We Are 3rd (Maybe) In Digital TV?

Drat the Dutch and the Finns; those two technological giants already have switched to all-digital TV systems. Now, the Land O'The Free and the Home O'The Brave faces the Big Switch in a fortnight. What about all of the aluminum-foil-covered rabbit-ear antenna sets? What about the rooftop antenna sets? Without a digital TV converter box — not easily attached to old TV sets — millions of viewers will be staring at snow on their screens on February 17. The Krait (Gail Collins' distaff colleague on the NY Fishwrap's Op-Ed page is Maureen Dowd, aka The Cobra.) looks bemusedly at the flurry of activity to save TV for the geezers. Forget the onset of the Son of the Great Depression! The geezers might miss "The Lawrence Welk Show" replays on Saturday nights! The geezers might miss BillO on Faux News! O, the horror of it all! If this is a (fair & balanced) national crisis, so be it.

[x NY Fishwrap]
TV In Peril. Is Nothing Sacred?
By Gail Collins

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administration affected all-digital american analog announcements anything bill box broadcasting car citizen communication congress converter coupons created cut danger deadline didn digital expire family feb going government imagine install issue line mainly months needed obama officials people perhaps public race reception republicans shows state supposed televisions transition tv unconverted voted

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On February 17, the nation’s TV broadcasters are scheduled to go all-digital, and Americans with unconverted analog televisions will get their reception cut off. Perhaps you are one of them. Perhaps you are in such a pathetic state of denial that you are not actually sure if you’re an analog person or not. Perhaps you think an analog is a rare burrowing creature found mainly in Australia.

All I can say is, shape up people. We are post-inauguration now. It’s all about the issues. You can’t palm yourself off as an informed citizen just because you know how many electoral votes Montana has.

In 2005, Congress voted to end analog broadcasting. The impetus was to raise money for the Bush tax cuts by selling off the emptied space. (Bad) But it also freed up lots of room for better Internet reception and public safety communication. (Good)

Other countries are doing the same thing. The Netherlands and Finland have already gone all-digital. In fact, the most unnerving thing about our Feb. 17 deadline is that the United States would be clocking in third. What are the odds that the Bush administration could pull off a complicated public initiative more efficiently than anybody but the Dutch and the Finns?

Everybody agrees that consumers shouldn’t suffer from the transition. So people who get analog reception — mainly those who use a rooftop antenna or indoor rabbit ears — are supposed to get converter boxes that allow them to get digital signals. In places like Britain, the government figures out which households are affected and then sends somebody to install the needed equipment.

Needless to say, the Republican-controlled Congress did not consider anything that socialistic in 2005. No, our plan was so deeply privatized that one DTV converter box retailer hired Joe the Plumber as a spokesman.

People who needed a converter box were supposed to request a $40 coupon, which could be used toward the purchase. The coupon was then sent to them by third-class mail — an interesting choice which sometimes meant the coupons, which expire in three months, did not arrive for four to eight weeks. The lucky recipient could then go to an electronics store, find the right kind of box, take it home and install it. (Just for fun, imagine the oldest member of your family doing this.)

Meanwhile, a public awareness campaign was under way. The Federal Communications Commission decided to spend $350,000 sponsoring a race car named “The Digital TV Transition.” Government officials no doubt imagined the golden moment when a Nascar announcer cried: “It’s the Digital TV Transition — over the finish line in record time.”

In the first race, the car hit a wall. In the second, it crashed and burned. Fans got to hear commentary along the line of: “Well, it looks like the Digital TV Transition is going to have to be towed off the track.”

Still, thanks to public service announcements on TV, an estimated 90 percent of TV owners now know something is up. Unfortunately, the announcements created a deep unease among people who were not affected by the transition at all, like cable or satellite subscribers.

Attention must be paid! The TV is in danger! Some folks thought they needed to buy a new set. Others may have been digging shelters in their backyards. Quite a few applied for those coupons even though they didn’t need them, creating a shortage.

Did I mention that once the government ran out of coupons, no new ones could be issued until the old ones expired? Or that people who didn’t manage to cash their coupons in before the expiration date couldn’t ask for a replacement?

At this point there are an estimated 6.5 million families still relying on unconverted televisions, and a waiting list for coupons. The Obama administration has asked for more time to straighten things out, and the Senate voted unanimously to postpone the deadline for four months. This shows that legislators of good will (Democrat Jay Rockefeller of West Virginia and Republican Kay Bailey Hutchison of Texas) can work in a bipartisan manner when the issue at hand is every American’s God-given right to television reception.

Then the bill moved to the House, where quick action required permission of a two-thirds majority. For once, the Republicans got a chance to make their presence felt, and they instantly sprang into action and refused to allow anybody to do anything. This shows you why Nancy Pelosi always seems a little irritable.

How could the Republicans not be worried about this? A disproportionate number of the endangered TV viewers are senior citizens. Bill O’Reilly’s entire audience is in danger!

The House is going to take another crack at the delay proposal soon. If they act, Obama officials will have another four months to resolve all the problems. As if they didn’t have enough to do. ♥

[Gail Collins joined the New York Times in 1995 as a member of the editorial board and later as an op-ed columnist. In 2001 she became the first woman ever appointed editor of the Times editorial page. At the beginning of 2007, she stepped down and began a leave in order to finish a sequel to her book, America's Women: 400 Years of Dolls, Drudges, Helpmates and Heroines. Collins returned to The Times as a columnist in July 2007. Besides America's Women, which was published in 2003, Ms. Collins is the author of Scorpion Tongues: Gossip, Celebrity and American Politics, and The Millennium Book, which she co-authored with her husband, Dan Collins. Her new book is about American women since 1960. Collins has a degree in journalism from Marquette University and an M.A. in government from the University of Massachusetts-Amherst.]

