Steve Burns Goes From Blues to Rock

Question: Why did you shave your head? are you making a statement?

Answer: Yes. the statement is, "we have male pattern baldness."

This QNA comes from the web site of Steve Burns, the original Blue's Clues host and star of one of the greatest episodes of Homicide: Life on the Street. After leaving the green-striped shirt, salt and pepper shakers, and floppy-eared blue dog behind in 2002, Burns became an indie rocker who pals around with the Flaming Lips and does They Might Be Giants tribute covers.

File this weblog entry under Money, People Who Know What to Do With.

Television · Music · 2007/11/02 · 4 COMMENTS · Link

Clinton Skirted Questions in Philly Debate

I caught the last 90 minutes of the Democratic presidential debate at Drexel University Tuesday night, which told me that Hillary Clinton thinks she can win the nomination without telling anyone what she'll do if elected.

Clinton had a commanding demeanor throughout the night, despite taking shots from every other candidate except for Bill Richardson, who appeared to be running for vice president with one of his answers. "I'm hearing this holier than thou attitude towards Senator Clinton, and it's bothering me because it's pretty close to personal attacks," he said, referring to comments portraying her as untrustworthy. "We need to be positive in this campaign. ... it's important that we save the ammunition for the Republicans."

The format treated Clinton, John Edwards and Barack Obama as the only candidates worthy of attention, which is a crying shame. Richardson, Joe Biden and Chris Dodd bring impressive credentials to the race and deserve equal time. (Dennis Kucinich's answer to the UFO question would have ended his political career if he had one.)

I'm trying to like Clinton, but all night long her answers were studiously vague. When asked whether she supports New York Gov. Eliot Spitzer's plan to issue driver's licenses to people here illegally, she supported it -- saying the plan "makes a lot of sense" -- before she opposed it -- saying "I did not say that it should be done." When asked whether she supports Rep. Charles Rangel's tax plan to replace the alternative minimum tax, Clinton had to be pressed by moderator Tim Russert before acknowledging that she didn't support it. Even then, she fell back on the hoariest excuse in politics -- claiming more information is needed before she can decide the right approach. Telling people you're going to have a solution is not a solution.

Obama didn't do anything last night to show he's capable of defeating Clinton or will ever aggressively make the case against her. His kinder, gentler approach to politics and soft platitudes about turning the page won't fly in the general election. The Republicans have a formidable spin machine ready to take down the Democratic nominee. Nothing I've seen thus far suggests that Obama can handle it.

In what little time they were given, Biden and Dodd impressed me the most. I'd vote for Biden if the Florida primary was held today, because he's intelligent, mindful of what government can and can't accomplish after 35 years of public life, and is a foreign-policy realist who could get us out of Iraq. He's also engaging as hell and loves the process of bringing the public to your side, a quality sorely lacking in the Decider. Peggy Noonan lamented earlier this month that Democrats don't seem to be taking Biden's campaign seriously. I second that emotion.

Politics · 2007/10/31 · 5 COMMENTS · Link

Adding Atom:Link to Your RSS Feed

The RSS Profile includes a recommendation to add an atom:link element to an RSS feed to identify its URL, as in this example from my own blog:

<atom:link href="http://feeds.cadenhead.org/workbench" rel="self" type="application/rss+xml" />

To make this work, all I had to do was declare the atom namespace in the feed's rss element:

<rss version="2.0" xmlns:atom="http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom">

The addition of atom:link, by letting an RSS feed reveal its own address, makes the feed easier to cache, send as an email attachment and deliver over file-sharing networks. It's an extremely useful capability that can't be accomplished using a core RSS element.

There's been some controversy over this recommendation, due presumably to the fact that it uses an element from Atom. When you submit an RSS feed to the Feed Validator that doesn't contain the element, you get the warning message "Missing atom:link with rel='self'." This doesn't prevent the feed from being valid, but it has irked some people who expected their feed to pass with no warnings.

Dave Winer wrote on RSS-Public this weekend that he can no longer endorse the validator because it checks for this element:

Okay, I'm not going to argue with you, and I fully expect you to trash me on your blog (which I do read).

But I should say this -- that after a few years of relative peace, I had started recommending and using the validator.

I can't recommend it now, because I can see what's coming next.

And I think you ought to tell the members of your board how you're using their names and company's names. I don't think they understand what you're doing, Rogers.

