Recently in Blog Nation Category
Via @anildash, some sad news today: Brad Graham, one of the blogger old-school and an all-around friendly, funny guy, has apparently passed away. (1968-2010.)
I never met Brad in person, but we traded comments now and again and his sites -- first, The BradLands and later Must See HTTP -- could always be counted on for great pop culture commentary and sundry other quality links. Plus, he was always a very friendly and welcoming presence back in the early days, and he really helped everybody feel like they were part of a burgeoning online community. Farewell, Brad. You will be missed.
Update: The online wake is here.
"If you're reading this article, it's likely that you spend a fair amount of time online. However, considering how much of an influence the Internet has in our daily lives, how many of us actually know the story of how it got its start?" From Al Gore to the Series of Tubes: By way of Webgoddess, a very concise timeline of the history of the Internet.
"Back in the proverbial day, GeoCities was the place where many a modern-day internet nerd cut his or her teeth. After a spectacular dot com purchase of $3.65 billion and an equally spectacular dot com bust, its closure marks the end of one of the earliest ages of the social web."
We're still a few weeks shy of the tenth anniversary 'round these parts. Nonetheless, GitM's original home is, as of this morning, defunct: Yahoo has followed through on their April announcement and is closing Geocities today. So long, old bird -- the neighborhood(s) just won't be the same without ya.
"'The Iranian government must understand that the world is watching,' Obama said in a written statement. 'We call on the Iranian government to stop all violent and unjust actions against its own people.'"
As protests -- and violence -- escalate in Tehran after last week's dubious election returns, the world increasingly looks to social networking sites to ascertain what's really going on in the streets. The revolution may not be televised, but -- so far at least -- it seems to be managing quite well with Twitter: "This is a country where you have tens of thousands of bloggers, and these bloggers have been in a situation where the Internet has been filtered since 2004. Anyone worth their salt knows how to find an open proxy [to get around government firewalls and filters], knows how to work around censorship...The Iranian government, by filtering the Internet for so long, has actually trained a cadre of people who really know who to get around censorship."
Update: Over at Salon, Iranian-American journalist Hooman Majd (who's making the rounds -- I saw him on the Lehrer News Hour yesterday as well) argues that the role of social networking has been vastly overstated: "More people have access to the Internet in Iran than other Middle Eastern countries but often it's dial-up, it's slow, they don't do it like we do all day long...The depiction of the Internet revolution isn't quite accurate. We're putting our own image onto Iran. Of course there are people Twittering from the demonstrations; they're just not representative of the vast majority of Iranians. What was so heartwarming about this whole thing is that the Iranian people stood up in mass and said you can't take this away from us."
"How absurd is that? Let us count the ways. First, even when the most establishment 'journalists' such as Rosen get caught engaging in patently irresponsible behavior, they still find a way to blame blogs rather than themselves (I thought I was just blogging, and reckless gossip is what bloggers do.) It wasn't blogs that "reported" Saddam Hussein's acquisition of scary aluminum tubes for nuclear weapons or that Iraq was behind the anthrax attacks; it wasn't blogs that glorified Jessica Lynch's nonexistent heroic firefight with Iraqi goons; it wasn't blogs that turned John Edwards into The Breck Girl and John Kerry into a "French-looking" weakling; and it wasn't blogs that presented retired military generals who were participating in a Pentagon propaganda program and saddled with countless undisclosed conflicts as 'independent analysts.'"
Call it the State of Play fallacy: After TNR's Jeffrey Rosen blames "blogging" for the obviously poor quality of his recent Sotomayor hit piece -- and vows never to blog again -- Salon's inimitable Glenn Greenwald sets the record straight about what can and can't be pinned on bloggers. "Despite his efforts to blame 'blogging' for what he did, Rosen didn't use journalistically reckless methods to smear Sotomayor's intellect because of some inherent attribute of the medium. Instead, he did that because...that's how the establishment media typically functions: 'background reporting from people with various axes to grind, i.e. standard Washington reporting.'" (And, for what it's worth, Rosen's original article was hardly what you'd call blogging anyway -- it was just a lengthy piece that ran online.)
"Over the last several years, the problem of attention has migrated right into the center of our cultural attention. We hunt it in neurology labs, lament its decline on op-ed pages, fetishize it in grassroots quality-of-life movements, diagnose its absence in more and more of our children every year, cultivate it in yoga class twice a week, harness it as the engine of self-help empires, and pump it up to superhuman levels with drugs originally intended to treat Alzheimer's and narcolepsy...We are, in short, terminally distracted. And distracted, the alarmists will remind you, was once a synonym for insane."
Or, as Matt Johnson put it 25 years ago, I've been filled with useless information, spewed out by papers and radio stations...Another year older and what have i done? All my aspirations have shriveled in the sun. And don't get me started on blogs, e-mails, youtubes, and tweets. In a New York Magazine cover story, Sam Anderson runs the gamut from Buddhism to Lifehacking to ascertain whether technology has really propelled us into a "crisis of attention". (By way of Dangerous Meta, a blog that's invariably worth the distraction.) And his conclusion? Maybe, but thems the breaks, folks. There's no going back at this point. "This is what the web-threatened punditry often fails to recognize: Focus is a paradox -- it has distraction built into it. The two are symbiotic; they're the systole and diastole of consciousness...The truly wise will harness, rather than abandon, the power of distraction."
Which just goes to show, the real key to harnessing distraction is...wait, hold on a tic, gotta get back to you. There's a new funny hamster vid on Youtube.
As per the norm of late, I seem to be well behind on both my movie-watching and movie-reviewing these days. (It's been awhile since Watchmen.) In an attempt to rectify the former, at least, I hit up the multiplex a few weekends ago with a decision to make. Eventually, and based mainly on which projected path would involve the least amount of downtime between shows, I decided to forsake an Apatow-ish afternoon with the old Freaks & Geeks gang (I Love You, Man, Adventureland, Observe and Report -- still haven't seen any of those) in favor of the latest batch of conspiracy-minded thrillers. Well, at least one of 'em was worth it.
First up was Tony Gilroy's frothy but entertaining Duplicity, a tongue-firmly-in-cheek, corporate espionage rom-com of sorts that sadly didn't make much of a splash at the box office. After a meet-cute in Dubai involving MI-6 agent Ray Koval (Clive Owen) and CIA asset Claire Stenwick (Julia Roberts), we cut to rival cosmetics company CEO's Paul Giamatti and Tom Wilkinson going mano-a-mano like it's Paris in 1778. Both looking for a leg up in the cutthroat world of shampoo, hand cremes, and lotions -- not to mention a chance to roundly humiliate the other in corporate combat -- these two masters of the universe have invested enough into their respective espionage and counter-intelligence departments (run by Milk/Michael Clayton's Denis O'Hare and writer-director Tom McCarthy respectively) to make Mossad blush.
Enter (once again) top-notch professional spies Ray and Claire, who discover they've both been hired by Giamatti's intel outfit years after their earlier falling-out in Saudi Arabia. Will these two photogenic spooks be able to bury the hatchet long enough to fulfill their mission objective of screwing over Wilkinson good? Or was that particular hatchet perhaps buried on an earlier Roman holiday? As you might imagine from a movie called Duplicity (by the writer of the Bourne films, no less), nothing is what it seems at first. And most everyone, not the least our two protagonists, is playing more than a few angles.
Blessed with charismatic performances from its two leads -- I don't usually cotton to Julia Roberts much, but she's fine here -- Duplicity is a jaunty bit of fun that mainly works because it doesn't take itself too seriously. Sure, the wheels-within-wheels of the plot don't quite always catch -- They're often contrived and sometimes needlessly convoluted. (If anyone out there saw the movie, could you explain what the significance of the marked bench was? I missed it.) And some of the setpieces definitely take too long, and don't make much sense regardless. (See for example, the hunting-for-a-fax-machine sequence, which even the characters eventually call out as ludicrous.) But Duplicity gets away with much of this because it's so goofy and good-natured about it all. If the cosmetics angle didn't tip you off from jump street, the stakes of the game here are purposely hokey and overwrought -- People talk about the MacGuffin here, a possible cure for baldness, like it's the Ark of the Covenant.
In the end, Duplicity is probably 15-20 minutes too long, its final couple of twists are pretty easy to see coming, and the film then spends too much time showing us all the myriad details we could've worked out on our own. But it's an amiable production through and through, and there are worse ways to spend two hours than watching Owen and Roberts sally sharp-edged barbs back-and-forth, debate the economic possibilities of frozen pizza, and occasionally tumble into the sack. At the very least, I didn't leave Duplicity feeling cheated.
