SmartRemarks

Where did we leave off? 

I was writing about the difficulty of finding something meaningful to say in the wake of all the full-time, professional political bloggers out there. Too often I feel like I’m just offering a synthesis of what others have said, rather than any new insight.

Perhaps I’m holding myself to an arbitrarily high standard. Posting seems easier on political discussion forums, where I can just spout off some quick impressions of the issue of the day without necessarily worrying about providing proper background and context for everything, and where the ebb and flow of responses from other posters guides the structure and flow of the discussion, rather than having to organize it entirely on my own. Nonetheless, I ramble on… 

Thus:  I was also writing about the political environment in which the Obama administration operates, and the political pressures that have led the president to make some decisions that are very disappointing in the eyes of civil libertarians, and indeed of concerned citizens in general. Which, in the wake of events this past week relating to the disposition of prisoners at Guantanamo and elsewhere, leads us to the perplexing questions:

Why has Barack Obama backtracked so quickly from so many of the progressive policy expectations of his supporters?

and, moreover,

WHY does the mass media keep treating Dick Cheney as a credible public figure?

One of these questions may seem deeply relevant, the other facile… but the answers are connected at a deep level.

Read the rest of this entry »

Tags: blogging, climate, Congress, conservatism, Constitution, Dick Cheney, energy, Guantanamo, health care, international, journalism, libertarianism, media, Obama, Reid, Republicans, torture

Just a quickie here. I’ve discovered today that in some browsers, this blog’s main page isn’t displaying the sidebar correctly. The search box, categories, tags, blogrool, etc. should be immediately to the right of the main content area… but in Safari and Opera, they’re instead rolling down to the very bottom of the page, underneath the content.

I haven’t been able to check it in Internet Explorer (I use a Mac). And it only seems to be happening on the home page, not when specific individual posts are loaded. Moreover, everything remains just fine in Firefox. I’ve tried to do some troubleshooting, but so far I haven’t been able to narrow it down.

So if you’re a reader and you don’t see the sidebar, please add a comment to this post and let me know what browser and system you’re using. If you’re a techie, feel free to pass along any suggestions that may be helpful. I put effort into getting this site to look the way I want it, and this kind of thing (while not disabling) is frustrating.

That’s all. On with your business!…

Edit:  FIXED.  See comment below.

Tags: blogging

…just in case any regular visitors are curious enough to care, should not be taken to signify abandonment of this blog, deliberate or otherwise.

In fact, at the moment I have the beginnings of nine different posts in my Drafts folder, on various topics ranging from politics to comics to books to TV shows. I just haven’t managed to finish any of them to a degree that would justify posting for public consumption.

I’ve had my head in in a bit of a cloud lately. Sorry about that. I hope to shake it off soon.

‘Nuff said for now…

Tags: blogging

Can this be real?

Out of all the floods of commentary generated by the economic collapse of the last few months, variously thoughtful and outraged, panicked and funny, this is the first site where I’m left admitting I have absolutely no idea what to make of it. It’s about… well, it’s about young New York women who (used to) date Wall Street bankers, complaining to allegedly comic effect that their gravy train lifestyles have been disrupted by their boyfriends’ dissolving professional lives. From the site’s mission statement:

Dating A Banker Anonymous (DABA) is a safe place where women can come together – free from the scrutiny of feminists – and share their tearful tales of how the mortgage meltdown has affected their relationships. DABA Girls was started by two best friends whose relationships tanked with the economy. Not knowing what else to do, we did what frustrated but articulate girls have done since the beginning of time — we started a blog. So if your monthly Bergdorf’s allowance has been halved and bottle service has all but disappeared from your life, lighten your heart with laughter…

Is it meant to be satire? Can it possibly be intended to be taken straight? Should readers be in on the joke, or cringe at the shamelessness of it all?  Read the rest of this entry »

Tags: blogging, economy, humor, relationships

Sorry I haven’t posted for a few days. But the holiday interregnum is now well and truly over, and the ordinary part of winter has commenced. Kids are back in school, the full staff is back in the office, and as of today the new Congress has been sworn in.

(Of course, that last part took place absent the junior Senators from Minnesota—although Franken’s win in the long, long recount, finally certified yesterday, is heartening, Norm Coleman’s legal challenge will delay things further despite being almost certainly doomed to fail—or Illinois—one can’t help but feel a little bit sympathetic to Roland Burris, but rejecting him as a symbol of Blago’s hubris is the sensible thing to do, and Burris certainly knew what a minefield he was stepping into. From Delaware Joe Biden is actually still there, until his successor is formally appointed on January 20; and likewise New York and Colorado will need new appointees Very Soon Now too, when Hillary Clinton and Ken Salazar move on to the cabinet.)

