And The Winner Is

James Wolcott:  " ... whatever one thinks of Bill Clinton, ranked No. 2 on the hall-of-shame list of America’s 'Five Most Broken Men'  ... ”

There's a list? Damn, I missed this.

Et Tu, Geraldine?

If Obama was a white man, he would not be in this position. And if he was a woman, he would not be in this position. He happens to be very lucky to be who he is. And the country is caught up in the concept ...

No I don't know where I got that, it's all over everywhere and you don't need the goddamn link anyway. I am so pissed.

You told me a few decades ago these women would turn out to be more than a disappointment, I would have jumped down your little sexist throat.

Course, the fact that Geraldine Ferraro happened to be very lucky to have been in her position—one that thrilled the bejesus out of us, I do recall that. You cannot imagine, if you are a man—or if you're one of the pups that do seem to becloud this Interwebs thing—what it was like. Sea after sea of male faces ... and for the first time, my god, there was a woman up there on the platform, running, as it were, for Vice President!

I think that was the moment that unlocked it, for America. The avalanche of feminine faces where the world had only seen men. Oh yes. The first female news anchors were an amazing sight. And we all gained authority. Why, it made me how I am today! (No remarks please.)

Sometimes this blog seems like nothing but questions. Why do people ... I'm sure there's a name for this, um, conversion reaction. (I didn't quite become a therapist. Is it obvious?) Where people cannot wait to accuse someone else of what they benefited from. Another goddamn sentence ending in a preposition. The world is going to hell, I tell you.

The good news: Intrade has Obama taking Hil and poor John McCain. Like I always say, Follow the money. This time, though, seems it just might have a happy ending.

Simply Irresistible

Reuters: “Campaigning on Saturday, in Mississippi, the former president was quoted as saying his wife and Obama would be a dynamic duo, 'an almost unstoppable force.'”

Hm, yes. Especially since they will be running against a man in a (well-deserved) coma. (Has anyone the sense that John McCain wants to be President? Lusts after four years of epic work and nothing but hassle? I see the word Retirement writ large on his face.)

The question for today is, How screwed up are Hill and Billary—I mean, Bill and Hillary—really.

We're looking for signs of grace, folks. Humility. What have you done with that grotesque ambition of yours, and can a beast like that ever be whapped down to size. Does it happen.

Can Bill and Hil even conceive of themselves as vice-president of anything.

It's clear he was a spoiled-rotten kid, the kind who deploy their considerable charm and charisma in the interest of just plain survival. Has Bill gotten a grip on himself—or is he still in addiction's grip.

A glib little sentence, but no small question. For make no mistake, Monica-gate was total addict behavior. Something Bill Clinton absorbed at his mama's knee. The belief that people are objects, to be arranged at will. A deeply mechanistic view that cannot, by definition, ever approach the Moral, which is so Golden Rule: treat others as you would be treated. Far too fluid—and rather rules out that primary drive, to get.

My guess is that their lives, that family, are shot through with ordinary lies ... that they are nice folks, but are textbook Dysfunctional  I mean, Where the fork are her tax returns? Things like that.

It's a Shakespearean drama, unfolding on the national stage. What does the woman do when the Unstoppable is not her queenly, entitled self, but this Dark Prince out of nowhere, with all this Honesty crap, and you really cannot grasp the attraction. And people are watching.

Hillary genuinely strikes me as a born Vice-President. Just saying.

Cry If I Want To

“I certainly hope not, and if that is the dreary case, how the hell does she think she's going to keep Bill Clinton from horning in on everything (NPI.) Honestly, has the nation gone to sleep on ... oops, not my blog? 'KTHXBYE!”

... I was busily ranting away at Frank's place when I realized, tis only right, mete and just to confine one's rant to one's own blog. Especially when you exceed the comment box.

Based on the results of yesterday’s primaries we may yet see a former President as First Gentleman in the White House ...

