Scott Yates

Robert Gibbs is just not funny

I've said it before, and I'll undoubtedly say it again, but Robert Gibbs is not funny.

He really thinks he's the star of the show. He's not, he's there to serve the public, not turn himself into a celebrity.

Denver Public Schools (DPS) Calendar update

I just finished updating the DPS calendar for next school year.

This year they actually released it at a reasonable time, and didn't wait until well into February (after most summer camps require a deposit) to let us know when school would start.

I do this each year for myself, not wanting to refer to the ridiculously obtuse official calendar. (Do green-and-black checkerboards mean early release and blue octagons mean assessment day, or is it the other way around?) Last year I figured it could help a lot of other parents, so that's why I post it here on my blog. If there's something I can do to make it more useful, please let me know.

Unemployment Rate For You

I seem to be in a mood to attack the New York Times today...

A million people have been linking to this gee-whiz graphic about the unemployment rate.

I don't think that's actually useful. I think all it does is make people feel better or worse about themselves while killing a couple minutes looking at some eye candy.

So, here, for you, with the help of the always talented Peter Jones, is a guide that is actually useful, and will not kill a bunch of your time today:

What is the unemployment rate for you?

New York Times Makes Up a Traffic.com Scandal

A story in today's Times about Traffic.com would have me outraged, if I didn't know there was more to the story.

The story, "U.S. System for Tracking Traffic Flow Is Faulted" makes the case that somehow Traffic.com rigged the system and got a huge pile of government money, and then wasted it all.

(Full disclosure, I sold MyTrafficNews to Traffic.com in 2006, but I no longer have any involvement with that company. I was a traffic nerd before I started MyTrafficNews, however, and I still am, having just written at length comparing traffic services.)

The story cherry picks some bits from a forthcoming government report, but that report isn't available so we have to trust that the Times did a good job of analyzing it. I haven't seen the report either, but I'm guessing it won't be nearly as dramatic as the Times makes it sound.

The heart of the controversy is that Traffic.com secured a deal with the government that it would get federal money to install traffic sensors, and then share the data. Without this deal, there would be hundreds of congested miles of highways in metro areas all over the country that would never get speed sensors. That's the big picture, and something that is easily overlooked.

Now the way Traffic.com set up the deal, it gets to use a small portion of that data first, but share nearly all of it all the time. Here's my recollection of how that worked in the real world: Traffic.com would instal a sensor and then share speed data that would show red-yellow-green on the traffic flow to everyone, including any local government and even the Traffic.com competitors. Traffic.com would keep for itself and its partners the exact speed data in exchange for putting in the sensors. My memory is that the federal money paid for some, but not all, of the cost, so Traffic.com was putting in the rest.

The bottom line for me is that the whole world got new data that it didn't have before. That's a good thing.

It's the kind of data you see right now on Google Maps -- the color coding is all you really need to know if a highway is rotten.

But because Traffic.com had some competitors, jealous that they didn't have whatever it took to put that deal together first, they howled like stuck pigs. They were doing that when I was involved, and it looks to me like they are still doing it, which is how that hit-piece ended up in the Times.

That hatchet job, by the way, doesn't even mention the fact that expansion of the program has already been stopped. I learned that only by doing a quick search this morning, but the program was shelved nearly two years ago. So why this manufactured scandal in today's paper? Good question.

Now, Traffic.com is not blameless, but you certainly can't blame the people there for implementing a program that was approved by Congress, and running it in the way that Congress directed.

I wish the people at Traffic.com were doing a better job of singing the praises of this program, which is a huge win for people who want to know about traffic jams before they get stuck in them. Somehow now the Times has turned that into a bad thing.

As I said, I haven't talked to anyone at Traffic.com for a while, but if I did talk to them I would tell them that they should have spoken to that reporter, and told him that this program is providing great data, is working, and will continue to make more information available to more people than was available before. It's doing its job for the taxpayers, the people implementing it are being fairly paid, and the congressional mandate is being fulfilled. This is a government program that is working. 

Why is that a scandal?

What to Call This Decade? My vote: The Naughties

I've been saying for more than ten years now that we need to all agree on what to call this decade that is so rapidly coming to a close.

When I say that, I've been getting a response, most recently from the esteemed Jesse Sheidlower, that we've gotten through the last 10 years without a name, and so there's no need to coin one now.

I disagree! Starting next month is when we will need it most! 

I don't think we need it when we are in it, because we can just say, for example, "I don't really like the most recent music from Hootie and the Blowfish, I like what they released in the 90s." 

Now let's say that band releases a much better set of songs in the next decade. (It could happen.)

How will we say, "I liked the recent songs, and the stuff from the '90s, but not the songs from the ____s."?

My vote is to take the word used commonly by Brits, the "noughties" and give it a proper American spelling, and call it the "Naughties."

This will give a little hint about so much of the naughtiness that went on. (Insert your own scandal here.)

The naughties are (almost) dead! Long live the naughties!

Won't I get a reputation for being soft on turkeys?

I think President Obama gave some nice remarks, and delivered his laugh lines well, and was cute with his daughters. For all the blather, it's clear that the president is a truly decent guy.

And his remarks about how Thanksgiving started during the depths of the Civil War really resonate in this year, with so many people struggling and so many troops overseas. He just put it all in perspective.

But there's really no better turkey-pardoning bit of drama than this one:

The Mark Cuban Effect at DefragCon

The DefragCon kicks off in an hour, but the pre-conference get-together was plenty interesting.

I've been to a number of tech conferences, but somehow some of the dynamics always surprise me, especially what I think of as the Mark Cuban effect.

Cuban, of course, is the brash and bold entrepreneur who built up an early "dot-com" and sold it to Yahoo at the absolute peak of the market before the tech crash in 2000.

Now he's involved in all kinds of stuff, but is best known for owning a basketball team. The name of the team, the Mavericks, matches his personality perfectly.

Cuban is known in tech circles for having contrarian viewpoints, and issuing them as loudly as he can. For instance he railed against the Google acquisition of YouTube.

He's certainly earned the right to do that.

Now, I don't want to pick on DefragCon, which is actually much better than some of the other tech conferences, but it is still full of people who just love to do a "Cuban." They make loud, bold pronouncements about why an idea will absolutely not work, how it's been done before, or why some competitor will demolish the idea before it can get any traction, etc.

I ran into lots of those people when I was founding, then running, a web-based business dealing in traffic information. If I would have listened to them I never would have started the business, and I certainly never would have sold it to Traffic.com. 

Heck, I may not have even bothered to wake up most mornings. 

Yesterday I talked to a couple of entrepreneurs who spent good money to come to the conference to learn and try to connect with others, and almost upon walking in the door they got the full "Cuban" from people who have never built, let alone sold, a company. (I actually had two experiences like that just in one day. The other was at the practice session for the upcoming Angel Capital Summit. More on that next week.)

I'm not saying that every idea walking around is great, and a little pushback is always a good idea. But for the next two days at Defrag I'll be attempting to tunnel through some of the bravado and find the great stories of new ideas, and bring them to you on Examiner.com or on sco.tt. I may not get to all of them right away, but I will try to report on many of them.

