Ron Paul is the only one I believe is sincere.

I started thinking differently about music in film and TV after hearing David Simon talk about why he prefers not to use music to make viewers feel a certain way. I’d never really thought about it before, but once I did I started to resent that type of persuasion—in newly made media anyway. I’m happy to grant exceptions to classics and allow myself to be emotionally led by the score in North By Northwest.

Later: My friend Hil points out that a program in Australia does this too, and that ominous lighting is a part of the effects package.

@Amyloo I also dislike tendency for ominous lighting, like almost interrogation style interview, black shadowy bgd & lighting only on face.

@Amyloo I think it is. Our equivalent #4corners changed to this style & it undermines my respect for them. The info itself usually enough

Check it out. There’s an underlying pitch in it for SocialFlow, a Betaworks company, but that is OK with me since it is a subtle pitch and it tells a tale you won’t hear elsewhere about social media reputation and how news takes shape online. It swirls around in little eddies that gather force and sometimes whoosh into the Main Stream.

Crazy how important Twitter has become in the news system, isn’t it?

It is becoming important for everything, not just news, though some voices are still absent. Funny, I will rail all day against curmudgeons who diss Twitter, but I’ll make a confession: I am glad I don’t see David Simon pimping each episode of his show in my stream. But maybe he would not use Twitter in that way; I’d like to think so.

What does my pleasure in Simon’s abstinence say about Twitter? Maybe that even people like me, a four-year user of the service, still find it vaguely trivial on the whole, increasingly promotional, self-centered. Yeah, it’s pretty much a mirror of the culture, and I suppose that is its value.

As a huge fan of several HBO original series, which are eminently rewatchable, I like having access to the complete archives of favorite shows. Comcast’s OnDemand chooses for me—only letting me at selected episodes of selected series, while HBO Go allows me to dip into whichever season of The Wire I might be in the mood for.

I’ve so fully embraced the whole streaming thing that I rarely watch DVDs anymore, and recently switched to the streaming-only plan on Netflix. I’ll choose to watch something that can be seen instantly and without the physical encumbrance of a DVD. In fact, I’ve developed an active avoidance of DVDs. I can’t quite account for this odd behavior when it means I miss watching things I know I would like, but DVDs have become almost distasteful to me.

There’s one thing I miss: listening to audio commentary tracks, and the studios will have to do something about that. It doesn’t seem like it would be that hard to provide a commentary version of selected online videos, and while they’re at it, I’ll take an MP3 of the audio for my commute, please. (I might even pay, a little.) With well-loved movies and shows, I already know what’s on the screen. I can see it in my head. And so often the commentary doesn’t necessarily map to the action anyway.

In the early days of podcasting we saw some experimentation with amateur commentaries to videos, and I think Battlestar Gallactica even produced an official audio commentary podcast. But podcasting has settled into a rut just generally. There hasn’t been a lot of innovation in recent years. I blame iTunes’ dominance as a podcatcher, which meant iTunes became podcasting’s Billboard top 100 ranking and a main discovery method, which led to elevating the MSM podcasts, and possibly caused amateur efforts to ape old media style and production conventions.

With the rapid convergence of TV and the web there are opportunities to get creative—with show formats, not just technology. Alternate sound tracks wouldn’t just have to be recorded, either; they could be live. I’ve always thought, for example, that sports fans (guys mostly) might like to hear opinionated, partisan play-by-play sprinkled with obscenities. You know, the way guys talk when they’re watching games together. Especially when they are angry at a coach. Wouldn’t that be fun?

Also, there are a ton of podcasts about TV shows. They could mix it up a little, break from their predictable formats and offer commentary tracks, maybe just on occasion, like for season finales.

It’s a little hard to tell from the translation but some members of the media seem pretty pissy about it. The communications guy holding the press conference isn’t having any of it. I wonder if there’s video. I’d like to hear the tone and see the body language in that exchange.

I heard about it in a retweet of Jay Rosen by Dave Winer so I’m hoping they will talk about it on today’s Rebooting the News podcast.

Dave did a solo podcast a few weeks ago and it struck me that he mentioned a reformation of the news media. I thought at the time that it is something like the Protestant Reformation in the sense that both are partly about disintermediation. Providing the Bible and holding services in the language of the people was meant to put them in more direct contact with their religion by cutting out middleman priests and the Latin scripture and liturgy which was understood only by the educated classes.

It all came full circle in little neural connections this morning when seeing Dave’s twitter handle fired off a reminder of the podcast, and the circle was cemented by the irony that that other reformation began in Germany.

If you’re like me, you’re not really a group protester, and maybe you’d like to help me try this small solo way to object to Bank of America’s sweet tax deal.

Here’s the idea: Print out this sheet—on both sides of the paper for the best result, so if the slips flip over, the message still can be seen. Keep some with you; fold up a couple sheets and put them in your pocket. When you pass a Bank of America location, tear off a few squares, and drop them on the concrete in front of the bank. Hopefully they’ll blend right in with the pavement, because there’s nothing more delicious than a subtle annoyance. Maybe do it at night for very small thrill.

