What The . . . ?

One of the other reasons for my hiatus has been this:

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When short on time, not near a machine, or witnessing something interesting on the spur of the moment I'd snap a shot with my phone's camera and send it to the QA. Every picture on this blog, with the exception of a few that I've bounced in from elsewhere, is a camera phone shot. It was an easy way to blog, and add some visual interest to my posts. Easy, that was, until I noticed, while in Atlanta, that Verizon was appending the above junk to my photos. The last time that I checked, they were not paying me to drive traffic to their site nor to Apple's; nor have I added them to the contributor's list of this blog. This appendage has curtailed my use of my camera phone to do mobile picture blogging and really annoyed me.

The real drag of this whole thing to me is that some marketing wiz at the above mentioned phone company must have figured that this was a god idea. Sadly, it sort of is. By appending this garbage to an emailed photo they get instant "viral marketing" (all the rage these days with marketers). Even if the emailed shot does not go to a blog, it can still be passed around via email, so either way this nets them free publicity. For photos sent to blogs, the appendage increases the number of links extant on the web, and thus makes them more visible to spiders; virally sends itself through feed readers and is basically a cheap (free) way to get some rather large text ads. Now, my blog, with its three readers is certainly not going to do them much good, but it's still annoying and, I believe, improper for this phone company to do this. If they asked my permission and paid me, it might be a different story, but this is my blog, and I don't want to do any marketing for my wireless provider -- they are merely a vehicle for data transmission, not a contributor, or participant in this space.

A Couple of Things to Note

I was kicking around today over on BlackFive, and found a couple of interesting things.

Woodrow W. Keeble: Medal of Honor Recipient
I found this story on the blog, BlackFive. It's the story of the
Woodrow W. Keeble, the first and only Sioux to be awarded the MOH.
He received the award for gallant service on 20 October, 1951 near
Sangsan-ni Korea. Definitely read the citation, and the background, they are amazing. The presidential comments are interesting too.
The medal was awarded 3 March, 2008 . . . how come I didn't see this
in the papers?

BlackFive post

173rd Airborne Brigade
Also on BlackFive, but via Michael Yon, I saw this call for support for the members of the 173rd Airbirne Brigade, currently serving in Afghanistan, and recently suffering a hatchet job in the NY Times. You can send a letter of thanks/support to them via this email address (adjusted in an attempt to avoid spammers): skysoldiers173rd[at]gmail[dot]com

BlackFive post
Michael Yon

Blogless, Webless

I've been very quiet on the blog-front during October -- this is my first written, Quarter Acre post of the month. From late September until early October I was very busy at work. Last week I took four vacation days and built a patio behind my house. I'll do a post on that project this week, with photos of the progress etc.

As I tackle my mountain of silly work-related-emails I am reflecting that I spent last week, outside, working like a dog, in some nasty weather loving every minute of it. I didn't check my email, this blog or even use the web once after October 7 when I logged on to turn on my Out of Office Auto Responder -- and I didn't miss it at all. I was distinctly Ludditic during my vacation. My tools were shovels, spades, grub hoes and a wheel barrow. I didn't miss the web. I didn't miss blogging. I certainly didn't miss my gig. I thought about things to write on this blog, and that was good. I should have some fun posts over the next few weeks as I dump some of the things I pondered while digging, scraping and shoveling earth behind my house.

The Understanding

I picked up this video via Little Green Footballs. This Marine says what the elite in this country need to hear with more eloquence, understanding and passion than any member of the elite could ever muster. Semper Fi, and thank God for people like SSG Lawrence E. Dean II.

Not So Sure . . .

On my morning commute I saw a guy who must have weighed 270 lbs. -- if he weighed a pound -- riding an old Kawasaki or Honda motorcycle. The bike was not a rice rocket, nor was it a high end cruiser -- just one of those 200CC beaters with the boring paint job. He had on a big, silver, full-face-shield helmet, a gray polo shirt, jeans and Ugg boots. It's the Ugg boots that spur this posting, my first in a while, because they put the scene over the top in terms of ridiculousness. Grown men shouldn't wear Ugg Boots, especially not 270 pound men riding old, beater bikes on 80 F mornings.

This is a petty, pointless little post but absurdity reigned.

We vs. I

When this blog first began the posts appeared in the first person singular. In an effort to keep some distance between us and the reading public we moved to the first person plural. However, it's becoming a pain to write in the first person plural -- over on our running blog posts appear in the first person singular and they are easier, faster and more fun to write. From, now on we're going to write this blog in the first person singular.

