I drove up to the mountains and dropped in on a girl I knew. She still lived with her parents, and her father was an enormous, blue-collar, squint-eyed, Bible-quoting Cherokee. She put City to City on the turntable in her room and every time it would finish the needle arm would reset and start over, prompting her father to bang on the door and demand to know what was going on.
To this day, whenever I hear anything by Gerry Rafferty, I get turned on and terrified at the same time.
3. Should I Stay Or Should I Go, The Clash.
During my sophomore year in college, I moved into a room with John Sloop and Robert Huffman, the central figures in a strange and wonderful collection of brilliant misfits who called themselves The Dead Lunetiks. All the Lunetiks were into punk and alternative music, and when Combat Rock came out, it became a group obsession. I remember walking into the room to find a bunch of them sitting around on the beds, listening to the album on John's stereo, and when it ended, they'd flip the disk and play it again.
This literally went on FOR WEEKS, and the Combat Rock obsession became the subject of some contention. So now whenever I hear this wonderful old Clash song, I'm instantly transported back to that room, and I usually tune over to another radio station. It's kinda like being allergic to chocolate.
4. Low, Cracker. The only place I ever had that was really my own was the little apartment my son and I got after I left my first wife.
We furnished it out of dumpsters and thrift stores and yard sales, and it was spare and simple and functional and I loved it. When I hear Low, or most any song off of Kerosene Hat, I'm back in that white-walled apartment, with its slanting afternoon sunlight cut into slices by miniblinds, in a place that was entirely mine, slowly unraveling the mystery that is Janet.
5.
I Won't Back Down, Tom Petty. Elevator, The Post and Courier. In the days when working at the paper here felt like a daily psychic melee, with me at the center and completely outnumbered, I used to belt this out on my drive to the office and clench my jaw and silently mouth the words before the elevator doors opened.
A word of advice: When you have to sing I Won't Back Down just to cope with a routine day, it's time to reconsider your career options.
| It's a high level discussion of the benefits from cooperative computing ( , , etc) and the bad uses of the same techniques: Distributed denial of service, click-fraud, , ..
.)
Viruses and computer worms have changed over the years. In short: they used to be vandalism.
Now they're a protection and/or theft racket using distributed computing techniques.
While we're near the subject, more regulation probably won't help this regulations already cover what they do.
work.
While it looks good on the outside ( Make people responsible! ) average cost of computing. It's not like drunk driving -- people have direct control over the alcohol consumption and understand the result.
Even kids today don't get it -- sure, they're usually more sophisticated than their elders, but very few understand what's spells to work computing magic.
In the article, Bruce says It's a natural side-effect of a computer network with bugs. I'd have to disagree.
It's a natural side-effect of human personality.
Security is a compromise and frankly, most people don't *want* good security -- it gets in the way of too many things.
| John Quiggin -- an Australian who, , fears that that Iraq has recently -- had last week about the worsening situation in the Middle East:
What is striking about the Middle East is that, more than anywhere else in the world, it is the place where belief in the effectiveness of violence to achieve political goals has reigned supreme, and the place where nothing of substance has changed, except for the worse, in generations.Like many people, I understand that romance, just as I understand that aggression and defense are aspects of the human condition. Because we live in the world we do, I often find myself in the Billy Jack camp: Uncomfortably conflicted between the goals of peace and the practicalities of violence, acknowledging that the political world is a place where the shortest distance between two points is seldom a straight line.Whether it’s the gunman firing an AK-47 into the air, the suicide bomber’s macabre video clip, the Revolutionary Guard armed with terror by air and armoured brigade, the romance of the gun seems to concerned to move even an inch towards any sort of solution.
So it is good for all of us to reflect on this most callous of realities with some humility: Even when they seem an attractive option, the outcomes of violent solutions are rarely beneficial for anyone, including the victor.
| I first learned about when it favorably reviewed one of my short stories, but I didn't really get in the Slashdot habit until my brother Dewey kept citing it. Today it's hard to remember how limited my newsreach was before I put the Slashdot live bookmark at the top of my browser.
