Britt's Up To Something Cool Per Usual

Check out what Britt Blaser's up to over at his blog, Escapable Logic.

Open Republic helps activists grow their community, their support, their contributions and their political power. This is the entry point for the tech-averse political novice and a backroom operations guide for the tech-savvy political pro: Dean done right.

Tyco Mistrial

All those months, all that money, it's a shame. Retrial possible as soon as May. Read about it here.

Strong Jobs Numbers And Kerry In Peril?

Pssshaw. What, like a registered Democrat with a job is miraculously transformed into a Republican? I doubt it.

It's not JUST the economy, stupid!

Please Stop Asking Me About BloggerCon And Orkut

I get about 3 or 4 messages a week asking me if I'm attending BloggerCon and about 4 or 5 invitations a week to Orkut. So I've been spending a lot of time telling people I was previously booked and wasn't able to attend the event, and "Thanks, but no thanks," I'm not joining Orkut even if God invited me.

BUT ...

Things have changed in my calendar and I WILL BE ATTENDING BLOGGERCON. How could I miss some of these speakers. They are too good.

I'm still not joining Orkut.

Harvard Business School Or High School Diploma?

Tonight, the reality TV show about business, Trump's The Apprentice put two men in the hot seat in Donald Trump's boardroom -- Kwame, an African American from Goldman Sachs with an MBA from Harvard Business School vs. Troy, a natural salesman and street-smart closer with a high school diploma.

It is an interesting choice. The thing is, from an entrepreneurial point of view, the salesman would probably go further in a start-up or new business situation. But from the point of view of Trump hiring a polished, experienced "aide-de-camp" the guy from HBS is not to be beat.

Interestingly, the street-smart guy Troy, had the choice to bring in either Kwame or the other guy, Bill, the founder of a cigar store business to face the possibility of one or the other being fired. If Troy had chosen someone more like him in credentials to go into the boardroom with him -- in other words, Bill -- he might have appeared stronger and saved his own ass -- so the choice of Kwame was a disaster. Don't go into a fight with an HBS grad when all you bring to the table is an H.S.D.

I think that error in judgment was more significant than the reasons Trump gave to fire Troy. (Essentially that he was a "loose cannon" and not as experienced as Kwame.)

Trump was featured in the beginning of the program giving a lecture to a full room of eager listeners. He was talking about passion. He had wise words -- if you don't feel passion for your work, forget it, you'll never succeed at it.

Oreos and High Tea

If you could see the rain in Boston today -- it's unbelievable -- there's sure to be flooding all over and the evening commute will not be pretty. So the only rational remedy I can see is Oreos and High Tea. And that's just what I'm having.

Kinja Live

All sort of new blogs being born -- today Kinja goes live. If it's a Denton blog, it's bound to be good. Now, wait, wasn't that about Smucker's Jam? Whatever... I haven't read it deeply enough yet to give my opinion, but I will.

Worthwhile Coming To A Theatre Near You

No April Fooling around here. Yes, Worthwhile debuts next Monday, April 5.

Lessig Review In New York Times Book Review

Got an advanced copy of the Lessig review by Adam Cohen of Free Culture. It will run in this Sunday's (April 4, 2004) New York Times. Not sure if it's online yet.

The shrinking of the public domain, and the devastation it threatens to the culture, are the subject of a powerfully argued and important analysis by Lawrence Lessig, a professor at Stanford Law School and a leading member of a group of theorists and grass-roots activists, sometimes called the "copyleft," who have been crusading against the increasing expansion of copyright protections. Lessig was the chief lawyer in a noble, but ultimately unsuccessful, Supreme Court challenge to the copyright extensions act. "Free Culture" is partly a final appeal to the court of public opinion and partly a call to arms. ...

To his credit, Lessig avoids the classic law professor's trap of writing about legal cases and doctrines as if no actual people were involved. He humanizes his arguments with stories like that of Jesse Jordan, a freshman at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute who innocently put together a new search engine for his school's computer network, and, after students started using it to trade music, was notified by the Recording Industry Association of America that he owed them $15 million. (They settled for $12,000, his life savings.)

Lessig grounds his argument about the new rules' impact on the culture in a basic observation about art: as long as it has existed, artists have been refashioning old works into new ones. Greek and Roman myths were developed over centuries of retelling. Shakespeare's plays are brilliant reworkings of other playwrights' and historians' stories. Even Disney owes its classic cartoon archive -- Snow White, Cinderella, Pinocchio -- to its plundering of other creators' tales. And today, technology allows for the creation of ever more elaborate "derivative works,' art that builds on previous art, from hip-hop songs that insert, or sample, older songs to video art that adds new characters to, or otherwise alters, classic films."

