Journalism is making the same mistake with AI that they made with bloggers. They jumped to the incorrect conclusion that we were trying to do what they do. #
If Google Reader had handled untitled posts more gracefully we’d be in a better place today. Their choice to require titles meant we have had a fracture, on one side — social web and on the other feed readers.#
Since I write so much about the Knicks here, I need to tell you that the Knicks won their first round playoff series against the Philadelphia team last night. Almost all playoff series that aren't sweeps are intense, but this one was especially so. So we're on to the next round, starting Monday, back in NYC, against the Indiana Pacers, an excellent team this year. And Doc Searls, who is also a Knicks fan, now lives in Indiana, so he is somewhat justified in believing the world revolves around him. I've always had that sense about Doc. #BTW, there are plenty of relatively low priced tickets available at the Pacers arena for the May 10 game when the playoff heads to Indiana. This is one of the Knicks fans' favorite tactics. Since there are so many New Yorkers, spread out all over the country, and we're pretty much all Knicks fans, this can create a demoralizing effect for the opposition players who assume their hometown crowd will be rooting for them, not the other team. It had a pretty adverse effect on the Sixers a few days ago. I was chatting about this with fellow Knicks fan NakedJen during last night's harrowing game, and said this might be a good tactic somehow in the election, if every time the opposition had a rally they discovered that most of the attendees were actually in favor of democracy and abortion rights. #
Can we please have a nice slogan we can chant at rallies saying that we think that women owning their own bodies is at least as important as everyone being armed to the teeth so they can shoot their dogs. I think the Repubs learned something after one of their own boasted that she killed her own dog with a gun. They learned that Republican voters think the right to bear arms does not make them hate dogs and to their surprise they don't endorse shooting them. Maybe shooting Jews, immigrants, people of color and libruls and libtards of all flavors would probably be okay but for crying out loud not dogs!! They're so freaking cute. #- I've developed new appreciation for two musicians from my generation: George Harrison and Bob Dylan, thanks to the encouragement of two friends, both of whom have links to my childhood believe it or not, but who are current friends in my dotage and they're both on Facebook. #
- So my first friend said she likes George Harrison the best of all the Beatles, and I thought that's weird because it really was down to Paul and John, I thought -- and then I heard this interview with George asking why he didn't explain in his memoir how he worshipped John as a kid, and George took exception, saying yeah in John's mind that's who I am, a kid who worshipped him, which I never did (says George). So now I have gone back through his music and see holy shit he really was as unique as either of the others, and he was more of a collaborator in his later life than either (of course we never got to find out how John would have evolved past 1980). And he was never going to be taken seriously by the others, so he had to get out of there to have the creative life he wanted. #
- About Dylan, the credit goes to my local friend and Andrew Hickey, who focused my attention on the music of Dylan's songs, when I had only been focusing on the lyrics. Silly of me. He only ever wanted to be seen as a musician, not a leader of anything, and that's where the difficulty came from, and why I wasn't really interested, even though I had listened to all the Dylan songs many times, and had a few of his albums growing up. So I just played Tangled Up in Blue and realized this has been rolling around in my mind for days, and I wasn't even aware of it.#
- Kind of like All Along the Watchtower (another Dylan song) in Battlestar Galactica, which I just heard is currently on Amazon. I think it's time for another binge of that. ;-)#
- Anyway, two doors open, and that's always good. You know this is why you pick your music when you're young and stay with it, because it's the soundtrack of your life, and it has new relevance at every step of your evolution. Sure I listen to other music, but -- it's the songs that were big when I was little that matter most. #
