Author: Stagger Lee

Today we toast Josh Marshall. Ten years ago he started Talking Points Memo, which was basically just a left-leaning slew of posts linking to breaking news out of the Florida recount, the sort of thing that would barely rate a Tumblr today (and in fact, he coded the whole thing in HTML by hand until 2003, when somebody explained this amazing thing called Moveable Type). From humble beginnings he wound up with TPM Media, an entity that actually employs reporters and commits acts of actual journalism, to the point that it was the first Internet news outlet to receive a Peabody award.

This is interesting to me because sixteen years ago this fall, I sketched out for one of my professors what I thought an “Internet-enabled newspaper” would look like. It would mean being able to link relevant stories together, and even update them as additional news broke. It would mean pictures right up on a website immediately. It would mean embedded USENET groups, so you could have feedback and discussion tied directly to an article. (Yes, I thought this was a selling point back then. Shoot me now.) He was very intrigued, but I don’t think I really grasped what was possible, because at the time there weren’t really smartphones or cameraphones – hell, I didn’t have my first cellular phone until 1996, if I remember right.

Actually, the first Internet-enabled device I had was a borrowed Palm VII for a couple of weeks in late summer of 2000, which would show “web clippings” on its dinky 160×160 4-bit grayscale screen if you raised its antenna and chanted to the voodoo gods long enough. I soon latched onto an AT&T phone that actually let me check my mail on an even dinkier screen (using CDPD over TDMA, gah), and in early 2002 I was saddled with a Blackberry (and support responsibilities for same) because some C_O had heard that they worked in the World Trade Center when the cellular was overloaded. Not until 2003 did I have a device which brought it all together and would do email, web and camera all in one – and the SonyEricsson P800 was a disaster of a phone to use as a phone even if the rest of the features were splendid, which they weren’t. Even as late as 2004, the platforms of the Metro weren’t chockablock with people all looking down at their phone all the time, the way the Caltrain platform was by January 2009.

Back during the last boom, the pundits all talked about how the Golden Convergence was coming, and that set-top box on your TV would be your computer, your mail, your movies, blah blah blah. I don’t think they figured on the convergence happening on the phone. And really, that’s what’s transformed news. How many cameraphone videos do you see during natural disasters or unexpected incidents? How much of your breaking news do you get from Twitter?

For the last couple of weeks, it seems like everyone on the internet has been taking the piss out of Clifford Stoll’s 1995 Newsweek essay in which he asserted that “What the Internet hucksters won’t tell you is that the Internet is one big ocean of unedited data, without any pretense of completeness. Lacking editors, reviewers or critics, the Internet has become a wasteland of unfiltered data. You don’t know what to ignore and what’s worth reading.” It apparently completely eluded him that in such a world, there would be a market for people who wanted to get into the editing, reviewing, critic-ing and filtering business.

And now, in 2010, Josh Marshall has set the bar for how Internet-based journalism works – because he didn’t know what Cliff Stoll knew. The moral of the story is this: just because you live in the future, don’t assume you live at the end of history.

Birmingham, Alabama has the largest Veteran’s Day parade in the country. At least twenty years ago, it also had a World Peace Luncheon in conjunction with the parade, and that luncheon featured more brass from all four services than I ever saw outside a blue line Metro car. I remember the Jazz Band from college perched at one corner of the stage, opening with the national anthem and then basically just playing every Glenn Miller tune we knew.

So let’s say I gave in to my impulses. Run, hide, get away from it all. Actually do what it takes to go away somewhere. Let’s go with Britain, because it’s the foreign country I’ve been to the most, and I’ve paid enough attention to Absolute Radio and BBC America that maybe I could pull it for a while.

First – how long? The stamp on the passport says “six months without recourse to public services,” which I assume means I might be able to get treated for a sniffle on the NHS but shouldn’t count on help with a job or housing or anything. So you need a place to stay – and a place for two, presumably, because I don’t think the wife will cotton to me running away to Britain without her. If staying longer than a couple of weeks, a job is essential, unless you have a stray house to sell for the cash to sustain you through this little outing. But even if you could sort that – ok, you have a shed to live in somewhere, and somebody will pay you money to blog, and the wife can keep her job and telecommute from the Pret around the block (or the pub down the lane if rural enough) – fine.

