A couple weeks ago I saw @waynesutton tweet about ordering an Invisible Shield™ cover for his new N95. That reminded me that I had seen the rather impressive video demonstrating this polymer film’s toughness on YouTube. Developed originally to protect the leading edge of military helicopter blades, they say, the stuff has ridiculous tensile strength and is lifetime guaranteed against scratching.
It’s just a thin film like those other, cheaper PDA screen protectors, so it’s not exactly drop-on-the-sidewalk protection — although apparently it provides an increase in friction coefficient that makes it less likely you’re going to drop it, even if you just stick it to the bathroom mirror. But for something like the iPhone or the N95, where watching content on a shiny, scratch-free screen is paramount, I figured it might be worth the $30 or so.
My Invisible Shield got here last Friday and I rushed to the coffee table to tear into the package and protect my N95 lickity-split, because I’ve already noticed some very fine, short little scratches despite the lengths I go to to keep it away from anything harder than my fingers.
Not so fast. Invisible Shield comes with a spray that is supposed to facilitate adherence (which I presume is temporary) to your device and prevent fingerprints from getting trapped in the interface. You’re supposed to spray the film, not the gadget, and it’s not exactly going to saturate your electronics or cause damage. Nonetheless, the instructions call for turning the device off, removing the battery, and upon application of the sprayed protective film, leaving it alone, unused, for 12 to 24 hours.
Uh huh, yeah. Needless to say, I have not applied my shield, nor do I have a clue when I might.
So, if you plan on being in a short coma or spending the night in prison sometime soon and you want to keep your iPhone or other beloved toy scratch-free, order your Invisible Shield now!
It’s been one of those weeks around here, have you noticed? Grading final projects and owing a report to NASA totally killed my plan to bore you all with several look-what-my-phone-can-do tech posts this week, so maybe that’s a good thing.
And more frustrating is that I didn’t get to weigh in on just how full of crap the Clinton campaign is again. As if being on the same side as John McCain isn’t enough of a clue, Hillary Clinton is still doing and saying anything she can to win for the sake of winning. (Meanwhile, some sociopathic Clinton worshippers are pledging to light candles for Hillary and “pray that Obama supporters will be less evil.” If evil means having the discipline not to expect a cookie right before dinner, so be it.)
This gas tax holiday is nothing but that pre-dinner cookie. It looks good to a child, but it only means you’re not going to eat your vegetables. Congratulations, Hillfans, you are children, and congrats to you too, Hillary, because you’re peddling the most ridiculous and counterproductive placebo in the energy market. You might as well start handing out crack on urban street corners.
I already went into great detail about gas tax holidays two years ago when Lt. Gov. Mark Taylor was swinging the idea around in his unsuccessful bid to be more appealing than Sonny Perdue. If you need to see the math about price elasticity and consumption feedback again, go there. Here’s the end result:
Assuming the gas tax that we’re asking Sonny to suspend is $0.177/gallon (a number I can’t determine at all from the data the DPG cites, so I’m trusting their very unsupported and under-labeled chart no matter how many rules of technical writing it violates), Joe Taxpayer stands to save $106 — but in reality, since this is surely a temporary suspension that would last at best through the election, we’re really trying to bribe this poor dumb taxpayer with $8.85/month. In return for this relief, we’ll be encouraging drivers in the greater Atlanta area alone to drive an additional 2.7 million vehicle miles daily — or 106,000 gallons of gas a day, emitting 929 more tons of CO2 a day. To suck that back out of the atmosphere, we just need TreesAtlanta to plant about 13 million more saplings.**
Hillary Clinton was chomping at the bit as hard as John McCain to attack Barack Obama this weekend for being so “elitist” and saying things that don’t mesh with her idea of “American values,” after the so-called gaffe discussed here yesterday. She then went into the heart of middle (”Don’t call us small!“) America and attempted to out-America Barack Obama by “bellying up to the bar” (as the Sunday pundits loved to repeat) and double-fisting with a beer and a shot of whisky.
The widely-reported shot of whisky was Crown Royal. Crown Royal Canadian blended whisky.
This may sound like more sour grapes, but hey, it’s my blog — and I consider new media my party so I’ll cry if I want to.
At SoCon’s, Press Club Panels and Journo3G’s we new media rabble-rousers urge the journalism giants to evolve and adapt and make use of the wealth of information available in social networks online. So why are some of us so quick to criticize them for missteps and bad internet fashion? Because we’re dicks, that’s why!
