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Daily Blah for... Tuesday, November 30, 2004
First Definitions
In the beginning was the word, and the word was blog. According to Merriam-Webster, "blog" was the most sought-after definition of 2004. Which is as good an excuse as any to register my increasing distaste for the word. Yesterday Dan brought over a homemade DVD he'd been sent containing an appropriately amateurish and narcissistic documentary on blogs, called Blogumentary. It opened with vox pops in Times Square where passers-by were asked to define "blog." The majority stared blankly into the camera, screwed up their noses, and said it sounded like something you'd find on your shoe, or a stain on your shirt. Which is entirely true. The word is just way too close to "bog," for one thing. For another, English words that begin with "bl-" or end with "-og" are rarely complimentary. Blighted, blunted, blunder, grog, fog, dog. A "blogger" sounds like someone you send into the sewers for a particularly nasty plumbing job. Come to think of it ...
So what say we decide on an alternative now, while the mainstream is still frantically flicking through its Merriam-Websters? Rather than squishing the strange bedfellows "web" and "log" together, how about using "Net" and "letters" to create "Netlets"? Wouldn't you rather be reading an "e-ssay"? Even "cyberjournal" would be slightly less repulsive than the current incumbent.
Daily Blah for... Monday, November 29, 2004
O Say, Did You See?
Remember Jimi Hendrix's iconic 60's version of 'Star Spangled Banner'? Now imagine it played by a caffeinated nutter on a violin. You've got talented violinist and instant Internet megastar Bobby Yang.
Pie!
More evidence of the collapse of Western civilization: the Weebl and Bob Flash cartoons.
I'd love to go back to 1990 and tell Tim Berners-Lee that thanks to him, one day workers all over the world would be able to goof off by watching absurd little one-minute animations. Who could ever have guessed this was going to be the art form most suited to the Web?
Daily Blah for... Sunday, November 28, 2004
Violent Videogames and the Hip-Hop Hater
I got my first complaint about the top ten videogames list yesterday, in a random voicemail from a random Time subscriber. The complaint was, not surprisingly, about Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas. About my including it in the list at all. "Do you have any idea how violent this game is?" my caller asked. I had to laugh, because the first sentence of my review begins "yes, it's violent ..." She then went on to denounce hip-hop culture in its entirety, which I believe betrayed the real motivation behind her call. No one ever went morally bankrupt in white-bread America by attacking multiculturalism.
Anyhoo, here's that much ballyhooed top ten list, with links to my mini-reviews for each:
1. The Sims 2
2. Rome Total War
3. Half Life 2
4. Katamari Damacy
5. Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas
6. Battlefield Vietnam
7. Halo 2
8. Burnout 3: Takedown
9. Fable
10. Pirates!
Daily Blah for... Wednesday, November 24, 2004
I Do Like Mondays (Like This)
It's not many mornings you get woken up by a call that tells you your story has landed on the front cover of Time. Precious few times in your life is that news also going to hit on your birthday. Rarer still is a day when even better news arrives just hours later. But that's what happened to me on Monday. I've been in such glee about it all, I've barely had a chance to sit down and write to you, dear reader. Well, that and the hefty copy of the Complete New Yorker cartoons P gave me which I've been steadily gorging through ever since.
The Time story was my piece on SpaceShipOne, which we pronounced the Best Invention of 2004. I knew it was in line for the cover, but forgot all about it until the PR department called -- on New York time -- early Monday morning. The photo shoot that became the cover almost didn't happen; it was set to take place the day after the election, and on election day -- while walking the desolate outer precincts of Reno -- I got a call from my editor saying our photographers had run into a snag. Burt Rutan wasn't going to let us take SpaceShipOne out of its hangar, or attach it to the carrier plane White Knight. It would take hours, Scaled Composites (Rutan's company) had said. It was out of the question.