Themeaddicts, owned by a Hollywood animatronics guru famous for doing the T-rex in Jurassic Park, has created a (complete with floating head), talking pirate skull, and talking toucan. It informs the homeowner of things like a car coming up the driveway or the jacuzzi reaching the right temperature, and it turns into a surveillance camera.
: Yes, this story is at least two days old, but notice how the grassroots is doing a better job of recognizing the significance of this development than the traditional media did?
Also, yesterday's Slashdottings included , which wasn't exactly top news in traditional media:
The NSA wiretap lawsuit filed by the EFF will apparently be moving forward. A federal judge has that the EFF's lawsuit against AT T be dismissed. Among other things, the judge ruled that 'if the government has been truthful in its disclosures, divulging information on AT T's role in the scandal should not cause any harm to national security.: The internet search engine said it had net income of $721m, or $2.33 per diluted share, up from $343m a year earlier.' The case will now move forward, pending a government appeal.
: For $1.99, you can now purchase MST3K-style commentary tracks you can download and synch-up with the DVD version of your favorite big-screen movies. Copyright?
Ha! This clever idea kicks copyright to the curb!
That's all good, interesting stuff, with a smart mix of subjects and perspectives, and each item only runs a couple of paragraphs.
How does your daily newspaper stack up to Slashdot?
| Just wanted to give you some news: I got married on June 24. Laura, who Í've been with for 4.
5 years now, is an English teacher. We're currently on a tiny beach in Mexico. If you want to follow our extended honeymoon/travel writing trip, we're at .
Nothing fancy, though. I also have a website, if you're interested: .
In any case, all the activity helps account for my lack of contributions to Xark!
, which I constantly tell friends to check out. Also, I'm just out of my league on all the global warming stuff.
Anyway, hope all's well with you.
For those of you who don't know him, Ben is an independent soul and an extremely talented writer who spent a few years reporting in Charleston, attended divinity school and decided to write freelance travel stories instead. Congratulations on your beautiful new wife, Ben, and best wishes from Xark!
by the way, ben -- the global warming stuff is over everybody's head.
don't feel bad. --dc
| Today marks the anniversary of , the first first of more than 400 posts filed here in the past 365 days. Here's the opening salvo from that original (and lengthy) document:
- There are no unrelated topics. frames that have proven to be less than effective, xarkers go look for new frames. Sometimes the best new frames just come up in casual enter the conversation. Consequently, xarkers avoid excessive entanglements with true believers, fundamentalists and other buzz-kills.
- Americans have had more than six years to get to know George W. Bush, and I don't think even his most ardent supporters would tell you that the man is a great practitioner of the attention-to-detail approach to leadership.
Hell, Bush is the guy who created a political advantage by lowering expectations about his ability to do stuff like, well ...
talk. Which I thought was brilliance. But once you've gone down that road, you can't come back now and tell people who already mistrust the guy that the King of Bumbling Syntax was intensely focused on the distinctions between breached and overtopped.
Or, you can try, but they're not likely to be convinced.
- The damage that was done to Bush (and yes, there was damage done to Bush by this leak) wasn't done by what the press wrote, but by the dueling images people saw in the video (emergency officials, looking involved, huddled together, speaking in urgent tones; president on vacation, seated with an advisor in a room at his ranch, offering bland assurances, making promises that turned out to be empty). And if the best the Right can do is battle back against the power of this image by niggling over words, then they're bringing a knife to a gunfight.
A year later, I'm still proud of those statements. I enjoy writing here just as much as I did in 2005, and our readership has grown into a diverse mix of local bloggers, old friends, new friends, people we've never met but know by handle, readers who have no idea who we are but enjoy the site and, of course, thousands of people who have shown up here to look at pictures of the world's ugliest dog, or via the search term snakes on a plane ..
