Are You There, God? It's Me, Blogging

I'm moving here for now with a brand new blog/social experiment/way to keep me off the streets. Hope you'll join me and thanks for reading here.

http://areyoutheregoditsmeblogging.blogspot.com/

Jen

All Is Well in The Forest

I've had a real busy week and am going on vacation to the middle of the woods where there is no cell phone or internet access. I am going to hike, swim, enjoy some smores and watch my dog eat flies.



Well, and outlet shop. I mean, come on.



At any rate I will not be posting for a week and do hope to have a cleared head and not so much work when we get back so I can start posting more regularly.



So don't call the police.

I can't find the thing I wanted to post for you online anywhere -- damn print magazines -- but I'll try to get something up soon.


Be well, take care, so long, farewell.

Last Post About PostSecret. Ever. I Think.

I really really really wasn't going to post about PostSecret again. But I came across this recent interview with Frank Warren online and was glad to see this comment.

(FW): ". . . The last element that’s difficult to copy from PostSecret is that of the mediator. Having a mediary is critical for a couple of reasons. One is that if you don’t have a mediator, you can get a lot of negativity, a lot of negative comments. One thing I’ve tried to do is create a safe, non-judgmental place where people can share their secrets in a way where there’s not going to be any social ramification. They don’t have to worry about people posting a message ridiculing them right after they express something that makes them very vulnerable. "

So that seems to imply the open comments was not his intention.

The whole article is here. It's very good.

http://dudleydavida.wordpress.com/2007/07/04/a-conversation-with-frank-warren/

Have a good weekend, I'm going to go live my life now and stop looking at all these internets.

Friday -- Other People's Media

I'm going to make Fridays easy on myself and post media that actually makes me happy. Here's a big personal favorite that happens to be one great friend interviewing another great friend about how she makes a living as a singing waitress.

Menu of Music

And hear more of Sally's great radio work here: http://www.sohosally.com/sound/listen.html

Duped. Or, I Am The Cosmo Girl

The connection between this story and media is tenuous at best, but it's a good safety lesson. Learn from my mistakes, grasshoppers.

I get a phone call from a guy today saying he's doing a nationwide survey for Cosmo magazine. The first few questions are standard: age, marital status, kids, do I work, what's my job.He then says the next questions are for an annual sex survey and will be explicit, and am I OK with answering them.

If you know me, you know that of course I'm OK with talking about sex. In my mind it's like talking about politics or movies, or in some ways, water or air. I think we all benefit from demystifying it and talking about it matter of factly.

Questions are personal but not lacivious -- how many times, have you done this or that, body image, etc .My husband overhears me saying "16, 1 week, no," and says to get the name of the survey company the guy works for. I wave him off and say "No, it's a national survey, it's fine."

Usually in a national survey the surveyer doesn't ask you if you'll touch your clitoris for him after spending 10 minutes asking you personal questions about your personal history. I said "You're a phone surveyer." He said "That makes it so much better." I said "Goodbye, sir."

Do I feel kind of stupid, yes. Will I ask for the name of the survey company in the future, yes. In fact, by not knowing my rights and doing things blindly, I kind of feel like the quintessential Cosmo Girl.

But here's the cool thing -- I don't really feel embarassed. I'm shocked by that! I talked about my sexual assault, sex after pregnancy, body image. I'm OK with my history. I'm OK with my past. I've done alot to make that happen. I've come a long damn way. It's awesome.

So, I won't go so far as to say Thanks, Phone Perv, even though that would be a funny last line. But instead, No Hard Feelings, Phone Perv.

Anyway, karma comes around. You'll get yours

MySpace, YourSpace, HisSpace

Work is slowing way down because of the holiday so I met a friend for lunch at a great Middle Eastern restaurant and read his tarot cards.

He mentioned that some of his students wanted to know if they could friend him on MySpace. I asked if he felt like that was an invasion of privacy. He said no, it's great, because he can send them homework reminders and test reminders. I thought that was really funny. I said he should just IM them pop quizzes when he sees them online and really torment them.

I couldn't help but feel like I'd jumped the shark in my own life. My kid isn't even in pre-school yet and I'm already obsolete in terms of how people interact through technology, how technology will be used in his education and his social life.

It's been nice to blog again but I'm already pretty sure this is it for awhile. Have a good holiday.

PostSecret -- One more rant

Hi --

As I posted earlier, Frank Warren of PostSecret is fine, he is on vacation, I know this because I called the cops .