Frank had writ (done wrote?) (writed?) and suddenly I was overcome, as if by fumes. So infuriating was the realization—and don't tell me America hasn't thought of this, although it is perfectly obvious it has not—Bill Clinton will no more stay out of the Oval Office than he successfully kept his pants zipped. (That sentence would be better in present tense, but it seemed crude; one does not really know. One did know, however—and however unwillingly—more about presidential ejaculatory matter and other grossities than we, as a nation, ever wanted.) (It stains.)

Did this not carve a deep enough rut in the national neocortex? Are not all, to a man and woman, sick to death of Bill Clinton and his close relations? (Oops, bad choice of words.) If the name Clinton be not anathema enough, take a gander, I dare you, at the worst, most devotedly unhip, glaringly 1995, clunky, unreadable excuse of a website ...

Do you know what youth for Hillary is called? (Hold your barf, please. We have bags.) 

“Hillblazers.” That's right, and anyone under the age of twenty found clicking that link will be promptly sent into treatment. I have monitors.

When the great culture war of the Sixties was over ... oh, sigh. Same old rift, nay, same old ne'er-to-be-bridged chasm. Between, you got it, the normal and Teh Square. 

Which is how she won Ohio.

(I wonder how the vote came down in Winesburg.)

Next up: Watch Barack Obama busta move.

Is It Over Yet?

I don't watch TV news, I don't turn on the radio ... and still I am just so bloody sick of the Clintons as people. Well, and as politicians, too.

Leaflets, FCS. Hillary waving a fistful of leaflets, and accusing Obama of some kind of betrayal, completely a video bite. Seeing as how said leaflets were identical to her own, and not particularly interesting at that.

After her immense graciousness on Monday night. Took, what, forty-eight hours for that to wear off.

We all been wretched, we all been fools when the dream love walked out. Not going to tell you what I've done. But that's what campaign managers are for! Keep you from being foolish on national TV! What the hell are those people doing besides billing her astonishing amounts of money. Truly record-breaking amounts. I smell cross-purposes.

Latest foolishness, circulating this photo of Obama, on a visit to Kenya, wearing Kenyan dress and headwrap.

Oh my god, he's wearing a TURBAN, people! You know what TURBAN means!

The reason I don't watch TV news is because stupidity hurts, and political campaigns are stupidity bronzed.

Drudge : Clinton campaign manager Maggie Williams responds: ‘If Barack Obama's campaign wants to suggest that a photo of him wearing traditional Somali clothing is divisive, they should be ashamed.’

Doin' the double-smack, what, me, swift-boating?

Oh yeah. Way to win superdelegate hearts and minds.

Speaking of heads, mine hurts. Do campaigns have to be this way? Mr. Obama says no, and it's that as much as anything that attracts so many of us. To listen to Barak or Michelle speak is balm to the listening mind. Never mind they so cute to look at. I think my heart would just burst to see them on the stand, taking the oath.

Even with me being so epitome of white. Doesn't matter. It's been along time since that kind of excitement's been around. Since Jack Kennedy's campaign and election, to be exact.The excitement of, Something different's going to happen.

I think we are all excited over the idea of something different, something better, and I think the name of that excitement is Hope.

Freetards: Boom or Bust?

That nice Doc Searls, I realized today with a slightly queasy sense of deja vu, is a radical of exactly the kind I used to know in Berkeley in the Sixties. Idealistic, passionately invested in an entirely imaginary group future, rather touchingly ignoring the nature of a capitalist society what has already et him and his Linux buddies and spit 'em back out.

Or, to put it another way (I could do these forever): Run 'em right over with the giant money truck, just like the rest of us, but the beauty (?) of Linux geeks is, They never even notice.

The Intention Economy will happen first with public media. This is the economy that will grow around customers' and users' actual intentions—rather than guesswork about those intentions, or efforts to capture or drive people's attention. As a result, the advertising boom will come to an end, simply because the supply side will know more about what the demand side wants, and will have better ways of relating to it. Advertising won't go away,and never will. But wasting money time and money with guesswork about what people might want will fade as a value system, simply because a system that starts the actual intentions of users and customers will be in place.

