Quips and Quotations (Budding Star Edition)

 

I'm gonna go have a beer. Love ya!

--Dylan Mulvaney, upon winning a Streamy Award for a series of TikTok videos chronicling her transition.

This Day in History

 

Meet Jawed Karim. I'll give you more information about him right after this very brief documentary. For now all you need to know is that on April 23, 2005, he uploaded to YouTube its first video, titled "Me at the zoo": 

Though I've since found out that this is probably the most famous YouTube video of all time, I was unaware of its existence until a week ago. Of course I've heard of YouTube, which regularly supplies this blog with its moving pictures, but never gave much thought to its origins. Not knowing anything about this video when I first saw it other than that it was the first, I assumed that young man was still in high school when it was created. I mean, he looks and even sounds like a teenager, doesn't he? In fact, Jawed Karim was 25 at the time. Admittedly, that's not too long after high school, but shouldn't he at least have, I don't know, a five o'clock shadow or something? Noting the contrast between his thoroughly Americanized speaking style and--I hope this doesn't come across as too xenophobic--foreign-sounding name, I figured he must be a first-generation American. As a matter of fact, he's a naturalized American citizen, born in a country then known as East Germany to a Bangladeshi father and German mother. Not too long after he moved with his family from East Germany to West Germany. When he was about 13, he and his family emigrated to the United States, settling in Saint Paul, Minnesota, where he graduated from high school. English, then, is not his first language, as he would have spent much of his growing up years speaking either German or Bengali, though I detect no trace of an accent, evidence of the transcendent, multicultural power of the phrase "that's cool".

  

9, 868,404? That was years ago. It's now up to 161,518,949.  There are 11,118,151 comments, and a few of the comments themselves have many comments. For instance, the comment, "I learned more about elephants in this video than I did in 12 years of school" has 500 replies (one of which is "Not even school can tell you whether they're long or not 😔.") Then there's the thumb up/thumb down. 182 thousand viewers didn't like the video. That's a lot of people, but it's dwarfed by the 7.5 million who did like it. As for subscriptions to his YouTube channel, "jawed", they're at 1.82 million. Certainly not everybody but I imagine at least some of those subscribers have been waiting for the full 16 years for Karim to post an encore video, whereas there's one subscriber that I know of--me!--who's been waiting a whole week. Don't fret. I'm patient. In the meantime, I have to ask, how did he come to post that 16 year old video in the first place? Did he answer a help wanted ad placed in the newspaper? Or, more appropriately, in the Wired classifieds?

   In a sense, it turns out that he was the one doing the advertising. Jared Karim cofounded YouTube with Chad Hurley and Steve Chen. The three twentysomething males met while working at PayPal, an online money transfer company, a kind of  digital age version of Western Union. PayPal was acquired by eBay in 2002. The story then gets a bit hazy, but Karim, Hurley, and Chen seems to have been bought out as a result of the acquisition, and with their newfound riches (which were nothing compared to riches yet to come) decided to form their own company. How did they happen upon video sharing? Stores vary, from Hurley and Chen wanting to start an online dating service specifically focusing on attractive women to Karim frustrated that he couldn't find Janet Jackson's infamous Super Bowl wardrobe malfunction online (I guess I should emphasize that these were three twentysomething heterosexual males.) Whatever its inspiration, YouTube was founded on February 14, 2005 (though not as an online dating service after all,, despite it being Valentine's Day.) By mid-April, the three techies had worked out all the bugs, and that's when Karim uploaded his video. So his primary motivation wasn't to be the next Lester Holt or Anderson Cooper, but just to have content for his own website. His video might encourage others to use the service. And so it did. Within a year, 65,000 videos--a mixture of DIY, as was Karim's, and third-party, i.e., movie and TV clips--were being uploaded every day, and the site was receiving 100 million views a day. That's a lot of supply and demand.

 

I doubt if artistic considerations (or the rules of title capitalization) were uppermost in Jawed Karim's mind when he and a friend (the guy holding the camera) put together "Me at the zoo," but can we regard it as art anyway, or is it just an audio-visual post-it note, with a computer screen in place of a refrigerator? And if it's not art, why is the video so popular? Well, I didn't read all 11,118,151 comments, but the 20 or so that I did skim through would indicate that much of it has to do with simple curiosity. "2021, time to watch the first video on YouTube", as someone named Lonely Sandwich puts it. Obviously, if that video debuted today, it would be less of a sensation, and the San Diego Zoo would find little reason to feel honored. Some naysayers feel the video is of substandard quality. Well, in my opinion, it's substandard in the same way that Gertie the Dinosaur (the first widely-seen animated cartoon), the Model T Ford (the first affordable automobile) and Pong (the first video game) are substandard. Immensely popular in their respective days, those things would be met with a shrug at best were they being introduced for the very first time in 2021. What one has to do is stop obsessing about all the innovations that have since come down the pike, and accept a famous first on its own terms. Do that and the appeal becomes immediately apparent, it becomes fresh again, the sense of promise is once more there. Karim's low-key, tongue-in-cheek approach fit perfectly with the experimental nature of early YouTube. While it's no The Wizard of Oz, I personally got a kick out of "Me at the zoo" and laughed out loud when Karim concluded by wryly saying, "...and that's pretty much all there is to say." Why not laugh? I truly believe he meant to end it on a humorous note. And finally, it is cool that elephants have such long trunks. If you don't believe me, then go to the zoo and see for yourself!