.
A good blog is judged as much by the people who participate in its threads as by the writers who post. So to all of you who read here and comment here, thank you.
Thank you very much.
Here's to Year 2!
| The crew from Chez Xark is going to be unplugged for a week.
No Internet. No Photoshop.
Try to keep the culture going and the Republic running while we're offline.
(Pet peeve No. 6: People who send you a passive-aggressive note telling you to do something absurdly presumptive and then sign it Thanks. As in: Here's my project that I've been working on for six months.
I'll need all your comments and concerns in writing by C.O.B today.
Thanks. Makes me want to reply: I've written all my comments on this broom handle. I'll need you to shove it up your ass.
Thanks. )
Yep. Definitely time for a vacation.
| It's a busy day, but just cleaning out my e-mail Inbox provided me with so many interesting items that I figured a links post might be in order.
Call it whatever you like. Argue with points.
But consider the possibility that this is some serious shit.
and how that erosion is seen by investors. Certain newspaper executives are going out and investing on other newspapers.
I don't see it. It's hard to make money buying a business that's in permanent decline. If anything, the decline is accelerating.
Eisenhower warned against. The democratic electoral process now exists and special operations forces throughout the world. As a leading advocate of this supremacy by stealth , Robert Kaplan, has written in place and to keep the public's attention as divided as possible.
We can dominate the world only quietly: off camera, so to speak.
In short, Spookworld triumphant.
against common threats: Google and Microsoft.
-- under which Yahoo will provide all the graphical ads on eBay, eBay's PayPal division will handle Yahoo's online wallet service, and the two Google-AOL alliance and Microsoft, which is still going stag. Indeed, it was just Monday that JP Morgan published a report saying the two made a cute couple. A partnership or merger between eBay and Yahoo is strategically feasible, the A combined company would have the leading position in auctions, communications, payments, graphical advertising, audience reach, and geographic breadth.
For eBay, hooking up with Yahoo will greatly reduce its dependence on Google nibbling at eBay's business with its free online-classified service, Google Base. For Yahoo, it's a means of extending its sponsored search and advertising to eBay's legions of shoppers. A win-win, I think.Or, from a different perspective: Everybody is picking sides, and great swaths of tech money, power and creativity are being leveraged in an enormous, high-stakes game. Winner takes the future.
And, speaking of enormous, high-stakes games: , with a win in the House this week that was a pleasant surprise.
Other outcomes . Out of the frying pan, into an enormous microwave..
.
13:47 UPDATE: I almost forgot -- the big news for bloggers is that to provide a service similar to (if not the same as, I can't tell yet) what it provides to .
In essence, the system collects anyone who links to an AP story and puts the blog post URL into an automated Who's Blogging?
directory attached to each story. The advantage to readers? You can find out what people are saying about a topic in something that approaches real time.
The advantage to bloggers? By blogging on what's in the news, and linking to it, you can build traffic to your site.
The WaPo certainly got its share of traffic out of Xark because of this feature: Given the choice between linking to an NYT story and a WaPo story, I always linked to the WaPo story.
Doing so meant more people would read what I had to say.
Rather typically, (a list of the five most-blogged-about AP stories, compiled dynamically) rather than the Actual Big Thing (the Who's Blogging? feature).
The problem? Technorati is a beautiful thing, but it isn't what it says it is. Technorati misses a lot, and just because you blog on one of its AP URLs doesn't automatically mean it's going to find you.
Then again, where will this system be in a year? Probably an awful lot closer to the goal.
| Howdy folks.
Sorry to have been such an inconstant blogger lately -- not that we haven't been working and writing and blogging -- only that it's been on another blog. If you haven't checked out our project yet, drop in. It's only a few weeks old, but because of the subject matter it already has a larger regular audience than Xark and that Janet and I have been hoping for since we left last fall.
