The Sexy Side of Science

This joke is really just for one person. The original is here.

Like It's 1994

A guy I know from the internet (which seems to be where I find most of my friends lately) is an astrophysicist who goes by the nom de web of ScienceTim. When he and his buddies are out at Mauna Kea playing in the snow at the top of the mountain and staring at planets through the telescopes, they use their downtime to make the world's geekiest music video parodies. It helps that one Kelly Fast (PhD, Atrophysics) has an incredible voice and is the hottest scientist this side of Denise Richards in The World Is Not Enough. If you don't believe me, check her out in her first geeky viral video, "Hotel Mauna Kea"



And that, as Jon Stewart would say, is your moment of nerd.

Trolls In The Bunker

"Just Before The Dawn Patrol Awakes" by Thomas Kinkade

This whimsical little inside joke of a photoshop pastiche was inspired by this news story about a hotel with rooms that used to be a nuclear bunker.

THE Bunker is the metaphorical retreat for regular readers of the Achenblog to go when the blog comment section (or "the boodle", Achenblog readers don't have much use for standard interweb terminology. See here for more odd terms) is over-run by trolls, flamers, and other drive-by bomb-throwers. Usually the cause is some tongue-in-cheek wry political piece that humor-impaired readers have taken completely out of context. But the hot-topic trolls get easily bored and leave when the topic returns to nuclear physics or needlework.

Trolls are an interesting internet phenomenon in that they explore the boundaries of internet abuse. They aim to, with only words, provoke extreme emotional responses just for their own amusement. They can be psychopathic, sociopathic, or simply mischievous. They exist to prove just how fragile and easily ripped the social contract is. While there are many definitions of troll, this one from a very good internet bestiary gets to the heart of the modern definition.

A troll is basically one who posts messages intended to insult and provoke per fas et nefas. {snip} For each person who responds, the poster (the troll as a person) will consider that person "caught". The troll (the troll as an action) is considered to have been a complete success if it disrupts beyond repair the normal traffic on a newsgroup or on a messageboard. In extreme cases, trolls are posted by groups of trollers and crossposted to unrelated newsgroups in an attempt to destroy those groups by flooding them with flames and off-topic ranting.

As the political season heats up, troll attacks (or RoveStorms in Boodle parlance) have become more common and more virulent.

The Achenblog has a long history of trolls. We adopt them and give them cute names and turn them away with our strongest weapons: surprise, whithering sarcasm, and a fanatical devotion to The Pope Boss. Heck, I was even one once.

Our latest troll flits around several WaPo message boards making personal attacks on individuals. His disdain for us is undercut by his persistence in pronouncing how banal and boring our conversation is several hundred comments into a post where only regualr readers would dare tread. Someone truly bored would have bailed long before. These comments clearly violate the Terms of Service and can and are deleted by the administrators when they get out of hand. In the meantime, while it is never a good idea to feed trolls, some are just so cute you can't resist patting them on the head while you strangle them by the throat.

BlatantCommentWhoring™: Where have you been attacked by trolls?

Welcome Achenblog Readers

Joel Achenbach was kind enough to link to my blog today, but he's not too savvy with the permalinks (bless his little old media heart). The articles he is referring to are:

Begging Forgiveness
and
Asking Permission
in that order. Just hit the back button after reading each and you will be returned here. If you want to read more of my intermittent ramblings on intellectual property, check out the plagiarism tag.

This post will self-destruct in 36 hours.

Hillary's P.C. Pit Bulls

There is a website out there with the innocuous name of Media Matters that has the following mission statement:

Media Matters for America is a Web-based, not-for-profit, 501(c)(3) progressive research and information center dedicated to comprehensively monitoring, analyzing, and correcting conservative misinformation in the U.S. media.

While that seems like a valuable service, in reality it serves as a water carrier for Hillary Clinton and attempts to silence criticism of her with harsh and casual accusations of sexism. They have become a hotbed of the umbrage industry. No remark is too slight or innocuous to incur their wrath.

Joel Achenbach, a journalist, blogger, and erstwhile humor columnist, had been covering the Clinton campaign when he came up with this observation about her speaking style:

Clinton fought back, but she needs a radio-controlled shock collar so that aides can zap her when she starts to get screechy. She came perilously close to going on a tirade. Volume is critical in these things: Ask Howard Dean.

It seems like a mildy humorous take on a frequent observation about Hillary’s triangulation on the right mix of wonkery and folksiness in her campaign appearances. Media Matters took it another way:

As Media Matters for America has documented…, the media have frequently attacked Clinton for the tone and volume of her voice or laugh. Most recently, following Clinton's appearance on all five Sunday political talk shows on September 23, 2007, the media latched onto Clinton's purported "cackle."

