better to be poor than to be a fat man in the eye of a needle

Andrew Sullivan had an interesting link today to a report about state's relative generosity index. He gives props to the red states, which generally are ranked higher. I think there's something else interesting in there.

While red/blue is interesting, check out the rich/poor. All of the top 10 income states are in the bottom half with regards to their giving. The 10 poorest states are all in the top half with regards to their giving.

This may seem surprising, but doesn't seem to be a new phenomena.

Many rich people threw in large amounts. But a poor widow came and put in two very small copper coins, worth only a fraction of a penny . . . "I tell you the truth, this poor widow has put more into the treasury than all the others. They all gave out of their wealth; but she, out of her poverty, put in everything--all she had to live on."

As for red/blue, it does seem a strange paradox that all of the highest earning (generally regarded as friends of the GOP) states went blue, while the poor (generally considered the constiuentcy of democrats) states all went red. Who came up with those conventions anyway. They should be fired.

funny . . . maybe not

well, i thought jon stewart was a standout funny man in this election mess. he was the one guy who could keep it real and real funny.

well, turns out i was wrong. he's just as much a chump as the rest.

check out this transcript from last friday's cnn crossfire show. stewart tries to show real concern for the partisan rancor for which crossfire is so well know. and beloved by it's small base of fans. what he ended up doing was joining, not so much in the partisan rancor (though he was on the cusp of that too), but in the general name-calling and personal villany of people who were bullied in elementary school.

i found a nice non-partisan site where you can watch the who exchange.

nobody's having fun anymore

this past sunday, the ny times magazine had an article worth reading (aside from the cover story about john kerry's understanding of how best to fight the war on terror - whch is clever.) but the real article of interest is the opening one, which laments, along with me, the absolute lack of levity in this year's campaign. here's the link, and here's a lift:

Many Republican voters say that there is a crusade at stake here, that President Bush's absolutist positions reveal the moral and -- some would say -- Christian heart of our nation. Many Democrats, on the other hand, see something just as important at risk: the Enlightenment idea that human reason and rational debate are the source of political truth, a notion championed by deists like Thomas Jefferson and Ben Franklin as the sine qua non of American democracy. There just may be too much at stake for cleverness . . .

ah yes, we're fighting the battles of the 16th century all over again, this time in reverse. how things come and go.

as for levity . . . there's always these guys.

blogging the veep debate (left handed)

9.04 yikes! who told gwen she looks good in that blue mr. rogers sweater?

9.06 snap! aside from calling the vp a liar, edwards just gave the same opening line as kerry did the other night. good job on the talking points boys.

9.08 "we need to be straight with the american people." is this some sort of sneaky jab at the pres/veep split on gay marriage?

9.09 is it me or is john edwards the only person who has ever called dick cheney incompetent?

9.14 cheney is really really good at pronouncing those foreign names.

9.18 edwards is sincerely trying to tell us that cheney is not competent. cheney's "i'm pissed now" meter is at about 8.6.

9.20 cheney corrects edward's math. 90% + 50% = 140%?

9.22 "Talk Tough" is now a proper noun.

9.25 wait, i'm confused. is john kerry resolute and steadfast, or unstable and insecure?

9.29 edwards has four pieces of scratch paper. cheney, one. what does this tell us?

9.32 gwen just said she had a question about american intelligence. me too.

9.36 gwen asks better questions than her boss. "mr. cheney, do you think u.s. companies should be able to do business within the 'axis of evil?"

9.39 oops, not good to confuse iran and iraq johnny boy.

9.40 she's good . . . denying cheney extra time. you go girl.

9.41 correction mr. cheney, it's factcheck.org, not .com. mr. jackson would be sad to lose such traffic to a clerical error

9.43 uh, oh! edwards is telling stories like a southern laweyer. hold on to your wallet.

9.44 oh my jingles. cheney's pulling senate rank!

9.46 it's getting sooooo crazy. cheney hates mandela, mlk jr., headstart and meals on wheels!