If you have a great story to tell (not just a press release announcing with great fanfare that version 3.2 of your whatever has just been released) look for me and let me hear it.

Stay-at-home dad

It's true, I'm essentially a stay-at-home dad, and what's weird is how busy I am. Most of the things I'm doing are open to the public, at least on-line, so join me for any or all of it. I know you are busy, too, but it's like they say, "If you need a job done, give it to a busy person."

Here's what I'm up to:

• Getting ready for the second installment of Second Saturday Science.
  
  The first was a big hit, check out the photos on the site for more. We're expecting a similar crowd of kids for this month's event, so we will not be in the community room this time, we'll be right out in the cafe area. If you have kids from around 6 to around 12, c'mon by. It's a lot of fun.


• Doing some coaching for TheBlogFrog in advance of the Angel Capital Summit.
  
  This is a great new company doing something that is great now, and will get even better.
  
  Remember how comments on blogs looked about the same for years, and how they didn't really interact with people in the modern, socially connected world? Then IntenseDebate came along and made the comments make more sense, and connected the commenters to their real-world profile, etc.
  
  Well, you know how forums on blogs have looked the same for years, and how they don't really interact with people in the modern, socially connected world?
  
  You catch on quick! You guessed it, the BlogFrog team has developed an easy way for bloggers to plug a fantastic forum into any blog, and maybe even make a little extra money on it in the process. They've already gotten some great traction with that most discerning of internet groups: the Mommy Bloggers. Keep an eye on BlogFrog, I know I will.
  
  
• Attending and reporting on Defrag Con 2009.
  
  It's been a while since I was a full-time reporter, but I've been attending a few events lately for this blog, but also for my Examiner reports on New Technology and on Google Wave. It's something that's quite comfortable for me to do: walking up and asking questions, and trying to write something coherent about it.
  
  The difference these days is that with the Internet as cool as it is, you can actually create things instead of just writing about them. Case in point is that just last week I wrote about how Wave could be integrated into a conference, and today I contacted the chief Defrag Confrencista to ask permission, he said yes, and a few minutes later I had launched the DefragCon Wave. (You need to already be in Wave to see that. Sorry.)
  
  Wave is still in its infancy, but it's fun to try it out. If you are on Wave, be sure to contact me in that brave new world. My username is "scodtt" (like Sco.tt with a "d" for the dot.)



• Helping Bud's Warehouse with a new site.
  
  You can click the link now, but wait until you see the new one, it will be much better. Really the best way to keep up with Bud's until the change is to check their Twitter account. This in some ways is the best twitter account I follow because the information they get about new merchandise is so handy, if I happen to be looking for what they get in.


• Lastly, but bestly, I'm spending time being a husband and a father. Kathy is busy keeping the world safe for arts in education, so I end up picking up a lot more of the time with our son, but that's just getting to be more and more fun every day.

So, if I'm not as in touch, or I'm not keeping my Facebook page quite as up-to-date, now you'll know why. 

Do keep in touch with me, however, especially if there's something I can do for you. These days we all need to count on our friends more than ever.

Thanks for reading!

Best Length for a YouTube video

I'm not sure why, but I'm crazy busy these days, so when someone sends me a link to a video, I very rarely even open it, and if I do close it if the length on the video is longer than about two minutes.

Here are two that broke that rule, however. I just got hooked on them, and could not stop watching them until the end. Both of them, I think, are just marvelous, and keep me optimistic.

and

So, the best length for a video? The length needed to tell the story properly.

Must Pop Topics! (Or, Why I Can Write Lots About Google Wave, and Not Much About the Rest of the World)

There's a game I just discovered from the excellent game collection over at Good Experience called Must Pop Words.

The idea is that a bunch of letters in balls float down to the bottom of a window, and you have to type words from those letters. At first they float slowly, and then they speed up. If you get to 50 balls, you lose. As Mark Hurst describes it, it's a combination of Tetris and Boggle.

The interesting thing is that I do much better when there are only a few balls, around seven or so. Once I get up to 35 or more balls it gets really hard. You would think it would be the opposite because there are geometrically more words that would be available with 35 letters.

I just finished reading How We Decide, the excellent book that draws in all the latest in neuroscience to help understand how the brain works, especially when it comes to making decisions.

One of the experiments that the author reviewed had to do with choosing a car. I don't have it in front of me, so I'm probably going to butcher this, but I think it went like this: 

Some subjects were asked to pick the best car, and they were given four variables for each of four cars. Some of them were asked to study the grid, and then announce what they thought was the best car. Some others were distracted after studying the list, and then were asked in the midst of distraction for the best choice, just using "gut instinct." 

The group that was not distracted picked the best car based on the four variables. Makes sense.

Then, a different group was asked to study a list of four cars, but for this group there were 16 variables. Again one part of this group was asked to study the list and then without distraction they were asked to announce their pick of the best car. The other part of this group was distracted, and then had to pick using a "gut instinct." Here the results flipped. The ones who got to study picked wrong; it's just impossible to keep 16x4 things in the rational part of your head all at the same time.

The emotional part of your brain -- the one that makes the "gut instinct" kind of decisions -- can keep track in some way so the people in this section way more often picked the car that had the largest number of better variables.

Picking a car, however, is way different from trying to form a word. Our emotional brain can make good decisions, but it can't pick words out of letters. I think that is why I stumble in that game when I have more good choices.

Now, why am I writing about this game?

Because it's interesting, to be sure, but also because of something I've been experiencing this week.

In my spare time I'm writing for Examiner.com. I started with one topic: New Technology. Then I wrote so many articles in that section about Google Wave, that with the help and encouragement of an old friend over at Examiner.com, I ended up starting a whole section devoted to Google Wave News.

Writing about Google Wave I have been unusually prolific, especially since I do most of my writing before breakfast.

But about "New Technology" my production has slipped. A lot.

I think it's because it's like the ball thing. With Wave there is plenty to write about, but really the choices are somewhat limited for a newfangled kind of a communication tool that's been used by, maybe, 0.000001 percent of the world's population.

"New Technology" just has so many possibilities, it's nearly impossible to choose with a rational brain. So, I'll do my best, but the best decisions may be the emotional ones and not the rational ones.

Douthat's Ignoble Nobel Blunder

I try not to comment about the New York Times, but for some reason I tripped across this story from Ross Douthat with the unfortunate headline: Heckuva Job, Barack. The first thing any conservative needs to know is that comparing President Obama to the guy who so badly mishandled hurricane recovery in New Orleans is only going to set your argument back.

Maybe some liberal copy editor slipped that headline past him.

Douthat based a his whole column on the notion that President Obama should have somehow managed to reject the Nobel.

Now I understand that the president is very powerful, but if he could swing largely symbolic European things his way he would have convinced the IOC to bring the Olympics to Chicago.

The Nobel is even less substantial, and I'm sure there's no way that he could have talked his way out of it.

One of my favorite books is from Richard Feynman, the physicist who's work spanned from Einstein to the Space Shuttle Challenger explosion. 

IN that book, he wrote that he wished he could have gotten out of accepting the Nobel, but learned there was no way to do it.