Then what?

How long before you come back? Do you ever plan on coming back? You’re cutting your old job adrift, almost certainly. You’re not going to see much of your friends – even with the help of Skype and FaceTime, there’s still the time zone difference, and forget about having people pop over to visit. You might see the Redskins occasionally, if you’re willing to get up at two AM for Monday Night Tuesday Morning Football (although regular start time would be 6 PM, just right to cap off a Sunday evening) but forget about hearing Sonny and Sam on the radio. Actually forget about following college sports altogether, unless you can arrange for some sort of wacky international streaming access (not bloody likely). Different TV might be a novelty for a while, might even be enough to while away the evenings sometimes, but you’re going to have to go out and make an entirely new crop of friends in a foreign culture (don’t forget, two countries separated by a common language).

But if you don’t do it for good – if you wind up only making a year of it or such, and you’ve quit your job and sold your house and abandoned your old life to make it work – what do you have to come back to? At that point, you’re committed. You’re all in. You’ve bet your life on the devil you don’t know.

So as much as it might help to be curled up on the sleeping bags in the shed, with the rain falling outside and the mist on the moors, and the splendid isolation from everything you might want to get away from for a while – you’re probably not going to be able to make it work.

I’m late to the party on this one, but now that Five Guys has landed in Silly Con Valley, it is finally possible to achieve a proper head to head comparison. I say late because others have already hit this up in other blogs, so this will probably be more impressionistic than a one to one breakdown.

First things first: the venue. The key factor for me is that Five Guys has no drive-thru. If you have to park and go in, you’ve given away half the title of “fast food” for better or worse. That among other things will lead to the real comparison later.

The burger itself: both go with a standard two patties and two slices of cheese, but Five Guys offers a much wider array of toppings with things like jalapeños and bacon. In n Out sticks with basically the same offerings they’ve had since the late 1940s. The standard 2×2 In n Out configuration is smaller in aggregate than the Five Guys equivalent, but not wildly so.

One place the Bible is not literally accurate is in the matter of feeding the five thousand. I am convinced that rather than mucking about with loaves and fishes, Our Lord fed the multitudes with one small fry from Five Guys. It is a preposterous serving size and basically unmanageable for a single person. The fries themselves are a thick skin-on cut that basically begs for barbecue sauce and seasoned salt. In n Out’s fries are the more traditional fast food type, and are in fact widely regarded in the Valley as the Achilles heel of the menu – because the potatoes are fresh and not frozen, the frying process results in a different texture and taste that largely depends on whether potatoes are in season. In n Out fries are much more suitable for layering onto one’s burger, though, which is important if you are Mike CASSSSSidy.

Five Guys has no milkshakes, which might be important to some, but their array of fountain beverages includes Coke Zero, which is my current indispensable propellant. In fact, that’s a whole separate post, about how the frack is Zero not a standard Coke offering after four bloody years.

Service was fine both places. In n Out is the diamond encrusted platinum standard for fast food service worldwide, but it’s not like Five Guys was being run by baboons or anything; quite the contrary, they aptly handled a line that was literally out the door on the day we went by.

Oh yes, price: a 2×2 type burger, with regular fries and large Coke, cost a hair under half at In n Out what it costs at Five Guys.

My conclusion, which I have repeated elsewhere, is this: for whatever reason, the greater 650/408 area is home to a number of charbroiled burger establishments. Clarke’s in Mountain View is the pinnacle of those, but establishments like Kirk’s and Jeffery’s also have a loyal following, and chains like Burger Joint and The Counter have moved in as well. I is my opinion that Five Guys is a much more direct competitor for places like that rather than for In n Out, in terms of offerings and price point alike. I’m not sure anything will ever pull me off Clarke’s as “this is where God goes for a burger” but I think Five Guys will definitely carve out a niche and light a fire under everybody else, as it may be the first fast food chain since In n Out to achieve the level of national buzz that makes people say “when is it coming here??”