9.51 "mr vice president, i don't think america can take four more years." cheese factor 6.7.

9.54 i like the edwards plan. i get to keep my tax cut for a few more years.

9.55 john kerry voted for tax cuts 600 times! sign me up.

9.58 cheney on gay marriage: if it weren't for those MA justices.

10.00 nobody wants gay marriage in this election. watch the edwards dance. dance johnny dance.

10.02 gwen is funny too. (initial sweater offense overlooked)

10.04 another bc04 obgyn reference. somebody check those contributions.

10.05 democrats have a plan for tort reform. this just in: hell froze over.

10.07 everything is so nice since they talked about mary cheney. once again, gay marriage brings folks together across party lines.

10.08 vp exposes tax loop-hole for trial lawyers. trial lawyers = offshore tax havenistas.

10.13 i'll give aids more money than you will.

10.17 cheney really shouldn't be joking about winning by three electoral votes. that said . . . funny factor 5.9.

10.18 "john kerry put criminals behind crime," edwards. and here i thought it was bad parents.

10.19 is anyone else tired of cheney repeating the questions.

10.21 why is edwards ripping paper into the microphone? does this mean something?

10.23 so how is cheney different from edwards?

10.23 they're lulling each other to sleep. cheney is passing on rebuttal options.

10.26 everybody's out of juice, including my left hand.

10.27 those are crazy numbers on latino andafrican american drop-outs. anybody know where those are from?

10.28 edwards took gwen to the bank for 15 seconds.

10.30 bc04 responsible for division in america. simple as that says johnny e.

10.32 again, cheney confused about where to start.

10.33 edwards closing: more southern stories. this man is hucklebury finn. kerry/edwards will make you happy, bush/cheney will make you have to work harder for less.

10.36 cheney closing: vote bush or there'll be nukes in a city near you.

Who's the literatest of them all?

Well, according to the University of Wisconsin, it's the midwest. that's right kids, read it and weep. With scant representation from either coast, it looks like the most well read people in the country live in the "fly-over" states of Ohio, Missouri, Minnesota and Wisconsin.

Check out the top ten there on the right.

Who's missing? How about the two cities who are most likely to tell you if you're cool or not:

New York City, 49th.
Los Angeles, 68th.

The chicken is pre-meditated

The subservient chicken was the distraction of choice in the newsroom late last week. It's really pretty fun if you get creative with it. One of my favorites was, "Build a fort." Give it a try.

Folks were wondering if it was a live web cam, and who that crazy man with too much time on his hands was? When I first saw it earlier last week I didn't notice that it was branded by Burger King. I think it wasn't branded at all when they launched it. Over the week, if my memory serves me correctly the branding increased - now it's pretty obvious.

As for the live webcam - that was doubtful. Today's USA Today confirms that one. The online version of the story doesn't go into details, but the printed version has an inset about the chicken which says it is indeed a database driven list of pre-recorded actions.

USA Today mentions that the chicken was an experiment to try and reach the "illusive" younger male audience. Judging from the chortling young chaps I saw glued to the monitors last week - it worked.

Crushed under the weight?

Ben wrote an interesting post last night. It started out wondering why he was purchasing a copy of the Kill Bill DVD, it ended with a contemplation of forgiveness.

Is forgiveness the opposite of vengeance? Google didn't know. Webster didn't know. I'm not sure. Is love the answer? And how do we find that place? Seems like it takes an awful lot more courage that vengeance. And it's a much less of a dramatic story arc. But it seems like a much happier ending.

I don't see a lot of movies, and certainly not the "horror" type, but for some strange reason I found myself in the line for Kill Bill on it's opening night last year. I sat through that one with a few friends in DC and it made an impression on me. First - being of the old shool kung fu ilk - the fight scenes where horrible, just horrible. And if anyone could look more ridiculous than Uma Thurman trying to weild a semitar, I've yet to see it.

