* Like Hell I’m Going To Let Some Black President Help Me Pay For Dialysis. (via Srinivas)

* How much would you pay to fix climate change? The Planet Money podcast reports.

* ‘People Hear With Skin as Well as Their Ears.’ (via Erica)

* University of Arizona law professor Brent T. White has jumpstarted a national conversation on strategic default.

Sherman Alexie Speaks His Mind

Mother Jones interviews Sherman Alexie about Obama, Kindles, the banning of his books in schools, and much more.

Tea with Cormac McCarthy

The Wall Street Journal sits down with the seldom interviewed Cormac McCarthy to talk about luck, The Road, parenting, and the end of the world.

The Delusional and the SuperFreaky

The A.V. Club features interviews with controversial best-selling authors Richard Dawkins (The God Delusion), and Steven D. Levitt (Freakonomics, SuperFreakonomics).

A Novel Approach

The Onion’s cover story this week is a hilarious parody of the Twitter craze.

Off to See the Wizard

Read Amy Goodman’s TruthDig tribute to “the man who put the rainbow in The Wizard of Oz,” lyricist E.Y. Harburg, and find out why the film is more relevant than ever in today’s troubled economic times.

You Know, There Are Some Excellent Red Wines Coming Out Of Argentina

By Kip Quinlan

So, what do you think of the wine? To be honest, I thought it was a little meek. Passable, but meek. Did you happen to catch what kind it was? Obviously, it’s a cabernet, but I can’t quite put my finger on the vineyard. Wherever it’s from, it’s certainly not the best I’ve had.

If our hosts wanted something nice, they might have done better with something from Argentina. A lot of people don’t know this, but there are some excellent red wines coming out of Argentina right now. Most people don’t think of Argentina as wine country, but you’d be amazed. There’s more to that country than the pampas and gauchos.

If you ask me, Argentine wines are highly undervalued. The Mendoza region is on par with the Simi Valley of California. For whatever reason, the Malbec grape just does really well there. It’s got a really fruity bouquet, but don’t hold that against it. The ‘99 Trapiche Iscay Merlot-Malbec offsets that fruitiness nicely. If you ever have the chance to buy a case, do not pass it up. I read in Wine Spectator that it’s going to be the next hot vintage and will be quite hard to come by soon.

Hold still—I think you have something on your sweater. There. Got it.

This is a great time for wine drinkers. I mean, we have so many options and choices available. And with the world economy in the toilet, there’s no shortage of great wines at great prices. It would be criminal not to take advantage of it.

If you’re interested in trying some Argentine wines, you could come over for a private tasting. I’d be happy to let you sample my stock. After all, my wine cellar’s gotten so full, I could really use some help clearing a little room! Anyway, here’s my card. Call me any time. I’m there all week, except when I’m on the boat.

Counterpoint

I Hate You, I Hate You, I Hate You

By Natalie Tran

Is that right? Are there some excellent wines coming out of Argentina these days? Please, tell me more about Argentine wine. Tell me everything you know. I’m begging you.

God, what a colossal prick.

A lot of people here might enjoy this conversation, but I’m not one of them. Who gives a shit where you get your wine? The way you’re guzzling it, I’d be surprised if you can even taste it. And I’m really impressed by your references to gauchos and the pampas. What a worldly, cultured man you must be to know those two words. Should we have sex here or in one of the upstairs bedrooms?

I hate you, I hate you, I hate you.

If there’s one thing more irritating than wine guys, it’s wine guys with personal-space issues. I can hear you fine: Quit acting like the music’s so loud that you have no choice but to lean in close to my ear.

Do you ever shut up? I wish I lived in your world, where I could spew a nonstop stream of dull facts and think people actually care. If you love the Mendoza region so much, why don’t you move there? No, I’m not going to buy a case of anything, I’m just looking for a graceful way to get away from you. Where do you think you’re putting your hand? Oh my God. He actually just did the invisible-lint thing. I don’t think I’ve had a guy try that one on me since college.

This would be a great time to kick someone in the testicles. I wish I had the assertiveness to say something, but I haven’t even had a chance to open my mouth. I’ve just smiled politely and nodded. Won’t someone please get this guy away from me? Won’t someone please hold a loud conversation about golf or foreign cars that this guy will overhear and want to join? Oh, how I long to hear this man say to me, “Excuse me, but I need to set someone straight about the merits of the new Big Bertha XP-200 titanium driver.”

