By Sheila
Lennon
'Bottom-up' journalism from the pros Nov 1, 2002
- (Last
week's weblog)
Journal / Sheila
Lennon
Spam
Theater: Andrew Keating
of Riverside, left, Jeff Dujardin of Providence, and Benjamin Keating,
Andrew's brother, on my Providence doorstep last night.
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'Trick
or treat' as performance art:
Every Halloween for a decade I have opened the door to two boys
who I always goofed with. Every year they got taller, and I'd figured
they might have dropped out of the spook trek by now. But last night,
there they were, less interested in my bag of candy than in launching
into a theater routine on my front stoop
Brothers Andrew
and Benjamin Keating of Riverside, both students at Mt. St. Charles
Academy, and their friend Jeff Dujardin of Providence, a student
at St. Raphael Academy, are the actors.
Waving little
barbells and flashing some abs, they did a rapid-fire "Door-to-door
health and fitness salesmen" routine. The spam in my inbox
had come to life. "Spam theater," I grinned, "that's
what this is." And I grabbed my camera.
They liked
it. "Spam Theater, that's it," said Andrew, who seems
to be the spokesman for the trio.
Of roughly 50
houses they visited last night, he told me, only two shut the door
on their act. At one house they were videotaped, at another, they
performed into a telephone so a caller could hear their routine.
Encouraged by
their reception, the trio intends to develop the concept into a
year-round theater piece. You might hope they ring your doorbell.
Their schtick is a hoot.
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The
No War Blog: It's called Stand Down: The Left-Right Blog opposing
an Invasion of Iraq. Writers with widely differing philosophies
and positions on other burning issues of the day come together on the
common ground of no war. Here's the "unity
statement":
The members of Stand Down hold a wide variety of different and, indeed,
conflicting political positions, but all are in agreement on a single
proposition: that the use of military force to effect "regime change"
in Iraq is ill advised and unjustified. We do not deny that the current
Iraqi regime is monstrous, but we hold, following John Adams, that the
United States need not go "abroad in search of monsters to destroy"
unless they pose a clear and direct threat to American national security.
It's important and it's a good read. Maybe humanity is evolving after
all.
Link
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Tasteless and tacky: Former Reagan speechwriter
Peggy
Noonan pretends to speak in Paul Wellstone's voice to scold his supporters
for his memorial service. Ironically, it's headlined "No Class."
Would Wellstone ever have critized how any family and friends choose to
mourn? Would he have ever chosen Noonan to play him after death? How embarrassing.
In response to yesterday's
Wellstone column here, Doc
Searls wrote,
I remember knowing instantly, the moment I heard Martin Luther King
had been shot, that the world changed for the worse in a huge way. It
wasn't just the riots that followed. It was the sudden absence of a
strong moral force. King's murder was deeply and profoundly discouraging.
This country was made far worse by it. I don't believe we ever recovered.
And Phil Leggiere at Noosphere
Blues adds John Lennon to the list of lost idealists.
Link
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Dub fun: One of the coolest toys I've found
on the web is the Dub
Selector.
I'm a big fan of Dub music -- instrumental reggae that's largely rhythm
section -- drums and bass -- with voice used occasionally as an instrument.
in Jamaica, a band may open an evening at a club with 20 minutes of dub,
a laid-back way to set a mood. (You might argue that dub bands are musicians
without a lead singer, but it's great background music for a low-key evening.)
Dub's holy trinity comprises Lee
Scratch Perry, King
Tubby and Augustus
Pablo. You can learn more about Lee
Scratch Perry here, and
here, and hear
clips here.
Interested? There's lots more at dub.com.
Link
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The
Political Oddsmaker gives you the odds of a particular
candidate winning their election. You can get odds for each of the major
U.S. races (Senate, House, and Governors for this election). It claims
a 98% success rate in picking the winner since 1996. via
Metafilter
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The
Tablet PC: It Rocks Wired raves,
"Might as well pawn off the old PC now. Tablet PCs are coming
and suddenly even the coolest little laptop looks so 20th century."
At the very bottom, the bad news: $2,299 for a standard unit, topping
out at $2,799 for the primo configuration.
Tablet PCs will have two formats: the "convertible" model
with an integrated keyboard and a display that rotates 180 degrees and
can be folded down over the keyboard, and the "slate" style
with a removable keyboard. The Scribbler is a slate model.