Parlez-Vous Monopoly?

In case you wondered --

What do they call Boardwalk in?:

France? Rue de la Paix
Germany? Schlossallee
The Netherlands? Kalverstraat
The United Kingdom? Mayfair

This Life

I was trying to explain this idea to a friend yesterday and getting nowhere with it. I went out for a walk in my town. I took a haphazard route, going through neighborhoods that were ... well I used the Monopoly board as an analogy ... walked through what I described as some Baltic Avenue and Mediterranean type streets, then took a turn towards town and back out on another boulevard that was pure Park Place and Boardwalk.

And on my walk I was thinking how it is some people end up on one street with the big house and some other people end up on the not so nice alley with the little shack and what the assumptions were when we were all growing up. Many friends of mine who expected to be doing very well now, are facing their 40's and 50's in a really difficult financial situation. Some other friends of mine are quite well off. Beyond the financial aspect, I also started thinking about what we do every day for work, for fun, for life.

I have to say, the walk at midday, at midweek, showed me a lot of empty houses, lovely big houses with wonderful lawns and yards and ponds and play structures and basketball hoops, but they were totally deserted. So the people who are living in these beautiful places, don't seem to be living in them at all, rather they are somewhere else working so they can afford these houses, big expensive places to sleep at night. Or maybe they are all inside, working on their computers, trading stocks ... but it wasn't a day for that, it was a beautiful Spring day and at lunch time, you'd think they'd at least come out for a minute or two. The houses really looked empty and dead. More like the red plastic Monopoly hotels.

And then, as I tried to explain to my friend, I've been thinking about how we all spend so much time having a life that seems to be the kind of life other people have -- get up, get breakfast, get dressed, go to work, get there at 9:00, leave there at 5:00 or 6:00 or whatever, come home, eat dinner, watch TV -- and I suddenly found this really sad. That we come to this earth and that's all we can come up with for a life. I don't want to be the fire-eating woman in the circus or something, but I think I want more of a life than a person who lives in a box, leaves their box in the morning, gets in their box-with-wheels, drives to another office box, sits in that box for 8 hours, their butt spreading a little wider every day from just sitting there, goes home to their box, sits in front of the box, eats a frozen dinner out of a box, goes to sleep on their mattress and box spring.

I tried to explain, I'm trying to imagine a life -- that's all -- since I don't find much value in this other life someone has imagined for me. I'm walking all over the Monopoly board wondering about a life. I might need to ride the rails a while. I might need to try my luck with Chance. I might need to find a little green house and set it up on St. James Place and see how that goes. I don't know, but I want to feel I had a hand in imagining this life -- MY life.

What's In Your Fridge?

Garbage day, so I took a little jungle safari into the back of my fridge to give some leftovers the heave-ho. I'm always fascinated by what we save and why we save it. My fridge seems to want to save old noodles and pasta for a rainy day. Not sure why. No one is eating them, that's for sure. Out they go. And one little tiny bit of tuna fish salad and some really old potatoes with scary eyes and shoots growing out of them.

Technorati's Pretty Face

To be fair, doesn't Technorati look great?

Top Bloggers List

Thanks Blogrunner for putting me on your Top Bloggers List ... but honestly none of it makes any sense and to be above Dan Gillmor, AKMA and Jon Udell seems completely crazy.

New Nielsens

Been having some fascinating conversations with Henry Copeland about his BLOGADS service. He was early and first to realize advertisers could really hit targeted audiences and serious opinion makers by advertising on blogs.

The Nielsens on TV used to guess at the audience and demographics they were hitting -- and the more technology comes into this space, the more we realize the Nielsens were hit or miss -- and more miss than hit unfortunately.

But imagine political campaigns plunking down $2000 for an ad on a blog -- and raising $10,000. That's a pretty direct ROI and easily measurable.

If you didn't read this piece in the Wall Street Journal about advertising on blogs -- check out this link.

Spoiled Brat

Was just reading some of the posts to the test blog for WORTHWHILE. They are great! I'm like a kid in a candy store. I'm a spoiled brat to be sure, lucky enough to read this great new stuff. Tried to talk our founders into launching sooner than April 5 -- they say, cool your jets. Here's a post from one of our new writers, a young woman entrepreneur.

