These are stills captured from video shot March 2006 in the Lower 9th Ward of New Orleans specifically the area between N. Claiborne, Florida Ave, Tupelo and Tennessee.
These are photos and stills captured from video taken August 2006 of the Lower 9th Ward specifically the area between N. Claiborne, Florida Ave, Tupelo and Tennessee.
I've been a hardcore Mac person most of my life. From the Mac Plus to the boxy Quadra to the Blueberry iMac to the tidy whitey iBook I'm typing this on, I've had 'em all. When I bought my retail business it came with a PC that had a kick ass POS system. When I closed the business, I brought it home and made it our main home computer since it's newer and more powerful than the aformentioned lap top.
I'd never had a trojan horse virusy thing until today. The HP PC went berserk and was seized by a message telling me that the Feebs were coming to get me if I didn't race out and buy a cash card at CVS. I was allegedly an internet scoflaw being punished for scofflaw-itude. I needed my business PC guy to help me regain control from the Ransomware virus. He did it from Denver too. Thanks for logging on, Dave.
Now that the bastard has been vanquished I'm using that anti-malware scanner thing a helluva lot more often. Hmm, I wonder if I can somehow blame Carly Fiorina or Meg Whitman for this...
In a statement on its Italian-language website, the collective accused the Catholic Church of being responsible for a long list of misdeeds throughout history, including the selling of indulgences in the 16th century and burning heretics during the Inquisition.
"Anonymous decided today to besiege your site in response to the doctrine, to the liturgies, to the absurd and anachronistic concepts that your for-profit organisation spreads around the world. This attack is not against the Christian religion or the faithful around the world but against the corrupt Roman Apostolic Church."
It also accused the Vatican of being "retrograde" in its interfering in Italian domestic affairs.
True dat. The Vatican was quite fond of Silvio Berlusconi until he insisted on walking about with his dick hanging out. Silvio shoulda zipped up both his pants and his mouth.
Speaking of Silvio's enablers, it remains astonishing to me that men who are supposedly celibate make the sexytime rules for their flock. Most Catholics ignore them unlike a certain Presidential candidate who wears sweater vests and talks about man-dog sex. (Do you think any sweater vest clad men have had sex with a dog similarly attired? I certainly hope not.) Anyway, I don't know about you but I rarely listen to men in dresses except on Mardi Gras when I have no choice. It's the price I pay for living in New Orleans...
You know what else hacks me off about the Vatican? The fact that real life Popes are as not as entertaining as Tony Quinn in Shoes Of The Fisherman or Rex Harrison in The Agony And The Ecstasy. Rex was so awesome in that film that he made one *almost* forget the huge piece of wood that he played his scenes with. Hmm, can ham be wooden? If so, Charlton Heston is either the hammiest piece of wood or the woodiest piece of ham ever. Take your pick.
Some day I'll have to tell y'all about my fleeting encounter with Quinn in a bar in the Plaka in Athens longer ago than I care to admit. End of teaser. Here's Pope Zorba:
Forgive me for the post title. It shows, however, why the Weiner Tweeter Tube story has legs: his name. The Washington press corps is easily bored by stuff like budget numbers and Medicare: they'd much rather be making juvenille jokes about the honorable member from Noo Yawk's, uh, member.
The most ridiculous part of this is that Andrew Breitbart is back on cable teevee peddling this dumbass story. Has this fucker ever been right about anything in his life? Not that I know of. I recall a time when this schmuck would have been laughed off the national stage instead of being recycled like what he is: the turd in our national punch bowl. Drink that, MSM.
My hunch is that Mr. Weiner's account was hacked and that someone hoped that this would turn into a new craigslist Congressman-type scandal. (FWIW, I've been hacked. My personal email account sent out viagra spam awhile back and after a few bad jokes at my expense, I changed my passwords and moved on.) It's probably no coincidence that it happened not long after the special election to replace that putz. It's also no coincidence that it got picked up when the MSM got bored with the nitty gritty details of government and was ready to bite into a juicy faux scandal featuring a man with a punnable name.
It's true that Weiner hasn't helped his cause with some of his public comments BUT turning this tempest in a twitter teapot into a national scandal is preposterous. It's time for everyone to move on and start roasting weenies and stop roasting Weiner. Yeah, he's a hot dog but he's not a dumbass, so let's get back to debating important shit like whether or not Snooki's trip to Italy will result in a diplomatic incident or, even better, a proposition from Prime Minister Berlusconi. That would take us full circle from hot dog to horn dog...