Link
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President
To Author: Your Book Is Unpatriotic: From the Hartford Courant,
As far as the nation knows, President Bush does not keep a Richard
Nixon-style "enemies list." If he did, though, Gabe Hudson
might well be on it.
Hudson's new collection of short stories, "Dear Mr. President"
(Knopf, $19), has made him a favorite of book critics, fellow writers
and lots of readers. But the book, it seems, has had the opposite effect
on the commander in chief.
If Hudson is telling the truth - and there's no reason to think he
isn't - Bush recently sent the young author a two-paragraph note, complete
with his own review of "Dear Mr. President."...
"The letter began by thanking me for sending the book,"
Hudson said. "Also, I'm from Austin, Texas, and the president touched
on the fact that I was a fellow Texan, congratulating me on my book.
But he was setting me up for the one-two punch. Because he called the
book unpatriotic and ridiculous and just plain bad writing. Beyond that,
I've been instructed not to talk about the contents of the letter for
the time being."
Link
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Your
brain may soon be used against you: The Philadelphia Inquirer
reports,
Ruben Gur, a neuropsychologist at the University of Pennsylvania, says
new kinds of brain scans can reveal when a person recognizes a familiar
face, no matter how hard he or she tries to conceal it.
The scanning machine, called a functional MRI, takes pictures that
highlight specific parts of the brain activated during certain tasks.
Telltale parts of your brain "light up," he said, when you
are presented with a face you have seen before.
It is easy to imagine such scanners being used in interrogation of
criminal suspects or terrorists about their associates. Gur described
just such possibilities for national security experts at a recent Penn
workshop.
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NASA
fighting back to confirm that U.S. really flew to moon : The Miami
Herald reports,
WASHINGTON - More than 33 years after the United States landed men
on the moon, NASA is spending more than $15,000 to convince people that
it really did happen and that the space agency didn't make it all up.
Stubborn conspiracy theorists claim that NASA's six Apollo-program
moon landings were faked. After decades of belittling and ignoring them,
NASA has decided to fight back. It hired James Oberg, a Houston-based
former aerospace engineer and award-winning author of 10 books on space,
to confront skeptics point by point. Many scientists already have done
that on the Internet, but skeptics remain unconvinced.
You can investigate for your self starting
here, where there are links to both conspiracy theorists and skeptics.
Link
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Sprint
PCS roaming into Wi-Fi: From News.com,
Sprint PCS has begun stitching together a network of wireless "hot
spots" to cash in on the growing popularity of wireless networking,
a Sprint PCS executive said.
The company has already signed agreements to let subscribers roam onto
a number of different so-called hot spots--public areas outfitted with
wireless networks--then be charged for wireless Web access on their
Sprint PCS bill, according to Wesley Dittmer, the senior director for
wireless LANs (local area networks) at Sprint PCS.
Link
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Researchers
Get First Look Into Antimatter Atoms, the National Science Foundation
says.
It seems like the stuff of science fiction, but NSF-sponsored researchers
working at CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, have
probed the properties of whole atoms of antimatter, the "mirror
image" of matter, for the first time. Their results provide the
first look into the inside of an antimatter atom and are a big step
on the way to testing standard theories of how the universe operates.
Current theories predict that the universe could just as easily be
made of antimatter as of matter and don't explain why our universe is
made up exclusively of the latter.
Link
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Oct. 31, 2002
Life after Wellstone: Andrew
Sullivan and others are shocked at Dr. Michael I. Niman's essay
Was Paul Wellstone murdered?
While there is no evidence to suggest any conclusion one way or another,
and won't be until the NTSB concludes its investigation, perhaps many
months from now, Niman is voicing a ripple that went through My Generation.
"Wow amazing how many people wonder that. Even that thought crossed
my mother-in-laws mind," wrote 30-something blogger Ron Goff at randomabstract.com.
I think I know about how old his mother-in-law must be.
Dr. Hunter
S. Thompson was more subtle:
Sen. Paul Wellstone of Minnesota was killed in a disturbingly familiar
plane-crash that very nearly included Sen. Ted Kennedy of Massachusetts:
...And it utterly destroyed Josh Hartnett, age 21, who was on his way
back to Minneapolis to personally campaign for Paul Wellstone, when
he heard the news of his death. It will be a nasty scar on his brain
for the rest of his life.