I always loved the Virlomi character in Orson Scott Card’s Ender series (well, until she got power mad, anyway). She’s an older battle school grad who appears in the later books, and starts a phenomenon called “The Great Wall of India,” starting with one little pile of stones that she claims she saw people in other villages making. Pile-making catches on and the little piles become giant obstructions, hindering the Chinese invasion of her country.

I think this idea must be a blend of Virlomi’s protest and a prank I played on my ex and my dad on major birthdays: thousands of even teenier paper slips that said “40” and “75” respectively, sprinkled absolutely everywhere and still being discovered years later.

For over 250 years the Royal Society for the encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce (RSA) has been a cradle of enlightenment thinking and a force for social progress.  Our approach is multi-disciplinary, politically independent and combines cutting edge research and policy development with practical action.

Way too ... what? Brainy, I suppose. Enlightenment isn’t in vogue in the U.S. right now. Which I guess means we’re in the dark ages.

OK, not as simple as the simplest FB plugins; you need an application ID.

I’m just adding the embed code to a single post, not integrating it into my CMS. Which is kind of interesting. You could use it on an ad hoc basis.

Will it improve civility on sites that use it? I think so. Over on Techcrunch, commenters are complaining they don’t like the fact that they see their Facebook circle as their personal social space, and comments on technology articles have no place there. I see that, and also see that it’s not just real names that will promote civility; you don’t want people you know in real life to perceive you as the negative asshole you are when you blurt out drive-by comments on blogs.

Later: Ha! Just realized I wrote “called Comcast” in my headline when I really chatted. Reminds me of my kids saying “Let me show you a song.”

Like a lot of citizens I’ve had bi-partisanship and harmony in political discourse on my mind lately, so I took a browse around a couple of right-wing haunts this morning. I thought this surely must be one of those occasions when the political spectrum might bend itself into a cylinder and left and right libertarians could connect. I did see a little of what I wanted to see: comments like, “Well, for once I agree with the ACLU.” The American Civil Liberties Union and 23 other groups came out against the scheme in June. (Letter, .pdf file)

More frequent were remarks that dig in on the left-right stand-off. On Free Republic a commenter mentions that Susan Collins is a “full fledged socialist/marxist that sides with the enemy every time.” The crowd over there often seems to get more steamed up about RINOs than it does about Democrats.

Freepers in the thread are also kicking around the idea of getting into ham radio, which fits with the apocalyptic survivalist rhetoric about food stores, ammo hoarding and gold that you see in certain circles. Am I imagining things or is there often a hopeful, wistful tinge to worries about mass deprivation? If there is, I think I understand it a little; one of my kids loves post-apok fiction and movies, maybe as part of a yearning for a simpler world.

At Glenn Beck’s The Blaze site, the talk is scarier. I made a screen cap of this comment because you’d think it might come down once moderators show up for work.

Please remember a very basic truth, and utter constant in this world: “If you shoot a FEMA NAZI in the right place, with a U.S. Caliber .30 Bullet, that NAZI will fall over dead and won’t give you anymore trouble.”

WHEN, the FED-NAZIS do finally get their marching orders, they will face no less than 30 million rifles pointed at them from behind every blade of grass in this country. The “High Entertainment” will commence the very nano second that this Communist Monkey in the White House, or any other, shuts down the Internet, or makes any one of several other “Trigger” moves.

Blaze commenters are not quite sure what to make of making common cause with the ACLU. One comes right out and states that if the ACLU is against the bill, he is for it, while another is more open-minded, stating that if the ACLU is against it, he’s really against it.

On both sites, any accord between the liberty fighters and the liberties union is grudging. A freeper says the ACLU might be right but he feels sure it is unintentional! A Blaze commenter remarks that a broken clock is right twice a day.

Oh well.

I may try watching it that way, if only to distract me from watching the VP and speaker. Congress can re-seat itself, that’s fine, but what I really wish they would change is the camera angle or the presence of those two players immediately behind the president. I can never help but watch them deciding when to applaud, and when to really show approbation by standing up to applaud. Drives me nuts.

Fringe, one of only two shows I make sure to watch every week, will be moved to Fox’s death slot next month, so it doesn’t look real good for a fourth season. Pity too, because Walter is one of the most unique characters I’ve seen on any kind of screen for a long while—a brilliant crazy scientist in his sixties who still loves recreational drugs.

In the case of Fringe they already have a comic book series made mostly to explicate character backstories, so they really should use it to tell us anything at all they have in mind about the future storyline, whether or not they make an attempt to wind up the story in the spring.