Which brings us to Kevin MacDonald's State of Play, a movie that was sorely lacking the state-of-play that exuded from every soap-scrubbed pore of Duplicity. No, this is a Big Serious Film, about Big Serious Issues, like Sinister Political Corruption and the Decline of Newspapers and such. Now, I unfortunately missed the original BBC miniseries version of this tale, but from the cast alone (John Simm, Kelley MacDonald, Bill Nighy, Marc Warren, James McAvoy, Polly Walker) I have to bet it's pretty good. But, as far as this American retelling goes, I found State of Play thoroughly ham-handed, mostly unbelievable, and often risible.
Darkness sets in early in State of Play, as the film begins with two seemingly unrelated deaths in our nation's capital. First, a homeless bagsnatcher is hunted down in Georgetown and -- conspiracy alert -- executed with a ruthless, professional precision. Then, a comely Capitol Hill aide falls in front of a subway train in the middle of morning rush hour. (DC-area folks might find themselves pondering why said aide walked through Dupont Circle and Adams-Morgan to board a train over in Roslyn, Virginia. Everyone else will just wonder why the fact she fell in a small security camera "blind spot" is so important when there had to have been several dozen eye-witnesses at the scene.)
We are then introduced to gruff, slovenly beat writer with a heart-of-gold Cal McAffrey (Russell Crowe), who lumbers around the rest of the movie like a newspaperman out of Sesame Street -- he not only knows every single working-class-joe in the District, but they all seem to want to do him favors. The yin to McAffrey's yang over at the Washington Globe is Della Frye (Rachel McAdams), the smart, attractive, but unfortunately surface-skimming blogger at the new online desk. McAffrey and Frye are assigned to cover the two murders for the Globe respectively, but there's a catch. For the dead aide, it turns out, happened to be having an affair with her boss, the up-and-comer Rep. Stephen Collins (Ben Affleck), who was currently leading a congressional investigation into Pointcorp, a Blackwater-style private military contractor.
What's more, Rep. Collins was once none-other-than newsman McAffrey's college roommate, and, complicating matters even further, both have shared the attentions of the congressman's wife (Robin Wright Penn). Will Cal use his journalistic pull to smooth things over for his two old friends in the press? Will Della be able to renounce her bloggeriffic tendency to wallow in scandalous ephemera and find the real story buried here? And, when it comes out that the murders are inevitably linked and that there's something very Dark and Troubling going on in the corridors of Washington, will Cal take Della under his wing and find a way to make her a "real" journalist? I mean, that's how Dad did it, that's how America does it, and it's worked out pretty well so far.
Even with Brad Pitt and Ed Norton, who were originally cast as McAffrey and Collins respectively, gone from this production, State of Play has all the marks of a Big Important Film, including respected name actors popping up all over the place. The supremely talented Helen Mirren is passable as the hard-nosed, tough-talking editor/doyenne of the Globe, but she isn't done any favors by the script, which keeps forcing her into goofy, Prime Suspect-style exclamations of Britishness. Jeff Daniels has some fun as a smarmy, probably-Republican Senator ("Don't use the Lord's name in vain around me"), David Harbour of Revolutionary Road shows up as our slightly-off-kilter Deep Throat, Harry Lennix and Best Supporting Actress nominee Viola Davis briefly play a detective and coroner respectively, and Jason Bateman just about walks away with the film as an oily club promoter caught in the middle of all the shenanigans. (He plays it broad, and seems to be the only person involved who recognized what a B-movie this is.)
But even all the talent on-screen can't save State of Play from its very significant flaws. For one, the film clearly purports to be a paean to investigative journalism a la All the President's Men, but the conspiracy that drives the story is outlandish in several ways. Basically -- moderate spoilers here -- it involves corporate and para-military thugs at the Blackwater outfit doing whatever is required to achieve their ultimate goal of "privatizing national security." Now, I have no doubt that Blackwater and its ilk are shady as they come. And -- given everything we've seen from them as lawless mercenaries in Iraq -- it doesn't take an extreme suspension of disbelief to envision a fictional Blackwater doing what they do here, engaging in under-the-table wetworks to protect some sizable market share.
But, and this is where the movie began to lose me, I'm not at all convinced that the Bad Guys here would even have to break the law as currently written to achieve their ultimate goal, and they definitely wouldn't have to go to the sordid lengths suggested in State of Play. Maybe it's news to the good people at the Washington Globe, but corruption has been effectively legalized for awhile now in DC. Why would Pointcorp be involved in such nefarious black-bag operations to ensure their pound-of-flesh profit margins, when they can just spread some money around legally and accomplish much the same objective? After awhile, I found the spy shenanigans here about as plausible as those of the evil soap corporations in Duplicity. (Honestly, did the writers not hear of Halliburton? They were bagging enormously lucrative no-bid military contracts for years the old-fashioned way.)
This brings me to my other major problem with State of Play -- its depiction of journalism and what ails it. But, before I move on -- and I'll tread lightly here -- State of Play makes a turn very late in the game that completely subverts the All the President's Men conspiracy argument it's been making up to then anyway, and it basically lets the air out of the entire movie. You can't have it both ways, y'all.
Moving on, as most every single review will tell you, State of Play closes with a loving montage of each stage in the process of making a daily newspaper -- the type being set, the rolls of paper being loaded, etc. etc. (They skip over all the crucial cutting-down-trees and paper-mill parts, of course -- Let's not get in the way of nostalgia.) And, yes, State of Play is very conspicuously crafted as a heartfelt ode to the newspaper industry in twilight, as mainly evidenced by the narrative tug between "good" journalist Cal, who pounds the beat relentlessly and tracks down every possible lead, and "bad" blogger Della, who -- at first -- opines without all the facts at her disposal and dishes out snark by the shovelful. (But don't worry, it turns out she's very trainable.)
Now, I posted briefly on this last month, but there are a lot of reasons newspapers are going under right now -- market pressures, obviously, but also over-consolidation, a decline in local-area coverage, papers following the cable TV herds into surface-skimming irrelevance. And, for an equally loving, but more resonant critique of why it's happening, I'd direct you to Season 5 of David Simon's The Wire. As Simon says here: "In every episode, what's being depicted is a newspaper that's actually not connecting with the problems that exist on the ground. It's not noticing that the police department has been cheating stats for years and making crime go away. It's not noticing that the third grade test scores are being hyped so that No Child Left Behind is not exposed for what it is. That's the critique, and very tellingly, almost perfectly, I think, with the exception of maybe one or two guys out there, everybody missed it." Or, as Simon's Gus Haynes puts it at one point when dissecting newspaper's Pulitzer-hungry mentality: "It's like you're up on the corner of a roof and you're showing some people how a couple of shingles came loose, and meanwhile a hurricane wrecked the rest of the damn house."
Now, whatever you think of this critique, notice it doesn't have much if anything to do with bloggers. Ok, sure, the blogging mentality spilling over into "real" journalism perhaps hasn't helped matters any -- I said as much here. But the idea that the Della Fryes of the world -- or Ana Marie Coxes, if you want to bring it home -- are the main reason newspapers are in trouble right now, or the main reason newspapers miss the "real" conspiracies in our midst, is so facile as to be insulting.
State of Play tells a story of a "good" journalist at a "good" DC newspaper uncovering sordid scandal and "bad" corruption at the highest levels of government, all the while making a "good" protege out of a "bad" blogger. Well, sure, it's a nice fairy tale, but let's get real. I don't remember bloggers having anything to do with Judith Miller, the NYT, and every other newspaper of note enabling Dubya's whole fake-WMD fiasco in 2002 and 2003. I don't remember bloggers telling the NYT to sit on the illegal and warrantless wiretaps story for an entire year, and an election year at that. I don't remember bloggers convincing the likes of Bob Woodward or Tim Russert to circle the wagons around Scooter Libby when he outed Valerie Plame. And I definitely don't remember bloggers encouraging the establishment media to declare Dubya-era torture a non-issue that we all need to just get over, in the name of a false "looking forward" reconciliation based on willfully ignoring illegality, corruption, lies, and moral atrocities.
So, thanks for the civics lesson, State of Play, but I'm not sure I can hold those wretched, superficial bloggers entirely accountable for the decline of paper-and-ink newspapers these days. Look, I'm as sorry to see journalism in the woeful financial state it's in as the next guy. But -- when it comes to enabling and cooperating with manifestly corrupt behavior in Washington -- y'all might want to look at your own hands too. Not all of those stains are ink.