(He wrote about that here, but the preview is missing the page that talks specifically about how he wanted to reject the prize. He discussed the idea of that with a reporter, and that reporter explained to him (in a phone call just after he learned he got the prize at 3:30 a.m.) that it would be a bigger deal to reject it than to get it. So he accepted the prize and spent much of the rest of his life making elaborate plans so that nobody would ever know that a Nobel-winner was going to be making a speech about physics.)

The Nobel prize has made it harder for the president to get his agenda done in the US, and anyone who knows 10 cents worth of domestic politics would have predicted that. The Nobel committee may be great at picking out really good books that I won't be reading, but they only have about a nickel's worth of sense about politics in the US.

Greatest Day of Sco.tt's Life!

I'm spending much of the day at the DemoGala event in downtown Denver. I'll be reporting on it for the Examiner soon enough, but I first have to say that this is the greatest day in the life of Sco.tt.

No, not my life, my domain's life. 

You see, I have a card with the domain on it, and that's it. The picture you see above is the whole image on the card. Kind of a minimalist thing that I thought was kind of cool. Turns out that for most people... not so much. They just look at it, and then look at me. Some people are genuinely annoyed.

But not the people at this all-technical event today. They all love it.

The best reaction so far came from the incomparable Adeo Ressi. He's the guy behind two of the great ideas of the last few years: TheFunded and the Founder Institute. He and I have communicated about another potential project a few times, but today was the first time we'd met in person. When he had to go off to speak, he asked for my card. I handed it to him and he said it was the greatest card he'd ever seen. "This makes it worth the trip to Denver!"

Then he went to speak and I went off to a different session hosted by Examiner COO Dave Schafer. Why? Because I said I would, and because Schafer and I long ago toiled side-by-side at an actual newspaper printed on real paper. It was actually an excellent panel with Matt Cohen of OneSpot, Boulder and BDNT's own Robert Reich from OneRiot and the very impressive Lisa Stone of BlogHer. (I'm a sucker for journalists turned entrepreneurs.)

Anyway, one of my spies (I have them everywhere!) told me that Adeo held up my card during his speech, and said it was great, and then he called me a jack-ass because I didn't come to his speech.

To be called a jack-ass by Ressi. Man, if that's not awesome I don't know what is.

Second Saturday Science is on the air

I'm very excited to announce that an idea I've been thinking about forever, and got a little traction when Mark Cuban got a little bit interested in it back in February, has finally turned into something that is happening.

If you have kids ages 6-12 and live in Denver, I hope you'll stop by this Saturday.

All the details are on the new site: Second Saturday Science.

Check it out, and I hope we'll see you there!

Google Wave Scams, Why can't we all just get along?

There's a lot of interest in something, so there the scammers go. Can't they just stick to photos of pop stars?

Anyway, here's a complete guide to the Google Wave scams.

As so often happens, there's a quote from Casablanca that's perfectly apropos.

"This place is full of vultures. Vultures everywhere."

(That link may not work for everyone just yet, it's from a startup called AnyClip that I'm trying. It's pretty great.)

Drudge Goes Down an Ugly Path

OK, I've gone on and on about Drudge, but it needs to be said: The guy has turned almost pathologically against President Obama.

Nobody anywhere was connecting that Chicago crime -- which by big-city standards was really only notable because of the nearby cameras, to the effort to bring the Olympics to Chicago.

Nobody but Drudge.

Now, Drudge has been out in front on stories before, and then quickly gets followed by lots of other media outlets. The guy had a nose for big stories.

But now he's just getting mean, connecting dots that just aren't there.

Maybe he knows, as some smart guys do, that getting the Olympics in Obama's adopted home town could be huge for the Democratic party. And if he does know that, maybe he wants to prevent that from happening.

I had a hunch that Drudge was losing it earlier in the summer. Check out this screen grab:

Somehow he's trying to make the case that you can't possibly grow lettuce in three months. That's the kind of thinking that comes from someone who used to be the night manager of a convenience store.

But I still read Drudge, and I still keep the DrudgeWidget on my blog. What Drudge needs to hear, however, is that he's in danger of becoming the worst thing of all in the web world: Boring.

Google is going to catch up, don't worry

Now that I'm writing about technology over on Examiner.com, I probably won't be writing about it as much over here.

It just has bothered me how some journalists have been counting Google out of the realtime fight.

Today I posted a Guide to the Google Wave Hype.

In short, it's not hype. I think this is the real deal.

The New New New Technology Examiner, Peaches and Crowdsourcing. Confused Yet?

Sometimes I just can't help myself...

This morning I'm cruising through my blogs, and I read a great post by Nate Silver about some very fishy survey results about Oklahoma students.

I've been meaning to write in this space about how I'm now the new "new technology" Examiner over on Examiner.com, but I haven't.

So, do I compose a nice post here, introducing my work over there? No, I gotta go mixing things up and helping Nate solve the problem of not having enough data to show that the survey results are bogus. How? Using crowdsourcing, something I've been reading a lot about lately.

Totally confused? Yes, sorry, I understand. I'd sit down and write a post explaining it all, but I really want to get to the Farmer's Market before they run out of peaches. I'll have much more in the coming days, but at least now you have some explanation of why I wrote on Examiner.com this morning that we could use Crowdsourcing to prove that Oklahomans are not that dumb.

Gibbs Needs to Grow Up

Robert Gibbs is the first male presidential spokesman who is younger than me, so naturally I resent the hell out of him. (For some reason the lack of years of George W. Bush's Dana Perino never bothered me, maybe because she's a Colorado native.)

I've finally figured out why Gibbs rubs me the wrong way: He doesn't know when to shut up. Watch this to see what I mean...

You see that? Secretary Sebelius made a funny, appropriate joke. Gibbs should have just shut up, but instead he drains the humor out of the joke by explaining it, and making the whole matter seem snide and patronizing.

Typical mistake by young punks like Gibbs. He's got "spokesman" in his title, but sometimes the best thing to do is just shut up. President Obama would be better served if Gibbs talked half as much.

The "You Lie!" Guy is also a wimp who sends his wife to do his dirty work.

This video is very good, and she does a very good job, but if his wife is so much better than him, well, then why aren't the good people of South Carolina sending her to congress instead of him?

Just asking.

No, Scott Baio is not a Gen Xer

I disagree completely with this guy's assertion that the Original Gen Xers actually started being born in 1954.

Poppycock.

If he had started in 1961, the year that Barack Obama, Douglas Rushkoff, Chris Anderson and Douglas Coupland were born, then he might have had a case. I mean Coupland literally wrote the book on Generation X.

But in the same year were born 

• Julia Louis-Dreyfus -- famous only because of the completely boomer-centric Seinfeld 
• George Stephanopoulos -- famous because of one of the first Boomer president, the appropriately narcissistic Bill Clinton
• Meg Ryan
• Randy Jackson and 
• child stars Scott Baio and Ralph Macchio. 

That is not a group of Xers by any stretch.

Thanks, but No Thanks

Well, the results were quite clear: Nobody wants a tool to keep track of job prospects.

Yesterday I launched a survey to try to gauge the interest in a new tool that would help job seekers keep track of all the jobs they are applying for.