Now Joel never used the word “cackle” or even referred to a laugh, but he is now tarred with the same broad brush that Media Matters has used on a half-dozen other commentators that have noticed something off-putting about Hillary’s tone. While Media Matters did not directly accuse Acehnbach of thought-crime, their stories tend to get picked up by more strident sites with fewer qualms about mudslinging. Feministing, without the benefit of ever reading anything else by Joel in context, said:

Thanks Joel, for doing the work of marking yourself as a misogynist so I now know never to read anything else you write. Shameful.

The remark even got a Malkin Award nomination from Andrew Sullivan, who is normally in favor of Hillary bashing. In all, nearly two dozen blog posts were made as a result of the original Media Matters post, some extremely vitriolic and one Spinal Tap parody that was pretty funny.

In addition to their website, Media Matters runs e-mail campaigns to have subscribers register protests against the employers of public figures they have singled out for action. I don’t know if such a notice went to Joel’s higher-ups, but a few days later he published an apology that has the most obsequious groveling since E. G. Marshall knelt before Zod:

…a single sentence has escaped the confines of the A-blog and gamboled across blogworld like a streaker at the Super Bowl. It was that rather ungentlemanly comment about Hillary at the debate. I won't bother with excuses and context: That one kind of got away from me. Shoulda hit the backspace the moment I typed it. [Was I channeling Mailer???] Regular readers here know that I am not a proponent of coarse, sexist, piggy, knuckle-dragging discourse, especially given my vulnerable personal situation as the lone male in a tribe of Amazons. I think anyone reading this blog also knows that I've praised Sen. Clinton repeatedly over the past year … for running an effective and disciplined campaign (to the point of being accused of being in the tank for her).

It is exactly that discipline that the Hillary campaign is exhibiting. Nobody, no matter how reliably liberal is allowed to go off-message. Achenbach’s 0ne-eighty was just a warm-up for the pressure Media Matters put on a bigger fish, Chris Matthews. Matthews is an Irish Catholic blowhard that revels in his candor and frankness. So of all the senseless off-the-cuff tirades he has made, what remark was the final straw in the minds of Media Matters?

"[T]he reason she's a U.S. senator, the reason she's a candidate for president, the reason she may be a front-runner is her husband messed around."

This is not a unique opinion. In Are Men Necessary?, Maureen Dowd says:

Absent her husband’s strengths, Hillary never would have been First Lady. Absent her husband’s weaknesses, she never would have been the Senator from New York. She owes her election, in part, to Monica.

But by attacking Hillary, Matthews opens himself up for the full political colonoscopy. Media Matters took the Chris Matthews oeuvre and searched for every word and phrase with a feminine and/or derogatory implication and began a high-level campaign to silence him. On January 11th, the site ran seven articles related to Matthews and issued one of their e-mail alerts to have subscribers pressure MSNBC.

As I’ve demonstrated, a single Media Matters article is chum in the waters of the blogosphere. A dozen articles in a few days ignites a feeding frenzy. After a week of fanning the flames with updates, the next e-mail alert is aimed at Steve Capus, president of NBC News. In it, they threaten the spectre of Imus and like all good shakedown artists, only hint at the consequences of not complying:

Mr. Capus, during the controversy last spring surrounding Don Imus' racist and sexist remarks broadcast on MSNBC -- remarks first documented by Media Matters -- we commended your acknowledgement that NBC has a responsibility to protect the network's trusted reputation for fair and equal coverage and to "continue the dialogue about what is appropriate conduct and speech" on its air. In the case of Chris Matthews, I implore you to once again consider the gravity of that responsibility.

That night Matthews goes on his Hardball show and makes a five-minute apology of sorts. Even this pound of flesh does not assuage the group. In the e-mail after that mea culpa, they send out another message and warn:

Again, thank you for your continued support; we've only just begun to play "hardball."

And they mean it. The next day another e-mail rehashes every prior accusation and then lists the people that have expressed public support for Matthews including Joe Scarborough, David Shuster, and Tucker Carlson, trotting out allegedly misogynist and sexist remarks each of them have made. They even take to task Mika Brzezinski for suggesting that in some cases Matthews may have been quoted out of context.

By making Matthews kowtow, they have started a witch hunt. Or at least a hunt for people that have ever called Hillary a witch. They know that if they can’t win the war of ideas, they can silence their opponents with accusations of (age/sex/race)-ism in order to disgrace even the mildest critics of their sacred cows. And as history has proven again and again, once a reign of terror begins, no one is safe. This is watchdog group that needs a muzzle. Or a shock collar.

BlatantCommentWhoring™: Were Achenbach or Matthews over the line, or is this a case of intimidation?

Fisking The Achenblogger

This blog is longtime big fan of both Joel Achenbach and the Achenblog. Joel used to write a humor column for the Washington Post Magazine, the glossy insert where the really long articles go. But it seems that a downturn in advertising from plastic surgeons and high-end furniture stores, made the powers-that-be realize there was only room for one Dave Barry derivative humorist and Gene Weingarten won that sumo-match.