Speaking of story, with whatever amount of time they have left, I think something more must be said about Walter’s ownership of Massive Dynamic. He’s one of the wealthiest, most powerful people in the world now, yet he carries on pretty much as he always has. Let’s see some wild spendthrift behavior by Walter. I’m talking islands and towns, space shuttles and zoos.

“There are basically no Palin Democrats. And given the passions she evokes, it’s hard to see how such a group would form,” the bloggers point out. 

They make a great point, but I think she does more than EVoke passions, she actively PROVokes them with her continual cheerful sneering at libs. In fact she’s painted herself into a corner. Anything she says to attempt to appeal to Dems will turn off her base because they love love love it—and her—when she gives voice to their resentments about elites, cityfolk and booksmart pencilnecks. It’s kind of a sweet sharing-bonding thing she has with her fans.

And some of her most supportive camps are way, way out there: over on Free Republic they’re saying Karl Rove is a liberal; and some of the Christian groups in 2008 were praying God would smite McCain so their Sarah might achieve her destiny. 

If she doesn’t win the nomination she still will want to keep that base (which might be better characterized as a market).

A hundred and eighty-two “This is Sportscenter” promos, going back to 1995, are archived on ESPN.com.

Well, there’s a fair chance I am completely full of shit, but I think the TLC Channel’s new supplemental site for the Sarah Palin’s Alaska show is purposely courting controversy. The site provides four blogs and a podcast to serve as a newer-media add-on to the traditional network show site. One of the blogs, called Not Taking Sides is the place to talk about politics, because, even though the TV series is non-political, politics are going to come into it, the inaugural post sort of explains.

It makes sense for TLC to do this from a marketing perspective. It’s true that the show is going to be political no matter how it’s positioned so why shouldn’t the very entity that’s creating the buzz get in on some of the discussion action? Negative comments about Palin are not scrubbed, and call me cynical, but some of them almost look like seed comments—they’re too well punctuated and use proper capitalization rules.

Head blogger for the politics section will be Matt Gagnon, Deputy Director of Digital Strategy for the National Republican Senatorial Committee. He’s busy working on a recount, they don’t say whose—maybe Joe Miller’s? So he will show up later.

It’s a funny old world out there in new media land, when commercial interests get in the game and the genuine might be genuine, or it might be a hustle, or might be a little of both.

You have to wonder, though, if Sarah is down with stirring the pot. Admitting there is a political angle runs counter to every description she has applied to the show. She might be OK with it, since the environment is somewhat controlled.

But about the app. The rage on the right to defund public media suggests that PBS/NPR fans are a sub-culture (that must be thwarted).  We may be a “type,” it’s true, but it’s a loose type, and I think the ideal would be a collection of PBS iPad apps carving out more specific niches. Why not make several apps for different communities of interest and bake social media features right into them? I think they could be supported, just as larger radio markets can support more narrowly programed stations.

I might like PBS but I love literary adaptations. An app devoted to Masterpiece classics could allow users to watch the latest productions and talk about them with each other. (Would they be into talking? Oh yes, yes they would.) I may not care much about migration patterns of bison, but fans of Nature would love an app just for them, too.

I wouldn’t be surprised if contributions would flow in, just because people appreciate it when they have been given a space that celebrates their passions and interests and provides an opportunity to revel in their obsessions in the company of like minds. Engagement follows when it’s all about the affinity group in relation to the provider of the media—not just about the provider.

In fact, I really believe that sometime in the not-too-distant future, the “Here is all our stuff” approach will come to be perceived as an egocentric stance. TV “channels” won’t be established by their creators; they’ll be determined or defined over time based on the density of followers on a scatterplot. 

This notion of increasing specialization of social media by affinity and interest has been a minor recurring theme of Gillmor Gang discussions in recent months.

Certainly that would prove why his theories must be an anathema and in stark contradiction to ”Bible Economics.” (Cindy Jacobs says God told her another great depression would occur if church members did not fast and pray in the days running up to the midterms.)

Bye now. I’m off to read more about Dominionism and the Seven Mountains. I’m thinking my novel’s candidate character will have to be a Dominionist, but will have to deny it. Fellow travelers will understand why it all has to be kept very hush-hush.

Then we have Nicolle Wallace processing some of her frustrations through fiction. (I started Eighteen Acres yesterday. She’s quite a smooth writer, and the story sounds like it will be interesting. I have a problem with her cliches, i.e. “She loved him to the very fibre of her being.”)

If you include non-print writing you might even throw David Simon’s The Wire and Treme into the category of working out political angst in fiction.

I think short print fiction could make a comeback and serve as useful propaganda at the same time. It might even help magazine finances to embrace it again, if they were bold enough to try something that conventional market wisdom says is passe. Think Dickens—whose novels were serialized in magazines—and the crowds at the New York harbor panting to learn from British passengers what became of Little Nell. 

Plus, we may even need a bigger helping of fiction to make sense of the craziness out there. Why couldn’t Huffington Post host Sarah Palin fan fiction? Why couldn’t The Nation publish a short story today that “what ifs” the proceedings of an inevitable committee hearing to investigate the president’s birth—because a few of those extreme right-wingers could get committee chair appointments.