@JohnnyCash: Hello from Reno. Shot man...just to watch him die, actually. Weird, I know.
@ACamus: Beach lovely this time of year. Also, killed Arab. Oops.
Or something like that. Apparently, a new study suggests that -- uh, oh -- using Twitter may stunt one's moral development. "A study suggests rapid-fire news updates and instant social interaction are too fast for the 'moral compass' of the brain to process. The danger is that heavy Twitters and Facebook users could become 'indifferent to human suffering' because they never get time to reflect and fully experience emotions about other people's feelings."
Hmm. I can't say I've found Twitter to be particularly useful yet -- to be honest, it all seems rather gimmicky to me, I worry about its Idiocracy-like implications. (Why 140 characters? Why not 10?), and, frankly, I often find that neither my life nor anyone else's (nor, for that matter, that of anyone's else's adorable little children) is all that fascinating from moment to moment. ("Got up. Tired. It's raining. Maybe I'll eat some Grape Nuts.") But I don't think I can pin any personal reservoir of misanthropy on it either. (For that, I blame FOX News.)
"Did I ever tell you how i got these sock-monkeys?" I guess this post probably isn't in my best interest, as y'all will just further diminish my slim chances of scoring this year's exceedingly cool victory swag, but nevertheless: Web Goddess's annual Oscar contest is now live, and check out this year's prizes! Huzzah to Kris on this pair of Gotham's finest. (It's just too my bad my grim view of Slumdog will probably kill my entry this year.)
"Change has come to WhiteHouse.gov...Millions of Americans have powered President Obama's journey to the White House, many taking advantage of the internet to play a role in shaping our country's future. WhiteHouse.gov is just the beginning of the new administration's efforts to expand and deepen this online engagement. Just like your new government, WhiteHouse.gov and the rest of the Administration's online programs will put citizens first." Happily and quite impressively, the White House website gets Obamaifed.
I'm not normally one for blog memes here, but this movie quote game via Divine Comedy of Errors looked like particularly good fun. The rules, as direct from DCoE: "1. Pick 15 of your favorite movies. (Ok, I picked 20.) 2. Find a quote from each movie. 3. Post them here for everyone to guess. 4. Strike it out when someone guesses correctly, and put who guessed it and the movie. 5. NO GOOGLING/using IMDb search or other search functions." Gotta stress that last one, y'all. That's not cricket.
1. "The rest of the country looks upon New York like we're left-wing Communist, Jewish, homosexual pornographers. I think of us that way, sometimes, and I live here." [SB got it. This is Annie Hall (not Manhattan.) Hard to pick one quote from this great, great film.]
2. "Are we like couples you see in restaurants? Are we the dining dead?" [Tessa pegged it: Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, from the Chinese dinner scene where Joel and Clementine wallow in quiet desperation. Sunshine, by the way, often gets particularly quality remix treatment on Youtube.]
3. "Sister, when I've raised hell you'll know it." [sb got this one too: Miller's Crossing, concluding one of the classic Tom-Verna dust-ups.]
4. "Defeat! Shameful, ignominious! Defeat that set back for twenty years the cause of reform in the U.S." [An old wooden sled to sb, who correctly identified this as Citizen Kane. The line is from the News on the March newsreel opening the film, when Charles Foster Kane loses the governor's race, on account of what we would now indelicately call a "bimbo eruption."]
5. "Three: If asked if you care about the world's problems, look deep into the eyes of he who asks, he will not ask you again." [Props to Rob Newland (nee Aaron Jacob Edelstein.) This is one of the "Seven Simple Rules for a Life in Hiding" from I'm Not There, my favorite film of last year (and, still, I think, one of the more underappreciated.)]
6. "Nothing is f**ked? The goddamn plane has crashed into the mountain!" [Mark it eight: CJS correctly conjured up The Big Lebowski, still a treasure trove of hilarity for these dark times.]
7. "I got the *right* man. The wrong one was delivered to me as the right man, I accepted him on good faith as the right man. Was I wrong?" [A bit of a stickler for paperwork, J. Dunn got this one. It's GitM's namesake: Brazil. The line is Jack Lint (Michael Palin) rationalizing his murderous interrogation of Tuttle, 'er, Buttle.]
8. "That Casey. He might have been a preacher but he seen things clear. He was like a lantern. He helped me to see things clear." [10 points for Gryffindor and Kris. This is Tom talking about the Rev. Casey in The Grapes of Wrath. (Of course, if you've never read the book or seen the John Ford film, the Boss can summarize it for ya in 4:24.)]
9. "So I graduate, I call him up long distance, I say 'Dad, now what?' He says, 'Get a job.' Now I'm 25, make my yearly call again. I say Dad, 'Now what?' He says, 'I don't know, get married.'" [Kudos to Eric Sipple, despite his breaking the first two rules of Fight Club.]
10. "As Bertrand Russell once said, 'The only thing that will redeem mankind is cooperation.' I think we can all appreciate the relevance of that now." "Was that on a beer mat?" "Yeah, it was Guinness Extra Cold."" [MattS correctly called it for Shaun of the Dead. Good on ya, mate.]
11. "We were frightened of being left alone for the rest of our lives. Only people of a certain disposition are frightened of being alone for the rest of their lives at the age of 26, and we were of that disposition." [Also got by MattS, this is High Fidelity, another very quotable movie. Rob (John Cusack) is talking about his dalliance with Lili Taylor's Sarah.]
12. "Everybody liked me. I liked myself." [SB knocks it down with Amadeus. Salieri is referring to the good ole days before God's Instrument arrived in Vienna.]
13. "Let's get down to brass tacks. How much for the ape?" [Recognizing the hand of the Good Doctor, CJS got it: Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. (And it seems the line actually made it into the trailer as well.)]
14. "Daddy what's gradual school?" "Oh Gradual school is where you go to school and you gradually find out you don't want to go to school anymore." [Not even an Ellen Jamesian, mikefromeseattle made the call: The World According to Garp.]
15. "I am altering the deal. Pray I don't alter it any further." [Kris beat several others to the punch here: The Empire Strikes Back. This deal is getting worse all the time...]
16. "Have you never heard of situationism, or postmodernism? Do you know nothing about the free play of signs and signifiers?" [Trust an academic and music lover, Ted, to get this one. It's 24 Hour Party People, as Tony Wilson (Steve Coogan) is explaining to a reporter why "Joy Division" aren't in fact a bunch of Nazis.]
17. "You're born, you take s**t. You get out in the world, you take more s**t. You climb a little higher, you take less s**t. Till one day you're up in the rarefied atmosphere and you've forgotten what s**t even looks like." [Welcome to the Layer Cake, claxton6. (This is Michael Gambon explaining the title.) By the way, I just learned very recently that chameleon Ben Whishaw played Sidney in this flick. Must've been focused on something else...]
18. "I was told to tell you that you're a fascist pig." [Points for Eric & Wendy: This is from Children of Men, when Clive Owen is making contact with Michael Caine's police "friend." (My favorite line from the movie would've been a dead giveaway: "Well that was even worse, everybody crying. I mean...Baby Diego ? Come on, the guy was a wanker!")]
19. "You broke into my house, stole my property, murdered my servants and my pets, and THAT is what grieves me the most!" [Stephen recognized this as Thulsa Doom in Conan the Barbarian. But does he know the riddle of steel, and what is best in life? One hopes, or Crom will cast him out of Valhalla!]
20. "You're going to make yourself a new home out there. You're a New Yorker, that won't ever change. You got New York in your bones. Spend the rest of your life out west but you're still a New Yorker. You'll miss your friends, you'll miss your dog, but you're strong." [Ted also caught this one. It's from the final Brian Cox monologue of The 25th Hour, still arguably the best movie yet made about the impact of 9/11 on NYC.]
As of this weekend, Ghost in the Machine is now nine years old. [0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8.] With an incoming Obama administration, an expanded Democratic Congress, and, perhaps most startling, the Knickerbockers actually two games over 500, it's looking harder than usual to find things to complain about around here. Even amid the twilight realm of the ABD, that faint orange glow in the distance is looking less like troubling fires ahead and more and more like an approaching dawn. Nevertheless, whatever the future holds, GitM (hopefully) rolls on. As always, whether you're a longtime reader or just a lost/adventurous Googler, thanks for stopping by.
