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

Classic image–the hero stands alone, facing a battle that everybody expects he’ll lose.

Those who were once his friends are filled with doubt. The forces of evil–for example,
big moneyed media–have done all they can to make sure the hero goes down.

If you read my blog, you can guess who the hero is–Howard Dean, a feisty Democrat from Vermont.

From my point of view, Howard Dean has already won. He has turned the Democratic primaries from a banal centrist teaparty into a spirited critique of George W. Bush. Candidates like Kerry and Edwards who once were politely suggesting that Bush might have gone just a teeny bit too far got pushed by Howard to point out that Bush’s presidency has been a major disaster to our economy, our children, and our friendships abroad.

I’m still hoping that Wisconsin will bust the conventional wisdom–that the enthusiasm and heart of Dean’s young supporters will carry his message to the Wisconsin voters.

Because, in the end, it’s not the enthusiasts like me who get to make the choice. It’s the actual voters, voting one by one.

If this were a Terry Pratchett novel, I know Howard Dean would win. Good luck, Howard. My heart goes with you.

Ayers Rock with guitar and pandas–these are the ingredients for another wild Flash animation from RatherGood.com, the team who also gave us Gay Bar kittens.

Email has started trickling up from down under, where Mickey is enjoying green Tasmania before heading north to the wide Australian mainland. I was eager to post some of her wild wildlife stories (platypus ponds!) Then I realized–she might want to blog them herself when she gets back.

Email! I love it!

Where was email in 1973? The day after our wedding, Frank left for a three-week summer school in Sicily–and the first paleblue air letter didn’t arrive until he’d been gone a whole week.

Let me spell that out for you:

But I still have all Frank’s low-tech letters, thirty years later. Meanwhile, our high-tech early memories, Super8 film of Mickey learning to walk and talk, have been declared obsolete over and over again. First, we were supposed to get them converted to VHS tape. Then, we were supposed to get the VHS converted to DVDs. Now HDTV is in the offing and who knows what the next format will be.

Email. I love it not least because I can print it out and then it is *mine*.

…and in my nightmare, I am back in grade school.

And one of my friends has embarassed the heck out of me–by saying stuff about me he meant as a compliment. And another friend is making little public jokes about us both. And then–

And then I wake up.

It’s morning, and I’m not in pre-teen hell and you can’t send me back there.

I have, as the New England saying goes, “better fish to fry.”

And how I wish I had known that years ago.

What did Big Media say after Diane Sawyer revealed that the famous Dean “scream”–broadcast more than 700 times with shocked comments each time–was the artifact of a mike that blocked out crowd noise?

Basically, “Oops!…I did it again…”*

CBS News: “Individually we may feel okay about our network, but the cumulative effect for viewers with 24-hour cable coverage is — it may have been overplayed and, in fact, a disservice to Dean and the viewers.”

— Andrew Heyward, President – CBS News

ABC News: “It’s always a danger that we’ll use good video too much.”

— David Westin, President – ABC News

CNN: “We’ve all been wrestling with this. If we had it to do over again, we’d probably pull ourselves back.”

— Princell Hair, General Manager – CNN

Fox News: “It got overplayed a bit, and the public clearly thought that, too, and kept him alive for another round.”

— Roger Ailes, Chairman and CEO – Fox News

Sorry boys, that’s not good enough. It would be nice if you could give me back my illusions about your diligent fact-checking and fair coverage. But you can’t.

No. Instead, I demand that every one of you gentlemen exorcise that inner Britney Spears.

Take off the multi-thousand-dollar suit, put on a tiny skin-tight costume, gyrate and sweat for us in front of a camera as you offer up those oh-so-lame-excuses. We’ll be here on the couch eating popcorn, making fun of your hair and lamenting how much cuter you looked when you were 15.

In not-unrelated news, John Nichols points out (The Nation):

[A nonpartisan] study of 187 CBS, NBC and ABC evening news reports found that only 49 percent of all on-air evaluations of Dean in 2003 were positive. The other Democratic contenders collectively received 78 percent favorable coverage during the same period.

(Thanks to Roland Tanglao for the link.)

Get back in those costumes, and give us another chorus…

Oops!…I did it again…
Yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah
Yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah…

Damn it, Britney–I mean, Roger Ailes–I want my country back.

I’ll start by admitting I’ve often broken this one.

“Thou shalt not plan face-to-face meetings during winter months (i.e. months not June, July or August).”

