For the first time in seventy-five years ESQUIRE makes a presidential endorsement: Esquire Endorses Barack Obama for President
Writing about the Esquire endorsement and the very lucid (and chilling) view ESQUIRE has of a McCain presidency, Andrew Sullivan writes in the Atlantic, Yes, something profound is at stake on Tuesday..
YouTube – Charles Meets Barack
“Everybody my age, they’re dying off. … these young people … they are really a united people [the volunteers] and that’s what this country needs right now.”
The perfect gift for your literary friends … with a warped sense of humor.
Chris Buckley on Rush Limbaugh at the Daily Beast.
Hoo boy.
[...]
As these words were going out over the Excellence in Broadcasting network, my father’s corpse was still warm. It was a day of passions, I know, and things get said in the heat of passion. But reading these words, in the cooler air of October—not that this October has been devoid of passion—well, as me old mater might say, I found them a bit…de trop.
That’s French for “a bit much,” and I’m putting it that way by way of stipulating that I am a card-carrying member of the Eastern seaboard, proletarian-despising media elite. My idea of roughage is arugula. I have not to date tasted moose meat and hope never to, unless it is served to me at La Grenouille, by Charles Masson, personally and under glass. As for politics, we elites have always inclined toward the black candidate who grew up with a single mother on food stamps, as opposed to the third-generation Annapolis cadet.
I am having these pensées (more French, learned at an elite New England boarding school) about el Rushbo because a few days ago, following my J’accuse! (okay, okay, I’ll cut it out)—following my “I’m voting for Barack” teachable moment in this space, I received, amidst other howls of outrage and a pink slip from NR, formal notification that I had arrived, career-wise. It took the form of a headline:
LIMBAUGH MOCKS BUCKLEY OVER OBAMA.
[...]
Well, you can mock Christopher Buckley, but reap your whirlwind, sir.
City Room™ – Politics – Excerpts of Seven Year-Old Obama Interview Cause Stir
In 2001, Chicago Public Radio interviewed then Illinois State Senator Barack Obama about civil rights. Over the weekend, someone posted excerpts of the interview, edited to misrepresent Obama’s statements. The item is now catching national attention.
Click here for Obama’s full interviews.
The clips are taken from an interview that aired in January of 2001. Then State Senator Obama is one of three legal scholars interviewed for a show about civil rights. Over the weekend, someone pulled excerpts of the show and posted them to You Tube—and today, the posting caught fire on political blogs, the Drudge Report, and Fox News.
The 4 minute spliced collection of clips portrays Obama as advocate a redistribution of wealth through the power of the Supreme Court. That folds in with some allegations by the McCain Palin campaign.
The twist here is that, when heard in the context of the whole show, Obama’s position is distinctly misrepresented by the You Tube posting. Taken in context, Obama is evaluating the historical successes and failures of the Civil Rights movement—and, ironically, he says the Supreme Court was a failure in cases that it took on a role of redistributing resources.
Singing skull [MAKE magazine blog post on the project]
And a vid of the actual skull singing!
Some people have waaaaay too much time on their hands.
[via a tweet from Make Magazine]
Linkbait: what it is, tips & tricks
A round-up article. Blog? Care about SEO? Much? Huiskes’ article on Linkbait is a good overview w/ tips & tricks.
MTVmusic.com, a very clean, very simple, good looking site full of music videos and only music videos. Lots of older, classic stuff, too, like one of our favorites, Dire Straits’ “Money For Nothing.”
The site looks good and, in our limited testing, works great. And like Hulu, MTV also (smartly) lets you embed their videos on your blog, MySpace or Facebook profile, Tumblr, etc. (see below). It also has the requisite “social” functions like comments, rating up/down, etc.
[via Huffington Post]
Tony Hillerman has died at age 83.
My favorite memory of him was his appearance as guest at the first fundraiser dinner for (what now is known as) the Foundation for Monterey County Free Libraries back in the early nineties. The Foundation had originally asked Robert Campbell to be guest speaker but Campbell answered (hashhish remembering here) something to the effect that Campbell really wasn’t so hot with the public speaking thing. If he had been good at it, Campbell said, he probably would’ve chosen a vocation other than writing. But he knew this guy. …
Hillerman signed one of my hardback first editions before the dinner and kept the audience laughing during dinner with his dry wit and self deprecating stories of bloopers he’d made and his life as a writer. Hillerman all-in-all proved to be a generous, charming, raconteur sort of a guy.
Hillerman did a lot for the mystery-writing community and writers in general, a lot for libraries and readers. He earned the Grand Master Award from the Mystery Writers of America. Talking mysteries : a conversation with Tony Hillerman and Seldom Disappointed: A Memoir are excellent introductions to Hillerman the writer and his writing.
Hillerman’s writing evoked the Southwest. His mysteries were appreciated by the Navajo nation because of his depictions of and respect for the native culture. The Navajo Tribal Council honored him with its Special Friend of the Dineh award in 1987.
He was one of a kind.
RIP.
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