BuzzMachine

EGOogling
: This morning I heard Howard Stern et al talking about searching the Internet to find out what people are saying about them. Artie Lang, the new guy, is still looking for anything nice said about him (I like you, Artie). Gary is still amazed at the cruel tooth jokes about his teeth. Howard looks. They all do.

Of course, they do. We bloggers look for ourselves: We go to Blogdex to look up who’s linking to us; we search our names in Daypop. We ego surf. We EGOogle.

And then it occurred to me that, of course, the famous, the stars, and the powerful do the same thing. If Howard’s posse does it, then surely Rosie and Rosanne and Madonna and Bubba Clinton and Al Gore and Bill Gates and Steve Case (if he dares) and the casts of Survivor and Bachelor all do it.

Whenever I write about Howard Stern here, I get more traffic. It’s the power of celebrity; I learned that working at People.

But the difference in this medium is that you can speak directly to the celebrities. You never know whether you are. But I’d bet on it. What if Arafat is reading the blogs? Or Tom Ridge? Or Michael Moore? It adds a new layer of fun.

From sea to shining sea
: I took homeless Nick Denton to lunch in the Conde Nast cafeteria yesterday. He was amazed that we have a food stylist. It’s Conde Nast. Life is style.

Substance is such a bother.

Nick is wide-eyed anew at things American. The other day, I told him that we had a hurricane watch in New York. He screeched: “Hurricane? Here?” Yes, Dorothy.

Now he has written a good column about his trip across America to get to New York (he complains about the edits in the piece as it appears at Management Today; that’s why he prints the whole thing on his blog; Nick is the one who said that the great thing about blogging is that there are “no editors”).

Anyway, Nick sees some differences across the country. But I, protoAmerican — midWest-bred, still serving the heartland in my businesses — have to disagree. What’s comforting (and boring) about America is its Holiday Inn no surprises ethos. Once you leave the city-states, as Nick calls them, of Manhattan or San Francisco and live where most Americans live — in the great suburbs, in the real America — there is very little that separates us and much, economically, that joins us: homes, lawns, mortgages, real estate taxes, Burger Kings, Taco Bells, Starbucks, Targets, Home Depots, food courts, warehouse stores, auto dealers, kids’ soccer games, parent-teacher conferences, malls, Houlihans, Fridays, candle stores, Gaps, and mostly cable TV. Besides the accents (and politics that tend to go with them) and in spite of the ethnic reach (my kids’ playmates are Arab, Indian, French, even Canadian) we are pretty much as homogonized as our milk.

Mail bomb bozo
: The suspect in the mailbox bombings had a web site. It’s down already, of course. But here it is in Google’s cache.

: Their CD: “Sacks of People.” I’d say that shows his attitude toward people.

Pim
: Adam Curry from Amsterdam [via Instapundit] says he would have voted for Pim, if he were Dutch.

Europe’s war of the right
: The Netherlands’ Pim Fortuyn, a right-wing, anti-immigrant, and gay political leader, has been assassinated. The coverage of De Volkskrant is here. You don’t need to read Dutch to see what a shattering event an assassination is in any country.

I don’t assume this is an act of political conspiracy. I remember the murders of my friends Harvey Milk and George Moscone in San Francisco. That was not the act of a conspiracy or politics; it was the act of one dangerous political freak and twerp, Dan White, who later got off with the infamous Twinkie defense and then killed himself. Unless government-sponsored, assassins are as a rule lone lunatics.

Still, this act only adds to the right-wing BTUs heating up Europe. Add Le Pen in France. Add right-wingers scaring the electorate in local elections in Britain. Add more in Hungary. And elsewhere.