Early Entrepreneurial Lessons

by Kate Yandoh

Although only 9 and not especially perceptive, I could tell that my parents were not as thrilled by the rapid population growth in my gerbil cages as I. So I asked for a ride to the local department store to see if they might be able to profit from my surplus. Armed with a shoebox full of little critters and clad in my favorite Polly Flinders party frock, I closed the deal and went home with an envelope of cash.

One Saturday, I went into the playroom to find mother and father gerbil happily devouring a new litter instead of their food nuggets. My mother tried to console me until she understood what I was saying through hysterical tears: "That's five dollars, gone!"

This introduction to product cannibalism spelled the end of my enterprise.

I'm With Jewel

Hey, like girls, do you know this great song by Jewel. She says it all:

I'm just a simple girl
In a high-tech digital world

Tuesday Yes Tuesday

Excuse me everyone, but I've been a little busy lately and poor Halley's Comment is getting a little thin here, but I'm about to launch a new blog and you wouldn't believe how much time that can take.

I think you'll love my new baby.

Electronic Arts Big Video Monster

Wow, their market share is monstrous. Very cool.

Electronic Arts Inc. (NasdaqNM:ERTS - news), the gaming industry's largest publisher, has perfected the art of getting gamers hooked on yearly releases of sports games and turning out versions of movie hits such as "The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King" and "Harry Potter (news - web sites): Quidditch World Cup."

EA's U.S. market share in 2004 is more than twice that of its closest competitor, and the company generates more revenue in the December quarter than its closest competitor does in an entire fiscal year, driven in large part by those repeat sports and film titles. -- Reuters via Yahoo News!

I don't know if I agree with the rest of this Reuters piece about how the gaming industry lacks creative energy. That's not been my experience. This year, I got my 8-year-old a P/S2 and his first video games, and I've been watching all of them and learning a lot. I think the creativity in gaming is awesome.

Scoble Sleeps

Thank God Scoble does sleep sometimes and on a Monday morning in the East Coast a blogger can still feel some shred of dignity that his blog in Seattle still says SUNDAY and he hasn't posted 25 new fresh interesting blog posts for Monday yet.

By the time you read this, I'm sure he'll already have proved me wrong.

Blogger Cool Stuff Coming

Somebody cool at Blogger told me that some cool stuff is coming out soon, except it's a secret, so I can't say anything about it, but it's really good ......mmmmmmmmm ... and so you didn't read this and I didn't write this and boy-oh-boy I can't wait and yes, btw, my lips are sealed. You didn't hear it here. Got it?

Am I The Last To Know?

This series of Christian books is enormously popular. Did you know about it? I just found out about it. Left Behind.

Kevin Marks, Please Read Me A Bedtime Story

What a terrific voice you have, Kevin! Your British accent is hard to beat. Are all Americans just ga-ga for a British accent, like me?

If you haven't listened to Kevin reading the Preface to Lawrence Lessig's new book FREE CULTURE, you should go listen right now.

Chinese Food

I've been writing very long posts lately and I just wanted to show you I can write a short one. Have some Chinese food today -- I just did -- and it's so darned good.

Scribble

There is a material world, where they keep things like Hot Wheels tiny cars and telephones and loaves of bread and the Post Office and clothing and TV's -- I've seen it, believe me.

And then there is my head -- where I keep all of that stuff, in a "just add water" form -- and a million other things. I am a writer and that means I am very very strange. I have so many things floating around in my head, even a cast of thousands of people who want to talk and talk and talk and tell me things about their lives.

Like this morning. I went to church. Church is in the material world. They have wooden benches there that they call pews and I was sitting on one and then there was a hymn we sang and then I realized I really wanted to write.

I wanted to find out what my lead character had told her sister in San Diego when she visited her the evening after spending the whole of Friday afternoon in bed with her lover -- a well-known Hollywood producer -- very well- known, too well-known and very married. So she drives down the San Diego freeway to see her sister and brother-in-law, but he's not there but their three boys (her nephews) are and they sit on the beach talking watching the boys.

And I knew what her sister was going to tell her. Her sister knew she was dating the married Hollywood producer and didn't like it one bit, she'd known for more than a year, but now it was going even deeper, because the sister's husband for the first time ever, was being unfaithful to her, no one would have ever taken him for the kind of guy that would do such a thing, and it was a big mess and the two sisters really needed to talk.

All this was happening in my head. I was driving down the 405 south -- near the Costa Mesa exit -- in church in Boston in a wooden pew.