Corporate giant CBS takes another step online today with the official launch of MobLogic, an online daily videocast about, um, news-ish. I say news-ish because as the hostess herself — Lindsay Campbell formerly of Wallstrip, where a good lookin’ babe and edgy edits brings sex appeal to business news — says, “I’m not a journalist. I’m coming at this like you: I read the news, I read blogs, and I wanna talk about the things that are going on around me in the world.”
Oh, good, you’re coming at this like me. Just what the internet needs: more of us. (Although truth be told, she does it much better, but c’mon, when you’ve got a real actress and a major corporate media studio backing you up, it’s hardly a fair contest.)
Why must I be so sarcastic? Because there’s something terribly artificial about such a “just like you” online “news” videocast whose host is “not a journalist” when it’s coming from a massive mainstream media outlet like CBS and a professional actress. Lindsay even uses the image of the Death Star to illustrate her affiliation.
I know, I know, I smell the irony in such criticism coming from someone who’s working on a corporate-giant-hipster-invasion news project that has a distinctly inorganic flavor to it as well, but c’mon, that’s always been MTV’s milieu.
Maybe I’m speaking out of turn here, but I think when we netizens urge the MSM to be more receptive and adaptive to online information networks, we’re not suggesting they completely reinvent themselves and bring us super-hip blog recaps on video podcasts with young babes (and whatever you’d call Itay). We want to see the same kind of solid [giving them the benefit of the doubt in some cases] news reporting, but to see it take advantage of new sources of information and methods of sorting and analyzing it that technology has made available. Learn from us, don’t try to be us, jeez.
In any event, this venture may be successful as hell. It’s already got the key ingredient as suggested by two of Lindsay’s man-on-the-street interviews (many of which, oddly enough, took place in front of other media giants’ buildings):
“Um, hot girls?” “Um, I don’t know…hot girls.”
Hot girl: check. Content: let’s wait and see. But the first part is a good start.
I’ve had my words butchered in newspapers before — in fact, almost every time I get newsprint attention, it goes awry. Last year’s AJC story on Young Dems that reduced me to a Guinness-drinking hitchhiker brought back fond memories of the Miami Herald sports writer that thought I was a sycophantic teacher’s pet. I guess it’s appropriate irony that this time around the story is about citizen journalism, so the story itself goes straight to the argument that there’s no monopoly on “good journalism” by people who train as journalists.
I’m not here to critique the original words of a college reporter like I expect them to be perfect. But there were enough complete misrepresentations of my interview answers that I feel the need to correct them, lest I look like a complete liar and moron. I already expect to see this article on my desk after lunch with some red penned comments by my boss, but maybe I’ll get lucky and slip under the radar.
After that, he freelanced in the political communication arena by staying on top of blogs like Techpresidents.com and exploring the political utility of websites like YouTube.
One does not freelance in the political communications arena by staying on top of blogs like techpresident.com (no “s”, just techpresident), one stays on top of blogs because one is a freelance political operative. I was just explaining how I found out about the gig.
Since 2005, Highsmith was a citizen journalist as a part of the 2006 presidential campaign and for CNN.
I wasn’t aware we had a presidential campaign going on in 2006, but it’s a good thing I started early in 2005! And while I have sent a couple of videos to CNN’s iReport website, I don’t think any of them ever got seen, and I certainly didn’t mention that in my interview, so I have no clue how I magically started reporting for CNN. What I did say — via email, so there’s no need to me to remember exactly what I might have said — was, “I’ve already been exploring that frontier for a while, as a blogger since about 1999, a podcaster since 2005, and finally dabbling in video since the 2006 election season; I’ve done “citizen journalism” on my own for kicks, as part of a presidential campaign, and for the news website The Huffington Post. CNN recognized that the wall between consumer and reporter was crumbling when they hosted the YouTube debates….” I guess the 2006 state legislature election season got mashed up with my work this cycle for Biden, and CNN jumped over the period, abandoning its YouTube debate-themed predicate, and took over Huffington Post’s spot as my former publication venue. Giddyup, CNN!
“As a Georgia Tech graduate student, my overarching theme will be technology, whether it be the kind of technology that impacts elections. So really, all I need to do to do my job well is keep my ear to the ground, listen to young voters and their concerns, and always have my camera ready,” Highsmith said.