I know these things. My brain is covered with scar-tissue. I was 22
when JFK was murdered, and I will never recover from it. ... Never.
And neither will Josh. Take my word for it. Those things are forever.
I was 16 when JFK was murdered in Dallas on Nov. 22, 1963. (Two days
later, I watched as his alleged assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald, was murdered
on live TV by Jack Ruby.) JFK's funeral was unbearably sad, despair and
loss thick as a shroud.
I can't remember if I cried
When I read about his widowed bride
But something touched me deep inside
The day the music died
I was almost 21 in the spring of 1968 when Martin Luther King was murdered
in Memphis on April 4, and, two months later, on June 5, Robert Kennedy
was murdered in Los Angeles.
These public figures seemed genuinely to care about the fate of the little
guy, and they became inspirations, especially for the young, to channel
similar idealism into political action. As leaders, as symbols, they were
irreplaceable. Whatever their personal foibles, they represented to us
a chance to change the world for the better.
Their deaths seemed to suggest, over and over again, that anyone who
put themselves out there would be cut down.
I do not know whether ice or evil brought down Paul and Sheila Wellstone,
their daughter Marcia and five others. But for those to whom Wellstone
represented the politics of principle, idealism has once again hit a wall
of death, the bottom falling out of the promise of a better world.
I understand the refusal of his people to mutely accept another senseless
ending.
Wellstone's memorial service-turned-political rally ignited a firestorm
of criticism. It would have been far more politically savvy to stand wooden
and mute, give standard eulogies to the strains of traditional dirges,
and let a wave of sympathy propel a Democratic victory for Wellstone's
successor on Tuesday.
But those who are offended that the service did not match their somber
expectations are out of line. This was not about them, nor for them. It
was an attempt to give life after death to the principles of Paul Wellstone,
to keep the spirit alive even if the body was destroyed.
At the end of my own father's funeral service, after his unexpected death,
I vividly recall an organist pounding out The Battle Hymn of the Republic.
Tears streaming down my cheeks as I followed his casket down the aisle
of the church, I sang the words Dad had taught me at his knee, and loudly
bellowed the line, "His truth goes marching on."
I heard that same intensity, the need to find a redeeming shred of meaning
in a world suddenly ripped apart, in the chant out of Minnesota, "Win
for Paul, win for Paul..."
A fair sampling of unmoderated reaction to Sen. Paul Wellstone's death,
its cause and effect, may
be read here. Postings run the gamut, from one by conservative Jonah
Goldberg to another by a "St. Paul resident" who recalls first
reports of the crash that suggested an explosion. More
Wellstone threads at IndyMedia.
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Oct. 30, 2002
The second handshake: Links abound today to
Virtual hands
reach across the ocean:
Scientists on opposite sides of the Atlantic have shaken hands over
the internet in the first public demonstration of the latest in touch
technology.
But the concept isn't new. In a virtual environment -- identical rooms
in two faraway places where every action in one is replicated in the other
-- two astronauts 6,000 miles apart trained together.
(I was fascinated by this at the time, and remembered it when I read
the story above. Google made it easy to find the following 7-year-old
report.)
Back
in '95, a similar handshake took place, minus the tactile factor:
From 0815 to 0845 on 20 September 1995, the first demonstration of
astronauts using a shared virtual environment across the Atlantic took
place.
Astronaut Bernard Harris (at the NASA/Johnson Space Center in Houston,
Texas) shared a virtual environment with Astronaut Ulf Merbold (at the
Fraunhofer Institute for Computer Graphics in Darmstadt, Germany). The
environment consisted of the Space Shuttle payload bay and the Hubble
Space Telescope (HST). The two astronauts cooperated in performing the
major activities associated with the changeout of the Solar Array Drive
Electronics (SADE) of the HST. The activities included the real-time
hand-off of the replacement SADE in exchange for the original SADE.
At the conclusion of the task the two astronauts shook hands and waved
good-bye.
Link
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More of the culture migrates to the Web:
Less than 7 percent of U.S. museum collections are on exhibit at any
given time, leaving the bulk of the nation's artifacts to gather dust
behind closed doors and glass cases, locked away from the public.
