I decided for my News Years resolution to start blogging again. It’s always been an a on-again, off-again affair with me and blogging, dispite the fact that I’m surrounded by bloggers in both my professional and private life. Honestly, I tend to be profondly dissapointed in what I write, perhaps my ego expects me to drop something great every time I put fingers to keyboard.
I mean, it’s not like I haven’t being feeding thoughts into the machine, that’s what Twitter is for. But for the past months, I’ve been streaming little micro-posts and linking like a maniac, but nothing at length. But there is still an long standing urge in me to write something and put it out in the world, so for 2009, I’m going to press myself to write and write until something great comes out of it. And if it doesn’t, I’m fine with that, as long as I keep at it, something will take shape, like a muscle getting regular exercise.
Just testing out the mobile capabilities of WP on my HTC Wizard/T-mobile Dash phone. Not bad. At Smith’s on 15th. It’s funny how many staffers from Linda’s worj here now, and how many patrons from Linda’s are here as well. A hyper-local migration perhaps.
I found this media art outside a year ago.
If your like me, you probably spend a quarter of you day scanning rss feeds, staring, tagging, emailing interesting stories. Most of your subscriptions will be from blogs like Engadget, Huffington Post, Gristmill (heh), where there aways interesting stories, and how’s editorial staff will more the likely celebrate the 1st of April by pulling a fast one on us, creating a fictional story with the hopes of it spreading throughout the media sphere until the drop the proverbial “April Fools!” line on their readers. Some people get irate by this, me, I love figuring out what stories are real and what stories are completely bullshit.
With that in mind, editors and bloggers aren’t the only ones that can have fun tomorrow, you the rss junky can get on the festivities as well by participating in a little game I call Fool Tagging . The game is simple: read your subscriptions on April 1st the way you usually do, but this time try to figure out which stories are real or which stories you thing are April Fools jokes, and using your reader (i.e., Google Reader, bloglines) or you bookmarking service (i.e., del.icio.us) tag these stories “fool”. There are two conditions of this that have to be in place however.
- You have to have your fool list of stories public, either using a public/share output option in your favorite service or creating a simple web-page list of the stories.
- You can only add stories between 12 AM and 9 PM on April 1st. Tagging anytime afterward wouldn’t be fun because by that time the world have investigated and figured out the fakes.
- If you work for a media shop, you can’t include links from your site (for example, I can not post fool links from Grist or Gristmill). This rule is obvious, working there you probably know what stories would be fake (if they are fake) and not only will you spoil the story for the readers, your colleagues will probably stamp you as a rat and a spoiler until next April, and that would suck.
I’ll be tagging my list on Google Reader and sharing it at http://tinyurl.com/yrhph8 . People who want to join in on the fun are more than welcome to post links to thier lists in comments section (no, comment bots plz). I look forward to seeing what stores people accuse of being false tomorrow. Happy hunting!
Milk
This weekend, I read Milk by Darcy Steinke. I found it at work in the office library. Grist being a media shop, we get advance copies of books from publishers looking to review or a plug on the website. This book looked out of place among the books about Alaska Wilderness preservation and how to successfully manage a green business. A random flip in the pages landed me into a descriptive and highly explicit sex scene the reminded me of reading pulp erotica back when I was 14. So naturally I had to take it home and get it a read, if not for the general curiosity of why such a book would have ecological importance (not to say sex and the environment work are mutually exclusive, sometimes sex is environmental work).
After reading half the book, I found not a stag novel, nor a environmental book, but rather a dreamy prose about sex, religion, loneliness and finding god. It was interesting. I’m not used to reading light and poetic “art” novels, which is what this book felt to me. I should check out more of the author’s work.
NY Times Review of Milk | Milk on Amazon.com
Iraq War, five years later — what you should check out.
The five year anniversary of the Iraq war passed recently, and there has been a fury of “where we are now” pieces done up by most of the mainstream media. I’ve observed that most of these reports are painfully short and shallow. Despite a sea of content coming out of books, blogs, films, and news stories, I can only acknowledge two programs that gave a deep, thoughtful chronologies and assessments of this troublesome war.
Frontline aired a 4 hour documentary called “Bush’s War”, perhaps the best news documentary on the war to date. Frontline as a news organization has covered this war so well, so in-depth, I’m sure this video document will be shown in schools years from now. Things that makes this stand out from other reports on the subject is it’s scale, and the number of current and former government officials that were involved in the war giving honest, long explanations of what happened and their opinions of the situation. It doesn’t paint the administration well, but at this point, making the Bush administration look good in context of the war is like putting perfume on a sack of shit. What it does show is a divided government (even more interesting a divided executive, the civil war going in the White House during most of the Afghanistan offensive and the planning the the Iraq invasion), and a vivid picture of modern America coming to grips with the use and misuse of it’s power.