An ellipsis! My kingdom for an ellipsis! I don’t mind having my rambling sentences truncated, but I’d appreciate the editorial courtesy of a piece of punctuation that would indicate I am not an idiot incapable of speaking in complete sentences. Somewhere in the neighborhood of “elections. So really,” you might actually imagine me saying, “whether it be the kind of technology that impacts elections (e.g., blogs and electronic balloting) or the kind of technology that is impacted by elections (e.g., energy sources and homeland security/military development).” Three tiny dots is all I’m askin’ for.
Anyway. Enough of that nonsense.
After a couple of slow first weeks, things ought to get fired up for the MTV Street Team on Super Tuesday, with a lot of cross-platform promotion of our election coverage throughout the day — stay tuned for details. In the meantime, as Grift mentioned yesterday, he and I will be representing the “new” end of the spectrum of media, along with former AJC man and recent online adventurer Tom Baxter and CNN.com’s John Helton as the more establishment voices at an Atlanta Press Club panel on February 7th. Then for dinner on Friday the 8th, I’ll be joining Grayson in leading the discussion table on electronic politickin’ — and as Prof. Leonard Witt put it, it’ll be “like having your very own American Idol star sharing dinner with you.” Hot, baby, hot.
It was a busy political scene on this three-day MLK holiday weekend, and that certainly eliminated hope of any rest for the weary (read: me). John Edwards showed up to stump in the house of labor as the city was blanketed (thinly) with some panic-inducing snow, and I went down to cover it for this week’s Choose or Lose story. While I was talking to another Young Dem on camera after the rally seemed to be over, someone started shushing everyone and when I turned around, Edwards was right behind me, preparing to have a mini press gaggle. Since I was there representin’ the yout’s, I asked him how he hoped to capture much of the youth vote now that it seems to be flocking toward the new, shinier ooh-ahh candidate. Edwards said he was going to keep talking about the important issues.
Yeah, the poor guy is so screwed. Here’s the video:
The next morning, at least 3 times as many people (I have calibrated eyeballs, trust me) braved 17-degree cold — way worse than a little snow — to stand outside in line for over an hour at the MLK Center to attend church services with Barack Obama. Lucky for me, I was standing in the right place at the right time when an Obama staffer came out to pull any media stragglers out of the crowd and through the side gate. “You’re media, aren’t you,” asked some random guy who saw my spiffy hat and frozen-solid camera. “Uh, yeah, sure,” I muttered and quickly ducked through the line and toward the staffer who was taking a quick headcount.
“Who are you with?”
“Uh, MTV’s Choose or Lose?”
“Did you RSVP?”
“Uh, no, sorry.”
“That’s okay, just go check in inside.” Well, there’s some tight security for ya. When I got inside another staffer with a clipboard and a refrigerator-sized Secret Service agent were making sure all the random press were who they said they were. Except me; I just told the girl I was told to check in here, and she said that’s fine, just go up the stairs. My spiffy commando hat was so convincing he didn’t even stroke me with his metal-detector wand.
They told us upstairs that live video was prohibited to all but a few pre-ordained network cameras, and I had to put my camcorder back in my bag. That was probably for the best, as I’m sure the miniDV tape inside would have shattered into powder had I actually hit the record button after 45 minutes of sub-freezing soak. I couldn’t even take a still photo for 10 minutes because every surface of my little Powershot was instantly covered in condensate as soon as I exposed it to ambient air; luckily I was standing right next to a jillion-watt spotlight that provided a nice current of hot air with which to bake my gadgets dry.
You wanna talk about an inferiority complex? Hang out in a church balcony snapping candids with your pocket-sized Powershot surrounded by a couple dozen massive DSLRs sporting telephoto lenses that can see the American flag on the Sea of Tranquility. Hey guys, I’m totally press! Check me out!
Except I’m not totally press, as I’ve already discussed. I’m something other. And after Obama gave his church speech and the campaign staff shuffled the press across the street for a really boring photo-op at the King tomb, my otherness became even more painfully apparent.
The media were herded into a cordoned-off area in front of the tomb and set up all their cameras along the edge of the pool, where they’d get a lovely shot of Obama placing a commemorative wreath. I followed suit and put my wee camcorder up on my skinny tripod in between two major media juggernauts. Had I stayed put, I might’ve been fine, but it’s hard to stay put when it’s well below freezing. I backed out of the camera line and began pacing in the open space, looking across the street to see when Obama would be coming over. At some point, a Secret Service agent must have seen my chest with its distinct lack of any press credentials and decided to come interrogate me.
