I'm a father, writer, blogger, digital strategist and insufferable new marketing geek. I'm into Apple technology, functional medicine, health and socio-political nerdery. If you've arrived here in error, I suggest clicking around a bit. If that doesn't work, well, there's always my Google Buzz stream. Not that that solves anything.
I hear people talking about going on a vacation or something and I think, what is that about? I have no desire to go on a trip. My perfect day is sitting in a room with some blank paper. That's heaven. That's gold and anything else is just a waste of time.
Fantastic interview with Cormac McCarthy by the WSJ's John Jurgensen.
Here's Letterman doing what I've always admired him for, namely being able to take a horrible interview and make it something special. In this case, he's able to pull from the ashes of a terrible, plodding interview a hilarious, awkward, spoiled Joaquin Phoenix, who never fully realizes what a plot object becomes to Letterman. Don't know what Phoenix's issue is here, but he picked the wrong late night TV host for the stunt. Video
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Inspired by Rolling Stone’s transcendent piece The Lost Years & Last Days of David Foster Wallace, I stumbled across this on YouTube. It’s interesting to see DFW live; I never have before now.
And it makes me even sadder that he’s no longer with us.
This winter, I will read Infinite Jest cover to cover. That’s a promise.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mVzhhvCRTCo]
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Letterman being unusually dogged in his commentary about McCain’s claim that McCain will suspend his campaign.
Enjoy this while you can; I don’t expect the video to last long on YouTube.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XjkCrfylq-E]
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Here's Sarah Palin soberly telling ABC's Charlie Gibson that because she can see parts of Russia from Alaska, she's has insight into Russian actions. And you have to love the chipper, hey-want-a-coffee tone of her voice when she gives her answer. As if we're ten years old.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JXL86v8NoGk]
Palin is getting fairly well skewered about her interview with Gibson (part two of which is tonight), and she should be. Palin ties Bush in the embarrassability department: watching her try to summon the knowledge and insight to answer questions about a job she's unqualified for is painful.
Regarding the premise of Palin's response, I think Balloon Juice says it best:
And when I look out my window I can see the moon. Doesn’t make me a fucking astronaut now, does it?
(via Chris)
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Watch Mike Murphy (former McCain strategist) and Peggy Noonan (former Reagan speechwriter) have a candid conversation when they think their mics are dead.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dq4sOM4tpno]
Full transcript if you'd rather read it than watch it:
Chuck Todd: Mike Murphy, lots of free advice, we'll see if Steve Schmidt and the boys were watching. We'll find out on your BlackBerry. Tonight voters will get their chance to hear from Sarah Palin and she will get the chance to show voters she's the right woman for the job. Up next, one man who's already convinced and he'll us why Gov. Jon Huntsman.
(cut away)
Peggy Noonan: Yeah.
Mike Murphy: You know, because I come out of the blue swing state governor world: Engler, Whitman, Tommy Thompson, Mitt Romney, Jeb Bush. I mean, these guys -- this is how you win a Texas race, just run it up. And it's not gonna work. And --
PN: It's over.
MM: Still McCain can give a version of the Lieberman speech to do himself some good.
CT: I also think the Palin pick is insulting to Kay Bailey Hutchinson, too.
PN: Saw Kay this morning.
CT: Yeah, she's never looked comfortable about this --
MM: They're all bummed out.
CT: Yeah, I mean is she really the most qualified woman they could have turned to?
PN: The most qualified? No! I think they went for this -- excuse me-- political bullshit about narratives --
CT: Yeah they went to a narrative.
MM: I totally agree.
PN: Every time the Republicans do that, because that's not where they live and it's not what they're good at, they blow it.
MM: You know what's really the worst thing about it? The greatness of McCain is no cynicism, and this is cynical.
CT: This is cynical, and as you called it, gimmicky.
MM: Yeah.
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One of my very favorite authors speaks about his 2000 essay (that eventually became a book) regarding John McCain and whether or not what he wrote back then is still applicable today. Great Q&A with one of the sharpest literary minds out there.
On whether Wallace has changed his mind since the book was published:
In the best political tradition, I reject the premise of your question. The essay quite specifically concerns a couple weeks in February, 2000, and the situation of both McCain [and] national politics in those couple weeks. It is heavily context-dependent. And that context now seems a long, long, long time ago. McCain himself has obviously changed; his flipperoos and weaselings on Roe v. Wade, campaign finance, the toxicity of lobbyists, Iraq timetables, etc. are just some of what make him a less interesting, more depressing political figure now—for me, at least. It's all understandable, of course—he's the GOP nominee now, not an insurgent maverick. Understandable, but depressing. As part of the essay talks about, there's an enormous difference between running an insurgent Hail-Mary-type longshot campaign and being a viable candidate (it was right around New Hampshire in 2000 that McCain began to change from the former to the latter), and there are some deep, really rather troubling questions about whether serious honor and candor and principle remain possible for someone who wants to really maybe win.
