Category: Blog Post

Our friend Deborah Caulfield Rybak reports today that Garrison Keillor is apparently not interested in renewing his show’s handsome permanent lease at the Fitzgerald Theater. As DCR notes, the reasons are not entirely clear, and both Keillor and MPR chief Bill Kling expertly deflected questions about what might have really gone down. (Kling: Keillor makes his own decisions. Keillor: We gotta keep moving, keep the circulation in our toes.) True enough, a radio program creates its cognitive setting out of thin air, and it can originate from Nanook of the North’s igloo, if that’s where the gods of radio wish to do their work.

Keillor’s remark that he’d love to take the show to jolly old England for a year strikes me as brilliant–at the international level, Keillor long ago surpassed Bob Dylan and the City of Chicago as Minnesota’s most noteworthy asset. (Oh, near Chicago!–bang bang!) Also, if you love the English language, and especially the printed word, as much as Keillor does, you often wonder just what it would take to pick up and move your whole sordid freak show over the pond to the Old Sod. I’d do it in a heartbeat, just to be able to read the Guardian and Private Eye and the Tattler and Q magazine everyday. Still, Keillor’s life shows several interesting patterns that might be motivating factors . For example, I think he tends to run away rather than fight, and he’s vulnerable to the gripe that there is no honor for a prophet in his own hometown.

It may also be true that his show deserves a more frenetic, glitzy setting like the Pantages or the Orpheum in downtown Minneapolis. (Though maybe not quite ready for Rochester and Morris.) Funny how satisfaction is never permanent, restlessness is the human condition, and Keillor seems to have the old itch to shake the dust off his shoes again. That, or negotiations with MPR have broken down, and this is the nuclear option.

H.L. Mencken once said “Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want and deserve to get it good and hard.”

That quote was recalled to me today by a good friend. We were talking about something else at the time, but I couldn’t help thinking this might be a good time for the Democrats to just adopt it as their mantra, shut up, and let the current cabal do its worst.

Alito, at least according to what I’ve been reading, may not be as bad as the Dems think, that bit about spousal notification notwithstanding. I figure sometimes people will often make different votes when they know they are losing than when they know they might sway the decision. I can’t figure any other rationale for that one, other than he’s just messing with us. Or, he’s really still into that old wife is chattel thing.

But, without rehashing all the things the Bushies have done to screw up the country, maybe the Senate Dems should let them just have Alito’s up or down vote, put him on the bench, because there’s no good way to stop him, and let him, Thomas and Scalia start chipping away at all the rights that have been won since 1964.

All those moderate suburban Republicans who voted for Bush, when they knew in their hearts they were making a pact with the Christian right wing devils, will wonder what happened when the government starts giving it to them–good and hard.

The lesson should start to sink in before November 2006.

Chris Elliott, one of our favorite comedians, has published his first novel. It’s called “The Shroud of the Thwacker,” and it seems to be an historical novel about a Victorian-era serial killer named Jack the Jolly Thwacker. According to the Times today, it a spoof of sensational period mysteries. But part of the novel was accidentally nonfictional fiction, er, fictionalized nonfiction… uh, let’s try that again. Elliott unwittingly appropriated a character from another work of fiction. “Boilerplate” was supposedly one of the world’s first working robots invented in 1893 by a man named Archibald Campion, as described at a website called “Mechanical Marvels of the Nineteenth Century.” Elliott took it to be a period hoax when he made Boilerplate a character in his story. As it turns out, Boilerplate and his entire invented history are a contemporary creation of Oregon artist Paul Guinan. That put Elliot in a ticklish spot, legally speaking, but he came to an “understanding” with Guinan. As quoted in the Times, Elliott seems genuinely embarrassed by the unintended spoof within a spoof. Still, I have my doubts. He may not be the unredeemable prank that his prototype Andy Kaufman was, but I wouldn’t put it beyond Elliott to have prearranged the plagiarism. His ad hoc profit-sharing arrangement with Guinan is notable for one glaring error in concealment–no lawyers were involved.

They say you can judge a person by which section of the Sunday Times he reads first. On that basis, this readers is moderately schizophrenic. It depends, but if I’m running out the door, and don’t wish to lug the whole shooting match with me, I’ll normally extract the magazine, the week in review, arts and entertainment, style, and the book review. If I’m feeling especially ambitious, i’ll bring a long the A section. At that point, it becomes obvious that I am passively declining the value of travel, sports, and business, which I don’t mean to do, but you know.

