I didn’t actually think that politicians would ever tap into the Mountain Dew/Red Bull-fueled underbelly of message-forum Internet humor, but here we go:

So, now what?

Who will get the Rhett and Link endorsement? (Hint: Giuliani.) Or the Chocolate Rain guy? Or that kid who flipped out about chocolate milk while playing Halo? “I want some MFING MIKE GRAVEL!”

In case you’re already figuring out who’ll be on H. Clinton’s ticket, Wikipedia has another nugget worth re-publishing:

December 17 [2003] - A CBS News/New York Times poll of likely Democratic primary voters shows Howard Dean getting 23% of the vote, with Wesley Clark at 10%, Joe Lieberman at 10%, Richard Gephardt at 6%, Al Sharpton at 5%, John Kerry at 4%, John Edwards at 2%, Carol Moseley-Braun at 1%, Dennis Kucinich at 1%, and the remaining 28% undecided.

Dean, Clark, Lieberman. Kerry was behind Sharpton.

[Somehow, this didn’t get published from Denver International Airport. Their wi-fi is free, but spotty at the end of the A terminal. Better than LaGuardia’s, though, which charges you.]

She is wearing as much gaudy jewelry as 50 Cent, and not as well as he does. She lives in Westchester. She grew up in Yonkers. She is wearing a fur thing that I don’t understand, green and brown tartan pants. Brown suede shoes. A smug smile.

She has an anesthesiologist son who lives in Denver.

“Why else would I be here?” she says, within earshot.

I am now forced to listen to the rest of her hate speech. A tamer moment:

“They say, ‘Oh, it’s beautiful.’ I got here. I see the mountains. I got the idea.”

A nice young man from Ann Arbor — now of Brooklyn Heights — lazily defends Denver and Boulder.

She is sure that SUNY schools are better than CU-Boulder. I make a note to Google “SUNY-Buffalo and Nobel.”

She’s not opposed to all non-New York locations.

“Boca,” she says. “The action’s there.”

I look forward to making sure she gets on the plane and gets the hell out of Colorado. Read the rest of this entry »

Today we’ll keep it simple, because I have a lot to do. In one of my many Wikidventures, I found this fantastic sentence:

“Drummer Frank Beard does not have a beard.”

And a video:

Of course, that’s not the video that was nominated in 1984 MTV award for best editing.

More airport chronicles.

I find myself passively agreeing as the driver tells me, “If you can make it here, you can make it anywhere.” He has the Dominican accent that has become more defined and distinctive to me over the last several months. I have lived in Harlem since June — it is now November — and I am ready to leave my — description stricken to protect the potentially innocent — neighbors, everything.

But the driver is telling me, “It’s a challenge. If you can make it here, you can make it anywhere. It’s as simple as that.”

He is making it in New York. He says that, as far as journalists are concerned, New York is the place to make it. If I want to raise a family or whatever, he says, if I want to live a different pace of life, that’s fine, do it somewhere else, but if I want to make something in my life, do it in New York.

He drops me off and, dazed, aware of my shortcomings, fears and insecurities at a little before 5 a.m., I want to buy a book at the airport. The bookstore is closed. I buy a bagel and a bottled smoothie, put them in my bag, and get in line for the security showdown ritual. Read the rest of this entry »

Well, here it is — the final episode of “The Guys in 3A.” Hope you had fun with the series — we did. Reid and I have been talking about continuing the spirit of the show with something… maybe a podcast, maybe more videos. We’d love to hear feedback of any kind. Enjoy!

Bizarrely, the embedded player isn’t working. Blame the writers’ strike and post a link, I say.

Lizzie, a friend and colleague who shares an interest with me in people who are extraordinarily passionate in their pursuits — nerds, geeks, you might call them/us — had shown me the trailer for a movie called Darkon.

The movie is a documentary about LARPing — live action roleplaying. We agreed that we had to see it. The trailer is here:

So Sunday, when I was feeling under the weather but at school anyway because I am a sap, Lizzie tells me that she has found a screening: that night at 6 p.m. It’s at a comic book convention. Brilliant. I have been to two conventions in my life, I think. The first was for a story called “Stalking Shatner” that I did for dirt. The second was for another story called “Dissecting UFOlogy.” So I have a bit of a history with such conventions.

And I love them.

So when we went to see the movie — Kenan (of GreenGrog) and I went a little early — I was a little disappointed to find out that the convention was all but over. There were a few stragglers, sure. But not the costumed massed I had been hoping for. Somewhat dejected, we headed up to the 18th floor, where the movie would be playing.

When we got of the elevator, we found 25 or 30 Jedi fighting with lightsabers. Hallelujah. I said to Kenan, “Do you think they have enough lightsabers that they could spell my name with them?”

“Hell yes,” he said.

So I approached a Jedi and asked if they were all from one organization. Yes, he said, NYJedi. Of course! I posed the same thing to him: “It looks like you all have enough lightsabers where you could spell out my first name, Dave, with them.”

In a flash, a female Jedi was corralling her colleagues and directing traffic. The prize is a photo posted after the jump. Read the rest of this entry »

Don’t I look dumb.

OK, so I just posted about how much I hate the idea of making YouTube into TV during the WGA strike. Well, this doesn’t fall directly into that category — it’s not something that will air while writers are striking because they’re striking — but a Web TV show just got bought by NBC.

No, it wasn’t “The Guys in 3A,” the smash-hit vlog starring me and my roommate Reid Levin, which is also an NBC Universal joint; it was “Quarterlife.” (But our final episode is this week, so tune in for that on Tuesday.) Point is, the transition from Web to TV is obviously already a trend. And that’s fine — as long as the people whose Web content is being turned into TV content are getting compensated fairly. But right now I don’t know that I trust they will be.

There are a lot more ins and outs on the writers’ strike than I think Jeff Jarvis realizes. He’s posted saying that networks should be using YouTube talent to fill the voids made by the writers’ strike because it’d be cheap labor and potentially a good fix, and so on and so forth.

Firstly, cheap labor is so insulting. To revisit a theme from about a week ago, I’m really tired of anybody considering “YouTube talent” as cheap labor. And it’s happening a lot. Sure, people will say that shows like Online Nation, which bought, for between zero and several hundred dollars, videos from folks who were posting on YouTube, thereby give them their only shot at exposure when they were played on national TV.

But honestly, a lot of the stuff that happens like that is a little exploitative. And Jarvis’ proposed solution here is doubly so: it would exploit the video talent — such as it is — from YouTube and it would further exploit the striking writers.

So it goes. Plenty more opinions on this, but a head cold calls. Email or comment if you’d like to have a chat about it. Beginning to use Skype more frequently, by-the-by.

From the picket lines, more on the WGA-E strike, via The Apiary. Presenting “Not the Daily Show.”