On the parallels between the 2000 McCain and the 2008 Obama:
There are some similarities—the ability to attract new voters, Independents; the ability to raise serious money in a grassroots way via the Web. But there are also lots of differences, many too obvious to need pointing out. Obama is an orator, for one thing—a rhetorician of the old school. To me, that seems more classically populist than McCain, who's not a good speechmaker and whose great strengths are Q&As and small-group press confabs.
On the Bush administration and what it has done to the Republican party and its plausibility in trying to create a populist image:
The truth—as I see it—is that the previous seven years and four months of the Bush Administration have been such an unmitigated horror show of rapacity, hubris, incompetence, mendacity, corruption, cynicism and contempt for the electorate that it's very difficult to imagine how a self-identified Republican could try to position himself as a populist.
On the youth vote:
If nothing else, the previous seven years and four months have helped make it clear that it actually matters a whole, whole lot who gets elected president. A whole lot. There's also the fact that there are now certain really urgent, galvanizing problems—price of oil, carbon emissions, Iraq—that are apt to get more voters of all ages and education-levels to the polls. For more interested or sophisticated young voters, there are also the matters of the staggering rise in national debt and off-the-books war-funding, the collapse of the dollar, and the grievous damage that's been done to all manner of consensuses about Constitutional protections, separation of powers, and U.S. obligations under international treaties.
On the Infinite Jest smiley faces, which were a (really great) idea in the book's marketing strategy:
One prong of the Buzz plan [for "Infinite Jest"] involved sending out a great many signed first editions—or maybe reader copies—to people who might generate Buzz. What they did was mail me a huge box of trade-paperback-size sheets of paper, which I was to sign; they would then somehow stitch them in to these "special" books. I basically spent an entire weekend signing these pages. You've probably had the weird epileptoid experience of saying a word over and over until it ceases to denote and becomes very strange and arbitrary and odd-feeling—imagine that happening with your own name. That's what happened. Plus it was boring. So boring, that I started doing all kinds of weird little graphic things to try to stay alert and engaged.
(via kottke)
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I've always held the belief that if you interview anyone in just about any field who's been doing it for a while, you'll undoubtedly come up with some awesome stories. As it turns out, I'm right, and human resources is no exception. Here's a list of the top 10 interview mistakes, and I swear I couldn't make some of these up if I tried. Among the most notable: - Candidate answered cell phone and asked the interviewer to leave her own office because it was a "private" conversation. - Candidate told the interviewer he wouldn't be able to stay with the job long because he thought he might get an inheritance if his uncle died -- and his uncle wasn't "looking too good." - Candidate smelled his armpits on the way to the interview room. - Candidate said she could not provide a writing sample because all of her writing had been for the CIA and it was "classified." - Candidate told the interviewer he was fired for beating up his last boss - When an applicant was offered food before the interview, he declined saying he didn't want to line his stomach with grease before going out drinking. - Candidate took out a hair brush and brushed her hair. Link [via Leo]
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Shawn Blanc interviews John Gruber, who has been one of my biggest blogging inspirations since the day I started. Without A-listers like him, GF may not exist today. Very much worth reading if you care about America or puppies. John Gruber: A Mix of the Technical, the Artful, the Thoughtful, and the Absurd
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I've not heard of Sigur Ros, but from what I can tell they're a fairly interesting post-rock band that makes some pretty interesting, flowing and haunting music. They sing in a totally made up language called Vonlenska, or Hopelandic in English. Somewhere -- certainly outside of my musical awareness, which is limited to begin with -- they're quite popular. Recently, NPR's The Bryant Park Project interviewed Sigur Ros in-studio. The hosts of the show, Alison Stewart and Luke Burbank, make it clear that they absolutely love the band, hence the invite into the studio for a casual chat. Instead of an informative chat with some cutting-edge musicians, what happened is easily the worst interview ever given. Maybe it was a language barrier. Maybe it was the fairly complex question structures. Maybe Sigur Ros is four Rainmen who are too busy counting wires and buttons to talk. I don't know. What I do know is that this is almost too painful to watch all the way through -- it's like watching a guy giving a presentation totally lose his way and crash and burn. Still, I sort of dig their music. [Via kottke]
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