I wanted to keep the survey small, so I only posted it to my Facebook friends and here, asking that if someone was working, to just send it on to friends who may be looking for work.

Nobody did.

Either I have really rotten friends, or something else is going on. I think now I understand it.

What friend would send an unemployed friend this tracking tool? I mean, what would you say?

Hey friend! 

I just found this great new tool for people who are out of work, and may be for months and months to come! People just like you!!!

Isn't it great that I thought about you when I thought about this crappy economy and how super duper hard it will be for you to find a job!!

Well, see you later.

Your friend.

I don't know why I didn't think that through before.

I was a bit bummed about this, thinking about how quickly dashed was my idea to create a great tool that would be widely used and much appreciated. My wife, always the clever one, took this as great news.

Better to find out after a few hours of work that the idea won't fly. Imagine if you'd spent a few months working on it, she said.

She's right, of course, so on to the next thing.

Are Job Opportunities Falling Through the Cracks?

I haven't written much about this, but I'm looking for a job. Somehow it seems difficult to say that in public because of the general shame that goes along with that, even in this crazy global economic head cold that we are all suffering.

There are job opportunities that pop up, and I diligently apply for them. The ones I really want I make a point of following up on.

But lots of others just seem to fade away.

Also, not all jobs are created equal. Sometimes a job isn't a job, it's just a chance of possibly doing some consulting. I want to keep track of that, too, but there's no "job" for me to track.

I've been trying lots of different systems to keep it all straight, but none of them is ideal. There are plenty of to-do list tools, contact-management tools and online or offline spreadsheets. There are also tools associated with the big job boards, but there is lot's of spammy stuff associated with those. There is also a handful of tools built for job seekers, but they charge too much, have way too much junk associated with them, or just don't really do it for me for some reason or another.

So, am I all alone here? Am I the only one who sees this as a huge need? Especially these days?

Let me know. I've built a very quick and easy one-page survey.

Click here to take the survey.

If you are not actively looking for a job, pass this on to someone who is. You can take the survey if you want, but it's really designed for those who are actively looking.

I'll report back here with the results, and with whatever plans I make based on those results.

Thanks!

We are all the press now

So it appears that Gannett and the AP are having trouble with some of the restrictions of the press passes issued by the SEC to cover college football games.

This fight seems almost quaint.

On one side you have the SEC, which is saying that to get a press credential you have to agree not to blog about the game. On the other side you have the press, including the AP -- which has shown nothing but animus toward bloggers -- declaring that it has the right to blog whatever it wants to.

So, let's say that the SEC doesn't back down and the AP is forced to cover the game by buying a ticket or watching on TV. What would that look like?

Well... it would look like what the world looks like. Zillions of fans will be going to games or watching them, and blogging about what they are doing in real time. They don't need no stinking credentials.

The whole idea of the press credential already seems retro.

We are all the press now.

Irony Alert: Bezos Apologizes for Big Brother-like Removal of 1984

The word "irony" is so often misused that it's almost refreshing when it is used properly.

Sure enough, the opportunity presents itself beautifully when Amazon removed the book 1984 from Kindles through a secret back door that most people didn't know existed. They thought that when you bought a book, well, that you owned it, just like with a book printed on paper. Not so.

So the moment comes, but unfortunately the US press didn't jump on the chance to call the situation ironic. Maybe they never read the book?

The British press, as we might expect, was all over the irony angle.

God save the Queen.

Unemployment is Helping Apple?

There's been a ton of analysis of why it is Apple is doing so well in the middle of the rotten economy, but there's one bit I haven't seen anywhere: Unemployment is helping Apple. A lot.

Here's why:

Just among close friends, I know a couple people who have been laid off. When they go, they have to turn in their corporate-mandated Blackberry. 

They have gotten used to having a smartphone, however, so they use a bit of their severance and go shopping for a new phone. They head to an Apple store. They may know full well that AT&T is a Big, Steaming Heap of Failure, but they also realize that if they are going to be unemployed, or turn into consultants, or whatever, that at least they don't want to hate their phone.

So, they get a phone that makes them smile. There's only one phone that does that.

I don't think that accounts for all of the 5.2 million iPhones Apple sold in the quarter, but I bet it was a lot of them.

When is it OK to Lie?

Never. It's never OK to tell a lie.

But I do think I've found one situation where it would be awfully tempting.

Gawker has the inside scoop on how members of the White House Press Corps were all totally willing to give up on what they do -- reporting -- just to get a ticket to watch fireworks at the White House.

Here is what the email from the White House to about 30 of the White House press corps read:

"You are being invited to attend this event as a guest. Blogging, Twittering or otherwise reporting on this event is not permitted. If you feel that you cannot agree to abide by these ground rules, please don't claim a ticket."

Every single one of them agreed to this rule.

Now here's the thing: I have immense respect for President Obama, and for his desire to keep his family out of the media spotlight. If I was invited, I would certainly not report that Malia spilled mustard on her shirt, or whatever.

But I absolutely would report about the other reporters there, what the general talk was, etc. I would just spill it all as if I was anywhere else in my life. Everybody else is reporting on everything else, how is this somehow different?

Why not lie, take the ticket, then report away?

I'm reminded of two analogous situations. 

First, of course, is Sharon Stone, saying, "What are you going to do? Arrest me for smoking?"

Second is Mike Arrington, who runs TechCrunch, announcing that he will agree to all embargoes (when PR companies give you the news early but insist you don't run with it until an agreed-on time) but then he will break that agreement and run the news whenever he damn well feels like it.

Now I realize that by taking the ticket and the reporting on the fireworks party I would be urinating in the punch bowl, and then the press office might decide not to invite any media to the private affairs. Well, that's OK with me, too. If the Obamas want private family time, they can do it without 30 reporters hanging around. If they want to make the reporters feel special, they are just going to have to find some other way to do it.

The world is changing, and those 30 people just aren't as special as they used to be. The White House Press Office needs to figure that out.

Don't Name That Trend... Be The Trend!

I've seen three different "Blegs" from people casting about for a new name for three different big picture phenomena.

(As they taught me in my magazine writing class back in the day, three makes a trend!)

One is looking for a name for the movement toward more technology and openness in government. This is a topic I'm endlessly fascinated with, but I don't think it will ever have a name because this is just the march of history.

A second is looking for a name for the flow of status updates that come in through Twitter, Facebook, and all the rest. This one may get a name, but I'm not sure what it will be. All the ones suggested, even by me, pretty much stink. 

I think this is becoming a real issue. People are really grappling with how to deal with this stream. It took a long time for people to deal with e-mail, and now people just don't know how to deal with a flow of blogs, status updates, tweets and all of it.

It helps me to think of that stream as my "published lifestream." My private stream is, of course, email and phone calls, but my published stream is the collection of published status reports that I want to read, and then there is the stream of what I publish both here on this blog, on my twitter account and my Facebook page.

In my mind the solution uses RSS, which right now works just the way I want it to work for blogs, but doesn't work for the others and even though the difference between a Facebook status update and a blog entry is one that is very difficult to explain because they are essentially the same thing at heart.

There are no good solutions for ways to deal with that stream. Even turning tweets into an RSS feed just doesn't work yet. There's much more to say on this, but I'll save it so I don't get too far off topic.

