BuzzMachine

The blog book
: I’ll be contributing to the blog book project as soon as I find more than 10 minutes to finish the email/post I started. In the meantime, note VodkaSchpundit‘s well-worded take on the concept:

Jeff Jarvis takes another navel gaze at the warblogs, and comes up with some fine lint.

The point I found most interesting? Blogs work like Memento.

More lottery madness
: No, I’m not buying one.

: Jim Treacher saw the same TV piece about the lottery trailer-to-Tara tale that I saw (a few posts down). His take:

Probably bought his lottery ticket with his bottle deposit money or something. Rags to riches, the American dream, etc. That was less than eight months ago, and in that time, this genetic cautionary tale has bought three houses (the one they showed would make Liberace go, “It’s a bit much, dear, isn’t it?”), seven luxury cars, jewelry out the ass, plasma-screen TVs and computers in every room, robots, a customized golfcart made out of a humvee for his daughter… Makes Ozzy’s pad look like a studio apartment.

: Gregory Taylor, a Northwestern (may alma mater) law prof, asks whether I’m being hypocritical (a common state of being for me):

But isn’t it contradictory to object on the grounds that the lotto takes money from those that can least afford it (“trailer trash”) and at the same time complain that the winners waste the money because they come from the class of people who play? In other words, lotto is bad because it takes money from the underclass AND because it gives money to the underclass?

Ah, but it takes from millions of poor people and gives it all to one poor person, who spends it stupidly; see above.

: Gunner20 also forwards a link to an anti-Lotto site in Tennessee. Where does the professor from Knoxville stand on this?

: Matt Welch sends email on the lottery, taking a stand that is either moralistic or libertarian (who has been spiking Matt’s beer?); you decide:

Speaking of the lottery, my argument against it is this — the state should not be involved in actively promoting vice to its own citizens, let alone (maybe to a lesser extent) depending on levies from said vice to fill a budget. I don’t want the state spending money on anti-smoking billboards, and I don’t want the state spending money on pro-lottery commercials. I want the state to govern. How’s that?

Goob
: Mac Thomason has no idea why he’s posting this: George “Goober” Lindsey on AL.com’s chat today at 2p CT. That’s one of my services. I’m so goshderned proud.

Sun spotty
: Got the NY Sun today. But it wasn’t easy. It was sold out already throughout Penn Station and nearby. That means somebody in the circulation department didn’t do a good job; that means lost sales. But there were guys in yellow T-shirts outside selling it. Too bad they don’t put any of it online for all you conservatives in Blogland.

: Read Ken Layne’s celebration of newspapers, inspired by the rising Sun.

: If the Sun did have a web site, I’d be able to point you to the text of Elie Wiesel’s speech at the pro-Israel rally in Washington yesterday. If the Sun had a web site, I’d be able to point you to its very good editorial explaining why the war in the Middle East remains a war against not just Israel but a war against Jews.

But the Sun doesn’t have a web site. How odd for a paper born of the web?

Redistribution of idiocy
: So the PowerWhatever lottery is up to $325 million heading higher, maybe to a record by the end of the day.

I find it tragic.

I sit on the PATH train from NY to NJ and see guys who clearly don’t have much money carrying a thick pile of lottery tickets — which means they now have even less money — as they head to the nearest newsstand to buy more tickets and lose even more money. I see the line at that newsstand, held in by police barricades, snaking around and around, packed with people — almost all of them minorities and, by all appearances, most of them poor. I come in my building and Bob the guard, who doesn’t have a bank account and pays $9 to cash his Social Security check, is shaking head head over missing the number… again.

This is the most regressive — the most cynical — tax ever created. The poor pay it.

But even worse is where the money goes.

I watched TV this weekend as it followed up on a guy who won $195 million in a lottery. All that money is going to fund the world’s worst interior design and most overpriced cars, a tribute to the taste of trailer trash.

It’s a tragedy to steal this money from the poor. It’s a tragedy to waste it on the stupid.

Imagine what you could do with $325 million if you had brains. You could start a company. You could employ thousands. You could create billions of wealth. You could pay billions of taxes.

I’ll just bet that a smart econ Ph.D candidate could write a helluva dissertation on that, proving that lotteries are helping to depress our economy, redistributing wealth in the most unproductive manner possible.

Hey all you economist bloggers — you, you, or you — tackle that one. Calculate the total amount of income — income at its most spendable — drained from the economy; how much spending power did we lose? Then look at where the winnings went; what did it build? Then look at the net income to the government for all this and who paid and how much it cost to generate that income. Then answer the question: Are we better off?

Ch-ch-ch-changes
: I was walking on Times Square at lunchtime. Saw a guy with three fanny packs around his waste. A year ago, I would have thought: “Tourist dork.” Now I think: “Dynamite?”

PULO
: Charles Johnson has been speculating on the odor inside Arafat’s compound. This report from the NY TImes doesn’t help the image:

“I am down to the last analgesics,” said Dr. Zedi Abu Shawish, a surgeon and deputy director of hospitals for the West Bank who said he has been caring for a half dozen wounded Palestinian fighters inside with dwindling supplies left by the Red Cross, performing an amputation below the knee on one man with just local anesthetic. “I need first of all the water. It’s the most important here for us, because if I have more diarrhea here, it will be messy.”

