It’s gonna be an interesting day in Washington, and if it gets too cold or something there’s always the Elvis exhibit at the Newseum.
* * *

• The blondes. A camera man was assigned to grab close-ups of as many beautiful blonde young female athletes as possible. There are scores of attractive blonde women competing and the audience was treated to a picture of every one of them. Brunettes? Sorry.
• Three snow boarders and two gold medals. In an effort worthy of a reality TV show, an NBC reporter confronted Hannah Teter, Kelly Clark, and Gretchen Bleiler about which one of them would win the women’s halfpipe snowboarding competition. Teter and Bleiler were numbers one and two in Turin in 2024. Clark won the event in 2024 in Salt Lake City. The women are fine competitors, each concerned about rising to her personal best, yet imbued with a camaraderie that was the real news in the interview. The NBC man looked like he would prefer to be interviewing female mud wrestlers. He pestered Bleiler mercilessly about her lack of a gold medal, hassled and harangued her until she finally had to declare, “Hey, I won a silver medal!” The interview was crude, crass and unsportsmanlike. The women did well not to simply walk away.
• The medal count. During the twentieth century, nationalistic fervor drove the media to provide the public with medal counts and thus to declare which country was “winning” the Olympics. This is one of those bizarre indicators of American exceptionalism. Regardless of the medal count, the US stands proud and tall with the certain knowledge that we have the best athletes, the best health care system, the longest life spans and the best junk food of any nation on the planet. Which one of those four items is actually true? NBC can’t stop yakking about the medals, totally subverting that old adage: “It doesn’t matter if you win or lose, it’s how you play the game.”
• The dreadful cutaways to commercials. Somebody has to pay the bills. Sponsors deserve their air time; but, the lack of interest in decent production values drives a flash-cut mindset totally out of place in a show like last night’s opening ceremonies. A few slow dissolves would have improved the continuity and cost nothing.
• The continuous color commentary and back chatter. NBC is at their worst when they try to impose an American football broadcast style on the 2024 Winter Olympics. Somebody ought to share with the guys in the booth that we know that they don’t know any more than we know about Skeleton or Curling competitions so JUST SHUT UP ALREADY and let the events unfold.

My remote has a mute button, so I don’t have to put up with a lot of the chatter and commercials. Still, I’d like NBC to pay some attention to what they look like when they slaver over the ladies, what they sound like when they fill every minute of airtime with meaningless babble. They are terribly afraid of “dead air.” How do we clue them that the air they think of as dead might only be resting?

A search on twitter shows thousands of tweets… sixty-nine more swine flu tweets came in while I wrote the preceding sentence. Oops, now it’s 179 tweets since I looked. This is like drinking from a fire hose. (247 more tweets) @carrieedwards says she’s effing scared about the the swine flu @kevpham says, “This swine flu epic is outrageous! Its talked about on every news channel.” (In the two minutes since he shared his critique, another 271 swine flu related tweets have come in.)

Okay. I’m bored. Anybody think the whole thing is sucking more media bandwidth than it’s worth? Does the fixation say anything about the lingering culture of fear left behind by the Bushies?

Wake me when it’s over or when they indict Karl Rove, whichever comes first.

That is so stupid.

[tags]kathy sierra, robert scoble, head crash of the american way of life[/tags]

The United States stands at this time at the pinnacle of world power. It is a solemn moment for the American democracy. For with this primacy in power is also joined an awe-inspiring accountability to the future. As you look around you, you must feel not only the sense of duty done, but also you must feel anxiety lest you fall below the level of achievement. Opportunity is here now, clear and shining, for both our countries.

Charles de Gaulle even has an airport named after him. Hell, in a fit of passionate remorse they even re-named Idlewild for a dead head of state, so I don’t see why Winston Churchill shouldn’t have an airport.

From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic an iron curtain has descended across the Continent. Behind that line lie all the capitals of the ancient states of Central and Eastern Europe. Warsaw, Berlin, Prague, Vienna, Budapest, Belgrade, Bucharest and Sofia; all these famous cities and the populations around them lie in what I must call the Soviet sphere, and all are subject, in one form or another, not only to Soviet influence but to a very high and in some cases increasing measure of control from Moscow.