The third (and therefore trend-making) trend looking for a name is the hunt for a name for the Denver-Boulder high-tech scene. This one absolutely positively will fail, and here's why: The Silicon Valley needed a name because it didn't really have any name before. It was, and is, really, the suburbs of Oakland, which is the original place where there was no there there. The Silicon Valley is the outskirts of the place with nothing there. 

There's absolutely nothing interesting about the Silicon Valley outside of the fact that a whole bunch of revolutionary high-tech companies have done very well there. It's amazing for that one aspect, and completely free of any other attributes that make for an interesting society.

Denver is an actual place. There IS a there there. Same goes for Boulder. Coming up with a name for one aspect of a place that is interesting on it's own won't work because people are already familiar with Denver and Colorado, and do not need a new moniker to help understand it. 

And, by the way, having a name for one aspect of the economy here also won't do anything to make it super-dooper-fabulous, as I have a hunch some of the boosters are hoping.

All three attempts at naming, however, I think come from something of a Baby Boomer mindset. It's important for people who were part of "The Summer of Love" or "Watergate" or "Getting Fat and Lazy and Moving to the Suburbs" to name things to show to the world how different they are, how much they really are "Changing the World, Man."

As Jeff Gordinier points out in his excellent: X Saves the World, it's Boomers that really want to label how they are changing the world. It's the Gen-X crowd that first of all eschews the Gen-X label, and then eschews any other labels before going out and actually changing the world.

I don't know if you noticed, but the people behind the aforementioned revolutionary changes in governing and in publishing of status details are not the ones trying to put a name on it. They are too busy doing what they do.

Good for them! Long live the Name-Free Trend!

Fourth of July Duds

OK, I know this is sacrilege, but I just don't get why fireworks are so popular.

When I see that the economy forced the cancellation of a bunch of shows, well, I have trouble getting upset about it.

It's not that I don't like fireworks, it's just that I can't see why everyone else does like them.

I mean, they are kind of cool from the perspective of fire and explosions and pretty colors, etc. And nobody has more love for our country than me of the history of the Declaration of Independence, the patriots at Fort McHenry, and all of the others before that and since.

But after that... meh.

I mean, even the most boring baseball game still has its unknowns, its surprise endings, its character development.

Fireworks have no narrative arc, no plot twists, nothing.

Last evening we went to the fireworks Rockies game, and got discounted tickets because they had an obstructed view of the fireworks. During the singing of the National Anthem, the crews cleverly shot off one firework that exploded just as we all sung "Bombs bursting in air."

That was perfect. I enjoyed the fireworks as a form of punctuation.

So when my son said he wanted to go home after we sang the song about the peanuts and cracker jacks, I said, "You bet, I think we've seen enough fireworks already this evening."

Maybe even Jefferson had a bit too much time on his hands?

I'm a big fan of Jefferson, I enjoy reading the Declaration of Independence every year. It's hard to imagine writing anything that could have such an influence on the world, and still be so easy to read and enjoyable.

But after the US was independent, and after Jefferson became president, I get the feeling that if he had solitaire on his computer, he might have been playing that some.

He didn't, so instead he invented ciphers, one of which didn't get cracked until this week. Amazing.

Be Nice To Reporters

I always try to be helpful to reporters. I used to be one, so there's that. There's also the whole dying-industry thing, which I did NOT bring up when they called.

But I felt a bit useless today with them on the phone. They called to get my reaction to Amendment 50 in Colorado, which passed last November.

I was a leader of the opposition, such as it was. Truth be told it was one other guy and me. We created a blog, and sort of assembled a rag-tag coalition of people that never met but came out against it. The "coalition" was the strangest of bedfellows, as the Boulder County Democrats came out against it, as did Focus on the Family. Nearly a million people voted no, but a bit more than a million voted yes.

So the election was last November, and tomorrow the changes kick into place. I think the reporters were hoping that I'd be organizing some kind of mass sit-in, maybe chaining myself to a slot machine or something.

Truth is I'd mostly forgotten about it. I'm not a big anti-gambling activist. I just thought Amendment 50 went too far, and that it would create little Las Vegas zones in those three mountain towns. I was also worried about the sociological problems associated with the Indian Casinos near Durango, where I lived and worked as a reporter, often detailing very sad stories from the reservations there, the Ute Mountain Utes and the Souther Utes.

But elections have consequences. The Nevada gambling corporations wanted to change the Colorado Constitution, so they spent $7 million to tailor it to their liking. They got what they wanted. I don't like it, but the election is over so now I'll just continue to avoid those towns.

And if any more reporters call, I'll try to come up with some better quotes.

Drudge, Hypochondria, and the President

I'm convinced that Drudge is a total hypochondriac. He's got about 20 stories about the swine flu up right now.

Not that there's anything wrong with that, but he is leaning a bit too far in the panic direction.

On the other side is TechCrunch, which has a story up, saying that "panic" is being spread over the web. 

I disagree. I think these types of flu are a bit scary, and with the federal government now working on it, it's a legitimate news story.

(I bet we find, eventually, that like the last big scare of the bird flu, that this is not just some random thing, that there is a big-picture story that caused this. It turns out the avian flu was caused by chicken farmers in China giving Tamiflu and other antivirals to their chickens. It didn't work, surprise surprise, but what did happen is that they helped create a flu bug that did not get better when you took Tamiflu. This is something I learned about from a doctor because it hurt me directly: I got the flu and couldn't take Tamiflu to get better.)

The thing that worries, me, however, is that Drudge has such animus toward Obama.

I don't know if there's anything to the story that Obama met and shook hands with a man in Mexico City who died the next day from the swine flu, but I do know that if it happened to President Bush that Drudge would have had that story front and center.

Denver's Altitude claims another

Harry Kalas died today, the day after leaving the Mile High City.

For those of you who don't know him, you probably know his voice. He was the announcer for the Phillies forever, and was also the voice behind those great NFL films, the ones that looked so great because they were shot on real film instead of video. They always seemed to show two rows of huge men with steam coming out of their snouts on some frozen turf. The voice just boomed out. I have a few of the choice ones on my iPhone that always make me smile when they come up in the random cue.

I got to meet Kalas, when Denver hosted the All Star game. I went with a pal to the Wynkoop back when Hickenlooper was still just a barkeep, before he went into politics.

Kalas was there on the patio with Hickenlooper, one of the world's biggest Phillies fans, and Hick was just soaking up every moment with this small, chain-smoking man. I didn't know who it was because when he was speaking in the group he just sounded like a regular guy. He was very slight, and was wearing a polyester suit. I figured maybe he was an uncle of Hickenlooper or something, the way he looked at Kalas with such reverence. Then I figured it couldn't be a relative because Hickenlooper must have been a foot or more taller than Kalas.

So I whispered to my buddy, trying to figure out who it was, and then learned it was Harry the K, the original "Outa Here!" guy. He had some amazing stories, very fun to listen to, but he was not at all boastful about any of it, he was just a very polite guy telling funny stories and then trying to deflect as much attention away from himself as he could.

And smoking non stop. 

I wonder how much of his amazingly deep and powerful voice for such a small guy was actually just created by the damage of all that smoke.