(Thanks to Scott, who came down from the mountain with something similar.)

Thank god Martha Stewart didn’t come…

Yesterday, we threw a farewell party for Mickey, who’s headed off to Tasmania, Kangaroo Island, etc., all paid for by a fine natural history tour group.

To celebrate the hybrid nature of Australia, we had English-tea scones and jam and mounds of creamy stuff to put on top (Empire days) plus music in the background that was mostly dainty tea-party-classical interspersed with such Aussie classics as “Tie Me Kangaroo Down,” “Drunken Philosophers Song”, and “One-Eyed Trouser Snake.”

Instead of dainty little tea sandwiches, which are a nuisance to make, we had heaps of French bread and cheeses and fruit and chocolate cake and two pots of coffee for any non-tea-drinkers.

Mickey’s friends John and Lizzie brought a magnificently entertaining baby. Mickey read some hilarious short bits on duck-billed platypi. But for me, the most family-typical moment came just as everyone sat down at the food-piled-high tea table and I said,

Oh, whoops–I forgot to make any tea!

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Hah! Now you can make all these claims and more, just by clicking a button at the Web Bullshit Generator

I’m glad W-BS-G is not on the list of Bloggies finalists up against Feedster. (Subtle hint there.)

Don’t forget, people who vote for Feedster are displaying the kind of good taste and general loveableness that cause the world’s karma engines to shower them with admiring fans of both sexes, charismatic smiles, a parking place right where you want it, and all those other things you’ve only seen hinted at by high-priced TV commercials.

Take that, W-BS-G!

(Thanks to Steve Pomeroy of StaticFree for the Del.icio.us link to the Bullshit button.)

….is headed off to nature-guide around Australia for the next 3 weeks?

Watch out for those giant ghost cane toads, Micks! We’ll miss you.

Today, I drove two NH college kids home to Northwood, NH to cast their first votes in a presidential primary.

We stopped for lunch on the way–Shorty’s Mexican Grill on Manchester’s Daniel Webster Highway just off I-93 Exit 9-S. We ate in the bar to watch the huuuuge TV playing Fox News. (Over the bar was a set tuned to CNN, playing almost identical stories with slight time-shifting.)

Dean was no longer a story on either station. Fox showed lots of footage of Clark, a long interview with Kerry’s campaign mgr, and an interview with Dem Nat Ctee Chair Terry McAuliffe (he was good!) that the interviewer cut off fast when McAuliffe said, “Bush is going down in the polls, he is toast in November.”

But the story on Fox News was not what we saw in NH with our own eyes. The big highway, I-93, had been bare of signs. But once we got on Route 28 and Route 4 we saw lots of them, set up near houses and businesses. We saw signs for Dennis Kucinich, Lyndon LaRouche–and most of the rest.

Considering the number of candidates, it was striking that so many signs were for Dean–about half of all we saw! Great Dean team up in NH.

In tiny Northwood, about 7 people stood outside polling place with signs. Every single one of them for Dean. These Deaners were middle-aged, local-looking people.

Inside the polling place, tons of flags, friendly people, familiar faces from the town. “Don’t you have an Uncle Bill who worked at the dairy bar?” Yes, he did, about 30 years ago. Zoe and Chace took their thick-paper ballots into canvas-curtained booths to vote. Zoe said the man just after them showed them his ballot–he’d also voted for Dean.

Then to Concord (NH state capital) to say hi at Dean HQ. We drove the length of Concord’s Main St. Near the State House, more Dean people with signs. Also a very few others–one Clark, one Kerry sign. One sign said “Honk for Dean”, which we did! Concord HQ busy and full of workers.

(I posted a lot of this as a comment to the unofficial Dean blog, and I’m too tired from driving to re-draft it now.)

The support and enthusiasm we saw were incredible–and the tiny bits of NH primary coverage on Fox and CNN we saw at lunch gave no hint of what we saw.

No wonder Dean says “I want my country back.” I say, good luck to the good doctor and his supporters.

Orkut debuted Thursday and decamped Sunday. Oh well….

They got lots of whuffie in between.

As Susan Mernit points out, more than 1,000 hits for Orkut in a Feedster search.

In related news, David Weinberger claims that “orkut” is the Finnish word for “orgasm.”

People who invested a lot of time in making themselves a nice home page over at Orkut are hoping this one will turn out to be multiple.