Not too long after YouTube was launched, Jawed Karim decided to go back to school, as a graduate student in--you would have thought he would have known enough about this subject by now but I guess not-- computer science at Stanford University. So while Chad Hurley and Steve Chen served as co-CEOs of the new internet startup, Karim was only an informal advisor, with a somewhat smaller share of the company's stock. When Google  purchased YouTube about a year and a half later, Hurley and Chen (still in their 20s) walked away from the sale billionaires, while all Karim got was a measly $64 million.

Still, he made do.

 

Jawed Karim was an early investor in Airbnb, the online houses-for-rent vacation booking company, and thanks to the success of that, in addition to his YouTube shares, he now has a net worth of around $190 million. Obviously, he's no longer anybody's idea of what was once known in the vernacular as the "common man". Nevertheless, he struck a populist blow against Big Tech a while back when Google, the motto of which is "Don't be evil", in the eyes of many seemed to be just that when it launched Google+  in 2011 as an alternative to Facebook. Rather than let the superiority of the product speak for itself--well, let's not go there--it decided to use strongarm tactics to attract subscribers, namely people already subscribing to such Google subsidiary services as Blogger and the aforementioned YouTube. Basically, if you wanted to partake in some or all of those services, you had to subscribe to Google+ and waste an hour or so giving a lot of detailed information about yourself, and deciding what portion of that detailed information you want under virtual lock and key and what you want out there for the whole world to see. Google+ came to an inglorious end in 2019, but not before Jawed Karim made his opinion known:

 "why the fuck do i need a Google+ account to comment on a video"

And that's pretty much all there is to say.  

 

  

 

 

A Word of Explanation

So where have I been all these months? No, I didn't succumb to the coronavirus, nor do I suffer from the malady mentioned in my most recent post. I admit it was very bad timing on my part to post about one epidemic when another was looming on the horizon. Truth is, I got so caught up in the writing that I paid no attention to the news coming out of Italy at the same time. Imagine my surprise the day after the President's speech--which I skipped--to find every thing had closed, including my beloved public library.

Ah, yes, the public library. As some of you may know, the past twelve years of Shadow of a Doubt has not been composed on any device located in my place of residence but on various computers provided by various branches of the Cuyahoga County Public Library system. Why did I do it that way? Well, it's free Internet they offer, which was very appealing back in 2008 when I was unemployed (in fact, a month before this blog began, I went online for the very first time to fill out a job application for Radio Shack, which so far has gone unacknowledged. Is there even a Radio Shack any more?) Also, I was very computer illiterate at the time, so if I made a mistake and the whole machine started hiccupping on me, I could just go ask the librarian for help, or, if she was busy, I could just, you know, go to another computer. They have more than one.

Alas, there were drawbacks. Such as, libraries close for the night. That wasn't too much of a problem when I was unemployed, or when I had a typical 9-to-5 job for about a year. But that 9-to-5 job disappeared along with the photo albums the company thought it could keep on selling in the age of Instagram. I soon found another job, but one that started when everyone else was going to lunch, and ended when everybody 40 or older began falling asleep in front of the TV. The latter is also about when the libraries closed for the night. That meant my only computer time during the week was about an hour in the morning, which I usually spent leaving comments on other peoples blogs. Weekends I devoted to my own blog (though I sometimes posted later than that to throw everyone--or maybe just one or two people--off-track.) Nevertheless, I got a lot done, and enjoyed myself doing it.

Well, you know what happened next. The world turned into an apocalyptic science-fiction movie. Except instead of this...

...we got this:

Look at Dr. Fauci on the far right.  He's hoping the Flesh Eater-in-Chief doesn't call on him.