Poor guy. Threw out the first pitch a week ago. Flies up to Denver because he's not the kind of guy who takes days off during the baseball season. Has some trouble breathing here but doesn't make a fuss. Goes with the team to the next stop and dies while writing out the lineup for that day's game. 

This very well done story of his death doesn't specifically blame Denver, but it's hard not to make a connection when we've seen it so many times before here. You just need all the lung capacity you can get here.

You will be missed, Harry.

Don Baylor is da man

Look, I just want to be the first to say it. Don Baylor is the man.

Pitching will always be an issue in Denver, but I'm convinced that the reason the ball hasn't been "popping" off the bat the way it did when Baylor was the manager has less to do with the "humidor" than it does with the fact that Don Baylor wasn't around.

Now that he's back, hitters are listening to him and the ball is leaving the yard a lot.

Yes, yes, we are only three games into the season, but the Rockies have not yet played in Denver, and already they are second in the league in hitting and second in homers.

Tulo is on pace to hit 120 home runs this season! Helton hasn't hit one yet, but you know spigot will open up soon enough.

So you read it here first: If the Rockies do well this season, Don Baylor deserves a LOT of the credit, and by the way it will be a lot of fun to watch and listen this year.

Gay Marriage, Marijuana, and the march of time...

Several quick odds and ends before my next post, which will be a big and very positive review of The Unlikely Disciple...

• Two excellent posts in a row from the FiveThirtyEight guys, showing how gay marriage and marijuana are on an almost inevitable march toward legalization. Those guys nailed it during the election, and they are still finding their footing now with no election to talk about, but with those two posts I expect to learn a lot from them in the coming years.

• In the marijuana post, it points out -- without comment -- that my generation (X) smoked less pot than either the boomers or the millennials. Doesn't really surprise me... even at NYU in the 80s, I saw very little pot smoking. Maybe I just ran with a nerdier crowd. I'm not advocating for or against legalization here, but I will say that I think smoking pot in general is somewhat narcissistic, which is why it makes so much sense that both the boomers and the millennials toke up. 

• My post from April Fool's Day was, mostly, a joke. I am not crowdsourceing my life. I have to say, however, the idea was posted as a joke but the more I thought about it the more it grew on me. I guess I want it both ways: I don't want to do it right now, but I do want to be thought of as the first person to ever crowdsource his own life. Hmmmmm.

• Baseball is back. Ahhhhhhhhh.

First Person to Crowdsource My Entire Life

I am announcing here that I will become the first human being to crowdsource my life.

That's right: All decisions about my life will be subject to the whims of the Internet. 

I've been reading with interest how excellent crowds have been at designing T-Shirts, fixing the patent system, guessing the weight of a pig and much much more.

Basically there are lots of ways for companies to save money and make money by using the wisdom of the crowds to solve problems, come up with new ideas, and spread the word. That's great for companies, so why can't it be great for a person?

Here are the ground rules: You, the internet, can tell me anything that I will do, as long as it is not against the law. Also, my family is off limits, so if you tell me that I need to go have an affair with Chuck's sister, well, I'm not going to do it, even if she totally does look like Wonder Woman.

So, by this time next year I'll make a full report on what you, the Internet, has told me to do.

Be gentle!

Geronimo!

Sam Cassidy for House District 3 in Colorado

I grew up just about a mile or so from where I live now, and I actually remember our state representative coming to our door, and chatting with him for a while. He was very nice, very engaging, a bit nerdy.

His name was Wayne Knox, and he was the representative there forever, and did a great job.

After he retired Jennifer Veiga was elected. I didn't live in the district while she was there, but she's done well for herself, moving up into the Senate where she is highly regarded. When she was in the House, I was a reporter, and we talked several times about where I grew up. House members always know their neighborhoods very well.

Now we have another representative who is leaving, but doesn't want to wait until her term is up. My hunch is she wants to run for something bigger, and wants to be able to raise money now. Whatever. I'm horribly parochial about these matters, and I'm looking forward to our next representative in the Colorado House.

So, I just about choked on my breakfast cereal when I read one of the names floated to fill in the position: Sam Cassidy. The reporter gave some identification to a few of the other candidates, but just left his name alone in the story.

(Are there no good reporters left? The writer couldn't have somehow spent a few seconds to figure out that the candidate was none other than a former Lt. Governor of Colorado???)

I covered Sam when he lived in Pagosa Springs, down in Southwestern Colorado. We've stayed in touch through the years, and I knew he was a neighbor of mine, having pretty much created the Ethics in Business program at DU, bringing it up to be one of the best in the nation.

But I had no idea he would think about running. Anyway, he is. I hope some members of the vacancy committee read this, and contact me to ask me about him. Be prepared, though, for me to go on and on. 

Sam would instantly turn HD3 into a district that has real influence in Colorado. If you are on that committee, vote for someone who can make the biggest splash in the shortest amount of time.

The Smell of the Press Room

As a former Rocky reporter and book reviewer, I was brokenhearted about the Rocky closing. I haven't been able to blog about it, so sad is the news.

I attended the wake, and the hardest part was talking to people who came up to me, knowing that I've made a living -- more or less -- online for the last half-dozen or so years, and they looked to me for hope that they will be able to do the same. I don't know what my own future holds, so...

They still have their heads held high, though, and they should. They produced an amazing product under the most difficult of circumstances.

And now today comes news of the next domino falling: They are closing the press at the Coloradoan. This is also horrible news.

It won't quiet the voice of the newsroom up there, but the 48 people losing their job were, I'm sure, doing as good of job at their jobs as the 250 or so people who were putting out the Rocky every day. They aren't as familiar to us, but they had respectable jobs doing honest work.

(Old fogey alert!) This saddens me especially because of my first regular journalism job at the Durango Herald. It was an afternoon paper then, and every day I would get to work early, read the official police blotter and turn it into the one we put in the paper and then write up whatever other stories were going on that day. We had to have all the words on the page so it could be pasted up by hand by 11:45 a.m. If we missed that, dozens of paper boys would be delivering the paper after dark, so we never missed it.

After gathering around the front page and the back page of the front section as the layout guy calmly finished his job with all of us yelling about the indignity of an editor moving a comma, or whatever, we reporters would mosey off for lunch. By the time we got back the presses were rolling, and I'd go watch every day, and grab a freshly printed paper and just breathe in the smell of it and flip through the pages.

At first, it was a thrill seeing my story on the front page, but that faded fast.

After that, it was just the joy of seeing something that actually got printed. The guys in the press room cared about the quality of the product, and it was an honor working side-by-side with them. We had different jobs, but we had the same goal every day: making something real.

We don't make much in this country any more. We buy a lot of plastic crap made by underage workers in countries that we just can't understand. Newspapers were one thing that we still physically produced.

We still do, barely. Now it's all done overnight in far away places and the papers are so thin that they can print, for example, the Denver Post, the Boulder Camera and the Fort Collins Coloradoan all on the same night on the same press. 

My son will probably never understand what it means to work someplace where people actually make something. Too bad, because for my couple of years in Durango, I was a part of making something, and I got to see the whole process from reporting the news to seeing it delivered in the course of a day, and it happened every single weekday.

