Hugh MacLeod Ages Like Fine South African Wine
It's funny what people reveal about themselves online. Read my blog for any length of time and you can probably figure out my uneasy Michael Corleone-like relationship with journalism, the field I majored in and subsequently escaped. I can't decide what to think about my long absence from the profession or the fact that I don't seem to be missed.
Read online marketing guru Hugh MacLeod, the guy who plies bloggers with a South African wine in the expectation they'll sing its praises, and you discover he's got a gigantic mean streak about middle age.
This morning on Twitter, MacLeod posted this tweet to blogger Frank Paynter: "Mssg to Frank Paynter re. your attempts to 'friend' me on Facebook. Go. ----. Yourself. -------. http://listics.com/."
He then followed with another message: "Seriously. Frank Paynter. Go ---- yourself. And your Mean Kids friends. Stupid, middle-aged Losers. Enjoy."
This was at least the third time I've read MacLeod point out somebody's age in the course of insulting them, so I did a little checking on the Google. Contempt for middle age is one of his regular themes.
An art director I know was laid off from Ogilvy's in New York about 2 years ago. He's had a very hard time. His current situation is a total disaster. He's 40 years old. Before the layoff his career had been less than spectacular.
Forget to upstream and you end up like him: middle aged and crashing on a friend's couch in The Bronx.
Apparently these MeanKids folk were taking the occasional pop at me as well. Mommy! Mommy! Come quick! A posse of middle aged, self-loathing underachievers is being mean to me Boo hoo hoo hoo...
Watching the big Madison Avenue agencies trying to get with the program is a bit like watching a middle-aged married man hitting on a co-ed in a bar.
I had it in my head that MacLeod was young, but I think this impression was based solely on snarky comments like these. As someone who turned 40 this year and gray 10 years earlier, I've cultivated an appreciation for young people who sneer at quadragenarians in their dotage. Unlike racists and sexists, agists always get what's coming to them in due time.
But as it turns out, MacLeod's no spring chicken. He noted his 40th birthday in 2005 with this gloomy cartoon:
That snide young whippersnapper is one of my elders.
But Never Sip From That Cup Again
Today's healthy living tip from Primate Brow Flash:
Matt turned me on to a use for old sippy-cups.
They work perfectly as Neti Pots!
Fill with warm salt water (1/4 teaspoon salt to 1 cup warm water), lean over a sink, tip your head sideways and jam the nozzle of the sippy cup into the higher nostril and pour. You will feel the salt water fill your nasal passages and then it will fall out of your other nostril. It left me with feeling of cleanliness in an entirely new place. ...
Note. If water steadily rises across your vision in one or both eyeballs while doing this, or if more than two cups of water disappears into your nose without any exiting, cease immediately.
Happy 100th Birthday, L. Sprague de Camp
Last Tuesday, the Yahoo Groups mailing list devoted to the late fantasy novelist L. Sprague de Camp failed to note the 100th anniversary of his birth. This unconscionable slight has inspired Leo Grin, editor of the Robert E. Howard literary journal The Cimmerian, to take up his metaphorical two-handed battle axe and go medieval on their asses:
... not since I quit the board of The Dark Man in December of 2003 have I been so disgusted at the hapless, witless performance of a group of colleagues. I'm so thoroughly revolted, in fact, that I've come to an ad hoc decision, one that feels not only appropriate but strangely purifying, like a good flea bath or delousing: I'm going to remove the D for de Camp group from my list of links on TC's blogroll. I originally put it up as a tangential link to REH, mostly out of a sense of charity towards my good buddy and frequent Cimmerian contributor Gary Romeo. But damn -- friendships aside, I see no reason to funnel Cimmerian readers towards a congregation that reeks of such bovine stupidity that it misses the most important de Camp milestone of this century. If they can't even work up the energy to mention his centennial, what good is the forum at all? Maybe D is for dumbasses? For shame, halfwits, for shame.
