Live Lonnie Cam on the Internet
I’ve started a webcam. You never know what you might find. Stop by sometime.
Movin’ On Up
I am pleased to report I have been following my heart and pursuing my dreams and making strides at becoming a writer. My work on the Open Salon group blogging project has been getting positive reaction and I have enjoyed the happy consequence of making new and interesting friends in the bargain. Salon’s editors promise the Open project will move from its current invitation-only status to a public release soon, so IJHTS readers will be able to see some of the things I’ve been up to and can check out the very high-level work of other members of the Open Salon community.
I am also very excited to have just begun blogging news and opinion pieces for WIRED magazine’s News Editor, Leander Kahney, on his Cult of Mac website. I’ll be putting up several pieces there Monday through Friday and actually will be getting paid to do so! Leander says he’s going to pay me, anyway - we’ll see how it goes. Stop on by regularly to keep up with Apple and Mac-related developments, post some comments to my pieces and Digg them, too. If i can help Leander drive more traffic to his site I just might be able to afford to remain in the Bay Area for a while longer.
And finally, I’m still doing some stuff on occasion for MacLife magazine. I had a long feature piece in the June issue, with a profile of US Olympic swimmer and world record holder Nathalie Coughlin coming up in the July issue, so that gig’s coming along, too. Links to everything I’ve done for MacLife should be available here.
How Low Can You Go?
This post was originally published at OpenSalon, a beta-test group blogging project of Salon Media.
I’m going to think out loud, if you don’t mind. I’ve been ruminating on something for a while now and I would like to indulge the openness and apparent civility of this forum to throw some very incompletely formed ideas against the wall to see what sticks. Maybe we’ll end up with a collective Rorschach test that can tell us something about ourselves, or maybe, as with making so much spaghetti back in college, we’ll just end up with strands of uncooked pasta and a mess on the kitchen wall. Read more →
That Didn’t Take Long
ABC News reports Miley Cyrus, Disney’s most recent pre-pubescent cash cow, is officially “embarrassed” by photographs set to appear in an upcoming issue of Vanity Fair, in which the 15 year-old star of Disney’s hit TV show “Hannah Montana” appears clutching a satin sheet to her naked breast.
Framed in festive graphics with bubblegum hues of pink and purple, Miss Cyrus currently adorns the bedroom walls, backpacks, lunchboxes and projected star-fantasies of millions of young girls across the globe. She has headlined sellout concerts of 10,000-seat plus arenas for much of the past two years and sold several million records of saccharine flavored countrypoppyrock music.
But having the whole world in her hand is never enough and a girl’s got to grow, right? Read more →
Reinventing Myself
Spring is time to refresh and renew, time for cleaning and clearing and starting over. This season, I’m taking the concept beyond the closet and the garage, beyond even the many rooms of my own internal mansion, and have embarked on a path I first imagined taking as a lad in school, when I became aware that behind each great and sometimes impenetrable work of literature I had to digest was the story of a real person. Read more →
Passions Over Torch Run Hot
The fourth and fifth stops on a planned 85,000 mile relay bearing the Olympic flame from the Acropolis in Athens, Greece to the site of this year’s Summer Games in Bejing, China turned ugly over the weekend, as thousands of protesters in London and Paris disrupted the procession, drawing attention to China’s reputation for human rights abuses and its heavy-handed suppression of internal dissent in Tibet. Read more →
Seen That Movie, Too
A CBS News-New York Times poll released Thursday showed Americans are more dissatisfied with the country’s direction than at any time since the poll began asking about the subject in the early 1990s.
In a bad omen for Senator John McCain’s fledgling presidential campaign, “a majority of nearly every demographic and political group — Democrats and Republicans, men and women, residents of cities and rural areas, college graduates and those who finished only high school — say the United States is headed in the wrong direction.”
Not surprisingly, the last time this particular poll registered such a dismal assessment by the American public, a fellow by the name of George Bush was getting ready to vacate the White House amidst an economy in dire straits.
An interesting twist to the current pulse of the nation is that dissatisfaction usually hits its low point in the months and years after an economic downturn (such as the low reading in late 1992 after the recession that began in 1990), not at the beginning of one.
Today, however, Americans report being deeply worried about the country even though many say their own personal finances are still in fairly good shape.
Two out of three current poll respondents believe the country is already in recession, though government economic data have yet to confirm their opinion.
Here Today, Gone Tomorrow
Bear Stearns, the fifth largest investment bank in the United States, had $17 billion in cash and salable assets on March 11. At the close of trading on Friday, March 14, the eighty-five year-old firm had an exchange-listed market capitalization of just $4 billion. Over the ensuing weekend, one of its competitors, JP Morgan Chase & Co., agreed to buy Bear Stearns in a paper transaction backed by financing from the New York Federal Reserve Bank, for just under $240 million.
In under a week, one of the venerable names of American capitalism turned to vapor. Shareholders, fully one third of whom are Bear Stearns executives and employees, whose stock traded less than a month ago at over $80, saw their interest in the company repriced at a mere $2 per share. And the offer was not for cash, but rather for the happy prospect of shares in the savior, JP Morgan! Read more →
The Sound of Breaking Glass
America loves nothing more than a sex scandal.
A collective peek up the panty-free skirt of a Former Teen Idol or a glimpse of nipple through the diaphanous gown of This Year’s Model beats the Comeback Victory, the Shaggy Dog, and the Horatio Alger story every time for getting the attention of the caffeine-fueled ADHD citizens of the Most Powerful Nation on Earth.
Combining sex with clergy, or sex and politics, will very nearly get the nation’s arbiters of all things newsworthy soiling themselves in excitement over the eyes and ears a sex scandal will send their way in the next 24-hour news cycle.
Thus, the front page of every newspaper in America today features the frowning, disconsolate mug of Eliot Spitzer. The lede story on every Internet news and gossip site tells the gripping tale of his ‘monumental’ fall from grace, the tragic story of Client 9 — the hard-bitten, former federal prosecutor-turned Governor of New York, who yesterday admitted to contracting for the services of a prostitute. Read more →
Pass the Fork, Please.
Today the U.S. Supreme Court declined an opportunity for a peek at the man behind the curtain, refusing to certify for appeal a case brought by the American Civil Liberties Union on behalf of numerous Muslim lawyers, journalists and other American citizens, who argued the existence of the National Security Agency’s warrantless eavesdropping program rendered them unable to perform their jobs.
Notoriously decided on the merits in favor of plaintiffs’ claims by Federal Circuit Court Judge Anna Diggs Taylor in August, 2006, the ruling in ACLU v. NSA was overturned and the case dismissed by the 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, whose 3 judge panel ruled 2-1 last year that, because the plaintiffs could not prove their communications had been monitored, they lacked standing to claim harm under the program. Read more →
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