Stephen Colbert on D&D: 'Enjoy Your Magnificent Isolation!'
Stephen Colbert was once an 11th-level paladin who explored Barrier Peaks:I had an eleventh-level paladin (it took me years to advance those levels) whom I took on Expedition, and he got the Power Armor, which was the big thing to get in that module. But he also went a little power mad. On the next campaign we saw merchant caravans crossing the desert, and my character flew down and landed next to a merchant and tore off the guy's head.
The DM informed me that I was not a paladin anymore.
I said, "Oh, ----, I forgot. I'm lawful good!"
He talked about his paladin again on the Colbert Report this year.
Fired North Texas Coach in Black Mood
My alma mater, the University of North Texas, made national news this past week when a booster for its football program threatened to withhold a $1 million donation after the team fired Coach Darrell Dickey.
In nine seasons, Dickey led the Mean Green to four straight Sun Belt Conference championships and the first bowl trip since 1959. He's one of the most accomplished coaches in the school's modest football history, but two losing seasons and criticism over recruitment led to his ouster. He's receiving a buyout in excess of $540,000 for the remaining years of his contract and agreed to coach through season's end.
Two incidents that took place during Saturday's North Texas-Florida Atlantic game show how wildly things have spun out of control at UNT since the firing.
According to parents of current players, right before Saturday's game Coach Dickey snuck new black uniforms onto the team without the school's permission. The rec-league quality jerseys, pictured here, didn't contain the names of players or the school and conference logos. They weren't cleared with Athletic Director Rick Villareal or announced to the press before the game and might violate agreements with the school's uniform supplier.
During halftime of the game, one assistant coach allegedly started a physical fight with with another after being told he should play seniors because it was their final home game. The incident got so out of hand the offense received no instruction before going back out to start the third quarter.
As you might have guessed, North Texas lost the game, 17-16, and fell to 3-8.
I'm a small donor to the Mean Green Club, the school's booster program, and a longtime fan of UNT football. Because I've been digging into these incidents on the GoMeanGreen.Com message board, I've gotten independent corroboration from sources affiliated with the program. I'm withholding their names at their request.
I can't recall a situation where a head coach sprang new uniforms on a Division I college football team to "piss off" his athletic director, as Dickey reportedly acknowledged to players before the game. Combine this with a coordinator putting another coach in a chokehold until being pulled off and it's a meltdown of historic proportions.
Dickey, who also abandoned his customary attire for all-black clothes and a black cap, is photographed with the team in the Denton Record-Chronicle. He told reporters it "wasn't anything other than kids liking that color," drawing the ire of parents who didn't like the stunt being blamed on players. When I saw game photos on Sunday I thought Dickey had declared a period of mourning for his job.
I left two messages today with new UNT President Gretchen Bataille to relay these events. The departing seniors on the team deserve a better sendoff than childish stunts from coaches nursing a grudge, fans deserve better, and a school paying Dickey another half-mil not to coach deserves better.
I'll be disappointed if Dickey makes the trip Saturday to finish the season against Louisiana-Monroe. I was on the fence about Dickey's firing, but I think he's shown his true colors.
Michael Arrington's Rich Commitment to Journalism
TechCrunch publisher Michael Arrington was recently caught scrubbing an old blog entry to hide a conflict of interest.Arrington wrote Oct. 27 about Maya's Mom, a Web 2.0 startup aimed for the Oprah crowd that received "around $1 million" in funding. When he wrote about the company in April, he told his readers that Maya's Mom founder Ann Crady Kennedy was one of his peeps:
Disclosure: Ann is a former colleague and so my opinions may be favorably tinted.
This sentence subsequently disappeared, so TechCrunch readers weren't told in October that he was hyping a pal. After he was caught by ValleyWag, Arrington offered a novel defense -- conflicts of interest are what make TechCrunch special:
TechCrunch is a new kind of publication. We don't fit into a neat little box like traditional media, who refrain from financial conflicts of interest with their readers and feel that they are therefore above reproach. They aren't, but they really, really feel that they are, and look down on blogs and other media as the unwashed masses. ...
TechCrunch is different. TechCrunch is all about insider information and conflicts of interest. The only way I get access to the information I do is because these entrepreneurs and venture capitalists are my friends. I genuinely like these people and want them to succeed, and they know it and therefore trust me more than they trust traditional press.
I am an active investor, board member and advisory board member with a number of startups. That isn't going to change. I also write about startups. That isn't going to change, either. Obviously people like what we write on TechCrunch or they wouldn't come back. But no one should think TechCrunch is objective or conflict-free. We aren't. We never have been. We never will be.
Arrington thinks there's something new in a reporter who trades favorable coverage for access, but his actions put him at the end of a long line of journalistic pretenders. Judith Miller of the New York Times could have made this disclosure during the run up to the Iraq war:
The only way I get access to the information I do is because White House officials are my friends. I genuinely like these people and want them to succeed, and they know it and therefore trust me more than they trust traditional press.
Arrington, who recently lost two of his most vocal critics with the shutdown of Dead 2.0 and the firing of ValleyWag writer Nick Douglas, told the Wall Street Journal that he wants the TechCrunch network of sites to compete with CNET.
If that's his goal, he needs to adopt the ethics of journalism and stop making sweetheart deals with the subjects he covers. Every week seems to bring news of another company Arrington has become involved in as an investor, consultant or board member.