"Of all the shortcomings of the establishment press today, none is more central to the corruption of the profession than the decision to prioritize balance over accuracy. That corruption is visibly on display in the current coverage of the McCain campaign's policy of deliberate lies...This is what gives liars a clear strategic advantage over non-liars. And it's an open question whether McCain's level of dishonesty turns out to be so great that it overwhelms reporters' unwillingness to report accurately on it." Over at TPM, Josh Marshall rails against media complicity in the McCain campaign's recent embrace of blatant falsehood as a political strategy. (You know it's bad when even the Post's Richard Cohen is renouncing his McCain-love.)
The other night, I caught the tail end of Bob Schieffer, Jonathan Alter, and Paul Begala on Charlie Rose, and Alter, Schieffer et al were blaming the pathetic, pathetic job by the mainstream media in this election on, of course, the blogosphere (much as Schieffer did in the interview here.) "We can't be responsible for all these bloggers. The Internet is the only vehicle to convey news...that has no editor. Even the worst newspaper has an editor." (Schieffer, 44:30) Uh, Judith Miller wasn't writing a blog, nor was the Gray Lady bereft of editors, when the NYT and the rest of the mainstream media basically inhaled the Dubya administration's lies about the Iraq war without complaint. And the same goes for the MSM's dancing around the obvious tripe emanating from the McCain campaign here in 2008.
Look, blogs aren't the problem right now. As Marshall and many others have noted, the problem is that all too much of the MSM, once again using "balance" as a cover for its cowardice, spends the majority of its time trying to ascertain -- and then straddle -- the exact middle point between the facts as they stand and McCain-Palin's recent spate of ridiculous deceptions. To paraphrase Colbert: If, as it has in recent weeks, the truth has a definite Obama bias, then it befalls the Fourth Estate, as the self-appointed referees of the political ballgame, to set the record straight. And if televised poobahs like Candy Crowley refuse to do their jobs, and even talking heads who should know better, such as my old employer, roll over like puppies in the name of McCain's presumed maverickness, then it's definitely up to the blogs out there to fill the void. (See for example, Andrew Sullivan, who's been compiling a sadly expansive list of the lies of Sarah Palin.)
The depressing slide of our major media institutions into frightened, ratings-fueled irrelevance didn't start with this election, or course. But the stakes are too high right now to sit back and let their abysmal erosion pay any more dividends for the McCain campaign. We need to fight back, and hard. (Ad below via Ted at the Late Adopter.)
"In my mind I’m barely scratching the surface here, and not because of what my interpretation means or what inspired the actual lyric, but because there are so many possible interpretations and mine doesn’t really that much matter in the long run. So no, I don’t think I’ll regret sharing a few ‘secrets’ with those who really care about the songs." (I finally talked to Michael Stipe, he touched me on my arm...) In honor of Matthew Perpetua of Fluxblog completing his recent R.E.M. side-project, Pop Songs '07-08, Stipe drops by to answer your questions about the lyrics. [Part II, Part III.] Great score, Matt, and congrats on finishing up the R.E.M. oeuvre.
While I'm getting all the "look at me -- I'm embedded!" links out of the way, here's a Conde Nast Portfolio report on the Big Tent, filmed Monday, that features me briefly. Judging from the questions I keep getting asked, numerous mainstream media groups seem to be doing variations on this same sorta puff-piece story ("Who are these crazy "bloggers," and (gasp) will they take over everything?), although -- at least so far -- I've spent most of my own interview-time talking to foreign press.
Also, whatever Drudge is currently saying about "Google massaging journalists," they're in fact massaging bloggers. Yes, there's still a difference (and, no, I still haven't partaken -- big line.)
"What I have wanted most to do...is to make political writing into an art." By way of Return of the Reluctant, it seems George Orwell's diary entries will be posted online in blog form beginning August 9, seventy years after he initially wrote them. Welcome to the political blogosphere, George! (And good luck breaking into the TNR-Politico-Atlantic-TPM mutual-regard society.)
FYI: As you may or may not have noticed, the list of categories to the right has been growing considerably over the past few days. This is because, [a] to take advantage of the usual summer lull, [b] in true bored historian form, I'm indulging my penchant for archiving, [c] since 90-95% of GitM's hits are Google searches anyway, and [d] since I didn't really think through how long it was going to take when I started, I've decided to go back through the archives and tag up the old posts with more detailed categories.
After several hours of work, I'm only to December 2007, so this should take a few weeks to complete, on and off. (And the Geocities era (1999-2002) will remain untouched for now.) But, hopefully, the backlog of posts will be more useful in the future.
In the past week, two friends and readers have informed me that GitM is acting somewhat squirrelly in the latest version of Firefox for Mac. Now, I'm a PC guy (by usage and by temperament), so I can't troubleshoot the problem on my computers here. But, is anyone else out there having issues recently? My guess it probably has something to do with embedded videos, since that's the only "new" thing around here lately, and most likely I'm betting the problem is either this St. Patrick's Day post from last week or the Tracey Morgan SNL one right before it. Does anyone know if Firefox (on a Mac) hiccups with certain types of embedded videos, or am I barking up the wrong tree? Any help is greatly appreciated.
Update: Raza at High Industrial informed me that the offending party was likely the Tracy Morgan post. I've now removed the embedded video...Mac Firefoxers, is everything back to normal?
"Despite the attention blogs can get, the poll said 56 percent of Americans say they never read blogs that discuss politics. Another 23 percent read them several times a year, the survey showed. While blogs are largely considered the realm of young people who are most Internet-savvy, only 19 percent of people ages 18 to 31, and 17 percent of those ages 32 to 43, regularly read a political blog, the poll said." A new Harris Interactive poll finds that most people don't read political blogs. Believe me, I've noticed. :s
"With a week to go before climactic tests in Texas and Ohio, Hillary Rodham Clinton’s campaign team has slipped into full recriminations mode. Looking backward, interviews with a cross-section of campaign aides and sympathetic outsiders suggest a team consumed with frustration and finger-pointing about the apparent failure of several recent tactical moves against Barack Obama. Looking forward, it is clear Clinton’s team has only a faint and highly improvisational strategy about what to do over the next seven days. Simply put, there is no secret weapon." Politico's Mike Allen and John F. Harris offer another dismal window into what looks to be the final days in Camp Clinton.
In related news, Atlantic blogger Marc Ambinder -- who, along with Politico's Ben Smith and Salon's Joan Walsh, has been one of the more obviously Clinton-leaning pundits in the paid blogosphere (nice work if you can get it) -- pretty much gives up hope: "The 'HRC can come back' bandwagon is rolling through town, and I spent a long time yesterday contemplating whether to jump on board. But the platform on which her supporters stand right now seems more tenuous by the day...Advisers figure that a loss in Texas is as likely as a win in Ohio; a large number of staffers appear to be willing to quit en masse next Wednesday if there’s a split decision and Clinton gives notice that she intends to fight for another month."
Update: Former Chief of Staff and long-time Clinton loyalist Leon Panetta gives his own post-mortem for the campaign, and puts the blame squarely on Mark Penn: "'[Penn] is a political pollster from the past. I never considered him someone who would run a national campaign for the presidency,' he said. He asserted that Mr. Penn 'comes from an old school, like Karl Rove -- it’s all about dividing people into smaller groups rather than taking the broader approach that was needed.'"
Hello, all. So...can you guess who I'm supporting in Tuesday's NH primary?
In any case, now seems as good a time as any to plug some GitM spinoffs I've recently put together, if anyone is interested. First up, if you usually come here just for the movie reviews, I've created GitM Reviews as a separate review site (although -- don't worry -- they'll always be posted here first.) Second, if your interest was piqued by any of the entries on civic progressivism of late, I've also created Small-R Republic as a central clearinghouse for that information. (Again, everything will be either posted here first or linked to as written.)
Both of these are projects I'm only starting to develop online, but they're enough off the ground that they can bear page views and/or advice from the regulars. (Also, while I've refrained from putting advertising here and plan to continue to, I may decide to put up ads on GitMreviews...so if anyone has had a particularly good or terrible experience with an ad provider, please let me know.)
Way to shield the hated heat. Way to put myself to sleep. Ghost in the Machine is 8 years old today. [0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7.] Time to take a break? Nah...I can still reach my destination (tho' it's still a ways away.) Until then, as always, whether you're a long-time reader, a first-time visitor, or (most likely) just a lost Googler, thanks for coming by.
"For those who attempt it, the doctoral dissertation can loom on the horizon like Everest, gleaming invitingly as a challenge but often turning into a masochistic exercise once the ascent is begun. The average student takes 8.2 years to get a Ph.D.; in education, that figure surpasses 13 years. Fifty percent of students drop out along the way, with dissertations the major stumbling block. At commencement, the typical doctoral holder is 33, an age when peers are well along in their professions, and 12 percent of graduates are saddled with more than $50,000 in debt."