Virginia Tech

What does one say when confronted with events such as transpired today in Blacksburg, VA?

As a cynic we await the coming media-coverage onslaught. The media has already written much about this event and created multi-media content in their coverage. More will follow, no doubt, until every conceivable angle will have been covered, uncovered, dissected and reassembled until some other horrible event yanks away the media's attention. Liberals will also use this as one more opportunity to confiscate guns (we don't own a gun, the highest power in our land, Mrs. Agricola, won't permit it, so, we comply).

As a blogger we are fascinated by the user generated content especially the video phone footage, camera phone stills and the story of the journalism class that posted from inside of Norris Hall during the attack.

As a father, a husband, a brother and a human being we acknowledge the terror and the tragedy of this event. We can only imagine the pain of the parents who have suffered the greatest loss imaginable, and offer the families and friends of the victims our deepest condolences and sincerest prayers.

Following-up a Couple of Posts

We've written a couple of posts recently about public service and taxation at the local level.

We found a great link over on Newmark's Door to an article in City Journal by Theodore Dalrymple that chronicles the degradation of the British system of public service. It rings true for us, and like Dalrymple we think it bespeaks a larger issue in society at large.

Newmark also pointed us to a terrific article by Jack Kelly in the Pittsburgh Post & Gazette about 300 that is definitely worth a read.

Athlete-Media-Relations 2.0

Regardless of where you stand on Curt Schilling, he is a unique talent both on and off the field. While he rubs many the wrong way -- esp. The Boston Globe's curmudgeonly Dan Shaughnessy -- as a self-promoter, he is redefining the way athletes relate to the media and the fans.

We happen to think Schilling is terrific and we look forward to his weekly chats with Dennis and Callahan -- the morning drive guys on Boston's sports-radio-giant WEEI. He always sheds great light on the game, and provides terrific insight into how it's played at the highest level -- at least in his POV.

Schilling has long been an active participant on the Boston Dirt Dogs and Sons of Sam Horn bulletin boards. He's also known around these parts to sports radio listeners as "Curt in the Car." This spring Schilling launched his own blog, 38 Pitches. It must be a nightmare for team-management to have a guy as savvy, intelligent and opinionated as Schilling out and about, opining and talking about whatever he wants.
This is a perfect example of the issue of how brand owners are losing control of their brand. Ownership, understandably, wants to control, what their employees say, but they have to be even-handed and judicious in how hard, and when or if, they come down on a player such as Schilling. We think that ownership understands that they would surely lose in any war of words with Schilling. This new foray into the blogoshpere is certainly forcing them to walk a razor thin line.

For now, ownership of the Sox is showing forbearance and continuing to permit Schilling to be visible and opinionated. It will be interesting to see how long they permit this, especially as the season progresses and Schilling draws nearer to free agency. Like the Sox, Schilling also has a brand to maintain and he does so by being open and pushing his message across multiple channels. There have been athlete blogs in the past -- ESPN has contracted with marginal players to chronicle a season -- but this is about as high-a-profile a player as we know of to go the route of the personal blog.

We'd love to hear and see more players go this route as well. It will radically change the relationship between player and fans as well as player and major media outlets. Part of this, no doubt, lies at the root of the issues between Shaughnessy and Schilling. In Shaughnessy's world, the player is supposed to sit there, give good quotes to the grizzled, old-media pro and allow the latter to control the message. Alas, the days of the gate-keeping, myth-making, and mythical reporter as major arbiter of player access are numbered.

Welcome to Athlete-Media-Relations 2.0. People like Schilling are helping to change the field of play (so to speak). The ballpark scribes now need to compete with the athletes themselves for the scoop. As long as this foray into the brave-new-world of DIY news production, brand management and self promotion doesn't distract too much from on-field performance -- Schilling got lit up on Opening Day by Kansas City -- we are all for it and look forward to the evolution.

Feeds

To all three of our readers, we're sure that you'll notice that we've added a new feed features to this layout. We've made a move to FeedBurner, partly to see what sort of action this site gets, and partly to play around with FeedBurner for professional reasons. If you have a feed to this site we'd appreciate it if you replaced the old Atom feed with the new FeedBurner one. It will be interesting to track stats and see what happens with this site. We have no visions of grandeur, just a desire to play around with the technology available to the hobbyist and professional alike.

Social Justice

A while back we read a fascinating string over on Little Green Footballs about a women's' studies prof at Loyola -- can't recall which one -- and her alleged run-in with some Iraq War Marine Veterans. Women's' Studies + American University Politics + US Marines = no hope of the truth emerging about what really happened.

