May Divorce Be With You

This weblog now has a second marriage to debate: the four-year union of the writers Carl Bernstein and Nora Ephron.

I love the movie Heartburn, which Ephron wrote as fictionalized revenge after she and Bernstein crashed and burned. They had two sons, the second born prematurely after Carl was caught convening a rump parliament with the future Baroness Jay of Paddington, a member of Britain's House of Lords.

In novel and film, Ephron lampooned Bernstein so hilariously that I'd be amazed if he ever dated another woman without first making her sign a non-disclosure agreement. James Wolcott believes she scared an entire class of famous men from bedding female writers, calling it the Nora Ephron factor:

Now here's Maureen Dowd, attractive, witty, bitchy, a woman who likes to share bon-bons of her personal life with readers. Ephron, the daughter of screenwriters, was brought up to believe "everything is copy," and I suspect that's Modo's philosophy too. But men with a lot to protect don't want to be turned into copy. Any bigshot in a public position of power and accountability is going to have to consider, "If our relationship [or marriage] hits the rocks, am I going to get ripped in print as revenge?"

At risk of my own matrimonial bliss, I often quote fictional Bernstein from Heartburn when asked whether I enjoyed a home-cooked meal: "I never want my roast beef cooked any other way." The line's delivered in such an insincere manner you wonder how fictional Ephron resisted the urge to gut him like a fish.

Movies · Politics · 2005/06/03 · Comment · Link

Master of Their Domain

Internet pornographers got lucky with ICANN and will receive their own top-level domain.

A Florida domain registry and the International Foundation for Internet Responsibility, the groups that requested the domain, will devote .xxx explicitly to sexual content, making it easier for Internet users to avoid such sites entirely or dive headfirst into the fleshy sea of sin:

ICM and IFFOR selected .xxx as the sole string for this application based upon its high ranking in the aforementioned criteria.

Although other potential strings were considered such as .sex, .adult and .porn, the research demonstrated that these strings lacked broad geographic recognition and were perceived to be primarily Anglo-Saxon.

When this registry opens for business, I will try to acquire benedictxvi.xxx to keep it out of the hands of pornographers.

Publishing · Domains · 2005/06/02 · 14 COMMENTS · Link

I bought a text ad on Google yesterday for the search term Mark Felt, wondering how many people would hit the search engine for more information on the deep-throated stool pigeon:

Chasing Mark Felt
How a 19-Year-Old College Student
Unmasked Watergate Source in 1999
cadenhead.org/workbench

The result: 525 clicks on 14,260 impressions, which cost me $26.22 (5 cents per click). Though at first my ad had no competition, by the end of the day, it was joined by ads from NPR, Kentucky Fried Cruelty, and the Washington Post, which you'd think has all the publicity it needs for this particular story.

Publishing · Journalism · Google · 2005/06/02 · 1 COMMENT · Link

Thomas Sowell's Fuzzy Math

On Memorial Day I read the local daily from cover to cover, one of my favorite lazy holiday traditions. I was pleased to find Thomas Sowell writing the same kind of piece he always writes -- an unhappy, factually thin screed on how one of these days, mark my words, as God is my witness, blacks will wise up and become more like Thomas Sowell.

If the share of the black vote that goes to the Democrats ever falls to 70 percent, it may be virtually impossible for the Democrats to win the White House or Congress, because they have long ago lost the white male vote and their support among other groups is eroding. Against that background, it is possible to understand their desperate efforts to keep blacks paranoid, not only about Republicans but about American society in general.

For an economist, Sowell's not very good with numbers.

Black voters comprised 11 percent of the electorate in the 2004 presidential election and went 88 percent Kerry, 11 percent Bush. The shift Sowell yearns for would amount to a 1.98 percent boost for the Republicans, hardly enough to cause Democrats to become electorally extinct.

Sowell's also spreading fuzz when he claims Democratic support is eroding among "other groups." Looking at presidential elections since 1976, it's difficult to find any demographic category in which support for the Democratic candidate is in significant decline.

Exit polls have tracked 28 distinct demographic categories in the last eight presidential elections, according to data compiled by the New York Times.