By way of Little Bit Left, a new site by a Columbia colleague that's well worth adding to the blogroll, the NYT surveys the sad plight of the modern ABD. (I'll be 33 at my current expected finish date, seven years after starting, and my cohort's attrition rate has been significant, so it seems the stats bear out in my case.) "Those who insist on dissertations are aware that they must reduce the loneliness that defeats so many scholars...'It's easy, especially in our field, to feel isolated, and that tends to slow people down...There's no sense of belonging to an academic community.'" Oh, I dunno...Berk and I often have very scintillating conversations...progressive citizenship, New Era consumerism, socks, squirrels, you name it.
A hearty congrats to former Columbia colleague Ted (of The Late Adopter) and his wife Reshima on the birth of their daughter last Thursday. I expect she will be well-versed in both American history and movie lore from a very young age.
With the aid of an eagle-eyed reader, whom I met at my friend Steve's wedding in Louisville last August and who saw it on sale, I went ahead yesterday and procured ghostinthemachine.com. The blog's been here at .net for five and half of its almost eight years, and is pretty well-established here. (Put another way, it seems like GitM already has all the readership it's ever going to get.) Still, I figured it couldn't hurt to finally pick up the .com addy I'd been eyeing since '99, and which now bounces to this site. At any rate, if you've been using ghostinthemachine.net to get here, go ahead and keep doing so. But, if .com strikes your fancy more...well, now that works too.
Movable 4.D'oh! update: Ok, with my limited knowledge of css and a lot of trial and error testing of MT 4's template system, this is the new look I've managed to piece together for the front page. Let me know if it's a strain on the eyes or otherwise unpleasant to peruse. Now, time to fix the archives...
Hmm. Ok, as you can see, things look slightly different at the moment. I've been trying to update to Movable Type 4.0, and, while trying to get the individual entry pages to update, it seems I've gone ahead and switched back to the default style. That's recommended anyway, but things might look funky around here for a few days while I get everything working again (and try to figure out how to get my individual entry pages to appear.) Bear with me...and hope I don't permanently break anything.
Update: Well, shoot. I think I broke it. Individual entry pages used to be listed by number. Now they're listed by name. So that means every entry that links to another entry is now riddled with "Page Not Found" errors. This is not good.
Update 2: Ok, that problem is fixed. I had to read up on archive mapping and then navigate my way around this bug, but that seemed to do the trick. Now, to start playing with the look around here. Sigh...MT 4.0 better be something else, 'cause right now I'm feeling like Gob Bluth...I've made a huge mistake.
Update 3: Ok, MT 4.0, autosave be damned, just ate the In the Valley of Elah review I'd been working on for the past hour. And, when it comes to fixing the templates, cutting and pasting is absolutely afflicted. I'm really starting to hate this "upgrade."
Also, since I came back to find over 10,000 spam comments plastered all over the Ghost, I've decided to take drastic action and installed a Captcha system, in the form of Jay Allen's comment challenge. So, if any of y'all want to leave a comment from now herein, you'll need to answer the not-very-tricky "challenge question." (The answer, as the hint basically tells you, is Berkeley.) As a result, the spam ratio around here has gone from 10-15 a minute to none, zip, zero over the past 24 hours. Can the war on spam finally be over? I'm not rolling out the Mission Accomplished banner just yet, but I'm cautiously optimistic.
"The man in me will hide sometimes to keep from bein' seen, but that's just because he doesn't want to turn into some machine." Or something like that. Obviously, I've been taking a break from the Ghost for a few weeks (although, as per the norm, that didn't much upset the thousands of comment spammers -- they still love the site, want to borrow my templates, have their own sites about infinitis, pr0n, prescription drugs, etc. etc.) And, since I'm off to my ten-year college reunion this weekend, I won't be posting much for the next few days yet. But, I figured I should pop my head in and say hello. So, hello. Hope everyone else is having a grand summer thus far. For what it's worth, I do hope to return to a normal schedule around here at some point...we'll see.
"What was once seen as a liability for Democrats and progressives in the past -- they couldn't get 20 people to agree to the same thing, they could never finish anything, they couldn't stay on message -- is now an asset,' Leyden said. 'All this talking and discussing and fighting energizes everyone, involves everyone, and gets people totally into it.'" The WP's Jose Antonio Vargas examines why the Dems are winning the Web War. "'For Republicans, the Internet is where bad things happen. Take [former U.S. senator] George Allen and his 'macaca' moment...You can kind of understand why Republicans have this almost instinctive fear of the Internet, where the mob rules."
In the deadliest act of school violence in American history, at least 33 people lie dead at Virginia Tech after what was presumably a jilted student's bloody shooting rampage."'It is difficult to comprehend senseless violence on this scale,' said Virginia's Governor Timothy M. Kaine in a statement."
And, as details from this story emerge, I've been catching up over at Medley on the recent nightmare befalling blogger Kathy Sierra, who's been the recipient of sexually repugnant death threats as a result of her posting on, of all things, tech issues. (Not to say that posting on anything else would justify the depraved sexist bile thrown her way, but I've sadly come to half-expect that sort of vileness from Freepers, the uglier elements of dKos, and the like.) I guess I shouldn't be all that surprised by the disgusting misogyny pervading this latter incident -- it's sorta like people acting surprised that we've found a racist in our midst in Don Imus, as if bigoted old white guys in positions of power were a dwindling species or something. And, true, these two events have little or nothing to do with each other, except that I'm finding out about them at the same time. Still, I have to say, sometimes all the rage, ugliness, and despair that seems to lurk just under the brittle crust of our society is overwhelmingly disheartening. Let's get it together, people. To go back to Auden again, we must love one another or die.
Update: Exhibit C in today's litany of horrors, this ghastly assault on a Columbia Journalism grad student, which occurred not more than twenty blocks from here over the weekend. Sweet merciful Jesus, this is a sick, sick world sometimes. Update 2: They got him.
By way of Quiddity, Matthew Perpetua of the always enticing (and mp3-stacked) Fluxblog has dedicated himself to writing on every R.E.M. song over at Pop Songs '07. I'll definitely be checking it out, even if I think he's way off on "Saturn Return"...(it made #15 on my own list awhile back, and is still up there in my esteem.)
As you no doubt know, the Oscars were held last night, with The Departed, Martin Scorsese (finally), Forest Whitaker in The Last King of Scotland, and Helen Mirren for The Queen the big winners of the evening. [Full list.] (Letters from Iwo Jima was to my mind a better film than Departed, but Scorsese's Aviator was better than the egregious Million Dollar Baby two years ago, so it's a wash.) Alas, once again I was a very close also-ran in the Webgoddess Oscar pool, placing in the top-four [I got 10 out of 12 of the major awards right, missing only on Best Foreign Film (I picked Pan, but was glad to see it lose, in a way -- it had already taken too many of Children of Men's awards) and Best Song. (Melissa Etheridge over Dreamgirls? Really? That's just bizarre.)] Ah well, wait 'till next year...
Cineastes and sock monkey enthusiasts take note: Kris's annual Oscar contest at WebGoddess is now officially open, and the prize this year is as cool in its own way as last year's Brokesock pair. I came really close last year (grrr, stupid Crash) so I think I'm going to hold off until the buzz solidifies before making this year's picks.
Grand news for discriminating readers of the blog nation: GitM's consistently excellent blog-twin, Follow Me Here, has returned from hiatus. (Both FmH and GitM date to 11/15/99.)
Yep, it's that time again: Ghost in the Machine is seven years old today. It's been an up-and-down year, to be sure, but I've got no plans to give up the Ghost just yet, seven-year-itch be damned. (Particularly given that this blog has never seen a Democratic Congress -- that should make things interesting for awhile.) At any rate, once again, and as always, thanks for stopping by. [0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6]
By way of Dumbmonkey, one of the old-school progressive blogs returns to the Big Game. Welcome back, Ethel the Blog!
Via LMG, two bizarrer-than-most comic book creators get in the blog game: Dave Sim and Bill Sienkiewicz.
Some amusing links via other blogs: Pureboredom offers an appreciation of John Hughes soundtracks, with a number of worthy mp3s available for download (via Freakgirl), and Webgoddess points the way to this slew of decently funny motivational posters. We're going to need more monkeys.