That's the problem. I think the material world is highly overrated. When I have to navigate the material world, I find it extremely irksome some days. It's full of so many things you can just bang into and fall over. I'd rather fly like a spirit through walls. It would be so much easier. So right in the middle of the church service, after the hymn and before the collection plate went around, I got up and went to a quiet enclave where no people were, right behind the chapel, in the balcony with after-dinner mint green carpeting, and started scribbling all the details of the San Diego sister visit on the back of the church program and some other pieces of paper I found that were about doing good works by missionaries in Guatemala or something.

I have to figure it's what God had in mind. To put all these people in my brain. How the hell else did they end up there? My character is so upset to hear her brother-in-law is cheating on her sister, she nearly flips, and of course, she suddenly sees her own messing about with the producer in a new way. I still don't know if she's going to dump him. He IS a bad guy and she's too naive to see it yet. But she will.

Going Out Going In

I'm thinking about how much time I'm spending inside, how much out and about, because as the weather changes here in Boston, it's beginning to be almost reasonable to just decide on the spur of the moment to go outside.

Until ... about ... last week, you had to plan most trips with all the accoutrements and considerations of a trip to the South Pole, or you'd lose a finger, a toe or simply your nose to frostbite in the cold we've been having. (Okay, I do exaggerate a bit, but not that much.) As you can imagine, this tends to persuade people to STAY INSIDE.

If you think we're all a little cabin feverish here -- believe me, we are -- how many videos/DVD's can you rent in one winter? I think maybe I've rented a few thousand this winter.

So I've been trying to balance time out and time in. It's tough to balance. You simply have to spend some time inside restoring dirty piles of laundry with clean, folded stuff, filling an empty fridge, getting bills and papers into order, sleeping, or you'll just slam into that "It's Wednesday and I have no clean underwear" problem. There's really nothing worse than a week of work followed by a weekend of being out all the time and not getting your nest in order.

Then there's the matter of writing. It takes a lot of time with no one around, with no interruptions. But that's for another post.

It's Not Unusual To Go Out ...

Going out for a late lunch at 3:00 with a friend. For some reason I've got this Tom Jones song in my head and I'm remembering how he hits the word "out" so sharply in the song. I like Tom Jones.

It's not unusual to be loved by anyone
It's not unusual to have fun with anyone
But when I see you hanging about with anyone
It's not unusual to see me cry,
Oh I wanna' die
It's not unusual to go out at any time
But when I see you out and about it's such a crime
If you should ever want to be loved by anyone,
It's not unusual it happens every day no matter what you say
You find it happens all the time
Love will never do what you want it to
Why can't this crazy love be mine
It's not unusual, to be mad with anyone
It's not unusual, to be sad with anyone
But if I ever find that you've changed at anytime
It's not unusual to find out that I'm in love with you
Whoa - oh - oh - oh - oh

IMHO

Daniel Okrent writes in this morning's New York Times about columnists relationship with facts, in his piece "The Privileges of Opinion, The Obligations of Fact."

He certainly knows which columnists stir the most ire. After a discussion of Krugman and Safire, he mentions Dowd:

... And Maureen Dowd is followed faithfully around the Web by an avenging army of passionate detractors who would probably be devastated if she ever stopped writing.

Coffee, Bagels, Maureen Dowd

Dowd in the Sunday New York Times this morning.

Republicans are demonizing Mr. Clarke, who has accused the administration of negligence on terrorism in the months before 9/11.

Bush officials accuse him of playing fast and loose with facts, even while they still refuse to acknowledge they took us to war by playing fast and loose with facts.

Even after a remarkable week in which a simple apology by Mr. Clarke carried such emotional power, Mr. Bush was still repeating his discredited line on Iraq, as if by rote.

"I made a choice to defend the security of the country," he said Friday, in a speech in Albuquerque, adding: "You can't see what you think is a threat and hope it goes away. You used to could when the oceans protected us. But the lesson of September the 11th is, is when the president sees a threat we must deal with it before it comes to fruition, through death, on our own soils, for example."

Missed The Apprentice

I can't believe I missed the Apprentice on Thursday. What the heck was I doing ... oh yeah, watching a movie with my son. Good choice, way more fun.

Here's what I missed. They went to the Trump Taj Mahal in Atlantic City. There were two women and four men left and they fired Katrina. That leaves Amy as the only woman. You could see that coming. She was the strongest woman competitor and every time they had to even up the teams and another team got their pick of the players, they always chose Amy, until last week.

