Let's Try a New Test! Jeeblus, this has been a technical nightmare!

10/01/2004 01:44 PM  |   |  Comment (1)  |  TrackBack (0)

OK, I Think This 'Web-log' Might Work Now

09/27/2004 12:30 PM  |   |  Comment (1)

The Magic Castle, and the PMS Adventure Project: Two good ideas in one! Though I've heard the Rustic now charges weekend rates, so the hell with them. UPDATE: Testing, testing. Really: TESTING.

09/23/2004 02:41 PM  |   |  Comment (0)

Ruffalo Bellhorn? Eric Neel's got a funny column today, naming the Page 2 All-Star team (with references to Courtney Love, Mick and Keith, and others), and including this bit:

Second base: Mark Bellhorn, Boston Red Sox. I like the 'burns and I love the year coming out of the clear blue sky. If I have my way, Ruffalo, another under-rated, patient Mark with some pop, plays him in "Screw the Bambino: The Story of the 2004 Boston Red Sox."

09/23/2004 02:19 PM  |   |  Comment (8)

Little Green Apples? That's what Charles Johnson's site was called just now by LA Weekly columnist John Powers, in a skeptical-but-positive commentary about weblogs on NPR's Fresh Air. My source claims Powers also said "Matt Dredge," but I didn't hear that. Like I said, it was mostly quite positive, though he did warn about "political operatives pretending to be ordinary citizens" (has this been a problem?), and drew a distinction between bloggers and "people who actually have to leave their house to do their work," which is borderline glass-house-resident-throwing-stones talk from a columnist famous locally for wryly blending pop culture with politics.

09/23/2004 02:05 PM  |   |  Comment (7)

About Allawi: Layne's link-filled take.

09/23/2004 01:48 PM  |   |  Comment (0)

Geography as Political Destiny? Cathy Seipp explains, after a fashion, how she arrived at her conservatism (or more precisely, at her awareness of liberal coccoonism), in large part because of her upbringing & revolt against white-bread Los Alamitos, which proved intellectually useful when she moved to the altogether different neighborhood coccoon of Silver Lake.

Here's a riddle, though -- I grew up, and now live in, pretty much the exact same places. (Los Alamitos was 10% tonier and 50% more boring than Lakewood Village, which is about three or four miles away.) Well, OK, my kin weren't "liberal, upper-middle-class (in attitude, not income) Jews, from Canada" (more like, I dunno, "centrist, middle-class (in attitude & income) apatheists from Oregon"), but somehow I and other floodplain/eastside types I know didn't conclude from all this juxtaposition that George Bush is Da Bomb. Must have been Eastern Europe, or the difference between Isla Vista and Westwood....

09/23/2004 11:13 AM  |   |  Comment (11)

Yeah, That's the Ticket! Journalism's in a crisis! Dan Rather's fonts, etc.! Everybody's talking about it! Like the University of Alabama's Edward Mullins:

American journalism could use a good dose of reform, and it won't come from New York, Los Angeles, Atlanta or Dallas.

That belief has guided plans to establish the nation's first master's degree in community journalism.

09/23/2004 10:43 AM  |   |  Comment (2)

'Israel's present may be our future. Best get used to it now': Anyone else notice how positively morose some warhawks are, when imagining America's future? You'll find an even gloomier prognosis talking privately with Roger Simon (who, like Totten, I'll be spending some quality time with this weekend). To say nothing of barking lunatics like Zell Miller.

Which is not to say that they're wrong. I certainly hope I don't have to live in anything resembling their quasi-apocalyptic visions for the future, but I could very well be delusionally optimistic. I just find it interesting how pessimism (or what pessimists would call realism) has now asserted itself so strongly in the pro-war camp, especially among the last remaining Liberal Hawks. I wrote a column in October 2001 urging optimists and pessimists to switch sides for a day; back then the "pessimists" in question were from the anti-war Left. Of course it's hard to see the sunny side up in a situation as screwed as Iraq is right now (especially for our soldiers), but from a purely pragmatic point of view, I think a Hundred Years War in which we regress to what Israel is now will, by mere definition, be one that we lose. And I'm optimistic enough to believe it won't happen.

09/22/2004 11:45 PM  |   |  Comment (10)

Dept. of Great Lead Paragraphs: Sure, it's a non-journalistic weblog entry, with hyper-personal details about various weddings, but it's just nice to read some funny, lively writing in a season when clicking on familiar websites is a recipe for pain.

09/22/2004 10:12 PM  |   |  Comment (0)

Hey, Anyone Want To Sell Me & Emmanuelle Your Car? Just asking, etc. The ideal candidate would be smaller rather than larger, sticker rather than automaticker, functional air conditioning & stereo, with bonus points for good gas mileage, cuteness, air bags, and whatnot. Will pay cash dollar bills.

09/22/2004 01:39 PM  |   |  Comment (6)

The Air Force Times, on Bush's National Guard Service: Link sent by a triple-secret operative. For those of you who care about such things, etc. Headline -- "Bush's Air Guard stint started well, then faded into mystery."

09/21/2004 03:09 PM  |   |  Comment (22)

Jon Stewart v. Bill O'Reilly: It's the short guy, by a landslide. Much, much funnier than Leno in his nonetheless interesting interrogation by Nikki Finke.

09/21/2004 01:55 PM  |   |  Comment (6)

Oh, the Horrors of Competition! From today's New York Times story:

CBS News officials said yesterday "a perfect storm," of circumstances -- including intense competition, faith in the reputation and judgment of a producer, and the reliance on a source with questionable integrity -- had led to their journalistic lapse.

09/21/2004 12:19 PM  |   |  Comment (15)

'[T]hese partisans also will seize the exception and call it the rule': Interesting, somewhat contrarian column on the Rather flap from righty Debra Saunders:

Let me stipulate: The news business attracts liberals. I work in a building where those of us who will vote for President Bush probably could fit in the paper's two elevators. New York Times writer John Tierney informally polled political journalists last month and found that journalists outside the Beltway preferred Sen. John Kerry to Bush 3 to 1, but 12 to 1 inside the Beltway. The informal poll was in keeping, Tierney wrote, with surveys that find "more than 80 percent of the Beltway press corps votes Democratic."

Every day this workforce nonetheless goes out in the world, talks to sources, reads documents, attends meetings and talks to people going about their daily business just to get the whole story. They learn layers of a story, find facts that surprise them, and then write about what they learn.

Sure, some reporters -- a minority in my experience -- put their agenda before their craft, just as some editors are oblivious to the bias that is the spine of many a political story. Still, most reporters work hard to play it down the middle.

09/21/2004 12:03 PM  |   |  Comment (12)

Nice Lil' Seipp WSJ Review of Kevin Starr's Final Installment on the California Dream

09/21/2004 10:16 AM  |   |  Comment (4)