Tho I am guessing freetard is too harsh a word for someone like Doc. Since AFAIK Fake Steve made it up. (If he didn't, it's his now. See below.) Besides, does Richard Stallman take photos to die for? (Die over, apparently.)

Today FakeSteve rags on Woz again, nailing poor Woz (where's Kathy?) in his inimitable steel-marshmallow way, namaste.

Writers do that, they hand out justice without mercy, and don't give a fuck if they're “correct,” which is why the best of them, like Dan, are so often uncannily right.

Folks please read the entire article. It's a gem. Except the parts where Woz says the company has changed and we put too much emphasis on making products look cool. That part you can just skip right over.

Now, here's an item from Doc's list I agree with.

Brands and reputations will matter more than ever.

More's the pity.

How Can People Be So Stupid?

Okay, maybe that isn't the line from that heartbreaking ballad in Hair. Maybe it is. Like I am under some obligation to google every detail this constantly-associating, hard-at-work mind spits out? Hey, this is the land beyond right and wrong!

Clever, wot? But them's the perks—and there ain't many, honey—of being a writer. The privilege of defining your own turf, which you had fucking better well do. Be you writer or woman. Swim out beyond the breaks.

So listen, you really want a president who has so much integrity, he can't discern right from wrong when it comes to a piece of ass? As my dearly beloved ex used to say?

Hell, no. We already had Billy-boy, and that was way-annoying enough. Besides (oh, right, Zo, like this matters) McCain has a pretty young wife, yes? Talk about stupid: when have I ever seen the ass-chaser who thought that one was enough.

Or perhaps this evening's chautauqua should be entitled: A Sex Addict? In The White House? Again?

So here's my beef with the New York Times: I don't like the style with which they pussyfoot. I believe it could be done better.

As his relationship with a female lobbyist underscores, John McCain’s confidence in his own integrity has sometimes seemed to blind him to potential conflicts of interest.

Talk about oxymorons. Jesus, I got whiplash.

Save Flickr!

sfgate.com: “A suit filed in Santa Clara Superior Court on Feb. 1 accuses Yahoo's board of failing to look after shareholder interests. It centers on an offer Microsoft made to buy Yahoo last year, that the board rejected.

The suit alleges that Yahoo's directors voted against the merger so that they could continue to collect their lucrative positions, which paid $588,424 to $649,788 in 2006. In fact, the board should have gone through with the acquisition to maximize shareholder value, according to the complaint.”

You know what, Jer? (I may call you Jer, mayn't I?) I don't care how you manage to do it—just keep those Borg fuckers out of Flickr.

Anyone deny that they would trash it in a trice? No. That Flickr is one of the single great—what is it, certainly not just a web site, not just a photo share ...

Well no wonder the word eluded me: here this is the FIW (fucking inter webs) and yet, and yet ... Flickr is a place where art goes on.

Next thing you know, someone will invent blogging as art, and call it Writing. 

The Few, The Proud

It was just like the old days. People chaining themselves to things. Draping themselves with rolls of film. Okay, I forget the significance of the film, but it was raining buckets, do you hear me, buckets, when these brave souls heard the call of duty. When you chain yourself to something, remember: no lunch, no bathroom breaks. That's revolutionary commitment! Chairman Mao would be proud. Oh, wait, that whole Mao thing went belly up. Sorry, deja vue is a powerful thing. One of the last peace marches I remember going on was organized by the Viet Nam Day Committee. Everyone marched, families—I brought my children, and wore an itchy crocheted miniature skirt. The march was powerful in its quiet size; just massive, the street all people as far as you could see. Outside the Copper Penny (insert your own joke,) police from all over California stood in an unending, slowly moving line, rather like painting the Golden Gate Bridge. Who knew what these crazy hippies might freak out and do.

Yet we were just people, families—it had gone that far, the whole city was sick to death of a pointless War. Come together like that, I suppose we did out a powerful scare in law enforcement. I mean, so far we had been a thoroughly unpredictable bunch, inventing faster than socia context could keep up. The police, the Suits, the establishment all much like Great-Aunt Winifred when my father handed her the Roman Candle. "Mercy sakes! " she cried, as she ran about the yard, not knowing which way to point, "Mercy! Mercy!"

