Here’s a good clip of Obama campaigning in Indiana.

One of my personal low points occurred in the late 1970’s when I attended the nomination/election of the next editor of the school paper at Penn State. The then-current editor-in-chief, having realized that his hand-picked successor was not the popular choice, went into a 15 minute, character-assassinating screed against the other candidate. That part didn’t bug me … it was sort of par for the course with this guy. But what bothered me was that it worked … for the few minutes that it required to force though a vote, the majority of a group of otherwise intelligent people were swayed. It’s thirty years later and I’m still appalled that it could happen.

Watching the Clinton team take a similar road in a desperate attempt to escape the quicksand of their failed campaign brings it all back. She needs to stop, if not for her sake, then at least for mine!

I spent the weekend planting 10 Frontenac grape vines in my backyard, after having been inspired to give it a try by my friend Bob. I have no interest in making wine, but this is going to beat staring out at cooking grass all summer. Assuming I prepared the ground correctly (hours excavating New England soil that is best suited for producing rocks of various sizes), and pruned the vines correctly, and … well, with me I guess it’s a bit of a gamble, but grape vines are strangely resistant to rotten growing conditions. I got a great deal of info from Jeff Cox’s excellent book, ‘From Vines to Wine‘.

The birdhouse that Jake selected and painted seems to have weathered the sub-prime scare, and a couple of sparrows have moved in. So I have that, my grape vines, and after next weekend (hopefully) a rain garden to stare at instead of my computer screen. I think this Reality thing is the next Big Wave.

First of all, I thought there already was one laptop per child, at least when they are sitting down.

Nicholas Negroponte’s ‘One Laptop per Child‘ (OLPC) program has had some delivery problems with their Give One/Get One program launched at the end of 2007. But who cares? His idea has been to design a useful, portable, low cost (ballpark $200) computer than can be given on a large scale to communities worldwide. As an enlightened, liberal American enamored with high tech, this is the charity I naturally gravitated to (which is another way of saying that my friends Reg and Julie kept sending me links about the campaign until I signed up).

I’m more than happy to wait for mine as long as they keep sending me pictures of towns and villages getting their computers. Like these from Ulaanbatar in Mongolia. The expressions on the faces of these kids tells the whole story for why this is a worthwhile effort.

Reg got his OLPC laptop … I am still waiting for mine … and loaned me his to check out. It is a solid machine that I think will readily appeal to kids. It’s not what I’d use for an everyday mobile machine (I’m holding out for the MacBook Pro), but it is just the thing that would aid a kid interested in images or music or programming or games or writing or community.

Lots of ways to participate … check it out.

Chez Pazienza over at HuffPo, and his blog Deus Ex Malcontent. Pazienza was a producer fired from CNN recently for writing a liberal blog. I’d stop watching CNN in protest, except I stopped watching that clown show long ago.

I studied Liberal Arts math/science at Penn State in the late 70s, but most of my friends were journalism majors met at the school newspaper, the Daily Collegian, where I worked as a cartoonist. This was during the aftermath of the Nixon resignation, the wheelhouse of Hunter S. Thompson, and the culture of Woodward and Bernstein, and somehow it all went Horribly Wrong. Growing up means losing campus-born-and-nurtured innocence about the way things work, and maybe this was always going to happen, but from the time a second-tier actor (third tier if you count the movies with the monkey) got hired on to play President of the United States in 1980, the path seemed weirdly inevitable.

For a while CNN looked like the Brave New World, but it mutated into some weird People Magazine publicity machine. Britney’s latest on-camera flip-out or the drug overdose of blue jeans model easily moving in front of the oil companies’ campaign to apparently simultaneously annex and depopulate Iraq. The lesson, as always, is ‘follow the money’. A news organization run by MBAs is not a news organization … it is, and will always be, a profit-seeking beast.

And if that starts happening to the blogs, same story. Although for now, the Internet has proven novel enough to confuse most of the old media money. Entry barriers are low, and sites like Talking Point Memo do provide some current hope for the Future of Information.

Frank Rich is on his game today as well, speaking about Hillary’s Audacity of Hopelessness. My brother and I are split on the Hillary/Obama question. He was working lights on an event Obama was involved with and felt like he was more marketing than substance, so favors Hillary’s experience. Hillary comes across to me badly … reeking of the sort of politics that says ‘do what you have to do, say what you have to say, to win’, seemingly oblivious to the fact that we are trying to withdrawal from toxic doses of that crap. I am willing to try something very new. I don’t buy into any of the messianic messaging that seems to be springing up around Obama, but I do hope that this could signal the opening of a door. To quote the good doctor, “History is hard to know, because of all the hired bullshit, but even without being sure of ”history” it seems entirely reasonable to think that every now and then the energy of a whole generation comes to a head in a long fine flash, for reasons that nobody really understands at the time — and which never explain, in retrospect, what actually happened.”. (HST)

There is a smoker out in front of our building today who is a dead ringer for Franz Kafka.  Same round glasses, short, neat beard, hunted intellectual look.  I nodded my head at him as I returned from lunch.  He waved a third arm and rattled his carapace.  Which I assume was intended in a friendly way.

I deactivated my Facebook page, much to my daughter’s great relief, I’m sure. I created an account to learn what it was, and I have to say I never really caught its wave. In the end, I guess it is a PHP-enabled blog server for people without the time or inclination to get into blog design, with some social networking tools enabled to help create, maintain, and encourage site traffic.

Facebook facilitates the sort of ‘virtual clubhouse’ that Howard Rheingold lucidly analyzed in ‘Smart Mobs‘ … a technology that provides a sense of privacy with one’s friends. And I understand the particular usefulness of that, particularly for teenagers still under the watchful eyes of parents and teachers and lacking the mobility or means to carve out much real-world personal space. (I’d say I grok it, if only to underscore that my Baby Boomer psyche left this particular experiment a long while ago, although I can still see why it is a tool so relevant for Generation Next).

The FaceBook application platform feels convoluted. It probably has to be to maintain their very-locked-down business model (services like Google AdSense won’t work within application pages, so ‘monetized’ applications seem either hamstrung or impossible).