In 2004, the Democrat's percentage of the vote fell to the party's 28-year low in only three of those categories: Hispanics, Republicans, and conservatives.

By comparison, the Democrat hit a 28-year high in seven categories: people 45 to 59, unmarried people, suburban residents, independents, Democrats, liberals, and Democratic congressional voters.

The party also reached an all-time peak among circumsized white male suburban lapsed Catholic computer book authors aged 30 to 44 with luxuriant hair who are worse off today than they were four years ago.

Politics · 2005/06/01 · 15 COMMENTS · Link

Deep Throat Old News to Student

Now that Mark Felt has owned up to being Nixon nemesis Deep Throat, I hope the media tracks down Chase Culeman-Beckman.

As recounted in Slate, Culeman-Beckman made news six years ago by claiming that he learned Deep Throat's identity 10 years earlier at summer camp.

The 19-year-old college student broke one of the biggest news stories of the 20th century in a paper for his school, which Slate quotes:

I was in the "Herons" group along with about fifteen other 8, 9, and 10 year olds ... One Friday in July we went on a trip to Long Beach, Sag Harbor, and Jacob, Max and I ended up sitting in the sand precociously talking about politics. It was an election year and I was in favor of George Bush because he had gone to the Greenwich Country Day School where I was attending, while Jacob and Max were for Michael Dukakis, although I do not remember why. At some point, the conversation turned to Nixon and Watergate ... which I knew little, if nothing, about. During the conversation Jacob told me: "Deep Throat was Mark Felt, he's someone in the FBI. I'm 100% sure."

I hope he got an A.

Update: A paper found Culeman-Beckman, who never believed Carl Bernstein's denial that his 8-year-old son could have found him out.

Journalism · Politics · 2005/05/31 · 7 COMMENTS · Link

He'd Rather Fight Than Switch

This morning's Guardian has an amazing transcript of a joint interview with the writers Christopher and Peter Hitchens, brothers who hadn't spoken in four years.

I love this exchange between an audience member and Christopher Hitchens:

Female audience member: Excuse me. I'm not usually awkward at all but I'm sitting here and we're asked not to smoke. And I don't like being in a room where smoking is going on.

Christopher Hitchens (smoking heavily): Well, you don't have to stay, do you darling. I'm working here and I'm your guest. OK. This is what I like.

Ian Katz (Guardian interviewer): Would you just stub that one out?

Hitchens: No. I cleared it with the festival a long time ago. They let me do it. If anyone doesn't like it they can kiss my ass.

(Woman walks out)

Politics · 2005/05/31 · 1 COMMENT · Link

Choosing a Programmer's Editor

A reader laments the difficulty of writing programs in a plain-vanilla text editor:

I have a question that I can't seem to frame correctly. It relates to my inability to format nested punctuation (in any language, on any day). I would dearly love to see a quasi-visual editor which replaces the {{ ... }} with nested shading, and bold type used to identify classes, italics for variables, etc. etc.

It clearly calls for a different approach to the text-bound, linear approach to coding. What would such a beast be called?

Most programmers choose their editor with more care than they put into the purchase of a car. I've been lusting after this vi reference coffee mug and I don't even use the program. I feel like H.I. McDunnough in Raising Arizona, driving past convenience stores that aren't even on the way home.

For years, sheer laziness caused me to write my Java classes, Perl scripts, and other software in Windows Notepad. When I did some professional development last year for Best Blinds, a local ecommerce company, I decided it was time to find a decent programmer's text editor for Windows.

I settled on UltraEdit-32, a $40 programming, web page, and hex editor that gets great reviews in places like PC Magazine.

There are some quirks with the software, such as a hidden-character issue that was causing the header() function to fail in PHP scripts, but otherwise I've liked the editor for both programming and web design.

UltraEdit offers some great features for programming (screen shot), including keyword and class highlighting and the identification of matching brackets.

Though I recommend UltraEdit, I'd dump it for an outliner that supported code highlighting. After writing UserTalk scripts in Radio UserLand's outliner, I'm convinced an outliner is the best way to write programs. The ability to expand and collapse blocks of code as you're editing, to see exactly what you need to see, is a huge benefit.

Radio Userland · Java · Programming · 2005/05/29 · 9 COMMENTS · Link

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