Thanks so much for your card. I’ll be sure to use it if I ever need a piece of scrap paper.

© Copyright 2009 Onion Inc. All rights reserved.

I have been ignoring The Onion for far too long now. We’ve been separated for a whole year, I think!

Don’t listen to what others may be saying about your highly unstable nature and crippling psychosis.  After all, most of those voices exist only in your head.

This entry will be another quick hit. I know they are becoming more frequent, but between standing in line at the post office, walking to get the flu shot, and waiting for the computer to update its various parts, my day has been a bit fragmented.

Came across Frank Lockwood, the Bible Belt Blogger today. Love that his most recent claim to fame is giving the NYTimes’s Jill Abramson a new experience by taking her to a Pentecostal church in Argentina that featured snake handling and an exorcism in which he, the blogger, became a participant.

The blog in the Arkansas Democrat & Gazette covers the landscape with just the right balance of respect and irreverence. His emphasis, as might be guessed from the fact that he writes for a paper in the heart of the Bible Belt, is on the Christian God, though he does stray. He had a recent entry on the Libyan dictator trying to convert 100 aspiring Italian models to Islam. Mr. Lockwood thought The Onion made that one up. I thought the colonel was reverting to crazy mode.

The Onion had to be the source, though, for the first of two back-to-back entries on Judaism. It was a maybe bogus report about nose-picking on the Sabbath. The other, on outlawing Shabbat elevators in Jerusalem seemed far more plausible. And there’s a quasi-Buddhist entry about the furor over the selection of a “Christian-Buddhist” bishop to an Episcopal diocese.

My favorites so far: the Boston Globe article that I found through his blog indicating a belief in hell is good for developing economies. Belief doesn’t seem to matter in places like the US.

Also good, “Satan causes cavities and weight gain, too.” That one of course was filed two days before Halloween and came from the Christian Broadcasting Network. I had heard that one before, but it’s nice to have another laugh.

The world wide leader in fake news has had some truly classic videos over the years. My personal favourites include the Macbook Wheel, Dorm Fire and Twitter stalking.

What makes The Onion parodies so hilarious to me are not just how — like all great comedy — true to life the jokes hit. Rather, in each vid there are levels upon levels of parody. This Modern Warfare video, much like its World of World of Warcraft predecessor, manages to satirize the news media in production and content, video game culture, youth culture at large, economics, war, the military, military bureaucracy and really, just every facet of life in an efficient three minutes.

One might almost say it is fake parody news with layers. Like an… uh, pie.

At the Web 2.0 Expo Baratunde Thurston editor of The Onion gave the most energetic key note speech to date. With a great rhythm Baratunde kept the crowd engaged compared to the Microsoft speech yesterday where event holders had to pull the twitter feed because the audience was harping on the speaker so bad. Moreover Baratunde did a great job talking about the importance of hashtags and most importantly how twitter topics can go viral. Here’s his speech just minuets after he spoke.

There was a great Pittsburgh-related article on everyone’s favorite parody news network, The Onion yesterday. Ever try and spell Roethlisberger? The parody new story plays on the fact that it’s such a hard word to spell and our insane love of everything Steelers.

“If you ask me if I would rather hire a kid from Boston with a 4.0 GPA who puts a ‘u’ after the ‘b’ in Roethlisberger, or a kid who can spell the name correctly, I’m going to hire the kid who can spell Roethlisberger,” said Pittsburgh attorney Martin Snyder, adding that clients in Southwestern Pennsylvania appreciate, above all, a lawyer with a working knowledge of how to spell the names of the entire 2005 Super Bowl team. “Anyone can go to law school and pass a bar exam, but knowing that there is a silent ‘h’ after the ‘w’ in Cowher? Well, that takes somebody special.”

“If you look at the data, our students were correctly spelling Roethlisberger only 43 percent of the time during the quarterback’s rookie season,” said Pittsburgh mayor Luke Ravenstahl, who called the 2004 statistic an embarrassment. “In just five years, we have increased that number to 92 percent. That’s 54 percent better than students in California, 35 percent better than those in Oklahoma, and 96 percent better than those in the Cleveland area, who tend to spell Roethlisberger by adding the letters ‘u,’ ‘c,’ and ‘k’ after the letter ’s.’”

“The bottom line is the Pittsburgh school system is giving its students a leg up on the competition, not only in America, but throughout the world,” Ravenstahl added. “Our kids correctly spelled Roethlisberger 12 times more often than all the students in Europe and Asia combined.”

