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| Tuesday, November 30, 2004 |
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Running deep 
Flogging
| | See, the manifesto is a @#$%^&*()+!!{{{{{FUCKING}}}}}!! .pdf. Have I made it clear I hate .pdfs? I do. |
| | Says here "our PDFs don't suck." Because they're beautiful and "a joy to read." Excuse me, they do suck if what they contain isn't also on the Web in relatively ugly but open, unowned, nonproprietary, standard and non-infuriating HTML (or its more modern and no less standard successors and derivatives). PDFs, no matter how beautiful, are not a joy to quote (how about all them line breaks you have to edit out?), or to link to. |
| | Forgive me. I'm in a bad mood today about people breaking the Web. |
| | One way they do it is by taking writing off the Web and offering it only as a .pdf "download". AAARg. |
| | A prime example, to me at least, of not knowing when to leave money on the table. Think where we would all be now, including Adobe, if the company had opened up the .pdf standard and Acrobat, way back when the Web was young. Perhaps there are millions (or billions?) Adobe might not have made. But I'm sure there are many more that they could have made because of the .pdf standard (rather than with it, which is what they chose to do). But alas. |
| | Still, container aside, Halley's manifesto rocks. Break open your Adobe whatever-it's-called and read it anyway. |
Hickeys all around
Worth more than a thousand words
| | As a father whose kids are all alive and well, reading about the death of Teddy Ebersol tugs at my heart. All the worse that Teddy's father and brother, who both survived the same crash, could only watch and plead helplessly while their wrecked plane burned. (Teddy was apparently thrown out of the plane and died instantly, so at least he didn't suffer.) |
| | For an interesting study in coverage, compare and contrast the Google, Google News and Technorati links to "Teddy Ebersol." All three reveal, in different ways, that some (if not most) of the best coverage and commentary is local, personal, or both. Kudos also to AP and the Rocky Mountain News, for providing pictures of Teddy and his family on the paper's Web site. |
Apparently not
| | On the drive down from the Bay Area on Friday, my eight-year-old asked me, for the first time, about politics. What are political parties? How are they different than, say, birthday parties? What makes them so different from each other? Why is it so strange that only one set of parents, of one other kid in his class (that he knows of) voted for George Bush? (Consider the demographics: we live in Santa Barbara, the Berkeley of Southern California.) |
| | I tried to explain politics with buttons on the radio. We were approaching San Luis Obispo at the time, one of the still-few homes (a link that's been broken for months) of an Air America Radio outlet: a little station on 1340am. (Trivia: All stations on 1340 are local: limited by the FCC to 1000 watts, or 1/50th the max allowed on most other channels. The other U.S. channels with the same limits are 1230, 1240, 1400, 1450 and 1490. Together they're known in the radio trade as "graveyard" channels.) We already had one button set on 1340, home of Air America in Santa Barbara; so 1340 became our Left channel. Since any SCAN of the AM band will net you half a dozen right wing talk stations (here are Rush Limbaugh's long list of stations in California alone), we stopped at the first one on our dial, KMJ/580, a 50,000-watt station out of Fresno that covers much of California (in spite of its highly directional signal). |
| | I am right, and you are wrong. |
| | You are not just wrong, you and those like you are intellectually insufficient and morally suspect. Why do you hate our country? Think of the children. God said to tell you that he is not pleased. |
| | Stop interrupting me while I'm shouting. Feel the crushing weight of my arguments, which are built on logic and constructed from facts that are sturdy and sound. You just whine about how you feel. |
| | Your information is flawed because it came from a source I know to be aligned with the forces of darkness. I am able to parse the media and edit what I see for bias and spin, while you are a gullible sap who believes everything you see on the TV or read in that wholly discredited rag you just quoted. |
| | You speak in cliches, slogans and sound bites. I speak in pithy phrases and time-tested words of wisdom. You call names, I tell it like it is. You are vulgar, I am colorful. |
| | And that one reminds me of an old WBAI "Techie Time" show from the early '70s. The arrogant host says "I am an eagle in flight, and you are a shrub on a dry stone." |
| | 6. Here is something you could work on right about now: I could not stomach to listen to your incessant hatred of President Bush. Bush is stupid, Bush is an idiot, Bush is Hitler, Bush is a Nazi, Bush masturbates to photos of dead Iraqi babies, I'd vote for my dog before I'd vote for Bush, I'd vote for Castro before I'd vote for Bush, the Rethuglicans are fascists, Bush voters are treasonous, Bush should be impeached, blah blah blah blah blah blah. It was old three months after Bush's inauguration, and it's now just tiresome. I don't hate my President, even though I voted for him with more reluctance than I can express and a queasy feeling in my stomach. Language like this makes you seem immature, needlessly vulgar, and obnoxious. |
| | 7. Lastly, and I hope this doesn't hurt anyone feelings, because my objective is to make you think, not emote: I don't think you really want my vote. I actively sought out your perspective. I tuned in regularly, for months, to your biggest media project, your serious effort to get your message out: Air America Radio. I listened all day on Good Friday as host after host mocked people like me for believing in Jesus's life, death, and resurrection. I listened as Janeane Garofalo, who was one of my favorite comedians for years, expressed hatred and disgust for Bush voters so vile that I ended my live stream feeling assaulted, as if I'd been vomited on. I listened the night that Mike Malloy told a young Republican to hang up the phone and go open a vein. I listened to pure, unadulterated venom that was so intense I sometimes cut the stream and cried. Tonight, your spokespeople on AAR have been calling people like me "snake-handling evangelicals," and that was about the kindest thing I heard. UmŠy'all? I've lived in the South my entire life and have never met a single snake-handler. Your attitudes, language, and behavior toward people like me: reasonable, thinking Christians who are quite moderate politically and who are just as well-informed as you are (yes, I've read all the PNAC essays, too, and yes, they scare me, too) is reminiscent of nothing so much as an abusive ex-lover, a crazy and drunken stalker. "I'll make you love me, or you'll regret it, you worthless bitch! Come here and let me beat you over the head and tell you how stupid and worthless you are! Then you'll see it my way!" |
| | A couple days before the election I finally bought and watched Michael Moore's "documentary," Fahrenheit 911. My original guess about its nature (a long negative campaign ad for Kerry, essentially) proved out. I found it insufferable. Worse, I worried that, like the worst of Air America, it would backfire. (Still not sure about that, though I am sure about Air America's 24/7 rantings.) |
| | What amazes me about this open letter, however, is that the writer didn't find the same fault with ranters on the right. Ever hear those guys barf all over Bill and Hillary Clinton? Wouldn't the sides cancel each other out? |
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