clk's blog

During Round 2 I was thinking of who I might want to interview for Round 3. If it were my choice, I'd want to talk to Brooke Gladstone, managing editor and co-host of On the Media. Then I got cut. But that didn't mean I still couldn't interview Brooke. So, following the guidelines for Round 3, Brooke and I had a nice 15-minute chat about media in the U.S. and around the world, left wing media bias, NPR and this Quest. Alas, the stuff about the Quest didn't make it into the 5-minute excerpt, but it is in the 15-minute piece. I'll post them both below. Please be kind enough to listen and comment.

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OK, if you don't care, then you're missing out, but it's not my problem. I've been posting with Harry Potter fans on message boards for months, now, and for what it's worth, I wanted to put my theories of what was going to happen in this book on this board...just because. So here are my theories.

Theory #1:
Snape is a good guy. Remember that every time somebody makes an assumption based on partial information they overheard or saw, the assumption is almost always wrong. This is a lesson Rowling teaches over and over again in all of the books. This is important because, in book 6, when Hagrid overhears Dumbledore and Snape arguing, (“Dumbledore told him flat out he agreed ter do it and that was all there was to it”), Harry surmises it must have been over Snape not reining Malfoy in. But Dumbledore was telling Snape to go ahead and keep his unbreakable vow. He was telling Snape to kill him. And Snape was telling him he wouldn’t do it. Dumbledore was dying anyway. He started the book with a blackened, dead hand--a classic literary allusion to death--and he became progressively weaker throughout the book. Also, he willingly drank the green potion in the cave, even though he was not sure it would kill him or not. He made Harry promise not to stop him. So Dumbledore was sacrificing himself. When Snape entered the rooftop and found Dumbledore sitting there, Malfoy and the Death Eaters around him, all Dumbledore said was, “Please, Severus. Please.” And Snape killed him. We assume that Dumbledore was pleading for his life. But he was pleading for his death.

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Sunday is my day to put my road bike on a trainer and ride. I can’t do outdoor rides without having to pay a babysitter. But my kids know that Sundays are for two things: riding on the trainer and watching golf (or football, depending on the season).

Alas, yesterday we had a birthday party. All day. It was fun, but I missed my Sunday.

So, this morning I take the girls to school and hop on my bike for an hour. No golf. The View is a repeat. ESPN doesn’t interest me. So I turn to CNN, which I realize I haven’t watched in months.

This was the most disturbing bike ride I’ve had in a long time.

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I've been puzzling this out since I took a trip to Vallejo, California to visit my brother and sister-in-law over Mother's Day. It simply sits on a fence of one of their neighbor's yards. I HAD to take a picture. I think it's a life lesson.

Also, check out Al's blog on Ann Coulter. I couldn't agree more.

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I’m a sucker for Starburst. Love ‘em. But they hurt my teeth if I eat too many. And how can you not eat too many Starburst?

They take me back, though, to when I was a kid, dancing around my bedroom with that sweet cherry paste popping in my mouth.

Listening to the Third Coast Audio festival to write my billboard, I was also taken back to that time when I was a kid. Bohemian Rhapsody. You know, the Queen song. Queen. Freddy Mercury. Someone on the documentary that ran on the Third Coast fest asserts that the band was never cool. I disagree. I vividly remember my high school football team verily shouting, “We are the champions…of the world,” beer sloshing out of the kegs that were flowing in the back of the red, Chevy pickup, as Freddy and company blared on the speakers that were set on top of the cab.

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Cheney Power Grab: Says White House Rules Don't Apply to Him
By Justin Rood
ABC News

Thursday 21 June 2007

Vice President Dick Cheney has asserted his office is not a part of the executive branch of the U.S. government, and therefore not bound by a presidential order governing the protection of classified information by government agencies, according to a new letter from Rep. Henry Waxman, D-Calif., to Cheney.

Bill Leonard, head of the government's Information Security Oversight Office (ISOO), told Waxman's staff that Cheney's office has refused to provide his staff with details regarding classified documents or submit to a routine inspection as required by presidential order, according to Waxman.

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6/15
OK, so, the 10 of us are sent this article that was published in Current, public radio’s trade journal. They did a story on the Quest. Great. First, Izzi’s subject header told us we were famous, and to check it out. Famous? That reminded me of a time, 10 years ago, when I was walking out of a Barnes and Noble in Skokie, Illinois, and I heard one teenager say to two others, in a plaintive voice, “I’m not famous. I’ve only been TV twice.” Wow, I thought, how far have we come from Andy Warhol? Now 15 minutes isn’t enough. Neither, apparently, are two appearances on TV.

And is fame the reason we’re doing this? I know Izzi was joking, but, really, did most of you send your stuff in ‘cause you want to be famous? ‘Cause I’m thinking, anyone who’s looking to be famous through public radio has some serious self-sabotaging issues, Ira Glass aside.

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I wrote this about my hometown last year for the newspaper I publish, PerformInk. I used a show about growing up in Vegas as a jumping off point. Below is an excerpt with a link to the entire story.

Carrie

At the opening of Vegas Baby, Gerrit O’Neill’s homage to growing up in Vegas, someone asks, “Ever fuck a whore?”
I got the opposite question. Upon telling kids at my East Coast college that I was from Vegas, somebody in the group would ultimately ask, “Are you a whore?”
I’m an earnest person. And in my 18-year-old earnestness I would explain, in a most unhooker-like manner, that prostitution is legal only in one county in Nevada and that the closest brothel is 90 miles from Vegas and that you could more easily be accosted by a whore on the streets of New York (where most of my fellow students were from) than on the streets of Vegas, which kept its illegal prostitutes in the anonymity of the hotel for the big gamblers. And after awhile, it would become tediously apparent that I wasn’t a whore and that I didn’t even get the joke and they wouldn’t bother me again.

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Hey, this is some video that we took of the First Robotics competition that I talked about in my initial entry. Thought everyone would like to see it. Check out the right side of the screen at the end. Part of the competition included two robots mounting their third partner. If they got off the ground, they got extra points. This was, for me, the funniest and most gripping part. I would literally lean with the robots, helping them with the force of my body from the stands to get the correct alignment. Alas, it didn't always work.

There's more, from us and from other people, on youtube. Just look up First Robotics.

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So, I'm walking down the street tonight and I see a rock, and start talking to myself. About rocks. Checking the minute hand as I go and stopping--roughly--after two minutes. Then I see a flock of seagulls and talk--with full gestures--about them. And I nod to the neighbors who are out taking their evening walks, and who must think I'm minutes from the mental institution.

Now, I've talked to myself all my life. And sometimes I get caught. But this is getting ridiculous. I can always say I'm learning lines or practicing for an improv, but what am I supposed to do, stop people in the street and say, "Hey, I'm just practicing?" That would make them run from me more. And besides, it would interrupt my monologue.

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