Nobody Pouts Going Into A Jiggy
You’re furious. I never taught you to sing. You carry rocks in your head and pitch them. Without warning. Happy drunk. You’re furious. I beg you for sin. I beg your skin. You buy a whore. Don’t give her water. You’re furious.
Just a quick note to tell everyone to check tomorrow’s Sunday Oregonian, although I have no idea what section.
When the time comes, I’ll have more here. And, ultimately, it all will lead to my finally posting my promised post-mortem over on Portland Communique.
I am having one of those days where the fact that the United States elected George W. Bush to the Presidency seems to be the moral equivalent of the body politic suddenly having stopped everything it was doing and then explaining, “I just threw up in my mouth a little bit.”
You might have noticed, as I just did, that suddenly BlueOregon looks like it did six or so days ago.
Apparently, the background on why is available in this morning’s report and this afternoon’s update from Six Apart, the makers of TypePad.
It seems, at least if Phil Stanford is correct, that the “threats” which prompted Lars Larson to cancel his plans to demonstrate that he is either a moron or a con man might have come not from some sort of anarchist boogeymen, but from his own bosses at KXL.
Wonder of wonders. A rightwing fathead has been caught trying to scapegoat his political opponents for his own problems. Who would have thought?
Earlier this year, between the final of three advance screenigns of the unfinished Serenity and its official release in September, I was pimping the R. Tam Sessions, a series of video clips released online surreptitiously.
Not just pimping them, but tracking the widespread online discussion amongst Browncoats as to what could be determined about them at any given point during the campaign.
On the fansite I had set up for all of this (linked above) I had assembled a rather large amount of information, scattered around on a FAQ page, a page on confirmations from Joss Whedon and Summer Glau, and a page about an aelleged artifact from the shooting of the videos.
I’ve finally assembled all of that collected information into a single page for those who might be interested.
Relatedly, I recently recorded an audio commentary for the R. Tam Sessions based upon my experience in tracking their release and the ensuing fan discussions.
Rationalists in the United States Senate have beat back re-authorizing the USA PATRIOT Act absent adequate oversight and safeguards.
Coincidentally, this happens just as the press was reporting on President Bush having authorized the National Security Agency to greatly expand domestic surveillance without court approval,
Not to mention the recent NBC News expose of Pentagon spying on protected political activity, and further evidence of FBI/JTTF spying on protected political activity in Colorado.
Timing is everything. Now that Portland Communique is dead, the 2005 Koufax Awards add a “Best Coverage of State or Local Issues” category for this year’s nominations.
“It is intended to honor blogs with a focus on happenings in a single state or single locality,” says the category’s description. “Which state or local blog provided the best coverage this year? When making nominations please include the state of locality of coverage as well as a link.”
Go nominate Portland Communique anyway, despite only operating for nine months this year.
It seems that Lars Larson has decided not to erect a cross in Pioneer Courthouse Square after all.
He blames unspecified “progressive groups like Indymedia” for “threats and promises” that it would be “vandalized…damaged…or destroyed.”
Of course, so far I can only find two posts on Portland Indymedia regarding the cross. The first just passes along his original press release, and the second has some moronic remarks about nailing Lars to his own cross, but they mainly are empty strut and swagger.
In other words, I’ve yet to find any actual threats to Lars’ cross, other than the threat the cross itself represents to a proper understanding of Lars’ own religion, wherein Christmas celebrates Christ’s birth and not his death.
That said, in the event there are any actual threats floating around there, I should say this: Brilliantly stupid idea. All making such threats would do is make Lars look even more like the martyr he so desperately wants to be.
So the primary reason for publishing print editions of Portland Communique was so I could see more than two and one-half years of my own writing on my shelves.
It was all very exciting then, to login to FedEx tracking and see that my shipment of books had been delivered and I could go pick them up.
Exciting, that is, until I discovered that not one of the eight books delivered had been printed properly. In fact, most of them suddenly go blank one-third of the way through. One of the category editions actually goes blank within 100 pages.
When uploading and assembling books via Lulu, you get to proof a print-ready PDF before finalizing and publishing. Every one of those print-ready proof PDFs is fine.
Now, I know they can’t quality control every book they print. But do they really have no process whatsoever whereby someone in the chain will send up a red flag on the premise that a customer can’t possibly be buying a 600-page book that goes blank after 100 pages?
A quick note asking any of the people who helped fund Portland Communique to head over to Talking Points Memo and help Josh Marshall reach his fundraising goal.
Marshall is looking to hire two full-time blogger-reporters to be based out of Washington DC to muckrake the culture of corruption in the nation’s capitol. This is the final day of the fundraising drive, and he needs your help.
Anyone who was interested enough in my own experiment in local blogger-reporting to help fund it should go help fund TPM’s new experiment which is following the same model of relying on reader contributions.