Joel got shuffled off to the Sunday Outlook section where this week he personifies the navel-gazing and deck chair shuffling that has afflicted the dead tree media conglomerates as they become this century’s buggy whip industry He wrote the tongue-in-cheek lament titled “I Really Need You to Read This Article, Okay?”

Let’s lightly fisk this cry for help and see if we can see where the problems are.

Newspaper journalism is different these days: Suddenly everyone is obsessed with eyeballs, page views, "stickiness," "click-through rates," and so on. No one shouts "Stop the presses!" anymore, but they do whimper "Why aren't I on the home page?" The noble product that we manufacture and distribute throughout the metropolis -- the physical thing so carefully designed, folded and bagged -- is now generally referred to in our business as the "dead-tree edition." It gets little respect.

I’m trying to remember the last time what we commonly refer to as fish wrap got respect, but I’m pretty sure it was back when Cary Grant was chasing Rosalind Russell around the copy desk. After all, newspapers got us into a ill-thought out war of imperial expansion. And that was in the 19th century. It's called yellow journalism for a reason. Journalism got a minor ego boost during Watergate but that was back when Carl Woodward was the president’s enemy instead of his stenographer.

Our future is on the Web. This is the mantra in newsrooms. And the Web lets us discover how many readers each article attracts. The data can be scrutinized in real time, moment to moment. Inevitably, this is going to change the way we do business -- excuse me, I mean the way we do journalism.

As opposed to television ratings or box-office grosses. Why is instant feedback a bad thing?

The classic slander against people in my profession used to be "You're just trying to sell newspapers." It wasn't true. We were much too pretentious to worry about the crass concerns of the bean counters. The business model for a newspaper seemed secure. Newspapers were cash machines, with profit margins routinely hovering around 25 percent.

It’s the big fat lazy industries that never see it coming. Detroit in the 70s and 80s never realized that efficient well-made cars would eat their lunch. I have a brother-in-law who has never read a newspaper classified ad. He has furnished his house entirely off of CraigsList. The dead trees were too busy charging ten bucks for the first 25 words so that I could sell a $50 lawn mower that they never saw the truck that hit them. If legal classifieds ever go virtual, every weekly lawn litter paper in the country will go away overnight. Overcharging when you have a virtual monopoly is always a prescription for long term disaster.

The most important Web site for mainstream news outlets is the Drudge Report, once mocked and derided as a tabloid operation with low journalistic standards. But Drudge, which has millions of readers, is the No. 1 source of readers coming "horizontally," via links, into newspaper Web sites.

This is one of Joel’s hottest buttons. His little boutique blog is on the exact opposite end of the erudite versus “linky” scale as Drudge. I never go to Drudge Report to read the flashing light headline, but rather to find the fifty or more opinion makers he has linked to in a clean concise quick loading format. If I want to find George Will, or heaven forbid, Charles Krauthammer, it takes six clicks and two pull down menus to find him on the garish WaPo homepage. Google rode a white screen to search engine dominance but most newspaper webpages look like someone spilled a box of HTML crayons on the screen. People go to Drudge for ease of use, not because they agree with his moronic opinions. God I hope not.

Mackenzie Warren, who runs the online edition of the Fort Myers News-Press in Florida, told the Los Angeles Times that he would use a fake e-mail address to lobby Matt Drudge and his associates to include a link to stories on the News-Press Web site. "I'd say, 'Great story down there in Florida.' Then I'd throw in some incendiary adjective, and next thing you know our story would be at the top of his site and our traffic would be on fire," he said.

I’m astounded that Joel found a quote where a Real Journalist admitted to sock-puppetry, a vile, despicable practice. People get fired for that kind of subterfuge.

There's a favorite saying in the news biz: "Nothin' but readers." Meaning: That's a story that readers are going to devour. A water-cooler story. We used to discern such articles through gut instinct. The best editors had a "golden gut" for news.

They also used to call those “Hey, Martha!” stories. Stuff so whacky you just have to share it. Only nowadays sharing involves everyone in your Outlook Contact list. Nobody knows what is going to be the next YouTube sensation and chasing it is a fools game. Now if you could find that e-mail where Karl Rove says “Fire all those loser lawyers” you would get plenty of links.

There's one hitch in all this: The numbers are squishy. The page-view metric is easily gamed. You may notice that many stories online "jump" to a second page (or third, or fourth, or 25th, etc.) for no obvious reason. That's just an attempt to up the page-view stats. And a page that automatically "refreshes" will have more page views even if it's minimized at the bottom of your computer screen.

One more thing: Good writing remains good writing regardless of platform. The Web tends to be a chattier place, more off-the-cuff, but it is still a place where readers appreciate a well-crafted sentence, a nuanced thought, a fully elucidated thesis and commentary undergirded by fact, honesty and a generosity of spirit.

How about some numbers then? This article is completely fact free. According to Editor & Publisher, WaPo.com is the third most visited online newspaper as measured by monthly unique visitors. Compare those to the audited circulation figures of the dead tree editions.

