THE ACCIDENTAL FUNKY PRESIDENT

How Gerald Ford enriched my life, specifically:


How James Brown enriched my life, particularly:


P.S. In years past I've put up a post asserting that I'm about to "do the hiatus," but this year, I thought you would manage.

P.P.S. The headline is all OXR, although I did solicit the help.

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posted by WWB at 5:54 PM |

 
MULTIPLICITY


Well, one is me, one is my father, another is a neurosurgeon in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, but the rest I have no clue about. Who are you people? And are any of you annoyed that I dominate the results for your name on Google?

I don't know how accurate this really is, and as it turns out, neither do the people responsible for the website. But the transparency is appreciated.

P.S. If you're anywhere near as vain as I am, you can click on the image above to run this search on yourself.

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posted by WWB at 10:04 PM |

 
INTERVIEW WITH THE SPAMMER

If you run a moderately popular website, and Blog P.I. is more moderate than most, sometimes you'll get e-mail invitations to link to spammish websites by well-meaning self-promoters bordering on outright spam. Sometimes, not so well-meaning.

I'm not sure which best describes the following, but herewith is a series of three e-mails between myself and an egregious practicioner of this dismaying trend. His name and website redacted:

Hi there,

I am writing about the page http://www.blogpi.net/category/john-mccain/ on your website. I would like to exchange links with that page from the following article on my site:

[REDACTED]

Once you post a link to my site, you can click on the following link to automatically add a link on [his website] to your site. If your email client won't let you open that link, you can paste the article above on your browser and click on the "exchange link" option at the bottom of the page. If you have any questions, please don't hesitate to reply to this email.

I checked out his website, and the content looked suspiciously like the style of a very prominent website very well-known as one from which spammers like to steal content. I checked, confirmed my suspicion, and replied:

Possibly if you had done something besides copy the text from McCain's Wikipedia entry and throw some Google Adsense ads in the sidebar, I might have been interested.

A day later, to my surprise, he got back to me:

Thanks for your consideration William. It is true the John McCain's article is just the wikipedia content... however that's a starting point and I plan on adding original content as the contest progresses. The lead in to the election page is original content.

If you wish to reconsider, this would be beneficial to both our sites.

Contest? If I'm not at least entered in the Publisher's Clearing House sweepstakes, I'm not interested.

Still, that's awful polite of him. Because he took the time to reply, I hesitate to relegate him to the "not so" category. But stealing content from Wikipedia and expecting others to be interested isn't especially ingratiating. And add to it the fact that the name he signed the second e-mail with ("Phil") did not match the name on the account ("Mark") and I suppose a spammer he must be.

Thanks for the interest, Phil/Mark. I don't care to embarrass you publicly, but I won't help you inflate your PageRank, either.

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posted by WWB at 7:23 PM |

 
OBSESSED WITH THE SMITHS

Last weekend I had the pleasure of attending the holiday party of my former employer, National Journal, at an allegedly haunted old mansion in Georgetown.

I caught up with old friends, ate plenty of free sushi and drank plenty of free wine — until about midnight or so, when the bar (and party) closed down. I departed with a grip of my former Hotliners for Tombs, a bar just up the street, for further intoxication and even dancing (for good or ill, I'm legendary).

But before long, one of my erstwhile colleagues suggested we decamp for another Georgetown party establishment: Smith Point. If you're not familiar with the establishment, I'll let Newsweek's Jonathan Darman set the scene:

Outside Smith Point, the line starts forming an hour or so before midnight. Preppy boys in polo shirts with upturned collars and preppy girls showing their pearls and cleavage want to see if "the girls," as the Bush twins are known, have shown up. Many nights they are not disappointed. In the spring of 2004, after graduating from Yale and the University of Texas, Barbara and Jenna moved to Washington to help their father's re-election campaign. They began going to Smith Point to unwind with friends after work.