"Colbert stepped farther through the looking glass by editing Wikipedia's 'Stephen Colbert' entry during his show. He railed against the Encyclopedia Britannica's assertion that George Washington owned slaves. 'If I want to say he didn't, that's my right,' Colbert said. On Wikipedia's "George Washington" entry, the following phrase appeared at the end: 'In conclusion, George Washington did not own slaves.'" The inimitable Stephen Colbert sends his legions against Wikipedia. (Via Now This.)
I've upgraded the site to Movable Type 3.31. Please let me know if y'all have any issues with functionality and the like.
"I just the other day got, an internet was sent by my staff at 10 o'clock in the morning on Friday and I just got it yesterday. Why? Because it got tangled up with all these things going on the internet commercially." Via my sis-in-law Lotta, GOP Senator Ted "Bridge to Nowhere" Stevens (R-AK) seems more than slightly confused about the functioning of the Internets, to use Dubya's parlance.
"Where is the analyst at a firm called Forrester Research who used to be quoted everywhere calling us, witlessly, 'the Slatanic'? Haven't heard much from him lately." A happy 10th anniversary to Michael Kinsley's Slate, home to Dahlia Lithwick, Fred Kaplan, Seth Stevenson, and several other writers and journalists invariably worth checking out.
Hey y'all...if you tried to leave a comment recently, but couldn't, sorry about that -- it's fixed now. Spambots overwhelmed the server while I was busy elsewhere.
"History will be kind to me, for I intend to write it." A personal note: At the kind invitation of Ralph Luker at Cliopatria, I've joined up as one of the founding bloggers of Revise and Dissent, a recently launched group effort by younger historians and historians-to-be over at the History News Network. I haven't gotten around to posting there yet (and I expect I'll be cross-posting quite often with GitM), but it's now up-and-running and my new blog-colleagues are already posting, so check it out!
My apologies if you've tried to come by here lately and found the site derelict. There've been issues on the server side (perhaps akin to this) that look to have resolved themselves.
As you may have noticed, I've tweaked the formatting of blog-entries here at GitM (mainly to resolve strange spacing issues in Mozilla/Netscape.) Let me know if you find the new layout (or the old layout, for that matter) unreadable.
A very happy sixth blogday to Quiddity, Neilalien (belated -- Feb. 25), and LinkMachineGo (preemptive -- Mar. 4), all must-reads on the fanboy/fangirl blog circuit. And, also turning older than one hand can count is Le Blogeur, perhaps the original who-blogs-the-bloggers site. Congrats to all!
Another Murphy enters the blogosphere -- My sister-in-law Lotta has just begun her own blogg for Allehanda, a Swedish newspaper. Check it out! (particularly if you speak or understand Swedish.)
Sorry for the lack of updates around here of late -- I've been using the blog-time to redesign the old headers above, as well as add quite a few more to the rotation. (It was something vaguely productive that I could accomplish while TV-binging to get up to date on Battlestar Galactica -- the thinking man's gritty post-9/11-traumatic stress disorder sci-fi shoot-em-up -- for a few nights.) At any rate, keep an eye out for new faces.
A very happy 5th blogday to one of Sydney's finest blogs, Kris at Web-Goddess (In case you haven't been reading her, she's compiled a very thorough set of Year 5 stats.) Also, a belated sixth blogday to Boycaught of Caught in Between, who, like this site, also got into the blog-game in late '99. Here's to many more! Update: And, in other excellent blog news, Raza at HighIndustrial is back for the '06...booyah.
A very happy 6th blogday to Hal at Blivet, and here's to many more.
As a nightcap to Kong (who, as it turns out, was sitting outside the venue) yesterday evening, I caught Goldfrapp for their only US performance (although they're rumored to be touring here in 2006) at the surprisingly spacious new Nokia Theatre in Times Square (it used to be a mega-sized theater...I saw Titanic there back in the day.) All in all, an excellent show -- Allison's voice sounded studio-perfect and their sultry electrobeat bounce really filled the room:
The (Supernature-heavy) Setlist: Train / Tiptoe / Koko / Slide In / Number 1 / U Never Know / Lovely Head / Fly Me Away / Satin Chic / Beautiful / Ride A White Horse (a particular highlight) / Ooh La La
Encore: Strict Machine / Black Cherry
The stage show (if you don't count the Jesus lookalike playing synth-violin) basically involved two dancers writhing in various costumes: as bikini-clad werewolves in "Train" ("Wolflady sucks my brain"), glittering horses in "Ride the White Horse," spidery green winged-things for "Strict Machine," and so on. Meanwhile, the comparatively demure Ms. Goldfrapp, looking a bit like Debbie Harry in a dark pantsuit, held court at center stage, and she sounded amazing. (Damiella/Dream Out Loud has posted some pics. If you invert the angle and add a few more heads, you basically get the show from my perspective on the right side of the room, where I'd fallen in with fellow bloggers Chris/Do You Feel Loved and Matt/Fluxblog.) At any rate, if they come to your town, check 'em out (and preferably in a spacious venue like the Nokia Theatre -- you'll want room to bop and dance.)
A very happy 5th blogday to Listen Missy, a fellow DC-to-NYC transplant with consistently great links and comment on film, dance, photography, and music. Encore!
Do You Feel Loved? turns five today. Happy blogday, Chris, and here's to many more.
Better late than never...
If you've tried to post a comment here in the past two days or so and were denied for "questionable content," sorry about that. I inadvertently added "http://" to my MT-Blacklist, causing basically all comments to bounce. The problem is fixed now.
A very happy (and belated) 5th blogday to All About George, a frequent source for absorbing links and occasional Dylania.
In keeping with the design and functionality around here being a good two or three years behind the curve, I've gone ahead and enabled Trackback and tried to fix up the RSS feeds (RSS 1.0, RSS 2.0). Please let me know if I broke anything. (Also, if there's a quick way to allow trackbacks on all the old posts without going through and doing it manually, that'd be helpful to know too.)
"How can we fix us? The fights, the silence . . . I know! Let's get a puppy!" A hearty congrats to Joel Derfner, who's both a friend from college and the brother/roommate of a good friend here at Columbia, on the publication of his recent book, Gay Haiku (a project which originated on his blog...assuredly a better way to make this hobby pay than the Kottke route.)
B.K. DeLong of Brainstream reports that The Leaky Cauldron, the Harry Potter-themed blog I started at the old Geocities site years and years ago, has not only been deemed J.K. Rowling's favorite fan site, but is also on the short list of press invites to Rowling's home once the Half-Blood Prince arrives. A hearty congrats to the Cauldron team!
What did I have to do with this? Less than nothing, really -- the site just kinda sat there until B.K. took it over and turned it into the flagship Potter fan site. But I did find this news another interesting reflection of just how much Internet-time's passed since GitM first got off the ground (the second in two days.) I'm old, Gandalf. I may not look it, but I feel it...
If you've arrived from Ralph Luker's kind article in this month's AHA Perspectives, welcome to GitM. If you click and/or scroll around enough, you should be able to find something that catches your fancy around here. And, if you're looking for more quality weblogs by historians (and aspiring historians), check out Cliopatria's comprehensive History Blogroll.
The Huffington Post, Arianna Huffington's answer to Matt Drudge, went live today, with a handful of celebrity postings (for example, John Cusack on Hunter) and a blogroll of the usual suspects. Seems ok, I guess, although I think Huffington would do well to make the site layout look less like the print version of The Onion.
A very happy 5th Blogday to the consistently well-written, entertaining, and informative Booknotes. Here's to many more.
He's seen things you people wouldn't believe. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion, C-beams glittering in the dark near the Tannhauser gate...and he's always made sure to post about it soon afterwards at LinkMachineGo, another excellent blog joining the ranks of recent five-year veterans. Congrats! (Somewhere, Grant Morrison is rejoicing.)
By way of Uncorked/Medley, a Federal Election Commissioner warns that political blogging may have to be regulated under the McCain-Feingold bill. Hmm. Well, obviously that wouldn't work. But, I get the sense that Bradley Smith, a GOP anti-campaign-finance ringer, knows this, and is raising the black flag of Internet Regulation just to get the blogosphere up in arms over McCain-Feingold in particular and campaign finance regulation in general. Well, I'm not biting. Sure, the FEC needs a new direction when it comes to addressing the Internet, but I highly doubt Agent Smith here is the guy to provide it. Better someone who at least recognizes the utility of and need for comprehensive campaign finance reform.
Happy recent 5th blogdays to Quiddity, one of the web's best-kept secrets for quality fangirl linkage, to Neilalien, bane of Dormammu and otherworldly portal to all things Strange in this realm, and to Le Blogeur, who's been eyeing the blog nation since before it was hip....we've come a long way, Sally/Renton.