Here's Weiner giving an account of this mishigas in more than 140 characters to Rachel Maddow:
Of the six car ads run during the Super Bowl, that chauvinistic Dodge Charger "Man's Last Stand" ad was scored as the least effective across the board. It also, surprising no one, came in dead last in with female viewers, per the 2010 Hoffman/York PURSEuasion Report on Super Bowl advertising effectiveness to women. According to a report from Kelley Blue Book, while the ad got very high ratings on a quick poll asking Bowl viewers to name favorite ads, that didn't translate into increased traffic on kbb.com's model information pages, which is used as a measure of ad effectiveness in generating auto sales. On that scale, again the Dodge Charger came in on the bottom.
Okay, so beer and cars is maybe an apple/oranges comparison. Generating interest in buying a car is a different proposition than making people spend money on booze, sure. And what about the question of further the "domineering women controlling their men" stereotype in advertising? Well, Heineken's approach with its American advertising has leaned toward the less offensive men and women sure are different stereotype but remember the "soccer swindle" ad was aimed at an Italian market where sexism is more entrenched. Even still, though, the Italian ad "punchline" not only relies on a feel-good surprise, it turns the tired "us vs. them" conflict on its ear, saying, literally, "Let's all enjoy this together!" This, as opposed to the reinforcement of chauvinistic resentment that fueled the Dodge ad fail.
So, hey, if you're going to spend a gabillion dollars on a single ad, why not end up with something that's not only massively effective, not only twists a stereotype, but leaves everyone involved with a smile on their face?
This is the most interesting thing I've encountered all week. I'm fascinated by how people have an effect, how they move events and issues toward a discernible goal, how they produce, how they are viable, what lessons they can teach.
It's true: we need all kinds of minds.
Temple Grandin's TED talk:
This classic scene from Sorkin’s “American President”
resonated with me today. In the argument between the president and Lewis, you
get the leadership metaphor of people crawling across the desert, looking for
an oasis. When they show up and it’s only a mirage, they’ll drink the sand
anyway. Lewis argues that it’s because they’re thirsty for leadership. The
president says it’s because people don’t know the difference. My take: In some
cases, it doesn’t matter, as long as we realize it and stop drinking the sand.
This amazing piece by Amy Kingsley shows us all what we
already know on this site: when you make journalism about the toys, you will
end up losing. The Las Vegas Sun is only the most recent of those who have
found that at the end of the Internet rainbow, there’s no pot of gold or
anything else of value. The article details the “deal with the Devil” they
found themselves in when the Sun kept sinking and eventually was sucked into a
JOA with the Review-Journal that essentially made the Sun an insert into the
LRJ. However, the Sun took the lemons and made some awesome lemonade. Instead
of simply parroting the news that the LRJ would publish, the Sun decided to
become more investigative and more of a community voice, which won them great
praise and a number of awards.
However, the biggest swing came when Rob Curley (as the
article describes him “a self-described Internet nerd from Kansas”) came in to
recraft the paper’s Web site and boldly strike out in search of profit online. The
mantra in Internet news has been for a while that Curley can conjure gold,
unicorns and Internet win by simply arriving to run your show. He gained fame
in the late 1990s while in Topeka, Kansas by moving from a state-house reporter
to a new media editor. His work on the site of the Topeka Capital-Journal was
radical and amazing, as he focused on things people cared about: local politics
and local sports. His work was a hit and he moved up to the Lawrence
Journal-World, following a similar pattern and saw similar successes.
In a career of any professional on the cusp of greatness,
there is always a defining moment. It’s the moment where you decide if you want
to be the big fish in the small pond or try your luck at surviving life in the
big pond. There are high school basketball coaches who stay in one town for a
lifetime and become a legacy, while others strike out for fame and fortune on a
bigger stage and either make or break it. Athletes take bigger contracts and
either shine or wither under the bright lights of L.A. or New York. Local actors
either make it to Hollywood or land in the Valley. In short, you can stay where
you are comfortable, or you can go for broke. Curley did the latter.
Riding a crest of adulation that cast him as the “next big
thing,” Curley moved to Florida to help the Naples and Bonita Daily News engage
in innovation and convergence. Less than two years later, he moved to
Washington, D.C., where he led the Washington Post into the world of
“hyperlocal” coverage. Again, two years later, he landed in Nevada.
While his act played well in Kansas, it gradually became
more and more threadbare with each move. Friends from Florida who worked in
Naples told me that Curley had become a “big picture guy.” This roughly
translated into “I’ll punch out the ideas, bless them as coming from Rob Curley
and you will love them because they are certified Rob Curley ideas. Then, you
guys go implement them while I head off to something more important.” He wasn’t
a detail guy nor was he around much.
I got a chance to see him at a media convention in D.C. and
I found myself staring at the giant images of high school football and local
restaurants he put up. “We cover every Friday night game like it’s the
Redskins,” he bragged. However, several of us snapped out of the glitz haze and
noticed that this really didn’t have a lot of steak behind the sizzle. It was
great Web, but there wasn’t much journalism there. Once the excitement of
seeing your 15-year-old kid catching a pass on the WaPo Web site wore off, what
else could they do to keep you coming back? The answer was “not much” as the
Post began dismantling the hyperlocal site soon after its launch. Curley was
already cutting a deal to head to the desert.