I suspect objectivity would interfere with his real goal, which was described to the Journal by another one of his peeps:
Mr. Arrington is a "very ambitious guy," says Keith Teare, the former CEO of RealNames, who notes that Mr. Arrington hasn't stayed at any job for longer than 18 months over the past 10 years. Mr. Teare adds that Mr. Arrington is "extremely focused on money. He wants to be rich."
Mr. Arrington doesn't dispute that. He says he has "never made any real money," even after selling an online-payments company he founded called Achex Inc. to First Data Corp. in 2001. He declines to divulge his net worth but says TechCrunch brings in about $120,000 in revenue a month, mostly from ads, sponsorships, an online job-posting service and the parties it holds.
If Arrington wants to join a world where $1.4 million a year in revenue isn't "real money," he's not going to get there by being a scrupulously ethical journalist.
Review: The Night Watch by Sarah Waters
The Night Watch, a novel by Sarah Waters nominated for Britain's prestigious Man Booker Prize, has been written with an enthralling narrative gimmick. Divided into three sections, it tells the story of six characters in wartime London beginning in 1947, stepping back to 1944 and finishing in 1941. You learn where they ended up by page 150 and spend the next 300 pages finding out how they got there.
This turns the events of the story on their head in interesting ways. When one of the characters remarks during the war that "we might all be dead tomorrow," you know they won't. Their fatalism falls on deaf ears; German planes drop bombs night after night that will never find them. As a cheating husband tells his mistress "you wait until after the war ... it'll be the Ritz and the Savoy then, every time," you've already learned with certainty that it's an empty promise.
The story's constructed as a mystery in which the details of the characters' lives are the mystery, so describing them individually would ruin surprises. The six are ordinary people living in London, dealing with World War II and tied together by romance or coincidence. Four of the six are gay -- one newspaper reviewer claims Waters has the literary goal of "writing lesbians back into history" -- but the novel builds on universal romantic obstacles like jealousy, self-esteem and guilt rather than issues particular to sexual orientation.
The author Martina Cole paid £1,000 pounds in a charity auction to be a character in the book. Her money bought her E.M. Cole, a female ambulance driver protective of her cigarettes who has disreputable friends selling black market coffee, soap and lingerie.
The Night Watch is an excellent novel with some violence and biblically unsanctioned sexual content that might turn off James Dobson but not Ted Haggard. I haven't read a book with literary aims this ambitious in years, and clearly I'm missing out.
Editorial Integrity for Sale, Priced to Move
I'm being paid $125 to write this review of ReviewMe, a site that brokers deals between advertisers and bloggers who will review a product or service for a fee. The person who came up with this idea, who calls himself ReviewMe Roy, explains:I wake up every day and the first thought in my head is, "how can I provide both valuable feedback and buzz to advertisers in the blogosphere, simultaneously allowing bloggers to increase their revenue while mainting their editorial integrity and true voice?"
I wake up every day and the first thought in my head is, "I need to pee." ReviewMe Roy scares me a little, like those people in McDonald's commercials who've made the "Dollar Menu" their reason for living.
The fee you earn for ReviewMe reviews depends on how highly your weblog is esteemed by Alexa and Technorati and how many people subscribe to your RSS feed. Workbench gets a sweet rate, but only if some company finds it on ReviewMe and puts my editorial integrity in their shopping cart. (One bug: Individual Blogspot blogs are given the entire blog hosting service's Alexa ranking.)
I'll stick with ReviewMe a little while to see whether any company thinks my true voice is worth a one-day rental, but I don't see how bloggers can mix in paid product placements without costing the respect of their audience. The only way to retain the perception of editorial integrity is to criticize the product you've been paid to review, as I'm doing here, but that strategy falls apart the minute you like something.
Lies, Damned Lies, and Charles Krauthammer
In his column today, Charles Krauthammer attempts to spin the election as an earthquake that was oh-so-close to being no big deal, really:... the difference between taking one house vs. both -- and thus between normal six-year incumbent-party losses and a major earthquake that shakes the presidency -- was razor-thin in this election. A switch of just 1,424 votes in Montana would have kept the Senate Republican.
In the final numbers on CNN, Jon Tester defeated incumbent Conrad Burns by 2,847 votes. Krauthammer deftly knocks this number in half to better suggest the closeness of the election.
But he neglects to point out that Montana is so sparsely populated that only 404,000 people voted in that Senate race, making the 2,847-vote margin of victory seem smaller than it is.
Tester smoked Burns by seven-tenths of one percent. That's an extremely close race, but in a more populous state like Florida, which had 4.7 million votes cast in its Senate race, that margin would've been a win by 33,000 votes.
59 of 60 Web Users Prefer the Drudge Report
The ad broker for the Drudge Report says that Matt Drudge's site broke traffic records on Election Day with 2.3 million unique visitors and 25.1 million page views.The scariest part of the press release:
This proves, once again, that when Americans want reliable, unbiased, instant news on what's happening and what's important, they trust Matt Drudge and the Drudge Report to deliver.
Drudge also had 100 million ad impressions that day. If you figure a click-through rate of one percent and 5 cents a click, both of which are on the low end, his two-person site earned $50,000 in 24 hours.
Right-wing critics of the Drudge Retort often taunt me with stuff like this, believing there's karmic justice in Drudge's traffic being so much bigger than ours.
On Election Day, the Retort had 38,900 unique visitors and 100,900 page views. That's microscopic potatoes compared to the Report, roughly one-sixtieth its traffic, but large enough to justify my journalism degree.
Our all-time traffic record is still the day that Janet Jackson's wardrobe malfunction sent thousands of people to the web for partial frontal celebrity nudity, which nearly melted my server in February 2004.
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