Back in December I won a stapler at the work Christmas party. It was a heavy-duty all metal Swingline. (Not the red one, sadly.)
Since I have e-mail I only bothered to load staples in it last week. And then only because they were loading another stapler and I grabbed some while the box was open. Its never found a use up until now.
My goofball new boss grabbed it and took in in his carry-on luggage to St. Louis. Kind of a test of the new airport regs. Having a bag full of suspicious metal earned him the "orange level" search... basically everything other than the rubber gloves and hoses. He wound up beltless, shoeless, and jacketless; supiciously held at check while they opened up and emptied his entire kit and nitrogen swab-scanned his laptop.
They warned him, "While we're searching your bag, you cannot touch it or anything in it." Emphasis was theirs, I gather. He wondered aloud at this so we pointed out that frantically grabbing at suspicious luggage was tantamount to going for a weapon. Had he disobeyed, he'd have surely eaten carpet as some mook rode him to the floor and knelt on his neck screaming at him. He'd have earned "back room privileges" for sure that way. :)
I've got no real issues with Dave Winer. To me it just seems like one more blowhard with a teaching posistion. Tho, now that I think about it, someone who spawns flame wars and bitter arguments about the web might be a damn good college level teacher. So long as they don't believe everything he says... he has a bit of a nasty habit of rewriting history.
One thing I must say will earn you heaps of deserved scorn and abuse is to dare use the phrase "legitimizing blogging" or "legitimizes blogging". The act of writing, of forming opinions and attempting to state them clearly, is one of the cornerstones of humanity. By its very nature it legitimizes itself. Even the buried-under-the-pillow diary or journal, with all the mental masturbation that "legitmize" implies, is a step above never daring to introspectively study where your opinions come from. Blogs are legitimate merely because they were assayed, not because they survived being assailed or are "proper" essays.
Unless, by "legitimize" you mean "worthy of being paid for". In that case, I might point out that most of your prior relations, your current spouse, and much of your own work fails the same test. In fact, most writers are worth paying vecause of their consistence, either in opinion, level of knowledge about a field, barely adequate humor, or meeting of deadlines. And by THAT test of professionalism, bloggers out in the world are making the "legitimate" writers look less and less worth paying everyday. Hell, the top tier of writers in the blog game today write better fact-checked, more balanced (or are at least better at declaring bias up front), less typo-ridden prose than many of the pro sources for the same opinions. Makes you wonder if the editors are cleaning up seriously shitty writing turned in by semi-literates or if they are spending most of their time as glorified document layout designers.
In any case, with Dave ensconced at Harvard, maybe he'll be less of a "WhINER" about MT, Blogger's Blog*Spot, Diaryland, and others giving away for free what he was trying to sell over at Userland. I know it sucks to have your business plan ripped out from under you two or three times but when you base them on core-tech anyone can re-write in perl,php,python,tcl, ruby, or even c in a week or two you have to expect that. Shit, we wrote a bare-bones intranet blogger in 1996 that was a core communications channel in our company for years. And we did it it less than 200 lines of perl and html, without any modules! Also, we didn't have to BUY and learn Frontier, either.
Good luck to Dave over there in the halls of academia. He's a top-flight geek so he deserves some reward after these past few years. But don't herald it as a new age in blogging... he isn't first blogger to get a teaching job, and it won't change a thing in the industry of puking out words. And watch him backpedal on his site over this choice quote:
Of course. And a digital camera, and everything. I’m going to do the first cross-country blog. I should get to Cambridge, probably by mid to late March.
No doubt I'm not the first to sneer at that bit of bloviation. You're not even the 100th to do a cross-country travel-blog, Dave! But we love ya just the same. :)
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