Archive for the ‘blogs’ tag
Blogathon anyone?
Maybe one day I too will summon the mental and physical dexterity to pull this off. Basically, Jen McCreight at Blag Hag is currently in the middle of a 24-hour blogathon that began at 7 a.m. PST today and runs through 7 a.m. PST July 24. From what I understand, this is her third year doing the event, which raises money for the Secular Student Alliance. One post every 30 minutes for 24 hours. Shew. Gives me carpal tunnel syndrome just thinking about it.
Top 10 things that should disappear immediately (but probably won’t)
1. Balloon boy — The next ridiculous “weird” news story that, in truth, deserved two paragraphs of coverage and nothing more, yet the media ballooned this thing into the ether (sorry it was irrestible), and we groan collectively.
2. Glenn Beck — We only need to watch Beck’s on-air sniveling, scare-mongering for about two minutes to realize that there’s little in the way of Painean common sense in that noggin.
3. Michael Jackson — Why dredge up yet another posthumous track from another dead pop star? The tradition is an old one, from John Lennon to Kurt Cobain to Tupac. This reminds me of Dave Chappelle’s hilarious skit about Tupac’s song from 1994.
4. Limbaugh, Al Sharpton — Limbaugh (thankfully) won’t be an NFL owner (at least not right now). Rush writes a column for the The Wall Street Journal. Sharpton threatens to file a lawsuit. Again, groans. Both are polarizing figures and are as predictable in such polarization as the sun rising in the east and setting in the west.
5. Dave Letterman’s personal life — Although it was commendable in some rights that he told his story of bribery and sexual actions on the air, we really don’t care. Just give us jokes, Dave. And if you couldn’t tell, the audience wasn’t even clear whether you were jesting or were actually serious.
6. Anna Nicole Smith — Drinking from a baby bottle? That-a-way to make your life come full circle! Get yourself so screwed up that you are reduced to sipping a sedative straight infant-style.
7. Rod Blagojevich — “Celebrity Apprentice?” ‘Nuff said.
8. Celebrity Apprentice, Dancing with the Stars, etc — Again, groans.
9. Larry King — Next four guests on the show: Balloon boy (See No. 1), Suzanne Somers, George Lopez and Maria Shriver. Hard-hitting, important interviews there. I’m not sure at what point King became irrelevant, but the point has long-since passed.
10. Blogs as news aggregates — I don’t make this final point to toot my own horn. In fact, I wish I could write more, but the simple nature of my approach to blogging limits how much time I can devote to it (as I also write news stories, sports stories and usually a column for a newspaper each week). Rarely, very rarely, I might post a single photo and a single sentence and make that “my” statement for the day, but this guy, Andrew Sullivan, is an aggregater among aggregaters. In one day (Oct. 17), I counted more than 20 posts. On another day, I counted about 40 … in a single day! True, he’s a good writer and reporter. His “Dear President Bush” for The Atlantic is exceptional, and I highly suggest folks take a look at it, but we don’t see much of that writing in his blog. Of the 20-something posts I counted today, most of the quotes from other sources were longer than the actual original content of the post itself. One “post” was just a picture of a painting with a caption from another source, saying how the painting, once valued at millions of dollars, was bought for $19,000.
I’m highly hostile of blogs of this kind because they simply don’t say anything. Sure, Sullivan has surely said plenty in his other endeavors, but why have a blog if you aren’t going to say anything? Anyone with a Web browser can find a bunch of quotes and links and put them together. I refuse to roam the Webosphere and collect a collage of news items every single day. Anyone can regurgitate information previously posted elsewhere. Indeed, it’s hard for me to imagine Sullivan having time for other endeavors, when on this day, he “blogged” from 8 a.m. to nearly 9 p.m., cobbling together these 20-something posts of quotes and pictures.
This is the predominant reason I stayed away from blogging as long as I did. I saw it as a short cut, something akin to a slightly wordier Twitter, in which folks who aren’t really writers (Sullivan really is a writer; I just use his ill-conceived blog as an example), turn to this medium to espouse their opinions in a pithy sentence or paragraph, but who don’t really have the wherewithal to flesh out full arguments. Thus, I decided if I were to pursue a blog of sorts, it would actually contain well-thought-out opinions. My posts, then, are more like essays; that’s why they come less frequently than others but with more content. They are an attempt to inform and make people think about concepts and ideas other than, perhaps, what they normally would.
The above points, however, have the opposite effect, and this is the reason why I made this list.
Note: All but the last point on this list were referenced from CNN, the most trusted name in news.
Palin’s helter-skelter media relationship
Those who blog anonymously, behind some WordPress (or Blogspot or whatever) screen name that shields you from the blowback of your own views, you are bored, pathetic liars, at least according to Sarah Palin, in these comments.
“Bored, anonymous, pathetic bloggers who lie annoy me….I’ll tell you, yesterday the Anchorage Daily News, they called again to ask — double-, triple-, quadruple-check — who is Trig’s real mom,” she said, in an interview to be published in the magazine’s (Esquire’s) March issue.
The Anchorage Daily News’ editor supplied his response here, attempting to validate rumors (the real story was, in fact, to the advantage of the Palin family!) that the “nonsense” heard surrounding the kid’s true birth mother, was just that.
Over the last year or so, Palin has had an odd relationship with the media. Recently, she has been conducting a voluminous amount of interviews after her ticket lost the election — perhaps as early preparation for Campaign 2012. But prior to Election Day, she was scarcely allowed to be interviewed, and the few sit-downs she did were disastrous. Also, for all her wailing against the media, she seems to now be using it in some way toward her own ends. Interesting. The fact is that if she is to advance her political career, perhaps to a White House run in a little less than four years, she will need the media — and she knows this. If that’s the goal, it would probably also behoove her to read more, particularly the media outlets she bashes, and to learn more, so that when asked which newspaper she regularly reads for information, she can not only be more qualified and well-informed to make a case for herself on a presidential ticket, but be able to give intelligent answers to convince the rest of us — if that’s even possible.