To read the entire hilarious article, click here!

-jp

(image  from The Onion)

If you’re like me, then the holidays are the only time you have to dig out the neurons covered in dust that have been on sabbatical while you:

-         Herd cats

-         Deal with other mammals in your life

-         Follow your own grandiose visions

So, I am using this post to share some of my favorite “get your act together” tools I use for “dealing” on a daily basis. Keep in mind, I am a busy, quasi-stressed out mom, entrepreneur, and colossal nerd.

THINGS I USE TO DEAL ON A DAILY BASIS

1. www.Mint.com – A free finance tool
2. www.Doodle.com – Easy group scheduling tool (see “cat herding” above)
3. www.GoogleDocs.com – I use an excel sheet in Google Docs to manage my team, some of whom are virtual. Love it.
4. www.PollDaddy.com – Polls are a great. I really like them. The fact that they are free makes them even better. You can use Google Forms as well.
5. www.EventBrite.com – This was introduced to me by the guys at iStrategyLabs. Use it for your real life events or virtual seminars. You will see why.
6. 1888PressRelease.com – Good stuff. I always like things that give you reach you don’t deserve because you have no money. But, we can’t let that stop us!
7. www.TwitterAnalyzer.com – Gives me good stats I can share with the guys in my department and let them know I’m not TOTALLY wasting time.
8. www.SlimTimer.com – It’s like you’re back in high school with your mom telling you to get your homework done. Love it.
9. Six O’Clock Scramble – Healthy meals in 30 minutes. I’m sure I would use this if I cooked. Okay, also, this is not business. But, you gotta cook, right? And if you spend 30 less minutes on cooking, then that’s 30 more minutes for your business.
10. www.FitDay.com – While we’re on the health topic, my favorite free health tool. Most entrepreneurs I know in EO (Entrepreneurs Oranization where you’re under 40 and have sales of $1 million or more) have some major hobby, including working out, etc.

What tools are you thankful for (more like the above, and less like – uh – a jack hammer). Or, as my aunt and dad and other erudite folks might correct me, “For what tools are you thankful?”

THINGS THAT ARE HIGHLY ANNOYING.

I have just read this blog, and am feeling quite snarky now. I am less thankful for the following:

• Trump Network on Twitter– How did Trump let this happen to his name?
• The “make cash at home” people
• The “make money on Google” people
• The “you can earn money on Twitter” people
• When I am looking for a document on my computer and click through like six windows, and then do that every time I need to find a document, several times a day, for years.

IF YOU DON’T LAUGH, YOU’LL CRY

It is important to laugh, because if you don’t laugh you’ll cry. Here are some of my favorite sites right now. These are only for people with sick senses of humor. If you are “normal,” don’t bother.

1. @darthvader – That’s right, you heard me.
2. Does this Blog Make Us Look Fat?
3. The Bloggess
4. The Onion

Have a Happy Thanksgiving everyone, and don’t forget to nominate the dynamic women in your life (over 18) as a role model for the Hot Mommas Project 2010 case competition. We make everyday women’s stories teachable to help the next generation. Email us with your nomination including name, contact, and reason for nomination.

Related links:

Why Mentoring Matters for Girls and Women – and How to Be Part of the Solution

My Interview on Washington Business Tonight on “Hibernating for Business” (Windows Media Player Needed)

Those who know me well will recall that I am an avid advocate of raising awareness.  Thus, it is with great glee that I notice that The Onion has reported on the declaration of December as National Awareness Month.  We can now only hope that this will lead to World Awareness Month and, not so far off, a Worldwide Year of Awareness (2012, anyone?).

I love The Onion’s Noveller, if only I could chuck out 75,000 words a day!

In a revelation that is bound to send shockwaves through Bollywood fandom, doctors in Mumbai have admitted that the real Salman Khan is trapped inside a thick layer of hardened muscle.  The information was found in a classified document, which had mysteriously found its way to a Chennai peanut vendor. 

Ram Kanakasabapathy and his friend, Visesh Rao, made the stunning discovery yesterday during a visit to their avicha-vaerkkadalai ^[1]  vendor in Saidapet.  ‘I thought the Times of India celebrity supplement and Sun News were the only sources of authentic information.  I never knew that my peanut man had them beat for quality news coverage,’ said Ram. 