And that closes this as far as I'm concerned.

I'm not clear on the nefarious plot I am supposedly undertaking, but the profile's just following the lead of RSS publishers who have been adding atom:link in growing numbers. It's the second most popular namespace element in an RSS channel, appearing in 15 percent of all feeds in a survey I conducted in June. Every FeedBurner feed includes one, and on Saturday, WordPress added support.

From my perspective, this is exactly how RSS namespaces are supposed to work. Publishers need to identify a feed's URL, so they have adopted the most popular namespace element that provides this capability. It might throw people a little that the element comes from Atom, since there's a syndication war going on and we takes no prisoners, but it's no different than adding an OPML element to RSS when you want an ownerId for your feed.

But thanks for reading my blog, Dave!

Rss · Atom · Opml · 2007/10/22 · 6 COMMENTS · Link

Exclusive: Techbloggers Have Sold Their Souls

On WebProNews, Robert Scoble demonstrates why the leading techblogs are becoming less critical and more susceptible to hype -- they're bargaining with PR flacks for exclusives:

I've noticed that PR types are getting very astute with dealing with bloggers lately and getting their wares discussed on TechMeme.

First they'll call Mike Arrington of TechCrunch. Make sure he's briefed first (Mike doesn't like to talk about news that someone else broke first, so they'll make sure he is always in the first group to get to share something with you all). Then they'll brief "second-tier" bloggers like me, Om, Dan Farber, Read/Write Web, and a variety of others. Embargo us all so we can't publish before Mike does.

One of the reasons mainstream tech magazines like PC Magazine are so boring is because they're completely dependent on early access to new hardware and software, so companies like Microsoft and Apple use this carrot to keep them from being too critical. They've become product catalogs, which is one reason people look to blogs for a more candid and free-wheeling assessment of new products. While magazines were running cover after cover singing the praises of Windows Vista earlier this year, bloggers were putting up danger signs about upgrading to the new OS on existing PCs.

Now, according to Scoble, A-list techbloggers have become just as desperate for inside access, even to the point of honoring an embargo intended to benefit another blog. What are the odds that TechCrunch will break the exclusive that a new product sucks rocks?

Tech · Journalism · 2007/10/18 · 18 COMMENTS · Link

Running for President, One Spam at a Time

I don't know who I'm going to vote for in the 2008 presidential election, but I've given small donations to both John Edwards and Barack Obama in response to specific initiatives I thought worthy of support, so I'm on their mailing lists. They both send personalized emails frequently, like the one I just got from Obama:

Rogers,

I'm leaving the Tonight Show studio and I wanted to share something.

Jay Leno just asked if it bothers me that some of the Washington pundits are declaring Hillary Clinton the winner of this election before a single vote has been cast.

I'll tell you what I told him: Hillary is not the first politician in Washington to declare "Mission Accomplished" a little too soon.

We started this week $2.1 million behind the Clinton campaign -- a lead they built in large part with contributions from Washington lobbyists and special interest PACs.

We don't accept money from federal lobbyists or PACs. But we've already cut that advantage in half with small donations from people like you.

Let's close the rest of that gap now. Please make a donation of $25:

https://donate.barackobama.com/closethegap

Thank you,

Barack

I know that a candidate has to chase dollars all the time to win, but I hear from Obama a 3-5 times a month, and it's always money money money. He never just wants to talk about how his day's going. I'm beginning to wish he took money from lobbyists.

Politics · 2007/10/18 · 3 COMMENTS · Link

Ellen DeGeneres Has Gone to the Dogs

Last week, Michael Arrington wrote on TechCrunch about Richard Figueroa, a photographer who was making obnoxious legal threats about a copyright violation of an Ashton Kutcher photograph. Figueroa mistakenly believed the photo, which showed up in a Google image search incorrectly linked to TechCrunch, was published on the site.

As Figueroa was calling TechCrunch advertisers and urging they boycott the site, Arrington published Figueroa's emailed legal threat, which included his address and phone number.

I don't know the law in this area, but when you speak critically of someone on a high-traffic web site and include their address and phone number, you know with absolute certainty what's going to happen next. Some readers with too much aggression and too little decency will call the person and harass or even threaten them. I think you bear some moral if not legal responsibility for inciting the behavior.

