Blather

{Crickets}

Hello. If you've stumbled into this, my long-dormant blog, via a search engine hit or possibly just a blow on the head, please be aware that I am now blogging at Tumblr and at Twitter. See me there... don't you?

I don't understand. What business are you in again?

"Los Angeles Based Licensing Agency, The Licensing Group Ltd, Returns for Its 13th Licensing Show with New Properties in Its Licensing Portfolio"

Blog Fatigue Gets Big Ink

So I've had some nice emails today about Katie Hafner's NYT piece on compulsive blogging, which mentions this weblog in passing. Some of you have also been kind enough to write over the last few weeks, wondering what's become of the daily snarkiness that marked this site until pretty recently. For what it's worth: Blather's been on a little hiatus, and should be back shortly. Check in every once in a while, if that seems like a good use of your time. Or set your newsreader to scour the site for updates. Shiny, futuristic RSS feed lives here. Mmmm... Shiny!

Blog Fatigue

Fatigued. So very fatigued... And so very, very cold... More later. Maybe.

On The Road. (Again?)

Blather's traveling for most of this month. Back in early May.

(I Can't Get No) Shameless Self-Promotion

Three wheels to glory, in this month's Fortune Small Business.

Screw the verdict, where's my check?

Slobodan Milosevic and other war-crimes suspects will be paid for the time they spend cooling their heels in The Hague, under legislation just adopted by the Serbian parliament ("Paying Ruthless Genocidal War Criminals' FedEx Bills Since 2004"). According to Reuters, "The new law provides all Serbian war crimes indictees at the U.N. tribunal with compensation for lost salaries, plus help to spouses, siblings, parents and children for flight and hotel costs, telephone and mail bills, visa fees and legal charges." The mental picture this spawns, of the extended Milosevic family giddily ordering up Spectravision and gobbling seven-dollar Toblerones in a suite at the Amsterdam Hilton, is almost enough to restore your faith in international justice.

I'm on TV! I'm on TV! I'm... Wait. I'm Not on TV.

Ashleigh Banfield, who I used to take a childish delight in poking with a stick back when we were all hot and bothered about Afghanistan, is apparently washed up at NBC, where she has been toiling invisibly for some time. Her representatives are said to be exploring exciting possibilities in syndication. Circle gets the square!

And SLAP! And two. And three. And four.

This is so wonderful I hardly know where to begin: Richard Simmons (yes, that Richard Simmons) overhears a guy make a comment while waiting in line for a flight at Phoenix Sky Harbor International Airport. The comment, if accurately reported, is so mouth-breathingly dopey that it barely even registers as a quip: "Hey, everybody, it's Richard Simmons. Let's drop our bags and rock to the '50s." Simmons, however, goes nuts when he hears it, tells observers he's going to "bitch slap" the guy, and proceeds to do so. The guy -- a 6'1", 255-lb. Harley salesman and cage fighter named Chris Farney -- is apparently so "stunned," in the words of a police spokesman, that he walks away, then thinks better of it and contacts authorities. Farney tells the cops he wants to press charges. Simmons is later allowed to board a flight to Los Angeles.

My New Favorite TV Show

As Jon Stewart pointed out on last night's Daily Show, people with jobs really missed out on something yesterday, unless their jobs permitted them, as mine did, to sit and stare at the TV coverage of the 9/11 hearings. The opening statement by witness and BushCo whipping boy Richard Clarke was so simple and eloquent, and offered such a stark contrast to the "What, us? Noooo, them" of other witnesses, that it seemed to knock even the panel's most aggressive Clarke-hunters off their game. (Former Navy Secretary John Lehman took a good nasty swing but missed by a mile, and Clarke never rattled.) Streaming video: The Washington Post excerpts Clarke's opening statement; C-Span has Clarke's complete testimony, plus the subsequent appearance by deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage, who really should think about playing silent-movie villains in his next career. The Post also has David Montgomery's take on panel member Bob Kerrey's open disgust over witnesses' buck-passing. Slate's Fred Kaplan weighs in here on Clarke's day before the cameras.

Wind! Smells! Something Shiny!

Poynter's Al Tompkins rounds up recent legislative activity on dogs in trucks. Common sense would seem to dictate that while a dog riding in the back of a pickup is cute as all hell, it isn't necessarily a good idea, as some dogs (and I say this as a dog owner) tend to let their natural joie de vivre overrule more basic instincts, like self-preservation. (Irish setters, I am looking in your direction.) Of course, some dog people disagree. "If you say the words 'ride in the truck,' they are going nuts," Amy Beasley of Columbia, TN tells The Tennessean.