Damn, now I’m hungry. And I didn’t drive, I’ll be damned…

When I first moved out here, people were trying to tell me about the rivalry between Cal and Stanford, both very fine academic institutions which support me in very different ways (but don’t think I don’t have a rooting interest). And I asked “Do you know anyone who’s been shot over Cal-Stanford? Divorced? No? I don’t think you take your football seriously. You see that flag that’s half Cal, half Stanford, and says “A HOUSE DIVIDED” on it? You know what that flag would say in Alabama? POLICE LINE, DO NOT CROSS.”

I thought about this in the wake of Alabama’s national title, and the hue and cry over Cam Newton, and the unabashed glee from my house at the travails of the athletic department at the Penitentiary University of Tennessee, and then looked a little wider, and had one of those shuddering realizations.

The Southern form of rivalry is one in which it is less important that you succeed than that your rival fail.

I don’t know whether this is something rooted in economic privation, although that would make sense. If you can’t make any headway getting up the hill, you may still wind up higher relative to your rival if they take a tumble and wind up beneath you. Easier to sit there and wish something on the bad guys than to get up there and do better yourself. Either way, this is something that has to be taken into serious consideration when examining the state of Southernization of national politics (which has happened, and don’t let anyone tell you different) – when everything hangs on demonizing the other, how much simpler to cut down the other than to raise yourself…

NB: I was at one point going to do a detailed breakdown of how the GOP nationalized campaign was a one-for-one recapitulation of the standard forms in Alabama from 1914-58, complete with Big Mules and Yankees and the class-for-racial alignment, but it is frankly too goddamn depressing to contemplate.

For my next trick, a test of blogging from the iPad with no other keyboard, from BlogPress, sitting in bed with my knees propped up. I don’t know that i would like to make a habit of this, but it’s totally doable. More on this later on this week, when we discuss how we live in the future.

It’s going to be below 50 degrees, and possibly raining, when I head out the door tomorrow morning. At least it won’t be as dark as it’s been the last two weeks, assuming the clouds aren’t too bad. I’m looking at various websites trying to sort it out and mulling over what I’m wearing tomorrow.

The problem is, I have a crap-ton of jackets. Having gone from Nashville to Washington DC to Silly Con Valley, I have a wide and varied array of coats, most of which are about 80% of the way there. Right now, the problem I’ve had lately is that it’s cold enough for a jacket in the morning but too warm for it by lunchtime, which usually means a softshell that can be wadded up and crammed into the backpack. If it’s raining, though, you have to commit to the coat because you’re not going to want to stuff a wet rainshell in with your laptop. And if the coat’s too thick, you can’t wear the backpack (the leather stuff is right out).

Right now, a rainshell isn’t enough unless you’re layering with something else, but the shell is the only thing with a hood. I have an oilcloth engineer’s coat which is shorter than a typical duster and flannel-lined to boot, which is plenty warm and doesn’t let the water through even if it does get hella wet on its own, but it doesn’t have anything to keep the rain off my head. There’s always my CERT jacket, but even if it was here and not at work, it’s BRIGHT canary yellow and tough to miss. (Although it would have been nice to have for today’s drill.) Hell, I even have a state-of-the-art sportcoat by Saboteur, in dark gray wool. that has taped seams and waterproofing, but you wouldn’t dare wear a backpack over it even if it were roomier, which it’s so not. That’s going-out wear, not a daily driver.

At this point, I don’t quite know what the move is. I know that everyone here repeats the manta “LAYERS LAYERS LAYERS” but I’d rather not have to take off more than one thing. Even if I were going to, I’d need some better layers than what I have. The really annoying thing is that I have a whole lot of jackets that are 3/4 of the way to what I need, and a lot that are wholly impractical but rich in sentimental value. And as always, I’m constantly searching for the one perfect 100% thing so I can unload a bunch of the 75% things.