The bar itself is a bit of a dive, a hangout for private-school Peter Pans who wish to relive those wild nights at the frat house. It succeeds in part by an old barkeeper's trick: keeping the wanna-bes lined up out on the street even when the place is mostly empty. The real regulars, who are on "The List," usually arrive late, sometimes after "pre-gaming" (downing a few shots at home). On this particular Saturday night, Barbara appears first, surrounded by burly boys, sipping a Bud Light as she heads for the bar. She is wearing a designer coat and her jeans are tucked into big, Jessica Simpson-style boots. Jenna arrives later, wearing a gold top with skinny straps, her head on the shoulder of her boyfriend. The dance floor after midnight is pretty raunchy, with couples grinding away, but the Bush girls steer clear. "The girls are probably more tame than a lot of people," says one Smith Point regular who worked in the Bush White House.

At length, I might have added.

But now you have an idea of what I'm talking about. A ritzy dive for slumming aristocrats, occasionally attended by genuine celebrities. If Paris Hilton knew what a Washington, DC was, she would come here. And while this may come as no real surprise, you know what?

It really sucked.

I suppose I should be grateful that they let us in for $5 a pop when we weren't on the actual list... but not too grateful.

Because I was somehow thinking ahead, I grabbed a few stills and even a couple videos. For example, here's a 3-D panorama of the place from near the back:


What's that? You can't tell what's going on? That's about what it's like. More nightclub than bar. Maybe it's a place where everybody knows your name (when you're on the list) but if they don't already know your name, good luck trying to shout it over the din.

Not that they could see your face to remember it by.

I really couldn't care less about how preppy or connected the regulars are; I can get by in almost any social milieu, so long as people are friendly. And the few people not of my group whom I interfaced with were polite enough. What I can say is that the place was too dark, too crowded, and too loud to be of any use whatsoever.

If you want to dance, you've pretty much got to dance in place. If you want to get a drink, you've got to jostle for a place in "line" ... although, that's true almost anywhere. But most of all, it didn't offer anything that dozens of other District bars can't boast.

I'll give Smith Point some credit for being pretty nifty, purely as a physical location. It's a modern grotto, down a staircase through an unlikely diagonal alley between two buildings, and into a cave-like basement room with an elevated alcove.

Maybe it's a better scene at other times of the evening (when it may be harder to gain access) but at the time we arrived, we wanted out almost immediately — and even before gaining entrance to the putatively exclusive club, we wished we'd closed out Tombs instead. (It's underground, too!)

And here is a video of myself and my inviting colleague (I think she'd prefer I leave her nameless in this post) trying to leave the joint on the way to an overpriced cab ride back into non-Georgetown Northwest:


So there you have it. I have now casually dissed — or maybe just nitpicked — the supposed hottest bar in town. Sue me, but if I want to fight with crowds just to get a refill on my vodka-Red Bull this weekend, I think I'll just walk up to Wonderland.

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posted by WWB at 10:11 PM |

 
COLLAPSE: HOW BUILDINGS CHOOSE TO FAIL OR SUCCEED

Well, the good news is that nobody was killed, so I might as well post these photographs I took from the site of the partial building collapse (just one floor, albeit the 24th one) down the street from my office on Friday morning:











Bonus footage of not much else happening!



Interesting? Not terribly. I might as well admit it: when I arrived on the scene, I had misread an e-mail and believed part of North Lynne Street had collapsed — so you can imagine my confusion when the road turned out to be entirely intact, and now you know why none of these futile images are pointed skyward.

I did actually see one man on a stretcher wheeled onto an ambulance, but decided against taking a picture of that. Guess I'll never cut it as a photojournalist.

P.S. In other unsettling Rosslyn-related matters, check the end of my Kathleen Matthews post from the end of last month for an unwelcome update.

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posted by WWB at 1:51 PM |

 
HONG KONG LIVES

As will become apparent over the next few posts, I've been clicking around YouTube a bit today — where I was pleasantly surprised to find a video of my favorite Special Administrative Region in the People's Republic of China currently occupying the top spot in the Travel & Places category.