And Mr. Gibson Thanks You For Your Seventeen Dollars

A Georgia couple really got into it, theologically speaking, after viewing "The Passion of the Christ": Sean and Melissa Davidson ended up debating the film so forcefully that Melissa walked away with injuries to her arm and face and Sean incurred a stigmata-like wound to his hand, although it was inflicted not with a spike but a scissors. Everybody involved seems vaguely embarrassed by the incident. "It was the dumbest thing we've ever done," Melissa says. Adds a Statesboro sheriff's deputy: "Really, it was kind of a pitiful thing.... I think they missed the point." The Smoking Gun has the incident report. (Also via reader Gary I. Selinger of New York.)

Plus, You Gotta Tip Like 16%

Thanks to Jane Farries of Not My Dog for this: The British Home Secretary wants the right to charge wrongly-convicted prisoners £3000 for every year of room and board they received while incarcerated. The Home Sec, David Blunkett, who could not have been more delightfully named if he'd been an actual Dickens character, argues that the prisoners would have spent that much for food and lodging if they'd been free, instead of, you know, wrongfully imprisoned. Understandably, ex-guests of the state see it differently. Robert Brown served 25 years for a murder conviction that was overturned in 2002; now he owes the Crown £80,000, his girlfriend has left him and he's facing eviction from his home -- all in all, the very stuff of bad country songs. "I never contemplated suicide once while I was in prison," he says, "but it's different on the outside."

Philadelphia to "The Real World": That's How We Do It in the PA, Beeyatch

"The Real World" is pulling out of my hometown after slamming up against one intractable reality: "This is a union town," according to Tony Frasco, vice president of Teamsters Local 107. RW producers figured to come into Philadelphia and set up non-union, as they've done in jerkwater burgs like New York, Chicago and Boston. They apparently didn't reckon on the creative levels of intransigence to which a real Philadelphia Teamster can rise when provoked. Too bad: Now we'll never know what a bunch of high-strung, narcissistic twentysomethings do when the Tastykakes run out.

Yard Fest!

Mark your calendar: It's Yard Fest 2004, Saturday May 1, from 10 am to 7 pm at Steve White's Folk Farm in Albuquerque, NM. Food, music and more outsider artists than you can shake a stick at. Generally speaking you don't want to go around shaking sticks at outsider artists, but I've been to Yard Fest and they're a really nice bunch of people. If you're anywhere in the Southwest, stop by and say hi.

Rummy Ruffled

"You and a few other critics are the only people I've heard use the phrase 'immediate threat.' I didn't...It's become kind of folklore that that's what happened."

-- Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, Face The Nation (CBS), 3/14/04

"No terrorist state poses a greater or more immediate threat to the security of our people than the regime of Saddam Hussein and Iraq."

-- Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, 9/19/02, quoted back to Rumsfeld by NYT reporter Thomas Friedman

"It--my view of--of the situation was that he--he had--we--we believe, the best intelligence that we had and other countries had and that--that we believed and we still do not know--we will know."

-- CBS transcript of Rumsfeld's response

(Via The Progress Report. Squirmy, uncomfortable video clip here. I guess one could make a word-parsing argument that "more immediate threat" is not the same as "immediate threat." It'd be hard to make the same distinction about White House spokesman Scott McClellan's remark from February of last year: "This is about imminent threat." I mean, it--I--we--heh! Phew! Hey, look over there!)

Mmm... Low-Sugar

As part of its continuing effort to establish the health benefits of pastries and coffee, Blather reported recently on the campaign to roll out a healthy doughnut. Now AP reports that industry behemoth Krispy Kreme is getting into the game. The Motley Fool casts a jaundiced eye on the idea.

Wrap Up Those Fosters, Mate, I've Got a Vote

The New South Wales parliament has its own in-house liquor store. According to one backbencher, it's in no danger of going out of business anytime soon.

No, Please, You Go Straight To Hell First, My Friend

The New York Times pulls off a neat trick with this dispatch on a Finn who's offering fellow Finns lessons on how to get mad. (Anger is apparently highly un-Finnish.) The guy's had almost no takers, which in the normal course of things would suggest a non-story. The NYT imaginatively claims that the lack of response is actually proof of how anger-averse Finns are, and makes it one of the hooks on which its piece hangs. I'm woozy with admiration for this technique, which somebody (okay, it's me) has dubbed the "circular self-confirming non-confirmation." Requires NYT login and password, which would undoubtedly make my blood boil if I weren't part-Finnish.