It’s already stranger than fiction out there, so why not?

I’ve been working on my own tale of a charismatic yet unprepared conservative candidate as seen through the eyes of a young blogger. I’m about 25 percent of the way through a first draft. I can’t match Nicolle for realism so I’m thinking my Sally Forth character will have to get even more bizarre, which could make the drudgery and fear of working on it more entertaining for me.

For today the question is about the campaign contributions maneuver which has been enabled by the Citizens United case. I would love for interviewers—who are supposed to ferret out answers to the questions citizens have on their minds—to drill down to one important question, and demand a straight answer. I want Christiane Amanpour and David Gregory and the other Sunday talk hosts to ask GOP candidates and strategists: ”Is it OK for groups to anonymously fund elections?”

Here are the answers the hosts should view as a dodge and a signal to ask again, even if it eats into the time they have allotted for the next question:

- “The Disclose Act isn’t as simple as just requiring disclosure.” Host, you interrupt and say, “I didn’t ask about the Disclose Act; I just want to know if you think secret funding is alright.”

- “Look, the Chamber of Commerce doesn’t support foreign governments, that’s ridiculous.” Host, you interrupt and say, “We are not talking about foreign sources or the Chamber right now. All I want to know is do you think secret funding is alright.”

- “Karl Rove is being vilified by desperate Democrats trying to change the subject.” Host, you say, “Sounds like you are changing the subject. The question was, ‘Do you think it’s alright for campaign contributions to be secret?‘“

I’m still happy with my iPad. I bit the bullet and decided against taking a netbook along on a trip last week. The iPad was a champ. My son and I used Google maps on it for navigation and 3G coverage held up in probably 99 percent of every spot from Brooklyn to Woodstock. I’d heard AT&T’s 3G is not as reliable outside the Chicago area, but no problem. It’s nice having a screen larger than a phone’s screen so the navigator can zoom in on a map section and quick give the driver a visual idea of what’s coming up. I’m not sure it would be a safe substitute for a real GPS device if you were driving alone in unfamiliar territory—no voice cues and too much fingerpainting needed.

No problems at all with our all-Apple devices except one that must have been caused by the airline’s wifi restrictions. My son missed most of the Bear’s game, having found a radio station’s .pl streaming file that worked until we got on the plane. He had to settle for ESPN’s live web coverage, which is pretty cool. It gives text updates and illustrates the current field position.

Of course I worry that she may believe Jesus will come sooner if we attack Iran, or if we indicate we wouldn’t mind if Israel did, just as I worry about evangelicals in the Pentagon.

Whether she believes it or not, this kind of talk plays to her base. A Pew poll published this summer said 58% of white evangelicals believe Jesus Christ will return to earth by 2050.

Drill down to her even more devoted base—the undereducated, whether or not they identify as evangelicals:

In addition, those with no college experience (59%) are much more likely than those with some college experience (35%) and college graduates (19%) to expect Jesus Christ’s return. By region, those in the South (52%) are the most likely to predict a Second Coming by 2050.

Palin isn’t just a joke. She’s dangerous because she would put her faith in dominionists while putting her trust in neocons who have a complimentary world agenda. Imagine Randy Scheunemann calling the shots for the world.

Get out and vote anti-bat-shit-crazy, won’t you?

“What we find is really two things. One is that people really underestimate what the actual level of wealth inequality is in the United States right now. And then in addition to that, when we asked them how unequal would you like it to be, they want things to be even more equal than they think they are, which is really more equal than they actually are,” Norton said.

But here’s the crazy thing: most of the respondents, no matter what their political persuasion, thought things should be more equal. So what’s that about? Is it that when you don’t talk about this stuff in a political context people leave their ideology out of it? Or if it’s not coming from Fox News, conservatives don’t know how they are supposed to respond except with an answer that seems fair? I really don’t know.

Here is the transcript of the interview.

P.S. Chicago’s WBEZ was doing a pledge drive this morning and played this spot from Alec Baldwin urging listeners not to contribute.

Too bad, though, that it’s just videos embedded in the very vanilla ABC News web page template. They must have one of those “It’s about our branding” people over there—one of that breed who is actually listened to. I’d say ABC should take a page from MSNBC where the primetime hosts each have their own branding under the network umbrella. Maddow’s site, for example, is cool, it matches her on-air set, while still fitting in with the overall site’s look.

Add the Tea Party Coloring Book to your Amazon cart and see what else purchasers of the book bought at Amazon:

• Roots of Obama’s Rage
• Crimes Against Liberty: An Indictment of President Barack Obama
• A New Road to Serfdom

.