NYTimes.com -- 14,149,000
USATODAY.com -- 10,611,000
washingtonpost.com -- 9,157,000
LA Times -- 5,267,000
Wall Street Journal Online -- 4,487,000

Those circulation numbers are two years old, so subtract about 25% across the board. In another year only people with exotic birds and incontinent puppies will still get a paper. WaPo is actually a major player in the online game. It’s just that eyeballs don’t sell as much as ink stains at the breakfast table. Until the metrics pay, there is plenty of jostling for position to do.

For a much more detailed primer on web traffic and funny numbers see this Gawker article about rival gossip site PerezHilton.

For example, look at the most-viewed list on any Web site: Opinion dominates. But opinions are worthless without facts to support them. You know the saying: Opinions are like ax handles, everyone's got one. (Substitute something else for ax handles.)

Still looking for the facts in this article. Of the top ten blogs at The Truth Laid Bare, six are rabid political sites, two are linkdumps, one is entertainment gossip and one is a mommyblog. The WaPo most read and e-mail lists seem to be a mix of hard news, opinions, weather and exposes. Your article is 18 most e-mailed as I write this, so you are getting some recognition.

Also on the web you get to swear and shit, unless the use of “ax handle’ was a subliminal allusion to the joke about George Washington’s ax, thus mentally associating with someone’s only temporarily out of print biography. If that was your goal, well played, sir.

My strong hunch is that most readers -- even those crazy Internet people! -- will gravitate to news sources that provide solid reporting and analysis. Get it right and be fair -- these principles are good ones regardless of the platform.

People go to be informed AND entertained. Looks do matter. The only thing keeping Joel from greatness is the ability to insert an “img” tag. Get that protégé of yours to give you some tips. He’s young and tech savvy. He sure knows his way around month-old cross-promotional astroturfed memes.

Citizen journalism, commentary, rants, recipes, travelogues. Readers can produce all this stuff for a newspaper Web site. The professional journalist can be an instigator of a micro-community of readers, but the readers themselves really run the show. And by the way, they do it all for free.

Hey, he’s talking about the Boodle now. Not only do we do it for free, we get our bosses to pay for it. Citizen journalism is fine, but we still need people that with the big rolodex that can meet sources in dark parking garages.

Some of you may disagree with the preceding. I invite you to post a reaction on my blog. And, um, if you don't mind, please "refresh" the page frenetically.

And feel free to link to the people that bother to talk you up and link to you. This New Media backscratching goes both ways.

BlatantCommentWhoring™: Do you still read a hard copy newspaper?

Mea Maxima Culpa

or
My Life As A Sock Puppet

In addition to writing this blog, I am a commenter in a couple of on-line communities. Every virtual neighborhood is slightly different in tone and demeanor, but they rely on a lot of mutual trust to remain stable. One I’m a regular in is particularly tight knit. If you are from there, you know who you are. If you are a curious observer, it’s not hard to find.

In this group there is a core group of regulars that go so far as to socialize and relate with each other in the real world. It has a particularly convivial atmosphere free of much of the humorless earnestness found so many other places on the internet. Like any virtual environment with open doors, it attracts its share of trolls, strawmen, and doppelgangers. They usually raise a ruckus, get bored, and eventually leave. In the meantime all sorts of shit is stirred, hackles are raised, and tension is heightened.

More than once, the issue of treatment vis-à-vis newcomers to this group has been raised hypothetically. Is there a clique and inner circle? Is the barrier to entry too high? Is the group too intolerant of differing opinions? Is there an orthodoxy that can’t be questioned? For reasons I still can’t quite pinpoint I wanted to find out. I would prefer to rationalize my motives but I fear it may have been some morbid mix of hubris, arrogance, and mean-spiritedness.

For this prank, I created a personality typical of the many drive-by trolls the site gets, a rabid libertarian with a propensity to SHOUT in CAPS LOCK. I made some ground rules for myself:

• I would never personally attack another commenter.
• I would never engage in a conversation between my “real” self and my alter ego.
• I would not take my fake opinions seriously.
  
• I would try to be provocative without being offensive.

It’s the last one that was the toughest line to walk. For one thing, I never quite knew where I wanted to go. Did I want to be an obvious caricature? How should I react to responses from people I respect? What should I do if I was confronted? These were all issues I unsuccessfully wrestled with.

I also couldn't decide how outrageous I wanted to be. My first couple of comments were arguably over-the-top offensive and treated as such. It pained me to be rightfully dressed down by people for opinions I didn’t really hold. I was never willing to go full throttle and I began to pull my punches. Not surprisingly, the better I behaved, the better I got treated. The Golden Rule works to some discernable degree. Still, I knew I had ruffled feathers. Not everybody was taking to the kinder, gentler version of my bombthrower.

I also wondered how long and how far I could and/or should take it. I toyed with being a fake blogger and even set up a website with a few red meat posts. I never published the link, but at least one fellow commenter was able to follow enough breadcrumbs to find it. I have no idea how. People on the web have scary mad skilz.