The course this prof was teaching dealt with "social justice." We didn't think much of it at the time -- except that the prof was a certifiable moon bat -- however until we came across a brilliant commentary on the the new film "Amazing Grace" in the Weekend WSJ Pursuits section. The day before the film had gotten a pretty good review (as a film) in the WSJ Weekend section (Friday, 23 February). The author of the commentary piece blasts the film for ignoring the religious (specifically Christian & Methodist) underpinnings of the Continental, and eventually US, abolition movement. The film frames the abolitionists as secular humanists when in fact they were evangelical Christians who viewed slavery as a sin, not just a matter of politics and social justice.

Reading the comments on LGF, and the above article, helped us to crystallize what has always troubled us about the term "social justice." The term lacks moral underpinnings. Social justice, as preached today, is a political conceit, something to bandy about in the public arena while playing both sides of the game at once and refusing to declare one way or the other -- waiting to see who will win, yet screaming all the time at those they "feel" to be "wrong." Abolitionists like William Wilberforce -- the protagonist in "Amazing Grace" -- engaged their crusades girded by belief in a defined universe, limned by their religious faith, of right and wrong, moral and immoral. Today's crusaders for "social justice" fear such absolutes and eschew faith, never realizing that without these things nothing will ever change if left up to the vagaries of the zero-sum political game.

Distance Training

We've started a new blog that will be a team blog and serve as a training diary. It should be a fun experiment and hopefully serve as motivation in our own training.

We've been a runner for a long time, but the move from NYC to Boston has wreaked havoc on our training. After some stern admonishment from our doctor we began training again in earnest about 4 weeks ago and have been running faithfully for that time. You can see the new blog over here:

http://distancetrainers.blogspot.com/

Happy New Year!

Happy New Year to any and all Quarter Acre readers (all two of you). May you and yours have a happy, healthy and prosperous 2007.

Next Blog & Portuguese Blogs

One of our new favorite web pastimes is to come onto Blogger and keep hitting the "Next Blog" button. It's fascinating what you bump into. One thing that amazes on a daily basis is the number of Portuguese-language blogs that we encounter. We're unsure how the randomizer works on this button and what the criteria are, but we've never blogged about Portugal, or Brazil, though we have visited the former and loved every moment of the trip. Perhaps the next blog button has some sort of psychic powers, and can read our mind and thus connect us with people who also have a connection to Portugal. It would not surprise if Google had this in Beta . . .

A Return

It's been a tumultuous year since last posting to this blog -- the birth of a second child has a way of limiting the amount of time that one spends navel-gazing on the web. However, with nearly a year's gap between posts we are feeling the urge to publish again. Perhaps it's the change of season, and the fact that short days and long nights will soon become the norm in the North East. Maybe, it's the fact that around this time each year, for at least the last 5, we feel the need to sound off, to make ourselves heard, regardless of how few will actually read or interact with our posting about what we consider to be the signal event of the last 50 years in the life of our country -- the attacks and murders of our fellow countrymen on September 11, 2001.

Amid all of the ratings-grubbing, maudlin, and politicized coverage that undoubtedly will mark the fifth anniversary of this attack we should look through the soft focus videography, and block out the surging violins to understand that this anniversary is the result of a cowardly and unprovoked attack. As much as defeatists and appeasers, both domestic and foreign may want to blame the U.S. these attacks and their harvest of widows, orphans and children-buried-by -parents lie squarely at the feet of fascistic Muslims who wish to dwell in the 14 Century and wish that we would do the same.

There is nothing in the normal course of international events that justifies the type of attack perpetrated on September 11, 2001. We certainly never went looking for this type of trouble; we never asked to be engaged as we are in the Middle East -- despite what the punditocracy would have you believe. We are fighting a war of ideas here, and it is a hot war. Bullets are flying, people are dying and the stakes are incredibly high -- the survival of western culture, liberty and freedom do depend on this conflict.

This is not hyperbole. The governments of Western Europe are cowed by their giant, restive Muslim populations and have completely withdrawn from this engagement. Their fear leads to their continuous denigration of U.S. efforts. This appeasement -- coupled with negative Euro birth rates -- will lead to the inevitable submersion of Western European culture beneath a Muslim sea. America really is the last redoubt of freedom and truly liberal Western thought in this world. We owe it to ourselves, to our heritage and not least of all to the victims of Muslim Terrorism to stand up to fascistic, Muslim dreams of a world wide caliphate. We need to wage this war to its end and we must fight it to win whether that victory comes five, ten or fifteen years from now.