When he said “Change is gonna come,” I couldn’t help but think of Sam Cooke, including the “It’s been a long time coming” part. Which put things in perspective. Is 20 months a long time? Sure, for people who don’t have jobs. Is it enough time to deliver on all those hopes we had two years ago when we were caught up in the presidential campaign? Nope. Not nearly long enough to dig out from that terrible mess, not long enough to give up and even think about sympathizing with the crazed opposition.

I’ve been disappointed but I can’t sit out the election. Neither can you if you know what’s good for you and every other average American.

(It’s just a form, but promising to do a thing is a step toward doing the thing.)

You know your base likes Elizabeth Warren. Right? I mean, a lot. Like, she’s a hero.

But it’s not only about politics, so I hope you will be able to find the strength to overrule any naysayers in your circle of counselors who seek to play more ball with interests who feel threatened by her. Won’t you do the right thing for all the regular folks who need her as our watchdog?

Thanks, buddy.

The Nation’s Katrina vandenHeuvel tweeted, “AFL’s Richard Trumka a strong & welcome voice on CNN this am. Candy Crowley sure seemed skittish w/some of what he said.”

I paid most attention to the last question in the segment. Crowley may have been rushed, but I think she rushed to misjudge the very issue she was trying to straighten out.

Is she taking a side on this, or doesn’t she understand? Either way it didn’t work out so well (unless this was an audition for Fox News). Sure sounded to me as though she was advancing the conservative (and erroneous) side of the argument, even to the point of helping out the association spokesperson when he was conceding too much ground.

I would like to see Trumka on TV even more. He’s sharp, knows policy—and he looks like your plumber. Can’t hang an elitist label on that guy.

I will embed the video when or if it becomes available. This part of the interview was not included in the clips featured on the CNN site, but once the video podcast has been pushed out maybe you can see it in the whole-show video. Maybe not. They might just excerpt it; it’s a long show. Somebody must capture all of every show. Media Matters? Are you interested in this? 

Here is the transcript.

Determined critics simply will not be pleased. Not if Obama swore off leisure time for the balance of his term. Heck, I don’t think some people would be mollified if we passed a law that required him to stay in the Oval Office 24 hours a day in a 4’ x 4’ cage sitting at a school desk.

NPR aired a story about Obama and business today:

A Chamber of Commerce spokesman in the piece talks about a “tsunami of regulation emanating from the administration.” With the financial crisis and the oil spill so fresh in everybody’s memory it is hard to imagine there is much of a demand for easing up on regulation, but who knows what they will be able to get people riled up about. You wouldn’t have thought there would be a market for fretting about the deficit either.

Then there’s taxes. Regulation and taxes is always the conservative mantra. I don’t buy the argument that raising the tax rate by a couple of percentage points discourages investment and the entrepreneurial spirit. Say your business is looking at a terrific opportunity that will require a $100,000 investment and you anticipate a gross return of 20 percent, $13,000 after taxes. Would a looming tax increase of 2 percent, meaning you would only see $12,600, make you do a total 180 on the great idea and say “Nope, forget it then. My spirit is broken.” 

The Chamber is holding a jobs summit tomorrow.

I still think talking more about small business would be a smart move. There’s even a small business jobs bill in play right now but you don’t hear a thing about it.

At the end of the NPR story the reporter opines that reaching out to the business world would alienate liberal voters. I don’t think you would find a lot of libs having a problem with the president reaching out to small business.

So I couldn’t help but think an iPad cover/case that looks like a comp book would be cute. You could scan a book, maybe cartoonize it a little, and have the fabric printed up by Spoonflower. Then probably pad it and wrap it around an actual comp book.

The fastening part, I don’t know. Maybe elastic at the corners, but it would have to be really tight. You wouldn’t want the device to slip out. I’m constantly afraid of dropping mine and cracking it. (I dropped an iPhone on a concrete patio once and it nearly broke my heart.) Thing is I don’t take mine out much. It seems to like staying at home with me.

Afterthought: Or maybe, as Paul Krugman says, it’s not public polling that sways the strategy, it’s news reports.

Big business has run amok—big oil, big health, big banks, but he could make a distinction that might prove interesting. It would make sense to double down on efforts you don’t hear enough about to help smaller businesses and entrepreneurs, where the real innovation and job growth comes from. Pump that up and make a big deal of it because it’s fair and smart. As a bonus it takes an arrow out of the Republicans’ quiver because the GOP and the Chamber of Commerce like to trot out the plight of small business when they really are shilling for huge business. See where they stand if a tax incentive were rolled out that dramatically favored tiny businesses and phased it down to zero at the 25th percentile of annual revenues.

By the way, the beneficiaries of help for small businesses aren’t always the smiling mom and pop retail store owners you see pictured in GOP pollster PowerPoints. I think one definition of a small business is 500 employees or less, which could be represented by a slightly different photo: a sprawling three-story complex in your average office park. 

