Where C-SPAN is the local TV news
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| The Washington Canard Where C-SPAN is the local TV news |
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Sunday, July 31, 2005
GREAT SPAMS (AND SUBSEQUENT E-MAIL INQUIRIES) OF THE INTERNET This doesn't approach anything like the brilliance of the Amber Forever Chatlogs, but that guy spent months doing that, and what you're about to read is, so far, a once-off thing. This arrived in my work e-mail on Friday morning: From: ALLIED SURVEY MINING [alliedsurveymining@yahoo.co.uk]On a whim, I wrote back: From: [Me]To my surprise, I received the following only minutes later: From: Allied Survey company [alliedsurveymining@yahoo.co.uk]So I replied: From: [Me]And that was that. Nothing further was heard from the Allied Survey Company. Perhaps I had Mr. Ampsonah all wrong. Maybe he had no interest in emptying my bank account in exchange for nonexistent services. What if he really had more gold dust than he knew what to do with, and embarrassed by the riches, wanted nothing more than to share his good fortune? I am so ashamed. Thursday, July 28, 2005
UGLY BUSINESS Just a few weeks ago, I criticized socialite journalist Judy Bachrach's guileless review of "The Washingtonienne," for being captivated by the supposed novelty of true-life Washingtonienne Jessica Cutler's observation that Washington DC is "Hollywood for the Ugly." The exact phrase, I demonstrated, had already been attributed to P.J. O'Rourke, a contributor to the very magazine whence her misbegotten review appeared, the Weekly Standard. Moreover, the sentiment is an old standby, not an original insight. As a snarky comment about the nation's capital, it's more common in contemporary discourse than JFK's one-liner, "Washington is a city of Southern efficiency and Northern charm," if not quite as clever. I remind you of this ugly episode (as it were) because the first sentence of Mark Steyn's "Post Mortem" column in the September Atlantic goes: Politics, according to Christopher Hitchens, is show business for ugly people.Where to start? I must say that I happen to think Mark Steyn is one of today's most gifted columnists. He prolificacy doesn't mean he's spread himself too thin; each of his multiple newspaper and magazine columns are a pleasure to read. His monthly two-page obituary for the notorious and obscure recently-departed is always fascinating. This latest is no exception, focusing on the unusual life of Edward J. von Kloberg III, the dictator's lobbyist, the "go-to guy for guys you wouldn't want to go near." Kloberg was a man with "a Rolodex full of evil" and an "expert at schmoozing friendless regimes into picking up the tab for his social life, a one-man oily-for-food program he kept running for two decades." An opera buff (wink, wink) Kloberg recently jumped from a famous tower in Rome where the suicide in "Tosca" takes place. He carried down with him a magazine cover featuring himself and George H.W. Bush.  For the most part, it's another great installment of what's arguably Steyn's best column. (The Washington Post's A1 treatment in May is also pretty good, if you don't subscribe to The Atlantic.)But that opening line — that's just lazy. Yes, according to Google, others have attributed this particular phrase to Hitch, although as of this afternoon I only count "about 30". But I also see "about 885" occurrences of the phrase without Hitchens' name necessarily attached, and others think it's a Jay Leno quote. What's more, Hitchens himself has a monthly book review in the Atlantic, which runs only a few pages before Steyn's. But if that's not enough, none other than P.J. O'Rourke is a frequent essayist for the Atlantic as well. I know people here are fond of saying that Washington is a small town, but this is too much to process (perhaps the vast right-wing conspiracy has hijacked the art of quippery). Maybe it's not laziness after all — more likely it's a tip of the hat from one drinking buddy to another, and that I suppose I can forgive. But it's about damn time we stopped pretending this DC-LA connection was a novel observation. I'd be more interested in hearing what a Los Angelino would say about it. And regardless of who first voiced the sentiment (I should write to William Safire) the observation no longer belongs to any one person. It belongs to "they" — as they say. UPDATE, FRIDAY — What do I get for never (ever) reading Fishbowl DC or Wonkette?  