Scaled Composites is a Mojave-based operation far removed from media-hungry civilization. It has no PR staff. I'd interviewed Rutan the previous week on his cellphone in Alabama while he paced up and down in front of a restaurant containing some fellow devotees of Werner Von Braun -- there was, he said gruffly when I offered to call back later, no better time. He later told me that I might as well "go Google all the articles" that had ever been written about him, because I wasn't asking him anything new. In short, I found him to be -- how shall I put this? -- something of a cantankerous old bastard. Now, in the middle of a sweaty desert afternoon spent persuading lazy but registered Democrats to get out and vote, I had to persuade this difficult genius to roll out his space plane baby for our cameras.
I can't remember how I did it, exactly. All I remember is that I was polite and calm, and gently reminded Rutan that we were talking about the cover of an internationally respected magazine with 24 million readers. I could understand why he didn't want to hook up White Knight, but could we at least take SpaceShipOne for a short roll into the sunshine? We'd reimburse him for any time, trouble and effort taken. Oh, well, I'll certainly see what I can do, he said. Next I know, right by my story in the Time system there's this great image of Rutan and his pilots beaming happily on a reflective wet runway in front of the reunited White Knight and SpaceShipOne.
So yes, the cover was a doubly nice treat. But what blew it out of the water was news that my cousin Julie -- the only one of four kids in my immediate family to not have been born on November 22 -- had just had a baby girl, Imogen. A baby girl born on November 22. I can't describe how immensely happy this made me. About as happy as I was that night at Benihana, where 14 freaks and I had a delightful cocktail-soaked evening watching chefs juggle knives. I'm easily amused.
Daily Blah for... Wednesday, November 17, 2004
Freshly Harvested Memes
Seen the kitten on a motorbike tearing around London? Amazing how much humorous mileage you can get out of one looped Flash animation.
Heard about the artist who reshelved the contents of an entire San Francisco bookstore according to color? I want that job.
You've heard the Grey Album by Danger Mouse, but have you seen the Grey Video? And speaking of illegal mash-up albums, you must listen to A Night At the Hip Hopera. Finally, Queen get the respect they deserve, yo.
Daily Blah for... Monday, November 15, 2004
The Underpants Game
I finally finished my top 10 videogames of the year list for Time. What's on the list, I hear you cry? Can't reveal that yet -- you'll just have to buy next week's magazine. Or maybe the week after's. But I can tell you I sweated and fretted more over the exact content and order of this list than any other story this year. And I never, ever guessed when I took this job that my, ahem, "research" would involve running around a replica of Los Angeles wearing nothing but underpants and cowboy boots. But that's what a full day of playing the fascinating Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas will do for you. (Okay, yes, that one is on the list).
Daily Blah for... Saturday, November 13, 2004
See No War
Sometimes I just have to shake my head in disbelief at the Alice in Wonderland country I live in. You've heard, presumably, that 66 ABC affiliates refused to show Saving Private Ryan in all its unedited glory, fearing FCC indecency fines. And that far from dispelling these fears, the FCC is actually considering fines against the stations that showed it.
So we're fine with screening tributes to D-Day veterans, right? No problem preempting regular programming with President Bush's speech from Omaha Beach (where, by the way, CNN picked up a mysterious local radio signal that was apparently transmitting the speech before he said the words). And we're fine, of course, with Stephen Ambrose and his graphic descriptions of how our citizen soldiers died. Makes a great stocking stuffer. But when it comes to screening the substance of what we should always remember -- the most realistic, pull-no-punches visualization of what actually went down at Omaha, with most of its dramatic incidents drawn from the same historical record -- it's indecent.
Of course it is. Heaven knows, if the great and good masses of American people actually got it into their heads what war entails, and perhaps started to think for themselves about the 1,000 dead American soldiers in Iraq, they might not be so enthusiastic next time around. They might actually go out and protest when we bomb Tehran.
Daily Blah for... Friday, November 12, 2004
Analogy of the Day
"You know what the Middle East is like? It's like when you look down the back of the TV entertainment center, and there are all these wires, and they're all tangled up, and you have no idea how they got tangled up, because you didn't tangle them up when you installed it all."