‘First of all, I would love to send a shout out to my homies, Rickster and G’Nesh.  Salman is da bomb and I luv Salman.  He is way more talented than that over-rated prick Shah Rukh.  There is only one Khan, and that is Salman’, Visesh rhymed in an unexpected, but oddly endearing moment of candour. 

 ’We are here every evening, but this was actually the first time I had paid attention to the print on the package,” continued Sesh, as he likes to be called.  ‘Ram and I were standing here tweeting each other on how difficult it must be for Deepika to have to act with her ex’s best friend’s cousin in her next movie.  That’s when I saw the name SALMAN KHAN on the sheet in my hand.  OH MY GOD!’  As luck would have it, Ram and Sesh had the first two sheets and for an additional Rs. 1000 worth of peanuts, they secured the rest of the explosive report.

The rest, as they say, is His story.  The friends then got on Facebook and one of their friends alerted this reporter, who was able to get a first-hand look at the report.  It appears that the discovery was made during what seemed like a routine visit by the doctor.  Salman had complained of an itch under his scalp that he couldn’t quite scratch.  Although everyone experiences this sort of a thing occasionally and for short durations, Salman’s itch had not gone away for a month.  While attempting to inject the Khan with anti-histamines, the doctors broke seventeen needles, at which point they realised that something was seriously wrong and a different approach was required.

Salman Khan in happier times, flashing some bling.

X-rays taken at the Tata Memorial Hospital revealed a one-inch-thick layer of unknown material covering Salman’s body.  The layer was particularly thick around the skull, chest and upper arms. 

 ’It is fair to say that the medical community, not just in India, but worldwide, has not seen anything like this before’, said Dr. Atul Apte, a renowned neurosurgeon at the hospital.  ’We have repeated the tests and yes, these results are real.  At this time, we are getting the opinions of our colleagues in the West, but it will be a while before we can come to any conclusions’.

The leading hypothesis is that Salman, in addition to the usual skeleton humans possess, has for some reason, started growing an exoskeleton.  Exoskeletons are normally found in the insect kingdom — the cockroach is a good example.  ‘While this hypothesis could explain what we see, it really doesn’t explain the why part of it at all,’ added a visibly agitated Dr. Apte.  ’The high-steroid, high-fibre diet Salman has been on for the last several years is suspected of causing heart failure, liver damage and regularity in bowel movements, but is not known to cause this type of side effect.  We are still working hard on this, and hope to come up with some testable explanations soon.  But, realistically, we are probably a decade away from understanding this issue’, he opined, eerily reminding us of the last paragraph.

Dr. R. S. Srinivasan, a prominent dermatologist in Chennai, had this to say: ‘This is terrible for Salman, but if you are a lover of science, (and frankly, who isn’t?) this is what you dream of.  In the 80s and 90s, we had the AIDS epidemic, which created a huge buzz and captured the imagination of the entire world.  But, this one is something else altogether.  It is almost straight out of a bad science-fiction movie — Superhero develops exoskeleton after being bitten by a cockroach. 

‘Unfortunately, a real-life exoskeleton throws up a host of dermatological, not to mention existential, issues.  In a sense, I feel cheated.  I took up dermatology mainly because I didn’t like the inside.  Who are we kidding?  It is gooey and gross.  But, with Salman, the outside has gone inside and something else’s outside has become his outside.  Rama! Rama!^[2].  Our sages said it right.  Ellam maayam^[3].  Is he supposed to go to an entomologist now or what?’

What is the cure for this ailment?  ’It is premature to talk of a cure when we don’t even know what the problem is.  However, if the exoskeleton idea is right, there is a chance that Salman will moult and lose the exoskeleton after some time.  But then, he might also regrow one right away and we need to have a plan to prevent that.  He might also want to eat the proteinaceous exoskeleton once he comes out,’ Dr. Apte’s voice trailed off into the breeze.

 ’I am now worried about the epidemic angle to this.  Salman was the pioneer of the buff revolution that has since swept Bollywood.  A lot of our youngsters have followed in his footsteps.  If this problem has anything to do with this new lifestyle, we will have a full-fledged swine-flu situation on our hands’.

To obtain an alternative medicine viewpoint on this story, this reporter spoke to Sadhu Sundaracharya of Kedarnath.  ‘I rarely agree with Madrasis or doctors but I do like what that Madrasi doctor said.  Yeh sab maya hi hai^[4].’