Mostly I find it—I don't know, is it sad or eminently laughable? I guess you had to be there. Once the Black Panthers armed themselves, those were serious, violent times, when both peace and justice seemed at hand.

Kudos to anyone who manages to find a radical act, really, never mind carry it out. The tree-sitters still sit, halting the University of California in its tracks. And the three brave souls who withstood a really tremendous downpour to chain themselves to the door of the Marine Officers Recruiting Station—there are three, look in the corner. Stand for what you believe in. Possibly even more courageous, the kind of courage so easily confused with the misbegotten impulse, stand when you seem a fool.

(formerly published as The Berkeley Three)

Pop Goes The Weasel

“Evidence in car may point to drug use, tiger taunting”
San Francisco Chronicle lobs one to Mr. Geragos. So far, nothing back!

My, is that man disliked. Whatever these poor lads—or not, turns out they were driving a BMW 3—have suffered, nobody, but nobody steps up and says, What a fine fellow is Geragos!

The comment list on only one of the related stories—Drugs In BMW, (Snakes On Plane) EMT Overhears Boys Confess in Ambulance, What The Hell Do EMT's Know .... Friends Come to Pick Up Car; Friends Asked For Names, Friends Speed Away ...

That Heather Fong is a tight-lipped one. Imagine, a Chief of Police who does her job! (And looks dear, head disappearing under that oversized cap.) (Though on the “dear” thing? Don't fuck with her.)

How many days and no Geragos rant. Abandoned the case already? Hard to think why, But fortunately, we've got our own little Bad Reporter to tide us over. This is just one panel: click on pic go see the whole, perfect thing.


Learn something every day. Who knew there were height requirements for weasel fences?

Truthfully, while, like nine million other people, I can't wait to see how this one plays out—count me in, on Tatiana's side, to the extent that no tiger worth her stripes leaps over any barrier unless provoked. I've been told that the skin of tigers is extremely sensitive—a few BBs and a slingshot, that would do it. Seems perfectly obvious, she needed to call a halt to some behavior of these "boys." Else she could have et anyone.

Last night I perused the reaction to just one SFGate article on the subject. It had received 981 comments, and by the time I fell upon this one, I knew just what he meant. Hell, perhaps by now, dear reader, so do you.

“Let's see, I could hammer nails into my forehead or I could post one more comment on the Tiger story. Where did I put those nails?”

Pop Goes The Weasel

“Evidence in car may point to drug use, tiger taunting”
San Francisco Chronicle lobs one to Mr. Geragos. So far, nothing back!

My, is that man disliked. Whatever these poor lads—or not, turns out they were driving a BMW 3—have suffered, nobody, but nobody steps up and says, What a fine fellow is Geragos!

The comment list on only one of the related stories—Drugs In BMW, (Snakes On Plane) EMT Overhears Boys Confess in Ambulance, What The Hell Do EMT's Know .... Friends Come to Pick Up Car; Friends Asked For Names, Friends Speed Away ...

That Heather Fong is a tight-lipped one. Imagine, a Chief of Police who does her job! (And looks dear, head disappearing under that oversized cap.) (Though on the “dear” thing? Don't fuck with her.)

How many days and no Geragos rant. Abandoned the case already? Hard to think why, But fortunately, we've got our own little Bad Reporter to tide us over. This is just one panel: click on pic go see the whole, perfect thing.

Learn something every day. Who knew there were height requirements for weasel fences?

Truthfully, while, like nine million other people, I can't wait to see how this one plays out—count me in, on Tatiana's side, to the extent that no tiger worth her stripes leaps over any barrier unless provoked. I've been told that the skin of tigers is extremely sensitive—a few BBs and a slingshot, that would do it. Seems perfectly obvious, she needed to call a halt to some behavior of these "boys." Else she could have et anyone.

Last night I perused the reaction to just one SFGate article on the subject. It had received 981 comments, and by the time I fell upon this one, I knew just what he meant. Hell, perhaps by now, dear reader, so do you.