It all makes me all the happier with our two-party system in America. Our system is often frustrating and certainly imperfect and frequently maligned. But this system assures greater stability. It assures moderation. It assures the closest any political body can come to consensus. To state the obvious: Because we elect our chief executive directly — and not via any coalition of parties that often have to do deals with devils to add up a majority to run the government — and because only two parties can truly afford to run major races and because our government’s cannot collapse on one lost parliamentary vote, we are left with two parties that each must find ways to bring their edges to the middle, for that is their only hope of winning. Sanity lives in the middle. Of course, we have our third parties as well but whether it’s Nader or Perot or Buchanan or Anderson, they tend to spoil elections and pump already overinflated would-be politicians’ egoes more than add to the debate or give us true choice. And because those third-parties do not succeed, it means that fourth or fifth or sixth parties — the ones that live in the extremes, the ones that are getting upwards of 15 to 20 percent of the votes in Europe — cannot possibly grow here; they cannot gain a position to blackmail coalition-partner parties; they cannot win; they stay on the fringe, where they belong and the government stays in the mainstream.

God Bless those Founding Fathers.

: The Times says:

…his main target was Islam. After an imam in his native city of Rotterdam described gays as being worse than pigs, Mr Fortuyn attacked almost every aspect of Islamic culture. His central argument was that The Netherlands had to defend its open and tolerant values against a flood of Muslims who were intolerant. Islam, he said, was a

Blog Nation
: Here’s the best reason to publish the blog book, Blog Nation, and hope it is a success: Noam Chomsky’s 9.11 rant has shipped more than 100k copies.

Blog biz
: Blogs, I’m coming to see, are bringing together the best and the brightest (well, at least the better and the bright) of our era.

These people are not only good writers with intelligent curiosity and independent minds.

They are also business people.

: Note Nick Denton — one of the best and brightest, truly — starting a new blog business. I sit on the board of one of the other companies he started, Moreover, and my company invested in it. He introduced me to Blogger/Pyra and my company invested in it, too. (I’m proud to see that both Internet companies are still alive. The Internet, as things turn out, will not be won by First-Mover advantage. It will be won by Last-Standing Advantage.) Now Nick is working on a new company and I’m quite enthusiastic about it. It will be small and smart and ahead of its time (but not too much). I’m having lunch with Nick on Monday and we’ll play oneupsmanship on new ideas.

: Matt Welch, Ken Layne, and Tim Blair are working hard to start a new newspaper. I’ve talked to the guys about the project and I’m excited about this, too.

: Last week, Henry Copeland stopped by (while I was on the phone to Matt and right after I got off the phone with Nick… blogs are my new clique) and told me about an exciting new business he’s working on. I’ll let him tell you about it when I’m ready.

: Max Power and Eric Olsen are putting together Blog Nation (I like the title, even if they don’t), a book with the best of this fraternity(sorority) of bloggers.

Smell the trend?

Bloggers are also entrepreneurs. It makes perfect sense: All these people are independent thinkers and energetic and smart and dedicated. I’m tempted to say that this is what made America great (except two of these are Aussies and one’s a Brit and one’s living in Paris). So this is what makes the Blogosphere great.

The Week
: Jim Treacher discovers The Week (or he will once he actually buys one). I’m surprised to say that it has turned into one of my favorite magazines, for it freeze-dries some of the value of the Web and weblogs.

The Week (and webloggers) browse and read so we don’t have to; they find the best of what’s out there and summarize it for us. No, this is not the Reader’s Digest of the new millenium; that’s pablum. Both weblogs and The Week have perspective and opinion

My colleague and friend Joe pointed me to The Week; I made fun of him but then admitted I was a wrong snot.

The other Jewish homeland
: In an otherwise odd excuse to criticize Israel and Russian support of it, Al-Ahram nevertheless tells me something I didn’t know about an “other Jewish homeland:”

The passions and pains of the Middle East conflict have drawn a bloody curtain over the fact that, ever since 1934, Jews have had a homeland in the Russian Far East. The Jewish Autonomous Region, popularly known as Birobidzhan, is an uninviting, mostly marshy territory, twice the size of New Jersey, that was earmarked to be Soviet Jewry’s home. It was conceived as a brave social experiment that would score propaganda points in the international arena and be hailed as a viable alternative to Palestine, courtesy of Joseph Stalin.

The Jewish Autonomous Region is still there and alive, notwithstanding the massive exodus that has occurred in the past 15 years to the alleged “historic homeland” that is present-day Israel. Those who decided to pack up and leave did it for economic rather than ideological purposes.

Note the “alleged.” Nevermind that.