‘ What is inside?  What is outside?  What is in?  What is out?  What is side?  Where are we standing when we ask the question?  Are we inside?  Are we outside?  If you are inside, the inside is the inside and the outside is the outside.  If you are outside, the outside is the inside and the inside is the outside, nah?,’ the Acharya queried in response to this reporter’s question on whether he can come inside, causing him to seriously reconsider greeting the Godman with a ‘What’s up?’ 

‘I recommend that Salman spend a few months at my Ashram.  I can guarantee that he will be a new person when he emerges,’ Sadhu Sundaracharya beamed between tokes of his food-less diet.

1. boiled peanuts; fantastic Chennai street-food, no kidding.
2. One of 330 million Gods! One of 330 million Gods!
3. It’s all an illuzhaan, baby!
4. It’s all an illusun, indeed!

ANN ARBOR, MI — After completing a poem originally titled “Last Dawnbreak,” local poet Keith Taylor spent five additional minutes removing verbs and punctuation in order to give the piece a level of vagueness more suitable for publication.

“Harshness your light fallen–Sporadic.  Droppings.”  reads the now-untitled poem’s opening line. “Juniper glass, my world of 19–Orion!  Orion!”

Though he has already replaced the names of his friends with largely unknown African deities, Taylor said the poem would not be totally ready for publication until his 5-year-old nephew completes work on the third stanza.

The Hold Steady Almost Killed The Sokol Underground

But it is.  Good God, it’s almost 2010.

*Side note:  It truly is incredible to consider for myself the difference in my life from the year 2000 to today.  I was a junior in college in Lincoln, having a grand old time, and just started dating someone.  I know am a homeowner in Omaha with said “someone” and have a beautiful daughter with her.  And it seems like 2000 was approximately 2 days ago.  Incredible.

So you’re starting to see the inevitable “Best of the ’00’s” articles and blog posts.  I typically am only interested in the music version of these lists.  The one I saw is from–for my money–the most reputable music site out there anymore, The Onion’s AV Club.

When I first saw this link, I couldn’t immediately think of anything really.  But wow–once I started reading through this list, I realized how good of a decade it has been for music.  Perhaps that’s a personal preference, but there are some all-timer’s in there.  For me, age 21-30 was far more influential for my musical tastes than, say, my high school/early college years because it has been the past 10 years where I really branched out and started discovering more genres and getting into a diverse array of music.  But I digress.

Check out the AV Club’s “Best of the Decade” story. Here is their Top 6:

(Why Top 6?  Because #6 is awesome, and I wanted to include it.)

#6:  The Hold Steady, “Separation Sunday”

#5:  Wilco, “Yankee Hotel Foxtrot”

#4:  Outkast, “Stankonia”

#3:  Radiohead, “Kid A”

#2:  Kanye West, “The College Dropout”

#1:  The White Stripes, “White Blood Cells”

I think that Top 6 is pretty stout, and you could really interchange any of them (although I think the White Stripes are pretty overrated for my taste).  I’m glad that Kanye is where he should be; that album is incredible.  I think due to his increasing douchebaggery has overshadowed just how good of music he puts out there (particularly his first three albums).  Wilco is Wilco, and Yankee is probably their best album.  Stankonia is as influential an album as will be produced in our lifetimes, let alone that decade.  And Separation Sunday is probably my favorite album by the finest rock and roll band in America right now.  Here are some other highlights for me from the list:

#50 – Broken Social Scene, “You Forgot It In People;” #37 – Justin Timberlake, “Justified” (yeah, I said it, but it’s undeniably a great pop record); #34 – Clipse, “Lord Willin’;” #33 – Death Cab for Cutie, “Transatlanticism;” #30 – Sufjan Stevens, “Illinois;” #28 – Ghostface Killah, “Supreme Clientele;” #26 – Amy Winehouse, “Back To Black;” #25 – Madvillian, “Madvilliany;” #9 – Jay-Z, “The Blueprint.”

Biggest Omission:  D’Angelo, “Voodoo.”  For my money, one of the best soul albums ever made, and a Top 5 album of all-time for me personally.  It is borderline criminal it’s not on here.