I got sucked into the role playing and found myself expending too much psychic energy on my other personality. I found myself upset when argued with. I got angry when I was ridiculed, even though it was what I was going for. I was even more dismayed when I was ignored. The silent treatment has always been the most brutal punishment to me.

I also had no end game or exit strategy. I imagined I would eventually grow tired and abandon the personality and it would become just another of the many anonymous provocateurs that had come and gone.

But like many sociopaths, I wanted to be found out and stopped. There was an ego effect at work that made me drop clues. My alias was an obvious spooneristic pun that one anonymous member figured out pretty quickly. And of course, I did get caught. I doubt I'm the first multiple personality on that blog, but I am the clumsiest. I posted a comment under my “real” alias that obviously belonged to the golem. I had nearly done this earlier in the day and knew the risk, but I had to get one last cryptic shot in. The second I hit the submit button I was embarrassed, terrified, and relieved. I frantically kept hitting refresh knowing that I would be called out. I apologized to the group, but I know it’s not enough.

I went too far and I’m glad it’s over. The people on the other end of a wire have actual feelings and emotions. To amuse myself I have damaged real friendships. Maturity is respecting rights and accepting responsibility. That is why chat rooms filled with teenagers are such free-fire zones. They haven’t learned that words have meaning and consequences.

Social experiments always reveal way more about the testers than the subjects. Character is defined as how you behave when no one is watching. I learned that I had created one, but that I hadn’t shown any.


CommentBeggingDept.
For Boodlers: Can I find redemption or forgiveness?
For Others: Have you ever posted anonymously or under a different identity just to troll?

Listen: A Vonnegut Meta-Tribute

When I learned of Kurt Vonnegut’s passing away, I dashed of a quick tribute. I was not alone in that reaction. Several of my blogfriends and either mentioned the death or came to my blog to offer condolences. Madame Courtney Whiny Complainy Pants, Esq. actually beat me to the publish button in addition leaving a nice message to me. Bob Braughler also thought of me in his post. Flasshe with typical impeccable musical taste posted the Al Stewart “Sirens of Titan” song. So many others left comments that they thought of me when they head the news. I thank all of you for your sympathy.

I kept my post short and personal because I knew there would be many more much more extensive retrospectives by others much more talented than me. And I was right. By mid-morning Joel Achenbach had posted an appreciation in the Achenblog. In particular, he mentioned a thesis that would be repeated several other places, but not as cleverly as Joel’s take:

His books were teenager books, really: To fully appreciate them, it probably helped to perceive yourself as an alien being, forced by Fate to survive on a completely demented planet. To be 16 years old, in other words.

While Vonnegut is a frequent topic in the boodle, Joel's post led to an outpouring of memories and discussion in the comments section that stayed amazingly on topic, particularly by boodle standards. The day ended up being a virtual cyberwake for a great writer. Many of the links I have used in this post came from boodle-mining there.

The Washington Post had several other great features. In addition to the formal obituary, they published an online photo gallery and book critic Michael Dirda held a hastily arranged online discussion. Later, Bob Thompson used his interview from when A Man Without A Country came out to put together another insightful essay.

I’m also active in the Wonkette and Gawker commenter communities where I made contributions to each of their surprisingly reverent posts. Although I really have no idea what the point of this follow-up post was.

Vonnegut’s death was covered by all the major most news agencies, but most places used the excellent New York Times obiturary by Dinitia Smith. Being the newspaper of record, the Times also put together a comprehensive retrospective that includes links to NYT reviews of most of his novels as well as reviews written by him. NYT also opened up comments for people to tell what their favorite book was. That thread now has several hundred responses.

NPR’s Morning Edition led each news summary that morning with news and they also put together a full page of links to previous interviews and profiles. Fresh Air used a very poignant interview from 1986 about Vonnegut’s days in the Dresden firebombing. Unfortunately, many of the older NPR clips are only available in RealPlayer, which does not play well with others on my computer.

The Charlie Rose Show also put together a retrospective on their April 12 show. The Vonnegut clips begin about 45 minutes in. The clips came from longer interviews that are available on Google Video. One was from when he was promoting the film version of Mother Night. The Vonnegut interview begins about 14:28 into the show and includes a good clip of Nick Nolte and John Goodman from the movie. The other was for the release of Bagombo Snuff Box. This interview begins 27 minutes in and has some great self-deprecating commentary on how his skills have declined. There is also a roundtable discussion with other writers about the process of screenplay adaptations.

Another long audio interview is available from one he did for The Infinite Mind on Second Life. If you can get used to a cartoon version of Kurt lounging around, it is an interesting recap of his vies on technology and the internet.

Some other papers had their own memorials including the UK Guardian. SFGate.com even had an obituary that didn't get published. As a college student, he wrote for the Cornell Sun, and even though none of the current staff were gleams in their parents’ eye when he wrote there, they work under his watchful eye.