I went looking for more on Birobidzhan and found it in a good Swarthmore online exhibition (move through its 35 fascinating pages by clicking on the page number; the directional arrows sometimes don’t appear). The purges of the 30s and then Stalin did in the settlement. The exhibit concludes:

Of the current population of over 200,000 in the Jewish Autonomous Region, no more than a few thousand are Jewish. In addition, hundreds are leaving the region every year for Israel and other places.

Here’s a book on the topic.

And here’s another good story about the last Jews leaving Birobidzhan; it says they are practically gone.

So how about giving it to the Palestinians, an even swap: The West Bank for Birobidzhan.

France v. Israel
: Andrew Sullivan tries to explain to Britain why Americans are siding more strongly with Israel and sneering more snidely at the French:

In almost two decades of living in America, I

A. Welch
: I told Matt Welch that I thought he was the mysterious A. Beam. My forensic blogging:

: He knows the whole L.A. clique well.

: Both of them say “anyways.”

Good enough for me.

Welch denies it.

So did Joe Klein.

: Jim Treacher thought it’s Welch, too. Welch says he thought it was Treacher or Blair.

: Emmanuelle adds:

we’re about to go to another L.A. party/barbecue where everybody accuses each other of being a.beam! It’s like an Agatha Christie novel: every body is a suspect. It’s fun! I suspect that a.beam writes from New York and has a lot of ideas.

All those L.A. people ever do is party.

Spidey
: Spiderman on track to smash records with a $105-million weekend. [via Drudge]

World’s worst job
: Mailman.

Allah’s shame
: The other day, I quoted Elie Wiesel calling on Muslim clerics to issue a fatwa against suicide-murderers.

Instead, they are issuing fatwas encouraging hate and murder.

At Islam Online, a nonMuslim writes in that he heard hateful incantations in Mosques in Arab countries:

The weight
: They have almost finished removing 1.6 million tons of debris from the World Trade Center. By the end of the month, the Times reports, it will all be gone. All that will be left will be the hole.

And the memory.

I fear the memory is beginning to fade. I fear it in me.

I went walking to the bookstore the other day; I do that when I need to get out and think. There, I found the book collection of the New York Times’ profiles of the victims of September — Portraits: 9/11/01.

I was shocked at the size of it and the weight of it. The dimensions of the book are big: every page is large and there are more than 500 pages. And this is not even a complete memorial to the victims; it is only the portraits published before February. There are even more to be written, which will be included in the next edition, an even bigger book.

I don’t know why I was so shocked at the size. Somehow, in my mind’s scale, I thought this book would be smaller. I wonder whether this is a symptom of my memory, fading.

Of course, the book is huge. The loss is huge. Thousands of lives gone. Thousands upon thousands of lives scarred.

I bought the book and finally read the portrait of my neighbor who died. It returned me to September.

If you, too, feel your memory fading, if 9.11 starts to look smaller behind you, I urge you to go to the bookstore and pick up the Times’ book, just pick it up.

Feel the weight of the grief.

Stands for F’ing Bloody Idiots
: I haven’t had a fresh reason to be mad at the FBI in, oh, at least a week. But here’s a new reason:

Two months before the suicide hijackings, an FBI agent in Arizona alerted Washington headquarters that several Middle Easterners were training at a U.S. aviation school and recommended contacting other schools nationwide where Arabs might be studying, law enforcement officials said.

The FBI sent the intelligence to its terrorism experts in Washington and New York for analysis and had begun discussing conducting a nationwide canvass of flight schools when the Sept. 11 tragedies occurred, officials told The Associated Press.

: Ditto airport security screeners: idiots. From Cleveland Live:

A screening machine detected explosives in a carry-on bag at a security checkpoint at Cleveland Hopkins International Airport on Friday, and authorities closed two concourses for 2 1/2 hours, officials said.

Airport Commissioner Fred Szabo said screeners were unable to find the bag and he could not rule out the possibility that the bag and the person carrying it got on a departing flight before the concourses were closed.

WAKE UP!

Unchallenged
: First the NY Times killed its Nation Challenged post-9.11 section, but they said they’d keep updating the section online. Now, quietly, they’ve stopped updating.