Yeah, you heard right: lack of press credentials. I forgot to mention that last week when I was describing the otherness of the MTV Choose or Lose Street Team. While we got many a nice gadget in our backpack, two things we wouldn’t be getting that elicited a few groans and puzzled questions from the team were a press badge and one o’ them logo boxes to stick on our microphones for extra street cred. It was emphasized to us that we were citizen journalists (again, as I’ve said, not quite accurate anymore) and thus would not get such standard fare of the old guard. A letter attesting to our journalistic (or journalist-esque) mission on company masthead signed by MTV’s VP of News should be all the authenticity we need, we were told.
As Mr. Big Scary Armed Secret Service guy started asking me where the hell my credentials were and I stammered on about checking in at the lobby and didn’t get a thingy and uh uh uh — I reached into my coat pocket and produced my multi-colored fancy letter of credential from the VP of MTV News.
“Yeah, but see I don’t know who the hell that is, so you’re gonna have to leave, NOW.”
It’s a good thing everybody’s ears were already bright red from the cold, because I was definitely being stared at by some of the old guard, safe and secure behind their superfancy laminated plastic nametags. For want of a nail, the shoe was lost….
Suffice it to say, that sucked ass.
The rationale behind our lack of shiny laminated nametags and the hypothetical legal liability from which that decision may have stemmed are a complete mystery to me. What it was about unpaid, even-less-official news hounds contributing to Off the Bus that allowed them to get press credentials from the Huffington Post is also a mystery to me.
Why I was a retard who didn’t think to wear his Huffington Post press credentials for security’s sake is another mystery, but one that won’t be repeated after that little ordeal.
First and foremost, thank you. Not to Iowans in their bizarre political shenanigans and inability not only to be polled but even to bother to get their lazy asses registered as voters prior to caucus night. No, thanks go to those of you who tuned in, made the chat room lively, kept me updated to the conversation via text message, and of course, dropped a little somethin’ in the tip jar. I really appreciated your virtual companionship on the nerve-wracking and ultimately disappointing campaign trail, as I do your assistance in subsidizing that trip of a lifetime.
I also really ought to thank the folks on Joe Biden’s campaign who put their trust in me as a hybrid supporter-citizen journalist and basically threw open their doors and let me pick and choose where I would do some reporting and where I would do some volunteering. The fact that they ever wanted my help with some YouTubery or other online communications efforts over the last several months has really kept me going when I’ve wondered why I’m trying to balance my technically-challenged dissertation and, well, anything that is not dissertation. They were a great bunch of people to work with, even though it was largely over the internets until the last couple of days.
Their trust was made even more special when it survived an ugly Off the Bus episode the morning of the caucus, thanks to the bizarre and unsourced rumor promulgated by one of my OTB cohorts, Beverly Davis. She claimed to have spoken to one of the Biden campaign’s “national consultants” at a bar on New Year’s Eve, and this anonymous source suggested that a deal was in the offing between Biden and Obama, described by Davis in such a way as to make Biden’s campaign for President sound suddenly less serious, more like the speculative “He’s just running for VP” crap that’s always alleged of any second tier candidate. No one at Biden HQ had any idea what “national consultant” Davis might have been speaking to, nor was there any such deal ever in the work; Biden has a fine day job and was in this to do as well as his bluntly stated positions could get him. The story was posted on the 2nd, I believe, and by the time I got to the office on Thursday morning it was already keeping Press Secretary Mark Paustenbach’s blackberry buzzing furiously. Lucky for me, Beverly Davis referred to herself in the aggrandizing institutional third person, saying, “Off the Bus spoke to…” about her drunken gossiper, leaving a tiny grammatical question in a few people’s minds at that morning’s staff meeting. “She didn’t mean Shelby, did she?” That was apparently one fleeting thought that was quickly dismissed — and solidly confirmed when I talked to staff in person. I wasn’t even in Iowa for New Year’s Eve, and they know me well enough by this point to have faith that I wouldn’t run with such speculative crap without confirming it more solidly with someone who knows what the hell they’re talking about. There was a similar moment in Greenville, SC, when the wheels came off the wagon for a few minutes and the whole campaign caravan fractured into several disconnected clusters when the Senator wanted to sneak off for a quiet lunch away from the crowds and the remaining aides lost track of the day’s agenda for a few minutes. I lingered outside the college fair where Biden was supposed to shake hands for a while and his former bodyman and a state committee member tried desperately to reconvene the group via multiple cellphone messages. The latter, not knowing quite who I was (but only seeing my fake press badge), looked askance at me before he was reassured that I could be trusted not to use this perfectly ordinary moment of campaign chaos to write a smear article, or I would under no circumstances be allowed within earshot of these phone calls in the first place.