But as Ben mentions, the movie was primarily about vengeance, and in making you feel that emotion - it is extremely effective. There were several times in that movie when I felt absolute rage on behalf of Uma's character. She had been attacked and nearly killed at her own wedding and she had been abused while she was in a coma for goodness sakes. Several children in the movie watched their parents be murdered right before their eyes. Vengeful feelings pulsed through my veins - I have a hard time taking entertainment lightly.

But to Ben's questions. I think that when someone gets hurt like that, whether emotional or physical or whatever, there is a price to pay on the other side of that. It's like physics yo. There is an equal and opposite force created when someone gets messed with.

I heard something a few weeks ago about forgiveness. The dude said that someone has to take it on the chin. If you forgive someone, you have to swallow the pain, if you get vengeance, they pay. Unfortunately neither of those choices seem scalable. If you get too much of either you're bound to be dealing with more issues than you started out with.

Is forgiveness the opposite of vengeance? Yeah I think so. Are they the only two options? I think Ben was onto something when he kept the questions coming. Is Love the answer, I think it is, but certainly no understanding of that word that we throw around every day.

If there is indeed a burden to be bourn for every offense, that's a lot of burden to be bourn. It weighs on me to even think about it. This is one of the reasons I've hesitated to see the Passion.

Holding hands

I was getting on the old 7 train to come home this evening and I got stuck behind an older couple who were holding hands. I followed them for a few hundered yards through the maze that is the Times Square subway station. They would seperate to move around people or objects, but always come back together and hold hands.

It reminded me of the diamonds commercial from a few years ago which featured a young couple walking briskly through a park and having some sort of turse-looking discussion. Toward the end of the commercial they came up behind an older couple who were walking slowly and holding hands. As the younger pair split to go around the older, they took notice and remembered what it was all about. When they met in front of the old couple, they were holding hands once again. How sweet.

But I got to thinking about the whole holding hands thing. Who thought that up? I ran a quick Google search on the history of the phenomena and only came up with this. Mildly interesting, but not the answer.

I thought of Nicole and I. Whenever we go out anywhere we are holding hands. I wondered if it was for the public. Is it something we do to let others know we're together? No, couldn't be that. If anything I'm less compelled to hold hands when others are around.

Nicole sometimes will tell me stories about how in Kenya folks who are close friends walk around holding hands. Just hanging out.

Maybe holding hands is to friends what the handshake is to associates. An agreement of sorts. I suppose lovers who are arguing aren't going to be holding hands as much and associates who don't trust one another may forgoe a handshake.

Seems plausible. I was just curious.

Interesting . . .

OK, I promise to stop talking about comment spam here. But one more interesting thing happened. After I installed Blacklist and there was an initial burst of spam-denied, the spammers left. I checked my site logs and nobody has even tried to comment spam for nearly two days. They must just give up when they see Blacklist. So there's some promising news - a civically-minded product that the bad guys are scared of.

On another interesting note . . .

If you drink a lot of water (i.e. you are hydrated well) it feels totally different when you get hungry. The hunger feels cleaner for some reason, it's almost pleasant. Just thought I'd mention that.

A happy ending

I'm putting this one in the phenomena category.

I've been watching with my civic-minded colleagues at MTV News online as our little Urban Outfitter's expose has unfurled into T-shirt Gate.

Now that everybody's had their fun I wanted to give the last word to my favorite cap on the subject - from the Weekly Standard:

Complaining Is for Earnest People

It is a truism of American politics that an election cycle is not an election cycle without its fair share of harebrained pseudo-scandals. But the latest might prompt observers to reclassify the Silly Season as the Stupid Season. At issue: the sale of a cheeky T-shirt that reads "Voting Is for Old People."

Stocked by Urban Outfitters and the creation of John Keddie, who helms vintagevantage.com (where the shirt is also for sale), the apathy-championing T-shirt has managed to unite chin-tuggers of all stripes. The lads at punkvoter.com squealed as if a nerve had been hit during a particularly painful septum-piercing. Al Jourgensen of the group Ministry wrote in a letter to Urban Outfitters, "I am shocked and appalled at your recklessness. Your T-shirt is knowingly irresponsible." And those rock'n'roll cads at Harvard's Institute of Politics were equally outraged. "The shirt's message could not be further from the truth," wrote the Institute's director, Dan Glickman. "We would be eager to work with you to suggest alternative products that send the right message to America's young people, and better reflect the considerable social conscience and political participation of today's youth. You might consider 'Voting Rocks!'"

