shelbinator.com

I never did get around to embedding this video, did I?

I took my bike to Miami with me over the holidays and rode in their Critical Mass ride the day after Christmas. It starts downtown at a roughly equivalent location in the city to Atlanta’s Woodruff Park, but the Midtown, VaHi, L5P and Cabbagetown equivalents in Miami are a bit more spread apart, so it took us 14.5 miles (by GPS) to cover a little less population, it seemed. There were 40-ish riders, which I got the impression was close to typical.

I’m actually surprised that many have survived, because the responses I was able to solicit whilst dodging cars also gave me the impression that the general riding tactics employed that night were fairly typical as well. The notion of “corking” as we know it exists only vaguely down there; it’s more of a “just go, go, go no matter what and don’t die.” The Atlanta CM corks to retain its contiguity and integrity; the Miami CM lacks significant contiguity and is more of a fluid mass than a solid. Lights that are red on approach warrant a pause, not a stop, and any phalanx of cars encountered is just an obstacle course, not a boundary. If we tried any of that up here, APD would be breaking us up every month (and someone in a tricked out Hummer would kill five or six in a clip). (I will concede that CM Miami is kind enough to give up one of the lanes to cars when they have two or three to choose from, an idea that might make sense here on Peachtree, Ponce and the like.)

Critical Mass Miami - December 2008 from Shelby Highsmith on Vimeo.

Certainly was a lot more exhilarating, though!

(Disclaimer: this was my first and hopefully last video whipped up on the cheap with the new iMovie ‘08, a piece of software so bizarre it’s no surprise people are going back and downloading the old iMovie HD 6, so forgive the lame edits and audio ducking.)

No time for words; must go get more coffee and put any words I can spare into the thesis. For now, you get my final Georgia video for that thing we called Street Team ‘08.

Last weekend I was feeling election fatigued — even partisanship fatigued. I was nauseated by most of the things I saw going on at McCain-Palin rallies, from their lunatic fringe of bigots to their core message that people like me aren’t “pro-American” enough. But I also knew there was plenty of hate coming from the left against the right, particularly against Sarah Palin, easy target though she may be. So this is what I whipped up for my Street Team video commentary:

I’m not so sure I’m feeling that warm and fuzzy anymore, but since the other side does have most of the guns, I guess I’ll keep an open mind to playing nice.

Bloggerinterrupted has a very good video up on YouTube with like a million skajillion views. He documents the results of the McCain-Palin campaign’s rather effective effort to brand Barack Obama as “The Other.” I’m sure people can disagree about whether there’s overt or even implicit racism and xenophobia in it, but an excellent point was raised on last week’s On the Media: McCain and especially Palin keep asking, “Who is Barack Obama?” They are painting him as risky by acting like he’s this big question mark, he’s The Unknown. Nevermind the one doing the asking was practically nobody in August. Huh.

This is coming from the same campaign that in another breath will accuse him of basically running for president since 2004, when he gave the speech at the DNC that made us all sit up and take notice. He’s officially been running for president for over a year and a half and probably hasn’t ever been more than 30 feet from a camera or a microphone since then. And yet he is more “unknown” than some backwater “Hockey Mom” that 98% of the country had never heard of two months ago, and who has spent half her time on the ticket in hiding from the big bad mainstream media (and the other half spewing talking points). She gets a free pass to One of Us Village, while that scary Other guy is still too risky and unknown.

Disheartening, to say the least.

Wow. What a jerk move.

In 2000, my father and I actually agreed on a political point. We both liked John McCain. I still knew I was voting for Gore, but I liked McCain and wanted him to be the nominee so two good men could debate serious issues and I could probably live with losing to the McCain of 2000, as we must call him these days.

McCain ‘08 has been a different animal. Most old men seem to mellow out in their twilight years, but some get cantankerous. McCain is clearly the cantankerous sort. And in his effort to win the White House, he has pretty much sold out, and after resisting years of Viet Cong torture has finally been broken to the point of saying anything to win, no matter how dishonest.

In tonight’s debate, he was angry and obnoxious. He would pony up one of his baseless attacks immediately after Obama had just explained how baseless the attack, already on the air in dozens of markets, truly was. It’s like he forgot his hearing aid.

And at the end, McCain, who loves to attack Obama for not “reaching a hand across the aisle” (boy does his beauty queen running mate love that line), couldn’t even reach his cranky hand out to “That One.”

“That One.” Nice, John. I mean, Senator McCain (I’d hate to upset Leslie Sanchez with my informality).

In case you missed this diss running off to a bathroom break, here, watch it over and over again:

(Note: C-SPAN’s Debate Hub is a better link than the one attached to the video above.)

A few weeks ago I mentioned this shindig over at the Arthur M. Blank Family Foundation with CBS political correspondent Jeff Greenfield. Since Jeff had said that the current state and trajectory of media tested his faith in American polity, I threw together this little look back at the MTV Choose or Lose Street Team ‘08 experiment:

Lucky for me, something got screwed up in the A/V system between Monday’s sound check and Tuesday’s event, my video had no sound, and I looked like a friggin’ idiot in front of the whole audience. Yeehaw!

It’s been done before, but frankly, I didn’t like any of the existing mashups out there. So here’s mine.

Back on Super Tuesday, our intrepid Alaska Street Team ‘08 reporter Dani Carlson was one of the 22 Flixwagon-enabled mobile reporters. Well trekking around on the tundra, she got some sit-down time with our latest vice presidential nominee, Gov. Sarah Palin:

The MTV News reprise highlights one of the more fun moments of the interview:

In this interview, Palin calls controversial Republican presidential hopeful Ron Paul “cool.” “He’s a good guy,” she added. “He’s so independent. He’s independent of the party machine. I’m like, ‘Right on, so am I.’ ”

That occurs around the 3:00 mark of the video clip. She also praised Romney (apparently for wanting to drill in ANWR) and had nothing to say about McCain (who back then was against it).

Apparently CNN’s internet reporter found my cellphone coverage of the hearty crowd reactions from the overflowing Manuel’s Tavern interesting enough to put on her big shiny screen. Bhaskar Roy, co-founder of Qik — whose software I used to stream video from Manuel’s (because frankly I wasn’t all that caught up in the speech) — sent me a couple snapshots of someone’s TV after he, and a number of local tweeple, were all a-twitter about the segment. I was totally oblivious (no one in Manuel’s noticed and said “Hey, that’s us! And that’s that guy!”).

That’s fellow YDAtlien Justi in the corner of the second pic.

They must’ve had slim pickin’s in the blogosphere at 11:42 p.m. (judging by the sudden simultaneous influx to the blog of people googling “shelbinator”), because the video ain’t all that interesting. But for posterity, here it is:

There’s a view from the back bar here, too.

In January 2008, at the beginning of the primary election season, Sen. Barack Obama addressed the congregation at Ebenezer Baptist Church on the Martin Luther King holiday weekend. King was a pastor of Ebenezer 45 years ago today, when he delivered his "I have a dream" speech during the march on Washington, August 28, 1963. Tonight, 45 years later to the day, Sen. Obama formally accepts the nomination of the Democratic party for president — the first African-American to be nominated by a major party.

Talk a walk with me through the childhood neighborhood of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

(Video page.)