Word Soup

Here's the day in the life of a small scale blogger. In case you were wondering. Which you weren't.

Step 1: Thanks to confidential sources and confirmed, leaked internal documents, break a major national technology story in May, and then today get final confirmation on it hours before everyone else. Post your story. Well ain't you somethin'.

Step 2: Watch the technology news website Techmeme and enjoy how other smaller scale blogging outfits give you credit for your work, something that's generally considered good form among bloggers. Some smaller outfits even quote you. Great! Groupies, here we come.

Step 3: Watch as the bigger news outlets read your story and reconstitute it without linking back to you in order to pretend they're an originating source. This despite the fact that spending five seconds on Techmeme, Google News, or any other aggregation system clearly shows where stories first originated. Subsequently watch your digg, Slashdot and Reddit traffic (sometimes tens of thousands of viewers worth of ad revenue) go to them instead of you.

Step 4: Watch the Associated Press ignore everyone and report on the issue as if it hadn't been discussed online for the past twelve hours in far greater detail by countless other news organizations. Note the AP even reference how the story first showed up in May AND makes reference to information that came exclusively from your source and your keyboard (in this case the potential for charging overage fees), but omits or muddles (in this case they claim Comcast announced it, which isn't true) mentioning where or how it obtained this information.

Notice by this point, despite breaking the story, tracking it for four months, and being the first person on the Internet to report on it -- you've all but disappeared from the news time line.

Step 5: Rejoice! You've hit the small time!

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Jon Stewart, on what newspapers (or any journalist or blogger for that matter) needs to do to help fix this nation's news industry:

"I can't believe that, as reporters, you would walk into a 'spin room'," he said, amazed at the journalists' willingness to swallow the bullshit that the campaign and candidates spoon feed them. "How can you keep talking to people who are lying to you?" he asked. "This loveless marriage [between reporters and politicians] has to be unconsummated." "The antidote," Stewart responded, "is to push back. The antidote is to create filters" to remove the muck from the information fish tank, so we can clearly see what's truth and what's political spin. Take the ball away from the cable news networks and do what they're being paid to do. "You're not on anyone's team. You're on our team, clearing our tanks."

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Something tells me that these kids aren't having as much fun as Democrats in Denver, who get to spend the week wined and dined by the nation's biggest corporations while the press is forced to wait outside.

And these are the supposedly humanist Democrats. Conservative party members in this country simply have their lobbying funds on an intravenous drip as they wail and posture about ethics and family values.

Have I mentioned that Amy Goodman is an ass kicker?

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When Deb and I were in Belgium, one bartender we met during a session of nibbling on "mixed grills" and gin waxed poetic about burning man for roughly an hour, explaining how the festival was a spiritual experience akin to having the world's entire catalog of information injected intravenously into your right eye by the deity of your choice while buck naked atop Mount Kilimanjaro. I've never been, but I've wandered, out of my gourd, through more than my fair share of even bigger temporary cities built on the back of a half-million drunk trust-fund babies to know what it is -- both good and bad.

Don't get me wrong; I think these events are fantastic gestation chambers for art, music and culture; I get how they let rigid nine-to-fivers shake off the binds of routine. I also understand how the event is chock full of powerful and beautiful moments striped by chemical additives (or not, you straight edge radical you). I have no problems with the event itself, it's the post-event spiritual pretense I could do without.

I mean really, you had a great weekend; you had unprotected (again) sex with a guy in a pink wig from Berlin under a blue tarp, you did a few mushrooms, and the night sky in the desert is fucking fantastic -- particularly under the glare of a forty foot metal dragon sculpture that breathes fire. I'm with you. But let's leave it there, ok?

I don't enjoy that discussion that begins with someone who believes in auras and the healing powers of rocks explaining their sunburned, epic, holistic transmogrification -- and ends, should you show the slightest sign of critical thinking, with that same person telling you you're incapable of understanding the spiritual and existential ramifications of 50,000 people shitting in a desert.

My girlfriend thinks it might be a coastal thing. Maybe. But I'm generally wide open to all manner of weird, and as someone who thinks patriotism is the refuge of scoundrels, isn't one to let a coastal feud cloud my judgment of beauty. I'd be willing to go someday with a pale ale intravenous wearing only a thong and these. Sign me up. Just don't pretend you saw Jesus in the latrine.