Peggy Noonan Can't Pin the Tail on a Donkey
Right-wingers have gone ballistic since Wednesday's Republican YouTube debate because four of the questioners appear to be Democrats, including the retired "do ask, do tell" soldier who hogged not one but two microphones, and it's apparently GOP policy to avoid speaking to outsiders until the general election. But when Wall Street Journal columnist Peggy Noonan went hunting for Democrats today in that debate's target-rich environment, she still came up empty-handed.
Check out this huge blunder in Noonan's column:
I thought of this the other night when citizens who turned out to be partisans for Mrs. Clinton, Mr. Obama and Mr. Edwards asked the Republicans, in debate, would Jesus support the death penalty, do you believe every word of the Bible, and what does the Confederate flag mean to you?
None of those three questions was asked by a partisan for a Democratic candidate.
Tyler Overman, who asked if Jesus would support the death penalty, is a 23-year-old from Memphis, Tennessee, with no stated political affiliations on his YouTube profile or MySpace page. I could find no blogger or media report linking him to Democrats.
Joseph Dearing, who asked whether candidates believe every single word in his Bible, describes himself on YouTube as a "saved Bible-believing Christian" and has posted 24 videos over the past six months on the Book. He's a 24-year-old from Grand Prairie, Texas, who has a GodTube profile that states, "I've grown a lot spiritually, thanks to the influence of the infallible word of God, which today is found in the Authorized (King James) Bible." He told the Dallas Morning News that he was disappointed in the answers he got and is a Ron Paul supporter.
Leroy Brooks, who asked the flag question, is a self-described "kid" from Houston, Texas who declares on his YouTube profile that he's a Paul supporter. This ought to be no surprise, considering the Guy Fawkes bust in the background of his video. Paul backers have adopted that literal revolutionary as a symbol of their metaphorical goal to blow up big government.
In comments he posted on YouTube, Brooks said the purpose of the question was "to get a major candidate to attack me or blow me off and therefore hurting their southern base." (I think it may have succeeded where Mitt Romney is concerned, because his slam against the flag will burn some South Carolinans.)
Brooks also explained what the Confederate flag means to him:
for me it is a image that represents the first and only time in american history when a large group of people, who disapproved of government policies (slavery being just one of many), stood up and said "We're not going to take it anymore!".
So he's hanging that ginormous Confederate flag on his wall as a symbol of opposition to slavery. YouTube grades on a curve.
There's something unseemly about fisking people because they asked questions at a debate, as if you can't ask a good question because you already picked a horse in this race. Many political bloggers have pledged their troth to a specific candidate; does that mean they should also drink a glass of shut the hell up?
My favorite response to the debate is the bloggers like Malkin who have outed Log Cabin Republican David Cercone because he's supporting Barack Obama. The fact he's been left to vote Democrat, because all of the Republicans on that stage are allergic to his support, was the point of his question!
As a yellow-dog Democrat who watched the entire debate, I thought most of the questions were fair, aside from the gay soldier who should've been excluded by virtue of being too closely affiliated with Clinton. The fact some people asked questions for less than genuine reasons is less important to me than the substance of the answers -- watching Mike Huckabee, Mitt Romney and Rudy Giuliani wrestle with Biblical literalism is just deserts for a GOP that's come to believe it has cornered the market on faith.
As Peggy Noonan should know, that question came from a God-fearing Republican.
YouTube Questioner in the Dark on Immigration
During last night's Republican YouTube debate on CNN, a disembodied head asked the candidates if they would ever support amnesty for illegal immigrants.
None of the candidates who answered his question -- Fred Thompson, Rudy Giuliani and John McCain -- wanted to anger the head, which makes perfect sense to me. That guy was terrifying.
When CNN moderator Anderson Cooper followed up the question by announcing that the head was in the audience, I expected the cameras to pan to a scene of unthinkable carnage.
Ripping Music to OGG Files on Windows
I rip music CDs to OGG files, abandoning the MP3 format in favor of an open standard that's encouraged for adoption by the Free Software Foundation. Although OGG works in fewer places than MP3 today, it's completely free for developers to support and gets music listeners away from patent attorneys, which makes it the better long-term choice.