Back to my situation. No library, no computer, but as we who made it this far in the 21st century know, that doesn't necessarily mean no Internet. I did have a smart phone. It was impossible--at least for me--to work on my blog from my phone, but I could still leave comments on other people's blogs. Which I did for a while. But I wanted to use the Internet for other things as well, and ended up pushing the phone's data capabilities to the limit. I spent a lot of time on Facebook and Linkedin, adding friends and connections, hoping if I got enough friends and connections, I might get out of the rut I find myself in. That was harmless enough. I also worked on my novel Gigi Freeman--longhand in a notebook at this point--and since in its own weird way it's historical fiction, that required quite a bit of research. One of the novel's major characters is the late Manhattan-based attorney, one-time Joe McCarthy sidekick, and alleged-Donald Trump mentor Roy Cohn, whom, unlike Gigi, was a real person (but don't get the idea that this is going to be anything like Angels in America--Tony Kushner's Cohn was Shakespearean, whereas my Cohn is more like someone you'd see on Gilligan's Island.) I found out Cohn's FBI file was available online, so I decided to check it out. Like you would check out anything else on the Web. Except when I clicked it on, this little word appears in the upper left-hand corner of my smart phone screen: download. All 750 pages of Roy Cohn's FBI was getting downloaded into my phone, and there was nothing I could do to stop it, not even turn the damn phone off, because once I turned it back on, it started downloading again! Once it finally stopped--all in all it took about ten minutes--I clicked the words "Roy Cohn's FBI file" off the screen. No way was I going to chance turning it on. I might end up with Ron Liebman's, Nathan Lane's, and Al Pacino's FBI files as well. So I just clicked the words away. But did they truly go away? My phone was never the same after that. It wouldn't let me stay on any web site for more than a nanosecond. And the keyboard stopped working. No, I take that back. It worked, but wouldn't stay on the screen long enough for me to type three letters in a row. The phone part of the phone still worked fine. That's when I decided to call the cable company.

Now, it just so happens that about the the time my phone started going haywire, I received in the mail a "one-time offer" of an Internet/cable bundle for under $50 a month. I'd been without cable for seven years now, and while I missed it somewhat, it wasn't the necessity of life that the Internet was gradually turning out to be (Take the IRS, for instance. While they strongly encourage you to file your taxes online, they will still grudgingly let you fill out a form. But how do you get this form? You guessed it. You have to order it online. Grrr!) I read the small print to see what the Internet all by itself would cost. Slightly more than it would as part of the bundle. If that was the case, why not also get cable? Except when I called the cable company, the person who answered the phone told me I had misunderstood the offer. The bundled Internet was just under $50 a month AND the bundled cable was just under $50 a month, so I'd actually be paying just under $100 dollars a month. I was about to hang up the phone when I got sucked into a bit of mild haggling. A different bundle was offered: Internet and phone service. I'd be paying a lot less than I was currently paying for use of a smart phone. The Internet would be a little less, too. No cable, but that wasn't originally my goal anyway. I did the math and decided it would be affordable.

I've shown this clip on this blog before, but I'm going to show it again, because I think it will give you a better understanding of the aforementioned math:

Life before pocket calculators.

So I went ahead and got the phone and the Internet. But now there was a new problem. I had a second-hand computer given to me by some friends about ten years ago, so it was about 15, maybe even 20 years old, thus making it...

...obsolete.

I didn't know that at first. I complained to the cable company, who, after I described the problem and told them the age of the machine, gave me Microsoft's phone number, and it was they who told me it was obsolete. It wouldn't be had I spent the last ten years getting upgrades, but now it might be too late. I called a couple of computer repair places, and they wanted nothing to do with it. Finally, a relative suggested I try uploading Chrome and see if that helped. It did, but just barely. It took about 20 minutes to access my email. I read three, each which took a minute to open. Then I decided to google "Truman Capote" (another character in Gigi Freeman) and that took ten minutes. Clearly, I needed a new computer. Both Wall-Mart and Best Buy advertised inexpensive laptops, but when I enquired further, both stores were out-of-stock and would be for at least two more weeks. Along with toilet paper, people were apparently hoarding laptops as well.

Amazingly, Target had a single $200 laptop still in stock the Saturday before Memorial Day. I ordered it on my new smart phone, and about 20 minutes later had it delivered to me in that establishment's parking lot. All well and good. Until I started using it. I now realize that for the past 12 years the Cuyahoga County Public Library system has been shielding me from the heartbreak that come with owning a computer. Library computers have been to obedience school, home computers need to be housebroken. A library computer is Lassie, a home computer is Cujo.

For starters, a library computer you just type in your password and start using it. You don't have to worry, care, understand, or even be aware of the difference between a browser and a search engine, between Microsoft and Google, between the company that manufactures the computer, and the cable company that wi-fis the content. It's all the Internet. Just jump in and enjoy! However, on a home computer, the browser and the search engines and the hardware itself seems to be in competition for your attention.  I guess I should be flattered except these things all need different passwords and my non-gigabyte brain can only come up with so many upper case-lower case-numbers-symbols combinations. Just why in the hell do I need a Microsoft account? Microsoft came with the computer. When I go to a bar and order a screwdriver, it's not like I need an account with Minute Maid. The word "security" comes up quite a bit, and I realize identity theft is always a concern. But, jeez, I drive a car that's older than the kid that works the drive-thru at McDonald's. In order to save money at coin-operated laundry machines I wash darks and lights together and often end up with some interesting shade in-between. Steal my identity and you just might end up a member of the working poor. Then there's all these boxes that keep popping up on my screen. Install this, upgrade that. Fail to do so and you risk being strangled in your sleep by the Ghost of Vacuum Tubes Past. And when things go wrong and the screen freezes up, who do I blame? Spectrum? Hewlett-Packard? Satya Nadella? Computer illiterate that I am, I should blame myself actually. But I'm willing to learn, and one way to learn is by reading. Reading instructions, for example. Unfortunately, the concept of an instruction booklet is held with as much regard in Silicon Valley or Redmond, Washington as the New Testament is in Tel Aviv. The one thing that doesn't freeze up is the software's box-making machine, this one telling me that if I have a problem, go to so-and-so's web site. But how the hell do I get to that web site if the computer is frozen? I know, I know. Use your cell phone, and as a matter of fact mine is sitting next to the computer as I type. But think for a moment about the significance of that. In order to survive in the 21st century, you need not one but two Internets! I don't particularly envy the life of a cave man, but there's something to be said for a time when the only technologies were the wheel and fire, neither of which needed to be upgraded every five minutes.

