Iowa Senator Tom Harkin’s annual steak fry featured Sheryl Crow and comedian Tom Arnold. Crow performed for over half an hour, playing hits like “A Change Will Do You Good.” Between songs, Crow told the crowd she “feels like four more years of Bush is dangerous.” [Audio of performance 47 min]
World Peace Conference
A Hollywood director with a reputation for making violent, bizarre films is headlining what’s billed as a world peace conference in southeast Iowa this weekend. Known for movies like “Mulholland Drive,” “Blue Velvet” and the T-V series “Twin Peaks,” David Lynch is also on the board of directors at Maharishi University in Fairfield. He says perpetual world peace will result by assembling eight-thousand people to continuously practice transcendental meditation. Lynch says “It brings peace, real peace, and peace is not just the absence of war. This real peace, being enlivened, drives negativity away like light drives darkness away.”
The Rule of Four
This novel by Ian Caldwell and Dustin Thomason is not a gripping story but I like the characters and the way the speak.
- A son is the promise that time makes to a man, the guarantee every father receives that whatever he holds dear will someday be considered foolish, and that the person he loves best in the world will misunderstand him. [Prologue]
- To count a hundred million stars, at the rate of one per second, sounds like a job that no one could possisbly complete in a lifetime. In reality, it would take only three years. The key is focus, a willingness not to be distracted. [Pg 7]
- We made a friendship out of nothing, because nothing was the the heart of what we shared. [Pg 48]
- The generational clock ground out another revolution, and time turned friends to strangers. [Pg 71]
- The only things people can ever know about you are the ones you let them see. [Pg 97]
- My mind is a flock of pigeons, fluttering away. All my thoughts are shit and feathers. [Pg 130]
Most Tivo’d
for the week ending 09/19/04:
1. The Apprentice [No]
2. CSI: Crime Scene Investigation [Yes]
3. The Sopranos [Yes]
4. Joey [No]
5. Survivor: Vanuatu, Islands of Fire [No]
6. The West Wing [No]
7. Six Feet Under [Yes]
8. ER [No]
9. CSI: Miami [Yes]
10. Will & Grace [No]
Five ass-related words (5ives)
Merlin thinks he uses “ass” a lot:
1. metric assload (n.) – a lot
2. asshat (n.) – willfully ignorant person
3. assy (adj.) – unacceptably low-quality
4. big-ass (adj.) – large
5. asstacular (adj.) – really bad
Jefferson City Art in the Park
Jefferson City had a little “Art in the Park” thing today. I thought it much better than these things usually turn out. I especially liked the Statue of Liberty piece and the giant eggs.
Radio Iowa interview with Laura Bush
O. Kay Henderson’s exclusive interview with the First Lady continues to generate interest by other media outlets. She’s scheduled to appear on C-SPAN’s “Road to the White House” (a weekly look at the candidates, issues & events shaping the 2004 Presidential race). The program airs Sundays on C-SPAN at 6:30pm ET & 9:30pm ET.
Journalism, Big Media, Objectivity, etc.
There was an interesting email exchange between between a couple of our reporters this week. David Brazeal’s comments seemed…sponge-worthy.
I think more likely we’re seeing is a gradual destruction of the great farce of 20th Century elite journalism–that we can do our jobs objectively. Dan Rather thinks he’s objective and Fox News is not. Fox News thinks it’s objective, and Dan Rather is not. The fact is, neither of them is objective. We might very well try to be objective, but it’s impossible for anyone with an opinion.
The problem for big-time journalism outlets is that people have figured this out. Most people don’t fault Dan Rather for being a liberal; they fault him for acting like he’s not. And the more these big institutions cling to this faade of true objectivity, the more obvious it will become to more people. As consumers get more sophisticated, they’re going to demand more source material, more first-person accounts, more access to opposing viewpoints. And they’re going to want it without the filter we’re used to providing. The question is whether we figure out a way to give it to them, or we go down with the ship.
How do you build web traffic?
1. You can buy ads in the Super Bowl. You can rent billboards on the Interstate. You can trade links with a thousand websites nobody gives a shit about.
2. Or you can create unique, compelling, relevent content. People interested in that content will tell other people interested in that content and on and on.
If you can’t do #2, it doesn’t matter if you can do #1. And the music comes out here.
If you watched any TV news (CNN, CBS, NBC, ABC, Fox) during the past 24 hours you might have seen the story about Laura Bush commenting on The Memos. The audio was from an interview the First Lady did with Kay Henderson, the news director of Radio Iowa, our statewide radio news network headquartered in Des Moines. Apparantly, this was the first comment by someone in the Bush camp on “the documents.” Just about every news organization in the country picked up Kay’s piece. And she had the savvy to send them all to RadioIowa.com.
Stats: 72,770 words
According to my Blogger Profile, I’ve written 72,770 words since I started this journal in August, 2001.