If you've never seen Hong Kong from Victoria Peak, and don't mind seeing it in a resolution below even suboptimal, then this is your lucky day:

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posted by WWB at 1:33 PM |

 
JESUS CHRIST WIKI STAR

Hi, my name is Bill, and I'm a Wikipedian. (Hi, Bill.)

It is true -- I am not just a frequent commentator on and booster of Wikipedia; I am in fact also a registered user and semi-frequent contributor. Most of my edits are simple clean-ups such as formatting edits, typo fixes and correcting British spellings on American subjects.

Sometimes, though, I have to go a little bit further. For example, see this comment I left on the discussion page for a controversially-named "post-thrash/metalcore" band, having just made an important edit to an oft-defaced, marginally-related entry:


P.S. It's my blog and I'll do what I want to, so this is cross-posted to Blog P.I.

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posted by WWB at 9:15 PM |

 
MY SO-CALLED SECOND LIFE

As I've noted previously at Blog P.I., I have spent some time in the Second Life metaverse over the past few weeks, walking (and flying) around and generally trying to get my bearings. It's been a slow start, but finally today I bought my first parcel of land (First Land) a Linden Lab-subsidized tract in a region (they call them Sims (no relation to the Maxis kind)) called Fraxini. So here I am, looking off to the horizon -- for the full-screen view, click on the image below:



Yes, I am posing triumphantly, or at least trying. And if you look closely, you can see one of my neighbors flying about. New land is being created all the time, so I'm not entirely sure if I'll get to keep that waterfront view. Then again, assuming I stick around, I'll probably move on eventually. For one reason why, check out this post by my one of my new neighbors.

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posted by WWB at 10:33 PM |

 
IT'S ALL MY FAULT

Every once in awhile, I check in on the old Comcast account I surrendered to the Cialis marketers when I switched to Gmail a year or two back. At the Hotline, I got plenty of e-mails from campaigns and party committees, and to this day I still get rote talking points critical information from the RNC. Take this one I just found, from early last month:

Dear William,

Just 24 hours to go... and there's big news.

The three final polls of Election 2006 are out - and all show momentum shifting dramatically to Republicans in the final hours of this campaign. Republicans are now more likely to vote and to have been contacted by one of our volunteers. This weekend, you helped us contact 7 million more voters. I have included a polling memo with this message that shows the extent of Republican momentum in the final days of this campaign.

William, the last few elections have been tight, and tomorrow will be no different. If we can keep this momentum going, Republicans are poised to make history, but we can only do it with your help.

Sincerely,

Chairman Ken Mehlman

Chairman, Republican National Committee

Can you hardly believe it? With all the momentum shifting in the GOP's direction, how did they manage to lose? I suppose he's right -- only I could have saved the party from losing its congressional majorities.

If only I had checked my Comcast account a month and a half sooner. But if it's any consolation, at least history was made... right?

P.S. As long as I'm on the subject of politics (and I swear, this is the last for awhile) I must strenuously object to this line from Red State today:

The Wilamette Weekly reports that popular ex-GOV Kitzhaber (D) will not challenge Sen. Gordon (R).

If you don't know, I won't tell you, but there are at least two things wrong with that sentence.

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posted by WWB at 6:39 PM |

 
GOOGLE EARTH²

For all the not-being-evil Google Earth achieves, one aspect of the (yes, free) program is that even where it includes the terrain of a certain location, it just paints two-dimensional satellite images onto the three-dimensional relief. For one good example, hop over to Christ the Redeemer:


Instead of looming majestically over Rio de Janeiro, here the Lamb of God looks as if he might slide down the hillside right into the Lagoa.

There is a limited solution, found via the (unofficial) Google Earth Blog — a kmz plugin which will add buildings to a few select places. Rio isn't available yet, but better still, there's Hong Kong:


Cool. Not perfect, but nevertheless fun. And just above the twin spires of I.M. Pei's Bank of China Tower is the New World Centre — the Watergate of Tsim Tsa Tsui — where I spent most of 1985. Though it's not among the buildings to get a detailed exterior, it's frankly not that far off. For a more detailed picture, see here.

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posted by WWB at 11:55 AM |