Blog publishing
: Matt Welch reveals that many months ago, he, Ken Layne, Tim Blair, and I, plus a few others, thought of bringing our weblog-inspired writing together for a book on 9.11 and its aftermath. But we were all too busy — blogging, among other more or less lucrative things — and never got around to it.

Now Welch is properly pissed that we didn’t publish our book while other, opposing fraternities of fools did publish their books. He’s urging someone to pick up the torch. I’ll cheer that on.

I’ll also admit that I had another book idea as well. I love this new genre, these weblogs, for many reasons, among them: This is a new form of storytelling in reverse, with the present on top of the past. Here, the beginning is the end of the story. Here, the reader starts off smarter than the writer, knowing how things will turn out and then reading back in time to find out how it all came to be. Every entry in these web diaries is immediate and reflects the moment in which it is written but also reflects the wisdom that came before.

I read back over my own weblog with its often achingly (and frequently embarrassingly) raw and personal recollections of September 11 and what followed and saw that progression myself; I saw the change in me, played in reverse. I saw, too, the unique flavor of the weblog. I’m not saying it was good; I’m too close to it and I admire too many other bloggers too much to think that. But still, I did wonder whether there might be a book in this. I wasn’t sure and so I contacted an agent, since agents are supposed to know such things, eh? Unfortunately, I hadn’t had an agent in years, having been too busy earning a living to write in the last decade or so. So I made contact with the first agent I could find via a friend of a friend. That was three and a half months ago. In all that time, I had one love-ya-babe conversation and just waited. I tried reminding the agency that this 9.11 thing is fairly timely and we should decide one way or the other now; the agent was too busy to deal with it. Only Friday did I get the answer: This 9.11 thing is timely, the agent opined, and now we’re late. I didn’t have the to say that if we’d done this around the New Year (when I made the first contact, damnit) we might have acted in time. But surprise of surprises, there are other 9.11 books coming out now. So it’s too late.

A good agent is as hard to find as a good contractor.

Now the truth is that there were probably many other good reasons why this would not work as a book, from the quality of my prose to the difficulties of capturing the richness of content the Web offers via simple links. And I am late to the book party. And that’s fine.

But here’s the point: I do believe that one way or another, blogs will yield books, good books. Blogs will yield new and exciting authors with new voices (start with that list at the top of this post). Blogs will yield new ways to tell stories, where today follows yesterday, where the audience is wiser than the author (an appropriate product of the first medium owned by its audience). There has been a great deal of talk lately about how blogs will or should change news and the news business. But I think an even bigger opportunity — and more needed — is for blogs to change book publishing and even writing itself. Blogs can bring new voices and immediacy and passion and wit and generosity to the stuffy, hidebound, predictable, dull medium of books.

So far, the first and only indication I’ve seen that anyone in the old medium notices the new one comes in the announcement that Bertelsmann has signed right-wing Web site Newsmax to a deal to start a publishing imprint. It’s a step — in the wrong direction, perhaps, but a step nonetheless.

If anybody wants to see a box of printouts from this blog, lemme know.

But if anybody wants to mine blogs for new authors, I’ll stand up and cheer.

I’ll buy those books.

: I’m glad Oliver Willis sent me links to his posts on this topic. I remembered his view that books will become the killer ap of bloggers but couldn’t find it last night.

: Relevant to 9.11 books (not blog books): Today’s NY Times roundup.

: One of the first blog books should be Will Warren’s collected verse and punchlines in iambic pentameter. Today: Amazonian Dowd.

Faith
: Too bad that Beliefnet.com filed Chapter 11. It’s a good site. [via Holy Weblog]

Golem
: A nice post from Eric Olsen on Sharon as Israel’s Golem, inspired by the play’s timely run in New York.

Through the political prism, from red to blue
: The weekend brings two opposing takes on the same Bush Administration tactics in the Middle East.

Here’s Andrew Sullivan in the Times of London coming off like a bit of sycophant again as he finds every reason to call Bush brilliant and ignores every reasonable reason to think otherwise.

And then here’s Frank Rich in the New York Times coming off like the emcee at a roast as he barbecues George W. for his disengagement and his black-and-white world view and giving him and his team no credit for seeing an inch past their noses.

If we’re to believe Sullivan, the Bush White House is engaged in a terribly cynical strategy: We scold Israel even as we wink and let them continue their attack and we do this only for international consumption, so we can say we tried and then go out and finish Dad’s war against Iraq.

If we’re to believe Rich, the Bush White House is filled with naive moralists and diplomatic dunderheads who wish we could stay on the sidelines and let this be someone else’s war.

The truth, of course, is somewhere in the middle, between red and blue.

Yes, our wrist-slapping of Sharon and Colin Powell’s foot-dragging journey across the Middle East (with an itinerary that reminded me of one of those old Family Circle cartoons, with a youngster’s defiantly circuitous route home) are cynical. Surely we can’t believe the world is so stupid.

And yes, Bush stayed out for too long and did too little and now is paying the price.

True, too, that Bush will find it hard to defend his very own doctrine that admirably called a terrorist a terrorist now that he is refusing to label the terrorist of terrorists one himself, now that he is about to reward him for terror with a meeting by the secretary of state.

These two pieces balance each other neatly, for they show that even as we debate whether Bush sees the world in black or white or gray, the truth is that the color of this world is brown, the color of the muddy mess in which we find ourselves, the color of bullshit.

: If you see this, I’ve succeeded in posting via email. My only regret is

that Nick Denton beat me to it. Drat.