//nedward.org is the personal weblog of John Niedermeyer, an Editorial Designer at NYTimes.com, living in Brooklyn.
The Boston Stranglers’ Scooter Rally was 2 weeks ago, and neglectful as always, I never posted my pics.
One highlight of the weekend was getting an escorted ride for 50+ scooters along the Charles River Esplanade, and then continued on along the Emerald Necklace to the Larz Anderson park, overlooking the city. Presley and I were joined by Sam and her cute Metro, and we met a lot of new people.
And, I avoided the combination of drinking and riding my Vespa.
We went to see Fahrenheit 9/11 at the Fenway 13 on Saturday night, and I became uneasy before the movie, because there were rent-a-cops milling about and checking bags. Were they expecting violence? Like a modern day Outsiders, with MoveOn.org members clashing with the Young Republicans?
There has been much made of Michael Moore, and the controversy surrounding whether he can correctly claim the title of documentarian. On the Today show, pseudo-journalist Matt Lauer nitpicked and argued with Moore as if he were host of Fox and Friends. Truth is, the journalists who think Moore is utterly ruinous, (Gwen Ifill comes to mind), are making this judgment from a pretty skewed, “elite” frame of reference.
It is, after all, a movie, which intends to bring important information to the masses, wrapped in an entertaining package. It is not journalism, and I am fine with not calling the film a “documentary”. Let’s call it Op/Ed.
Moore is shameless, manipulative, and yes, he has an opinion. But I simply refuse to hold him to a higher standard than I do Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, and Ann Coulter. He makes me laugh, he makes me sick, and he presents a point of view that is totally american.
Other reactions:
Since the licensing structure has been revamped, I thought I’d spend a few minutes updating Suckahs.org (and all it’s weblogs) to MT 3.0.
Honestly, the motivation for the upgrade was recent barrages of comment spam. MT-Blacklist was a good patch, for a while, but I think the only safe method to both allow comments, and stop your site from becoming a 1-stop billboard advertisement for “penis enhancements”, and mortgage financiers, is comment registration.
If you’d like to comment, (there are 1 or 2 of you), I’d suggest registering with TypeKey. Registered commenters will be posted right away, and everyone else will need to be verified first.
We were sitting at work, having lunch, when a hawk landed just outside our window. I half expected him to have a mouse in his mouth, but no luck on that front.
I wonder what kind of hawk this is? They are common in eastern Massachusetts, because I’ve seen them around Boston…
Dan Cederholm of SimpleBits has written a book, Web Standards Solutions, which arrived today with it’s familiar cover.
I’m interested in streamlining my site, improving on semantic markup, etc., so I hope that Dan’s book will be a good reference. Oh, and I love his redesign.
It seems that everyone is refreshing their sites these days.
pet-pieve: I answer the telephone, (though it reads “unkown caller”), the voice on the other end asks for someone who does not reside here, and when I politely inform them of this fact, they hang up without response.
And, they call back twice, with the same bad manners.
…no wonder I never answer.
I suspect much of this country feels, as I do, that Ronald Reagan was not the saint that the radical Right would like us to believe. Still, the media coverage this past week has not only been gushingly positive, but also all-consuming.
While watching that carriage parade around for 4 hours last night, and suffering through Dick Cheney’s political eulogy, I kept thinking of the horrible things this guy was responsible for — and many of them meet my definition of High Crimes and Misdemeanors.
And yet, no articles of impeachment in eight years… don’t get me started on what they did to Clinton.
Review: A+
Yes, we attended last night’s showing of Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, at 12:01am. And, despite some suggestions from my work mates, I did not play dress-up.
My reactions and excitement after seeing the 3rd installment on the big screen, directly parallels what I felt a few years ago when I dug into the 3rd Potter book — Azkaban is where the series takes a much darker turn. The Dementors are frightening in the film, though the new director Alfonso Cuar?n devotes far more energy to stoking fear of Sirius Black, than of the prison and it’s soul-sucking guards.
Overall, Cuar?n’s vision is a breath of fresh air — the film is scarier than Chris Columbus’s two films, (it’s a mystery to me how films like this manage to receive a PG-rating), but it’s balanced with a few whimsical moments courtesy the Whomping Willow, and by Michael Gambon’s quirky take on Dumbledore.
How long do I have to wait for the Goblet of Fire?
UPDATE: Capn saw it last night too
//nedward.org is the personal weblog of John Niedermeyer, an Editorial Designer at NYTimes.com, living in Brooklyn.