An ambitious project will allow some of California's most valuable,
and previously inaccessible, works to be viewed online by anyone, anywhere,
at any time.
The Museums
and the Online Archive of California Project recently launched a
website with integrated access to museum, library and archival collections
across California.
Users can search 150,000 images of artifacts, paintings, manuscripts,
photographs and architectural blueprints from 11 public and private
museums.
Link
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Visual fun:
Evil
Clown Generator: Rapidfire parts.
Lady Liberty Fireworks:
Click the sky above the statue and make fireworks.
CEO
Halloween Masks: Forbes lets you be Martha Stewart and freak 'em
all out. (At projo.com we made similar masks a coupla years ago of Bush,
Cheney, Nader, Hillary Clinton, Gore, Buchanan and Lieberman. They're
downloadable here, also suitable for printing and pasting on cardboard.
Photoblogs.org:
When the words all get too much, there's nothing like a good photoblog
to blast you into your right brain. Photoblogs.org lists 154 photoblogs.
Link
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Ebay
Feedback Generator: Lazy buyers and sellers can click until
they find an appropriate canned phrase, then copy it into an Ebay feedback
form. More a chuckle than a tool... so chuckle.
Link
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Oct. 29, 2002 - (Last
week's weblog)
I'm skipping all the bad news today.
101
things that the Mozilla browser can do that IE cannot.
Link
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Shift change: I've been thinking about the
issues raised earlier this month by Mobius 2002, a presentation of new
products in Redmond, Wash., near the Microsoft complex. Microsoft invited
certain bloggers to attend, paying their airfare and lodging, and gifted
them with hardware priced well north of $1,000. Questions
arose about the propriety of bloggers accepting the junket.
Newspapers foot the bill when they send reporters to cover events and,
in good times, some beats were coveted for the trips and the toys. Those
days are over. At all but the largest news organizations, travel budgets
are pretty much pared down to major sporting events and must-cover disasters
in awful places.
Since old media has no budget, there's an opportunity -- even a necessity
-- for a transfer of responsibility for consumer reporting to knowledgeable
volunteers who write, the good bloggers. But volunteers can't be useful
surrogates for us if they're being fed only free Microsoft products.
You can't fault Microsoft for reaching out to alpha bloggers. It's good
business strategy to try to get good press wherever they can.
Microsoft invited bloggers because they're new media. Most newsrooms
don't have a hardware reviewer; it's a niche thing. Most bloggers belong
in that niche, and each reaches tech-savvy readers.
I have no problem with bloggers taking the trip and writing about the
glamour of being a tourist in Gatesland. Sounds like fun. You earned it.
The collision comes when you start to blog your new tools. If your only
opportunity to see and write about hot new hardware is limited to the
products of those who wined and dined you in Redmond -- and gave *great*
party favors -- some will call you a shill. Maybe you'll actually be a
shill and won't realize it, since you don't get to see what else will
be in our stores. Your influence as a blogger -- a publisher -- is bigger
than it seems when you're sitting alone at your PC. What you write about,
you promote.
Do you have to write about "things Microsoft" to keep being
invited? Is there a quid pro quo? (Maybe Microsoft doesn't plan to invite
any bloggers ever again after all this....)
The commons needs bloggers who want to review hardware, not just snag
some. But how do you hang out a shingle and let manufacturers know you're
an equal-opportunity, objective reviewer? As an indy blogger you can't
buy squat.
Maybe Eric Olsen's Blogcritics.org
offers a clue. He's working to arrange review CDs for volunteer music
reviewers -- jazz releases for jazz fans, etc.
Distributed hardware reviewing might work, too. A loosely organized group
of serious "hardwareviewers" might convince a wide range of
manufacturers to send them products to try, not to keep. If enough vendors
sent new products to this group of serious bloggers to pass around and
try out, write about and even buy (at the discounted actual cost of manufacture),
we'd see a range of credible user reviews. What these reviewers chose
to buy would be especially useful information. (The now-retired Providence
Journal auto editor got to test drive cool cars for a week, several times
a year. He loved those weeks.)
Widely distributed, upstreamed reviews would work like word of mouth
-- even small firms would have a chance as bloggers discover and trumpet
innovative good stuff.