Sorry, Ted - You may be The Late Adopter, but now we have an even later adopter in the Columbia History Department -- On Friday, ancient historian Jason Governale set sail with his new blog Corsairs United. Happy hunting.
Found while perusing the Metafilter dust-up (via LinkMachineGo) that ensued after Kottke's recent decision to quit his job and blog for food (I stopped reading Kottke years ago, but power to him) -- Dan Hartung, one of the earliest old-school bloggers and former proprietor of Lake Effect, has returned to the game with Stilicho. Welcome back!
With spring just around the corner, old blog stalwarts Lots of Co. and Do You Feel Loved? (and, for that matter, even the ghastly-retro AICN) get spiffy new redesigns. And, if you stop by GitM mainly for the politics, I have two newly-born blogs of note for you. My Columbia colleague Ted Wilkinson (currently working on a dissertation on Pat Brown) has set up shop over at The Late Adopter, and Ben Kirby, an old friend and political hand from DC, is now posting at The Spencerian. All of the above are well worth checking out.
Hmmm...I tried to update this morning and was locked out of MT..."Got an error: Bad ObjectDriver config: Connection error: Too many connections." It seems fixed now -- still, it's random snafus like these that make me think I really need to get wiser about how to troubleshoot such issues.
A hearty congrats to Chris at Do You Feel Loved?, who procured one of his dream jobs yesterday, and will be working for none other than DC Comics starting next week. With this and Batman Begins, is Detective Comics back for the '05?
After the general post-election gloominess began to wear off near the end of last year (of course, it hasn't completely subsided -- at times, I think you can still see the cynicism emanating off me like little cartoon lines), I made it a resolution of sorts to start getting more involved in Dem organizing for this upcoming political cycle. So when some friends of mine (and founders of Concerts for Change) alerted me to their forum this evening on "Net Roots and the DNC," which included A-list lefty bloggers Atrios and Afro-Netizen, former Dean director Zephyr Teachout, Personal Democracy Forum editor Micah Sifry, and NY Dem Party higher-ups Judith Hope and Mark Green, I very quickly decided to go check it out.
All in all, it made for a partial yet intriguing glimpse into the State of the Party 2005, and one I found at turns dispiriting and encouraging (and far more often the latter.) The panel itself was decently engaging, with most of the discussion centered around the imminent battle for DNC chair. (While there were a number of Simon Rosenberg buttons among the attendees, the panel seemed to split between Dean enthusiasts and DNC agnostics, who felt the upcoming election wasn't of much import regardless of who wins.) There was also some discussion of the role left-leaning bloggers might play in helping to keep the media more attuned to right-wing spin jobs, but, alas, no one figured out how to square that circle just yet.
Former mayoral candidate and Nader Raider Mark Green, charismatic enough in that politico way, closed out the forum part of the evening with some clever but clearly canned remarks for the Young People into that Newfangled Technology stuff. (For example, he advised the crowd to "choose your mentors well," which, c'mon now, is the same hoary advice Strom Thurmond gave 1000 of us at Boys' State when I was 17 years old.) He also regaled us with a short US history lesson, which I'll give him a B+ on -- he was spot-on with George Washington plying his constituents-to-be with rum and George McGovern and direct mail, less so with the Lincoln the "real Log Cabin Republican" quip.)
As I said, I found some elements of the evening somewhat discouraging (and not just because I soon realized that my limited socializing skills at these sorts of things had further atrophied since entering academia.) For one, at times I felt the discussion seemed on the verge of degenerating into the worst kind of New Left-era identity politics, whereby the gender and ethnicity of the new DNC chair was somehow more important than his or her vision for the party. [This was driven home by a (white) fellow in the back hijacking the conversation at one point (does this sort of thing happen at GOP events? I always wonder) and loudly enumerating the few minorities in the room (By which he meant black people -- Latinos and South Asians went under the radar), all to suggest that the event was somehow a charade and a farce for its lack of proportional representation.]
This is not to say that issues of gender and ethnicity aren't absolutely central to our party's core principles, or that the all-white-male slate for DNC chair isn't a disappointment -- to suggest otherwise would be both neanderthal and imbecilic to the extreme...even, dare I say it, Summers-esque. But, to my mind, it's a question of focus. White, Black, Asian, Hispanic, male, female, straight, gay, or bisexual...we Dems just got our asses handed to us by the predominantly white male GOP. At a certain point -- hopefully soon -- we're going to have to learn to deemphasize these differences among us and reemphasize our commonality as left-leaning citizens of the republic, rising up together against the corporate-sponsored avarice, imperial ambitions, and narrow-minded bigotry of today's Republican Party. In other words and IMHO, rhetorically we need to start thinking 1933, and at times I heard way too much 1972 tonight.
(Also, and I know this is a goofy history-geek semantic distinction that I'll just have to get over, but people kept throwing around 'progressive' when they meant 'liberal.' Not the same, y'all.)
All that being said, however, my general impression of the evening was quite favorable, mostly because of the energy, exuberance, and organizational acumen on display from the attendees. We may have lost the recent battle in 2004, but much of the online community-building infrastructure seems intact...and, indeed, seems to be here for the duration. I was reminded of the recent scholarship on the rise of the New Right (by Lisa McGirr, Rick Perlstein, and Matthew Dallek, among others), which ably demonstrates how conservatives, soundly defeated in 1964, managed to capture the California governorship only two years later, once Reagan had replaced Goldwater at the top of the movement. For now, the wheels are definitely churning at the grass-roots level...if we can just get the party machinery in order, find a standard-bearer willing to abandon the protective camouflage, and, most importantly, work on a way to articulate our democratic values against the corporate ministrations of the GOP, we might actually get somewhere.
If nothing else, it speaks volumes that conservative direct-mail pioneer Richard Viguerie is worried about what he sees from the online left -- he's a guy who knows a thing or two about political organizing, and how quickly the worm can turn. Matt Drudge and GWB, we're coming for you.
"Did you think to try to warn them, or were you working on something new?" This may not come as a surprise to many folks, but apparently U2 recently made the business decision to screw over their biggest fans, from forcing fan sites to remove lyric postings to misorganizing a botched online ticket presale that turned into a seriously Dirty Day. I've never been much more than a casual U2 fan, really -- I have all their studio albums, love the A-side of The Joshua Tree like the rest of the Western World, and was most intrigued by them during their more experimental Achtung-Zooropa-Pop phase (To be honest, I haven't had much use for their "Instant Classic Rock" incarnation since.) Still, while Bono's continuing work for Third World debt relief is obviously a very worthy cause, it's sad to see the band turn their backs on their hardcore following like this...and in such patently dumb ways.
As you may have noticed, I've added a Flickr window to the GitM sidebar, making good on my earlier threat to regale y'all with more pictures in 2005. Not much new quite yet, but there'll be more to come soon, hopefully - I'll try to go heavy on photogenic Berkeley pics and keep yours truly safely ensconsed behind the keyboard where I belong.
Well, much as it was fun to delete hundreds of poker, weight loss, and prescription-drug-related comment spam every day, I've gone ahead and (very belatedly) installed MT-Blacklist. Hopefully, it shouldn't affect the few of you out there who do leave actual comments here...but if so, please tell me.
As you can see, I've tweaked the design around here for 2005...and there's probably more to come. The rotating title image is a trick I've seen at much better-designed sites such as High Industrial and Donkeymon, so I was pleasantly surprised to see I could basically cut-and-paste my way to coding prowess via this helpful article. All title pics are used without permission and intended as homage...how's that for a useless disclaimer?
Congrats and best wishes to Kris at Webgoddess and her Snook on their recent wedding in Vegas (and on the Internet.) Hope luck was a lady the rest of the trip!
As it turns out, GitM has a twin. Eliot and the always-excellent Follow Me Here also celebrated Year 5 yesterday. Congrats, and best wishes on many more!
Ghost in the Machine is five years old today. Well, what a long, strange trip it's been...I must say, I don't think I ever envisioned this lasting half a decade when I began back in 1999, particularly when I've never been able to keep a journal-journal for longer than a year or so. And to be honest, I had been considering taking a hiatus of late...Even before the election, I'd been feeling thin and stretched, like butter scraped over too much bread, and since then -- as with many of you, I'm sure -- my frame of mind can get quite Boromir-ish at times. But, that being said, blogging's in my blood at this point, and the onset of Dubya II seems a particularly terrible time to put the keyboard down. Besides, how else am I going to find an outlet for my political antipathies and terminal fanboyisms? So y'all are just going to have to deal with a nervier, punchier GitM in the weeks, months, and years to come...five years down, and here's to many more.