As I also mentioned earlier, I can't get on PostSecret anymore because everyone sharing their secrets, and wondering where Frank was, and yelling at eachother, has either caused the server to crash, is just so chock full of delicious word that my computer can no longer download the page .

Now I am the biggest Luddite in the world. I am the last adopter. I work in the technology industry, and my cell phone is so old that it is being held together by a twist tie for an outdoor garbage bag. When I am with colleagues and have to make a call, I literally run and hide. I started this blog the week after the NY Times said blogging was over, then rarely posted to it.

Even I know that 4,000 posts to a website with no advertising on it (meaning no cash behind it) is going to crash its servers, or be so chock full of delicious words that it will crash it's users browsers, rendering it unreadable.

So even I know, that unless Frank Warren's intention was to crash his own site, or my web browser, he probably didn't mean to leave the comments on, as so many people -- many of whom talk about him as if he is Jesus -- have said. Soooo many people went on and on about how Frank meant to bring the site to the next level, meant for everybody to share on the comments board, meant to let the great social experiment get even greater.

If that is the case, then Frank didn't know that 4,000 posts to a website with no advertising on it (meaning no cash behind it) is going to crash its servers, or my damn web browser, or both.

I don't know what it is about the blogsphere that makes so many people feel as if they can assume what other people's intentions are. I have a tremendous admiration for Heather at Dooce, who puts her life out there every day and then deals with it when people make comments about her parenting, her appropriateness, and why she does what she does, when it isn't anyone else's business.

But the reality is bloggers aren't people you know, uh, unless you're reading the blog of someone you know. Der. Readers don't have the right to assume they understand what's going on with bloggers, or project their own feelings onto them.

Do you agree, or is this just part of the deal of belonging to a community, that the person putting their opinion out there has to accept the labels, taunts, attacks and misperceptions of others? Because most healthy people, if presented with that in real life, would walk the hell away.

In Case of Emergency, Blog for Help

So I stopped blogging. And I guess the only thing that makes me want to blog is other people's idiocy. I think that's what I'll rename this blog. Other People's Idiocy.

I'm sure you've heard of PostSecret. It's a great art project that has touched many people's lives. People write their secrets on postcards and send them to Frank Warren, who runs the site on his own time for no money. He picks twenty or so cards each week, probably from hundreds or thousands, and puts them up as images. PostSecret is usually ranked in the Top 20 blogs read nationally on Technorati .

It's worth mentioning that Frank's mailing address is his actual house and it is displayed clearly on the site.

Frank posts every Sunday. There were no new cards this week, not Sunday morning, Sunday night, or today. In addition, the comments section, which he usually screens and picks out maybe four or five to post, had gone insane, with over 3,500 comments there last time I looked. Alot of them were people posting their own secrets, supporting eachothers secrets, a few of them were people attacking eachother's secrets, some of them were wondering what the hell had happened to Frank. Additionally, the suicide prevention number that had always been on the site was gone. No explanations. The monkeys had totally taken over the lab

After reading 40 or so comments that asked were Frank was or begging someone to drive to his house to check on him, I did the following. It was incredibly difficult and it took days and days of my time.

1) I Googled Germantown + Marlyand + police
2) I called the police department and said "I know this may sound strange, but. . " and then told them what I just told you.
3) The police said they would drive out to check on him and had me repeat what I had said to a dispatcher
4) I called back when they told me to and I was told Frank went on vacation.

I won't get in to the madness that is PostSecret right now, with so many posts that i can't download the site anymore. A lot of the people there seem to be supporting and helping eachother with their secrets, which is great.

What I will say is this -- clearly I don't blog enough for anyone to get worried when I don't, but what happened with Frank was like someone not showing up to work for 8 days. So to my family and friends:

If I ever disappear and you have no way of reaching me, CALL THE F'ING POLICE.

And I promise that if you ever disappear, I won't sit at my computer and wring my hands and try to figure out what message you're trying to send me with your absence. I will also call the f'ing police.

Bloggers, let your audiences know if you are leaving town and don't plan to to communicate.

Ranter signing off.

NYT is the New Pink is the New Blog

I will explain where I've been and what's next soon. But for now --

As you've probably heard by now, Anna Nicole Smith is dead. She was 39 years old. Sad end to a sad life. Was I a fan or even a rubbernecker in her bizarre white trash Marilyn Monroe as performance art existence? No. But I certainly had nothing personal against her.