What is it with me and outerwear?

that Vandy was down 41-0, and the coach of the other team challenged the call that the Vandy ballcarrier was down, claiming he’d actually fumbled, you’d say “wtf, Vandy doesn’t play USC this year.”

Fuck Urban Meyer. Fuck them Gators.

The first time I can remember it was my senior year of undergrad. My phone (and its integrated answering machine) was on the main line at the Honors House because my roommate was the RA, and as such he had system voicemail which I couldn’t check. So my phone was downstairs, ringer cranked to the stars. It was impossible to miss.

And nothing good ever came of that phone ringing. The only person who ever called me was my new girlfriend, the one who replaced She Whose Name We Do Not Speak. And she had already gone off the rails. I should have had the sense to pack it in, but I didn’t, and one thing led to another and she was still my girlfriend even after I went off to grad school.

Grad school was electronic. Email off the VAX was our principal means of contact. So the ringing phone could only mean somebody I didn’t particularly want to talk to. And then grad school wasn’t there anymore, and in those first trying years out of school, the phone meant family I didn’t want to talk to, or bill collectors, or worse.

And over the course of these past nine years, everybody I want to talk to has long since figured out that the text message is the best way to reach me. And I’ve done the same. I don’t know if this is a product of the aversion or just feeds it, but there it is. Because I hate it. That’s half the reason I have one wacky ringtone after another, especially tailored to certain numbers so I’ll know whether it’s somebody I want to talk to. The regular ring of a phone is like an icepick down my spine, a shock of dismay and foreboding that I can’t abide having to deal with. And the more tense, or uneasy, or depressed, or anxious I am, the worse it gets.

Maybe that’s the price of having embraced the modern era. Email, SMS, picture messages, Twitter, Facebook, FaceTime, all manner of ways to reach the people I want reaching me. And so only the bad things come over the phone now.

No, seriously. I’m disengaging from football as much as I can at this point, because quite frankly this year has done nothing but add to my general store of angst and despair. Consider:

* Cal is circling the drain and now has lost the starting QB for good thanks to a shredded ligament. Kevin Riley’s career with the Golden Bears is done.

* Vandy’s best player, running back Warren Norman, broke a wrist and is out for the season, with Florida, Kentucky, Tennessee and Wake yet to play.

* As it stands right now, the Furd is in a position to potentially make the Rose Bowl.

* Auburn is on the inside track to a national championship appearance, despite the new Cam Newton scandal flowering in Alabama.

* The Redskins are in utter disarray, thanks to their highly overrated coach whose only accomplishments have been inheriting John Elway, putting guys behind the dirtiest line in football, and being a golden child of the NFL re: officiating. Now he’s benched his QB for reasons that defy logic (and which have changed with every press conference) and the city is in an uproar, and rightly so.

Basketball starts in a week or two, and I will be off to that like a shot. Meanwhile, the postmortem:

Vandy has a first-year coach and is, well, Vandy, so this is about as good as you could expect. I think Tennessee and Wake might still be doable, for all the good it does us. Bama will be fine; even if they don’t beat Auburn they may still luckbox into the Sugar Bowl if Auburn makes the BCS simply because they will be the second-best team in the SEC (the SEC East is beneath pathetic this year). As for Cal, this is the beginning of the dark age. It will last through 2012 unless Tedford can do something amazing in AT&T Park, and at a minimum he needs a new offensive line coach. If they can’t pass-protect any better, it won’t matter which of half a dozen candidates goes under center next year. I don’t really want to go to any more Cal games this year, just because the losing is going to be miserable in every particular. Maybe the UW game because it’s the last game in Old Memorial, and the only reasonable possibility for a home win left on the schedule. And the Redskins? Well, I’ll probably want a trip or three to Dan Browns, and I’ll want to listen to Sonny and Sam on the ridearound because you never know how much longer they’ll keep the team together (and I’ve been fortunate to have them out here for 4+ seasons I never expected to get).

But it’s time for cold weather and hot gyms and my Commodores doin’ work. Break out the rugby and strike up the band.