You might--if you're a dork. The Washington Post reported that the Institute went on to quote John F. Kennedy, saying, "The future promise of any nation can best be measured by the present prospects of its youth." To which we respond with the wise words of Evelyn Waugh, who pronounced, "What is youth except a man or woman before it is fit to be seen."

Color us cynical, but isn't it in the republic's best interest for those who are easily swayed by T-shirt slogans not to make their voices heard on Election Day? On vintagevantage.com, Keddie writes, "It appears that taking yourself too seriously is for old and young people alike. We're calling on the Camp Cool faithful to stand by our side during this difficult, uncertain time. Ha!" THE SCRAPBOOK, a Camp Cool regular, stands with Keddie, and hopes that this shameless endorsement is good enough to win us one of his overpriced T-shirts, size XL.

Don't get me wrong, I'm as likely as anyone to want to poke a hipster in the nose when I see him checking himself out in a pane glass window. But urban life would be far too depressing if I couldn't look forward to laughing at their co-operative and coordinated efforts at expressing uniqueness.

Dissentors be praised

One reason I enjoy reading blogs is that you can see a dissenting opinion, in all it's splendor, right up there with the original author's opinion. That's the beauty of the two way publishing thing.

What's even more interesting is the way that bloggers who follow current event are beginning to show up the relative ivory towers that are major news networks. Working in a big news room myself, I see the way that a major news story can get handed around from paper to paper and airwave to airwave and become a major phenomena. It can be a real mess.

Take two recent examples. Howard Dean screams in Iowa after an empassioned speech. What's the big deal? Nothing until CNN plays it 600 times in four days and then every major paper must keep up with the coverage. And how about the more recent Bush 9/11 campaign ads. There were three days of gangbuster, front-page coverage on the main news outlets about the rage of the victim's families. Turns out they were talking about 6 families while more than a dozen had come out in support of the ads.

This kind of stuff really shapes public opinion. Yet it's missing any sort of peer review or any other vetting process outside the ethos of a particular newsroom.

It's a lot different with blogs. Somebody writes a story or a bit of coverage and anyone can comment in real time. The author can see the feedback right away. It's a vulnerability and accountability which makes it more likely that folks will end up with a better shaped look at the world. Sort of keeps one's personal opinions in check.

Take a look at how bloggers are becoming that peer review for ivory tower journalists here, here*, and here. These are just three that come to recent memory.

PEW for People and the Press released some survey results last month saying that folks are trending away from the major networks to get their news. Could be interesting if we (non-professional journalists) become the news anchors of tomorrow.

It only gets deeper

The Times has another story on the front today which is powerful. Yesterday's story was about young kids wising up and trying to clean up the sexual mess that they find themselves in after a generatioin or two really irresponsible sexuality. Today's article is about seniors who live alone and are homebound. In the NYC region they expect that number to grow by nearly 30% in the next 15 years.

Growing and growing numbers - homebound folks with very little love or even contact with other people. Think of what that would be like. One lady in the story says:

"No one comes knocking at my door. I like having someone knock at the door, even if it's only a few minutes. You don't think you're living a hermit's life. You don't like to feel like you were running a race and you suddenly stopped. After all, do you want to talk to yourself day after day? I'm bored with me already."

I think that these two stories lay a lot of shame our doors. I suppose we either have to learn to stomach messed up young kids and isolated old folks or take responsibility for it. But it also seems that people have begun to think that Meals on Wheels, social security and sex-ed programs are the equivilent of respopnsibility. Read these stories and if you still think that, you've got worse problems.