Yesterday, though, was an unusually crazy day and I had time for just two stories– Deborah Solomon’s bizarre interview with George and Barbara Bush’s personal chef, in the magazine; and an A1 business story that jumped to the ballast tanks of the business section. The latter story was one of the more comprehensive I’ve seen about Google, particularly the business end of the business. That is, how an idealistic little search engine company that had the best search algorithms in the world had the chutzpah to recognize that that asset could be leveraged into billions and billions of dollars in advertising revenue. How’d they do that? By returning paid advertisements with every search, thereby targeting ads to people who are specifically looking for information that an advertiser wants to provide, and may be in the best position to provide. Of course, the serious dough comes less from Google’s results pages themselves, and more from the colonization of all editorial content on the web. Thus, anytime the word “soda pop” appears on any page on the net where Google is serving ads, a Coca-Cola ad runs in the gutters (not an actual example). I’ve mentioned before that this is a sort of reverse product placement: A writer might innocently use the word “Nike” in a story about basketball, and Google serves an ad from the Nike coproation that runs adjacent to the story. That would never fly in the world of print, because it would be seen as discrediting the story; being adjacent to an advert, we assume that a nefarious, human being with a suitcase of snake oil was responsible for the hard sell. Not so with Google; we apparently see it as a blameless mechanical pairing. The massive servers at Google out in California are merely reacting to editorial content, never directing it.

Naturally, since Google now sells more ads than almost any other stand-alone media company, they must grow or die. The Times article mentioned that Google is looking at ways to extend into other media, and it’s an interesting thought that doesn’t get teased out very much. In particualr, reporter Saul Hansell writes,

Now Google is looking to expand its advertising into even more places. It is testing a plan to buy pages in magazines on which to place text ads.

I imagine that would look something like this: My magazine will publish yet another lengthy, fawning story on Nick Denton, which will refer ad nauseum to the amazing blogs Wonkette and Gawker and Fleshbot. Before we go to press, we will make our issue available to Google’s search spiders, and Google will buy adjacency advertising on behalf of Nick Denton. Maybe this even happens at the printer’s FTP site, to aquit everyone at the magazine from any direct involvement. We merely hold apage oipen for Google ads that will be eelectronically zapped into place.

(One interesting tangent made clear by Hansell’s piece was that Google’s insight was that simple, single-format text advertising–very much an electronic version of a small calssified ad–is what’s dridving this revolution, not huge splashy brand-driven display ads. This may result in an aesthetic evolution in advertising–a return to narrative and text-based ads. In other words, ads that people read rather than oogle.)

Ironically, the business section of the New York Times which celebrated the history and the putative, profitable future of Google also printed a full-page paid advertisement (not adjacent, by God)–by Google, looking for exceptional job candidates. Google executives obviously knew the story was coming, and probably even knew when it was coming, and they exercised their good sense and business acumen by capitalizing on the ersatz hyperlink. All those thousands of servers, and still the human genius for the sales pitch shines through.

Like the class weakling kicking sand in the face of the vanquished playground bully, some Democrats are now tut-tutting about the “far right” torpedoing Harriet Miers. “She deserved her day in court,” Mark Shields reliably repeated last night on NewHour, David Brooks in a pink tie smirking nearby. Understandable that the left was cautiously optimistic that she might have become a SCOTUS turncoat, but we really feel bad about missing out on some of the more interesting questions she might have been asked by our fine elected representives in Congress. Like: “So have you ever actually been inside a courtroom–say even a municipal family court?” Or, “How do you feel about the President of the US placing personal loyalty above the welfare of the nation he supposedly stewards?” (Good followup: “To your knowledge, has the president fired Michael Brown yet? Or, for that matter, anyone in his entire administration, ever?”

Neglected for almost a week: In last Saturday’s NYTimes, you might have been sidetracked by MoDo’s salvo in her brief but incandescent public catfight with JuMi. I wasn’t; I noticed that the easy-to-overlook, irenic Nick Kristof wrote at length about why we all should fear a capricious indictment (or two) from an off-the-rails independent counsel, because, you know, remember the hateful playground pushing that happened the last time a president was impeached? Aside from the fact that I don’t even know where the goalposts are now, or whether they even exist, because they’ve been moved so far and so frequently by the moral relativists on both teams, I found it somehow consoling that Kristof is able to rise above it all to suggest that an indictment (or an impeachment) would be a bad thing for the nation, and that it is the voters who should exact revenge:

Absent any very clear evidence of law-breaking, the White House ideologues should be ousted by voters, not by prosecutors.

And so they shall. After the Bush Administration reverses the twenty-second amendment, and permits itself to run for election again in 2006.