big number

This is amazing.

I wish they'd provided a link to the number, just to scroll through a 9.8 million digit number. I wonder how far it goes. Is there a pattern to it all?

Reminds me of one of the best magazine articles ever written.

Cross-X by Joe Miller

snake oil

Bastards.

I'm so frustrated with my wireless service because the coverage is spotty in my house. The calls often drop. So I find myself standing out on the sidewalk to talk with folks on the celly.

I've called Verizon a couple of times to bitch. The first time, they had me reprogram my phone. Didn't help. Then last week I barked my way up to a manager and I got them to send me a new phone. Free.

But here's the catch: 15 days from when I activated the phone, I I'll be locked into a two-year contract with Verizon.

So I get the phone. And it's much nicer than my current, scratched-and-beat-up thingy. It's one a them Razrs.

But the signal's no different.

The prudent thing would be to return the phone and suffer until next July, when my contract ends I'm free to start over with whomever.

But that would mean parting with the new toy.

That's how they get you.

Bastards.

down south

I'm on this antarctica kick lately.

If you check my blogroll, down at the bottom of the right sidebar, you'll notice I've added a few blogs from people living on the bottom of the world. I subscribe to all of them on the RSS feed.

Antarctica seems the closest we have to life on another planet.

I started out by reading Phil Jacobson's blog regularly. He's a dishwasher at McMurdo, which is apparently the closest thing to a city on the continent. All summer I've been reading about his trevails through a southern winter. The sun recently rose down there for the first time in months.

I guess I got caught up in Phil's enthusiasm for the sun, because I started hunting out more blogs from the ice cap. Let's see, there's:

A Brooklynite on the Ice

Antarctica!!!

Julius' Travels in the South

Dave Down South

Life in Antarctica

The cool thing is they all post pictures. It's a pretty land.

I guess that's what makes blogging such a great development in the world of media. I can get a real sense of a place I might never visit. A truer sense than I'd get from a feature in any paper or magazine.

Pages

I'm in this month's Pages. You can't get it online.

It's a nice, short article by Jenna Schnuer. She interviewed me earlier this summer for about an hour via phone. I really enjoyed talking with her. Good questions. She's the only one so far who's really picked up on what I'm trying to say about race with Cross-X.

updates

I added a few things to the sidebar, including another tour date (Seattle!), a bunch more blogs, and recommendations for a book DVD and moozik. Check 'em out!

persuasion

On Monday night, when President Bush interrupted my TV watching, I told Allie to turn it off. Didn't want to hear it.

But she insisted to leaving it on. She said she was in the mood to hear his idiot drawl.

So I listened while playing a stupid Internet game. And after awhile I start thinking, Damn! This is pretty good.

I haven't been paying attention to the news. I don't know how the pundits scored the speach. But from my perspective it was beautifully written, and delivered with an almost perfect mix of authority, thoughtfulness and down-home plain talk.

Of course, I knew it was mostlly bunk -- all the stuff about how the war in Iraq is vital to our freedom and all that. But that's not the point. Presidential speeches aren't really about reality. They're about framing the debate. They're about persuasion.

I've been thinking about this a lot lately, as we gear up for the new debate season. We're running an argument this year about the importance of persuasion, about the need to strike a balance between ethos, pathos and logos inorder to affect just about anything.

They're keys to power.

Some of our primary evidence is the last two presidential campaigns. Both Gore and Kerry were both almost entirely logos-centered, we argue. Little real emotion, no clear sense of their characters. Bush, on the other hand...

Bush's cowboy, or barbecue buddy schtick might be complete hooey, but it works.

Good speech. That's where the opposition needs to be.

menage å troi

really kick ass reporting

I don't think I have the guts it would take to pull off an interview like this, with the President of the United States in my face all Lyndon Johnson like, in his office, with all the power and history it conveys. I'm not a huge fan of TV news, and the Today show. But this was an excellent job by Matt Lauer.

lane switch

This book has been like a slow train coming down the track. For a while I thought it had BESTSELLER written across the top.

The train seemed to have made its way around every bend on the way to Bestseller land, seemed to be chugging up all the steep hills.

But in the last week it's been rerouted. And now it seems more like one of those rickety old pump-cars you see in the old cartoons.

The snags?

First, the New York Times Book Review has opted not to review it. Apparently this is an especially crowded fall season, with heavy hitters like Charles Frazier throwing new books into the mix. Then I found out that the early nibbles we got from the TV talk shows have all apparently ventured off for bigger prey.

So I'm in full-on hand-to-hand-combat marketing mode. I'm sending out dozens and dozens of personally written, unique e-mails to any and all people I can think of -- bloggers, news reporters, activists.

Agent Lydia said yesterday that she always believed this would be a "grassroots book."