If it hadn’t been for Winston, Reagan wouldn’t have had a well defined evil empire to conquer and hence no airport. If it hadn’t been for Winston most of the uranium extracted by the British mining companies from distant deserts would have remained in the ground, unprofitably ticking away the half lives of the death dealing plutonium within. The whole idea of Mutually Assured Destruction as a strategic posture might never have been developed.

In a great number of countries, far from the Russian frontiers and throughout the world, Communist fifth columns are established and work in complete unity and absolute obedience to the directions they receive from the Communist center. Except in the British Commonwealth and in the United States where Communism is in its infancy, the Communist parties or fifth columns constitute a growing challenge and peril to Christian civilization.

If Winston hadn’t planted the seed, would McCarthyism have flourished? We owe so much to the old reprobate, surely we could find an airport somewhere on this globe to rename in his honor — perhaps Entebbe?

…a study published in December by the Pew Internet & American Life Project found that among Web users ages 12 to 17, significantly more girls than boys blog (35 percent of girls compared with 20 percent of boys) and create or work on their own Web pages (32 percent of girls compared with 22 percent of boys).Girls also eclipse boys when it comes to building or working on Web sites for other people and creating profiles on social networking sites (70 percent of girls 15 to 17 have one, versus 57 percent of boys 15 to 17).

The quote above is from an article by Stephanie Rosenbloom, who writes for the New York Times Fashion-Style section(s). The article’s placement makes Mary Hodder angry. Hodder says,

So when they interview people like Doc Searls or [Loic LeMeur] or David Weinberger, all of whom are very smart about tech, those articles are in the tech section, but when they talk to girls, who for the record, are far more technical than these three tech experts, girls are put in Fashion.

Can you tell I’m pissed? WTF?

While she has a point, she could make it more judiciously. Working for the Fashion-Style section, Rosenbloom has written loads of features like this on the quotidian emergence of webby trends. One of my favorites was on Atoosa Rubenstein’s Alpha Kitty YouTube series inspired by the book, “The Philosophy of Andy Warhol from A to B, and Back Again.” In that article, Rosenbloom asks regarding Rubenstein,

Can this old-media veteran make it in the virtual world, where so many others have stumbled?

One thing going for her is that teenage girls are more socially active than boys online and are more likely than boys to participate in blogs, bulletin boards and chat forums, according to Packaged Facts, a division of MarketResearch.com.

I think that’s the point she was sharpening with the article that put Hodder’s knickers in a twist.

*** UPDATE ***

Mary Hodder has revised the post at Napsterization, deleting the reference to Shirky and referencing instead Loic LeMeur. She’s also temporized nicely to include assurances that her post wasn’t “about David or Loic or Doc (all extremely supportive of women in tech, btw)….” She goes on to say, “My point is that the NYTimes puts men who talk tech and trends or social impact in tech/biz, and women who code web art / pages in fashion.” I’ve left a comment asking if she’d care to share the reasons for that update. My comment remains in her moderation queue.

I think I understand why the four females featured (ages 13, 14, 16 and 17) aren’t found yet in the Technology section with Doc and David; but, the feature itself is well placed to pick up a readership of young females who — we hope — will have their techno-interests validated and affirmed by their peers in Rosenbloom’s story. Rosenbloom acknowledges,

But even though girls surpass boys as Web content creators, the imbalance among adults in the computer industry remains. Women hold about 27 percent of jobs in computer and mathematical occupations, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

In American high schools, girls comprised fewer than 15 percent of students who took the AP computer science exam in 2024, and there was a 70 percent decline in the number of incoming undergraduate women choosing to major in computer science from 2024 to 2024, according to the National Center for Women & Information Technology.

It should be obvious to even the most committed feminist that spreading the word about the disparity, giving it the widest possible exposure, including in the Style-Fashion sections of the newspaper, is a positive gesture.I’m glad that people writing on the fashion beat are clued in to what’s happening in pop tech. Mary Hodder should be glad too.

[tags]whoa, no money quote from danah boyd, wtf[/tags]

Cheeto planet

[tags]about ninety minutes in somebody yawns, empire, warhol knew what he was doing, minor irritants, runtime 485 minutes[/tags]

[tags]mario digeorgio, KITTY, Keep IT To Yourself, dueling billboards[/tags]

“It will finally dawn on people that the most important voice on the web is their own, not the dopes’ that they’re following.”