feel the freedom of america

for new citizens

even though he says with a laugh that we in the usa cherish the right to free speech, it’s hard to believe that those expressing their free speech weren’t escorted out of the assembly.

update: yep, escorted out

lots of comments over at Countdown to Crawford

under different circumstances i would have easily been a christian minister. like a real one. like fer real.

i definately have the faith. and im a salesman. and i dont mind being in front of a crowd giving a speech. but i dont love it. some people love it. some people always hafta been on stage.

i also couldnt not have sex. mostly because its not in the bible that preachers cant have sex. the sons of levi were the only ones to make it to the promised land. they were the preachers. they had sex.

im also not a very good bullshitter. imagine all the crap you gotta hear about this persons family and that persons problems if youre in charge of a church. yeah no thanks.

however every time i was at a church that had an organ or a good guitarist i was instantly seduced. im sure it was the acoustics.

imagine totally changing your life because it literally sounded good.

speaking of changing jobs, this post goes out to my former assistant sports editor, melissa lalum, who was so great that i stepped down as sports editor and gave it to her. for the last dozen years she has been at the los angeles daily news.

this week she stepped down as managing editor at the daily news and will run the college paper at cal state northridge, the daily sundial.

congratulations melissa. and thank you for not interviewing at the times because if you had gotten hired there i would have been tempted to step down again because you were always better than me at everything. meanwhile watch the sundial improve by a gazillion.

i didnt feel exactly complete about our coverage of the xeni/boingboing/violet controversy. dont get me wrong, we had solid posts; exclusive interviews with both violet and xeni, no one else had that. but i couldnt help feeling something was missing. in the past ive been accused of never being satisfied, id prefer to call it perfectionistism, and this wouldnt be the first time id have to plead guilty of it.

to be honest i wasnt sure that we had the whole story. not the salacious stuff, but answers to the questions about protocol and transparency and all the Web 2.0 junk that i care about. plus metafilter had over 1300 comments and the BB thread had almost that many and many of commentors had questions that i felt we hadnt fully explored in our posts.

today magically, unbelievably i got an email telling me about, and then inviting me to, a conference call with xeni, a few other boing boingers and federated media chief john battelle. we talked for what must have been over an hour. and these are some excerpts of the two posts david sarno published today on the LAT blog Web Scout:

Xeni Jardin: When I decided to unpublish these posts — and I did that — it wasn’t like there was a policy or practice in place where we would all confer with each other before we posted something, so I didn’t confer with all of my editors before taking it down.

Did you think people wouldn’t notice, or if they did notice, that they wouldn’t care?

XJ: God, I don’t know if I really thought through all of that. I just really didn’t. It’s hard for me to articulate exactly how weird this is. Suddenly it became this big huge thing with all this public scrutiny and all this speculation. But at the time I just wanted to take this material down for a host of reasons that I don’t want to talk about in public because I don’t think it would do this person any good. We don’t blog in detail about every minute decision we make about what to publish and what not to.

…There wasn’t an attempt to hide it. And I didn’t bring it up again in part because it involved some personal, private stuff that I don’t tend to get into. Like whether someone’s character is this or that, or whatever kind of personal dirty laundry was involved.

Regarding the decision to remove:

XJ: My biological father who died when I was a kid was a painter and a print maker. He went through different phases in his creative work. A lot of what he did was paint very beautiful photorealistic portraits of nude women. Sometimes he went off into experimental territory that he was embarrassed about… sometimes he would just grab batches of the stuff that was crappy as years went on, and go to the backyard and burn it. And it wasn’t that he was censoring himself, and God knows nobody else was censoring him. It was that this was his creative work. This was art. And he felt like some of it wasn’t representative of who he was anymore and he didn’t want it to be available to the world to see.

That’s how I felt with this situation.

that was part of part one. in part two came an interesting question that i had never thought of before:

John Battelle: Isn’t it also the right of the person who put it up to take it down? If you were truly the owner, I think one could argue unequivocally that you had that right. The question is: Do you damage the community in doing so? And are those rights involved in that damage more important than the rights of the creator? That’s exactly the essence of what we want to come to an understanding about.

i think we might get one more part of the interview posted to the blog. so stay tuned. (or am i still being annoyingly unsatisfied?)

photo of Xeni by Clayton Cubitt via Xeni’s flickr

i would probably be sass‘s boyfriend.

it would be pretty easy to do. all id have to do is grow a few inches, wear really lame expensive clothes, and literally be sorta gay. i dont say that in a mean way or a derogatory way, but she really likes gay dudes. which is fine, they tend to have better style, and will probably be into clothes shopping with her.