Anyway, my rambling preamble was triggered by this article on safe sex at Burning Man in the San Francisco Chronicle, simply because I enjoy a good, smarmy lead in paragraph, and the reality of STDs struck me as an oddly fascinating and mean balance to the traditional burning man epiphany narrative:

"While attendees of the yearly arts festival known as Burning Man come from all over the nation and the world, the impact of the costly desert bacchanalia is felt pretty strongly around San Francisco. Many rejoice at the sudden lack of rich hippies and art cars dripping Barbie heads and Legos onto the roads when fog breaks down cheap art-store epoxy, and the ease with which one can get brunch in the Mission. There are virtually no white dudes with dreadlocks for seven square miles. San Francisco smug levels ratchet back to tolerable in the absence of arty hipster trust fund brats and Web 2.0 lets-resurrect-Pets.com-as-a-vlog leeches. Super annoying guys don't hit on me in bars assuming I know what the hell they're talking about when they use terms like "the burn," "the man" and "off the grid.""

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From Flickr

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This guy is fucking terrifying in an awe-inspiring inane sort of way:

"I want to know everything, but I’m not an intellectual, and I don’t like their company. I’m the most superficial man on Earth.”

"I have no problem with journalists — many are friends,” he says. “Only if they are really stupid, or if they’ve got bad breath, or if they smell. Yesterday [at the Chanel couture show] I had a problem. I said, ‘I’m sorry, you’ve got to tell this woman that she needs to be taken away. Her smell is not possible.’”

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Some random boob talks about Verizon FiOS (fiber to the home) in the NY Times:

"The service has been particularly popular among the more sophisticated customers attracted by higher Internet speeds, said Karl Bode, the editor of BroadbandReports.com.

“Deliver quality technology and cutting-edge speed, and customers respond,” he said. “I’m preparing to move into a new home, and FiOS availability actually played a part in where I was willing to move. And I’ve probably been one of Verizon’s most outspoken critics over the years.”

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I wondered when the mercilessly efficient HMO industry would start embracing euthanasia as a "cost efficient alternative" to giving a flying fuck and helping their patients fight cancer. Apparently Oregon Health Plan has made the leap:

"When Barbara Wagner's lung cancer returned, the Oregon woman was prescribed a chemotherapy drug, Tarceva, that could lengthen her life and provide comfort. Then, she was notified that the Oregon Health Plan wouldn't cover the cancer drug, but would cover palliative (comfort) care, including a doctor-assisted suicide.

“Treatment of advanced cancer that is meant to prolong life, or change the course of this disease, is not a covered benefit of the Oregon Health Plan,” said the unsigned letter Wagner received from LIPA, the Eugene company that administers the Oregon Health Plan in Lane County."

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From the Times Online:

"A study of 30 university students aged between 20 and 24 years old found that drinking just one 250ml sugar-free can of the caffeinated energy drink increased the “stickiness” of the blood and raised the risk of blood clots forming.

Using tests to measure blood pressure and the state of blood vessels around the body, the Australian researchers said that after drinking one can participants had shown a cardiovascular profile similar to that of someone with heart disease.

Red Bull today emphatically denied that the drink, which is distributed to 143 countries worldwide, was dangerous."

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Now that cancer and AIDS are cured, and we all generally live in enlightenment and peace, I'm glad the nation's scientists can get down to working on the really hard problems. One to mark off the list: getting pancake batter into cans that once used, will sit in the earth for countless generations to come. America. Fuck yeah.

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I always knew Julia Childs was a spy:

"Famed chef Julia Child shared a secret with Supreme Court Justice Arthur Goldberg and Chicago White Sox catcher Moe Berg at a time when the Nazis threatened the world. They served in an international spy ring managed by the Office of Strategic Services, an early version of the CIA created in World War II by President Franklin Roosevelt.

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Nimit Malavia

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I've seen countless women run off with men (or women) who generally leave them hollow, sore, and generally really fucking sorry. There's some good news for women who hate introspection, and need to blame something else for that nasty bout of codependency! According to Live Science, your shitty taste in men is possibly due to the pill:

"While several factors can send a woman swooning, including big brains and brawn, body odor can be critical in the final decision, the researchers say. That's because beneath a woman's flowery fragrance or a guy's musk the body sends out aromatic molecules that indicate genetic compatibility.

Major histocompatibility complex (MHC) genes are involved in immune response and other functions, and the best mates are those that have different MHC smells than you. The new study reveals, however, that when women are on the pill they prefer guys with matching MHC odors."

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