The other piece comes from the radio show On the media, this time giving a refresh of how the media covered the war. This reflexive look at the goings on in a war of embedded reporters, the war of Iraqi stringers and Solider bloggers, gives a solid review of this, the first media saturated war.
Note that both these pieces comes from pubic media, PBS/WGBH and NPR/WNYC respectively. These shows are a testament to the quality public broadcasting, such richness makes the typical news weekly news program seem airy and trivial.
Grist.org gained some props from our colleagues across the Atlantic today. Our blog Gristmill gained top spot on The Times Online must read list of Green blogs. Says The Times:
The green blog from the other side of the pond. Grist Mill has dozens of posts a day, a veritable army of contributors and is as happy number crunching as it is doing the fun stuff.
Notice “the” in the sentence being italicized, awesome. Speaking of online media sites, the New York Times has a great blog called Open. It’s from their website developers, geared towards the open source community. It’s great to read some professional blog from people who do exactly what I do, write code for a news site. Although there are so man news websites out there, you rarely see any industry blogs out there, at least not any that are exclusively discussing this topic. It’s been out for a year now, I’ll have to look at the old post and catch up.
Speaking of media site development, we’re buiding some new site widgets using a new web service called Sprout. The best way to describe Sprout is that is very rapid flash development. It provides a very easy and intuitive way to create flash animations and simple flash applications. And it’s an online service, no software to download, you just to onto the website and create an account, all the development is done Sprout’s web interface. The non-coders and front end guys in a production team would like this allot, especially if they are not familiar with hard core flash development but still want the flash magic in projects. Sprout’s currently in beta, so what they offer in build components is a bit limited (they allow access to rss and xml data, but not any type of ODBC connectivity) but I would just assume that this features will be added in the near future.
When I woke up today, I thought today was going to be Monday, not “Eliot Spitzer paid four grand for a prostitute and got caught” day. But from the moment this morning, when Lisa, Grist’s Senior Editor, sent me an instant message with the New York Times link next to the question “Have you seen this?” to me info-dumping a whole days worth of information and innuendo to my half-bemused girlfriend a half hour ago, I’ve been as engaged in the scandal with the same perverse interest I would have if I witness the expensive act myself. It’s Eliot fucking Spizter!! You can’t dream this shit up! Yesterday, if I went up to you and said that Eliot Spitzer was caught in a prostitution sting, you would be looking to see where I put my crack pipe. Even today, if the New York Times just went to print with just the allegation of sexual solicitation, it wouldn’t of been believed by a hefty portion of New York state’s population. Even with the proof being part of an established FBI investigation and Spitzer pretty much admitted it in a brief press statement, I’m still have trouble just digesting the idea of it. And yet here we are. Guy fucked a prostitute. Wow.
Eliot always reminded me of Joe Friday from Dragnet (the old school show, not the shitty 80’s movie with Tom Hanks in it). By the Book. Professional to the point of being boring. But a justice seeker. Spitzer went after corrupt banks, corrupt stock brokers, even corrupt media companies (He was on the other end of two cases charged against the recording industry, one for royalty neglect by the companies to artists, the other for “payola”, the act of record companies paying DJ in money and gifts to get selected artists into heavy radio rotation). I was glad he became Governor, I respect the guy, still do.
I’m sure a lot of people out there feel the same way I do, which why today’s news flared up so wildly over the newsmedia landscape. Since I’ve spent half the day looking at the blog feeds on my Google reader light up like a Christmas tree, I like to just list some observations I had.
Observation #1: People find this more funny than aweful.
As far as reactions go, this isn’t Monica caliber. Sure there is a spectrum of people calling for his resignation (most from his opposing political party, the Republicans), people aren’t praying for his soul, or for the future of the state. In fact the general consensus it seems in the bloggersphere is that he shouldn’t resign.
A Post on Gawker.com (part of their Spitzer scandal post orgy), summed it up well.
As AG, Spitzer had prosecuted prostitution rings. He knows, especially with the classy ones, that the client lists are well-maintained, and they get out, eventually. So to head down to DC and hook up with a whore the night before a CNBC appearance (at 7 a.m.!) and a Congressional appearance is the height of abject stupidity. D.C. is quite boring, in Eliot’s defense, but still.
Now he’s maybe retiring, and everything in Albany will return to normal, and the Democrats probably won’t pick up that Senate seat they need to secure a majority and force reform bills through. But you know what? We think he should stick around. Not even just to piss off Joe Bruno.
