Get the smellin’ salts, Pork! Oh poor Capelouto… not only are the rogues at Cox Plantation linking to bloggers today, but Atlanta blogger content direct from the Gold Dome (Shelby’s) is, GASP, getting picked-up and distributed by… the Associated Press. Oh how the sky is falling!
Cyber Alert! Cyber Alert! APB. Call HLS. Call GBI. Call some kinda Ministry of Information. And get me Suzanna Capelouto of GPB on the phone… NOW.
Two balding, middle-aged reporters reported to be violating ethical principles of one person at a state public news outlet. Rogue reporters and their minds are said to be exclusive property of Anne Cox Chambers, Cox Media Plantation. Last seen typing into electronic devices either in living room or MSM newsroom on Marietta. Said to be linking to local uncertified, uncredentialed blogger via a Cox Plantation electronic column (aka “blog”) belonging exclusively to Cox family members. Credibility meter may be crashing. We repeat… credibility meter may be crashing. Ethics meter likely doomed.
Talk about your Stuff White People Like… the white folk LOVED William F. Buckley, who died yesterday. What better way to honor the memory of the founder of modern conservatism and conversational media than by imitation! Appearing on a panel last night (with Daryn Kagan) about new global media methods, held at the Southern Center for International Studies, I’m either channeling Buckley, who’s TV personna of louche chair-slouching always fascinated me as a child when I’d glimpse him on other people’s TV sets, or I’m morphing into Tom Baxter.
photo courtesy of Luisa Cuellar-Calad
This blog will make you chortle and head-nod.
Of course we’re used to Foxworthy making us laugh our butts off. In the analog days of yore, when I’d get bored on my constant roadtripping back and forth between South Carolina and Atlanta, I’d pull over to any ‘ole gas station along I-20 and pop-in for yet another Jeff Foxworthy cassette. Then I’d just moreorless crack myself up for another hour or so. Before I knew it, there I’d be.
I still get stupid-laughing thinking about Foxworthy rambling on about his liquored-up dad pulling his ski-boat along the highway, despite the fact that the ski-boat fell off the trailer numerous exits ago.
Today, Jeff talks to the AJC about what being a dad, father, brother, son is all about – for him. Get a hankie. From the most excellent Phil Kloer:
Foxworthy has a home office, but he prefers to set his laptop on the breakfast bar. The couple’s daughters, 16-year-old Jordan and 13-year-old Juliane (“Jules”), sometimes do their homework at the kitchen table. And on a shelf is a little glass bottle full of tiny plastic beads a friend gave Jeff and Gregg six years ago.
“He said, ‘This is how many more weekends you have with your kids’” before college, Jeff explains. “One bead for every weekend.”
“We’re supposed to take a bead out every week,” says Gregg, his wife of 23 years. “But we just couldn’t bear to do it. It would hurt too much.”
The little bottle of beads is a lot of what Jeff Foxworthy, at age 49, is about these days. He frequently makes career decisions, including turning down feature film and stand-up offers, on the basis of how long and how far it will take him away from home.
“My life is centered around them,” he says. “I’m a dad and a husband and a brother and a son and a friend. I like what I do, but it’s not what I am.”
Full story here.
Daryn Kagan, yes the Daryn Kagan who was the face of CNN for many years, is now the face of indie new media with her story-driven site, Daryn Kagan.com. Here’s the story behind her stories:
Daryn Kagan is the creator and host of DarynKagan.com, an inspirational online community that features a daily Web cast of stories that, “Show the World What is Possible.” DarynKagan.com has become a daily destination for thousands of Internet users who seek news stories that inspire. Launched in November 2006, the Atlanta Journal Constitution described DarynKagan.com as “a lively gathering spot,” while the Boston Globe noted DarynKagan.com is “bucking the media tide,” with its “emphasis on stories that illustrate the triumph of the human spirit.”
For me, the media story that’s the most inspirational of all is that Kagan is doing exactly what she wants to be doing – on her terms. She’s cranking out fascinating, original content she creates herself… and building a network around that. Because she can.
And did I mention she’s got a book coming out too? Soon!
Did that awful song from Once win something at the Academy Awards? I keep hearing it everywhere. That’s got to be the lamest song ever. It’s got all the heart and soul of a parking lot stripe, and never fails to remind me of “The Ketchup Song” on Prairie Home Companion.
Ketchup
Ketchup
Ketchup
We have all suffered enough by now.
The Technology Association of Georgia’s (TAG) annual tech-fest, The Georgia Technology Summit, is happening today at the Cobb Galleria. Several Twitterites are there and emitting plenty of Tweets about it all. Twitter hash code is: #gts2008.
I was going to go as Press, but I’ve about had my fill of mostly-white-male events lately. I just can’t get terribly inspired to get there. Still, I may yet muster-up that familiar old urge to roll tape…
Inspiration: who’s got it, who doesn’t. Let that set your daily agenda and see where you end-up.
Latest poll data broken down here on Matt’s webcast. Obama with 47%, Clinton with 46% among potential Democratic voters.
According to Naomi Wolf, the end is about 3/4 here already. This interview has got to be the scariest thing I’ve heard in ages. Are all New Yorkers this paranoid? (Doug sure is since he moved there.) Then again, I’m not on any TSA “Watch” list at the airports, as Ms. Wolf is… least not this week. I think.
All that can change in an instant though. Or so they say. Or we won’t say when Blackwater gets that fat contract to enforce martial law… on us.
