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| Sunday, September 22, 2002 |
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Battling certainties 
| | If we want an original take on something, it's best to look to the peole who look to other people for something completely outside the prevailing frames of reference, yet deeply personal and grounded in the real world. |
| | So today I turned to to David Weinberger, who today turned to Andrius Kulikauskas, who is one of the most original guys we both know. |
| | ...as soon as I focus on myself, my own image cursed, my own mind invalidated, my own power lost, then my screams will bring vicious hands upon my every weakness. |
What we said he said
Larry Lessig is in the house
| | What's so cool about this piece (aside from the fact that it's very well done) is that it takes technolgy's case to entertainment's home town, big time. This is a Good Thing. |
| | Larry and others have been positioning this whole battle geographically: as a fight between Silicon Valley and Hollywood. But in terms of leading personalities it's mostly between Larry and Jack Valenti. |
| | The regional thing is a handy way of characterizing the issue, but it's overbroad. Larry himself has complained convincingly about how technology folks don't give much of a shit about Saving the Net. My guess is that most entertainment industry folks also care far less than Jack Valenti about defending the Sonny Bono Act and the DMCA. In fact, I have a hunch most of Hollywood's technology folk are closer to Lessig than Valenti on the issue. In fact, they might even be closer to Lessig than the technology folks, because more entertainment folks see themselves as professional creators; and the right to make use of old creative work is the main issue with today's story, and with Eldred. |
| | Or at least that's how it looks to me this morning, ninety miles away. I'll find out more tomorrow when I survey the damage at the Beverly Hills Hilton, where Larry has suddenly given a bunch of very scary panels a lot more to talk about. |
There she goes
| |  Channel surfing, looking for the evening news, I just ran across the last moments of the Miss America pageant. Which wasn't. A pageant, that is. It seems to have wandered far away from its swim suit & big dress ideals, which were locked down back in the Fifties, when Bert Parks was still the only conceivable host.
What I'm seeing here looks like a quiz show. Five finalists with stand behind podia giving their answers to fairly obvious multiple choice questions. Several of them apparently can't name the first American in space, or the only president other than Dubya whose dad preceded him on the job. Kinda reminds me of those dumbness tests Howard Stern does with bimbos and homeless people. |
| | I guess the host is famous, but I don't recognize him. I've lost count of his flubs in the five minutes I've watched so far. |
| | Okay, we have a winner... Miss Illinois, not that the Competition page names the state. Nor that it matters. Hey, it's just a TV show. A little smaller in scale than a Pageant. A little more like, I dunno... Survivor or something. |
| | Come to think of it, Miss America would be a lot more entertaining if the contestants voted each other off. Much better than the current system, whatever it is. |
| | In our family the Pageant peaked in '64, when my aunt and uncle came up to Atlantic City from Graham, North Carolina, to cheer Jeanne Swanner, a tall hometown girl with a taller personality who ended up winning Miss Congeniality. My uncle delivered Ms. Swanner among thousands of other babies over his many years as Graham's town doctor. |
| | The winner that year was Donna Axum of Arkansas, who sang opera. Beautifully, I recall. |
| | The  last contest  I remember watching was in 1983, when Vanessa Williams kicked ass. It was the first time I thought the pretttiest contestant was also clearly the smartest and most talented. Vanessa lost her tiara not long after that for having posed nude (good pix, too), but went on to a terrific career. And she still looks hot, nineteen years later. Apparently Rick Fox (he of the perpetual stubble) agrees. He married her in '98. |
| | thanks, once again, to Daze Reader for pointing out that this week Dan has invented a new fetish: "DOAC," a.k.a. "defecating on Ann Coulter." |
| | Dan seems to recommend doing so on Ann's face. |
| | one time, an editor at Hustler loaned me some coprophagy tapes. i didn't see Ann in any of them. |
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