Copyright © 2009 The New York Times Company

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You Got That Right, Dude: It Sure As Hell Ain't McDonalds! (Or, Turducken!)

This blogger has eaten "Turducken" — a Cajun dish consisting of a partially de-boned turkey stuffed with a de-boned duck, which itself is stuffed with a small de-boned chicken. The thoracic cavity of the chicken and the rest of the gaps are stuffed, sometimes with a highly seasoned breadcrumb mixture or sausage meat, although some versions have a different stuffing for each bird. However, ingenuity lives in the Land O'The Free and the Home O'The Brave. A pair of barbeque mavens in Roeland Park, KS (a Kansas City suburb) — Jason Day and Aaron Chronister — have offered a pork challenge — "The Bacon Explosion" — to the turducken. If this is (fair & balanced) sus scrofa, so be it.

[x NY Fishwrap]
Take Bacon. Add Sausage. Blog.
By Damon Darlin

"The Bacon Explosion" by Don Ipock for The New York Times

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bacon barbecue called christmas chronister claim com conservative cooked days digg explosion fat flavor followers health hobby hours interests internet inventors liberal linked marketer meats mr network path people posted readers recipe roll sausage seems send serves service site smoke smoker spread stumbleupon team traffic twitter used vegetarians web wrote

created at TagCrowd.com

For a nation seeking unity, a recipe has swept the Internet that seems to unite conservatives and liberals, gun owners and foodies, carnivores and ... well, not vegetarians and health fanatics.

Certainly not the vegetarians and health fanatics.

This recipe is the Bacon Explosion, modestly called by its inventors “the BBQ Sausage Recipe of all Recipes.” The instructions for constructing this massive torpedo-shaped amalgamation of two pounds of bacon woven through and around two pounds of sausage and slathered in barbecue sauce first appeared last month on the Web site of a team of Kansas City competition barbecuers. They say a diverse collection of well over 16,000 Web sites have linked to the recipe, celebrating, or sometimes scolding, its excessiveness. A fresh audience could be ready to discover it on Super Bowl Sunday.

Where once homegrown recipes were disseminated in Ann Landers columns or Junior League cookbooks, new media have changed — and greatly accelerated — the path to popularity. Few recipes have cruised down this path as fast or as far as the Bacon Explosion, and this turns out to be no accident. One of its inventors works as an Internet marketer, and had a sophisticated understanding of how the latest tools of promotion could be applied to a four-pound roll of pork.

The Bacon Explosion was born shortly before Christmas in Roeland Park, Kan., in Jason Day’s kitchen. He and Aaron Chronister, who anchor a barbecue team called Burnt Finger BBQ, were discussing a challenge from a bacon lover they received on their Twitter text-messaging service: What could the barbecuers do with bacon?

At the same time, Mr. Chronister wanted to get attention for their Web site, BBQAddicts.com. More traffic would bring in more advertising income, which they needed to fund a hobby that can cost thousands of dollars.

Mr. Day, a systems administrator who has been barbecuing since college, suggested doing something with a pile of sausage. “It’s a variation of what’s called a fattie in the barbecue community,” Mr. Day said. “But we took it to the extreme.”

He bought about $20 worth of bacon and Italian sausage from a local meat market. As it lay on the counter, he thought of weaving strips of raw bacon into a mat. The two spackled the bacon mat with a layer of sausage, covered that with a crunchy layer of cooked bacon, and rolled it up tight.

They then stuck the roll — containing at least 5,000 calories and 500 grams of fat — in the Good-One Open Range backyard smoker that they use for practice. (In competitions, they use a custom-built smoker designed by the third member of the team, Bryant Gish, who was not present at the creation of the Bacon Explosion.)

Mr. Day said his wife laughed the whole time. “She’s very supportive of my hobby,” he said.

The two men posted their adventure on their Web site two days before Christmas. On Christmas Day, traffic on the site spiked to more than 27,000 visitors.

Mr. Chronister explained that the Bacon Explosion “got so much traction on the Web because it seems so over the top.” But Mr. Chronister, an Internet marketer from Kansas City, Mo., did what he could to help it along. He first used Twitter to send short text messages about the recipe to his 1,200 Twitter followers, many of them fellow Internet marketers with extensive social networks. He also posted links on social networking sites. “I used a lot of my connections to get it out there and to push it,” he said.

The Bacon Explosion posting has since been viewed about 390,000 times. It first found a following among barbecue fans, but quickly spread to sites run by outdoor enthusiasts, off-roaders and hunters. (Several proposed venison-sausage versions.) It also got mentions on the Web site of Air America, the liberal radio network, and National Review, the conservative magazine. Jonah Goldberg at NationalReview.com wrote, “There must be a reason one reader after another sends me this every couple hours.” Conservatives4palin.com linked, too.

So did regular people. A man from Wooster, Ohio, wrote that friends had served it at a bon voyage party before his 10-day trip to Israel, where he expected bacon to be in short supply. “It wasn’t planned as a send-off for me to Israel, but with all of the pork involved it sure seemed like it,” he wrote.

About 30 people sent in pictures of their Explosions. One sent a video of the log catching fire on a grill.

Mr. Day said that whether it is cooked in an oven or in a smoker, the rendered fat from the bacon keeps the sausage juicy. But in the smoker, he said, the smoke heightens the flavor of the meats.

Nick Pummell, a barbecue hobbyist in Las Vegas, learned of the recipe from Mr. Chronister’s Twittering. He made his first Explosion on Christmas Day, when he and a group of friends also had a more traditional turkey. “This was kind of the dessert part,” he said. “You need to call 911 after you are done. It was awesome.”

