BuzzMachine

It’s the economy, stupid
: Hello, George, are you listening?

How ironic
: I have one smart British friend who says that Americans just don’t understand irony. He’s probably right. I can’t tell whether he’s being ironic when he says it.

I also can’t tell whether Nick Denton is being ironic today when he embarks on a very bloggish riff on the Second Amendment. I hope he is. Inspired by the mad sniper in Washington, Nick says, “the gun lobby is about as convincing as the tobacco companies which pretended cancer had nothing to do with cigarettes. Crud. Easy access to firearms *is* associated with higher murder rates.”

But, sadly, he doesn’t stop there. He then argues:

And there is still an honest case to be made for the Second Amendment. It goes something like this. Guns do result in more fatal murders, but that is a small price to pay to guarantee freedom. The balance between the individual and government is ultimately determined by force. All the rights — to privacy, a fair trial, of free speech, to property — are underpinned by the power of individuals to organize against overmighty government, demonstrate, and ultimately take up arms. At a time when we are giving central government more powers, the counterweight of a people’s militia is more important than ever. Even as a madman runs amok in the DC suburbs.

Smell like irony to you? I sure hope so. Tell me I don’t have to call the Libertarian Deprogramming Unit.

But then, I’m just a blunt American.

Ba-one-da-two-bing-three… Ba-one-da-two-bing-three
: This is what makes Boing Boing the alpha blog (as someone called it; sorry I can’t remember who): Cory Doctorow discovers Crunch’s new course in cardio stripping.

Finally, a killer ap
: Gizmodo, a new daily fave of mine, reports that the new Dell PDA will have “Compact Flask expansion slots.”

Finally, a good use for a PDA: storing bourbon.

It takes a lot of fertilizer to fill the Garden State
: Josh Marshall has a chortle or two today at the expense of our too-junior senatorial candidate in New Jersey.

Fuhblogaboudit
: James Lileks sends me email pointing us toward a blog from my Jersey neighbor, Tony Soprano.

Supermensch
: Kathy Shaidle of RelapsedCatholic writes about the Jewish roots of superheroes in the latest issue of Jewsweek.

Some fans and amateur historians, obsessed with back-story “mythology”, claim they’ve uncovered the secret “Jewish-ness” of characters created within this unique geopolitical crucible. Superheroes, they claim, are usually outsiders, gifted yet misunderstood, strangers in a strange land. Taking up the theme in, of all things, arch-conservative Nation Review, Robert George mused: “Perhaps that ethnic heritage explains the common themes of abandonment, loss of home, and the existential need to bond oneself to a greater good.”

: Also, in Jewsweek, a story about the new Veggie Tales movie — cartoons by Christians with an agenda — contains this from one of the creators:

“We made a decision at the very beginning not to portray Jesus as a vegetable.”

: And read about Israelis picking up their gasmasks.

After illustrating for us how the adult mask fits, the soldier calmly reminds us of the symptoms to watch for that would necessitate using the anti-nerve gas syringe. Chest pains, body tremors, nausea and vomiting — I experience the symptoms just listening to her. She hands us a small tri-lingual explanatory brochure, and we are ushered out so the next group may receive their instructions.

Terrorism
: A former FBI profiler on the Today show this morning said that whether the face of the Maryland sniper is Mohammed Atta’s or Timothy McVeigh’s, this is terrorism.

Skinbacks I have known
: Romenesko points to a great correction:

The Daily Evergreen would like to sincerely apologize for an injustice served to the Filipino-American, Spanish-speaking and Catholic communities on the front page of Thursday’s Evergreen.

The story “Filipino-American history recognized” stated that the “Nuestra Senora de Buena Esperanza,” the galleon on which the first Filipinos landed at Morro, Bay, Calif., loosely translates to “The Big Ass Spanish Boat.” It actually translates to “Our Lady of Good Peace.”

Pardon me for being inspired to share another old-fart story from my days in the business but I can’t help myself.

Here is the story of the only time I ever got to shout “Stop the presses!!” in my newspaper career.

I was Sunday news editor of the San Francisco Examiner (which meant that I put together the part of the Sunday Examiner-Chronicle that no one read) and we had one story, with photo, about the Catholic church and another story, with photo, about the California condor. The first papers came up from the press room (back in the days when press rooms rumbled below your desk; now they are miles away, somewhere near an Interstate) and we saw with horror that the captions under the two photos had been switched.

So, under the Pope, it read: “Soon to be an endangered species.”

I picked up the phone and yelled, “Stop the presses!!”

This may be why I left hard news for fluff.

Never forgetting
: I was just thinking this morning that though, of course, 9.11 comes to mind every day, many times a day, it’s no longer so much atop the mind.