Daily Blah for... Tuesday, November 09, 2004
The Next Prize
Upset that you missed out on the $10 million X Prize? Want to follow in Burt Rutan's footsteps, boost commercial spaceflight and help get us the hell off this crazy planet? ("Yes please," scream 56 million Kerry voters.) Well, lucky for you that there's another starbound bounty up for grabs -- the $50 million "America's Space Prize." It's a little tougher than the X Prize: by Jan 10 2010, you must take five people into orbital space (250 miles up) and complete two full orbits of the Earth.
Anyone need an extra passenger?
Daily Blah for... Monday, November 08, 2004
From Sierras to Shining Sea
It had to happen. In the wake of the election, a group called "Move On California" has been formed to discuss the possibility of this great state, the world's fifth largest economy, seceding from the Union. Will it gain any traction? Who knows? I'm certainly in favor. I'll take Ahnuld over Dubya any day.
Daily Blah for... Sunday, November 07, 2004
You Want Numbers? I Got Your Numbers Right Here, Bub
The official tallies are coming in from Florida, and they make for queasy reading.
In six Florida counties, the votes for Bush and the votes for Kerry add up to more than the total reported turnout -- a total of 188,000 voters over reported turnout. Someone has been voting early, often and electronically.
Also there's the mysterious case of the defecting Democrats. Mysterious, because they seem to have defected to Bush in larger numbers in 29 Florida counties that use Diebold optical scan machines to tabulate results.
Take a look at just five:
In Calhoun County, 82% of the registered voters are Democrats. But Diebold said 63% of the county voted for Bush.
In Lafayette County, 83% of voters are Democrats, but Diebold said 74% voted for Bush.
In Liberty County, 88% of voters are Democrats, but Diebold said 64% voted for Bush.
In Suwanee County, 64% of voteres are Democrats, but Diebold said 71% voted for Bush.
We did not see anything like that kind of swing to Democrats state-wide or nationally. Not even in the most lopsided Southern states (at least, not the ones using Diebold and ES&S machines).
I know. You don't want to have to think about this any more than I do. But it appears that either the machines have (finally) become sentient and are voting for Bush, or they're getting an assist from one or more humans.
Dieboldgate
I would like nothing more than for discrepancies about this election to go away. They make my head hurt and my gut churn. I'd rather let Bush have his second term and be done with it. The thought that the United States might once again have an illegitimate president, due this time to massive electronic voting machine fraud, is too much to even contemplate.
And yet we have to try. Because it appears that the discrepancies between exit polling and final result are far greater in states that had EVMs with no paper trail. Check out this disturbing graph comparing the two. (Note that CNN and the AP changed their exit polls retroactively to conform with the result. I can't imagine anything more Orwellian).
Blackboxvoting.org has blanketed the country with the largest Freedom of Information Act request in history -- for modem transmission logs, computer trouble slips, etc. From just one such pre-election primary audit in Washington state last month, the site turned up a ton of stuff -- three crucial hours missing from primary day on the internal log, and lots of suspicious modem activity.
Then there are the old stories that won't go away. Max Cleland losing all-electronic Georgia in 02 by eight points when no pre-election poll or exit poll had shown him anywhere near defeat. Chuck Hagel's landslides in Nebraska in 96 and 02, even apparently winning all-Democratic black neighborhoods, on EVMs that he had sold the state as head of ES&S. Hagel's opponent cried fraud and said the story was "bigger than Watergate." Maybe it's time we listened.
In elections in developing countries, large differences between exit polling and the final result is the first sign of fraud that independent observers watch for. I hate to treat the US like a developing country. But what choice do I have? I must follow my curiosity, and my reasonable doubts, as far as they lead me into gut-churn territory.
UPDATE: After posting this message to my journalism school class list, it stirred a great deal of interest in that graph. One alum who now works for Air America passed it on to the talk show host Randi Rhodes, who promptly talked about it on air. There's a lesson for us all here: one email, one blog can help make a difference.
Daily Blah for... Thursday, November 04, 2004
To Leave or Not To Leave?