Mr. Chronister said the main propellant behind the Bacon Explosion’s spread was a Web service called StumbleUpon, which steers Web users toward content they are likely to find interesting. Readers tell the service about their professional interests or hobbies, and it serves up sites to match them. More than 7 million people worldwide use the service in an attempt to duplicate serendipity, the company says.

Mr. Chronister intended to send the post to StumbleUpon, but one of his readers beat him to it. It appeared on the front page of StumbleUpon for three days, which further increased traffic.

Mr. Chronister also littered his site with icons for Digg, Del.icio.us and other sites in which readers vote on posts or Web pages they like, helping to spread the word. “Alright this is going on Digg,” a commenter wrote minutes after the Explosion was posted. “Already there,” someone else answered.

Some have claimed that the Bacon Explosion is derivative. A writer known as the Headless Blogger posted a similar roll of sausage and bacon in mid-December. Mr. Chronister and Mr. Day do not claim to have invented the concept.

But they do vigorously defend their method. When one commenter dared to suggest that the two hours in the smoker could be slashed to a mere 30 minutes if the roll was first cooked in a microwave oven, Mr. Chronister snapped back. “Microwave??? Seriously? First, the proteins in the meats will bind around 140 degrees, so putting it on the smoker after that is pointless as it won’t absorb any smoke flavor,” he responded on his site. “This requires patience and some attention. It’s not McDonald’s.” ♥

[Damon Darlin was named technology editor for The New York Times in May 2007. Mr. Darlin joined The Times in August 2005 as a West Coast correspondent and “Your Money” columnist. Previously, Mr. Darlin was senior editor at Business 2.0 since 2002, where he began as executive editor in 2000. From 1997 to 2000, he was assistant managing editor and managing editor at U.S. News & World Report. Before that, he was senior editor at Forbes Magazine since 1993. Darlin received a B.A. degree in American history from the University of Chicago in 1979.]

Copyright © 2009 The New York Times Company

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John Updike's Final Word

[x Wikipedia]

John Hoyer Updike (March 18, 1932 – January 27, 2009) was an American novelist, poet, short story writer, art critic, and literary critic. Updike's most famous work is his Rabbit series (Rabbit, Run; Rabbit Redux; Rabbit Is Rich; Rabbit At Rest; and Rabbit Remembered). Both Rabbit is Rich and Rabbit at Rest received the Pulitzer Prize. Describing his subject as "the American small town, Protestant middle class," Updike was widely recognized for his careful craftsmanship, his highly stylistic writing, and his prolific output, having published more than twenty-five novels and more than a dozen short story collections, as well as poetry, art criticism, literary criticism and children's books. Hundreds of his stories, reviews, and poems appeared in The New Yorker, starting in 1954. He also wrote regularly for The New York Review of Books. His work attracted a significant amount of critical attention and he was considered one of the most prominent contemporary American novelists. Updike died of lung cancer on January 27, 2009.

If this is a (fair & balanced) requiem for a real heavyweight, so be it.

[x NY Fishwrap]
Requiem
By John Updike

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ago dark death demise depths die died eyes full greet huge instead john life nowhere occur oh overdue promise real register requiem response shabby shame shock shrug subterfuge tearless thought unplumbable updike wide young

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It came to me the other day:
Were I to die, no one would say,
“Oh, what a shame! So young, so full
Of promise — depths unplumbable!”

Instead, a shrug and tearless eyes
Will greet my overdue demise;
The wide response will be, I know,
“I thought he died a while ago.”

For life’s a shabby subterfuge,
And death is real, and dark, and huge.
The shock of it will register
Nowhere but where it will occur. ♥

[This poem is taken from John Updike’s forthcoming collection, Endpoint and Other Poems.]

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Wobegon Boy Waxes Hopeful

Hope is — according to the online dictionary — the feeling that what is wanted can be had or that events will turn out for the best. The Wobegon Boy is suffused with the anticipation of our happy ending. Unfortunately, "hope" rhymes with "nope." If this is (fair & balanced) réalité, realität, realtà, or realidad, so be it.

[x Salon]
A Hopeful People
By Garrison Keillor

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achieve active airport attempt barely books bought cabdrivers converse days de dents diet documents fine forth french happen home hopeful huge inner longer lord mal meatpackers morning oh pain papers people print rejoice replace serve sheep sort suis suitcase sure thanks thorn toothache tranquility understand vocabulary woman would've years zahnschmerzen

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It is God that has made us and not we ourselves, we are his people and the sheep of his pasture, and George W. Bush is no longer the top sheep. Altogether a cause for rejoicing as we forge ahead in the struggle to achieve inner tranquility, which for me the other morning included misplaced glasses, a madcap dash to the airport, and en route in the taxi a call from my wife saying, "You forgot your billfold." One more sheep with a thorn in his hoof.

Tranquility. A woman you barely know comes to your home with a sheaf of papers and explains what the documents are about and you don't understand a word and the papers are a blur of fine print but you sign them. For all you know, she could take them to the bank, get a hundred grand in 50s, jump in the Jaguar and be in Toronto by midnight. You trust not. You hope not.

Paranoia belongs to the fringe right and left, not to genteel burghers like you and me. We sit under our fig tree and enjoy our cheeseburger without brooding too much about toxic chemicals used by meatpackers or thought-control drugs injected into the beef. Every morning in the newspaper, some columnist cries out in alarm that yet one more disaster is creeping toward us like a cougar about to spring and chew our throats, and we read a few paragraphs and turn the page and warm up another Danish.