She must be the greatest little kid’s mom ever. She read to me constantly, probably starting when I was less than two years old, and I’m always grateful for that. We had a family custom that called for me (and my brother, too, I guess) to close a book hard enough to make a big whopping sound when we finished it. It meant “Hey, Mama, I made it through that whole book.” Then she would call out, from wherever she was in the house, “Very good!”

One summer when we missed the deadline to register for city rec swimming classes she drove my brother and me way out of town two or three times a week to a lake where classes were still available. She taught me to play to piano and encouraged us kids to take dancing lessons and tennis lessons and sing in the church choir.

She and my dad are great grandparents, too. They flew my kids to Florida every spring break for years and sported them about to every amusement park you’ve ever heard of, always letting them choose the parks, the rides, and the food.

Mom’s a wonderful decorator, with a load of taste. She like colors like I do, and sees ideas for combinations of colors everywhere. I’ve always thought that was proof that she’s really creative and wicked smart in the sense that she can bridge concepts from disparate realms. For example, she might get an idea for a color for throw pillows against the color of a sofa by spotting a woman on the street wearing a scarf that looks nice with the color of her coat. I can’t do that.

I love her. Many more, Mom. 

My folks from Germany arrived at Governors Island 300 years ago in June. By October 1710 they were encamped at Germantown to manufacture ship stores for the British crown. The tar making didn’t work out at all and the clan moved twice, ultimately settling in what is now Herkimer County, NY. (The approximate period and location depicted in ”Drums Along the Mohawk.”)

I like the tradition, but don’t feel anything like pride of aristocracy—I’m just proud to have blood that’s been American for a long long time—since Isaac Newton’s time, think of that. It’s not hoity-toity in the least; they were farmers and carpenters, and militia members as early as the French and Indian war. They were scrappy and sort of assholes. One story about the Mohawk years from Philip Otterness’ Becoming German tells of a gang of Palatine women riding a tax collector out of town on a rail and peeing on him. Very early tea partiers. A namesake of my line’s patriarch had no use for Tories.

My Bellinger line, as far as my dad has been able to figure out: me > Richard > Vernon > Ellis > Adam > Phillip > Adam > Philip > Philip (Known as Lips!) > Johannes. My oldest son is called Adam and my last name is his middle name.

What’s to like?

A cathedral

Not to like? Well… it’s based on trash historical fiction. Ken Follett’s rep has slid from Eye of the Needle days. Pillars and its sequel no doubt took long labor and research, and they show a glimpse of the period that I like to hear about, even if I’m not sure it represents the period accurately. The books also pander to Gothic tastes, kind of a guy’s take on bodice ripping. Follett’s villains have all the subtlety of Snidley Whiplash. (Come to think of it, Ian McShane, who plays Waleran in the series, would make a great Snidley Whiplash.)

I’ll admit I’m not completely immune to the thrill of the Gothic in tiny infrequent doses, though I’m really embarrassed to recognize I like it. As for the mini-series, I figure if a story puts me in even a broken time machine to the 12th century, I’m in, ready to enjoy the good bits and slide the trashy bits over to (alright, over near) the periphery of my judgement.

Comment on Friendfeed]]> 2010-07-03T14:51:23+00:00 http://amyloo.com/blog/index.php/site/home/despair_at_the_craft_store/ I hadn’t been to Michael’s for years. I went yesterday for something specific but took some time to survey the state of crafts.

Scrapbook materials take up many aisles. It’s the rage. Scrapbooking appears to be a sort of assembly art, not that creative, it doesn’t seem to me. There are a lot of pre-made objects you can buy and then you assemble them, bringing your own taste or whimsy. I’m sure there must be a certain satisfaction in it. I’m also sure the craze couldn’t exist without products to buy.

Then as I wandered around, I noticed it’s not just scrapbooks. It seems like many—not saying most—crafts consist of buying things that somebody else made and putting them together. Can I buy a chain and a plastic teardrop crystal, put one on the other, and claim that I make jewelry?

I remember painting a preformed plaster cat at summer Bible school when I was about 8 and thinking “I didn’t make this.” But I think it’s getting worse. Is it part of the same trend as toys that entertain kids but don’t allow for much imagination or doing on the kid’s part?

Comment on Friendfeed]]> 2010-06-06T17:39:24+00:00 http://amyloo.com/blog/index.php/site/home/aftermarket_ipad_accessory_for_lying_around_a_bean_bag_pillow/ ipad

The rubbery iPad case/folder is a little tippy for sitting the device upright, and you do want to take your iPad to bed to watch Netflix. I tried a beanbag pillow on my first day with my little prize a month ago, and darned if I’m not still using it.

One nice thing: you can rotate it to something other than a 90-degree angle. If you’re not a bed watcher or reader you won’t understand the sovereign importance of this feature.

Another discovery in the what-will-I-use-this-thing-for department: the iPad is perfect for reading long magazine articles online. I’ve found that I tend to abandon nice meaty stories if they go on for pages and pages; I’ve even been known to *gasp!* buy a print magazine if there’s a particular long article I want to luxuriate in. Not anymore.