Read the rest of this entry »

Tags: Al Franken, Apple, blogging, Congress, economy, Gaza, Illinois, Israel, Obama, resolutions, Senate, transition, unemployment

Collapsing industries are hardly an unusual thing this year. Real estate, banking, airlines, automobiles, music and more are all in dire straits. One of the most consequential ones, however, with ripple effects that will last far beyond the pain of this current economic downturn, is the death spiral of the newspaper business.

For some years now, even when economic times were better,a common question in public discourse was “will print journalism be able to survive the challenge of the internet?” 2008 was the year the answer became a painfully clear “no,” and the question shifted to “how long before print journalism gives up the ghost?” Indeed, one of the biggest news stories of the year was, ironically, the death spiral of the industry responsible for coving big news stories.

Read the rest of this entry »

Tags: blogging, economy, Humanities Festival, internet, journalism, media, newspapers

This weekend marks three months since I launched this blog… 91 days, and this is my 84th post. So if I’m not quite averaging a post a day, it’s pretty darn close. Starting it was really just a shot in the dark, but I seem to be making a go of it.

(That’s not quite the volume some notable bloggers manage, of course, but hey, nobody’s paying me to do this. (Anyone? Anyone? Bueller?…))

Coming up with things to write about hasn’t been nearly the challenge I’d imagined it might be. Indeed, I have a growing list of topics for future posts, almost certainly more than I have the time or energy actually to write. I’m not the sort of blogger who just dashes off a line or two with a link to something interesting—I like to invest a little more time and thought into what I write. Despite that, I’ve noticed that the of-the-moment character of blogging tends to mitigate against writing about big-picture concepts, in favor of current events or breaking news. There are things I’ve wanted to write about since the start on which I’ve barely scratched the surface. Still, along the way I’ve posted some entries of which I think I can be genuinely proud.

Generating traffic is a constant challenge, far more than generating content. I never wanted this to be something read only by me and my mom. (Actually not even my mom:  she’s a bit of a computerphobe. My dad did print out an entry once for her to read, though. …Yeah, I know.)

According to my Wordpress Stats plugin, I’m making slow but detectable progress on that front. I don’t have crowds breaking down my virtual door, but there’s a reliable readership. I’m averaging about 63 views per day over the last three months, and the trend is upward. Interestingly enough, while I’ve written more about politics than any other single subject (unsurprising, given the election season), it’s the entries about comic books that consistently draw larger readership. (The exception proves the rule: my single most-read post by far was the one about Sarah Palin’s wardrobe, but that’s largely because I was lucky enough to get an early trackback link in on a blog at The Atlantic’s site, and some of its plentiful readership drifted my way… to the tune of seven times my next-most-popular entry. After that, though, all the most popular single posts, the ones that get triple-digit readership, are comics-related.) I suspect this may be because there’s a much smaller “universe” of comics fans online, relatively speaking, and thus more people willing to link to me… whereas everybody and his brother is writing about politics these days, so it’s harder to stand out from the crowd.

I definitely have interesting ideas for upcoming posts in both categories, though (and others as well), so whatever your preferences, no need to fear.

Writing on a daily basis has made bigger demands on my time, energy, and imagination than I’d expected at the outset, but I think that’s not necessarily a bad thing. I’ve had ot push myself beyond some prior boundaries, and it’s satisfying to discover that I could do it… and that people would take an interest in reading it. I think I’ll stick with it for a while.

(And if a few more of you out there were to feel inclined to post some comments along the way… hey, that would be nice too!)

Tags: blogging

Well, I did it! If anyone happened to encounter difficulty reading the blog between about 11:30 PM and 2:30 AM (CST) last night, it’s because I was busy upgrading the back end to the newly released WordPress 2.7. (Ideally I’d have liked to have some sort of “Under Maintenance” screen in place for visitors; I do in fact have the Maintenance Mode plugin, but as the upgrade process involves deactivating all plugins anyway, it wouldn’t really have done much good.)

This was the first time I had to walk through the WordPress installation process “by hand,” and hopefully the last.  Read the rest of this entry »

Tags: blogging, software, WordPress

So as anyone who pays attention to the technical side of the blogging world (although I have no idea what small, obsessive sliver of the population that may be) is probably aware, WordPress 2.7 is scheduled for release in a few days—December 10th, to be specific. In fact, it’s already been rolled out as of today (Thursday) for bloggers hosting at WordPress.com, and for the externally hosted (like me) there’s the only-slightly-preliminary “WordPress 2.7 Release Candidate 1.”

I’m not usually an early adopter of new software; if I have something I like that works, I stick with it… but this is a major upgrade, and they’ve been teasing its improvements for a while now. (At least as long as I’ve been blogging, in fact, which after all only dates back to September.) I don’t feel like waiting.

Read the rest of this entry »

Tags: blogging, computers, WordPress

For the duration of the holiday weekend, I’ll be out of town enjoying a cabin camping trip with some friends. So, no new posts until at least Monday. I trust no one will suffer undue stress due to the atypically long wait for more of my stimulating prose.

Of course, the world could fix itself between now and Monday. Then what would I find to write about?…

Tags: blogging