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Trying Something New: IP Inferno

After a year-plus of blogging (still a newbie by some standards, I know), I want to try to explore some other dimensions of the experience. There’s a well-advanced discussion going on about how blogs are evolving as media. Specifically, both practitioners and onlookers are debating their their role as complements to and venues for journalism and other editorial content and whether blogging can develop some sort of revenue model.

So, I’m all for experimenting. Ted Shelton, a friend and one-time colleague (we met at CMP’s NetGuide back in 1996 and have crossed paths occasionally since), has been working in a variety of high-level technology and online publishing jobs in the last decade, and is both active in blogging and intrigued about where it could go as a business. One of his projects is IP Inferno, a blog focused on Internet Protocol-based communications and applications and how they”re changing the way we get in touch, talk to each other, and exchange information. I’m just a dabbler in the subject myself. About the same time Ted was launching IP Inferno, I was starting into some intensive research on Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) firms for a magazine feature that never quite made it into print. The VoIP services you’re likely to know about are Vonage and AT&T CallVantage, because they advertise a lot. The provide innovative telephone services to people who have broadband Internet service — DSL or cable-based.

Anyway, Ted and I have been talking about blogs and their future. He’s looking to take IP Inferno, which has appeared on one influential list of the most influential VoIP bloggers (sort of like getting a Golden Globe, except without the national TV exposure). He wants to explore what it might take to get more exposure and turn his well-received site into a money-maker. As part of that, he’s looking for contributors, and I’ve signed on to do post some of my own especially insightful thoughts there. As I said, I’m all for experimenting. I also have an idea the experience is going to be helpful in developing my own subject-oriented, newsy blog project. And if nothing else, it’ll be fun and challenging to work on something with Ted.

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Blogsex! Sexblog!

Tomorrow’s New York Times Magazine is publishing a feature on blogging. The focus is on personal blogs — very personal blogs, with lots of sex and gossip and carrying on. The most interesting aspect is how blogging opens people’s lives to public inspection in a new way. Especially in relationship to their sex lives. And another thing: You wouldn’t believe all the sex and gossip and carrying on you find on all these blogs. Lots of sex. S-E-X. Sex, sex, sex. And gossip. And carrying on.

Actually, it’s a fairly entertaining piece, but a little in the vein of, hey, I just went on that Internet thing and look what I found!

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‘Birthday, Bro

Let’s see. There’s some news about brothers. One hundred and one years ago today — today being December 17, 2004 — Wilbur and Orville Wright made their first halting hops into the air at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina. If you have a chance to go down there sometime, the approximate start and end points for the four flights they did that day are marked. Judging by the distance alone, the accomplishment seems so modest. Eventually, they flew again; eventually the skeptics accepted they could actually do it. And the next thing you know, we have people prancing on the moon and stealth bombers flying over Baghdad. But that’s another story.

There’s more December 17th news in my life. Forty-eight years ago today — not that I remember it, but the event was documented by senior family members, doctors, nurses, and Cook County — my brother Chris was born, the third Brekke baby to appear in two years, eight months, and 15 days. Back then, it was just a family; nowadays, it would be a reality show. The Amazing Baby Race or something.

Anyway: Happy birthday, Chris!

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Abe Lincoln, Gay Republican

Gaylincoln Giving “Lincoln bedroom” a whole new meaning: The New York Times has a story this morning on a new book that says  Abraham Lincoln, our gloomiest president, was “gay.” The work, “The Intimate World of Abraham Lincoln” by the now-deceased psychologist and sex researcher C.A. Tripp, focuses on two men with whom Lincoln shared a bed: a four-year bunkmate in Illinois and a bodyguard who hunkered down with the chief executive for a time during the Civil War.

The Times quotes Larry Kramer, the AIDS activist, as saying, “… the most important president in the history of the United States was gay. Now maybe they’ll leave us alone, all those people in the party he founded.” (He’s got to be kidding: This is going to send the anti-gay conservatives into paroxysms of rage about the “home-a-sekshool conspiracy to turn America home-a-sekshool.”) One historian, Jean H. Baker, speculates in the article that Lincoln’s gayness could explain his willingness to break with popular opinion on slavery and issue the Emancipation Proclamation.

It turns out the stories about Lincoln bedding down with dudes are both true and well-worn (examples of past online posts here and here, and the discussion is said to go back to Lincoln’s lifetime; in my own sheltered experience I hadn’t encountered this idea before). But here’s the thing: Even if it’s true that, apart from sleeping under the same covers, he was sexually involved with these guys, isn’t there something false or forced in mapping the modern idea of gayness onto him, as the people reacting to this book are doing? As the Times notes, the word homosexual was coined only in the 1890s; ideas like gay consciousness and queer liberation have emerged much more recently. Just consider the world Lincoln emerged from: Homosexual sex was a criminal offense, and had been for centuries in Britain and America (the Wikipedia notes in its review of the history of sodomy law that the first such statute on the books was Henry VIII’s Buggery Act).