Tipped off by Mickey Kaus that those blogs have been talking about the same thing, that's what. Apparently Fishbowler Garrett Graff seemed ready to declare the phrase coined by Paul Begala in 1999. Then Wonkette pushed it back to 1995, when George Magazine (whose defunct status perhaps puts the lie to the claim that DC is anything like Hollywood) attributed it to a "comedian" — Leno, perhaps? Then Graff's tipsters told him it was first heard in 1992 by ... Begala. Kaus' own readers tipped him off that the line was used in 1991 by Texas political consultant Bill Miller in a Dallas Morning News article.Hmmm, better. But not good enough. Instead of e-mailing the vacationing Safire, I headed over to the archived forums of the American Dialect Society, and ... survey says Mickey's readership probably includes one Benjamin Zimmer of Rutgers, who found the Miller reference on Factiva just last night, and posted it to the ADS listserv. Mystery solved? Perhaps, but it's too soon to know for sure. The problem here should be obvious — we can't prove a negative; we cannot say that no one said it before Bill Miller. Alas, it's late in the afternoon on a Friday and I have a big send-off party to get ready for. If I can find out more, you'll be among the first to know. Tuesday, July 26, 2005
BRUSHES WITH FAME VIA TELEPHONY While getting my hair cut at the Watergate barbershop recently, Willard Scott called to make an appointment. I can hardly believe that man has enough hairs to necessitate a cut. Ben Stein comes in every few weeks, but I've missed him yet. Maybe he'll call. Sunday, July 24, 2005
SHENAND'OH!  As I mentioned in the previous post, I spent most of the daylight hours on Saturday in a late model Honda Civic heading to and from the Shenandoah National Park via I-66 (not the famous one) and hiking along trails on the eastern side of the mountain. My hiking companions were friends/co-workers, whom I'll refer to as A and E (everyone seems to use this initial thing except me; I'll give it a whirl). The Blue Ridge Mountains, which partly run through the park, are more like large hills covered in deciduousness than, you know, mountains to anyone who's been up in the Rockies, or even the Cascades, but it sure beat yet another lazy afternoon in the District. I hadn't been outside the Beltway (and yet still in the area; NYC and Portland trips don't count) since my visit to Colonial Williamsburg almost exactly one year ago.  It was beautiful, all right. And — cue the foreboding tone — dangerous. The perfect weather and incredible vistas off Skyline Drive at the north entrance to the park lulled me into complacency. When we pulled into the visitor's center a few miles in, however, we received our first sign that the locals were restless. As we got out of the car, a large wasp flew in the open doors and stubbornly kept trying to exit through the non-opening read windshield. Not that we took it as any significant reminder that we were interlopers. We just needed to figure out where we were going.  We settled on one of the trails near (relatively speaking) Mathews Arm (warning: PDF) campground, about 20 miles in. And no sooner had we started down the trail than we spied a few elk galloping through the woods. I guess elk are potentially more dangerous than wasps, but they're cuter by several, nay, many orders of magnitude, and complacency returned.  For the most part the trails were well-worn, and though bugs constantly buzzed around our ears or clung to greenery nearby, the hike was pleasant and undemanding as we meandered through the wilderness. No spider webs impeded our progress, giving the impression that we hadn't been the first people down this stretch of trail that day. About a mile or so in, the grass grew a little taller and the insect life buzzed a little louder, and as I led the way for awhile, I was hoping to see the trail start to loop back and up. It seemed to go on and on, deeper into the park. And then the trail came to a sharp end. Vertigo-inducing precipice? Impassible thicket? Another parking lot? I wish.  Rattler! I probably came about three strides from a four-foot black rattlesnake (possibly the C. viridius cerberus, as pictured above, although that snake was photographed in California) when its rattle-tail shot up and started shaking its maracas of doom. Fight-or-flight kicked in, and I jump-stepped backward, saying something along the lines of "Hoo-oh-ho-holy shiiiiit!" That was the end of our forward movement. With haste, we hiked back up about fifty feet before E suggested we try to get a picture of it. By this time I had already opened my one beer and wanted no part of it; I'll never cut it as a photojournalist. But I handed him my Canon and wished him luck. He headed back down the trail, leaving A and myself to stand there, her with a cigarette and I with the Red Hook, waiting for E to return or (as I half-expected) cry out in snake-bitten pain. Still on edge, A and I became all the more cognizant of the insects flying around and, intermittently, landing on us. I became momentarily convinced a large fly or bee had flown up my shirt, and in trying to shake it out, I accidentally spilled beer down the front of my shirt. And of course, the rattlesnake had wandered off before E returned to the spot of our recent confrontation. Oh well.  