Other omissions:  Common, “BE;” Coldplay, “A Rush of Blood To The Head;” Arctic Monkeys, “Whatever People Say I Am, That’s What I’m Not;” Vampire Weekend, “Vampire Weekend;” Kanye West, “Late Registration;” Gnarls Barkley, “St. Elsewhere;”  Al Green, “Lay It Down;” Jay-Z, “Unplugged;” Ryan Adams, “Gold;” The Roots, “Phrenology;” Q-Tip, “The Abstract;” J Dilla, “The Shining”

So where are you at?  What are your top albums of the past 10 years?  What are your glaring omissions?  Leave ‘em in the comments.

Though this Onion article is clearly written in jest, it raises an interesting point:

The entire office staff of Altman & Hanson Accounting remained utterly baffled as to what, if anything, should be done in response to the prominent sobbing coming from the cubicle of 36-year-old clerk Jack Underwood, sources reported today.

Leaving aside the usual jokes about pay cuts and furloughs and loss of benefits, it’s entirely possible that one of your coworkers may indeed be crying at his or her desk at some point.

What do you do?

Well, for starters, if you’re the person who needs to cry, the professional thing to do is find somewhere private to break down and then compose yourself. Bathrooms are good — especially if your floor has a semiprivate one hidden somewhere — as are conference rooms not being used at the moment or, if you can make it in time, your car.

If you are the observer of the tears, you have three options:

1. Ask what’s wrong.
2. Ignore it completely.
3. Poll your coworkers to see if anyone has an answer.

The most likely of these, of course, is item 3, which not only saves you from having to deal directly with the person in tears while satisfying your inner need to gossip and making sure that the crying coworker’s plight is communicated to as many people as possible.

Next-most-likely is item 2, ignoring it — it’s likely that the person crying can’t control himself or herself, which is why s/he is sitting at his/her desk instead of escaping to somewhere else. Depending upon how well you know the person, you probably already know if you should ask what’s wrong or just keep moving on.

And then there’s item 1, which is getting involved. For those looking to form an extracurricular relationship, this can be a great door-opener — sit down, talk, and squirrel away those brownie points. It’s a definite in. Just remember that you could be getting yourself into a huge mess — what if the problem involves your mutual boss? What if that person got fired but you didn’t? Or, worst of all, what if it’s something you don’t think is worth the tears? Can you trust yourself not to say “man up, Nancy!” and instead respond kindly?

Of course, there are times when you can’t help it. Once, a co-worker of mine got a call that his brother had suffered a stroke and it took him some time to recover. At that time, we were part of a tightly-knit department and we all offered to help out. He was fine after an hour or so and declined our offers to cover his shift. His brother is now on the road to recovery, and most of us met him on his last visit to the office.

Personally, the best option in my opinion is to ignore it. As I said, if the person can’t get out of there in time, there’s a good reason for it, and unless that person is your work-wife or work-husband, you probably shouldn’t get involved.

The same, by the way, goes for angry coworkers who can’t stop expressing how they feel. Just remember to duck.

The man behind #swineflu and #HowBlackAreYou was the hit at this year’s NYC webfest

Baratunde Thurston. Image: O'Reilly Media

This has nothing in particular to do with Apple (AAPL), but it’s very 2.0.

We spent much of last week at a conference in New York City called Web 2.0 Expo — a celebration of the “next generation Web” where one of the centers of attention was the giant Twitter screen set directly behind the keynote speakers that showed what the audience was tweeting about whomever was onstage.

The speakers included a typical mix of Web celebrities, including O’Reilly Media’s Tim O’Reilly, Digg’s Kevin Rose and Jay Adelson, author Douglas Rushkoff, Flikr co-founder Caterina Fake and White House chief technology officer Beth Noveck.

But the hit of the conference — judging from the laughter, the applause and the tweets — was Baratunde Thurston, Web & Politics editor at The Onion.

His talk was entitled “There’s a #Hashtag for That” and I’ve discovered that it’s a kind of Twitter touchstone. The audience at the Javits Center thought it was knee-slapping hilarious. People who don’t quite get what Twitter is for — like my wife — are even more mystified than they were before they watched it.

The video is posted below. We’d love to hear what you think.

Thurston tweets as @baratunde. The hashtag for Web 2.0 Expo is #w2e.

[Follow Philip Elmer-DeWitt on Twitter @philiped]

When life gives you lemons, why not blame them on your troubled upbringing and consequent inability to show affection? It sure beats making lemonade.

