Betsy Devine: Funny ha-ha and/or funny peculiar

Discussion of blogging in presidential campaigns led by Dan Gillmor:

1. Zephyr Teachout, Dean blogger: “There were 3 audiences [for the
   Dean blogs]. One was the press. One was the activist audience. One was
   the audience of the campaign itself.”
2. Cameron Barrett: “The
   Clark campaign scratched the whole concept of the single blog–because
   that wasn’t going to scale. We wanted a community of blogs instead of 1
   blog with 100,000 comments. We wanted an architecture that would let
   people have structured conversations.”
3. Dick
   Bell, Kerry blogger: “We needed a front-end that could cope with an
   adversarial environment–we built it ourselves, because we had to deal
   with a lot of trolls.”
4. Jim Moore: “A lot of people are still not on the web. When
   the service employees union endorsed Dean, we thought we were going to
   get lots of email addresses. They have 1.1 million members, but only
   10,000 email addresses.”
5. Dave Winer: “In the end, it wasn’t Dean’s opponents that
   beat you, it was CNN that beat you. If the Dean campaign had had a
   rival network to get out their image of that speech, they might have
   won, and we all might have won.”
6.  Matt Gross, Dean blogger: “We pushed
   staffers to blog. When people pushed for Dean to blog, the reality was
   that if posts had been signed by Dean they would have been written by
   Matt Gross. Kate O’Connor’s posts on deanforamerica
   were like the Lifetime section of your newspaper. Zephyr’s were the
   organizing section. Matt Gross was the Walter Cronkite.” [laughter and
   applause]
7. Dick Bell: “Political consultants always tend to be
   looking in the rearview mirror. Whatever the big thing was last time,
   you see a whole lot more of that next time.”
8. Dave Winer: “None of you guys get it. We are not voters. We are
   taxpayers. We go to work. We die in those wars. We are not eyeballs. We
   are not at the bottom and you are not at the top. Example, Channel 9 at
   Microsoft. By giving engineers inside Microsoft a chance to be seen by
   people outside, it changes the engineers’ “world.”Blogs are changing the world.”
9. Oliver
   Willis: “Citizens want to be marketed to. What campaign blogs look
   like: ‘Here are some pictures, the other guy sucks, vote for me.’ “
10. Hossein Derakhshan (aka Hoder), Iranian blogger [in IRC]: “Blog is words and TV is images. As an
    outsider, I see that many people in America can more easily be driven
    by images than words, like most other people in the modern world. Dean
    didn’t have an image, he had lots of words. This is exactly why
    Al-Jazeera is really frightening: it’s using image against image.”

For more: Bryan Strawser, Jeff Sandquist, and Lenn Pryor all blogged this session, with intriguingly different points of view. 

Top ten quotes from discussion led by Jay Rosen:

1. Chris Lydon (responding to Jay’s question, “What is moving blogs
   toward journalism?”): “We’re moving toward journalism for the same
   reason we bombed Baghdad–because we can.”
2. Henry Copeland: “150 yrs ago, one of the mainsprings of journalism was partisanship. That has been denatured in the big media.”
3. Dean Landsman: “Look at LiveJournal. Those are journals–but is that journalism?”
4. Callie Crossley of WGBH:
   “I am a journalist. Journalism is not just the tools. Journalism is a
   set of practices, a framework. It involves the selection of material,
   framed by some ethics about how you get the material.There are people
   on the web who are journalists, and there are bloggers, and the two are
   quite different.”
5. Dan
   Gillmor (responding to Jay’s question, “You had a whole career in
   journalism before you became a blogger. How did it change you?”) : “Not
   as much as you think. I was a columnist. If you write about tech in
   Silicon Valley, you are used to feedback from readers, and you learn
   they know much more than you do.”
6. Jay Rosen: “Trust is part of the brand in journalism. The reader doesn’t
   have to re-decide, every time a new byline shows up, do I trust this
   person? In a blog you have to re-do that every day.”
7. Jeff Sharlet: “As journalist, I covered the Christian right. As
   a blogger, I find myself more and more becoming part of the community
   of the Christian right.”
8. Micah Sifry: “People are hungry for filters they can trust. We
   are awash in information….An expert, somebody who grabs onto
   something and sticks to it, is serving a useful function.”  David
   Weinberger says, “I’d rather have an aggregator than a filter–100
   different viewpoints from all over the world.” Micah responds, “It’s
   not either-or.”
9. Tom Regan, Christian Science Monitor: “I think journalism needs
   an enema–I think blogging is the best thing to happen to journalism.”
10. Mary Hodder: “Blogging pulls back the curtain. If a campaign reporter has some particular opinion, I want to know it.”

For more: See Jay’s own discussion, blogposts by Jeff Jarvis and Will Richardson, and photographs by Werner Vogels.

According to the RAC Foundation,
listening to classical music while you drive is no safer than listening
to rock. What drives up your blood pressure and your heartbeat (and
makes you go sailing through stoplights) is music that’s fast and loud.

Their top list of music to avoid includes Wagner’s Ride of the Valkyries and Verdi’s Dies Irae.

Well, I won’t be listening to those–Frank and I are addicted to Teaching Company courses, and we got about halfway through the Enlightenment on our way down here. Yes, this is what happens when nerds marry nerds. See you at Bloggercon!

Or, for that matter, “Which Shakespeare character killed the most chickens and ducks?”

Many hotels keep a random supply of books–but the
Nittany Lion Inn has a whole roomful. Most were probably left behind by
guests–the usual case.  But some are mysterious.

Several years of scholarly journals on programming, from the early
seventies? Shelf after shelf of Readers Digest  books? Tall,
multivolume picturebook series with titles like Our Fair Land or This Is History?
Did somebody come to Penn State carrying this stuff, in hugely overpacked
luggage? And then, suddenly converted to Zen Buddhism, leave them all
behind and depart as a barefoot pilgrim?