The hike out was uneventful, allowing me to snap photographs of the pristine Virginia wilderness, along with its naturally-occurring electrical lines/telephone poles. Heading back down Skyline Drive toward the park entrance, we spotted another designation for the area on a sign: "Rattlesnake Point Overlook" — that might've been useful to know ahead of time. We stopped for frozen custard in the nearby town of Fort Royal before heading back up 66 toward Washington. Back inside the Beltway, in Ballston, we stopped at Rocklands for barbecue. It was a big meal for a big day. Instead of being incapacitated by rattlesnake venom, I was incapacitated by beef brisket. That's how I prefer it. P.S. — Here is just one of several panoramas I have slated for posting in the days ahead. Saturday, July 23, 2005
THIS JUST IN  It took me far too long to finally buy a digital camera, but I waited just long enough: this Canon PowerShot SD400 is pretty much everything I ever wanted in a digital camera. It takes large, beautiful It took a few days to straighten this all out — after, of course, I had already bought the camera. Likewise, it took me a few days to straighten out my other — less-expensive and longer-delayed — purchase this week, a PlayStation 2. On Thursday I picked up a used one from CD/Game Exchange as well as the double-pack of GTA III and Vice City. The games wouldn't play, though CDs and DVDs would. I took the games back, they exchanged them for other discs, and those wouldn't play either. The following afternoon I decided to pick up a new PS2, which is less than a third of the size and cost about $40 more than used. Turns out the games worked. I went to return the old console, and suggested they could sell it as a CD/DVD player. The guy behind the counter insisted it played the "blue discs" and so penalized me a trivial amount for their having sold me a defective machine — he "graciously" refunded my money, minus two dollars. In other news, some friends and I took an all-day trip out to Shenandoah National Park, where I took a number of pictures from the mountaintop lookouts and along the hiking trails, and — as I'll get around to explaining — had one a contentious encounter with one of the less-agreeable, more-noisome local inhabitants. Stay tuned, more after this extended sleeping break... Thursday, July 21, 2005
MILLER TIME Ah, that felt good. The above header is so easy to fall back on when writing about people surnamed Miller that I bet many a newsroom style guide specifically mentions it as a cliché to avoid at all costs. I'm pretty sure I've never used it, until now. It's a great relief. Speaking of Miller and many newsrooms, I might as well post an e-mail that I bet many journalists around Washington have received this week — New York Times executive editor Bill Keller's e-mail to the staff upon meeting with her at a prison down in Alexandria. It doesn't appear to be on Romenesko, but if I have it, so do a lot of people. And now so do you: To the Staff:Say what you will about Judith Miller, but going from Ms. Chalabi to Ms. Solzhenitsyn in this short a time is no mean feat. Wednesday, July 20, 2005
GREAT SPAMS OF THE INTERNET I think this one was meant for Art Vandelay: From: yuchung@swissinfo.org [yuchung@swissinfo.org] Monday, July 11, 2005
ANNOUNCEMENTS Rather abruptly, I present to you The Hotline's Blogometer. It's a project I've been working on for the National Journal's Hotline for nearly six months now, and finally today I got the go-ahead signal to take it out of beta and into the blogosphere. The reaction since it first actually went up a few weeks back has humbled me -- I mean the good way. Mystery Pollster Mark Blumenthal (who really isn't all that mysterious anymore) calls it "very cool." The American Constitution Society's blog calls it "just the timewaster you've been looking for." More reactions can be found here and here, but the mention that really made my day was the highly-coveted and always-appreciated Instalanche — something this blog once experienced. (Update: Mickey Kaus has some very Mickey Kaus-like comments. I'm humbled again.) So what is this Blogometer thing, exactly? It started as section of The Hotline. It remains so, but now it also has a dedicated page on the worldwide interwebs. On the net it is arguably a blog, but I don't see it as one. These days at work I spend nearly five hours a day scouring blogs, blog search engines, blog rankings and then more blogs, looking for interesting news, conversations, arguments, donnybrooks and rhubarbs, then organizing the mass of text and links into a comprehensive-yet-readable summary of what was being said in the political blogosphere over the previous 24 hours. I should add that the although I write the Blogometer, it is not "me," that is to say, it's a product of The Hotline and