On the web nothing dies and interviews from before his death are still available, like the beginning of this one by Douglas Brinkley in Rolling Stone which has the best version of his mock diatribe against the cigarette companies:

The lying bastards! On the package Brown & Williamson promised to kill me. Instead, their cigarettes didn't work. Now I'm forced to suffer leaders with names like Bush and Dick and, up until recently, 'Colon.'

That quote illustrates the increasingly curmudgeonly voice he had in later years. His more incendiary essays were written for In These Times, a socially and politically activist magazine. They have their own tribute page of the essays he wrote for them.

All of Vonnegut’s books are in print and can be bought inexpensively in your local new or used bookstore or online. This doesn’t keep people from trying to find his words for free. The high school lit class staple “Harrison Bergeron” is available here. Trying to pick among his books is a popular parlor game. Salon had Dave Eggers put together a great guide to the novels that includes icons that indicate which of his major themes are addressed. Vonnegut famously graded his own books. For the Achenblog Boodle, I put together my own grouping of the relative importance of his works. That spurred a debate on whether to start at the top or save the best for last. I recommended Cat's Cradle to newcomers, but don't avoid Slaughterhouse Five, which Time magazine named one of the hundred best modern novels.

I have read nearly every word Vonnegut has written, often more than once and frequently in multiple places. Going through all these tender reminisces can result in bon mot fatigue. In addition to the many allusions to his catch phrases (of which yours truly is a serial offender), several anecdotes keep re-appearing including his quip on the occasion of Isaac Asimov’s death with a tongue-in-cheek reference to his own passing.

And there will always be the silly stuff. He will be dogged with the hoax sunscreen speech forever (a real commencement speech can be found here) as well his feud over Venus On The Half Shell by Phillip Jose Farmer. His cameo in Back To School has a funny punchline, but it also gets to the heart of an interesting meta-comment on his works. Who really does understand an authors words? Every time I read one of his books, I find a new angle or an overlooked irony. You should too.

Blatant Link Mongering™: This is perhaps the linkiest post I have ever written. I intend to update and add to it as I find new items of interest. Feel free to add Vonnegut related links of your own in the comments.

Update (3/17/07): Drink at Work linked to this poignant video montage.

Ring My Bell

I hate it when comic strip characters, even ambiguously gay ones, have way more cultural savvy than me. I had never even heard of Joshua Bell until a few days ago, but he is obviously famous enough to be a Dennis the Maestro punchline. It seems Joshua is a rock star in the classical music world and is both single and straight, not that there is anything wrong with that.

Washington Post columnist and noted prankster Gene Weingarten talked Bell into performing for nearly an hour at the entrance to the L’Enfant Plaza Metro station in DC. I am familiar with the place, having used that station for business and pleasure many times. I’ve even met fellow bloggers there since it is an easy to find and well traveled location. If you watch the video, in the far upper right is a newsstand that does way more business selling lottery tickets than magazines, even if you account for the broad selection of titles that are normally delivered in plain brown wrappers.

Weingarten wanted to know if genius would be recognized when presented in a location where it’s not usually expected. His social experiment met with deafening apathy. Bell’s open Stradivarius case collected only 32 bucks, which won’t get you nose bleed seats at most of his performances.

The long feature article has much hand wringing over the lack of culture in society and our failure to stop and hear the roses. They conclude that much of art is in the context. How true. It’s also a matter of matching material and style to the audience.

A much more successful street performer, although I hope to never see him in Carnegie Hall, is Times Square’s Naked Cowboy. On our recent band trip to New York, I was herding a group of about twenty teenagers from the Virgin Megastore to the Sam Ash music emporium so they could gawk at piccolo trumpets and enameled clarinets when I saw The Naked Cowboy drawing a crowd at the point of Duffey Square (which is really a triangle). I led the group across Seventh Avenue so they could gawk in person. One girl in our group even got up the courage to get groped by him. Those pictures are sure to be on Facebook by now.

Naked is a bit of a misnomer, the Naked Cowboy actually wears a hat, boots, and Hanes cotton briefs with his name Sharpied onto the back. His guitar has a tip jar opening and he spends more time posing than playing. One proud pair of parents had their cute daughters tag-team him while taking pictures.

He has a ready set of lines like “Take your time, I can do this all day” as he flicks his tongue suggestively that tends to speed up boyfriends taking too long fiddling with the focus. The weather that day was pretty cool but business was brisk and there was no evidence of shrinkage in the crowds around the Naked Cowboy.

So the next time Joshua Bell wants to do a little busking, I suggest he leave the three million dollar Stradivarius at home and don some tighty-whiteys instead.

Blatant Comment Whoring™: Who is your favorite street performer or where is a good place to see them?