That kind of trust raises a much broader question about this new-fangled citizen journalism stuff, as was reiterated to me yesterday by Leonard Witt, professor of communications at Kennesaw State University and networked journalism enthusiast. I will be co-hosting a dinner table discussion on politics and new media with our friend Grayson at the upcoming Southern Social Media Convention in a few weeks at Leonard’s request. In our emails I mentioned that while in Iowa I was a sort of hybrid campaign volunteer/embedded reporter, and it was tricky explaining to some people how that worked; he said he, too, would have questions about how that worked, and justifiably so. Just what kind of “journalism” could you expect to get out of me regarding the now defunct Biden campaign? Would I basically be shilling propaganda under the cloak of news? Absolutely not. For the most part, I provided video to Huffington Post, so what you saw is what you got. The text article I wrote about the Greenville trip was basically presenting the mood of the meetings, the policy topics discussed, and even a mention of the caravan’s consistent lateness and my speeding across South Carolina to keep up. I was not blowing sunshine up anyone’s skirt, to butcher a cliche. But there was certainly a lot of trust between me and a campaign I liked, and I was not going to rush to publish something before making sure it was a real story just for the sake of a gotcha. After the Beverly Davis flap, I asked the communications staff what the real deal was and said I’d be interested in publishing my own piece on their response, whether it was a denial or a “no comment” or what have you. The Press Secretary pointed out that Marc Ambinder had already published the official campaign statement on his blog, and that slowly some of the major news outlets were updating their parrot stories appropriately; as far as the campaign was concerned, that was the end of the story. My decision not to follow up on my own was two-fold: first, and most objectively, I had plenty of other things to work on, story-wise, so if Ambinder had already written it up, there was little point in my repeating old news; second, and perhaps biased on my part, if I continued to make a story of the non-story, the non-story would BE the story, and I’d just give legs to what was bunk in the first place. I didn’t want to do that to the candidate I was most fond of, and so to that extent, I was a biased citizen journalist.
So what does that say about citizen journalism? I guess the usual as with any kind of reporter: caveat emptor. In most of these new media outlets, the goal is not to eliminate or stifle bias, as in the old model, but to own up to and publicize it. You want to hear a bunch of pro-Obama fuzzy lovin’? Read just about everyone else on Off the Bus. You want straight coverage of the positive points of second tier brainiacs like Biden? Try me. You want mud? Try Drudge.
For the record, here are some final video clips from Caucus Day that I didn’t have the energy to deal with for a while.
I’m in New York now getting ready for my MTV Choose or Lose ‘08 Street Team orientation, just in time to turn the page. (Expect some more videos this week.) I think with the testing and dissertation writing on the up-slope at school, and MTV reporting probably taking the rest of the time, it’s time to close the Huffington Post chapter. The Bev Davis fiasco was probably all the excuse I needed, anyway.
I’m probably also done with politics for a while. People have already been asking whom I’m for now, while the body was still warm even. Right now, I don’t feel like I’m “for” anyone. I’ll go into a little more detail on my thought processes here when I wrap up this MTV trip, but frankly, the rest of you haven’t got much to wow me with. You never gave the smartest, most qualified guy in the room a chance, so I’m disinclined to give a hoot about your celebrity right now — and I’m definitely not inclined to waste any more graduate school time getting them nominated. Talk to me when we’ve got one polished show horse standing, and I’ll see what I can do.
Now, time to go hemorrhage some cash in Manhattan!
Washington Post’s online politics explorer Jose Antonio Vargas went to a political button shop in Des Moines, IA the other day to take the pulse of retail politics — literally retail politics — and he shot some video interviews. The store owner talks about paraphernalia sales trends as indicators of candidate popularity, and a handful of likely caucusers chime in on their favorite presidential hopeful.
Around the 2 minute 50 second mark is where my brain absolutely explodes, unsurprisingly. An Iowa woman visits the store with her six-year-old daughter to pick up a Santa sackful of Hillary buttons and t-shirts and explains why she switched to Hillary from Edwards, and in so doing includes this gem of an assessment:
I do think that Hillary has the most, um, experience, as — especially as far as foreign issues, foreign policy.