We are a hopeful people. I have at home a traveler's phrasebook that tells you how to say you have a toothache in French (mal de dents), German (Zahnschmerzen), Italian (mal di denti) or Spanish (dolor de muelas), which, of all my investments, was the most hopeful and most foolish. I bought it in the airport years ago, imagining that on the flight over the Atlantic, I'd pick up an active vocabulary of maybe 400 words or so, and be able to converse with cabdrivers and hotel clerks about the weather or the arrival of trains or location of suitcases, and so forth. I had a couple of old uncles who got along with small, active vocabularies, things like, "OK then," or, "Oh for goodness sake," or, "Well, you never know" -- and I thought I could do the same in other languages.

The little book stayed in my suitcase. Cabdrivers in Berlin had no need of conversation with me, and I never experienced a Zahnschmerzen or mal de dents over there, and if I had, the dentist surely would've known the word "toothache." My attempt to say "mal de dents" might actually have made the French think I had a sharp pain in my left ventricle and they would've thrown me down and torn my shirt open and slapped the paddles on my chest and there I'd be with a toothache and also convulsing helplessly on the Rue de Tutti and regretting my attempt at international understanding. I'm sure this sort of thing happens all the time.

The second most unused book, I suppose, is the Holy Bible, a perennial bestseller thanks to our good intentions to attend to the Word and divine the Lord's Will, which one does for a few days until you realize that you already know the Lord's Will and you would prefer not to.

After that come diet books, which are bought in vast number and perused and put away. Twenty bucks for nothing, when the secret of dieting is simply: "Eat when you're hungry." And then the spiritual books about achieving inner tranquility and "How to Achieve Orgasm in 30 Days or Less" and inspiring books of all sorts.

We are a hopeful people.

One ponders that as we see the fresh faces in Washington replace the bullheads who've been bottom-feeding for eight painful years, and one is full of hope that the replacements will do the right thing and serve the common good, but then we are the same people who planned to converse in French about toothaches, and that didn't happen either.

Meanwhile we have this classy family in the White House, overachievers but gracious about it, mischievous kids and a smart man and a woman who sometimes tosses him glances that say, "Oh, just get over yourself." What their presence says about the decency and generosity of this country is huge, friends, just huge. Rejoice, America. Je suis Americain. Ich bin ein Amerikaner. ♥

[Garrison Keillor is an author, storyteller, humorist, and creator of the weekly radio show "A Prairie Home Companion." The show began in 1974 as a live variety show on Minnesota Public Radio. In the 1980s "A Prairie Home Companion" became a pop culture phenomenon, with millions of Americans listening to Keillor's folksy tales of life in the fictional Midwestern town of Lake Wobegon, where (in Keillor's words) "the women are strong, the men are good looking, and all of the children are above average." Keillor ended the show in 1987, and 1989 began a similar new radio show titled "American Radio Company of the Air." In 1993 he returned the show to its original name. Keillor also created the syndicated daily radio feature "A Writer's Almanac" in 1993. He has written for The New Yorker and is the author of several books, including Happy to Be Here (1990), Leaving Home (1992), Lake Wobegon Days (1995), and Good Poems for Hard Times (2005). Keillor's most recent book is a new Lake Wobegon novel, Liberty. His radio show inspired a 2006 movie, "A Prairie Home Companion," written by and starring Keillor and directed by Robert Altman. Keillor graduated (B.A., English) from the University of Minneosta in 1966. His signature sign-off on "The Writer's Almanac" is "Be well, do good work, and keep in touch."]

Copyright © 2008 Salon Media Group, Inc.

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If Not For Snark, This Blog Wouldn't Have A Personality!

In the dim past of this blogger's life, someone — in exasperation — told him: "If it wasn't for sarcasm, you wouldn't have a personality." The truth hurts and sometimes the hurt is deserved. However, sometimes sarcasm is deserved. Indeed, sometimes snark is deserved. Thanks to Lewis Carroll, for a great word in his 1876 poem, The Hunting of the Snark. If this is (fair & balanced) philology, so be it.

[x New York]
Snark Attack
By Adam Sternbergh

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age argued assholes attacks blind book calls celebrity consistently conversation critics denby everyone fact fans funny generous hype internet invite irony lies lifeless live man moment nation outrage palin people point re response ruining site snark snarky spin sports surprising titled tv used victim wit world writes written wrong yes

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You have to give David Denby credit for bravery: Writing a book titled Snark: It’s Mean, It’s Personal, and It’s Ruining Our Conversation is like writing a book titled Keying My Car: It’s the Wrong Thing to Do or Why Flaming Bags of Dog Poop on My Doorstep Just Aren’t Funny. You invite the transgression even as you decry it; you loose the hounds on yourself. Given Denby’s age (65) and position in the firmament (film reviewer for The New Yorker), he could have written the most concise, insightful, artfully balanced, and expertly argued book about snark and still come off like an Internet-age Andy Rooney, wagging his finger from his rocking chair at the boisterous kids on the lawn. And he has not written the most concise, insightful, artfully balanced, and expertly argued book about snark.

I’m sorry, did that sound snarky? I apologize. Denby’s book invites—even begs masochistically to receive—a snarky response, but he won’t get one here. I enjoy snark. I practice snark. And I hope herein to defend snark. But it’s too easy to stamp this book with some snarky dismissal (EPIC FAIL) and continue on one’s self-satisfied way. Denby’s book is serious, and wrong, and it deserves an appropriate response. Moreover, the book is premised on a popular meme: that so-called snark, what he calls “a nasty, knowing strain of abuse spreading like pinkeye through the national conversation,” is both increasingly unavoidable and intrinsically corrosive. I disagree on both counts. Snark can be misused and misdirected. It can be mean, and it can be personal. It’s also not only useful as a form of public conversation but necessary, for reasons that Denby either ignores or fails to comprehend.