Call it scandal fatigue, call it people just not wanting to waste a good politician, or just the absurdity of it all, but it seems to me that people are more laughing at this than anything else. It’s been twelve hours of pure comedy on sites like Wonkette and The Huffington Post . We at Grist got on the action too.
Perhaps we as a country are becoming more like Europe when it comes to our politicians involved in something sexual. Hell, the head of state in Italy can cheat on his wife, have the whole country know about it, have the wife curse him out in an op-ed piece in the national paper, and still don’t resign. Just saying.
Observation #2: Even if people aren’t going to care that much, he’s going to resign anyway.
At this point the bizarre clockwork of political protocol has already been clicking away. The script of public disgrace and honorable termination of one’s political career has been written and will be spoken by it’s newest actor tomorrow morning, Eastern Time. Even though his term barely started, a year and three months ago (he was suppose to be in term until 2010), even though he could just fight to make up for such a dumb mistake, still try to help out the people of New York until the very end, until they have to get the state troopers to get him out of the governors mansion, he’ll just, ironically enough, pussy out. What a fucking waste.
Observation #3: The hookers and Spitzer’s wife are not being seen as victims.
Of course it’s hard to feel sorry for anyone who gets paid $32,000 to have sex with somebody. I try to look at this a couple of ways, but every way I look at it I came to the same conclusion, you can’t feel sorry for a $4,000 an hour prostitute. I doubt girls who sell their body’s at that high a level do it under false pretenses, force, or desperation. They do it to get a new fur coat every Friday.
But still, people are going nuts with the “whores” shit, it’s like they found a non guilty way to saying “whore” or “ho’” every five words in a post. If you ask me, whatever girl can get four large off a guy for an hour of a little consensual sex, she’s the pimp and he’s the ho’.
Silda Wall Spitzer is the real tragedy here. She has more of a two-dimensional depiction in the media so far. People don’t even reference her directly, but rather as a example of the long suffering politician’s wife archetype. Strange strings of fates have twisted in this shit, considering the Spitzer endorsed Hillary Clinton for president, she herself having a cheating spouse. You know I bet when Clinton found out she probably went somewhere private and laughed her ass off. She’s far too intelligent a person not to appreciate the funny in the fucked up. You know, if prostitution was legal New York would still have a decent Governor, just one whose divorced.
Observation #4: If Spitzer resigns, New York gets first Black Governor… but like this.
David Paterson may well be the first African American governor of New York, the first legally blind governor in this country’s history, by tomorrow. I don’t know anything about this guy to be honest, but I’m a sucker for firsts. But man, who wants to be governor for this reason? It’s like getting a new car with a dent in it: Love the car, but first you have to take car of the freaking dent. Sudden personnel changes in high profile political spots always weirded me out, it always felt like an unexpected shift in the media current. And this one feels especially jarring due to my little knowledge of Paterson. Definitely need to look at this guy some more, but this may be the best thing to come out of this random stupidity.
Observation #5: At least Heidi Fleiss found a new use.
Yeah, that’s right Ms. Fleiss has been doing the talking head rounds. Just saw her cracked out ass on Nightline. She did bring up a good point though about how it’s hypocritcal for Spitzer to actively prosecute prostitution rings but then go ahead and participate in one, but then I think “why should I care what she thinks, it’s Heidi Fleiss!”.
Months of soul searching culminating in a caffeinated fit of file deletion and re-setup as I bombed my old movable type blog and created this WP version today at approximately 2:30 PM PST today. Weeks of the old site being linked farmed by spammers took it’s tole on me, not to mention the volley of recommendations from friend and colleagues about me finally using WordPress over Moveable type, and finally my need to focus more on just writing, and less on design and maintenance all lead me to creating this profile.
Although I’m planning to have an install of wordpress on my own server, this will be a nice in-betweener for now, perhaps posting to wordpress.com will lead for more friends and strangers giving me a read.
So who am I? My name is Jerome Woody (hi). I currently work as the web developer for Grist Magazine, a great, muckraking site of humor-tinted environmental news and commentary. I’ve a native upstate-newyorker who moved to Seattle for graduate school (library science), and just stayed. I live with my girlfriend, who is an assistant producer at KEXP and is just crazy enough to love me, and with a cat who’s just crazy.
I have an almost unhealthy obsession with information, media, and technology. I’ve studied information science for six years and have been working for journalists as their go to tech guy for even longer. This blog will be mostly about that obsession, from Twitter to Ted Koppel if you will. Anyway, that’s my intro, I’ll try to be interesting most of the time, especially with the link sections.
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