Stickybuffalo.com

With June behind us now, as well, I am halfway to fulfilling this particular promise/threat. Is 2011 softened up, now, and ready to just roll over for the remaining six months? Oh if only we could rely on that.

I’ve read some more books, meanwhile; let’s see if I can remember anything of them.

You Do Understand, Andrej Blatnik. Is the usual paperback novel too large for you? An average USA Today story too long? Then you need this book. It’s a very small book full of even-smaller stories, most of them not really even “stories” but rather vignettes, at most, and in some cases just stray thoughts no longer than your average Tweet. They’re often interesting vignettes and stray thoughts, though, and in one or two cases quite memorable even. For the small investment of time which the book requires, its return is certainly respectable.

The Riddle of the Sands, Erskine Childers. This is an entry in the small genre of pre-WWI British stories attempting to plod the complacent state into recognizing the threat of the Wilhelmine German Empire, the best-known example probably being The Thirty-Nine Steps. You have no idea what I’m going on about here, I suppose; never mind then. Think of it, perhaps, as a kind of boys’ adventure story with slightly older lads, lots of sailing amid treacherous, foggy North Sea waters, and espionage against a dastardly Hun plot. Honestly, I found it rather good; for being more than a century old it shows its age in very few ways, while on the whole seems quite captivating and “contemporary.”

(more…)

Or our internet overlord. One of those two things. Probably the latter unless the site admin has been getting checks in the mail. Whatever! Anyway…

'Chrome phones home a lot'

Look, bright primary colors and playful child’s-toy-ball shapes! We’re so friendly!

So install our software right now goddammit you little—er, uh, hi there! Um, hey look! We’ve convinced online media to write another “news story” about a new cute “Google Doodle” on our homepage. Again! “Don’t be evil!” Bye! See you real soon. And we do mean see you…

You’ve probably read how Al Gore has called out President Obama for his duck-and-cover non-approach to climate change and any sort of progressive agenda on energy or the environment, generally.

I don’t think I even need to comment directly on that; I’ve mostly made my statements on those issues and see no call to rush out another one. I do, however, want to deliver a rebuttal to the snotty, sneering, pinheaded little example of “tut, tut” punditry posted by Frank James at NPR.org.

James begins with a condescending little head-pat, congratulating Gore on style for “one of the piece’s pithiest passages,” then having established this as the high-water mark promptly begins pissing and moaning about every substantive point.

Kicking off the “tut, tut” routine, James opines that “[Gore's] disgust for the news media have [sic] generally handled the climate-change issue is readily apparent,” implying that Gore is obviously placing himself outside the realm of what Paul Krugman calls “Very Serious People” through such a blatantly immoderate attitude. (This of course makes an astonishing contrast with NPR’s agonized, breast-beating guiltfest when a right-wing critic takes aim at perceived media faults in a far-less-erudite manner.)

Later on, James returns to the media, pontificating that Gore “mostly glosses over how that sea change has made media outlets rely more on the Trump and Sheen stories to draw audiences to their web sites. To a large degree, news outlets are responding to their consumers by giving them Trump and Sheen.”

James rakes Gore over the coals for failure to satisfactorily address this or that; the spare declaration “Gore doesn’t really deal with these questions” is obviously meant as a devastating kill-shot. Naturally, though, Mr. James has nothing to say  about the appalling implications of his own defense of celebutard journalism. Or about the directly-relevant point made by Gore, and even quoted in James’ post, that “The referee — in this analogy, the news media — seems confused about whether he is in the news business or the entertainment business.” (more…)