If the above rant was a bit too much for you to get through, perhaps this clip will make you better understand the technical challenges I faced:

Arthur C. Clarke was off by only 19 years.

Finally, I 've had to work a lot of overtime the last few weeks--I know, a rarity in these troubled times--and that's kept me away. But I managed to eke out this post, and they'll be more eking out to come. More quips and quotations, more vital viewing, more pop cultural observations, and more in memoriams. Also, another (this time disease-free) chapter from my nonlinear novel-in-progress, the aforementioned Gigi Freeman. I hope you'll be there.

Oh, and by the way, this song has been running through my head these past few months. Take it away, Gloria:

Lockdown, shmockdown!

Multimedia Outlet

Longtime readers of Shadow of a Doubt should be familiar with a feature that appears here from time to time called "Graphic Grandeur", where I examine the graphic arts, which sometimes includes illustrative work, but more often than not comics, both strips and books, mainstream and alternative. In carrying out this examination, I owe a good deal of gratitude to the above web site, in providing me with informational tidbits about the great cartoonists of past and present, as well the great cartoonists' art itself, which I've happily snagged (Fair use! Fair use! I can't emphasize that enough!) It's not just the information or the art, however; this web site has inspired me. Comics are such an underappreciated art form that it's tempting to ignore it on this blog altogether. Isn't there enough movies and TV shows and celebrity quotes to keep me busy in this space? Why spread myself thin by adding comics to the mix? Well, for one thing I love comics, and The Comics Reporter often reminded me why I love them. The relative popularity of the web site also proved to me that there were people out there who like reading about comics, and even if they don't want to read what I have to say about the subject, they could at least lovingly gaze at a Dan Decarlo-drawn Betty and Veronica cover. Longtime readers of Shadow of a Doubt should also be familiar with the many obituaries that appear in this space. Well, finding out that someone notable died is easy if that person is Whitney Houston or Tim Conway, but when it's a Russ Heath or Carmen Infantino, I don't learn about it from The Huffington Post, The Daily Beast, the TV news, or my local paper but from The Comics Reporter (I was pleasantly surprised once to find a link to this blog on TCR after I did one such obit.) Speaking of obituaries, that's kind of what you're reading right now. Tom Spurgeon, the founder, and I believe the sole reporter, of The Comics Reporter, died this past Wednesday.

Spurgeon was an editor at the print magazine The Comics Journal (where I first encountered his name) from 1994 to 1999, and, after he left that post, continued on at the magazine for a few more writing reviews and conducting interviews. From 1999 to 2002, Spurgeon and artist Dan Wright collaborated on a Wildwood, a comic strip about forest animals with a Christian bent (it never appeared in my hometown paper, but samples I've seen on the web didn't seem particularly preachy. Spurgeon recently endorsed Bernie Sanders for president, so I'm assuming he was not part of the Christian Right.) In 2003, he and Jordan Raphael wrote Stan Lee and the Rise and the Fall of the American Comic Book. The next year Spurgeon and Rapheal launched the aforementioned Comics Reporter, one of the first comics news aggregator sites, featuring criticism (at which Spurgeon excelled), interviews (he was pretty good there, too), cartoonists birthdays, comic-con listings around the country (including Cartoon Crossroads Columbus, of which Spurgeon himself was the Executive Director) and, of course, breaking comics news. There's been no new postings from TCR since Spurgeon's passing, so I have to guess it's not going to survive him. Now that doesn't mean I'm going to stop doing "Graphic Grandeur". I have a couple of posts in mind, including a big one a few days before Thanksgiving. And nowadays there's plenty of online comic news aggregation sites, all of which have have reported on the death of Tom Spurgeon, the man who paved the way.

1968-2019

Quips and Quotations (Will It Play in Peoria Edition)

Technology, while adding daily to our physical ease, throws daily another loop of fine wire around our souls. It contributes hugely to our mobility, which we must not confuse with freedom. The extensions of our senses, which we find so fascinating, are not adding to the discrimination of our minds, since we need increasingly to take the reading of a needle on a dial to discover whether we think something is good or bad, or right or wrong.