hence, it's bipartisan, it's irreverent, and narrated using the "editorial 'we.'" The Blogometer debuted in the Hotline in late March, in fact on the day Terri Schiavo (an issue FLOG™ and I debated back in October 2003.) died. Since then we've added regular blogger interviews and a start on covering campaign blog advertising. With the help of the dot com staff and my superiors, the website came together over the few weeks. It's been fun — and we've only just started. The advent of the Blogometer does mean something else: I've given up my contributorship to DCist. That was a tough one — Gothamist LLC is on the way up and DCist in particular is one of their most-trafficked sites. But I've had a good run, and I even got a Washington Monthly byline out of it. If my apartment building was on fire and I could only save one Monument feature that I wrote during my seven months on the volunteer-run site (an unlikely scenario, I know), I'd choose the one about the Masons, the LaRouchies and the Klan. As for the Washington Canard, it will continue on as it ever has: At the times of my choosing, on no fixed schedule, and sometimes not for days. But you never when I'll post next — you'd better check back frequently. Meanwhile, Oregon Sports Fan has gone on permanent hiatus, as the current editor (furthest on the left) is minding two ornery preteens all summer before spending a year in Germany. What will happen with it I can't say, but it'll remain where it is for awhile — I host all my images there. I'll stop there now, although I'm awful tempted to tell the story of how I bit down onto a wire in my sandwich at a restaurant in my office building at lunch last Friday — maybe next time. See you in the blogosphere. Thursday, July 07, 2005
I'LL NEVER DRINK A SEVEN & SEVEN THE SAME WAY AGAIN  Nothing wrong with hoisting the Union Jack today. Thankfully, FLOG™ and the FLOGette are safely out of London, ensconced in the German Alps right now. And Echopraxia tells me everyone he knows in the city is safe as well. Good. Horrifying as the whole thing is, we're all quite fortunate that today's death toll is far below that of Spain's 3/11 attacks. Over IM, Echopraxia sends me this, which I quite like. Our city works. We rather like it. And we're going to go about our lives. We're going to take care of the lives you ruined. And then we're going to work. And we're going down to the pub.For a better round-up and links to more resources, check out today's Blogometer*. P.S. — I rarely ever agree with Atrios, but he sure called this one last month: The summer of 2001 was declared "summer of the shark" despite the fact that the number of shark attacks wasn't abnormal. Then a little tragic event happened and they shut the hell up about sharks for a little awhile. ... CNN just spent 22 minutes at a live press conference about a shark attack.I guess that makes Natalee Holloway this summer's Chandra Levy. P.P.S. — From Hotline's Last Call: Attention Hill flacks: if you can't condemn a terrorist attack before lunch, don't bother sending a statement._____ *Yeah, yeah. I know. More later. Tuesday, July 05, 2005
WASHINGTON POST REPORTS IN TUESDAY EDITIONS Star reporter Bob Woodward is a goddamn lightweight: "Martinis were about 90 cents, if that, and I believe I had maybe even six or seven," Woodward writes in his new book, "The Secret Man: The Story of Watergate's Deep Throat." Dropped off at a Pentagon parking lot afterward, he began crawling toward his Volkswagen Beetle and was intercepted by sympathetic military police. Someone drove him home.Six or seven martinis? Once? Some journalist! Monday, July 04, 2005
AMERICA THE BOOM-IFUL  Just like last year, it's been a veritable war zone outside my apartment window, as at least a thousand people gathered on the hillside below me to watch the fireworks on the Mall and, sometimes it seems, compete with the show. An hour and then some after the official, government-sanctioned show is over the good people of SoCo are still celebrating the birth of their country by blowing up a small part of it.Meanwhile, today Dan and Ashley are in, of all places, France. That seems bad (and I suppose I forgive them), but it's not half as bad as the woman two floors up from me who draped a Union Jack over her balcony railing tonight, just as the fireworks were starting. On any other day, fine by me. But today? Lucky for her, the crowd was too polite to shout, Donnie Brasco-style: "Who won the war?!?!" Meanwhile, Tim Dreier has one of the better, if not eloquent, July 4 thoughts. As for my own, all I can think of is: USA! USA! USA! UPDATE — Forget the Union Jack, take this announcement from DC-area economist (!) Max Sawicky: We're going to the funky peacenik patriotic politically correct parade in Takoma Park. The only July 4th parade with a float of Leon Trotsky.I better just say "no comment." Friday, July 01, 2005