Naturally, after any such rebuke for common sense, there's a lot of talk on the part of common-sense owners about getting the hell out of Dodge. I can understand that. (Personally, I'm thinking about a three-week vacation to Australia). But two things readers might consider: firstly, it's not as easy to expatriate from the United States as you might think, as this Harpers piece points out. Secondly, if you leave, you effectively cede the country to right-wing loons. That's the basic argument behind Ten reasons not to move to Canada. Change can still be effected from within. It doesn't only happen every four years.
Oh, and I will be turning down any marriage proposals made purely for my British citizenship. Sorry.
Daily Blah for... Wednesday, November 03, 2004
Finding the Left's Five Million
So Karl Rove did it. He'd been talking for years about the missing four million evangelical Christians; voters who sit naturally in Bush's camp, but did not turn out in 2000. Guess how many millions Bush won the popular vote by? You got it. This is also why "moral issues" showed up as the surprise no. 1 most important topic in exit polls, trumping terrorism, Iraq and the economy. Rove dragged them to the polls with wedge issues (like gay marriage) and outright lies (like the leaflets that hit West Virginia and Arkansas with the claim that Kerry would ban the Bible). This is unabashed, amoral evil on Rove's part, of course, but give him his due. He's a political genius.
Democrats should not walk away too disappointed. They achieved something quite special: the largest vote against any sitting President, ever. This is all good ground-building work for next time. And it would be fair to say Rove's evangelical voter tide has reached its high-water mark. Their numbers have got just one direction to go in at the next election. Put it this way: you can't amend a state Constitution to ban gay marriage twice. And what other evangelical position out there has the support of the majority of voters? Certainly not abortion.
But what the Dems have to realize is that Bob Shrum is no match for Karl Rove. Shrum is, or rather was, Kerry's speechwriter and chief adviser. His campaign experience includes McGovern '72, Kennedy '80, Dukakis '88 -- and no successful presidential campaigns whatsoever. His rhetoric was retro to the point of being meaningless. You could always tell which of Kerry's stock phrases came from Shrum's brain; they would start "we're gonna fight for ..."
No, Shrum didn't have the first clue how to reach voter's emotions like Rove does -- or for that matter, James Carville did. It's all about passion. This is what "values" really means: grabbing them in the gut, being real, passing the smell test. And as my friend Qat was imploring earlier today, Democrats should clean up in this area every year. This is the party that believes in in tangible compassion. With charismatic candidates, and advisers who understand how to connect with voter passions, I'd say the Dems could grab at least an extra five million voters it needs to handily outnumber Rove's evangelical army at its strongest, as well as keep the ones that turned out yesterday (many of whom now know where their polling place is for the first time in their lives).
See, I believe they could have sold gay marriage, educating and shifting the poll numbers on that topic, instead of shying away from the issue every time it was raised. Couldn't you imagine Clinton selling it, talking from his gut about real lives, real partnerships? You don't say you're fighting for people; you make it about people.
is it too early to start talking about 2006?
Daily Blah for... Tuesday, November 02, 2004
All About Turnout
I'm in a hotel suite in Reno, nervous as hell.
It's been a tough and exhilirating day. I helped get out the vote in Nevada, and I saw the best and the worst of the American democratic process. The best was a line at my adopted precinct's polling station, Spanish Springs High School in Sparks, that stretched round the block from 7am to 7pm. It was a remote, desert-surrounded part of the greater Reno area; still, the people would not stop coming. The worst was a county official who refused to assign idle poll workers to help reduce the line, and Republican watchers who threw their weight around without revealing their affiliation.
All day, though, the sight of that turnout gave me a very good feeling. Currently, Kerry is 4% ahead in Nevada. In Nevada, a state that has been solid Bush country for election after election. We did some good work here today.
The connection between high turnout and a heavy Kerry vote is tenuous, but Nevada proves it is there. And you know what? In Ohio, they're still voting at some polls three hours after it closed. Lined up round the corner, just like Spanish Springs.
This is the word from the optimistic side of me. You will not be hearing from the pessimistic side tonight.
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