Well, I'm not at all scared of yardwork...

(metaphor overload, I know, but it's a blog for Godsake.)

salsa

The only pepper plant that did well this year is the habanero I planted (with more than a little fear). Turned out to be a good deal, as salsa making has been my top summer conquest.

Here's a pictoral recipe:

Pick one a these...



And some a these...


Chop them in half with onions and garlic and sweet pepper and put them on a flat pan...


These are like little atomic fuel packs...


Then burn them in the broiler...


Put them in the spinning thing...


Steamin' hot...


Eat...




Let me tell you. That shit is righteous!!

bad check

We don't need no stinking paper shredders!

it arrived!

another date

I'll be giving a reading at The Raven in Lawrence on October 25. I'm going to put a full calendar in the sidebar.

primal

I was telling Allie how great I feel now that I'm running all regular like, and I started thinking how weird running is, you know, when you really think about it. Like, I'm just running. Around. With an iPod.

I said to her, "I wonder if running is like the hunt."

She smiled and nodded, knowing I was referring to my caveman instincts.

I added, "And the iPod is the spear."

kick ass journalism

via Salon

take two

Keith Oberman is really rocking lately.

via Salon

ethics

When I read this morning that City Council Member Sandra McFadden Weaver has asked the city's ethics commission to investigate her fishy real estate deal, my first thought was, Ha! That ethics commission is a joke!!

Some gainfully employed reporter oughta call Harry McLear, the ethics commission's chairman, and ask him what he thinks about the commission's clout.

clearinghouse

There's been a lot of stuff I've wanted to blog about over the last few days, but I've been too busy to get it done.

Like, I watched John Stossel's report Stupid in America, about public school. I usually think Stossel's a tool. And this report did include some of his ethically dubious tricks. But I have to say I agreed with him on a lot of points.

Of course, it was a thrill to see images of Central High, which Stossel used to illustrate his point that money won't solve the problem. I agree, to an extent. Money poorly spent won't solve the problem. I never hear anyone who sends they're kids to Pembroke Hill say that money's a problem over there.

I'm still working my way through the audio recording of Truman. I'm starting to like him. He's kind of like an average Midwestern schmoe who aimed high and hit way higher than he aimed. He just dropped the bomb, and now he's struggling mightily with economics. I still got a long way to go. It's like 50 hours.

Allie and I have been watching season three of The Wire. I'll just go ahead and say it: Best TV show ever made. I should do a series of blog posts about this show. I really should. It's just so deep.

Been making frozen goodies with a present Allie's mom and pop recently gave to us.

The fall crops have sprouted.

Debate practice started yesterday.

I get interviewed today about my book.

Sorry for the boring grab bag.

for the ladies

Yesterday I got this touching message from Geoffery:

I feel like you've made me a better debater, speaker and researcher and I get along with feminist now thanks for every thing

you my nigga

So when Geoffery wins a national championship for the University of Oklahoma, I guess I can share in some of the glory.

Meantime, all you independent women in Norman can thank me.

(And bell hooks.)

on point

I haven't been following the news, so I wasn't aware of the Rumsfeld speech that is the target of the above editorial. Here's an excerpt:

One of the most important things the American Legion has done is not only to serve and assist and advocate, as you have done so superbly for so much of the past century, but also to educate and to speak the truth about our country and about the men and women in the military.

Not so long ago, an exhibit — Enola Gay at the Smithsonian during the 1990s — seemed to try to rewrite the history of World War II by portraying the United States as somewhat of an aggressor. Fortunately, the American Legion was there to lead the effort to set the record straight. (Applause.)

Your watchdog role is particularly important today in a war that is to a great extent fought in the media on a global stage, a role to not allow the distortions and myths be repeated without challenge so that at the least the second or third draft of history will be more accurate than the first quick allegations we see.

You know from experience personally that in every war there have been mistakes, setbacks, and casualties. War is, as Clemenceau said, “a series of catastrophes that result in victory.”

And in every army, there are occasional bad actors, the ones who dominate the headlines today, who don’t live up to the standards of the oath and of our country. But you also know that they are a very, very small percentage of the literally hundreds of thousands of honorable men and women in all theaters in this struggle who are serving our country with humanity, with decency, with professionalism, and with courage in the face of continuous provocation. (Applause.)

And that is important in any long struggle or long war, where any kind of moral or intellectual confusion about who and what is right or wrong, can weaken the ability of free societies to persevere.

It's a remarkable speech, certainly. For instance, the implied shock in the line about the U.S. being "somewhat the aggressor" during WWII, when a former secretary of defense recently admitted that we'd committed war crimes in our repeated bombing of civilian targets in Japan -- even before we dropped the big one.

But it's the last line in my excerpt, the one I bolded, that I find particularly chilling.