But apparently at some point in her short life, Anna Nicole kicked the dogs and fucked the boyfriends of Abby Goodnough and Margalit Fox. What else would account for this catty attempt at news reporting that reads like an obituary about the school slut written for the school paper by every other girl in the tenth grade:

Anna Nicole Smith Is Found Dead in Florida

In other news, astronauts always wear diapers in outer space; Nancy Pelosi can fly whatever the hell she wants if she promises to get close enough to Cheney to shiv him with a letter opener in the next State of the Union address; and somebody had better start covering global warming or Darfur or the Mess in Iraq again before I put my eyes out.

Maybe God Himself Needs All of Our Help, Out Along the Road to Peace

About two years ago, my mother -- who was a young woman during the Vietnam War -- asked me why there was so little protest music today. I told her that the music business has a longer gestation period than it used to, and that songs against the war and talking about social issues were probably on the way.

Well, here we are at the end of 2006, coming up on three years into the Iraq occupation that has no name, and I still don't know where the protest songs are. I know they're out there, but I know they're never going to be on the radio. When I want to get riled up about the War in Iraq and the political mess we're in, I listen to Dylan's Masters of War and It's a Hard Rain Gonna Fall -- great songs, but they're forty fucking years old.

American Idiot just doesn't count. Great album, calls the president a gasbag, references september 11th, but it's a concept album, a punk rock opera, and it works more as a commentary on American culture that actually addressing social or political protest.

So where are the songs that feel how you feel? Where are the songs that are getting into the iPods and ears of people who don't consider themselves "all that political" and have to reconsider when they listen? Where are the songs with anger and intelligence and soul over the state of our world today?

Well, I've got two.

I got Tom Waits' Orphans: Brawlers, Bawlers and Bastards for Christmas, fainted, then got up and started playing it. Road to Peace is a seven-plus minute clear-headed indictment of the Israeli/Palestinian conflict with no fuzzy metaphors and an almost pedantic, repetitve tune that doesn't allow you to wander off from the intent of the song. Listen to it now:

Road to Peace can be heard here on Tom Waits' myspace page.

Road to Peace lyrics are here

A few weeks ago I got turned on to Barenaked Ladies Fun and Games, which, for a group who tends to sing about chimpanzees and bank robberies foiled by nuns, is all the more a vicious and beautifully shocking "Fuck you" to the Bush administration and anyone within a hundred feet of it. We saw them perform it live at Radio City and the audience was silent through the entire thing, then roared with applause.

YouTube video of Fun and Games can be seen here

Anyone else?

As a short aside, I have to say when I heard Beyonce's "Ring the Alarm" a few weeks ago with that blaring horn in the background and Rage Against the Machine-style bullhorn vocal distortion, it was killing me that here was this great song that sounded like a war and she wasn't saying anything. Can you imagine what Beyonce alone could do for pop culture if she had an opinion about anything other than her man or her ass?

If you were a tree, what kind of tree would you be?

A really fucking oppressive tree. I' m sure after this hipsters will start wearing t-shirts with Castro and Chavez stenciled on to them for $40 a pop, because there's nothing like communism without context. While you're at it, pick up a onesie for my kid. I wonder if Castro will somehow come across as loveable in a get-out-of-my-yard, you-punks kind of a way, with subtitles. I can't wait.

In other news, Angelina Jolie recently discussed papparazzi (my God, I've seen names for obscure cured Italian meats that were easier to spell than that word) photographing her kids in an interview. I think the answer to this is similar to the call to send the kids of Republican lawmakers to Iraq under a draft -- with, admittedly, like one one-millionth of the urgency.

Proposed solution: Get the editors' names at the Star, US Weekly, etc and find out where their kids go to school, soccer practice and so on. Do this for the papparazzi (and ask them to send me a damn dictionary) while you're at it. Hire unknown photographers to photograph thse kids every waking step of their lives for a year. See how long their parents can tolerate it.

Within a few months, problem solved, fake news story (how pappa--ahh! are ruining the ethics of the country) off our radar and we can get back to shipping Muffy Tipperton off to ground ops.

More on Castro
and in case you didn't get the title of this post (with added bonus on how much Ms. Wawa loves Castro)

We put the Corp in News Corp

Admittedly, this is a lazy post, due to infrastructure issues at SCTS headquarters (i.e. our pipes burst). So I'm going with the first thing I saw on Media Bistro this morning, the report of Judith Miller getting canned for poor judgement. Uh, no, not for publishing a book about OJ Simpson murdering his wife and friend written in an entirely new verb tense called "what if". It seems poor judgement applies only to third party hearsay about ethnic slurs.