It's funny how the FDA will reject drugs because they have made a moral judgement that the side-effects outweigh the benefits. After all, it feels good to stick it to a pharmacutical company - they're just out to make a buck by screwing the public anyway. But I think that the pursuit of "personal liberties" is beginning to control us rather than vice versa.

Imagine the response if a federal agency was set up to accept of reject products and advertisements that other retailers wanted to sell to the American public. What if they said, "Sure it might be nice to have a college education in another state, but that may cause a kid to loose touch with his family and forget the debt he owes to his parents and grandparents in their old age. This sort of marketing may leave the country with millions of unwanted and unappreciated elderly." Could you imagine the cry of free-speech-foul?

The one idea is palatable because it looks to screw rich folks, and that's the American way. Yet nobody seems to care about the other, much larger, set of rich people (mostly the entertainment industry) who sells discontent by the bucket and tells folks to be "like Mike." There's a lot more money to be made in image making than in drugs.

Even so, it's hard to deny yourself freedoms and take up old-school responsibility. But it's worth making a life of trying, because denying it only gets us in deeper.

They ain't been shootin' straight

There is an article in the Times today about all of the confusion over the quiet decline in the teenage birthrate. It's a long piece, but interesting reading.

The analysis in the story is confusing and never really does anything useful, but the stories about the kids, and the questions that the author asks are the good stuff.

I think that kids are figuring out that sexual "freedom" is not all it's cracked up to be. It's such a product of the fast-fading modern mind that anyone would think about sex outside of a more substantive relationship. Yet that's exactly the public discussion - whether in the sex-ed classes, at the lockers, on the silver screen or in the ghettoblaster - that has been taking place ever since I was a wee-tyke. Most of the kids in the story sound like they have been worn out by life and the sexual misconduct of their friends and families. They're all saying "maybe we should take a look at why we are so burdened in our early teens."

There are some really amazing and powerful quotes from these kids who are just looking for real love and realizing they've been lied to.

"No one loves me, I'm going to have a child who will love me"

"They want to get away from the clinical aspect of sexuality," she said. "They all want to learn more about relationships, intimacy, talking to your partners, love."

"I think there's something very profound going on. I don't think anybody understands in depth this change in teen culture"

"Every other movie on that channel is, like, a teenage mother crying or a woman getting beat," he explained. "And my older sister, who is sexually active, we'd just be watching TV and she'd be, like, `You do know how that happens, don't you?'"

Yet it is still amazing to me that nobody is talking about families. It is almost a taboo - why can't folks just say that people need each other and that blood is thicker than water. Are they scared of something? What's up?

two thoughts on climate

Climate thought 1: The weather has been so nice the last two days that I have enjoyed riding to work in a sweater rather than a coat.

Climate thought 2: I remeber in Washington how when people argued about politics, there would be some lefties and some righties and some kookies and some free thinkers and some friends of free thinkers who were there for the free drinks. In New York it is different. It's like listening to a family fued - everyone is stilll arguing, but they all have the same accent. Since when did MoveOn.org publish a little red book?

Ordinary People and the Biting Biters who Bite Them

Mike Tyson move over. Check out this crazy fella. I ride the seven train to and from Manhattan every so often. Now I'll be keeping an eye out for biting biters with an especially crazy and bloodthirsty look in their eye.

Sissy Stores

There is something strange going on in Time Square these days. It's the sporting good stores, they're getting really wierd. Ever since I've been up here I've been looking to buy one of those little supplement/waterbottle combos. You know, buy a pound of CytoMax and get the free waterbottle that comes along with it. I usually like these deals because the waterbottles are generally oversized and make for a good office companion so I can hydrate while in meetings.

Here's the rub. None of the sporting goods store in or around Time Square (and there are at least six of them) sell any sporting goods. It's really bizarre - I can get a pair of 1984 Jordan's or a pair of Adidas with no laces (like Run DMC) but not a single item that pertains to actual exercise or sport.

So, at the risk of looking like a sissy, I humbled myself and bought a water bottle from Starbucks. Pale green.