“Let's see, I could hammer nails into my forehead or I could post one more comment on the Tiger story. Where did I put those nails?”

Eat My Shorts

From the Columbia Journalism Review today:

The press’s simultaneous amplification and shorthanding of Clinton’s display of emotion support Steinem’s point: Clinton’s gender, in a still-sometimes-sexist society like ours, may be more problematic than we allow ourselves to acknowledge or believe. After her emotional event yesterday, Clinton held a rally in Salem, NH. About eleven minutes into it, two men interrupted her speech, shouting at Clinton and hoisting handmade signs. The signs, and the hecklers, screamed, “Iron–My–Shirt.”

Which is pretty damn funny—too funny, now that I think of it, these guys were some kind of ironists (yes) on the loose. Students, smarty asses. Bloggers.

No, I take that back. Most male bloggers are too tensed up—from being on the A list, or on no list at all—hey, it's a dog-eat-link out there—to take time off just to be funny.

Seriously? A male friend with talents and jobs across the bio-spectrum reflected on what had happened to his own adolescent savagery in the years since. “I still compare myself at every moment, just not to the other guy anymore, but ... with my own goals.”

They gauge performance, they never stop gauging performance; keep this in mind, ladies.

And CJR? I got a journalistic bone (yes) to pick with you.

“Still sometimes”?

“May be”?

Stop pussy-footing (yes) around and write the simple truth.

G-L-O-R-I-A

The rest of you net-bunnies are probably too young to get the joke or get excited over this, but I am all stirred up to find a whole article by the Big G, whose every word informed so much of our lives ever after. Women my age. Um, that would be Gloria Steinem. (Remember her? Ya little runts.)

This is like hearing from the Pope! That is, If I gave a damn what some (any) isolated old man says, which I do not, and on principle, be you female or male, neither should you.

Steinem writes—and I want you to remember this—there will be a quiz:

Gender is probably the most restricting force in American life

and

... whether the question is who must be in the kitchen or who could be in the White House.

I am just going to do a dance around that statement, and you don't get to fuck with it. Gloria said so.

No happy dance, no way. You think things are that much further along than in 1976, when the boldest of us, because it was a Movement, rather timorously proposed that perhaps our husbands might change a diaper? Do the dishes sometimes too? And it took a whole movement to get up the nerve—don't laugh—because no one ever had. Asked these guys to get off their duff. Not en masse. Not, you can be sure, at home. His castle! And we took a beating for it, emotionally, which anyone knows is how to really hurt a woman. The tide of ridicule rode high.

The Patriarchy, even the puniest of them (and what a boon it was) were still coasting along like so many low-hanging hot-air balloons, still making Money the household God, as well as demanding we all worship at that altar. Issuing forth the same crap accusations if we disagreed as ... as has been so recently seen in the latest TechyCrunchDirt fooforaw, wherein the guy in charge was either so hair-trigger or so bloated with entitlement—and isn't this the first thing men buy with their power?—so beyond criticism, it took him about two minutes to attack, in that time-honored, go for the gonads way, the woman who dared a critique.

The difference, in thirty years, (which BTW, went by in an eye-blink) is that I may speak freely about this asshole and many others. I may also be loathed, hated, misunderstood ... But the real difference is that I know now, all the way to my bones and back, that the way a man speaks to you offers a complete characterological study of him—even if it's more than you wished, or, more often, horribly less. For women do dream, and men, thinking it their duty, do not disabuse us unless or until they find their own motivation to. Meanwhile you can be floating along and then one day, blam.

Does it matter if I tell you this is not autobiographical, that I was in fact the one who blammed him, though no one ever had longer or fair warning. None so blind, and all that.

For those of you who like a bit of science with your tea, Steinem also wrote

This country is way down the list of countries electing women ... it polarizes gender roles more than the average democracy.

There's more to her article, but my god, enough pearls for one day.

The Man of My Dreams

I just picked this off a network, hey, like fruit from a tree, and hustled back here to publish my treasure, thereby both giving it away and making it more deeply mine.