Later: Brome made a stand with Legos.

Comment on Friendfeed]]> 2010-06-01T11:44:25+00:00 http://amyloo.com/blog/index.php/site/home/figures_bernie_sanders_agrees/ Governing That’s funny, and typical, and tells me something about myself, again. The socialist in Congress is the only commentator I’ve heard so far who tied the banks to the oil companies as I did this morning.

Nice how MSNBC now lets you clip a clip to show just the part you’re talking about. And nice how they expose their text promo in the embed code so you can strip it off if you can read plain HTML.

Later: Bob Herbert on Saturday:

There is nothing new to us about this. Haven’t we just seen how the giant financial firms almost destroyed the American economy? Wasn’t it just a few weeks before this hideous Deepwater Horizon disaster that a devastating mine explosion in West Virginia — at a mine run by a company with its own hideous safety record — killed 29 coal miners and ripped the heart out of yet another hard-working local community?

And: Frank Rich on June 5:

BP’s recklessness is just the latest variation on a story we know by heart. The company’s heedless disregard of risk and lack of safeguards at Deepwater Horizon are all too reminiscent of the failures at Lehman Brothers, Citigroup and A.I.G., where the richly rewarded top executives often didn’t even understand the toxic financial products that would pollute and nearly topple the nation’s economy. BP’s reliance on bought-off politicians and lax, industry-captured regulators at the M.M.S. mirrors Wall Street’s cozy relationship with its indulgent overseers at the S.E.C., Federal Reserve and New York Fed — not to mention Massey Energy’s dependence on somnolent supervision from the Mine Safety and Health Administration.

Comment on Friendfeed]]> 2010-05-27T22:37:46+00:00 http://amyloo.com/blog/index.php/site/home/i_think_i_understand_the_president/ Governing I flatter myself that I think I understand the way Barack Obama must think.

People want to hear big indignant statements from him about the Gulf oil gusher because we’re indignant about it and we want him to represent us. But it’s posturing; we know that and he knows it. If he’s like me, he rolls his eyes when he encounters posturing by other people and he would rather not do the thing he scorns.

What he will do, because he’s expected to, is rail against the delay and fret about the damage. A better approach would be what Dan Froomkin suggests: seize the moment to talk about regulation, but not just about oil. He could chance it and be brave, generalize it—tying in mining and the banks, maybe even the Citizens United case, not minding what opponents might say about bashing business. It’s been building to this point since the Reagan years and now big business has run fully amuck.

Comment on Friendfeed]]> 2010-05-27T12:06:56+00:00 http://amyloo.com/blog/index.php/site/home/contextual_ads_ooze_toward_the_sleaziest_content_on_your_site/ I wonder if I’m placing myself in contempt of terms by even saying this. Doesn’t matter. I’ll take down the ads; I haven’t had any for a long time and don’t need them to eat.

So I put an ad unit on my blog this morning, kept refreshing the page, looking at different posts and watched how it slowly learned what’s on my site. Probably cut-rate cr*** c*** and b**kr**y plans are shown regardless of the content because there are a lot of advertisers wanting to push that stuff out, but I had the added magnet of a long post about my experience with a particular company and another about f******** reform. Over the course of an hour they seemed to be acting as a beacon for more and more ads about youknowwhat even on unrelated single-post pages. Do you think that’s possible?

Now I’ve closed the posts. See if helps. I liked seeing the Washington Post banner on my blog. Why can’t more of the ads be like that? If they didn’t make you feel like such a slime merchant the ads would be even more used, don’t you think? Or don’t most small publishers care? I don’t know, but I care. See how long I can stand it. I’ll let you know.

Update: Credit-related ads are largely gone, a day later. Pleasant surprise. I’ll try reopening my February post about Capital One and see what happens.

Comment on Friendfeed]]> 2010-05-24T11:55:09+00:00 http://amyloo.com/blog/index.php/site/home/card_per_tweet/ When Dave Winer put out a call for ideas on suitable page layouts for a tweet-per-page site, I didn’t have any ideas. I still don’t have any ideas for a whole page layout, but this might be a neat background. I spied an index card sitting on top of my printer/scanner this morning and it asked me to scan it. Somebody must have thought of this because it seems just right in size, shape and sensibility for a single tweet.

Comment on Friendfeed]]> 2010-05-18T12:52:51+00:00 http://amyloo.com/blog/index.php/site/home/salesforce.com_and_this_whole_flash_vs_apple_thing/ Now I get why Salesforce wanted Steve Gillmor and why he wanted them. If you judge from the commentary on the company’s Cloudblog, some crazy bright people work there. The blog’s subtitle is “An industry view with altitude,” and some of that big picture thinking comes from knowing industry history, and some of that historical knowledge comes from the grey hairs you see in the contributor photos. As a fellow greyhair, I like that.