Not that we can’t interpret the past with our own knowledge and understanding of the world today: We really don’t have a choice. So in the case of Thomas Jefferson, we see something odious in the fact he couldn’t bring himself to free his slaves and had a prolonged conjugal relationship with one of them. But that doesn’t make him a member of the Jim Crow movement or the Klan. Likewise with Lincoln: If he did have a thing for guys, it’s a much more complicated matter than simply labeling him the Gay Emancipator to figure out what his homosexuality meant both to him and to history.

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‘When All the Laughter Died …’

My usual chain of random thoughts just led to this recollection: That one Christmas, my mom gave me a copy of a book called “When All the Laughter Died in Sorrow.” It’s the autobiography of Lance Rentzel, a good Dallas Cowboys and University of Oklahoma wide receiver whose career was pretty much killed after he was arrested for exposing himself to some little girls.

Why did I think of that just now? I was contemplating an excellent Washington Post story from the other day talking about one big problem the United States is having in Iraq is simple wear and tear on equipment. Since the war planners made such blithe (or unforgivably superficial) assumptions about how the military action would go, they grossly underestimated how many tanks, Humvees, Bradley fighting vehicles and other workaday army equipment the campaign would need. Since the toughest duty expected in Iraq after the first few weeks was dodging bouquets flung at the liberators, the repair budget was grossly underestimated, too. (Eventually, that leads to things like National Guard troops looking for armor scraps in garbage dumps in Kuwait.)

And thinking of that story made me think of Saddam and his henchmen and their laughable warnings that

Baghdad would become the graveyard for the invaders. I laughed to myself, anyway. And then I thought about how we’ve had 1,300 troops killed in Iraq so far and 10,000 wounded. Yeah, that’s hardly a morning’s work in some wars — check out the Civil War battles of Antietam. Or Fredericksburg. Or Chancellorsville. Or Gettysburg. Among many, many others. But Iraq, of course, is a much different kind of war. And numbers aside, there’s nothing about that old “graveyard” rhetoric that seems funny anymore.

And that made that book come into my head. I always misremember it as something like “When All the Laughter Turned to Tears,” or some variation on that. It’s a tragic story. From what I remember of it, Rentzel talked about how hard he’d driven himself throughout his childhood to excel. The book was part of his therapy, as I recall, part of coming to terms with why he’d done what he’d done. The book was praised, critically, and I imagiine Mom just saw it at Maeyama’s, the dependably good bookstore in Park Forest, and picked it up for me. Judging by the publication date, I must have been 18.

I’ve always wondered whether there was some kind of message in the gift, whether Mom was afraid I was a pervert in the making or something. Probably not. I hope not. It still occurs to me, though.

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His Master’s Voice

Nipper_paintingAn Audioblog test. Tell me whether you’re shocked, disappointed, agog, or amused at the sound quality, my diction, my lack of coherent thought, or any of the above.

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The Verdict

Sure, you’ve got the victim’s family and the family of the defendant. You’ve got jurors who handed over six months of their lives to hear testimony and see evidence and make a tough call. You’ve got the prosecutors and defense lawyers. But in the end, the people I really feel for in the Scott Peterson case are the spectators. No more titillation. No more rage on behalf of someone they didn’t know and would never have cared about save for her dreadful fate. No more hatred for a suspect they likewise didn’t know. No more poring over testimony and gossip. No more jockeying for what one news outlet called “the 27 coveted public seats inside the courtroom,” where they could see the monster himself, or the grieving mothers, or the juror with the orange hair. No more booing and cursing the suspect’s family. No more cameras to show off for or reporters to impress.

But it’s not the end of the world. There’s always the execution to look forward to.

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Portraits of Crazyworld

The New York Times has a fine story on an artist, Steve Mumford, who’s gotten himself embedded with U.S. troops in Iraq as a combat artist. He’s been working for Artnet, which has posted a 15-part Baghdad Journal featuring Mumford’s drawings, paintings and dispatches. I’ve only looked at a couple of the more recent installments. I think they’re frank and human in a way you don’t often see in the mainstream press. In the Times story, he says his view of the war has changed. When he first went to Iraq, he thought the whole operation was a “huge blunder.” But he says he’s been won over to the view that the U.S. mission could succeed, partly by talking to Iraqis, partly by seeing firsthand what U.S. troops have been doing to fix things in Baghdad (which one Army officer he quotes calls “crazyworld”).