The Onion reports -

WASHINGTON—In an effort to combat what organizers are calling “our current epidemic of complete and utter obliviousness,” the American Foundation for Paying Attention to Things has declared December “National Awareness Month.” “All across the country, millions of men and women are dangerously unaware,” AFPAT spokesperson Karen Teeling said during a press conference Monday. “What’s worse, the vast majority of those suffering from this debilitating state of mind don’t even know it.” “That’s why this December we’re asking that all Americans stop whatever it is they’re doing, and take a moment to open their eyes for once—just once—in their lives,” Teeling added. “It’ll make all the difference in the world.”

Continue reading.

AOL asked me to write a blog post this week on all the comic invective directed recently toward Glenn Beck, knowing that both his defenders and detractors would come out of the woodwork to wage war in the comments section.* And come they did, by the tens of thousands, thanks in part to a headline on the AOL welcome screen that overstated my concern about some of the more below-the-belt spoofs. (“Attacks on Beck Crossing the Line: Our Writer Says Recent Parodies Are Anything but Funny: Skits Under Fire”)

Now, I’m not a Beck fan, as even a cursory reading of the article would make clear. If anything, the assignment gave me an excuse to embed videos of several Beck-lampooning sketches, some of which I think are perfectly fair. The best of these was the Stephen Colbert monologue embedded at the top of this post, which perfectly mimics Beck’s performance style, calls him on his BS, and does so without resorting to ad hominem attacks. What I objected to was those sketches that got personal — Jon Stewart appearing to make fun of Beck’s recent health woes, Andy Cobb taking Beck’s icky incest fantasy from his book The Real America: Messages from the Heart and Heartland out of context to imply that Beck really meant it (he did not; he was merely making an offensive analogy to gay relationships), and The Onion wishing for Beck to die a violent and gory death (a video that contains some NSFW language).

I’ll admit, I actually thought all of these were funny, even the ones I found squirm-inducing and inappropriate. But I also thought that they made the tactical and ethical mistake of stooping to Beck’s level. Ad hominem attacks, quoting people out of context, and wishing people dead may be things Beck does routinely, but his critics won’t win any converts by doing the same.

That seems unfair, that Beck’s critics should have to play by rules that he won’t follow, but only by maintaining a higher standard than Beck will his critics avoid being charged with hypocrisy, a charge Beck defenders will use as an excuse to ignore the substance of the criticism.

That doesn’t mean Beck shouldn’t be fair game for ridicule; indeed, I think ridicule may be the only thing that can discredit him. But there’s a right way to do it, one that allows his critics to maintain the moral high ground, and a wrong way. Besides, its easy enough to skewer Beck for his public actions; there’s enough fodder there without having to skewer him for who he is in private as well.

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*By the way, there’s little that’s more depressing to me than the vast chasm, as seen in the comments section of my AOL post, between the pro- and anti-Beck factions. Both sides seem to live in mutually exclusive realities. Beck supporters believe he’s the lone voice of truth in journalism (which doesn’t speak well of the rest of the Fox News talking heads), the only person who’s asking tough questions of the Obama administration (which is somehow fascist, socialist, and communist at the same time), someone whose every assertion is backed by “facts” and “truth” (because no one is calling his red phone to challenge his claims), and someone who so frightens liberals (based on the kinds of attack clips embedded in my post) that he must be doing something right. The Beck loathers think he’s either an idiot, a loon, a huckster, or some combination of the three; an entertainer trying to pass himself off as a journalist; someone whose every assertion is a lie, backed by video clips carefully edited to distort and take out of context the quotes of his ideological foes; and as big a threat to America as Beck fans think President Obama is. Both sides are quick to resort to insults and name-calling (did no one actually read my post?), both dismiss evidence cited by the other side as tainted by the bias of its source, and neither seems able to agree on something as basic as the meaning of such concepts as “facts” and “truth.” How will we ever bridge such a gulf when we can’t even agree on basic premises?

I think Beck is a demagogue, but I also think the populist anger he taps into is genuine. His viewers get that they’re being robbed by powerful special interests, but not that Beck is channeling their anger toward the wrong targets (ACORN, SEIU, and other groups of relatively powerless blue-collar and minority Americans) — or that this self-described “rodeo clown” performs this act of misdirection at the behest of the real culprits, in order to hide their crimes and to distract Americans from who’s bamboozling them by sowing discord among them. It’s going to take a real Wizard of Oz moment to pull back the curtain on Beck; instead of a Toto, maybe it’ll be a satirist like the dogged Colbert who will expose him.