--Adlai Stevenson

The Best Years of Their Lives

 I freely admit this blog often highlights once-famous movie and TV stars who are now on the fast track to obscurity, but that's my whole point. Fame is ephemeral. The household name of today is the senile babble of tomorrow. But if one of those once-famous, now-obscure people had a certain amount of talent, as occasionally is the case, then I want to remind everybody of that before the individual is inevitably overcome by anonymity. As Mrs. Loman once said in a different context (talent itself being somewhat ephemeral), attention must be paid! What's got my attention today, however, is an instance of being on the fast track to obscurity and then jumping the rails in an unexpected way. Google Estelle Getty, who played Sophia Petrillo on The Golden Girls, then click on "Images", and you will get a bunch of pictures of, not surprisingly, Estelle Getty. Or maybe it is a bit of surprise. After all, she died 11 years ago, and it's been 27 years since the last original episode of The Golden Girls aired. Yet as of this writing, anonymity is still a ways away for her. Sophia lives! But it doesn't stop there. Of late, if you google Getty's name and click on "Images", you're likely to get at least one picture of the once-famous, now-obscure film actress Myrna Loy. It seems someone on the Internet, either knowingly or unknowingly, is trying to pass off a picture of Loy as being that of a young Estelle Getty. If you have any inkling at all as to what Myrna Loy once looked like--she died in 1993--see if you can find her in the above image (which I snagged from elsewhere on the Information Highway.) It will be fun. Kind of like playing Where's Waldo?  

Quips and Quotations (Sex, Lies, and Videotape Edition)

My God, what’s happening to Brian [Williams] is in the Zeitgeist...He’s trumping Bruce Jenner on social media. I mean, cross-dressing Bruce Jenner killed somebody, but Brian Williams is still trending.


--Unidentified NBC News source.

Quips and Quotations

It takes a great deal of courage to see the world in all its' tainted glory, and still to love it.


--Oscar Wilde

Dispatch

I was looking at one of those online news aggregate sites when I came across the following...

NEWS YOU MIGHT LIKE:

Woman Dies From Gas Fumes

Now, I ask you, why in the world might I like THAT? I have no quarrel with the woman. I never even met her!

Did I Ask Your Opinion?

According to my site meter, somebody from howtogetridofstomachfat has checked out this blog.

I like to think of them as love handles.

Garment District

Saw something interesting on my site meter the other day. For those of you who don't know, a site meter gives the blogger some inkling on the nature of their audience. Don't worry; it gives neither names nor addresses. If the blogger's lucky, though, they'll learn the country and city of the person checking their site out. The meter seems to work best if it's a direct connection between one person's computer and the blogger's. If the blog is accessed through a third party, the trail is often lost. Even so, the site meter may still state who that third party is, and that's always good to know. It can also raise more questions.

According to my site meter, someone accessed my blog from this site:

http://risingtaste.com/

Rising taste? I wondered, was that the same as good taste? Was it a way of achieving good taste? Was that site perhaps telling people that if they want good taste, then they should read Shadow of a Doubt? Was my blog now right up there with classical music, William Shakespeare, Chippendale furniture, and white Christmas tree lights? At long last, the aesthetes had discovered me!

When I clicked on the actual site, I saw the focus was a bit more narrow than all that:

Risingtaste - where taste meets fashion

It was an online clothing store. Well, that leaves Shakespeare out.

Still, it was flattering to think that the fashion mavens had discovered me. Strange, too. There are no photos of me on this blog, but, trust me, such a photo would never be confused with the cover of GQ. But perhaps tastes were changing. Was disheveled "in"? Come next spring, will frayed T-shirts with stubborn mustard stains (I rubbed Tide on it; nothing works), faded jeans with the back pockets coming off, socks that fail to adequately cover the big toe, and scuffed up shoes tied in quadruple knots because the damn laces keep coming undone, be all the rage on the Paris runways?

I examined the web site more closely. In small letters, right underneath the heading, it read:

Wholesale clothing from China

They must have found out I live near Wal-Mart.

Garment District

Saw something interesting on my site meter the other day. For those of you who don't know, a site meter gives the blogger some inkling on the nature of their audience. Don't worry; it gives neither names nor addresses. If the blogger's lucky, though, they'll learn the country and city of the person checking their site out. The meter seems to work best if it's a direct connection between one person's computer and the blogger's. If the blog is accessed through a third party, the trail is often lost. Even so, the site meter may still state who that third party is, and that's always good to know. It can also raise more questions.

According to my site meter, someone accessed my blog from this site:

http://risingtaste.com/

Rising taste? I wondered, was that the same as good taste? Was it a way of achieving good taste? Was that site perhaps telling people that if they want good taste, then they should read Shadow of a Doubt? Was my blog now right up there with classical music, William Shakespeare, Chippendale furniture, and white Christmas tree lights? At long last, the aesthetes had discovered me!

When I clicked on the actual site, I saw the focus was a bit more narrow than all that:

Risingtaste - where taste meets fashion

It was an online clothing store. Well, that leaves Shakespeare out.