im not at all gay, but for some reason i dont mind one bit going clothes shopping with hot asian girls as they try on endless amounts of new clothes. be them raymi outfits (pictured) or not.

the other day i realized that i have had three asian girlfriends in my life. the first was linda who is half japanese (they do it to you every time). next was the first person i ever met who i would ever consider a nympho. she was chinese and no matter where we were or what we were doing she always wanted sex. it was sorta fascinating and believe it or not, it got old way quicker than youd expect. it would have made an excellent charles bukowski short story. and the last asian gf i had is korean. hello kitty with titties i called her. which was supposed to be funny as in “hey look im an ugly american who doesnt know that hello kitty isnt korean”. for some reason she accepted my lame culture jokes, probably because she knew i meant them in good fun.

anyways i would be very happy to have sass as my gf because she is an excellent blogger. i think i have decided that for now on i will only date women with blogs because then they would understand why at 3:09am i am sitting with the window open and the tv on mute because i feel the need to write the second blog post of the day.

i think sass would understand that. shes also fine as hell. and i think she would be happier dating an america 5 times her age. a man so old he doesnt worry about the gray hairs on his chest, but the ones he occasionally gets in his nose. cuz they look like buggars to the untrained eye. so sometimes he has to grab a whole mess of them while hes driving home to hollywood in order to rip out the offending gray one. but then people in the car next to him think hes picking his nose, which grosses them out. but no, hes only trying to get the gray hair out, no buggars. no buggars.

its all very seinfeldian, but true.

maybe if sass was my gf, for my bday she would get me some car tweezers. and i would get her some more of those super cool socks.

photo by raymi who also has an excellent sock collection

maybe its because i was so bored at school and there was the pen and there was the paper and theyd beat you if you got up and walked around
or theyd try to embarrass you if you fell asleep.
but for some reason they left you alone if you wrote.
id write the most amazing stories.
my favorite character in these day dreams was a guy named Bryn Speed.
the teacher had just taught us about symbolism so i thought i was cute by having his initials be BS, since thats what i was doing, etc.
because im a million years old i dont remember any of Bryns old stories
except for one.
apparently one day Bryn was flying the space shuttle. he had hotwired it.
his side kick was an old english sheepdog with was faintly like my first dog.
his dog was called Phydeaux because i was so damn clever. and in high school.
Bryn and Phydeaux in this story went into space in the space shuttle
and pointed the craft into a black hole because they had heard that if you go thru
a black hole, you would end up in a new universe.
it was sorta like hyperspace on Asteroids without hitting the button.
they make it to the new universe, park the shuttle next to a bar
and inside the bar meet a girl who’s pink, head to toe.
bryn has a drink with her and when he puts his hand on one of her many knees
realizes that his arm has turned blue. and not just his arm but his hand
he panics and asks if she has a mirror in her purse, she whips one out
and sure enough he has completely turned blue.
he was all, what was in that drink?
she was like, just beer, but isnt it cool that it can change your skin color like that
but bryn didnt think it was very cool and started panicking even more
phydeaux, sensing the freak out, started barking, and everyone noticed them freaking
and the girl said, dude if you dont like it, just take a leak
so they run into the restroom, bryn takes a wizz and his natural color returns to him
they go back to the bar and the girl is signing the bill of her tab
totally unimpressed and says, so is that what earths like, people obsessed with skin color?
and phydeaux said, not me, all i care is your ass smells nice and shitty.
and then id end the stories with The End.
then id draw a picture, fold it up, and give it to the prettiest girl in class.

today i stayed at the office till after midnight.

because thats where the best writers are
and i never want to stop learning.

apparently the uber-popular blog boing boing (currently the #5 blog on technorati, but it spent years at #1) deleted about 70 posts from its archives. the target? anything referring to sex blogger Violet Blue (pictured).

not a very web 2.0 thing to do from a group of extremely savvy and smart web experts and leaders.

yesterday david sarno’s blog Web Scout talked with Violet who said she had no clue why they would do such a thing.

today boing boing wrote a post admitting that they “unpublished” the posts but it was a private matter and hoped that everyone would appreciate the fact that it was happening on a “personal” blog.

unfortch the double b is not a personal blog, it’s a groundbreaking group blog that has set the bar for many contenders and pretenders. it’s the reason many other blogs are around. the superstars who write there are all internet celebs to a certain degree, all for the right reasons. and this web 0.2 action of taking down posts is curious at best. disappointing at worst.

anyways the drama continues. just ask metafilter who has hundreds (888 as of blogtime) of comments on this topic.

self portrait of violet blue via her flickr account (some pics nsfw)