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Friday, September 6, 2002
Remembranes 
| | Halley recalls buttons from the '64-'65 New York Worlds Fair that looked like this: |
| | Meet me
at the
the smoke
ring |
| | The extra "the" wasn't a typo. It was intentional. |
| | Anyway, it reminds me of how much I loved that fair. I went every chance I could get. I'd take the train down to Penn Station from my boarding school in Westchester, then get on the Flushing subway line out to the Fair. Or I'd take a bus in from Jersey, walk from the Port Authority terminal over to Grand Central and get on the Flushing line from there. |
| | That was in '64. In '65 I graduated from high school and started to drive, so sometimes I'd go over there in the family's '63 VW or '63 Chevy. |
| | Those were the only two years it ran: 64-65. One more than most Worlds Fairs get. All this futuristic stuff about Science, much of which happened, but none of which predicted the most important development at all: The Net. |
| | Not much left now but the Unisphere and the run-down old New York pavillion, I guess. That's all you can see from the Van Wyk Expressway on the way from JFK to Manhattan. |
| | I can still remember most of it, though, like it was last Summer instead of nearly 40 years ago. |
The man is a fucking poet.
Wider fi
| | Alas, no Linux or OS X drivers. Only Windows variants. Somebody needs to correct that. |
| | Backthanks goes to Robert Grosshandler of iGive, who's been impressing folks at coffee shops and other public places by surfing live in places where there's no wi-fi. |
A date with spirituality
| | Yesterday Dave mentioned a PBS special about 9/11 and spirituality. The title is Faith and Doubt at Ground Zero. Not all PBS stations are showing it at the same time, and programs like Frontline (which this is) usually get repeated; so you may still be able to watch it. For example, it will be on at 9pm EDST on 9/08 on the PBS channel carried by DishNetwork and DirecTV. |
| | I also want to plug the program because the credits will list my friend Jock Gill's daughter Amanda, who has been working on the project for the last year. |
Bonus link
Now hear this
| | The common mistake when thinking about audio or video on the Net is to assume it somehow competes to deliver the same information as text, when it does not. Audio, in particular, can have a magical impact, because it conveys intonation and drama better than much printed material, simply because most people are more talented talkers than writers. |
| | Just as some of the "best" blogs are the product of writers' efforts, great audio blogs will come from people who know audio or who take the time to learn. Judging audio blogging from the efforts of a few tentative experiments misses the point, that this is a young medium. |
| | Along with pre-judgment, there is a tendency to assume that blogging is a purely egalitarian phenomenon. What's really happening is akin to the early Web, when new voices were finding audiences. A few bloggers will market themselves, starting with cross-linking and compliments to win more hits, and become stars. That many of the most-trafficked blog-related sites are ranking systems is testimony that we're engaged in a medium-building effort that has already transformed from purely individual effort (not that all bloggers are searching for fame) to an institutional investment in capturing audience attention. |
| | By the way, a number of folks have suggested that I might want to take up audioblogging, since I'm an Olde Radio Guy and all that. |
| | The answer is: not really. Even though I think I'd be good at it. And have a lot of fun with it. |
| | The main reason is time. Blogging for me is a way to leverage time in the extreme. For worthwhile-ness per unit of effort (say, per keystroke), blogging kicks ass more than anything else I've ever done. |
| | Another big reason is one Mitch talks about (not in the quoted sections; you've gotta go read his whole post): linking. It ain't the same with audio. Can't be. |
| | What I write on the Web has a degree of accessibility and persistance that audio doesn't. Mostly it is far more easily sourced — meaning I can point to it as a source. That may change as somebody-or-other creates ways of making audio segments as easy to mark, parse, skim as text. |
| | Anyway, it's a great topic, and I hope it takes off. |
Crossblog flog
I'm turning into fucking Dracula
| | I wrote everything below between 1 and 2 in the morning. And I'm not tired, for some reason. |
| | Guess I'll climb in my coffin anyway. Gotta catch some dark. |
Surf's up
Marc his words
Good sharks, those lawyers.
| | LawMeme took some chum I threw on the webwaters yesterday. The result: Ernest Miller's Hollywood's Secret Agenda Revealed. There are too many delicious ironies in the whole thing, but Ernest manages to unpack a pile of them. |
| | Oh, did I say I was gonna crash the party? Who wants to join me? The real trick will be blogging the mother, live. |
| | I see some of the panels aren't filled yet. Hmmm... |
Be like Doc. Only younger.
| | ...here's a gratuitous unrelated link to the Doc because I haven't mentioned how much I love him lately. He's my American Idol. And Mrs. Searls is my hero for roping him in. I sure hope there is a single Doc Searls in his mid thirties wandering around out there, otherwise I'll be single for life. |
| | I'd blush, but that would compromise my altruistic mission here, which is steering some lucky-fuck younger-me in Moxie's direction. |
Well, we are, but that's okay.