Despite his expressed optimism, his picture of Iraq — the violence, the apparent distrust of anything American, at this point — looks anything but hopeful. His most recent dispatch ends:

“When I get back to my hotel the following week Baghdad’s streets feel more dangerous than ever. A rocket has hit the nearby Sheraton; reporters are largely confined to their hotel rooms amid a rash of kidnappings. Only five other people are staying at the Al Fanar: an American contractor, his Iraqi wife and a British colleague, a rather mysterious Japanese woman who tells me she runs a massage parlor in the Green Zone, and a reporter, a young French woman who I occasionally spot in a headscarf, in the lobby.

“Drivers and hotel staff, with little work to do, hang out there, watching TV, while a lone macaque monkey in a small cage stares quietly out the lobby window at the street. In an effort to salvage something from this depressing scene I’d tried to arrange for this monkey to be transferred to Baghdad’s zoo, but the hotel owner refused to sell.

“For several days I stay within the confines of the security zone around the hotels, while my friends Esam and Ahmed come to visit. I’m quite sure my movements are being watched, and when I’m finally ready to leave Iraq I tell the hotel staff I’m going to visit a friend for a day before leaving town.

“However, the hotel driver, Farouk, looks not in the least surprised when I ask him to take me directly to the airport. We drive past the blighted landscape of palm tree stumps next to the highway, cut down and bulldozed to lessen the danger of ambushes. After 30 minutes we pass the first military checkpoint at the airport’s outskirts, and I breathe a sigh of relief.”

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Gary Webb

Something I missed over the weekend: Gary Webb, the San Jose Mercury News reporter who wrote a series of articles linking the CIA, Nicaragua’s anti-government contra rebels, cocaine traffickers, and the crack epidemic in Los Angeles, was found dead in suburban Sacramento on Friday, December 10. The cause of death was a gunshot wound to the head, and the sheriff’s and coroner’s offices up there are quoted as saying Webb appears to have committed suicide. (Un-shockingly, some in the parallel conspiracy-driven universe have revealed his death was a “suicide,” in quotation marks, meaning that he was rubbed out as someone who knew too much about the “Bush Crime Family.”)

Right here I’ll say I would need to go back and read what he wrote, how other media responded, and the substance of government investigations to offer an informed opinion about Webb’s stories. What’s clear was that as an investigative reporter, Webb was the real thing, sharing a Pulitzer Prize at one point and getting lots of other recognition for his work before the contra cocaine story.

In saying he had evidence that the CIA was in bed with people who had helped trigger a disaster of epic proportions in the second-biggest U.S. city and beyond, he was suggesting something that most people would reject as fantastic, too evil to be true, to byzantine to really hold together. That was my own reaction. And like most messengers bearing such tidings, he paid a price: others in the journalistic establishment worked to discredit his work, his own paper wound up repudiating the stories, he was transferred to a bureau office 100 miles from where he lived. Sixteen months after the series ran, he quit the Merc. And continued to pursue the story, eventually expanding his investigation into a book, from outside a big-city paper.

Conclusion: I don’t have any. The guy was 49. He believed passionately, and apparently sincerely and without cynicism, in the integrity of his journalism. He had three kids and had been pushed outside the professional realm he loved (his former wife is quoted as saying, “All he ever wanted to do was write”). And he apparently shot himself. It’s a tragedy, that’s all.

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Coincidental Verse

The Writer’s Almanac. I’ve mentioned it before. Praised it. I like it. Appeals to my “finer things in life” side. (Yes, there’s more to the world than “Survivor” (finale tonight!), “CSI,” and “Six Feet Under” (the last viewed on DVD only).

I get The Writer’s Almanac email every day. Often I can’t bring myself to open it because of the possible emotional and time commitment. When I do, though, I’m occasionally surprised by how fitting the poem for the day seems to be. Not the predictable ones, like Thanksgiving-themed verse during Thanksgiving week. But shots in the dark that just fall squarely on some event in my life, something I’m thinking of. For instance, the poem “The Longly-Weds Know,” which the almanac sent out December 2, the day after my wedding anniversary.

And then there’s today’s almanac. The poem is “1100,” by Emily Dickinson. I hardly know from Emily Dickinson, though if pressed I might be able to tell you that she came up with the line “hope is the thing with feathers” and that Julie Harris played her on stage and small-screen. I was puzzled by the title, having been so Dickinson-deprived that I did not know her poems were not titled, but numbered. With Max’s passing on my mind, the poem’s really a bull’s-eye. It starts:

“The last Night that She lived

“The last Night that She lived

It was a Common Night

Except the Dying – this to Us

Made Nature different.

We noticed smallest things –

Things overlooked before

By this great light upon our Minds

Italicized – as ’twere. …”

Go and read the rest.