The first difficulty of writing about snark is that you have to define snark. This proves consistently tricky, no less so for Denby. His definition is a tap dance on hot coals, as he mostly tells us what snark is not. It’s not irreverence or spoof or satire. It’s not Jon Stewart or Stephen Colbert or Keith Olbermann. It’s not irony, at least not irony as exemplified by “the sharpened blade of Swift.” “Snark is like a schoolyard taunt without the schoolyard,” he writes. “Snark is hazing on the page.” Basically, Denby argues that snark is humor as a vehicle for cruelty. Of course, a book titled Cruelty: It’s Ruining Our Conversation hardly jazzes the reader, as it might have been published at any time in the last 400 years. Snark, as a term, feels current, modern: a viral killer for our cacophonous age.

Denby traces snark’s history from Roman poet Juvenal to Spy magazine to Maureen Dowd (see here), then contends it has flowered into an epidemic, thanks to the Internet. “I would bet that half the words written as instant messages or Twitter are snark of one sort or another… even a man as generous as Walt Whitman would be hard-pressed to hear in these flares the barbaric yawp of a free people,” he writes of the electronically enabled hoi polloi who insist on ruining “our” conversation. Snark “prides itself on wit, but it’s closer to a leg stuck out in a school corridor that sends some kid flying.” It’s the bitter bile coughed up by the angry defeated, “repackaging the anger as smear.” It’s the lingua franca of the bullying and the jaded, yet it threatens to choke us all, as the “gas of snark enters the air around us as a corrosive sense that cynicism is hip and everyone is vulnerable.”

To anyone who survived the nineties, these attacks may sound familiar. Denby’s essentially rehashing the arguments mounted against irony, post-9/11, when everyone was dancing briefly on its grave. Denby even exhumes Jedediah Purdy, irony’s premillennial adversary, who bristled at his peers’ morally asphyxiating detachment, calling it “the negative security of perpetual suspicion.” Snark, as it’s usually understood, is irony’s bastard offspring. It’s irony curdled into something even worse. But irony’s critics were wrong then, just as snark’s critics are wrong today.

Let’s examine the charge that snark is, by nature, disenchanted and apathetic, unable to rouse more than a fleeting sneer toward whatever victim stumbles into its crosshairs. “Snark’s aesthetic judgments can’t be trusted; it has too modest a rooting interest in artists actually succeeding at anything,” Denby writes. My first exposure to snark as an Internet term for sarcastic criticism was with the Website, "Television Without Pity." Founded in 1999 by three friends of mine, the site, which wore its snark proudly—its credo was “Spare the Snark, Spoil the Networks”—was a virtual watering hole where TV fans could gather to rant about, snipe at, dismiss, ridicule, and, yes, snark on their favorite shows. It was consistently funny, occasionally mean, and snarky to its bones. But it was never, ever, disengaged. In fact, TV creators used to frequent the site to gather judgments and solicit opinions. These creators recognized the obvious: Just as anyone who ever read the lyrics to a Nirvana song (or Peter Bagge’s comic-book series, elegantly titled Hate) would know that slackers, in their wounded idealism, could be wincingly earnest, any visitor to "Television Without Pity," or similar snarky fan sites, can see that its acid-tongued readers are the best fans a culture could hope to produce— informed, demanding, passionate.

This raises a tricky question that Denby, like most of snark’s critics, never addresses: Where exactly did all this snark come from? Did we simply transform overnight into a nation of venal assholes? I’d argue that slackers adopted irony not as a pose of hipster cynicism but as a defense against inheriting a two-faced world. When no one—from politicians to pundits—says what he actually means, irony becomes a logical self-inoculation. Similarly, snark, irony’s brat, flourishes in an age of doublespeak and idiocy that’s too rarely called out elsewhere. Snark is not a honk of blasé detachment; it’s a clarion call of frustrated outrage.

Take this small example from Denby’s book: In pining for the tough-talking wit of Rosalind Russell and her ilk, he writes, “Whatever its miseries, the country in the thirties and forties was at peace with itself spiritually: We were all in the same boat.” Now, you could calmly point out Denby’s lazy generalization as he reimagines a time of widespread inequality as an idyllic epoch of snappy-pattered togetherness. Or you could respond, “Denby, you dumbass, not only were we not all in the same boat, we weren’t even at the same water fountains.” Sometimes the snarky response is the correct response.

This seems truer than ever before. Consider how much of our public speech—in politics, celebrity, sports—is composed of spin, prevarications, and barefaced lies. If you’re looking for a telltale moment from the last election as to the state of our political discourse, don’t look toward Sarah Palin’s mean-girl snark attacks at the Republican Convention (as Denby does) or to the columns of Maureen Dowd. Look instead at that unguarded moment when commentator Peggy Noonan let slip her true feelings about Palin’s nomination into a hot mike—in contradiction to what she’d just said live on-air. Or consider the oft-made but pertinent point that postdebate commentators reside in “Spin Alley.” When we live in a world where professional analysts on TV can be trusted to simply say what they actually believe, then I think we’ll find that snark will start to turn its own volume down.

Yet in snark Denby sees a symptom and calls it a disease. In a particularly tin-eared moment, he defends, of all people, Tom Cruise. Given the wealth of legitimate snark victims, why pick the star who best personifies the meticulous image-grooming and draconian information control that’s come to characterize modern celebrity? Surely Denby is not blind to the damage done to journalism, and society, by a culture of habitual lies. (Maybe not. He goes on to stick up for Barry Bonds.) Later, Denby notes with patrician dismay that a blog named With Leather declares itself to be “all about the assholes and idiots in the world of sports.” He priggishly clucks at this “mix of adoration, envy, and resentment,” without even a nod to the world of sports being, self-evidently, full of assholes and idiots. Or that there’s a lucrative industry built up around camouflaging that fact from fans, who, not surprisingly, are then drawn to blogs like With Leather.