Still, it was flattering to think that the fashion mavens had discovered me. Strange, too. There are no photos of me on this blog, but, trust me, such a photo would never be confused with the cover of GQ. But perhaps tastes were changing. Was disheveled "in"? Come next spring, will frayed T-shirts with stubborn mustard stains (I rubbed Tide on it; nothing works), faded jeans with the back pockets coming off, socks that fail to adequately cover the big toe, and scuffed up shoes tied in quadruple knots because the damn laces keep coming undone, be all the rage on the Paris runways?

I examined the web site more closely. In small letters, right underneath the heading, it read:

Wholesale clothing from China

They must have found out I live near Wal-Mart.

Dot Common

Ever see a street mime perform?

Ever watch a parade?

Ever peruse a bulletin board?

Even listen to a friend bitch about the President or Congress?

Ever read a blog?

According to a Pew Research Center study, a tipping point occurred last year: more people in the U.S. got their news online for free than paid for it by buying newspapers and magazines. Who can blame them? Even an old print junkie like me has quit subscribing to the New York Times, because if it doesn't see fit to charge for its content, I'd feel like a fool paying for it. This is not a business model that makes sense.

--Walter Isaacson

The Internet is turning economics inside out. For example, everybody on the Internet now wants stuff for free, and there are so many free services available.

--Uri Geller (I wonder if he now bends spoons for free.)

Ever draw a picture?

Ever play a musical instrument?

Ever compose a poem?

Ever sign a petition?

Ever write a blog?

The Cult of the Amateur: How blogs, MySpace, YouTube, and the rest of today's user-generated media are destroying our economy, our culture, and our values. By Andrew Keen

--Book title


My problem is that it fundamentally undermines the authority of mainstream media. We think two things going on simultaneously, the rise of the user-generated content, which is unreliable enough and corrupt, and a crisis in professional journalism, professional recorded music, newspapers, radio stations, television and publishing. And that is the core of our culture. Once we undermine the authority and expertise and professionalism of mainstream media, all we have is opinion chaos, a cacophony of amateurs.

--Andrew Keen, in an interview on National Public Radio

In recent years, there's been two charges leveled against the Internet and the blogosphere. One, that it's free, and two, that it's dominated by amateurs.

Let's take the first one first (duh). Is the Internet really free? According to Time Warner Cable of NE Ohio, it's "only" $34.95 a months for a full year. Cox Cable is $32.99 a month. Comcast is "as low as" 19.99 for 6 months, but you have to be an existing customer. AT&T offers $19.95 for a full year. Why is Time Warner and Cox so much more than the other two? I think maybe they have monopolies in certain areas. Of course, you don't need cable or even a telephone if you want access to the Internet. Just go to Starbucks. But they do expect you to at least by a latte. Buy one everyday for a month, and you've spent at least twice as much as if you had gone with Time Warner! Finally, there's the, ahem, library. Even that's your taxpayers dollars at work.

Anyway, getting things for free is not completely unheard of in our capitalistic system. I mentioned some goods and services you don't have to pay for at the very beginning of this essay. However, I left out two of the most significant. You don't have to pay for non-satellite radio (well, you have to buy the actual radio, but you know what I mean), and, if you're willing to settle for just six or seven channels, TV is free as well. Of course, nowadays most of us do pay for TV, and, if you want something "on demand", you pay even more. There was a movement afoot about a year ago to get people to pay even more for specific sites on the Internet, usually those originating in print, but it never went anywhere. More about paying for content at the end of this piece.

The second charge leveled against the Internet, and, more specifically, the blogosphere, is that it's dominated by amateurs. Really? You don't say! Let me peruse the "List of Blogs" at the left to see if this is true. Be right back...

...OK, not counting The Huffington Post, which is more of an online newspaper, only five of the 24 blogs are by professionals, meaning at one time or another these folks have drawn a paycheck for their writing (though not for their blogs, which are free.) I can't say for sure that the other 19 blogs are written by amateurs, since most are using assumed names. There's maybe four I'm not quite sure about. Of the fourteen blogs I'm pretty confident are by amateurs, what will you find? Photography, poetry, essays, autobiography, theology, visual art, travelogues, comic archives, philosophy, and even an occasional short story.

Now, I want you to reexamine the two quotes by Andrew Keen. They're easy to find.

Before the advent of the Internet, amateur photography, amateur poetry, amateur essays, amateur autobiography ("Dear Diary..."), amateur theology ("Now I lay me down to sleep..."), amateur art, amateur travelogues ("Want to see some slides from our trip to Bermuda?") amateur archives ("I'll trade you my 1964 Daredevil with the Wally Wood story for that 1966 Spiderman with the Johnny Romita cover."), amateur philosophy ("Ever wonder if you're the only being that exists and everything else is in your imagination?" "Sorry to interrupt, bub, but you want another?"), and amateur fiction, weren't considered corrupt, chaotic, or a fundamental threat to our values. Instead, they were called hobbies.