Curmudgeon Found

This post will make sense to perhaps five people in the entire universe, but since I’m one of them and I find it amusing and it’s my blog, here it goes:

We all have an online persona. For most people, their face on the web is close to who they really are. For others, it is a liberating creative outlet. One of the funniest people I know on the web doesn’t even have his own blog. Curmudgeon, as he is known on the Achenblog, (not to be confused with Josh the Comics Curmudgeon) is a larger than life character that tells long rambling shaggy dog stories, coins groaningly bad puns, and has a slightly askew but marvelously perceptive outlook on any issue.

Alas, ‘mudge (as his handle is frequently abbreviated) has gone missing. The details are unimportant, but his character has gone wondering the desert southwest on some sort of atoning visionquest. There have been various dispatches and sightings along the way, but most of these are red herrings and smoke screens. I have to announce that I have found ‘mudge and have the evidence. Look at the two pictures below.

The one on the left was taken in February at one of the infamous bacchanalians known as a Boodle Porching Hour (or BPH) where fans of Joel Achenbach gather to prove there is no level of celebrity too low or obscure to not have a demented and slightly frightening cult of personality fanbase.

The other picture is from the November 4, 2006 episode of Apartment 3G. Perpetual bubblehead LuAnn Powers has just met Bill Gibbs, the occupant of the artist’s loft next to the one she has been borrowing. This man is not named Bill and is clearly the person I know as Curmudgeon. While some may argue that the comic character is wearing suspenders instead of a cummerbund, don’t let an artist’s mistake fool you, he is the real thing.

I think ‘mudge is making a big mistake messing around in the world of comics. The life of an A3G character is doomed. You will be used and abandoned by these “girls” that have shared the same apartment for 45 years. Men in their life never even get past second base with any of the Dorian Gray-like hotties of 3G.

Mudge, give up your attempt at a fresh start in a new medium. The Washington Post doesn't even carry Apartment 3G. You are missed and needed. Get your perky blue bottom back to the Boodle.

Blatant Comment Whoring™: Share your favorite Curmudgeon story or tell me about some outrageous character you know from the blogosphere.

The AchenBoodle Book Drive

When my son was little, I read the bedtime stories. I was angling to pass the George Will Custody Test which says that whichever parent can recite the first page of Cat In The Hat from memory gets the kid. My son wasn’t all that big a Dr Suess fan, but we had Chicka Boom and Ready Teddy down cold. I finally got the boot as bedtime reader when he kept reading ahead of me out of one of the Narnia books.

I figured my job was done, but my son remained an indifferent reader through elementary school. In another bout of parental bonding guilt, I decided we would join a book club. The local library runs book clubs for all ages and had one for middle school aged parent/child pairs. Both people had to read the book for the month and then meet at the library for a group discussion with refreshments afterwards.

The book club facilitator would start each year with a big cart full of candidate books and then take votes on the selections. He would subtly steer the kids to some more issue oriented books rather than just pure adventure or fantasy. Since the demographics skewed slightly male, the choice of books appealed to my son. It also exposed him to some genres and writers he would not normally read. When we joined, there would be about half dozen kids each month. A few years later it had grown to nearly twenty pairs each month.

After three years, my son’s reading level had outpaced the book club selections and we dropped out moved on. As the receipts from the local BigBoxOfBooks will attest, his reading pace hasn’t slowed down any.

I’m not trying to just brag about what a good reader my son is or what a great dad I am. My point is that getting kids to read is more than just teaching them to read. I have an “imaginary” friend on the internet that goes by the name Cassandra S. She volunteers with a reading program in rural North Carolina. Her group does not have the resources of an affluent suburban library system. She has asked our little on-line community for help with her program and we think a great aid would be to donate books for her group. Let me let her say it in her own words:

We're targeting early readers or beginners, and trying to help those that are struggling with reading. Of course, we want to encourage children to go beyond what they think they can do, but we certainly want them to feel successful in whatever they strive for. I work with primary, middle school, and some junior high students.

She also added a list of books recommended by some teachers and librarians including:

Fourth Grade

• Tales of a 4th Grade Nothing, by Judy Blume
• Super Fudge by Judy Blume
• Sarah Plain and Tall by Patricia Maclachan
• Justin and the Best Biscuits in the World by Margaret Pitts Walters
• The Whipping Boy by Sid Flieschman
• How to Eat Fried Worms by Thomas Rockwell
• Ramona Age 8 by Beverly Cleary
• Because of Winn Dixe by Kate DeCamillo

Sixth Grade

• The Giver by Lois Lowry
• The Cay by Theordore Taylor
• The Adventure of Tom Sawyer by Mark Twain
• The Call of the Wild by Jack London
• The Adventures of Ulysses by Bernard Evslin
• Amos Fortune, Free Man by Elizabeth Yates
• Famous Story for Performance Holt, Reinhart, Winston
• Local News by Gary Soto
• Red Scarf Girl by Ji Li Jang
• Journey Home by Yoshiko Uchida
• Myths, and Folktales Holt, Reinhart, Winston