Gratuitous blogfloggery
| | I'll say this for Norah: she knows how to retract with the best of them: |
| | Sadly, as one friend of mine put it recently, the internet is something of an ³echo chamber,² and this means that even the flimsiest vitriol gets posted and reposted, annotated and updated ad nauseam until the accumulated pettifogging becomes a kind of beslobbered palimpsest that looks and reads like a snot rag. |
| | All of this has made me regret one of my earliest posts on this site in which I took a hatchet to Maureen Dowd. I was wrong to do so. It was a perfect example of the kind of parasitic, attention-getting crap I¹m talking about. The truth is that I, like every other opinion journalist on the planet, would kill to have her spot on the NYT page. I envy her. I also find her snarky attitude irksome, but that, my friends, is my problem, not hers. Nobody is forcing me to read her. |
| | As for my expressed dislike for her, it was tripe. I apologize to her and to you. You deserve better. Besides, there¹s nothing more loathsome than someone who blames her own career shortcomings or dashed ambitions on the successes of someone else. There¹s also nothing more toad-like than someone who uses another person¹s fame to raise her own profile, or uses righteous indignation as an excuse to pass off pure small-minded bitchiness and cheap sarcasm as real critique. Maureen Dowd may be taking up space, but she¹s not keeping anyone else down. If we¹re all as good as we think we are, then we¹ll rise of our own accord. Dowd¹s incumbency at the Times has nothing to do with it. |
| | There are plenty of constructive criticisms to be made of Dowd¹s opinions, and I will, no doubt, make them here from time to time. But I am determined to do so civilly and with the respect due anyone who labors under the heavy burden of producing two columns a week for the newspaper of record. The pressure must be enormous. Maybe Andrew Sullivan finds it a breeze to bang out 700 original, topical, unredundant words in a sitting, but most of the rest of us know how hard it really is. (And yes, I am aware that unredundant and beslobbered are not in the dictionary.) |
| | I, therefore, make the following vow. I will not vituperate against my peers. I will argue, express my disapproval, my dismay, my dissent, and all other opinions of others¹ work in a manner worthy of mature public discourse. But I will not rant like a frustrated queen about other journalists¹ supposed lack of talent. |
| | As for the aforementioned — though unnamed — blogmonsters, I have hereby railed enough against your poor and shallow tactics and will do so no more. You haven¹t earned respect from anyone, but I¹ll at least make an effort not to berate you any further. Instead I¹ll ignore you. So back to the swamp with you and the deserved obscurity from which you slithered |
Antarctica everywhere
| | From what I can tell, the main attraction of Linux to governments like Venezuela's and China's are the same as the attractoins of the Net itself: it's free and transparent. (Ignoring for the moment that the gov't of China actually wants the Net to be neither.) What's lost in pieces like this is that it is possible to prefer open source in infrastructural stuff such as generic operating systems while not caring about the development methodologies involved in making the non-infrastructural software (most of which is commercial) that runs on top of generic OSes. The problem with reporting that stuff is that it doesn't fit the story template. |
| | In other words, it ain't that simple. |
Op monger
| | The Weekly/Daily Standard has been making the most of actor and comedian Larry Miller, who's one of those guys (Kevin Pollack is another) who manage to be both A-1 standup comedians and standout actors playing 2nd and 3rd banana roles in movies and on TV. |
| | Larry is a funny writer too, it turns out. LIke in this piece here, where he explains violence a bit: |
| | Ineffective, unfocused violence leads to more violence. Limp, panicky, half-measures lead to more violence. However, complete, fully-thought-through, professional, well-executed violence never leads to more violence because, you see, afterwards, the other guys are all dead. |
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