Politics isn't usually thought of as a hobby, but people sometimes approach it that way, as Billy Joel once noted ("and the waitress is practicing politics"). It's why campaigns depends so much on volunteers. And some people just like to talk about politics. I'll grant you there's a lot of harsh opinions about politics on the Internet. But you can also find similarly harsh opinions about politics in a bar, (actually, you can find harsh opinions on just about anything in a bar.) Maybe if we'd stop comparing the Internet to older media such as TV or newspapers and instead to Earth as a whole, we might have a better understanding of it. It's not called the World Wide Web for nothing.

On my profile page, I call myself a writer, but it's not my profession. Would I like it to be my profession? Sure. Would I like to make a lot of money writing? You bet. Would I like to achieve such heights of success and renown through writing that I'm asked to replace Simon Cowell as a judge on American Idol? Damn right I would! But if none of that comes to pass, if writing can't be my profession, I still want it as a hobby, even at the risk of undermining the authority of the mainstream media.

Speaking of that mainstream media, just what is it that makes the likes of Andrew Keene so hostile to the lowly amateur? Wouldn't simple indifference be enough? It was before the Internet. Maybe it's just frustrating to climb up the media ladder, only to have it seemingly kicked out from under you by a temp with a laptop.

There's now a consensus that the mainstream media's big mistake was putting its' wares on the Internet at no extra charge. Doing so blurred the distinction between the professional and the amateur. Does Howard Stern broadcast on ham radio? Does Jonathan Franzen leave 100,000 words on the bathroom wall? Does Plácido Domingo join in when you sing in the shower? No to all of these. Yet on the Internet, the Aristocracy--print newspapers and magazines--live on the same block as the Great Unwashed, aka amateur bloggers.

I first wanted to write about this over a year ago, but couldn't quite get my mind around it (a recent post by fellow blogger Elisabeth made me want to revisit the subject.) At that time it looked like newspapers and magazines might go extinct. Since then, however, an unlikely savior has emerged: Steve Jobs. I understand that those who own and control the mainstream media are excited by that new iPad of his. As consumers aren't accustomed to getting things for free on such devices, media titans can now charge for subscriptions to such formally printed material as The New York Times , or Better Homes and Gardens.

So it looks like the professionals might get to keep their cherished hierarchy after all, while leaving the rest of the Internet to the amateurs, the proletariat, the teeming masses.

Works for me.

What Do You Mean It's Completely Different?

One of the mainstays of the comment section, LimesNow, had a surprise visitor to her blog today. Here's how it came about. A couple of days ago she had done a post on the late soul great Sam Cooke. Today she decided to do a sequel of sorts about another great, Otis Redding. Either this post or the earlier post attracted the attention of none other than Sam Cooke's nephew, who left a comment. You can read what he said over at Lime's place.

LimesNow is understandably thrilled that someone related to Sam Cooke contacted her blog. Fine, Limes, be thrilled. I'm happy for you. I really am.

But I warn you, Limes, don't let it go to your head. You're not the only one capable of harnessing the power of the Internet. Some of my online musings have created such a tidal wave of interest that you and your visitor are mere drops of morning dew by comparison.

For instance, I once mentioned Monty Python on this blog.

And ended up with a lot of spam.

Star Search

Of late, I've been thinking quite a bit about Lindsay Lohan and Rich Little.

First Lindsay Lohan. A couple of weeks ago I stumbled across an article about her on The Huffington Post that was actually a link to some gossip site. It seems Ms. Lohan had just had a lover's quarrel with her girlfriend, one Samantha Ronson, and was seen standing outside a nightclub screaming "The bitch left without me!"

OK, that's about as salacious as this post is going to get. Remember, Rich Little's coming up. He's anything but salacious.

To be honest, that Huffington article was just salacious enough that I had to read it twice. I swear I had no idea until right then that Ronson was Lohan's girlfriend. In fact, I had never even heard of Ronson. But here's the real scary part:

I wasn't entirely sure I knew who Lindsay Lohan was!

I mean, I had heard the name before. A couple of years (or perhaps months) back, when Britney Spears and Paris Hilton were getting in all sorts of trouble, Lohan was often lumped in with them, usually as an afterthought. It was often something along the lines of: "Britney and Paris were driving drunk and naked through the streets of LA, swearing at the top of their lungs and making fun of chess nerds. Oh, by the way, Lohan was seen the same night upchucking into an open manhole!"

Like I said, she was an afterthought.

But no more, for I read the Huffington article/link twice, and there was no mention of either Britney Spears or Paris Hilton, thus forcing me to finally confront a question I had long avoided--WHO IS LINDSAY LOHAN?!

I asked an acquaintance, who promptly answered my question with a question:

"YOU DON'T KNOW WHO LINDSAY LOHAN IS?!"

I answered her question to my question with yet another question:

"Well, why should I?"

Finally, she gave a straight answer.

"BECAUSE SHE'S FAMOUS, THAT'S WHY!"

