Today was our first anniversary. Missy and I are heading to Costa Rica tomorrow. I am so in love with that woman.
Filed my taxes; getting a refund. Had fun at SXSW. Had fun visiting The Boyz in Nashville. Still have a job. Golden Birthday is coming up next month. Choir is still awesome. Decided to go home for Xmas for the first time in four years; made my mom do that squeal she does when she’s excited.
Life is good.
While I’m gone, tell me what’s good.
Of National Lies and Racial Amnesia: Jeremiah Wright, Barack Obama, and the Audacity of Truth
Indignation doesn’t work for most whites, because having remained sanguine about, silent during, indeed often supportive of so much injustice over the years in this country–the theft of native land and genocide of indigenous persons, and the enslavement of Africans being only two of the best examples–we are just a bit late to get into the game of moral rectitude. And once we enter it, our efforts at righteousness tend to fail the test of sincerity.
But here we are, in 2008, fuming at the words of Pastor Jeremiah Wright, of Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago–occasionally Barack Obama’s pastor, and the man whom Obama credits with having brought him to Christianity–for merely reminding us of those evils about which we have remained so quiet, so dismissive, so unconcerned. It is not the crime that bothers us, but the remembrance of it, the unwillingness to let it go–these last words being the first ones uttered by most whites it seems whenever anyone, least of all an ‘angry black man’ like Jeremiah Wright, foists upon us the bill of particulars for several centuries of white supremacy…
We were shocked to learn that black people actually believed that a white cop who was a documented racist might frame a black man; and we’re shocked to learn that lots of black folks still perceive the U.S. as a racist nation–we’re literally stunned that people who say they experience discrimination regularly (and who have the social science research to back them up) actually think that those experiences and that data might actually say something about the nation in which they reside. Imagine.
Major trends: 1. News is shifting from being a product — today’s newspaper, Web site or newscast — to becoming a service — how can you help me, even empower me? 2. A news organization and a news Web site are no longer final destinations. 3. The prospects for user-created content, once thought possibly central to the next era of journalism, for now appear more limited, even among “citizen” sites and blogs. 4. Increasingly, the newsroom is perceived as the more innovative and experimental part of the news industry. 5. The agenda of the American news media continues to narrow, not broaden. 6. Madison Avenue, rather than pushing change, appears to be having trouble keeping up with it.
I don’t know why this tickles me so, but it does.
When you order online from Chipotle, this shows up on the confirmation screen. Also, they neglected to charge me for guacamole. Score! Unfortunately, they also put rice in it which I did not want. Do you know hard it is to pick around rice?
Kwame, please. You done wrong and people should maybe leave your family out of it, but just…. just STFU. For real. Be quiet.
Got to talk to Future Tense’s Jon Gordon while at SXSWi. Super nice guy! I’ve been listening to Future Tense since my early days of second shift when I’d be driving home from work at 10:30 pm and FT would come on at halftime of As It Happens on MPR. Jon chatted with us Minnesotans a bit and shot some video. Greg is my Metblogs co-captain and Gillian is one of my choir peeps (and SXSW roomie).
“An hour and a half with Barack Obama”
Marc Andressen gets up close and actually has a real conversation with Barack Obama. Confirms all my gut feelings with actual information.
Since I need to fill this baby up, I’m resorting to responding to meme-tagging. Thanks (or not) to Ed Kohler, I give you the 123 meme.
Instructions!
1. Pick up the nearest book (of at least 123 pages).
2. Open the book to page 123.
3. Find the fifth sentence.
4. Post the next three sentences.
5. Tag five people.
I started to do this at work. The only thing on my desk at work that’s over 123 pages and not confidential is Validation Fundamentals and page 123 is actually an outline with no complete sentences in it so Lucky You.
So now that I’m at home, the nearest book is Anthony Bourdain’s No Reservations, which I am not reading but which M™ borrowed from the library.
Nearly a week later: They’ve brought in a polka band to play in the dining room of the “Mexican”-themed restaurant at Le Royale. Outside, on the pool deck, though the bar is unattended, where the bottles were they keep the radio cranked up to drown out the sounds of bombing–so as not to scare the kiddies. These days, we wake up to molar-vibrating percussions and go to sleep to distant thunder.
Some shit was going down in Beirut.
Tagged: 1. Do 2. It 3. If 4. You 5. Want (Has everyone else done this already? I think so.)
The Pew Research Center recently did a survey on News IQ and let’s just say that the American public didn’t do so well.
12 out of 12 correct answers puts you in the 97th percentile. Honestly, I happened to guess correctly on a couple of them. But it’s multiple choice; it shouldn’t be that difficult.
What’s screwed up is that the question answered most correctly (by quite a bit) is about Barack Obama’s most famous campaigner.
How’d you do?
(via News Cut)
For the longest, this was my favorite quote:
The dumber people think you are, the more surprised they will be when you kill them.
And while I do still love it because that’s just my sense of humor, it has been supplanted.
In February, I had one of the greatest experiences of my life in the best damn concert the Twin Cities Women’s Choir has ever done. Joan Szymko put the words of Eleanor Roosevelt to music in The Beauty of Your Dreams. From that song, I learned this quote:
You must do the thing you think you cannot do.
I want that on a giant poster in a really cool font. Well, maybe not, but it’s a little big to go on a post-it on my monitor.
Makes me a little verklempt every time we sing it. You know how putting things to music makes them all the more powerful.
If I ever get a piece of our recording to share I will (in as legal a way as possible, of course, in case our Executive Director is reading this).
You must do the thing you think you cannot do.
In the words of my new buddy Clarence, marinate.