I've been thinking a lot about the way the men will support one another at work (and in life for that matter), even if they don't like one another. Women seem to put personality ahead of that type of gender loyalty often enough. I know I'm generalizing, but this show puts these tendencies under the microscope. If a woman player doesn't like another woman, they don't seem to step back and judge her on her business acumen -- they just get rid of her for "personal" reasons. I think the sociological aspect of this show needs to be considered. Of course, it's phony and bogus in many ways, but it can be an interesting place to consider how we all work at work. I get the feeling men have a loyalty to their gender that's very basic -- and helps them survive in this world. It's a successful worldview if you're a man in a man's world. Is it a man's world? I don't know. I tend to think men are on the decline, really getting kicked around out there. They need to hang together.

Would it be easy for Donald Trump as a man to pick Amy, an obviously beautiful and smart woman, or any woman for that matter, as his apprentice? Will he have a loyalty to a man simply because he's a man? Or is it to avoid the obvious social complications of having a woman as his "right-hand man" and having people wonder if he's sleeping with her. Who -- in fact -- wonders these things? And how do they become obstacles to a woman's progress in business? Sometimes I think there's a "morality of convenience" that is in play. It's convenient to keep women out of the top positions and boardrooms and better for men to do this as it helps them keep other men in those jobs. There have probably been many big bosses sleeping with their male assistants for years, but we'll never hear the tales.

The people who wonder if a pretty female assistant is sleeping with her boss -- those "people" from what I've seen, are usually other men who want to sleep with her. So I'm not altogether convinced is has anything to do with propriety or morals. I think it has to do with jealousy and power. One man being jealous he isn't getting a piece of the action while another is. And men knowing on some fundamental level that they don't want to share power with women. In the guise of "moral and upright" behavior, they can deny women access to power. I sometimes wonder if these male/female dynamics at work are all twisted around that first oh-so-powerful relationship in a man's life -- his mom. I sometimes wonder if men are not terrified of women's power and they know better than women how powerful women can be.

So maybe we can have a little episode next week about Trump and his mother. That would explain volumes. A little intervention by Dr. Phil, for instance, to come in and talk to The Donald about dear old mom. Okay, I'm just kidding. Back to the real story -- who will be the Apprentice?

Can Trump really chose a woman, or is it rigged? Interestingly, the first 4 programs, when the teams were all women against all men, the women won 4 times in a row. The solution -- don't let the show continue to demonstrate how the women were killing the men week after week -- mix up the teams.

I guess we'll all just have to wait and see.

You're Fired

Trump is so nutty and funny and now, this rant that his "You're Fired" sign makes New York a better place to visit and more friendly ... well, he's probably right.

New York -- the place where they say it to your face. In every other town, they just downsize you.

Walking The Winter Woods

Slept soundly thanks to lots of exercise yesterday. Walked through the woods for more than two hours at a fast clip, stepping quickly along the bike path that wanders through my town. The weather was springy, bright then rainy, then bright, didn't know what to expect. Easter colors of yellow sun shards, soft hum of purple crocuses, rumble of grey rain clouds and the promise of a new season.

Torpedo cyclists in black rubber butt shorts, rollerbladers with duck-splayed legs roaring by, babycarriage-pushing mom joggers, walkers chatting with slight Hungarian accents, runners sweating in expensive nylon garb, everyone going by, going by, going by, "to your left" they shout, whiz of wheels, I was often pushed into the muddy shoulders of the path but didn't care much, with my big boots on, no problem, had counted on an extended mud encounter.

Looking up at the stark poles of winter trees, in the highest place, an abandoned nest, sinister like a crazy woman's bun full of sticks, perched in the crotch of branches. These trees have no leaves, no buds, nothing but makedness of bark stretching tall and chopsticky skyward. Wind rattles the poles like lonely masts in an empty harbor. Every 100 yards or so, you might find a spray of ancient dessicated oak leaves -- who knows why they hung on through winter -- bleakly bleached looking more like a carpenters' blond wood carvings than actual leaves that ever lived.

Down on the ground we are thinking S*p*R*i*n*G*!!, oh so confidently, but up on high in a quiet lonely place, the bare grey trees can't reach far enough, hard enough, please, just show us some sun, please, get us out of here, they seem to be yearning and not at all convinced they'll survive the frozen mud patches, even still some snow paddies around their roots, they seem like they'd like to fly into the sky away from this winter wood. They look like the unfortunate fat kids in a gym class, asked to reach high for the pull-up bar and just can't make it, just can't stretch far enough, rooted to the ground, rather hopeless.