From the NYT (I told you, lazy):

<Rupert Murdoch personally ordered the dismissal of Judith Regan, the publisher of a widely criticized O. J. Simpson book, after he heard reports of a heated conversation Ms. Regan had with a company lawyer on Friday that included comments that were deemed anti-Semitic, according to two people familiar with the News Corporation’s account of the firing.
Mark Jackson, a lawyer with HarperCollins, a division of the News Corporation that includes Ms. Regan’s imprint, reported the alleged comments from a phone conversation with Ms. Regan to Jane Friedman, HarperCollins’s president and chief executive.
“And then Jane called Rupert and Rupert said he won’t tolerate that kind of behavior,” said one of the people, who spoke on condition of anonymity.>

Here's a brief list of the behavior Rupert Murdoch will tolerate, to be updated when the infrastructure stops falling down. Please add anything you can think of:

Tony Blair
FOX News
Payola
Censorship

Math is hard, let's go shopping

The above is a quote from a voice-chipped Barbie that came out on the market years and years ago, prompting a group calling itself the Barbie Liberation Organization to switch those voice chips into GI Joes. This is also a favorite joke with my best friend, who made the switch from studying fluffy pretty words, like me, to becoming a statistician.

The US Census Bureau put out its 2007 Statistical Abstract of the United States today. The abstract says, among thousands of other things, that adults and teens will spend nearly five months (3,518 hours) next year watching television, surfing the Internet, reading daily newspapers and listening to personal music devices. If you'd like to take all five of those months off, you might be able to get through the report in its entirety. Of course, that's not the intention but there's something perversely enticing about the idea.

For someone like me for whom the above title bears a grain of truth, you might do better checking out the press release. There's a surprisingly nice sense of humor as a gift to those of us who begin blacking out at the sight of so many numbers in so little context, such as "Pet owners walked an average of 1.6 dogs in 36 percent of U.S. households in 2001, while people were tolerated by an average of 2.1 cats in 32 percent of homes. (Table 1227) ". Also, apparently the US endangers more crustaceans than anyone else in the world.

I'm hoping to slowly wend my way through this thing and will post on it as is possible and relevant. If my statistician is out there, I'd love your two cents in the comments.

And from the world of statistical improbability, Tony Snow apologized to an NBC news reporter for calling his question about the Iraq Study Group "partisan". I'm impressed and just ever so slightly turned on.

Dead White Girls -- Across the Pond Edition

Today's major difference between the US and the UK in terms of reporting on murdered prostitues:

The UK cares about their dead prostitutes so long as there is a connection to Britian's proud whore-murdering history

The US does as long as a foot fetishist is involved

The US story-- of street prostitutes of various races murdered weeks and weeks ago, some of who were not reported missing at the time they were found-- will probably make international news now that a kink angle is in the mix as of today. Prior to this, the US story was buried in the TRAVEL SECTION of the NY Times, I guess because the main problem here is it could affect someone's itinerary.

At least the Atlantic City police sounded genuinely upset in previous articles. Nobody else seems to be. Maybe me.

As an aside, check out how the Times' readers get their panties in a knot over the correct use of "Ripper" versus "Strangler"in the comments section of the first story. Their main concern here is getting out their copyediting ya-yas. I'd love to see someone try that with Nicholas Kristoff; he'd probably have them kidnapped and airmailed to Darfur to see what they should really be getting upset about. I love the Times, but sometimes the readership baffles me. On the day after elections, the most read and emailed story on the site was about how to bake bread that doesn't require kneading. Because that's going to change the course of history.

In Other News From The Wild, Wacky World of Guns

Since the last post is basically a couple of "guns are for kooks" stories I thought I'd give the NRA a fair shake and post what is listed on their site as their top news story. If you want the fabulous framing photo of hot babes with rifles, fathers and sons bonding after having just executed a deer, and, of course, the White House, go to the link for the full media experience.

For the record, I have no problem with a law-abiding gun user keeping a gun in their house for protection, hunting, or blowing innocent soda cans off a fence as long as it's not my fence. The gun users I have a problem with are the millions who are NOT in the NRA, and that is who the majority of legislation is aimed at. I'd like to read more about how the NRA is going to help cut down on criminal misuse of the Second Amendment -- I'm sure no one is standing up and testifying for muggers', drug runners' and bank robbers' right to bear arms. Are they? And if so that couldn't possibly be because that's who gun dealers are actually selling to, could it? Nah.

