BuzzMachine... by Jeff Jarvis

November 27, 2002

Canux redux
: Zach of Zoombafloom has a fine response to my post re Canada below.

What's wrong with media today
: If you want to know what's wrong with old/big media, just watch TV news over a holiday weekend. It's all so perfectly predictable that you could write it all before seeing it, any of you could. And we're not just talking about dinky local stations; the Today Show is just as bad: Let's go to the airport and have some poor if overpaid shmuck stand there and say the same stuff all over again about the busiest day for travel and how you should get there early and what the price of gas is and how many will die on the highways and how Sunday will be worse and....
When I worked on newspapers, I long wanted to declare just one day in which all stories would (a) not come from flacks and (b) not come from predictable formulas. Just one day.

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Mmm, Mmmm, Good
: MSNBC's Best of Blogs has the good idea of collecting food blogs before our national gorge.
My longtime favorite: The Red Kitchen recipe blog (a great use of Movable Type, by the way, with categories making the filing and finding of recipes easy).
Then I tried a new one, Eat Drink and Be Married. The first post:

No blog today. Food poisoning is not blogging matter.

Ain't irony delicious?

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Vote often
: Matt Welch started it: A write-in campaign for Glenn Reynolds as media person of the year at Patrick Phillips IWantMedia.com poll.
Henry Copeland joined in.
It's a damned bandwagon.
Let's all vote. If we can't stuff a weblog ballot the way we want, then we are all wimps.
Vote here.

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How much is that doggie in the window?
: Tom Tomorrow is selling autographed cartoons.
Tony Pierce is, remember, selling books made from his blog.
Nick Denton is channelling Crazie Eddie.
Hmmm. What do I have to sell? Kids? No, no market for them. Cat? No, kids would kill me.
How about autographed copies of the launch edition of Entertainment Weekly?

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Amen, Sir
: Salman Rushdie is the sole voice of reason in the Islamic world.
Sole?
Well if I can't hear any others above the din of hate, that's the only census I can make.
Rushdie has another spectacular opinion piece in the NY Times begging for other voices of Islamic reason:

Where, after all, is the Muslim outrage at these events? As their ancient, deeply civilized culture of love, art and philosophical reflection is hijacked by paranoiacs, racists, liars, male supremacists, tyrants, fanatics and violence junkies, why are they not screaming?
At least in Iran the students are demonstrating. But where else in the Muslim world can one hear the voices of the fair-minded, tolerant Muslim majority deploring what Nigerian, Egyptian, Arab and Dutch Muslims are doing? Muslims in the West, too, seem unnaturally silent on these topics. If you're yelling, we can't hear you.
If the moderate voices of Islam cannot or will not insist on the modernization of their culture — and of their faith as well — then it may be these so-called "Rushdies" who have to do it for them. For every such individual who is vilified and oppressed, two more, ten more, a thousand more will spring up. They will spring up because you can't keep people's minds, feelings and needs in jail forever, no matter how brutal your inquisitions. The Islamic world today is being held prisoner, not by Western but by Islamic captors, who are fighting to keep closed a world that a badly outnumbered few are trying to open. As long as the majority remains silent, this will be a tough war to win. But in the end, or so we must hope, someone will kick down that prison door.

Here's hoping that there are more such voices wanting and waiting to be heard.

: Den Beste adds in his two cents (well, whenever he adds in anything, it's more like two dollars):

...the problem is that now that we are actually beginning to watch what is happening in places where Islam actually gains political power, it's invariably really, really ugly. It's entirely possible that strains of Islam exist which are tolerant, peaceful and valuable, but Islamism as a political movement is ultimately cruel and barbarous.

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Collector's editions
: Not a good trend for magazines when you see two Farewell Editions -- for Rosie and Context -- on the newsstand at the same time.

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Birds of a feather snooze together
: The real problem with Al Gore attacking FoxNews is that it only reinforces his reputation as the duke of dull. Love it or hate it, FoxNews is the only entertaining/watchable news channel (it's the one I watch; it is the Howard Stern of news channels: I watch it to see what they'll say next). Thus it figures that dull Al would not like it. No amount of Letterman time will erase this image. Love him or hate him, he is dull.

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