I know it’s unwise to insult Iowans before the caucuses, but come on. I’ve heard some silly things in my life, but that’s just plain ign’r'nt. That does nothing to dispel my paranoia that a number of fans of the top 3 are only fans because they haven’t bothered to dig beyond the trio that the MSM is pumping down their throat.
The New York Times tries, too little too late, to be accurate about this “experience” crap.
But during those two terms in the White House, Mrs. Clinton did not hold a security clearance. She did not attend National Security Council meetings. She was not given a copy of the president’s daily intelligence briefing. She did not assert herself on the crises in Somalia, Haiti and Rwanda. And during one of President Bill Clinton’s major tests on terrorism, whether to bomb Afghanistan and Sudan in 1998, Mrs. Clinton was barely speaking to her husband, let alone advising him, as the Lewinsky scandal sizzled. In seeking the Democratic presidential nomination, Mrs. Clinton lays claim to two traits nearly every day: strength and experience. But as the junior senator from New York, she has few significant legislative accomplishments to her name.
Seriously, people, this is the future of our country at stake. Please do some homework before you drink the Kool-Aid.
On Friday, Caucus4Priorities, some bunch-of-hippies PAC headed up by Ben & Jerry’s co-founder Ben Cohen that wants to cut defense spending and re-route the money to happier domestic agendas, endorsed John “My priority is a 28,000sf house with a recreational building” Edwards. This “sweet” deal, as the papers like to pun it, apparently comes with 10,000 bleating Iowans that have pledged to caucus for the endorsee. A CBS News story talks of Edwards’s defense-cutting plans thusly:
If elected, Edwards said he would examine the nation’s missile defense system and the F-22 fighter jet.
“The idea that America, over the long-term, can control the spread of nuclear weapons — and just look at what’s happening in Pakistan as a perfect example of this — is a fantasy, it will not happen,” he said.
Good thing CBS decided to cherry-pick missile defense and the F-22 as cost-cutting opportunities for Edwards, because if you look at the rest of the candidate scorecard, you’ll notice how many other defense programs about which they just couldn’t get a real answer out of John Edwards.
Reducing the nuclear stockpile? Undecided.
Cancelling the DDG-1000 destroyer or C-130J transport plane? Undecided.
Pledge to eliminate earmarks in defense spending? No answer.
It probably won’t surprise any of the regular readers who I’m about to tell you had answers to all those questions that Caucus4Priorities would have found favorable: Joe Biden. And of course, by record alone, those hippies should’ve given Dennis Kucinich their much-deserved support, since he’d pretty much cancel everything deadly under the sun and fight global terror networks with his pocket-sized copy of the Constitution. But I guess C4P hasn’t got the balls to gamble on anyone outside the top three.
In a video posted today, wacky quasi-conspiracy theorist Davis Fleetwood, who was one of YouTube’s guests at the debate in Charleston, reports that he’s been hired by the Kucinich for President campaign, making him, he believes (and I can’t dispute) the first “videoblogger” (whatever that word means) to be hired by a presidential campaign.
See, Ma?
Hope that works out better for him and the campaign than John Edwards’s aborted attempt to hire some opinionated bloggers. But hey, it’s only Dennis Kucinich; what has he got to lose?
On the other hand, people who read the Huffington Post still aren’t interested in videos. Maybe it’s the quiet atmosphere of their office where they’re screwing off by reading political blogs but don’t want to give away the game by playing something with volume. But different audiences are definitely more interested: my Biden interview was over 250 views on the first day just from being posted on a couple of nerdier political blogs by Biden supporters; since it launched on HuffPost, it’s only gotten to the high 300’s, a lot of which is probably still coming from the other blogs and this li’l blog itself. A video that managed to go to press before mine — not that that was hard, considering the way my story spent 30-ish hours in limbo up someone’s keister while several others popped up throughout the day (glad I stayed up so late to get it done) — has only mustered 210 views, despite its association with the big NPR station WNYC. (And half of its traffic is coming from a non-HuffPost website.)
The suspicion only gets reinforced: YouTube is no place for serious politics. YouTube is for setting yourself on fire.
But hey, setting yourself on fire might land you a job.
Obligatory Cloverfield post Cloverfield is what it is: a big, indestructible monster shows up out of nowhere, attacks Manhattan, and lots of people die. You should know already if this is your kind of movie or not, but if it is, definitely see it in the theaters!