Is anyone else out there having a problem with interminably long rebuild times on Movable Type? It's been slow as molasses around here since 3.11, and 3.121 hasn't helped matters. And it's gotten to the point where it takes 15-20 minutes to post a single entry or to delete one wave of comment-spam, which obviously is cutting down on the choice links and commentary in these parts. Advice on rectifying this would be greatly appreciated, either here or at my post in the MT forums. Update: Michal Sabren, the always friendly proprietor of Cornerhost, has tweaked the archiving around here, which should hopefully bring things back up to speed.
Mark Noferi -- an old friend, former DC speechwriter, current Stanford law student, and inveterate Red Sox fan -- has joined the Blog Nation over at Nofeblog. Worth checking out, particularly if your interests run towards law, music, baseball, and/or politics.
when Hal Rager came to Cornerhost, Coyote was waiting.... Blivet becomes the WordPress-powered Blivet 2.0. Welcome to the Cornerhost environs.
Well, GitM has been running slower and slower ever since I installed Movable Type 3.11 a few weeks ago, and, yesterday afternoon, the server decided it had had enough. So I've been locked out of the blog here for the past 24 hours, and MT is still running slow as molasses. I also discovered my digital camera batteries have all gone the way of the dinosaur, which may nip my proposed Flickring in the bud too. Sigh...it's been a very entropic week.
Since it's getting such good press around the blogosphere (and since Raza at High Industrial was kind enough to send me an invite), I've opened an account over at Flickr, which so far seems like a rather neat photo-sharing application (and one whose deep functionality is probably wasted on me.) At any rate, I've been meaning to take more pictures lately, so hopefully this'll provide a nice impetus. If you're on there, say hello.
June ain't got nothing on September...Congrats and best wishes go out to my college roommate Ray and his lovely wife Susan, who were married on Saturday here in the city, to my HVL stroke Ted and his bride Colby, who married the same day in nearby Cooperstown, and to Webgoddess and her Snook, who announced their engagement over the weekend. May you all have warm words on a cold evening, a full moon on a dark night, and a road downhill all the way to home!
Many condolences to the family and friends of Aaron Hawkins, a.k.a. Uppity Negro, who tragically took his own life sometime last week. While his site wasn't in my daily blogroll, I eventually found myself there a number of times over the years, and his posts and commentary were consistently funny, passionate, and well-written. Aaron was an inspired individual, and his loss is tragic. (Discovered on All About George.)
While tooling around on Friendster the other day, I noticed I'd somehow lost a handful of friends very recently. Now I know why...one of them was fired for blogging. (More here.) Hmmm...given the innocuous content of Troutgirl's posts, this would be lame in most any circumstance. But since Friendster's whole bag is "social software," this seems particularly pathetic. (Found via Plasticbag.)
"What happens to your online self when you die?" By way of LinkMachineGo, City Paper delves into Ghosts in the Machine.
Steve at Now This provides quality commentary on Dave Winer's recent weblog meltdown, which I discovered while trying to access Tomb of Horrors. Since Winer has successfully parlayed his whole self-promoting Father of Weblogs schtick into a cushy Ivy League sinecure, you'd think he at least give all those blogs an early warning before he shut 'em down (or, perhaps, convince fair Harvard to pony up some server space.) Still, acting like a self-interested jerk has been Winer's M.O. for years, so I guess something like this wasn't unexpected. Update: Winer gets worse.
So, as most of y'all probably know by now, there was a great hullaballoo in the Blog Nation today over the release of MT 3.0, and specifically over Movable Type's decision to start charging for various premium packages. Since GitM is just a one-user, one-blog operation, I still qualified for the free download, so I personally can't complain. At any rate, we're running 3.0 around these parts now, so if everything suddenly disappears, you'll know why. To be honest, I'm such a low-level user anyway that I haven't as yet noticed much difference from 2.62. The new comments-editing page seems geared to quick and easy mass deletions, which should alleviate the spam situation. I also haven't enabled the TypeKey comment registration quite yet, but may begin playing with it in the next few days.
Ok, the Movable Type comment spam situation is now officially off the hook. I just spent the last hour of my life deleting 100 or so epigrams and witticisms sent in by diet loss and breast enhancement sites. This...must...stop.
Well, a number of people have suggested that I put the GitM sidebar back on the left side of the screen, so it's been done. As per usual, I've also received a number of blog-comments asking me to try phentermine, gamble online, and procure some cheap auto insurance, but, alas, those requests will not so readily be fulfilled here. Sorry, xysggsll and Cheap Phentermine Now!, and thanks for writing. (Bring on the Typekey, y'all.)
Like Genehack, Do You Feel Loved?, and countless other MT blogs, I've had to deal with a spate of comment spamming lately. So, for anyone else with similar issues, here's an anti-spam hack for MT...please drop me a line if you notice the comments getting overrun.
Friendster cracks down on imaginary friends. I was wondering what happened to my boy Chewbacca.
Via Breaching the Web, Scott Kitchen - formerly of The Other Side - has returned with New Orleans or Bust. Welcome back.
Since GitM is now larger than 500 pages, Atomz will no longer search the site for free. Can anyone out there recommend any good free search applications? Update: With help from Kestrel's Nest, I've solved the problem for the time being. Thanks, Eric (and sorry about that tooth.)
Wendell Wittler, formerly the inimitable One Swell Foop, returns to the blogging ranks. Welcome back! (Via Now This.)
Lake Effect returns from a two-month hiatus with some interesting reflections on the Iraq war. Well-worth reading, as always.
Found in the referrer logs today: Blogshares, a Hollywood Stock Exchange-like site for blog investments. Unfortunately, at the moment I appear to be worth nothing, although I think that's mainly due to a URL discrepancy. So, hey, I've got growth potential.
Google buys Pyra(!) (First seen at LinkMachineGo.) Congrats to the Blogger crew [or should I say cabal? (3/28)] If weblogs aren't mainstream enough already, they will be in very short order.
Congratulations to my friend Jon, whose satellite successfully launched yesterday evening. Also, congrats to Mike (and Dineen) of What's On It for Me? on their forthcoming first child. Usually I would bemoan more GOP voters coming into the world, but I'll definitely make an exception in this case.
Genehack returns to his former digs, Do You Feel Loved? closes up shop, and Absolute Piffle warns of an extended break (Congrats on the adoptions.) Also, happy blogdays (belated, in CiB's case) to Caught in Between, WebGoddess, and Dumbmonkey. Keep up the great work, y'all.
Bloggers of the Left, Unite! (Via LinkMachineGo.) As Lake Effect has noted before, I'm positive Lefty bloggers aren't the rare breed the author thinks they are - a quick browsing through the portal will lead you to dozens of well-written progressive and liberal blogs (Ethel the Blog, Tomb of Horrors and Monkeyfist, for example, to name three off the top of my head.) In fact, I'd hazard to say that the majority of blogs are probably of a lefty bent. Unfortunately for balanced discourse, though, Sullivan and Reynolds both seem to have captivated huge (by blog-standard) audiences almost right from the start. I'd be lying if I didn't find their immediate popularity considerably annoying, but oh well...that's just sour grapes. After several years of writing this blog, I've found its best not to dwell on the (lack of) readership...Therein lies madness.
Many happy returns to The Other Side and Understandishable, who are both reposting after summer hiatuses.
Many congrats to John and Lor at Genehack on the birth of their daughter, Rosanna.
Hey, while I was in Hawaii, there was a Metascene sighting. Booyah.
Booyah...After a too-long hiatus, Pearls That Are His Eyes returns. (Via Do You Feel Loved, who's hopefully not taking too long of a hiatus either.)
Lots of Co. joins the Movable Type masses.
Fairvue Central has updated his Elements Portal, and GitM has gone from Osmium (76) to Indium (49), "a very soft, silvery-white metal with a brilliant luster. The pure metal gives a high-pitched "cry" when bent. It wets glass, as does gallium...There is evidence that indium has a low order of toxicity; however, care should be taken until further information is available." Don't say I didn't warn you.
Happy third Blogday to Medley, who's gone on hiatus to celebrate.
There's yet another new interesting look over at High Industrial. Check it out.
Warblogs and the Pyra crew have it out in the NYT.
The NYC Bloggers Subway Map, by way of Do You Feel Loved?, who also pointed the Blue Kylie remix that's getting a lot of run on my Windows Media Player right now.