And I loved it so much.

Goodbye, press room. You will be missed.

In These Frugal Times: The Fruugalist

This is going to be huge.

A good friend just started a new email newsletter and site called The Frugalist.

The idea is simple: A daily email to help those who used to have plenty of money with a new resource to help them save some money.

But it's more than that. As it says on the gorgeous site, it's about "Less Spending. More Living." You can tell from the first issue that came out today that the idea is more about helping people deal with this new reality;  not just saving money but figuring life all out without much money.

I've been honored to volunteer helping the amazing site designer Evelyn Wilder get her idea for this thing going, along with the ever-talented Kathy Yates and "the other" Scott.

If there was ever a right time and a right place for something, it's The Fruugalist right now.

Sign up now so you can tell people that you were one of the first to be on the list when Oprah is talking about it and there are zillions of subscribers.

Nobody Messes with Joe?

President Obama made it clear that he has great trust that the recovery money will be spent wisely, and he believes that because he has his vice president watching over the money. "Nobody messes with Joe," he says.

And then Joe himself goes on the tee vee the next morning and makes it totally clear that he has an iron grip on the details of what's going on.

"Do you know the website number?" he asks.

OK, so basically nobody messes with Joe, unless they happen to know the website number when he doesn't.

Suuuuuuuper. Just great. Awesome. I feel so safe now.

Screaming for a Joke

Sometimes you trip over a story, and it just screams out to get a joke written about it.

Like this one:

Prehistoric fish pioneered sex

Sex has been a fact of life for at least 380 million years, longer than previously thought. Internal fertilization was widespread among prehistoric fish living on ancient tropical coral reefs in the Devonian period, research published in the journal Nature on Wednesday showed.

So, if I was Conan O'Lenoman, I think I might use this:

Scientists today announced that all jawed vertebrates had sex much earlier than previously believed. That's right, it was 380 million years ago that animals with mouths were having sex. They found the key piece of evidence in the back of Larry King's dressing room.

DPS Has Been Driving Me Crazy for Decades and Still Is!

The DPS board waited an eternity to do two things it should have done long, long ago.

First, the board finally dropped the racist symbol of South High School, the Rebels. I suppose given that the Klan essentially ran Denver in the early 1900s, it shouldn't be a surprise that the school board back then would ever allow the not-at-all subtle mascot of a soldier fighting to protect slavery -- but it's shocking how long it took to get rid of it.

As a student there in the latter half of the last century, I remember that we had petitions, discussion, requests and official letters written to try to dump the mascot. In further proof that the students really have no say over what happens in the school, the effort went nowhere.

Well, a new group of students has come along and asked for a change. Good for them. And now that the administration is made up of people, well, around my age, those students actually got somewhere.

The new superintendent said he could hear this dog whistle. "I grew up on the Mason-Dixon Line," he said. "I understand the power and the meaning of these symbols."

(Those of us who grew up far from the Mason-Dixon Line understood it, too, but it was still good of him to recognize it for what it is.)

I wonder what the administration is denying now that will be granted decades from now.

DPS Calendar

The second thing that the board waited until way too late to approve was next year's school calendar. Admittedly this is a much more parochial concern, but many summer camps require deposits and a commitment in January, but the board waited until February 19th to decide on the first day of school for next year.  

And the proposed calendars were different by a huge swing; there was three weeks difference in the first day of school!

Well, at least I can do something about my other, related, complaint: The undecipherable format they publish the DPS calendar in. I went and made one for myself, and then -- using technology that is just not that hard -- made the calendar available to all.

Here you are: the Denver Public Schools (DPS) Calendar in several handy formats. Enjoy.

Back on the Tee Vee

Well, the interview is done, and now it is on the air, so you can see this story about me and Mark Cuban here. (Unfortunately I can't embed it here, but click the link. It's short.

It was a fine story, and I'm probably the only one who will look at it and say, "Gee, why does he move his head around so much????"

By the way, the Second Saturday Science idea is getting some traction, and we'll have more about that here soon. I was interviewed by a national newspaper today, I'll have a link to that when it comes out.

So, I was feeling rotten about my interview, well, I was until I watched this:

Mark and Me

I created the category of "Fantasy Business League" so that I could comment about big business decisions in the way that others like to talk about sports. That is, I could comment and dable in the world that I follow, but not have any real interaction with those who actually play in the big leagues.

Well, today the fantasy business league got to go into the dugout for a visit.

I’ve followed Mark Cuban’s blog for years. This is a guy who is in the big leagues for sure. He started Broadcast.com and sold it to Yahoo back when that was a good thing. He’s gone on to other huge successes, including buying the Dallas Mavericks and appearing as himself on the Simpsons. It doesn’t get much better than that, unless he buys the Cubs, which would be just fine with me.

So today he decided in what is his classic style to get into the whole “stimulus” thing by trying a completely open source method of soliciting business ideas and then giving the criteria to fund them. The ideas were to be submitted right on his blog.

Many people reacted, as so often happens, with fear, saying that they didn’t want their precious idea to be distributed to the public. I’ve been there, but then I learned the reality is that there are plenty of great ideas out there, and unless it involves some kind of hard science, it is exceedingly rare that the idea on it’s own is worth 10 cents. Actually doing the work -- usually called “executing” in today’s parlance -- is the only way to succeed.

So I took an idea that I’ve had for more than a year and posted it. I worked hard to follow the rules that he put out there, something that very few of the others did.

And he responded. In length. Twice. So far.

His response to my idea (Second Saturday Science is what it’s called, more on that in another post) was so genuine, so engaged, and so, well, out there, that a reporter was inspired to do a story.

The stories about the crappy economy have moved way past depressing and are now downright annoying. It is, however, the biggest story going on right now, so this reporter, Craig Civale, to his credit wanted to do a story about a stimulus plan that might actually pay off, you know, this year.

His station, WFAA, is in Cuban’s town of Dallas, so it was a natural for him to do the story. He called me, and I actually answered the phone -- something that doesn’t seem to happen much these days. He asked a few questions, and then called back a few minutes later and asked if I’d go down to the ABC station in Denver to tape an interview.

No problem! If Second Saturday Science is going to take off, it’s going to need some publicity, so I hustled my arse down there and answered some questions. I understand it’s already been on the air in Dallas, and should be on the interwebs soon enough.

So, will this be my new “job”? I don’t know. If Cuban signs on to be a part of it, than for sure yes. He will be able to help me draw attention to it and open doors in ways few others could.

If not, well... stay tuned!

I'm baaaaaack

I consider myself a data-driven person. If something is working, do more of that. If not, then stop.

I was not having luck finding a job, and I was blogging a lot.

I had an inkling that my blog posts were a part of me not finding a job. I knew the economy had a lot more to do with it, but I couldn't control the economy. I could control my blog, so I basically just stopped.

And then, well, I STILL didn't get a job.

So I was going to, this month, switch over to a different blogging platform, Wordpress, which I used in my volunteer fight against the expansion of gambling in Colorado. I liked it a lot, so I thought I would switch before I started blogging again.

But as Rick says, destiny has taken a hand.

Later today I'll be blogging about me and Mark Cuban. Yes, that Mark Cuban.

