Mark Evanier on Johnny Carson
The comic book and TV writer Mark Evanier writes News From Me, a great pop culture weblog that has been wall-to-wall Johnny Carson for days.He appears to have found every interesting retrospective and trivial tidbit about Carson in the pro and online media, adding some of his own observations:
I met Carson three times, I think, plus he called me once on the phone after his retirement to thank me for some information I'd relayed to his secretary. He was always disarmingly gracious. People called him cold and impersonal off-camera, but I think that was a bum rap. He simply could not be friendly with all the people who wanted to be his buddy and, like many performers, coped with the onslaught by erecting fences. One of his associates told me that post-abdication, Johnny became a much happier and friendlier person because he was no longer suspicious that everyone he met was angling to get something out of him, especially a Tonight Show appearance.
In the mid-'90s, I had a great time interviewing Evanier and cartoonist Sergio Aragones at the Dallas Fantasy Fair for either Wizard Magazine or the Comics Buyer's Guide, writing about Groo and The Mighty Magnor.
Reading his weblog is a lot like that interview, except that he isn't pausing every 20-30 seconds for an adoring fan's autograph request and I'm not furiously taking notes.
Tony Kornheiser vs. Jacksonville
Tony Kornheiser wrote a column in the Washington Post ripping Jacksonville as a Hooters-loving, foul-smelling, remote city of doublewides that only got the Super Bowl because Tuscaloosa was booked:Jacksonville is where Pat Boone was born (sometime around the Martin Van Buren presidency), and where the Southern hair band .38 Special got together. Somehow it doesn't sound like hip-hop. It's more like I-Hop.
As a seven-year resident, I'm more offended by Kornheiser's laziness than anything he wrote about Jacksonville (though he should have included St. Augustine along with No. 17 at Sawgrass as the best perks of living here).
A recent Slate article maligned Kornheiser as one of the phone-it-in sports columnists who has been ruined by TV gigs. His column hasn't quoted a single source in four months, according to Slate, and you'd be hard-pressed to find anything resembling a work ethic in his anti-Jacksonville rant.
Kornheiser didn't even bother to skim the Super Bowl XXXIV Media Guide, where he could have found four much better local targets for ridicule: We gave the world Lynyrd Skynyrd, Limp Biskit, Slim Whitman, and David Hasselhoff.
RSS Begat RSS Begat RSS
Sean Palmer and Christopher Schmidt have released a new draft of RSS 1.1, an independent effort to replace the RDF-based syndication format RSS 1.0.When I covered this subject originally, the spec's subtitle -- which dubbed it an "initial draft" -- threw me off about how long it has been under development.
As the Rough Guide to RSS 1.1 explains, Palmer has been working on his proposal since at least September 2002.
I don't heart RDF, so I have no opinion on whether 1.1 should replace 1.0. I just hope that if Palmer and Schmidt cannot ultimately reach an agreement with the RSS-DEV Working Group to mothball 1.0, they will withdraw their spec rather than put three active, competing RSS formats in circulation.
The Lord Works in Mysterious Weblogs
Two years ago, Atlanta Journal-Constitution reporter Ron Martz was embedded as a journalist in Iraq when two soldiers travelling with him were shot. He wrote a first-person column that thanks God for providing him with human shields:I prefer to believe it was the hand of God that put them there, one behind me, one to my left. They were there to protect me. ...
Had they not been there, I most likely would not be now typing this.
Less than 30 minutes after the two soldiers joined me, both were wounded by bullets that could have hit me. The soldier behind me was hit in the left wrist and the left eye by a bullet that struck the side of the armored personnel carrier and shattered. A bullet hit the soldier to my immediate left in the right arm, just a few inches from my left arm. The bullet broke his arm, entered his body just below his armpit and came out his back.
This kind of reductive, God-picked-sides reasoning creeps me out, whether it's a journalist crediting God for bullets hitting someone else or a quarterback who thanks God in victory but never makes Him catch Hell in defeat.
Because I leave comments open on Workbench, the discussion of Martz's column has become a debate between his current and former wives, now that Cynthia Martz has dropped by:
Mary Warren is Ron Martz's current wife. No wonder she supports him! As his ex-wife of 25+ yrs. I think I know Ron Martz a bit better.
Though I don't know which one is the better authority on Martz, I know who to thank for sending Cynthia to my weblog.
Nofollow: Think Before You Link
Workbench visitor David Lewis shares my pessimism about the new nofollow link attribute supported by Google.I predict that lots of people will be clamoring to get rid of "nofollow" within, say, 3 months, if not sooner. It really does little or nothing to eliminate comment spam -- you need a proactive approach for that -- but only solves a problem for Google, namely to get rid of what, for them, are lots of unwashed links.
Unless I misunderstand search engine optimization, there could be negative consequences for Google also, because the attribute gives publishers an economic incentive to use nofollow on all external links, boosting the PageRank of internal links.
Every profit-minded publisher who does this will weaken the effectiveness of Google's ranking algorithm, especially within the commercial subset of the Web. The publisher of a large, popular site like the 500,000-page New York Times could run a script to add the attribute to all external links, bestowing the benefits of its high PageRank exclusively on its own corporate properties.
Search Engine Watch Publisher Danny Sullivan goes into more detail about the issues raised by link condoms on his weblog.
Making Buzzword.Com More Available
Manila, the software running Buzzword.Com, stores most weblog content and server data in Frontier's object database, a flexible and powerful database that I covered in Radio UserLand Kick Start.As objects are deleted, Frontier monitors their freed-up blocks so they can be reused, as Matt Neuberg describes in Frontier: The Definitive Guide:
... as the database is used, free space opens up in it, and pointers to the free blocks are added to a list called the "avail list," which must be traversed each time Frontier searches the database. This strategy makes saving and accessing the database rapid and robust in the short term, but over time its accumulated effects reduce the database's efficiency.
I took Buzzword.Com offline this evening for 90 minutes to compact all object database files and wipe out these avail lists. I'm hoping that it improves the server speed; users should let me know if it's making a difference.
Update from Craig Jensen: "Longtime blogging friend Garret Vreeland says he can connect to BookNotes in less than 5 minutes. That's progress!"
A sneer from political reporter David Halbfinger about Bob Somerby, the publisher of the media criticism site Daily Howler:I've never followed this blog, and am pretty sure I don't know anyone who does.
You gotta love a New York Times reporter who concludes that if he doesn't know something, no one else does either.
Social Media
Subscriptions
Blogroll
Projects
RSS Advisory Board
How to Read an RSS Feed with Java Using XOM
The RSS Advisory Board Just Turned 20
Downloading 50,000 Podcast Feeds to Analyze Their RSS
Tara Calishain Explains: What is RSS?
Be Unique And Use RSS Guid Like Everybody Else
Statistics
This blog has been published since Nov. 7, 1999 (a span of 9,457 days).
Thank you for visiting Workbench.