Meanwhile, we're just back from our three-day weekend at the in Black Mountain, and so we've passed another milestone for 2006. I always like to take stock of situations at milestones, so now seems a time to do so.
The situation right now is chaotic, but as William Irwin Thompson says, chaos and noise are the raw materials of creativity.
In the case of sexual reproduction/evolution, this is absolutely literal. But that's another post.
I don't want to stop thinking about and writing about media and culture and politics, but I know I'm not satisfied with the way I've been writing about it lately.
Xark is 10 months old now, and it began with the idea that if you want new outcomes, you should try new approaches. And with work and kids and all my usual excuses, I've gotten predictable. So I've got to break that cycle.
In the meantime, let's start the conversation. What could Year Two at Xark be like?
For those of you who post here, what changes would you like to see?
What could you do differently?
For those of you who read this site regularly, what would interest you?
Should we add writers?
Create structures? Recurring features?
Put up more photos?
More doodles? More art? Video?
Music? Poetry?
In other words, if one of the keys to a good life is regular updating of one's identity, how could Xark's identity change.
.. for the better?
Two things are for sure: 2006 in Greensboro, and there's a fall LEAF scheduled for Oct. 20-22 in Black Mountain. That's two major creative milestones spread over two consecutive weekends, and we're going to both.
So why not join us? Meet us there? Go on your own and bump into us?
Why not kick your world over sideways, update your identity and imagine a new way of doing things?
Look at your schedules. Think about it.
And then come on!
| After a rainout on Saturday, we got out to our first minor league baseball game of the season Sunday: a double-header at Riley Park on the Ashley River. As the grounds crew fanned out to prepare for the second game and our family scattered, I found myself imagining a life in which one could actually buy season tickets to a minor league team and organize one's schedule and thoughts around homestands.
Which reminded me of politics.
For years I've responded to the lazy Americans don't appreciate democracy because they don't vote critique with this idea: Low rates of voter participation do not necessarily mean that voters don't care. It can also mean that Americans have better things to do with their time.
And by better things, I mean the pursuit of happiness. We're the only nation with a founding document that talks about happiness, and that means something.
Politics is an ugly business, and the people who are attracted to it are seldom our best and brightest.
So when you see that 85 percent of an electorate in some foreign country has turned out to vote, you can rest assured that things there are pretty bloody awful. People typically turn their full attention to politics only when things have gotten so bad that we can no longer focus our thoughts on more meaningful and productive aspects of life.
So many pleasant things can occupy our time: Family, neighbors, friends, correspondence, games, gardens, books, movies, music.
Those of us in the middle class willingly exchange our political attention for these things, offering generous terms, and all we ask is that the political class not screw things up so badly that we have to put our lives on hold to fix them.
Were there problems in America in the fall of 2000? Absolutely.
But it seemed a time of moderation: We'd had eight years of a moderate administration, and the choice that fall was between a Democratic moderate and a Republican moderate. So yes, Florida was ugly, and there were dark clouds on the horizon, but I couldn't get all worked up about the outcome. I was beginning to believe there was only one political party in America anyway (the Corporate Party), and that the Republicans and Democrats were just factions therein.
O, to be so dumb and happy again.
We are entering a political age, and the best we can hope is that our institutions remain healthy enough to correct the excesses of recent years, at least in some middling, contrary, average-it-out way. I grew up in the sixties, lived on a commune in the 1970s.
I don't need Utopia. I don't want to go back to all that drama, all that us-and-them. That's not a value judgment about who was right and who was wrong -- that's just a 43-year-old guy who got tear-gassed as a kindergartener reflecting on our last political era.
Personally, I'd much rather spend my time on happier subjects. I'd rather lose myself in the rhythms of the minor league baseball season, the hip-hop-inflected challenges of Hampton Park streetball, the promise of the upcoming football schedule. It's spring here.
Time to plant peppers and tomatoes, to fall asleep in a folding lawn chair reading .