DUMB AND DUMBER  Just a few hours ago I was in the Taco Bell a few blocks down from here, buying my groceries for the weekend (in the past couple days, I've seen four or five too many cockroaches around my sink — I'll have to decontaminate the whole kitchen). With tax, my purchase of a few Chicken Quesedillas and a few more Bean Burritos added up to exactly $13. I handed the woman behind the counter a $20 bill. I looked back down at my computer printout of the semi-official history of Suck.com, which I had been reading since I left work. A moment later, I glanced back up and watched her punch the following numbers into a calculator sitting next to the register:Deedee — I had time, in this interval, to check the clock (just after noon), my own reading material (engrossing), the mood of my fellow customers (restless) as well as her uniform name-tag (Deedee, of course) — then finally handed me seven dollars.20.00 Whatever. The fact that she left school without being able to marshal elementary integers through her head (and for the record, I am certainly not a number person) was not my problem. What mattered was that I got my full order, which doesn't always happen. With lunch/dinner/lunch/dinner (vemin aside, I'll surely sleep through the breakfast hours until work resumes next Wednesday) in hand, I walked two blocks up to the liquor store to buy a half-gallon of Smirnoff to complement the orange juice and Red Bull I would soon mix it with.  Walking out of the liquor store on Florida, I crossed the street, heading for my place. It's probably worth mentioning that I had my iPod blaring for the entire time since I'd left the Watergate about 45 minutes earlier, removing my headphones only long enough to interact with Deedee and tell the dude at the liquor store which bottle I wanted. As I crossed the street, I heard a: "Hey!" I looked back. Just some guy. Didn't make any sense to me. Arriving at the front door of my apartment building, I finally realized what I'd done, and what that yelling was all about: I'd left my half-gallon of Smirnoff back at the liquor store. So I dropped off the food (keeping it warm in my presumably cockroach-free oven) and headed back down to pick up my rightful vodka. Walking back in, the guy behind the counter gave me a mild lecture (about the headphones, I think) before handing me the liquor I'd already purchased. I suppose there might be something to be said here about different kinds of intelligence — spatial ability versus attention span — but if so, it's certainly incomplete. I've always been one to draw a distinction between raw intelligence and wisdom, between smarts and street smarts, but I'm not sure what to make of this. I've always been sure that, at least, I possessed the latter attributes. Considering these two events, as far as I'm concerned, we're both idiots. UNSOLICITED PREDICTION  Now that we have the first SCOTUS vacancy in over a decade, it's fightin' time in the District of Columbia. Not to mention, it's the first vacancy in the current era of hyper-partisanship as well as the first vacancy in the era of blogs (whether the two are related, I leave to you).We don't know what President Bush is going to do, but we think we know a few things: He's said to want to nominate the first Hispanic justice, and the most frequently mentioned candidate would be Alberto Gonzales. But the right won't have it because they're pretty sure he's pro-Roe v. Wade, and the left won't have it because they're pretty sure he's pro-torture. My semi-educated/completely-uninformed guess is that Bush will go with a Hispanic judge who is also from Texas and is presumed to be more conservative (particularly on abortion) than Gonzales: Emilo Garza. Of course, I only give him a 5-to-1* shot at best. Michael Luttig, Harvie Wilkinson and John Roberts are all experienced judges who have the conservative credentials of Nino Scalia but none of the nuttiness of Bob Bork. I'm not sure whether Bush puts ethnicity or ideology higher on his check-list (I'd prefer ideology) but we may well know by the end of next week. _____ *I've been telling people for awhile that I think Hillary "HRC" Clinton has the best shot of being the next POTUS† of all presumed candidates, but that prediction is no better than 5-to-1 as well. †I love the terms SCOTUS and POTUS, but my favorite is definitely FLOTUS. P.S. I guess I'm leaving out Michael McConnell, who's been on the short-list as well. Conservative, not Hispanic, but known to be a strong candidate. If Bush eschews racial considerations entirely (and frankly, I think he should) then McConnell would probably be a good choice, too. |
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But what about the decor at the Alexandria Detention Center? Does Judy like the food? And how does she handle tv privileges with her blockmates? After the jump, more revelations from Keller.