Man, if this stuff was coming from anybody else but a New York Jewish intellectual… say a white nationalist kid from Tennessee maybe… I’m just sayin’. Funny though, gun control issues don’t come up at all in this interview. And as far as I know it, gun control law has loosened, not tightened, so if Blackwater was, and again, I’m just sayin’, to get a contract to enforce martial law, which Ms. Wolf seems to imply is moreorless an inevitability, then Blackwater might meet with more than just a little resistance… from the ghettos to the mountains I’d imagine.
Best get crackin’ on that Playlist of “Songs For When Blackwater Comes A’Calling.” Here’s one now:
And boy don’t we love it! Young Chez Pazienza will not shut-up with the pooping on the heads of CNN bigshots. My kinda guy. If I was hiring, I’d snap Loudmouth Chez up in a second… if CNN hired him back. Which they’re not likely to ever do. From the scene of the blogging crime, The Huffington Post:
My only hope is that Ed Litvak’s departure from American Morning will somehow be good for the show, although I’m inclined to think that until someone puts an arm around Jon Klein, writes something nice about him, then pushes him out the door, nothing’s going to change. It’ll just be more of the same nonsense.
(FYI, Jon Klein is the Pres. of CNN. I love how Chez just by-passes all the little people and goes straight to the top.)
Screw ‘em, hon… you were born to the blogosphere. Now go take your rightful place in one of the many mansions to be found here.
UPDATE: Well, he already has. Should have known. Chez’s delightfully titled blog is here. Which of course makes me want to now, instead of going to the gym where I should be, commence digging around for an old, dusty photo of this editor as a teen in that the same Parisian place Chez’s blog is double-ententred for.
You gotta love a blogger/programmer who pole dances so beautifully… in her geek glasses even. Women are truly amazing.
Good Oscar gowns commentary from Slate. For instance… regarding Tilda Swinton:
Amanda: She could have done well with a little lipstick; she looked almost cadaverous. Her look was very austere, very avant-garde—she was probably wearing a Japanese designer. I thought the asymmetry of it—all that draping on one side only—didn’t quite work. But it’s hard for me to be objective with Swinton; I think she has a kind of amazing reptilian beauty.
Full article here.
From Southern Political Report’s Tom Baxter:
Convinced (former Alabama Governor) Siegelman was guilty and ready to move on, they (traditional media) were bailing out of the story just as the new media was beginning to pay attention. Since Siegelman’s conviction, the story has been kept alive on the internet — notably on the blog Horton writes for Harper’s and several spirited, Democratic-leaning Alabama blogs — and in a few of the state’s smaller and alternative newspapers.
At times, the animosity between the two sides of the media divide has equaled that between the two parties in Alabama. Horton has sharply criticized the Birmingham News, the Mobile Press-Register and the Huntsville Times, all former Newhouse papers now owned by Advance Publications, for their coverage.
Bloggers… whatcha gonna do with ‘em?. Read more from ‘em! All that Alabama dirt Mr. Horton at Harper’s has been digging in is here.
Find out who’s money is going where, including yours, with this super-duper Member of Congress money aggregating tool, Influence Explorer. Of course you’ll need the magic word to log-in.
Atlanta’s main PR-man-about-town, Tom Houck, was featured on CNN in a video package available here, remembering his days with MLK, Jr. and the Civil Rights movement. Text story here.
Houck’s still out and about in the ATL, making all the right scenes and outpacing younger PR guns who seem cluelessly, ahem, somewhere else. In other words, in the fake, processed world most contemporary PR operates in, I wouldn’t look for any of them to get arrested at the front lines of fighting for something they believe in… as did Houck when he was the young gun. Unless of course it would get their client on GMA the next morning, but I diverge…
Tom will be live at 6pm tonight on CNN to take your email questions too.
Apparently Republicans are so offensive even to each other that they’re now having to run whining to the enemy/dreaded liberal media with their sorry tales of woe about… how the White House made ‘em do it. Is anyone really all that surprised?
From CBS News, where the whole sorry story airs Sunday night February 24th on 60 Minutes:
Rove’s attempt to smear Don Siegelman was part of a Republican campaign to ruin him that finally succeeded in imprisoning him, says the operative, Jill Simpson.
Simpson speaks to Scott Pelley in her first television interview, to be broadcast on 60 Minutes Sunday, Feb. 24, at 7 p.m. ET/PT.
Simpson spoke to Pelley because, she says, Siegelman’s seven-year sentence for bribery bothers her. She recalls what Rove, then President Bush’s senior political adviser, asked her to do at a 2001 meeting in this exchange from Sunday’s report.
“Karl Rove asked you to take pictures of Siegelman?” asks Pelley.
“Yes,” replies Simpson.
“In a compromising, sexual position with one of his aides,” clarifies Pelley.
“Yes, if I could,” says Simpson.
Simpson says she found no evidence of infidelity despite months of observation.
Who knew Rove had such an interest in hanky-panky multimedia? Maybe he should have tried YouTube first, if of course that medium had been available way back in the dark ages of 2001, when most of this ”surveillance” stuff allegedly took place. But no matter now, as bribery charges seem to have done the trick.
And if you wonder sometimes… could your friends, colleagues and neighbors be watching you in hopes of catching you in something compromising? Well, given this sordid tale, they sure are!
Back at the Tech ranch for Day #2 of the Computation & Journalism symposium. Several Atlanta bloggers are Twittering it all. So head there if you’re interested. Also, there’s live web cam too, found here.