The same situation took place on a much larger scale with Ellen DeGeneres and a pet adoption agency this week in Pasadena, Calif. The agency took a dog back after DeGeneres broke her adoption agreement and gave it away to friends, and she made the dispute public in a sobbing rant on her daytime talk show.

You'll never guess what happened next. Mutts and Moms, an adoption agency run by a pet store in Pasadena, Calif., is getting death threats, according to founder Marina Batkis.

... Baktis expressed concerns for the safety of herself and her animals. "I haven't eaten, I'm sick and I've had heart palpitations," she said, sobbing. "My life is being threatened, this is horrible. I rescue dogs. I can't believe this."

DeGeneres, who has a net worth of $65 million, has unleashed a mob of irate viewers on a couple of women who run a strip-mall pet store. As one commenter wrote on the Washington Post web site, "it may be the most ridiculous use of celebrity I have ever seen. By the way she's carrying on you would have thought the dog died."

Sad as it is to see a two-week bond between family and dog severed by an adoption agency, I hope Mutts and Moms and Attorneys can make DeGeneres a couple million lower on the Forbes chart next year. Profligate wealth is wasted on the wrong people. If I were Ellen DeGeneres -- a phrase I don't get to say nearly enough -- I would just buy the strip mall and become their landlord, or if that fails start a pet store across the street that sells chew toys and catnip at predatory loss-leader prices. Failing that, I'd solve the problem with ninjas.

Television · Pets · 2007/10/17 · 8 COMMENTS · Link

Review: The Reluctant Fundamentalist by Mohsin Hamid

Mohsin Hamid's The Reluctant Fundamentalist, a novel shortlisted for this year's Man Booker Prize, has a killer hook. Changez, a Pakistani graduated top of his class from Princeton working at a financial firm in Manhattan, slowly becomes radicalized by America's response to the 9/11 attacks. Sitting down at a restaurant in Lahore, Pakistan, with a mysterious man who appears to be an American military operative, Changez tells the story of how he came to renounce the U.S.

The novel, briskly told in 184 pages, neither sensationalizes the subject matter nor uses it to lecture. Hamid tells the story in second person, with Changez as narrator and the reader in the position of the operative. "Excuse me, sir, but may I be of assistance?" it begins. "Do not be frightened by my beard: I am a lover of America." As his story unravels, it becomes clear that something terrible is going to happen between Changez and the American, a cat-and-mouse game that's all the more intriguing because it isn't clear who's predator and prey.

Changez' job in Manhattan is to evaluate the financial condition of troubled companies with a ruthless eye towards the bottom line, cutting costs and downsizing workforces to grease the wheels for a buyout. "Focus on the fundamentals," his company drills into his head, putting a different spin on the novel's title than the scowling young Muslim on the cover.

The particulars of the narrator's daily life in New York are secondary, at least in my mind, to his attempt to explain to an American why he renounced the country, returned home and took action against it. Hamid's storytelling is most compelling when Changez wrestles with feelings that would inspire the disgust of his American colleagues:

The bombing of Afghanistan had already been underway for a fortnight, and I had been avoiding the evening news, preferring not to watch the partisan and sports-event-like coverage given to the mismatch between the American bombers with their twenty-first-century weaponry and the ill-equipped and ill-fed Afghan tribesmen below. On those rare occasions when I did find myself confronted by such programming -- in a bar, say, or at the entrance to the cable company's offices -- I was reminded of the film Terminator, but with the roles reversed so the machines were cast as heroes.

Least compelling was his romance with an American woman that's one-sided, charmless and grim.

The war that nearly happened between India and Pakistan after the terrorist attack on the Indian Parliament in December 2001, an event I had almost forgotten, figures heavily in the book. Changez returns home as one million troops mass on the border. Hamid describes Lahore, the hometown of Changez and himself, in an unexpected way that demonstrates the glope-sweeping breadth of the Muslim world: "Lahore was the last major city in a contiguous swath of Muslim lands stretching as far west as Morocco and had therefore that quality of understated bravado characteristic of frontier towns."

Wounded national pride figures strongly in Reluctant Fundamentalist, which ratchets up the tension towards a thrilling end. Hamid began the book before 9/11 to tell the story of why a secular Muslim, living large among America's elite, might resent the country. 9/11 changed everything.

Books · 2007/10/17 · 1 COMMENT · Link

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