As a crazy liberal, that's actually all I'm asking for, no bullets through my window or through my friends. I'll be looking that up soon.

http://www.nraila.org/Legislation/Federal/Read.aspx?id=2482



ELECTION 2006 RE-CAP

Thursday, November 09, 2006

On November 7, 2006, the American electorate took out its frustration and anger on the Republican Party and turned over control of Congress, not to mention governors’ mansions and majorities in several state legislatures, to the Democrats. Importantly, however, on a day that saw voters expressing dissatisfaction over conduct of the war, over political corruption and over competency to govern, Americans cast their votes for record numbers of pro-gun candidates, both Democrat and Republican.
Many of the newly elected office holders pledged their support of the Second Amendment while on the campaign trail. They got elected when voters took them at their word. Those same voters, which certainly include first and foremost NRA members, will be closely watching them to make sure they walk the walk as well as talk the talk. NRA will make sure opportunities for tests of true intentions are not long in coming.
Change in Washington, D.C., will be very real. Extreme opponents of our Right to Keep and Bear Arms have been elevated to seats of power, especially in the House of Representatives, where Nancy Pelosi will become Speaker and John Conyers is set to take over the powerful Judiciary Committee. Anti-gunners will also assume the chairs of important sub-committees. The power shift is balanced in part by the fact that Second Amendment champion, and former NRA Board Member John Dingell, the longest serving member in the House, is set to regain the reins of the Energy and Commerce Committee and will be a powerful voice for gun owners rights among his colleagues. Pro-gun Democrats will also chair some very relevant committees and sub-committees.
There will be battles ahead, and, with the 2008 elections on the ever-nearing horizon, NRA members and their fellow gun owners must remain ever vigilant. We must let our representatives, both Democrat and Republican, know one thing: we expect our Second Amendment rights to be respected.
Again, thank you for all you have done this election year, and all you will continue to do in the future.

Score Two for Texas

With apologies to my dear friends in Austin. I know, I know, the red states have blue veins but they also have an awful lot of bright, bloody red.

From today's Reuters:

Lawmaker Aims To Allow the Blind to Hunt http://today.reuters.com/news/articlenews.aspx?type=&storyid=2006-12-12T154047Z_01_N11175774_RTRUKOC_0_US-BLIND-HUNTERS.xml&src=nl_usoddlyenough

Real Estate Agent Gives Guns to Homebuyers http://today.reuters.com/news/articlenews.aspx?type=&storyid=2006-12-12T135303Z_01_N11282317_RTRUKOC_0_US-LIFE-GUN.xml&src=nl_usoddlyenough

Thanks to Drew for the tip!

Dude, I really have to get back to work, but --

Every blogger in the world should sign up for this, and speak up in this p.r. educational session for how to deal with the baffling scary blogsphere. One of the speakers actually has "Kryptonite" in their job title, which is sort of meta-genius and also just a bit funny.

From the Bulldog Reporter:

<
What to do when a blogger sandbags your company, news or CEO? What’s the smartest — and most fruitful — way to build long-term relationships with bloggers in your space now . . . before crisis strikes? Join Bulldog Reporter’s PR University for an exclusive panel of blog-savvy crisis communicators to learn the answers to these and many more critical questions designed to demystify the blogosphere — and to give you the proven step-by-step tools, tactics and techniques you need to respond to online rumors and detractors so you can protect and promote your brand online with greater confidence and success. >>

http://www.bulldogreporter.com/conferences/crisisonline-reg.html?s=crisisonline-email

The Great Myanmar Debate

From today's Onion.

As an aside, I'd rather see a baked potato named man of the year than the guys who invented YouTube, who didn't invent YouTube this year but sold it to Google for more money than they deserved, setting off a frenzy of bullshit Web 2.0 companies in the tech sector. I'm all for Web 2.0, but I'm not for a tulip fiasco. Anyhoo--

Dictator Slays Millions In Last-Minute Push To Be Time's Man Of The Year

YANGON, MYANMAR Although Than Shwe is considered a sadistic and merciless tyrant within the borders of Myanmar, his human-rights abuses have long been ignored in the international media.

What's actually up with Than Shwe http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Than_Shwe&oldid=93916121