Evntually, this might evolve into a level-playing-field trade show organized
by such a "hardwareviewers" group -- all sorts of vendors lining
up to show their goodies to all, their entry fees funding travel "scholarships"
to the show for the bloggers.
And the "hardwareviewers" can still take the junket to Redmond.
They wouldn't be so hardware-hungry and can just enjoy the party.
Blogging is bottom-up journalism. When it comes to reviewing, Microsoft
shouldn't control this pipe, the bloggers should. This is how we literally
turn the system around.
What form that will take, how we'll get there, that will evolve. But
it's based on the same sort of cooperation as a smart
mob.
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Grubb gets serious ink: Ed
Cone reports that the Greensboro, N.C, News-Record covered Libertarian
blogger Tara Grubb and her opponent, Rep. Howard Coble, together in its
campaign preview article this morning (Challenger's
'hits' don't faze congressman)
If Internet page views were votes, U.S. Rep. Howard Coble might be
quaking in his loafers.
His opponent in the Nov. 5 election, Libertarian candidate Tara Sue
Grubb, is running her campaign with a Weblog,
an online diary that lets computer users share views with her on a variety
of social and political issues.
The youthful, third-party candidate had 20,000 visits, or "hits,"
to her site in its first two weeks this summer. Her innovative use of
the Web has drawn interest from online writers and print columnists
as far away as Providence, R.I. and San Jose, Calif.
Last week, we
revisited Grubb's blog; our first
mention of her candidacy was Aug. 21.
Link
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Oct. 28, 2002
'E&P' Names 3rd Annual Photos Of the Year:
From the story
at Editor & Publisher: "All of these pictures will be on
display Oct. 31-Nov. 2 at Photo District News' 'PhotoPlus Expo'at the
Javits Convention Center in New York. " The
photos.
Link
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Political winds: Josh Marshall at Talking
Points Memo offers a gracious
and genuine tribute to late Sen. Paul Wellstone, and points to a possible
political watershed: "Backfire"
by TRB -- that vintage spot in The New Republic that began decades
ago as an anonymous column, signed only with those initials, but now bylined
Peter
Beinart, TNR's editor -- suggests the Iraq issue is helping the Democrats.
Voters to whom the threatened war is a top issue tend to be anti-war,
he writes, and notes, "The more aggressive a president's agenda,
the more inclined voters are to balance it by supporting the other party
for Congress."
Marshall continues
this theme today, analyzing several key races.
Marshall is former Washington Editor of the American Prospect, and is
completing a dissertion on Colonial History on the way to getting a PhD
at Brown.
Link
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"100,000
Rally, March Against War in Iraq," reports the Washington
Post. Over at Metafilter,
a blogger asks, "Why is no lawmaker stepping up to represent
this constituency?"
Todd
Gitlin, in Who Will Lead? in Mother Jones earlier this month, argues,
"Liberal-left antiwarriors need to be out-front patriots if they
expect to draw the attention and the support of Americans at large."
Bonus: At Online Journalism Review,
Stephen O'Leary covers The
Antiwar Movement on the Web
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Ms.
Magazine Editor Decides to Step Down:
(L.A. Times, reg. req., but this is just about the whole story.)
After just three months, Tracy Wood has stepped down from her post
as editor-in-chief of Ms. magazine. Wood will oversee investigative
reporting at the feminist publication, a post she says is a far better
fit. ...
The October issue was to have been the first under her stewardship.
There was no October issue. No new editor in chief has been named, Wood
said.
Link
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Boo!
Primeval terror (since 1929) At Salon, "You think Halloween
has pagan roots? Guess again. Two new histories of America's second favorite
holiday reveal the truth."
Link
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"Healthy" fast food, sort of.: Here's
the menu of a chain that wants to take the junk out of the drive-through.
AP
wrote the story from Boca Raton, Fla., and we read it at the Minneapolis
Star Tribune.
Not a lot more help here for those on the newly trendy low-carb diet
bus, to whom buns are forbidden. The Atkins diet and variants urge the
avoidance of sugars and starches, in order to force the body to burn fat.
Low-fat versions of many foods are often higher in carbohydrates than
the original products.
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Subterranean Homepage News
by Sheila Lennon
features & interactive producer of projo.com
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