Someone had posted the question, Who can I reach at Amazon to fix a customer service situation gone wrong? (I don't think you're supposed to take items from a closed site like this and—whoa, there's a blog police in my head?)

Answer: I just got a similarly weird "error msg" from L----In! First they say, hey, here's a new member who used to work at MMmedia just like you (the poor bastard). Perhaps you know him. As it turns out, I do, So I invite him to like, you know, L--- In. But then I get this ERROR MSG in response to my invite: "Please note: You cannot send invitations from this page because several recipients of your invitations indicated that they don't know you."

Have we achieved Fascist Networking yet?

sheesh!

Clarification added 6 hours ago:
Gosh, I didn't realize that this would be visible to everyone. Just to be clear, when I said "poor bastard," what I should have said was "poor FUCKING bastard."

And when I said "Fascist Networking" what I meant was "National Socialist Networking."

I hope this serves to clarify my position.

His only faults are that I have never met him, and, well, do you see him posting about me? (Answer: hell, no.)

Besides, the older men get, the more they like—no, let me put this another way: he is my age, give or take, and the whole of my life, since I was eleven or twelve, the male of the species has treated me as if I were as interested in naked women as they.

But it's really more than that. These things are pointers, in the way links point to something else, something huge, bigger than Google ever dreamt: Women are actually other people!

Different! Separate! Similar, in that we are as full of ourselves as any guy, with the same self-interest ... but with the addition, okay, of an inborn capacity to deeply care for and about others.

But enough about that. For now.

Aw, Fuck

Justine Larbalestier, in her blog:

"If you want to write your novel relatively quickly and productively, it should have no access to the interweb thingy, also no games, or anything other than the two aforementioned programs. If you can’t write without easy access to endless forms of procrastination sorry, I mean, research tools, then by all means be connected to that gateway to hell the intramanet."

Gruber Avoids a Stroke

But I say, Take care of your arteries, man, and they will take care of you. Yes I do think you burned off a at least a few potential TIA's with this magnificent title:

Yet Another in the Ongoing Series Wherein I Examine a Piece of Supposedly Serious Apple Analysis From a Major Media Outlet and Dissect Its Inaccuracies, Fabrications, and Exaggerations Point-by-Point, Despite the Fact That No Matter How Egregious the Inaccuracies / Fabrications / Exaggerations, Such Pieces Inevitably Lead to Accusations That I’m Some Sort of Knee-Jerk Shill Who Rails Against Anything ‘Anti-Apple’ Simply for the Sake of Defending Apple, and if I Love Apple So Much Why Don't I Just Marry Them?

But brace yourself. Adam L. Penenberg (give the guy a break, he's probably fourteen years old. No? Oh. Well in that case, his stupid-ass ass? Kick it again. The crime? A level of witlessness that makes Enderle Industries spokesperson, R. Endlerle, look good. Okay, not good ... But why do you read these assholes anyway?)

I do love it when you get all wound up in your Daring-Fireball-the-guy-who-never-gets-wound-up way. Restraint is a such pleasure to read.

However, I feel strangely compelled point out, You missed one:

“But none of that will stop a growing number of adversaries from doing all they can to pare Apple down.”

Now promise me you won't get upset.

You Are Coming To A Sad Realization

Apple Downloads - FileDefense: "FileDefense automatically alerts you when any program is accessing files and prompts you to accept or deny that access."

Hey, not me, baby. I trust my self not to click on pop ups, especially the ones offering to clean my registry, and not to visit germy sites.

I love the way the porn industry used to keep it, um,under wraps on the front page. Now you got girls in one of my ever favorite poses, fresh white cum dripping down their chin. Nice for the kids.

Who all is making money off the ever-growing number of switchers, who got a few years to go before they get what Unix does. Which is more than Redmond can seem to ever grasp. Steve Jobs is not the only person to ever think a thing through and to decide upon excellence. Anything less is, frankly,boring—and the Borg People all work in Washington, where I envision tears of boredom dripping down my face, were it my face.

But really. How likely is that.