That’s the recurring blind spot in the criticism of snark. Can it be nasty? Definitely. Is Perez Hilton a repugnant Horseman of the Apocalypse? You bet. Is snark scattershot in its application? Of course—all too often it’s applied like a clawhammer to the soft skulls of undeserving targets. Does the reflexive glibness practiced at certain outposts of the Internet (which, contrary to Denby’s sensationalism, flourish mainly in the niche of media and celebrity gossip; snarky blogs about economics, business, politics, and technology are the rare exceptions) produce, in the regular reader, a wearying hopelessness, building up in your system like mercury poisoning? Yes, I’m afraid it does—though no more so than the wearying hopelessness that might come from watching too much Nancy Grace.

Charges against snark are valid, especially when backed up with cherry-picked evidence. But you could make the same accusations against all strains of humor, throughout history, when misapplied. In targeting snark, Denby sights a trendy straw man, but he misses the important point that snark is not an idea; it’s a conduit—an outrage delivery device. He claims that snark is the favored voice of a generation “who know, by the time they are 12, the mechanics of hype, spin, and big money,” and about this, he’s exactly right. But instead of moving on to denounce the toxic pervasiveness of hype, spin, and big money, he blames the refuseniks who rail against it, claiming that everything seems “lifeless and unreal to them.”

Current events are certainly unreal but snark’s response is hardly lifeless. Snark is not the poison; it’s a home-brewed antidote. It’s the angry heckler at the back of the room. But Denby can only hear the hecklers, not the ridiculous act they’re heckling. When you are living in a nation awash in bullshit, it should not be surprising when people cry out, The nation is awash in bullshit! and maybe throw in an extraneous And your mother dresses you funny! It should also not be surprising, I guess, when people like Denby, ensconced on their porches, their conversations interrupted, tut-tut and tell those people to keep their voices down.

Next: David Denby’s Hall of Shame ♥

[Adam Sternbergh is an editor-at-large at New York and the co-author of Hey! It's That Guy: The Fametracker.com Guide To Character Actors. Sternbergh is a writer and co-founder of Fametracker — w Web site which dissects celebrity and the entertainment industry.]

Copyright © 2009, New York Media LLC

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We Need A 4th Monkey: Do No Evil

We are about to become the equivalent of "good Germans," who ostensibly were not to blame for allowing Hitler to persecute the Jews, and who did not see the Holocaust as it occurred before their eyes. Denial of the truth is universal in many places: Germany, Japan, Serbia, and now the Land O'The Free and the Home O'The Brave. It is difficult to deal with war crimes and the criminals who commit them. The United States must not emulate the "good" Germans, Japanese, Serbs, and other perpetrators and enablers of crimes against humanity. If this is (fair & balanced) national shame, so be it.

[x Salon]
This Modern World — See No, Speak No, Hear No....
By Tom Tomorrow (Dan Perkins)

Click on image to enlarge. ♥

Tom Tomorrow/Dan Perkins

[Dan Perkins is an editorial cartoonist better known by the pen name "Tom Tomorrow". His weekly comic strip, "This Modern World," which comments on current events from a strong liberal perspective, appears regularly in approximately 150 papers across the U.S., as well as on Salon and Working for Change. The strip debuted in 1990 in SF Weekly.

Perkins, a long time resident of Brooklyn, New York, currently lives in Connecticut. He received the Robert F. Kennedy Award for Excellence in Journalism in both 1998 and 2002.

When he is not working on projects related to his comic strip, Perkins writes a daily political weblog, also entitled "This Modern World," which he began in December 2001.]

Copyright © 2009 Salon Media Group, Inc.

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KLAR? A Users Guide For This Blog

KLAR — Keep Learning And Revising. This is a guide to the new version of this blog. If this is (fair & balanced) innovation, so be it.

[x Sapper's (Fair & Balanced) Rants & Raves]

• Above The Banner

Google Search Tool For The Blog
Blog Visitor Count
• The Banner — Blog TitleAdditional Blog Features:
Double-clicking on words for an Answers.com-response
Reminder of the internal search tool for the blog
• Left-side MenuRSS Subscription Options (drop-down menu)
Comments Subscription Options (drop-down menu)
Blog ArchiveSearchable/Clickable By Current Month & Day
Searchable/Clickable By Year (Previous Years)About Me (Blogger Profile)_________________
On the right side of the page, blog entries are in two different font colors: Green Text sets off the blogger's introductory and concluding remarks and the posted text itself is in brown. In brief, Green Text was written by the blogger and brown text was written by someone else. Finally, each blog post concludes with a ♥.

Copyright © 2009 Sapper's (Fair & Balanced) Rants & Raves

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Thanks For Smarts, Class, & Syntax... (And Dick Cavett)

Richard (Dick) Cavett, born a Nebraska boy with cheek, hits all of the right notes about the ceremonies just past in Washington, DC. If this is (fair & balanced) lachrymosity, so be it.

[x NY Fishwrap]
I’m Not Weeping; It’s An Allergy
By Dick Cavett

Tag cloud of this article:

amazed beauty black chief country cry death don dozen embarrassed eyes fail familiar feel forth found give god heart historic history hymn instant isn life lines man marching moment music people produced read sacred single sit someone sorry sound stanzas sympathy takes tears thought true turn watching whole world young

created at TagCrowd.com

These foolish drops do something drown my manly spirit.
– Shakespeare, “The Merchant of Venice”

I had neither planned nor expected to cry.