The Library List

• The Farm Book by Jan Peloog
• Little Black Pony by Walter Farley
• The Horse in Harry's Room by Sud Hoff
• Cowboy Slim by Julie Danneberg
• All the Pretty Horses by Susan Jeffers
• No Howling in the House by Erica Farber
• Dinosaur Hunters by Kate McMullan
• Fox Be Nimble by James Marshall
• Grasshopper on the Road by Arnold Lobel
• A Garden for Miss Mouse by Micheala Muntean
• No Carrots for Harry by Jean Largerman
• Frog and Toad Together by Arnold Lobel
• Pigs Pigs by Gail Gibbons
• Buck-Buck the Chicken by Amy Ehrlich
• True Blue by Joan Elste
• My Little Red Car >by Chris Demarest
• Franklin's School Play by Pauletter Bourgeois
• Clifford's Family by Norman Bridwell
• Moongame by Frank Ash
• The Reason For a Flower by Ruth Heller
• Lady and the Tramp >by Disney
• Miss Piggy's Night Out by Sara Hoagland Hunter
• The Great Pet Sale by Mick Inkpen
• Bunnies and Their Grandma by Amy Ehrlich
• Fievel's Big Showdown by David Kirscher
• Leaf Jumpers >by Carole Gerber
• Find Nat by Kelli Foster and Gina Erickson
• Daisy Rabbit's Tree House by Penny Dale
• Humpty Dumpty as told by Kin Eagle

Cassandra added:

Now if any of you know of good African-American stories, I would love those very much. The lists given to me contain just a few of those stories, but not many. The public library here has just a few, but I know there are so many out there even if I cannot get them here. I would love those stories as well as the above lists. And this isn't all, folks. I have another list to get from the school this morning. And please feel free to throw in your favorites. I want the children to have access to a lot of what goes on in this world, and it can all begin with books. Thanks again.

She also mentioned the need for some professionally published series aimed at teaching reading skills.

Seedling Publications and access their leveled reading site. Choose from emergent and fluid readers categories.

Lerner Classroom, at this site we have different categories of books for K-3, 4-6 grades. I would love to have the science, health, and earth series. If possible the classroom sets would be wonderful.

Scholastic, at this site one has picture builders, skill builders, character counts, early readers, and the list is endless. Any choice from here would be great.

My family had a big purge of the kiddie books a few years back, but I wondered how many of my readers had extra books that could use a second home in place that needs them. Books even get a big discount at the post office, so really all you would be donating are books your kids have outgrown and a little postage. I'm sure new books would be appreciated as well. To protect Cassandra’s privacy, I don’t want to give out a mailing address except to people that e-mail me at yellojkt [AT] yahoo [DOT] com.

Since my audience consists of mostly LostGooglers® searching for unsavory topics, I would sincerely like to have some links to this post from more reputable sites to help spread the word. Because getting kids to read is hard, but the rewards are amazing.

Feeding The Blog

I have a whole ritual with the Sunday paper. Naturally, I read the comics first. But before that I sort all the ads that come wrapped with the comics. My wife reads Parade, so I set that aside. I also pull out the Best Buy and CompUSA ads so I can indulge in a little technolust. I usually set aside for later reading the Book Reviews and the Washington Post Magazine section to read after I finish the main paper. Articles in the magazine tend to be very long and more than I want to tackle on Sunday morning.

Lately though I have had to at least skim through it first. I have become a regular reader of Gene Weingarten’s Chatological Humor (Tuesdays With Moron) chat that appropriately enough happens Tuesdays at noon. Gene also writes a humor column in the back of the magazine and this weekly column is now syndicated trying to get it’s share of the Dave-Barry-is-on-hiatus-and-we-need-to-fill-that-newshole-cheap market.

As such, his column is frequently mentioned in the chat. To be current, I’ll quickly read the column on the back page of the WaPo Magazine before setting it aside and returning to the comics. The WPM is also where they hide the Sunday Dilbert, so I have to fan through the magazine to find that.

Yesterday I ran across a headline with the word blog in the title so I stopped and read that too. Joel Achenbach is another WaPo staff writer who keeps an honest to God blog called, either unoriginally or cleverly, depending on your viewpoint, the Achenblog. His article titled The Tail That Wags The Blog, which since it really saw print and thus technically narrowly avoids being a meta-blog post, is the funniest and truest thing I have ever read about blogging.

Keeping a blog current is insanely harder than I thought. At any given time, I have a half-dozen or more good ideas, but finding the time and energy to actually execute the concept can be exhausting. A blog is a ravenous beast that needs to be kept current or it falls into neglect.

I read a lot of magazines lately instead of books. It’s not that I think of magazines as being better than books; they just have a greater sense of urgency. You might as well not read a month old Time magazine, but that 800 page Neal Stephenson novel isn’t going anywhere anytime soon.

I probably post to my blog rather than other needed cyberchores out a sense of duty and compulsion. The Achenblog gets thousands of hits daily and regularly collects over 200 comments per post. Thank goodness I don’t have that sort of pressure. How about them sour grapes?

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