After having some trouble finding a ripper that supports OGG, I discovered Audiograbber, a free Windows program that's unpolished but gets the job done. Audiograbber can download album data from FreeDB, save the songs with customized filenames, and create playlists.
I'm not an audiophile, so I don't know if the settings I'm using are optimal for music -- stereo, quality 5.0, 147 Kbits/second -- but I cranked it up to 11 on some new deviltry from Mudvayne, and I don't think I'm missing any subtleties.
Credit: The photo was taken by When1_8becomes_2zero and is available under a Creative Commons license.
CNN's Self-Importance is Beyond Debate
At last night's Democratic presidential debate in Las Vegas, CNN moderator Wolf Blitzer spoke for more time than five of the seven candidates, repeatedly getting in the way of substantive discussion by reducing issues to yes/no options. But it wasn't until the audience got its chance to ask questions that the CNN team demonstrated how inflated in self-importance our leading broadcast journalists have become during presidential campaigns.
After a commercial break, undecided voter LaShannon Spencer posed the following question, which was greeted with applause by the crowd: "We constantly hear health care questions and questions pertaining to the war. But we don't hear questions pertaining to the Supreme Court justice or education. My question is, if you are elected president, what qualities must the appointee possess?"
This question was the first posed about the court during the debate, and the audience greeted it with applause. But Suzanne Malveaux, the CNN anchor assigned to audience duty, couldn't leave it alone and let the candidates speak. She added a question of her own: "I'd like to get to Senator Dodd, if you would. And in answering that question, also tell us whether or not you would require your nominees to support abortion rights."
After Dodd answered the question, Blitzer posed it to all of the candidates: "All right, let's go through the whole panel. I want everybody to weigh in. This is an important question that was raised. I'll start with Senator Biden. Would you insist that any nominee for the U.S. Supreme Court supported abortion rights for women?"
Last night's voter questions were better and more serious than the ones asked by CNN (with one exception at the end). On the court question, Blitzer and Malveaux reduced the voter to a prop, replacing her question with their own and telling the audience how "important" it was.
The arrogance was so apparent that Sen. Joe Biden, much to his credit, chided them for it:
Biden: Suzanne's decided. I'm not answering her question. I'm answering the question of the woman who is there. Okay? (Cheers, applause.) And -- number one. And then I'll answer Suzanne's question.
Blitzer: Well, let's ask the woman. Do you want him to answer that question?
Biden: Do you want me to answer your question?
Spencer: I would like for you to answer both questions.
Despite the admonishment, Malveaux did it again as the debate was drawing to a close.
Frank Perconte, a student at UNLV where the debate was being held, posed this question: "Whether it's the continuing violence in Iraq, or if it's a potential confrontation with Iran, or even the emerging instability in Pakistan, nothing seems to be getting any better in the Middle East. It only seems to be getting worse. And if the upcoming election is anything like the last two elections, if any of you is elected, in all likelihood, you'll be presiding over an extremely divided electorate. Almost half the country is not going to agree with you on the direction you want to take this country to meet those challenges in the Middle East. So my question to you is, assuming you are elected, the day after you take the oath of office, what message will you offer the whole country, to unite all of us behind you, so that you can see us through this period of transition that we're in?"
Malveaux couldn't just direct this question to candidates and let them run with it. She responded, "I'd like to refer that to Senator Obama. Senator Obama, you said on a TV interview just this past weekend, you didn't believe that Senator Clinton was able to unite this country. Why do you believe she can't?"
In the movie Broadcast News, Albert Brooks plays a high-minded TV reporter who finds his business being taken over by telegenic celebrity anchors and ratings-obsessed entertainment. Watching a colleague shed a tear on the air during an interview, Brooks laments, "Let's never forget, we're the real story, not them."
Like every film decrying the state of broadcast journalism, the film has proven to be prophetic. Sharing a stage in Vegas with the next Democratic nominee for president, Blitzer and Malveaux acted like they were the real story. But we're the ones who should be crying.
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