The Sun’s Web site essentially seceded from the paper under
Curley’s watch, wrapping itself in the trappings of “cool ‘Net folk” such as
video games, nice furniture and more. While the paper journalists bristled when
dealing with the splashy nature of Curley’s dominion, it was clear they
probably wouldn’t have hated him and his folks so much if they actually brought
some serious game to the table. Instead, according to Kingsley, they launched a
failed TV project, crashed out the Web site with coverage that few wanted to
see and was at least partially to blame for massive cutbacks at both operations.
It’s now 2010 and if his pattern holds, there’s probably
another leap coming in Rob Curley’s future. Someone, desperate for an improved
Web world, will pony up big cash and heavy prizes for this messiah of the
Internet. What’s funny about this is that people are looking at Curley like
he’s the answer, just like when we’re fat, we look for a pill or a fad diet to
cure us. The pill won’t make us thinner, but exercise and good nutrition will. Rob Curley isn’t the answer, but at one
point, he did have the answer.
He just forgot it.
As a Kansas kid, he knew Kansas. He went to Emporia State
and then worked as a reporter at the Ottawa Herald in Kansas. He moved to
Topeka and then to Lawrence. He knew what made the people of Kansas pay
attention to something. He understood his folks and their background. Just like
a pastor knows his flock, Curley knew how to reach those people. However, to
borrow a phrase, he’s not in Kansas anymore.
The Internet is about niches. It’s about knowing how to
reach a very specific audience with a very specific message. It’s about
understanding people in a geographical area or an interest area. That’s why
Curley succeeded and that’s why Curley failed. It took him more than half his
life to know what the people of Kansas wanted. He then packed up his “Web in a
box” approach to journalism and peddled it out of the back of his covered
wagon. It wasn’t specialized to their needs and he wasn’t interested in pouring
his soul into learning about Naples or D.C. or Las Vegas. Thus, when he hit
them with local politics and local football, they wondered, “What the hell is
this crap?”
Hiring Rob Curley to run the Web for the L.A. Times or Beaver
County Tidbit in Flea Speck, Washington isn’t going to make that site a winner.
In fact, he’s more likely to kill it than save it. If you want to put together
a site the people want to see and are willing to pay to view (or at least
advertisers are interested in), you have to find out who you are trying to
serve, what they want, how they want it and how best to get it to them.
This isn't another Balloon Boy post but it starts somewhat adjacent to it, so stay with me here. In her post the other day, It Doesn't Concern You, A. talked about feeling "pressured" to have an opinion and/or be invested in hyped-up stories "that have nothing to do with anything."
But increasingly I feel pressure by the media-sociological machine to
have a personal opinion about other people's lives and that gets on my
damn nerves. It's all news of the weird now, all little personal
outrages, all the time, and none of it matters to anyone.
She was looking at this in the context of laziness and stupidity in the media, and while I don't disagree with her on that, I tend to focus on a different part of the elephant than she does. As I, and others, noted in the comments on that post, advertising and marketing and their attendant industries drive the media machine, not customer opinions, needs, or wants. Like heretic said, "They sell eyeballs to advertisers." And sure, the assumption is that the shinier the inanity du jour, the more eyeballs they'll sell, but it's more than that even. Our opinions, good, bad, or indifferent, our traffic patterns, our consumption of media old and new, are increasingly just so many data points in a huge dynamic, mine-able aggregate.
Today, pretty much as I write this, at the Web 2.0 Summit, Microsoft will announce two separate data-mining deals, with Facebook and Twitter. Data minutia from tweets and status updates will update the new Bing search engine service. In real time. Think about that for a minute.
The pair represents the hugest trove of real-time and content-sharing information, generated from their massive data streams.
The deals with Microsoft will probably include a payment of several
million dollars to both Facebook and Twitter, along with various
revenue-sharing proposals that would give them a piece of the
advertising revenue made from search results.
Doing these kinds of data deals with big search players does make a
lot of sense, since it would be hard for both companies to turbocharge
their own search engines without running into the big cash-laden guns
at both Google and Microsoft, which recently launched the Bing search
service.
UPDATED: Google just announced its own data deal with Twitter, which certainly validates Twitter's insistence that their Microsoft deal would be non-exclusive. Next?
One of the first blog-based books, the anthology Special Plans examines Feith's role in misleading America into war. Buy from Amazon and William, James & Co.
One of the first blog-based books, the anthology Special Plans examines Feith's role in misleading America into war. Buy from 