One hopes there will be time for all that again someday. But this is 2006, and you can't nap in the shade when your house is on fire.
| Info-debris on the last day of my Knight Center fellowship...
GEEK FANBOY NO. 1: What does it say about the state of my life that I've met numerous newsmakers and never asked for an autograph, but after Craig Newmark's talk yesterday I went up and stuck out a Sharpie and a notepad?
Newmark, by the way, signed it with his first name and e-mail address.
GEEK FANBOY NO. 2: When I asked Dan Gillmor to sign a copy of We The Media on Wednesday, he wrote:
To Dan:Which is fine, I guess, but if I were Dan Gillmor, I'd sign books this way:
We'll figure this
out together in
the end.
Best,
Dan Gillmor
To Dan:This is because Gillmor's statement My readers know more than I do has become his version of If you're shipping international, you gotta use FedEx. It's all anybody ever quotes him as saying, and he says it all the time. I mean, the guy's a newspaper columnist whose first cit-J just tanked, but he's landing soft with joint sponsorship from UC Berkeley and Harvard for a cit-J think tank.
You know more
than I do.
Best,
Dan Gillmor
Which I guess means he'll be saying My readers know more than I do over a lot of rubber chicken.
DAVE SLUSHER SPECIAL: Hey Dave, I talked to this guy after Newmark's thing. He's trying to connect e-waste to the people who could use it.
Very much that conversation we had walking back from the bar in Greensboro back in October. Sounded very Uplifterish in his orientation.
HWOT SPECIAL: Hey Harriet, since you like Ginsberg, check out this postcard I bought at City Lights:
| MORE LIKE THAT PLEASE: If you haven't been over to yet, then run, don't walk, to Pandora and the .
Had a friend show it to me on Monday, but it wasn't until a second person sent me the link Thursday that I really got on there and started playing with it. It's already part of my life.
What is it?
Basically, it's a relational database of music in which artists and songs are cross-tabbed by meta-data. Tell it a band you like and it will cue up a bunch of things it thinks are related. Don't like what it gives you?
Give it a thumbs down. The more you tell it, the better the recommendations become, in the same way that the Netflix system works.
The idea is that the database will lead you to surprises, and I got my first hit when Alana Davis begat KT Tunstall, whom I'd read about but never heard.
And yep, she jumps right out at you.
The thing isn't perfect -- it doesn't understand what Cracker is at all, and its fruitless search for material that is like Mike Doughty just reinforces my vague notion that the guy sounded original. How do you write metadata for clever?
Plus, you can add artists and songs to channels, and pretty quickly that sets a tone that can be fun to manage. My Dexter Romwebber channel now includes Southern Culture on the Skids and Mojo Nixon, and I expect that list is going to grow.
SPEAKING OF MUSIC: my favorite band since its , has been in a well-publicized feud with Virgin Records for years, and David Lowery wrote about the conflict in 2003's aptly titled
Lowery, of Camper Van Beethoven fame, is an indie-music hero of legitimate standing.
And the band deserves some cred for its latest Virgin smackdown. Blogger explains it in a :
Virgin, the group's former label, put together The Best of Cracker: Get On With It for release next Tuesday, without Lowery, who convened Cracker in a studio to re-record a dozen of the band's best songs (plus a new bonus song) for their own best-of package, Here's the best part, though: not only is Cracker's version out the same day (on Cooking Vinyl), IT COSTS LESS. And more of the money goes to Cracker, because the band owns the masters to these re-recorded versions (which sound just as great, if not better, than the A lot of bands suffered in that era, many were forced out, guitarist Johnny Hickman says in the press notes, referring to Cracker's heyday.
We survived through loyal fans and grueling hours of work without a major's support. We own these songs, and now, we own the new recordings.
Look, even if I wasn't a fan of Cracker, Camper Van, Lowery and the underappreciated Hickman, I'd dig these guys for their support of indie music in general and independent podcasters.