The Shakespeare jokes come from a funny collection of vintage puzzles by Gyles Brandeth, The Puzzle Mountain (1981). Some of the jokes are really very old. For example:

Others reflect an older sensibility. A couple of famous naughty
limericks are here, metamorphosed to clean ones–the man whose balls were of
different sizes is, in Brandeth’s book, a girl with mismatched ears. (Or maybe the man just has drag on?)

OTOH, Brandeth includes jokes that might jar a modern PC sensibility.
The punchline for Othello: “Because he was a tawny
general of Venice.” OK, I’ve kept you waiting long enough for the
PETA-unfriendly joke about who killed the most ducks and chickens.

It was Hamlet’s uncle, because he did murder most foul.

Don’t you just love the selfless patriotism of Fox News?

I have mixed feelings about the Christian faith I grew up in–wow, that’s an understatement!

Does the Christian god (or any god) exist? I don’t know.

Yet, when a previously-Christian friend said she was losing her faith and asked me how I did without it–I felt the same guilt you might imagine if you had stolen a hundred-dollar bill from a good friend to meet some need of your own. (In my case, the need to be a smart-alec.)

OTOH, I despise the rantings of the religious right. I was a Christian for long enough to know that
literal-minded followers of Jesus Christ should be up in arms against tax-evading rich folks, not “gay marriage.”

Today, or maybe yesterday, was Good Friday. What a relief! Between Good Friday and Easter Sunday, Christians and non-Christians draw close together.

Christians imaginatively share the doubt and fear of the early apostles, who had seen their leader tortured and crucified. We ex-Christians have that same feeling of doubt 365 days a year.

On Sunday morning, our paths diverge again. Believers celebrate the risen Christ. Unbelievers like me hide jelly beans for our children, and then get on with the confusing business of trying to be a good person with nobody up in heaven who’s keeping score.

A year ago today, I blogged about Aesop’s lamb-and-wolf fable.

Notice that, if there is a God keeping score, the innocent trusting lamb would triumph in heaven over the wicked wolf. If there is no God, the wolf wins and the lamb is simply…lunch.

My position, of course, is intermediate. I caution my readers against a lamblike innocence–and I assume you share my revulsion against the wolf.

It’s spring, and my kitchen counters are filling up with tiny cheap pots of plants I can’t resist–grape hyacinth, crumple-leafed primrose, tiny daffodils.

Today I went even wilder and brought home a huge handful of sweet peas. I love their rumply delicate look, their colors like spun-sugar candy or honeymoon nighties.

I never buy cut flowers, and I could have resisted these if they didn’t remind me so much of that poem:

A sweet disorder in the dress
Kindles in clothes a wantonness…

Yes, these sweet peas are brought to you now by Robert Herrick (1591-1674)…and maybe, just a bit, by the month of April.

Just back from seeing The Fog of War. Picture a US government official, talking fifty years later about the decisions that sent kids off to war. As my friend Sidney said, “It’s not hard to see Iraq here.” Yes, thanks to Robert McNamara–who helped spin Vietnam for JFK and LBJ–the prequel of GWB is showing now.

Amazingly, fifty years later, McNamara –soft-spoken and still brilliant in his mid-eighties–doesn’t feel he did much wrong.

Razor-sharp on any technical or historical subject, McNamara gets a fond and goofy smile on his face when he talks about Kennedy and Johnson. He loved those guys. He wanted to help them out. He advised them to pull US troops out of Vietnam, but when they said no–hey, he was just there to give them a helping hand. (Quite a few newsreel clips feature McNamara telling the camera that Vietnam was going incredibly well.)

There’s a long telling clip of McNamara getting an award from LBJ. MacNamara is beaming, happy, teary-eyed–unable to choke out his words of gratitude. LBJ tries not to look too bored and annoyed. “Yes, you prostituted yourself for me, and it was just what I needed. Now let this event be over so I can stop looking at you.”

Errol Morris, who won an Oscar with this film, also directed those wonderful Apple “Switch” ads. And the sad thing is that McNamara (whose IQ must be 999) saw himself as a kind of lovable Janie Porche–“I saved Christmas!”

Janie Porche saved Christmas for her family and friends, and I’m sure they were grateful and happy and loved her for it. Her brilliant success was their delight. But Robert McNamara made a career out of trying to generate that kind of delight in two throat-slittingly ambitious career politicians. He still doesn’t get it that he was cynically used.

And he still feels that sending young soldiers off to die–or ordering bombs that would burn civilians alive–well, it was worth it, really, because he loved Kennedy, and he loved Johnson, and they loved him in return. Didn’t they?

* Does it sound like a spinach cinema? (One that you ought to go see, but don’t really want to.) Reach for your inner Popeye and go anyway–you’ll be fascinated.

Brand-new and piping hot today–Halley Suitt has corraled David Weinberger and a few stellar others into a group blog for Worthwhile magazine.

The magazine doesn’t exist yet, but when it does it will be about passion and profit and what makes worthwhile work.

The blog is funny and sharp and full of interest, as you’d expect with those writers–did I mention Tom Peters?

If the magazine lives up to this blog prequel, it’ll be–oh damn, can’t resist this, sorry–really worthwhile.

The Future of Freedom Foundation:

One of the most common lies in the criminal-justice system is the “I don’t remember” lie. The reason people use it is that they know that it is extremely difficult to prove that the statement is, in fact, a lie — that is, that the person really does remember the event, contrary to his representation. One of the reasons the feds were able to successfully pin the charge on Martha Stewart was that the conversation she supposedly didn’t remember was “too important” to have been forgotten.

Thanks to Matt Mower of eVectors for the link