We've Got Kids in Harm's Way

I'd love to ask Frank Luntz, the diabolical image minder who crafts political language for Republicans, what he thinks of this quote yesterday from President Bush on the war in Iraq:

I understand how dangerous it is there. I understand we've got kids in harm's way, and I worry about their families. And obviously, anytime there's a death, I grieve.

I can't think of a worse way for a president to restore flagging public support in a war than to describe our troops as children. The quote reminds me of Nineteen, the '80s pop song by Paul Hardcastle that declared the average age of combat troops in Vietnam was 19.

The average age of American casualties in Iraq is around 27, according to Drew Brown of Knight-Ridder.

Politics · 2005/06/21 · 13 COMMENTS · Link

Wikipedia's a Sticky Wicket

The neutrality and factual accuracy of this article on Wikipedia are disputed.

The Los Angeles Times gave up its wikitorial experiment after three days. Someone got their goat by adding one of the web's most infamous gross-out photos to the site.

Jeff Jarvis defends the honor of wikis, blaming the Times:

They didn't get that wikis are a collaborative medium where, even when people disagree, they try to find common ground, knowing there can be only one outcome, or else the wiki will, by its very nature, fail.

Look up any hot-button subject on Wikipedia, the most well-known and successful wiki, and you'll find a lot of contributors in the common ground, looking for a place to plant mines.

As an example, check out the entry on the mercury-based vaccine additive thimerosal and the ongoing nine-month flamewar among people removing each other's edits.

Any parent reading Wikipedia to learn about the suggested link between thimerosal and increased autism in children will be either reassured or alarmed, depending on who edited the page last. (Our highly recommended pediatrician in Jacksonville has signs declaring the practice "thimerosal-free.")

Here's how one of the warring thimerosal editors describes the work of another:

It falls into a pattern that is becoming all too familiar: he disputes everything he finds disagreeable as being false or biased; deletes whole sections if he disagrees with one word in it; asks for citations; disputes that the references provided are legitimate; deletes references if he feels there are too many; and then starts revert wars. On the thimerosal issue, I've repeatedly asked that if he's so confident that thimerosal is harmless that he wants to withhold information about the controversy, he should voluntarily inject himself with equivalent doses to what babies have gotten to prove his point.

Publishing · Parenting · Journalism · Wikipedia · 2005/06/21 · 5 COMMENTS · Link

In New York, some adopted children are being sworn in as American citizens at an exceptionally American place: a mall.

They returned to their seats clutching their certificates of naturalization, government documents that declare in the poetry of bureaucracy one's bond to this land. Cherished pieces of paper, they say: I came from there, and now I am here.

The children were also clutching gift bags, courtesy of the mall. Along with those sacred certificates, they received a small teddy bear, a plastic cup, a noisemaker, free soap from one of the stores and two coupons. One coupon offered 20 percent off fashion accessories, and the other offered "hot" summer tank tops, two for $20, or four for $30.

Politics · 2005/06/19 · 2 COMMENTS · Link

President Clinton on Alan Colmes Tonight

I picked a good time to become new best friends with Alan Colmes.

He scored an interview with President Clinton that airs this evening on his syndicated radio show, which broadcasts live from 10 p.m. to 1 a.m. Eastern.

I've borrowed Matt Drudge's siren, because I have some advance details about the interview.

From excerpts that I wheedled out of a Fox News publicist, they discuss Hillary Clinton's political ambitions, his lingering sentiments about impeachment, and whether he would accept the vice presidential nomination on a Clinton/Clinton ticket.

President Clinton tells Colmes that he hopes his wife focuses entirely on her senatorial re-election campaign in 2006. "One of my rules of politics is if you look past the next election, you may not get past the next election," he says. "I hope the voters in New York will ratify her service. I think they will. She's become justifiably very popular here because of the job she's done."

One confession he makes in the interview might be upsetting to Knopf, the publisher of his 2004 autobiography My Life -- he pulled some punches:

I rewrote a lot of the parts of the presidency, because I didn't want to be mean-spirited about it. I didn't want to, you know, say what I really thought about some of the way some of these issues were handled and covered and the obsession with things that were called scandals that turned out to be totally phony.