Vive la Cracker.
SO THEN JANET TOOK A PICTURE OF OUR CAT: Xark! wouldn't be a blog if we didn't occasionally show you a picture of a cat or write about the fate of the Republic whilst clad in nothing but boxer shorts and a hoodie.
Below is Janet's latest portrait of our current cat, Freak Boy:
FOX SECURITY IS COMING TO GET YOU!
This just in: When a caller to the mentioned THE NAME Keith Olbermann, Bill O'Reilly cut the mike, dropped the call and then threatened the caller, saying that they had his number and that he would be referred to Fox Security, and You're going to be getting a little visit.
I could go more in depth, but I won't.
to a blog post that discusses this in greater depth .
Is it embarrassing for O'Reilly that he's such a pansy fascist? Who knows?
may be beyond embarrassment at this point. But the threat clearly embarrassed somebody. Fox radio didn't actually air the exchange, and the only way the bloggers got their hands on the audio was by paying to become one of Reilly's premium members, which let them get the whole show.
Anyway, go listen. Please.
THE KATRINA BRIEFING VIDEO -- OVER THE TOP ON OVERTOPPING : Yesterday at my I wrote about , and here's the short version: The videos don't really give us any important new information -- they just tell a powerful visual story that is damning to the White House claim that the president was actually paying attention.
I also noted that the Right's response seemed to be breaking along two lines: Framing the story as just another media (Democrat/liberal) attack; and making a big fuss about the difference between the words breaching and overtopping.
On Day 2 (or Day 3 if you're in the 24-hour newscycle), the overtopping/breaching gambit seems to be the agreed-upon message. To wit: When Bush said that nobody anticipated that the levees would be breached (a September statement the WH quickly clarified), he wasn't saying that nobody anticipated the levees would be overtopped.
And since the AP video doesn't have anybody specifically saying the word breached, then the entire charge is a media fabrication.
From : Leading the charge is L.A.
-based , who rips into the ' widely-linked version: The distinction is critical, because Bush never said nobody anticipated that the levees might be overtopped. He said event.
This is just -- to put it kindly -- dumb.
On two counts.
So, surprise surprise, video surfaced Thursday of Democratic Gov. Kathleen Blanco blundering an assessment of the levees several hours after the first breach.
Message? Look over there! A puppy!
Under attack by words? Confuse the words and change the subject. Under attack by images?
Give the media different images...
and change the subject.
Which I don't think they've done particularly well. By continuing to play blame everybody else, the President's Men demonstrate a lack of understanding: Americans already accept that all levels of government played a role in the Katrina debacle.
We don't just blame Bush -- the response was poor from top to bottom. What Americans find unseemly is the way the White House has dodged blame while directing it at others. What do you think caused somebody to leak this briefing in the first place?
And here they are doing it again.
Blaming the media won't solve this problem, because by giving people a chance to watch video of the President in action, people can form their own opinion of his level of interest, involvement and concern. And that story has nothing to do with word games.
AND ON A RELATED NOTE: No, none of this makes me rethink the role of former FEMA chief Michael Brown, the White House's designated Katrina scapegoat. From : We were wrong. And we owe you an apology.
In watching the recent videos of videoconferences immediately before and during Katrina, we clamoring for government action.
This is not an either/or choice here. Brown or some other FEMA type may have leaked this video in retaliation for the WH blame-campaign, but the fact that Bush looks worse doesn't make Brown look better.
He was unqualified for the job, and he failed in his task. It's not fair to blame him entirely, but none of us did.
In the Army, by the way, if one of your people fails, you fail.
Apparently Lt. Bush was out sick that day in Army National Guard School.
| In an e-mail discussion about global warming today with a conservative acquaintance of mine, he mentioned a scientific study that claimed to prove that 70 percent of all scientific studies are wrong.