And then we went to lunch.

At this little place in Stirling, NJ, where we sit out back and have bean burgers, the big backyard was filled with a private party. “A benefit,” the waiter explained, “for Flight 93.”

Friends and family of the stewardesses of United Flight 93, the jet that crashed in Pennsylvania.

Their brochure listing the donations they received to raise money said: “Last year, we learned to laugh again. And started a tradition. This year the tradition continues. So today laugh, dance and have a great time, but never forget the real reason we’re all here.”

Can’t forget. Can’t ever forget.

Times squared
: Lileks knows (and loves) my neighborhood — Times Square — better than I do.

The gang that couldn’t catch the gang that couldn’t shoot straight
: John Ashcroft called yesterday a defining day in America’s war against terrorism.

He wishes.

Let’s look at the scorecard:

: They put an idiot Marin-minded kid from California away for 20 years for being stupid enough to go to Afghanistan and stop bathing.

: They got an idiot kid from Britain who couldn’t blow up his own shoe to confess to being a damned fool.

: They arrested a bunch of losers in Buffalo for not quite doing something bad.

: They arrested a bunch of losers with outdated Commie names (October?) in Oregon and elsewhere for trying and failing to fly to Afghanistan.

: They arrested a guy who was probably stopped from being the 20th hijacker by the hijackers themselves because he was such an idiot.

: Note that not one of these arrests did anything to make us in America any safer; they did not get any cells like the ones that attacked us on Sept. 11.

: They haven’t managed to crack a clue in the anthrax attacks.

Oh, yes, it was a defining day: the definition of inadequacy.

: And they say bin Laden is still alive.

One man’s annoyance is another man’s art
: A cell-phone symphony [via Shift]

Time flies when you’re having fun
: Haven’t seen her in ages. Jenni is aging.

Art
: TV is rarely considered art but that’s snobbish crap. TV is art and it’s art that matters because people watch it; it speaks to them.

There is art that doesn’t matter because it’s not seen or can’t speak to people or is just bull.

Take today’s New York Times business section. Good for the New York Times that they sold eight pages of advertising and called it art. Bad for my fellow Deutsche Bank shareholders that we paid the bill for this murder of trees in the name of art.

Those eight pages are filled with tiny print — at first, you think it’s another kind of stock table with words, not numbers — that turn out to be just a list of words collected from the many people and many languages of New York. “Wordsearch, a translinguistic sculpture,” it’s called.

This is one of those things that sounds like a good idea… but isn’t. (As Nick Denton once said — I remember it even if he doesn’t — regarding business: “I can’t afford brainstorming anymore.” The same could be said for the meeting that lead to this project.)

Eight big pages of tiny words.

What’s the point?

You know what, don’t answer that. I don’t care. The point is obvious but still, I don’t care.

This is self-absorbed show-off snobbish-wolves-in-populist-sheep’s clothing. It’s a waste of paper and ink. It makes my head explode.

I’ll take popular culture any day.

Snobs
: And while I’m on my populist rant, let me complain about the lead of Caryn Jame’s review of the Forstye Saga in the NY Times today:

Oh, the English and their wacky sense of humor! Mark Thompson, the chief executive of Channel 4 in Britain, recently gave a lecture about the state of television and said, “When you’re looking for ambitious, complex and above all modern TV, you find yourself watching not British, but American pieces.” To American viewers that idea rings with a Monty Pythonesque absurdity that could keep us howling with laughter all season. If American television represents the avant-garde, we’re all in very deep trouble (even though Mr. Thompson was right in citing the anomalous “Six Feet Under” and “24” as models of innovation).

What incredible snobbery! What knee-jerk anti-American, anti-cultural-populism!

Yes, damnit, American TV is giving us “ambitious, complex, and above all modern TV” and a TV critic at America’s most-respected newspaper should know that. Start with The Sopranos, West Wing, Six Feet Under, 24,and Oz and keep going through the reinvention of news (FoxNews, love it or not, gives news personality) and the invention of late-night humor (Germany clones David Letterman for a reason) and the addition of wit to the crappy reality genre Europe exported to us (they created Big Brother; we created The Osbornes). No, British TV is not smarter than American TV. No, Masterpiece Theater is not the smartest thing on TV. No, American TV — and Americans — are not classless and dumb. Oh, how I hate this cultural treason.

I think I need to write a book about this.

What he says
: I have long contented that the so-called Golden Age of TV was just a figment of Milton Berle’s ego — it was just bad vaudeville on video — and that TV is better than ever today. Now I know I’m right … ’cause my fellow TV Guide veteran Lileks says so:

This is not one of those TV