Obama's Birth Certificate, Even if the Lunatics Ignore It

Courtesy of the LA Times, here's a link to President Obama's birth certificate. Just figured as many bloggers as possible should post this, so the wingnuts have fewer and fewer excuses to say they've never seen proof.

The so-called "birthers" movement is so crazed and ridiculous, what does this say about GOP congressional members who can't bring themselves to denounce the movement? They're all such products of the power-by-any-means school of Republican tricks that none of them have the guts to simply challenge the wingnuts in their town hall meetings and tell them that they're lunatics, they're flat our wrong, and they should return to reality and stop wasting our time. In those words -- not nicely, not respecting their "intelligence"; be brave and let 'em have it.

After all, any GOP congressperson who doesn't realize that every time a "birther" erupts on the public stage the Democrats cement thousands more votes -- well, that GOPer is too ignorant to survive long.

More Ridley, More Alien

Starlog.com passes along word that Ridley Scott, the director of the staggeringly good science fiction/horror movie Alien, is going to direct a prequel to that movie.

With all due respect to James Cameron, who really established the series' popularity with his Aliens sequel, the Scott original remains one of the few movies to successfully get across real alien-ness. So I've got high expectations for his prequel.

Larry Flynt on Obama

Hustler publisher Larry Flynt writes a short item on today's Daily Beast urging Obama to toughen up and, er, "bitch-slap" the Republicans to "put them in their place."

When I interned one summer in the vice president's office back in 1990 (oh, leave me alone), one of my more-interesting regular tasks was to compile a collection of articles from newspapers and magazines for the vice president to read. In one of those compilations, I included an article Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan wrote for the New York Review of Books, in which he called for the end of the national security state in the wake of the Cold War's demise.

You can assume, even without reading the two pieces, that Moynihan's was the better written piece of prose.

The VP didn't take Moynihan's advice then, and I doubt, even if some intern puts Flynt's article in Obama's daily news briefer, that the president will take Flynt's advice today.

Magazines on Screen

Let's see, just as an exercise: What television programs have been set in or around magazines?

Suddenly Susan (San Francisco-based magazine The Gate)

Ugly Betty (New York-based magazine Mode)

Just Shoot Me (Blush)

That's not a very long list. I must be missing a bunch of them. What are they?

Playing Taps for Music Magazines

Slate.com blogs about the difficulties that music magazines are having surviving (or not), and the author -- a veteran of defunct music rag Blender -- offers his three reasons for their demise:

• Too few superstars, and all the magazines cover the same ones.
• Music magazines have lost their access to the top stars and previews of music, so there's less reason for fans to read them.
• Social networking has stolen the audiences.

I personally think his first and third reasons are minor and uninteresting. After all, music magazines that want to be mass market best sellers have to prostitute themselves to the flavor of the month to make sure they eet their rate base; but what makes a music magazine -- or any other genre-specific magazine, such as science fiction films or politics -- a must-buy for readers is when it helps find the up-and-coming or overlooked artist/film/book/thinker and puts that person on the cover. So stop whining.

But the second reason probably indicates more of what's wrong with the music magazines and how they've stopped knowing how to serve their audiences. They are not the only publishers who have lost their niche exclusivity; back in the 1970s and early 1980s, science fiction films and television programs were almost completely the purview of SF magazines, which could get all kinds of access to filmmakers and authors that fans could not find elsewhere. But as SF became more of a mainstream success and as traditional media chased pop culture to lure audiences, even mainstream publications were putting out special Star Trek issues and featuring Battlestar Galactica on their covers. That's great news for the fan; but it obviously created a big challenge to the niche publications that were selling their access and now had to start selling their unique outlook and any value-added content related to the media.

The same, I think, is true of music magazines. Rolling Stone has always mixed politics in heavy doses, as did Spin from its early years. But politics and artist interviews and concert photos and all the rest aren't enough to keep feeding big audiences.

Music magazines, in my humble opinion, are niche magazines and should be operated like such. The MBAs running them don't want to hear that their natural market probably limits them to 100,000 or 200,000 circulation ceilings, but, as I keep saying on this blog, that's a great opportunity for smaller, entrepreneurial publishers and investors to come in and play where the big guys no longer can.

Update: A New Parodic Interruption

Back in April, I wrote about magazine and newspaper parodies, and noted my own brief involvement in the trade when I worked on the USA Today parody put out by my college daily, The Badger Herald, in the mid-80s. In the blog post, I noted that I didn't have a copy of the parody any longer, and I asked if anyone did.