If it’s true, as some maintain, that men who cry are pantywaists, then I stand condemned.

Not being one of those whose tear-production is either quick or voluminous, I was amazed at how many times, watching the all-day spectacle, I lost it.

And it wasn’t just at the easy times like, say, during a sudden close-up of a tear-streaked elderly black face in the crowd, but also at moments that were just plain “for the country.”

“Historic” and “historic moment” and “historic day” were repeated mercilessly, but remained true. Only a zombie could fail to feel the truth of it.

*****

It seems, doesn’t it, that there are two kinds of tears?

There’s the kind produced by the death of your dog (which just happened to me once again, and about which I always offend someone by asserting that the reason the death of a pet is worse than the death of a human is that you have mixed feelings about all people), or by the loss of a loved one. And there’s the almost opposite kind — but still tears — produced by watching Astaire and Rogers, the young DiMaggio and the young Ali, a sudden Picasso, Ol’ Blue Eyes’s voice, the 23rd Psalm, or any performance by Meryl Streep. Or Obama’s grin for his daughters.

Music bypasses the brain and goes straight to the heart. I wish my life had more of it. Once, years ago, I was taken along to Tanglewood for a concert by the great Zino Francescatti, a name scandalously unknown to me the day before.

Somehow we were in the front row. I was not on TV yet or I would have been even more embarrassed when, repeatedly and to my total amazement, the virtuoso violinist caused me to, as suddenly as a hiccup, give forth with an audible, gurgling sob. Beauty tears, I guess you could call them. Tears of joy.

Aretha can make me cry. So could Ella, and Etta, and Ruth and Billie, and Carmen and Lena, and, and . . . the list goes on and on of female black singers who have unlimited access to my emotional innards.

And yet somehow I was never moved — a limb confronts me and I am about to venture out upon it with a dangerous confession– by the sanctified Marian Anderson.

Her affectations and regal bearing I found embarrassing. It takes a heart of stone not to be moved by just about anybody’s rendering of “He’s Got the Whole World in His Hands,” but her choosing to make “hand” sound too much like “hahnd,” and her queenly personal use of the royal “we” and “our” in both speech and writing sort of put me off. (Sorry to those for whom this admission will place me beyond redemption.)

The refreshingly robust delivery of “Amazing Grace” by Wintley Phipps last Tuesday got to me big-time. And I always worry for that great song, fearing it might grow stale through overuse. It gets trotted out to give instant depth of feeling to mediocre dramas that can’t otherwise spur emotion. One year, it was the theme music of three feature films.

I find most “sacred music” pretty dismal. I don’t have a strict policy of “nothing sacred.” Once past the overly familiar “Mine eyes have seen the glory” stanza of “The Battle Hymn of the Republic,” at least a dozen lines in the sublime later verses — even just reading them — can make me gurgle and (since I don’t own one) ask for a hankie.

At least a dozen lines and passages in it simply cannot be read impassively, from “I have read a fiery gospel writ in burnished rows of steel” to whole stanzas like:

He has sounded forth the trumpet that shall never call retreat;
He is sifting out the hearts of men before His judgment-seat:
Oh, be swift, my soul, to answer Him! be jubilant, my feet!
Our God is marching on.

One moment in that stirring hymn never fails me. Though not much of a believer, I have only to think and hum the first line of one of the less familiar stanzas to induce instant throat stricture:

In the beauty of the lilies Christ was born across the sea,
With a glory in His bosom that transfigures you and me:
As He died to make men holy, let us die to make men free
While God is marching on.

Why was Julia Ward Howe not forced to turn out at least 20 more hit singles?

*****

I felt bad when George Bush was booed.

But only briefly. My sympathy for that man has a half-life of about four seconds.

There was a surprising number of outpourings of sympathy for his having to sit there and, as it was too-often described, “take it on the chin.” Was there ever a chin more deserving of taking it?

“You have to feel sorry for him,” someone cooed. “No. You do not!” I shouted at the screen. I know he “tried” and he “did what he thought was right.” But so does the incompetent surgeon.

What does that excuse?

His brief discomfort “sitting there” can’t have been less endurable than the discomfort of the young soldier describing on the news how he watched helplessly as his gut-shot buddy bled to death on the sands the smirking Texan sent him to.

*****

And a hearty sayonara to that other fellow.

Do freshman philosophy classes nowadays debate updated versions of the age-old questions? Like, how could a merciful God allow AIDS, childhood cancers, tsunamis and Dick Cheney?

*****

As with all good entertainments, there was unintended comic relief.

Not since Robert Goulet forgot the words to the national anthem has there been a moment to rival the chief justice’s blowing his lines, turning The Oath of Office into an Abbott & Costello “Who’s-on first?” routine.

The giggling schoolboy side of me thought it laughable as hell. What would the funny man do next? Drop the Lincoln bible on his foot?

Yet the increasingly curmudgeonly side of me frowned and found it inexcusable. It isn’t as if some tipsy, third-rate actor did it. It was the chief justice of the Supreme Court of the United States!

And he was playing to perhaps the largest audience in world history.

Nerves? Stage fright?

How nervous could a man in his position possibly be? As one of the dozen remaining people in the country with job security — and for life — oughtn’t he be at least relatively calm?

*****

All in all it was, to put it feebly, a day to remember.

And, remarkably, I heard, the mobs of millions produced not a single arrest. All kinds of history was made that day.

What this — as Tennessee W.’s Blanche DuBois says, “young, young, young man” can do for the country and the world is yet to be revealed.