"Well, if she's famous, how come I'm not exactly sure who she is?"

"Have you tried to find out who she is?"

"Other than this conversation...no."

"WELL, YOU HAVE TO MAKE THE EFFORT!"

You have to make the effort.

So I googled Lindsay Lohan and here's what I found out. She's a model, actress, and pop singer. In the last ten years, she rose to stardom in such Disney remakes as The Parent Trap and Freaky Friday.

How could I not know that? The answer lies with Rich Little.

About a year ago I caught Little on David Letterman. He was the very last guest. Maybe not even that if you define "guest" as one who sits down and talks to Dave. Little just did his stand-up routine, as if he was some unknown getting his big chance on a nationally televised program. It was really kind of a comedown for Little, who was quite famous in his day. Famous mostly for imitating other people quite famous in their day. And my day. By that I mean I recognized every person he imitated. Had I gone into a coma in 1980 and emerged sometime after 2005, I STILL would have recognized every person he imitated. He did Jimmy Stewart, Richard M. Nixon, Carol Channing, Truman Capote, George Burns, Jack Benny, Paul Lynde, Archie Bunker, Ronald Reagan, Walter Cronkite, and...Howard Cosell. Howard Cosell? Man, I hadn't thought about Howard Cosell in years! He also was quite famous in his day, but unlike old movie or music stars, there was little chance of an old sportscaster being rediscovered by a whole new generation. Unless that whole new generation happened to catch Rich Little on David Letterman.

Whatever generation, or generations, were in Dave's studio audience that night, Rich Little's routine did get a lot of laughs. As soon as it was over, a surprisingly pleased Letterman (he does have a reputation as a cynic, you know) walked over, shook Little's hand, and asked, "So, what you been doing with yourself?"

I was less concerned with what Rich Little had been doing with himself lately, and more curious as to why he didn't imitate anyone who had become well known after 1980. According to Wikipedia, Little's about 71. So, maybe he's just an old coot stuck in the past. But why THAT past? And, at any rate, he was 42 at the beginning of the '80s, and 52 by decade's end, and not even eligible for Social Security by the millennium's end, so I didn't think senility was the answer. And remember, the studio audience, most of whom looked younger than 71, got all of the jokes.

I picked up the remote and started channel surfing.

Cowabunga! I had my answer!

You couldn't channel surf before 1980. Well, you could, but it would have been a pretty small wave. Just the three networks, public broadcasting, and UHF. Then, in the '80s, came cable, and, in the '90s, the Internet.

Now, I want you to remember what my acquaintance said: You have to make the effort. Not before 1980. In that three network era, finding out who was famous required no effort at all. You had the luxury of total passivity. The burden lay entirely with the famous person. That's why he or she had to hire publicists, press agents, personal managers, media spokesmen and the like. The non famous just had to sit back in front of the tube and absorb it all, even if they didn't particularly want to.

Here's an example. I have never seen a single episode of Kojak. Yet, by 1976, when I was 14, I somehow knew that it starred a bald-headed actor named Telly Savalas who sucked lollipops and asked, "Who loves ya, baby?" Now, I didn't seek that information out. But, by some peculiar cathode ray osmosis, I just knew.

And it wasn't just TV stars. The small screen was also informed by the big screen. That's how I knew, at a very tender age, that some guy with cotton in his mouth named Marlon Brando played a bad guy named Godfather who wanted to make people offers they couldn't refuse. It's not from sneaking into an R-rated movie at the age of 11 that I knew all that. The film's trailers were on TV, and, more important, everyone from Fred Travelina to Frank Gorshin to, well, Rich Little imitated the guy (It was a few years later that I found out about the OTHER Marlon Brando, the young guy in a motorcycle jacket or torn T-shirt who coulda' been a contender while screaming for Stella.)

You even knew, again without particularly wanting or needing to, about public figures outside of entertainment. The President, obviously. But how about Henry Kissinger? Why is it exactly that he is, or was, a more famous Secretary of State than either Dean Rusk, who served under LBJ, or Cyrus Vance, who served under Jimmy Carter? Well, I suppose you could say, "Henry Kissinger was the architect of the policy of rapprochement with China blah, blah, blah...", but I think his real claim to fame was his weird accent, mimicked by everyone from Robin Williams to John Belushi to, well, Rich Little.

But that's now all in the past. With hundreds of networks and web sites and whatever it is people Twitter on, the burden has shifted from the Lindsay Lohans of the world to us, the non-famous. We no longer have the luxury of being passive. We have to make the effort.

Hmm. Maybe I should hire a publicist.

Information Tollway

There's been a lot of talk lately that the major news organizations should start charging people for information on the Internet. I think it's a good idea.

From now on, it will cost you folks $15.00 a day for the privilege of reading this blog.

Hello? Hello? Anybody out there?

Kirk is

going to stop off at the hardware store and buy a--

Wait a second.

This is Blogger, not Facebook.

Excuse me, but this whole Internet thing gets a little confusing at times.