And the internet gods did provide, in the form of the Herald's editor, Jason Smathers, who pointed me to a scanned copy of the entire issue on the Herald's web site. It also links to some of their other April Fools issues, which are definitely worth checking out.

Many thanks to the current denizens of the Herald Tower.

Obama and Buehrle

Chicago Tribune reports that Obama was notified of White Sox pitcher Mark Buehrle's perfect game today via e-mail; he then called the pitcher to congratulate 'im.

Mark Buehrle, Jim Parque: A White Sox Day

White Sox pitcher Mark Buerhle pitched a perfect game this afternoon, retiring all 27 consecutive batters from the Tampa Bay Whatevers. Great news, and the Sox are just one-half game behind the Tigers for the lead in the AL Central.

It is nice to see the news of the perfect game splashed all over the major media (well, most of them; didn't see it on the home page of the Washington Post). Then again, if a pitcher from the Yankees or Red Sox had done this, we'd be suffering through Michael Jackson-level of media overkill.

Less known but still worth noting here is another White Sox pitcher-related story today. Former Sox pitcher Jim Parque wrote an article for the Chicago Sun-Times explaining how and why he used human growth hormone years ago, in an attempt to resurrect a career following an injury (and after leaving the White Sox).

He explains feeling worried about supporting his family, worrying that he didn't have the skills or experience to work outside baseball, and focusing desperately on making his game better. (He only used the HGH for a short time before abandoning it.

He writes:

I want everyone to know that I fully understood what I was doing, the ramifications of the unethical decisions I made and how it potentially could cast a dark shadow over my career. For that, I truly feel sorry. Although I did not truly know if the drug I took was, in fact, HGH (although I am confident it was because of the way my body felt after the injections and my Internet research), I still chose to inject it, and I am fully responsible for my actions.

I have to admit finding his article very interesting, partly because it reads like a pretty personal and honest explanation of his thought processes, and because it puts a human face on the controversy. (He does say that the HGH he took was not illegal at the time that he ordered it.) I'm no fan of drugs, but I thought he did a good job of explaining himself.

That also gives me pleasure because when Parque was with the Sox, he was my favorite player. I remember going to Sox games early, sitting out in the cheap seats, and watching him warm up, and I liked the intensity he brought to it. He seemed smart and focused, and I guess I like that more in an athlete than dumb and driven.

So it's a weird day for us White Sox fans today. Both news stories, I think, show why baseball is a game that encompasses so much more of its fans lives than just what they see on the field. It's a game of people doing stupid stuff and great stuff and making you think.

Mr. Magazine Does It Again

On his excellent blog, Samir Husni (a.k.a., Mr. Magazine) busts some myths about young people being dumber than posts and not reading. Fears that young people can only view digitized content have terrified publishers of every sort, especially since the UK decided to turn over all research in the country to a 15-year-old intern. But then, when I was a teenager in the 1980s, people thought we didn't read, either, and we did.

Anyway, Husni's blog is a regular must-read. He is one of the seemingly rare people today who hasn't drunk the kool-aid that the Anything But Print crowd is peddling. He knows that print is a different medium from digital; therefore it has a different role, different strengths, and different weaknesses. Trying to do the same thing online and in print is ridiculous. It's time for smart publishers and editors to recognize that and do in print what print does well, and do online what digital does well.

A Kindle Book: Now You Have It, Now You Don't

Over at Slate.com, Farhad Manjoo writes about Amazon's demonstrated ability to delete books from users' Kindle digital book holding thingies. The company reportedly went into people's Kindles, without permission, and removed the book files.

Now, if they were deleting the book files of everyone who bought a copy of Glenn Beck's Commons Sense or The Secret, then no one would really complain and, in fact, they'd be doing the world a service. But they were deleting books by George Orwell and Ayn Rand.

"The worst thing about this story isn't Amazon's conduct; it's the company's technical capabilities," Manjoo writes. Whether or not Amazon promises not to do it again, the point is that the company can; I think, with the various security and protocol breaches that take place all across the internet on a daily basis, you should figure that if Amazon doesn't do it to your hand-held electronic fake book, someone else will, sooner or later. The Justice Department, your prospective employer, any of a number of crackpot groups, publishers, your parents, your kids, that annoying person you dissed at the coffee shop. Whoever. It'll happen.

Maybe it's time to invest in a hard copy paper version of every "book" you put on Kindle. It's the only way to make sure you have it forever. (Until you lose it in a flood, of course ...)