Currently playing on the blog: one Flash post after another. I’m an iPad owner with just a two-week tenure (waited for the 3G), so I’ve been following this whole Flash-Apple thing—dubious two months ago, warming up, surprised to be so persuaded by Jobs’ Thoughts on Flash, yet still worried about non-video Flash. The “Well, you have H.264” argument doesn’t answer a concern for a few important applications of Flash.

Worried about what non-video Flash? Most of it I couldn’t care less about: HBO’s new all-Flash site, car dealer sites, Flash banner ads, maybe even widget platforms and embedded audio plugins. I do wonder how quickly other methods can replace e-learning courses and demonstrations like the nice stuff The New York Times makes to illuminate its stories. But especially e-learning, a market expected to reach $50 billion by 2014, as big as the market for home improvement for energy savings, though you don’t hear much about it from web/tech luminaries, let alone in presidential speeches.

I’m not deep in the online training game, but have some connection to it. As far as I’ve been able to determine in my world, nobody’s planning to make courses any other way. There might be an opportunity here for a company to really clean up with some type of vector something or other. In HTML5 canvas? I haven’t looked into which technologies are out there poised to replace what Flash can do. I figure e-learning types could be watching casual gaming programmers and follow their lead, but I don’t think most of them are. Even if they did pick up on methods used in gaming, it seems like it would have to take another few years before content authoring tools for non-programmers could become available.

Salesforce itself must expect status quo at least for a while. As I was reading the second post on the current blog index I wondered if the company did any online training, so I nosed around the site and spotted a recruitment ad for curriculum developer for Force.com. Rapid deployment software experience desired: Articulate Studio, Captivate, Camtasia—all Flash-based.

We may be entering a rather painful interregnum and I have to say it’s all very interesting. God, I love change.

Comment on Friendfeed]]> 2010-05-14T11:31:38+00:00 http://amyloo.com/blog/index.php/site/home/it_was_a_creed_written_into_the_founding_documents/ Palin Comment on Friendfeed]]> 2010-05-11T18:15:53+00:00 http://amyloo.com/blog/index.php/site/home/finally_fringe_is_getting_on_with_the_story/ TV

Walternate strolled in, in the final minutes of the last episode. Two more eps to go in the season. About time. I’ve been channeling Sringer Bell‘s impatience.

P.S. Levi Johnston is a poor man’s Josh Jackson.

Comment on Friendfeed]]> 2010-05-08T23:19:01+00:00 http://amyloo.com/blog/index.php/site/home/random_notes_on_my_first_three_hours_with_the_ipad/ ipad I was so excited I forgot my area code.

I signed up for the 3G plan: limited bandwidth, $14.95 for a rolling 30 days, no contract. It seems quite fast in suburban Chicago, even loading a movie on Netflix.

Netflix looks beautiful. I hadn’t really tried to predict what I might want to do with the device, except that I thought I would like curling up in bed to read books and watch movies. I’m not sure how I’ll prop it up. The case is nice for creating a school desk slant angle but you need something more like an easel to watch it. Right now I’m using a sort of beanbag pillow.

Public domain books in the iBook store are much nicer than the PD books made for Kindle.

I synced all of the audio in iTunes. Will I listen to audiobooks using it? I have no idea. It might be safer for driving, with the larger controls.

After specifying Gmail in the device settings, it accepted my user/pass, but the inbox never did fill up after several attempts.

It’s a little smaller than I imagined it would be.

I got the keyboard, not Bluetooth, the accessory that the iPad mounts on vertically. The keyboard has a nice touch. The ensemble looks extra sweet. I predict it will be used in many a home magazine or furniture ad.

After using it constantly for the first three hours following unboxing, I wanted to do something else. I can’t afford it, so I’m going to be biased toward loving it, but that doesn’t mean I won’t actually love it. I may already love it a little. We’ll just have to see what it’s good for—maybe something I can’t foresee. I want to make a web app for it to really learn how what its middle ground position in the universe of devices is all about.

Comment on Friendfeed]]> 2010-05-01T00:03:39+00:00 http://amyloo.com/blog/index.php/site/home/echo_from_france_sound_familiar/ “Your coming to power is undoubtedly a historic event. For the first time this old Gallo-Roman country will be governed by a Jew. I dare say out loud what the country is thinking, deep inside: it is preferable for this country to be led by a man whose origins belong to his soil… than by a cunning talmudist.”

—A member of the French parliament following Leon Blum’s election as prime minister in 1936.

(Of course Blum really was a socialist.)

Comment on Friendfeed]]> 2010-04-30T02:48:20+00:00 http://amyloo.com/blog/index.php/site/home/yeah_i_fell_off_the_wagon/ Well that didn’t last long. Two weeks ago I said I’d try not to gripe about the Right. Couldn’t do it. You can’t follow the news and keep that pledge.

Comment on Friendfeed]]> 2010-04-18T12:38:24+00:00