Since by its own terms the study he cites has only a 30 percent chance of being correct, I don't know exactly what that says.
| No. 1 search term at Technorati this hour?
No. 2?
STICKS AND STONES: I like a cheap laugh as much as the next guy, but what really sends me are those laughs that actually say something priceless.
Here's Rob Corddry, on last night's :
Jon, tonight the Vice President is standing by his decision to shoot Harry Whittington. Now according to the best intelligence available, there were quail hidden in the brush. Everyone believed at the time there were quail in the brush.who what WHEN where why: The White House press corps went off on little Scottie at yesterday's press briefing, demanding to know why the administration waited for another source to announce Cheney's little mishap. And of course they all know the answer: By sneaking the event past the Saturday night news cycle, they made all the Sunday-morning political talk shows whiff on the story.And while the quail turned out to be the 78-year old man, even knowing that today, Mr. Cheney insists he still would have shot Mr. Whittington in the face.
Plus it gave Cheney time to sober up.
Sunday morning political talks shows are a big thing in Washington, where people actually watch Sunday morning political talk shows. I know that's hard to believe, but then again, some people actually like barnyard porn sites, too.
| Cowasjee did not expect Musharraf to succeed. Whatever Musharraf does now, it will be coming down, he said.
but he's at the top, and he would like to stay there as long as possible. I asked what he expected to happen to Pakistan. You cannot fight ignorance, he said. This country is important for what? Its nuisance value?
So what did he foresee? I pressed. Doom, he smiled.
-- Pakistani social critic and Zorastrian Ardeshir Cowasjee, interviewed by Nir Rosen for his article Among the Allies.
The biggest problem, though, in Kennedy's view, lies with the dysfunctional nature of American law enforcement.I used to live inComparing criminal justice to a real profession, like medicine, he points out that if there'd been a breakthrough in breast cancer treatment in Boston in the mid-1990s, and 70 percent of women who would have died of breast cancer were living, then when people were talking about breast cancer in San Francisco they would not say, well, nobody's made any headway on this, this is an intractable problem, we're going to start from scratch. And if they did, then their patients would hold them accountable, but there is no mechanism like that in criminal justice. There is no real professionalism.
How do you get to be a judge? Get a law degree. How do you get to be a DA?
Get elected. There is no collective knowledge, no relationship between theory and practice. There was a time when surgeons were barbers, and what medicine did was bootstrap itself up. In criminal justice, we're still barbers, and if people in these communites, paying the tax bills and visiting their raped daughters in intensive care, knew the way business was conducted, there would be bodies hanging from oak trees. The presumption that most people have, that this is serious, thoughtful work, and that if you don't get good results it's because absolutely nothing works, is so wrong.
And if people really knew, I swear, there'd be blood running in the street.
--Criminologist and gang violence researcher David Kennedy, quoted by Daniel Duane in his article Straight Outta Boston.
A cramped house with confusion
And pain.
But then I met the Friend
And started getting drunk
and singing all
Night.
Confusion and pain
Started acting nasty,
Making threats,
With talk like this,
My, but it was an eventful few days.
..
THE WAR IN SPOOKWORLD: In case you missed it -- and in some newspapers it was pretty easy to miss -- the CIA's former top man for the Near East (that would be Iraq, for those of you keeping score at home) has published a piece in Foreign Affairs that details how the Bush administration .
I don't know why this would surprise anybody, but it adds more weight to the don't trust these bastards with anything important argument.
Funny thing, though: None of the right-wing news feeds ( , ) or liberal media bias updates I read every day ( , , ) have had a word to say about Mr. Pillar's revelations or the media's coverage of them.
Pillar has been a semi-public critic of the White House in the past, but the Foreign Affairs article is a significant development in that it gives the 28-year Spookworld veteran a credible platform to make an extended case on the one point that matters most as we move forward: Can this administration be trusted? I've been convinced for months now that -- which is not exactly a pleasant position for me.
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