But for starters isn’t it nice having someone in the Oval Office with smarts? And class?

And syntax? ♥

[The host of “The Dick Cavett Show” — which aired on ABC from 1968 to 1975 and on public television from 1977 to 1982 — Dick Cavett is also the coauthor of two books, Cavett (1974) and Eye on Cavett (1983). He has appeared on Broadway in “Otherwise Engaged,” “Into the Woods,” and as narrator in “The Rocky Horror Show,” and has made guest appearances in movies and on TV shows including “Forrest Gump” and “The Simpsons.” Cavett received a B.A. in theater from Yale University.]

Copyright © The New York Times Company

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Praise The Lord (Of Your Choice) — Kristol-Unclear Is Gone!

This is Kristol-Unclear's Farewell Address in the NY Fishwrap. Goodbye, Kristol-Unclear, don't let the door hit you on the way out. If this is (fair & balanced) gloating, so be it.

[x NY Fishwrap]
Will Obama Save Liberalism?
By William Kristol

All good things must come to an end. January 20, 2009, marked the end of a conservative era.

Since Ronald Reagan’s election in 1980, conservatives of various sorts, and conservatisms of various stripes, have generally been in the ascendancy. And a good thing, too! Conservatives have been right more often than not — and more often than liberals — about most of the important issues of the day: about Communism and jihadism, crime and welfare, education and the family. Conservative policies have on the whole worked — insofar as any set of policies can be said to “work” in the real world. Conservatives of the Reagan-Bush-Gingrich-Bush years have a fair amount to be proud of.

They also have some regrets. They’ll have time to ponder those as liberals now take their chance to govern.

Lest conservatives be too proud, it’s worth recalling that conservatism’s rise was decisively enabled by liberalism’s weakness. That weakness was manifested by liberalism’s limp reaction to the challenge from the New Left in the 1960s, became more broadly evident during the 1970s, and culminated in the fecklessness of the Carter administration at the end of that decade.

In 1978, the Harvard political philosopher Harvey Mansfield diagnosed the malady: “From having been the aggressive doctrine of vigorous, spirited men, liberalism has become hardly more than a trembling in the presence of illiberalism. ... Who today is called a liberal for strength and confidence in defense of liberty?”

Over the next three decades, it was modern conservatism, led at the crucial moment by Ronald Reagan, that assumed the task of defending liberty with strength and confidence. Can a revived liberalism, faced with a new set of challenges, now pick up that mantle?

The answer lies in the hands of one man: the 44th president. If Reagan’s policies had failed, or if he hadn’t been politically successful, the conservative ascendancy would have been nipped in the bud. So with President Obama today. Liberalism’s fate rests to an astonishing degree on his shoulders. If he governs successfully, we’re in a new political era. If not, the country will be open to new conservative alternatives.

We don’t really know how Barack Obama will govern. What we have so far, mainly, is an Inaugural Address, and it suggests that he may have learned more from Reagan than he has sometimes let on. Obama’s speech was unabashedly pro-American and implicitly conservative.

Obama appealed to the authority of “our forebears,” “our founding documents,” even — political correctness alert! — “our founding fathers.” He emphasized that “we will not apologize for our way of life nor will we waver in its defense.” He spoke almost not at all about rights (he had one mention of “the rights of man,” paired with “the rule of law” in the context of a discussion of the Constitution). He called for “a new era of responsibility.”

And he appealed to “the father of our nation,” who, before leading his army across the Delaware on Christmas night, 1776, allegedly “ordered these words be read to the people: ‘Let it be told to the future world that in the depth of winter, when nothing but hope and virtue could survive, that the city and the country, alarmed at one common danger, came forth to meet it.’”

For some reason, Obama didn’t identify the author of “these timeless words” — the only words quoted in the entire speech. He’s Thomas Paine, and the passage comes from the first in his series of Revolutionary War tracts, “The Crisis.” Obama chose to cloak his quotation from the sometimes intemperate Paine in the authority of the respectable George Washington.

Sixty-seven years ago, a couple of months after Pearl Harbor, at the close of a long radio address on the difficult course of the struggle we had just entered upon, another liberal president, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, also told the story of Washington ordering that “The Crisis” be read aloud, and also quoted Paine. But he turned to the more famous — and more stirring — passage with which Paine begins his essay:

“These are the times that try men’s souls. The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of their country; but he that stands by it now, deserves the love and thanks of man and woman. Tyranny, like hell, is not easily conquered; yet we have this consolation with us, that the harder the conflict, the more glorious the triumph.”

That exhortation was appropriate for World War II. Today, the dangers are less stark, and the conflicts less hard. Still, there will be trying times during Obama’s presidency, and liberty will need staunch defenders. Can Obama reshape liberalism to be, as it was under F.D.R., a fighting faith, unapologetically patriotic and strong in the defense of liberty? That would be a service to our country.

Editorial Remark At The Conclusion: "This is William Kristol’s last column." ♥

[William Kristol is founder and editor of The Weekly Standard, the influential journal of politics and ideas located in Washington, D.C. He is also a regular panelist on "Faux News Sunday" and an analyst for the Faux News Channel. Kristol received both his A.B. (1973) and Ph.D. (1979) from Harvard University. If there is any justice, Kristol and his fellow neo-con war criminals (who gave us the Iraq War) should go to the dock in the World Court at The Hague. Let Kristol-Unclear, Paul Wolfie, and Perle of Foolishness stand alongside The Dubster, The Dickster, and The Rumster before they all climb the scaffold stairs and dance at the end of a rope like Saddam Hussein. War criminals of a feather should hang together.]

Copyright © 2009 The New York Times Company

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