The publisher might be in a forgiving mood -- the former president's book broke the first-day sales record for non-fiction, selling 400,000 copies.

As for whether he'd be his wife's running mate, that will be revealed in the broadcast.

Live discussion of the Colmes radio show began Wednesday on the Drudge Retort, which the host was kind enough to plug on the air last night.

Site traffic is normally light during the time his show airs, but the on-air mention appeared to bring an extra 10,000 hits to the site that hour, tripling the usual traffic.

In response to a guest's claim that that homosexuality is a choice, Retort users responded by describing the moment they decided to be heterosexual:

At the dance after the rodeo in Pecos -- July 6, 1991.

We'll call them "Shandi" and "Tracie".

For me, it was during recess one afternoon in second grade. If Mary Beth Farkas is reading this, I would again like to apologize.

Radio · Publishing · Politics · 2005/06/17 · 10 COMMENTS · Link

Microsoft has abandoned six million developers with its decision to end mainstream support for Visual Basic 6, Karl E. Peterson writes in the current Visual Studio:

There are millions of existing VB6 and VBA applications; this alone constitutes a compelling reason to ensure support for these applications on existing platforms. Otherwise, the authors of these applications have no means to use new platform features and no reason to encourage their customers to adopt the new Microsoft platforms.

Robert Scoble and Dan Appleman covered this in March, opposing the petition drive to add VB.COM into Visual Studio.

Programming · 2005/06/17 · 2 COMMENTS · Link

Keeping Computer Books Up-to-Date

Charles Wright in the Sydney Morning Herald:

With the number of blogs increasing at a phenomenal rate, more people than ever will find themselves dealing with the market-leading Movable Type. The Movable Type 3 Bible, from Wiley, gives you a thorough grounding in the complexities of a blogging platform that, on the surface, looks relatively easy to master but repays the effort required to learn about its more powerful features. Increasingly, these books are rendered somewhat out of date with the release of new versions, which this book promises to solve with an update site. Frankly, there's not much there, but there is a link to the author's site.

A truism of computer book writing is that a new software release will be announced the day after your book goes to press on the same subject. I need to write more on Workbench about Movable Type's PHP publishing features in advance of the book's next edition, but otherwise it keeps current with version 3.

I've always thought that computer books should be paired with active web sites, which is why there are more than 5,000 pages on this server supporting my books. I occasionally get a nice email from someone who picks up an eight-year old copy of Teach Yourself Java 1.1 Programming in 24 Hours and is pleasantly surprised to find the support site online.

As I told Wright in email, with the dot-com bust and the abundance of free technical information on the web, the economics of supporting a book after publication have never been uglier.

I should not have been so quick in college to choose journalism and computer science over a career in interpretive dance.

Java · Movable Type · Publishing · 2005/06/17 · 1 COMMENT · Link

Googlemilk: And Then They All Blamed Me

Alex Pareene, who describes googlemilking as "thinking of a great setup, and letting the internets provide the punchline," offers this contribution to the game: "and then they all blamed me."

The phrase reveals scapegoated sex club workers, abuse survivors, drug addicts, and a Canadian who blogs about flatulence:

i guess all this talk of gas has had its effect on me. last night i had two dreams and in each one i 'let one go' while i was around other people and they all blamed me and i denied it.

More usefully, it also leads to Athelstane e-Texts, a ginormous collection of lovingly transcribed 19th century children's books.

The site includes 32 adventure books by George Manville Fenn, including Brownsmith's Boy, Marcus, the Young Centurion, and Dick o' the Fens. A discussion on LiveJournal suggests that Fenn's work still fills a niche:

So much manliness ... Nic Revel may also have alligators, I know one book does. Alligators that no doubt thrash about like giant serpents in the dark recesses of their tunnel-like lairs. (I'm so excited by that prospect that I misspelled several words and had to edit!)

Publishing · Googlemilking · Google · 2005/06/17 · Comment · Link

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