 

Drudge Report let's me down... Again

The whole story of the Drudge Report is such a great American story. Here's a guy who was a night manager at a convenience store, and in his spare time he starts a site that is crude even by the standards of the 1990s.

And the site has a huge part to play in the impeachment of a president.

Ever since then I have gotten slightly itchy if I go more than about eight hours without checking Drudge. He just seems to have a nose for the stories that are going to have legs, and he always gets them first. I don't know how he did it so well for so long.

I love that site so much that a friend and I created the Drudge Widget, which you can see on the right side of my site if you are looking at the http and not the rss.

Earlier this year, Drudge let me down in an understandable way, getting the wrong name for Obama's VP.

Then Drudge spent a bunch of time trying to make it seem like McCain has a shot of winning, and anyone who's watched the race closely knows that just isn't true. The most reliable site for polling has had to spend a post nearly every day debunking Drudge.

Here's the problem with a huge ideological bias in breaking news: It's boring. I have to say I now go for days without reading Drudge, and then I don't find much new when I get there. Maybe it's because I'm using my RSS reader (NetNewsWire) so efficiently either on my machine or on my iPhone, but I don't think that's it.

I think it's just that Drudge has lost his edge, and seems to be flailing a bit. I'm hoping that after the election he'll get back to normal.

And maybe by next year he'll stop putting the wrong year in his title tag, and maybe he'll finally getting around to making a favicon (the little icon in the URL window of the browser). If I can make one, Drudge can certainly make one.

Come back, Drudge! We need you!

This game may last forever!

We are in day three of what might just be the last baseball game of the year.

I just did a blog search, and I can't believe I'm the first person to make this connection: This game might go on for months, just like that great game in the Iowa Baseball Confederacy. 

In that book, the game went on for 2,000 innings.

This game between the amazing Rays and the Phillies may not go on for that long, but it's so delicious that there's a game that seems to be saying to the world that we don't quite want summer to be over.

It certainly feels that way here in Denver right now, it's been one of the most amazing falls ever, with blue skies and warm temps every day. Just like baseball, it's the summer that nobody wants to end.

I'm glad it will end, though, and that we'll have winter. It sharpens the senses, makes us feel our fragility.

Of course, the other great thing about this crazy World Series game is the great writing about it. There have been plenty of great columns, but for me this one stands out.

Pulling on their last World Series breath, watching their brilliant season circle the dugout drain with expectorated sunflower shells and Skoal drool, and falling obediently to postseason force Cole Hamels, the Tampa Bay Rays had a single hope:

Havoc.

Skies had to open. Gods had to roar. Pitching staffs had to be blown into confusion. Third base had to become lake-front property.

The Philadelphia Phillies had to be knocked off what had been a downhill run since the series moved north. And not just the Phillies. The whole series.

Something, you know, apocalyptic.

Then Evan Longoria and Carlos Pena got hits in the same inning.

And that wasn’t even it.

It rolled in on winds cold and sure. It rose up over Citizens Bank Park, over the neon Liberty Bell, over giddy, expectant fans covered in red hoodies and trash bags.

Dressed in swirling curtains of rain, cloaked in a howling northwest breeze, it stopped the World Series at 80 minutes before midnight, the middle of the sixth inning, Game 5.

Havoc.

Ahhhhh. Love it.

McCain in Durango. Uh-Oh.

Many people have their equivalent of Paris in the '20s. I actually have two: New York in the '80s and Durango in the '90s.

Durango was my first real journalism job. The pay was rotten, but I made a bunch of great, lifelong friends and did some outstanding journalism for a paper with a circulation under 10,000.

I was there during the '92 campaign, Clinton-Gore vs. Bush-Quayle. Dan Quayle himself made an appearance in Durango at the airport, and then got in a motorcade and drove down to Farmington, N.M. Both states were in play, much like this year.

Through a combination of dogged pursuit and dumb luck, I was able to get an exclusive interview with the sitting vice-president of the United States while he drove from Durango to Farmington. It was a lot of fun, and he was a gracious host in the back of his limo for more than half an hour.

But it was clear in his eyes and in his tone that he knew that if he was spending time in towns like Durango and Farmington, the effort to stay in office must be in trouble. It was.

So here we are in 2008 and McCain himself made a campaign stop in Durango before heading to New Mexico.

Uh-oh.

Well, I hope the people in Durango enjoyed it. People in Durango seem to enjoy just about everything, so I bet they did.

Obamacon watch does not include President Bush

I've been writing about and telling friends about the Obamacons for months, those conservatives who support Senator Obama.

I haven't written about it lately because, well, it's not even interesting any more there are so many. It was shameful that Christopher Buckley got fired from the magazine his dad started.

But when I saw this story, "Bush Not an Obamacon!" I had to pause.

Somehow "Obamacon" has become so popular of a word that it's losing it's original meaning. The "con" part is for "conservative."

I'm not one of those who takes part in the whole Bush Hatred, but I take exception to the notion that President Bush is somehow conservative. I'm not sure what word history will assign to his particular style of governing, but it for sure won't be "conservative."

EBA - That's me!

I've been having a lot of lunches and coffees lately, trying to figure out the next adventure in my professional life. Typically at some point the person on the other side of the coffee cup will say, "So, what is it that you do?"

I hate that question, and generally mumble something about having started as a writer/reporter/editor and that morphed into an entrepreneur/consultant/strategist and then the person looks for a waiter and begs for more coffee. Who can blame them?

Well today I'm sitting there over a bowl of cereal and I read in black and white what it is that I do!

"But the most active opponents of (Colorado Amendment) 50 may be Denver lawyer Jon Anderson and entrepreneur-blogger-activist Scott Yates."

Even though I used to write for the papers, seeing myself described in that way was a little jarring, but it grew on me pretty quickly.

Maybe I'll have business cards made up: Scott Yates, EBA.

Maybe I'll start an EBA club on a social network. I mean, there's one of those for everything else, right?

Or maybe I'll just clip Blake's column and send it to a certain third-grade teacher who once told me that my unchecked narcissism and smug self-righteousness would never get me anywhere. IN YOUR FACE, SISTER MARGARET!

Anyway, thanks to Peter Blake I now know who I am. All the people I'm having coffee with will appreciate this very much.

More Sco.tt on tee vee right here in Denver, Colorado

Here's another clip of me exercising my democratic privilege.

Ahhhh. Exercise.

I would just put this on the Colorado Amendment 50 site, but that is on a free-hosted site because that campaign has no money, and the free site doesn't let me embed videos. 

That's right, while I may look good on TV (OK, even that is a stretch), the entire campaign consists of a lawyer working pro-bono, a free-bee blog, my volunteer time and the truth. We are up against $7 million, lots of slick advertising, and some of the best in political consultants and lobbyists in the state.

I don't know what our odds are; I'm not the gambling type. 

That said, I do like being an underdog. While I didn't run guns to Ethiopia, and I didn't fight with the Loyalists, I think of myself as having a bit of Rick in me. While it's true that the other side pays much better, I'm enjoying my time, meeting a lot of great people, and if I can do anything to stop the expansion of government into the regressive taxation of gambling, then it will all be for the good.