Obama/Bartlet '08

I think many of us have imagined this meeting of the minds, but I do think it kind of falls flat. I thought Bartlet would be more helpful and encouraging of Obama. Sigh.

Barack Obama meets Josiah Bartlet

In Honor of the Day

To be sung, lustily:

Most days are like all of the others,
Go to work, come back home, watch TV,
But, brother, if I had me druthers,
I'd chuck it and head out to sea,

For I dream of the skull and the crossbones,
I dream of the great day to come,
When I dump the mundane for the Old Spanish Main
And trade me computer for rum! ARRR!

Want more? go to Talk Like a Pirate Day Song lyrics

Firings and Regulation and Lies

OK, so Barack Obama wants to deal with the economic crisis by introducing more regulation of the markets. John McCain is against more regulation. Instead, his solution to the crisis is to fire the SEC chair.

I'm not against firing the guy. It does appear that he missed something about his job in letting all this happen. But I think McCain's approach sends mixed signals: he is trying to appear very dramatically concerned about the crisis (to match Obama's own lashing of the government), but he's sticking to his conservative guns at the same time, without actually proposing any new strategy. Just firing people, Palin-style, isn't going to solve this problem. We clearly do need more regulation--or, if regulation for things like how much of a capital margin you have is already on the books--we need to enforce it more. We need to do more than just fire people. We can't just take the emotional steps and leave off the smart, strategic ones because they're less fun and cathartic.

Tbilisi

When I hear of its sad state in the news, I think of Georgia strongly, because I had just recently been taken there by a book, one which in its very core decries Russian imperialism. Here is Georgia:

From Ryszard Kapuscinski's Imperium, translated by Klara Glowczewska:

...One should see the museum in Tbilisi. It is located in the former seat of a theological seminary, where Stalin once studied. A marble plaque at the entrance commemorates this. The building is dark but spacious and stands in the center of town, at the edge of the old downtown district...The splendor and excellence of Georgia's ancient art are overwhelming. The most fantastic are the icons! They are from a much earlier time than Russian icons; the best Georgian ones came into being long before Andrey Rublyov...their originality lies in their having been executed largely in metal: only the face is painted. The most glorious period of this work spans the eighth to the thirteenth centuries. The faces of the saints, dar, but radiant in the light, dwell immobile in extremely rich gold frames studded with precious stones...There is an icon here on which several generations of masters worked for three centuries...

...Then there are the frescoes in the Georgian churches. Such marvels, and yet so little is known about them outside of Georgia. Virtually nothing. The best frescoes, unfortunately, were destroyed. Thhey covered the interior of the largest church in Georgia--Sveti Tschoveli, built in 1010 in Georgia's former capital, Meht, near Tbilisi. They were a masterpiece of the Middle Ages on a par with the stained glass of Chartres. They were painted over on the order of the czar's governor, who wanted the church whitewashed 'like our peasant women whitewash stoves.' No restoration efforts can return these frescoes to the world. Their brilliance is extinguished forever...

...Niko Pirosmanashvili is all the rage in Paris these days. Niko died in 1916. He was a Georgian Rousseau...Niko lived in Nachalovce, the Tbilisi neighborhood of the lumpen and the poor...Niko painted suppers like Veronese. Only Niko's suppers are Georgian and secular. Against a background of Georgian landscape, a richly laid table; at this table Georgians are drinking and eating...The culinary fascinated Niko...Niko's Georgia is sated, always feasting, well nourished. The land flows with milk. Manna pours from the sky. All the days are fat. The residence of Nachalovce dreamed at night of such a Georgia...Over and over again he painted his feasts, with that table against a mountainous landscape...

This Makes Me Happy

I've been jarred a few times in the last day or two by someone using the male-gender-specific pronoun when referring to the presidential candidates. Somewhere along the way I just got very used to assuming that one of the candidates was a woman.

A Brotherly Band

On company blogs, people talk most frequently about the results of what their company does. It's very infrequent that people talk about how the company does it (that's the trade secret, after all).

Are we ever going to get there? What would it take for us all to talk to each other about how we go about our business?

That is, to some extent, what the publisher O'Reilly's doing with their Tools of Change for Publishing conference and blog. Maybe it's because publishing as an industry's beginning to feel a little too squeezed? Like we all have to be in this together? Like we're all staring the beast in the face and think that throwing our lot together may be our last hope?

Well, maybe it's not that dramatic. But it's something that William Heinemann proposed in an Athanaeum article in 1892. Then it was shrinking profit margins due to exploding author advances and production costs. Now it's exploding author advances and flat sales.

So do we get more cutthroat (as in many cases we are), or do we, in Heinemann's words, and in O'Reilly's footsteps, "form ourselves into a brotherly band, and stand together against the inroads that are being made on our common interests"?

The Guy Who Makes the Lists, or, Aggregation Is Power

The Wall Street Journal just came out with new rankings for most influential business leaders (here).

Obviously, this is a sparkly day for Gary Hamel (#1) and the rising stars just behind him.

But what does a piece like this do for Tom Davenport, the ranker himself? He may not be Gary Hamel, but his position as someone who we depend on to tell us who is isn't too shabby either.

The U.S. News and World Report gets as much out of the annual college rankings as the top ("top") schools. And is the Academy around for any other reason than to give us the Awards (I mean really)? These groups are powerful because we rely on them to get it right.

Point being, the guy who makes the lists--who tells you who to listen to, where to go to school, what to watch, what to read--may be just as important as the folks on the lists themselves.

And hence, the internet aggregators. Google makes its money by giving you authoritative lists (search results, feed reader). Digg.com does too. These companies aren't in the content business; they're in the list business.

We all know the content business in publishing is suffering these days. That brings up the question: Can, and should, you do both lists *and* content? Should the NYT list articles not in the NYT as "most emailed"? Would more people visit their site if they did? Should our company's site list competitors' books as "similar products" if that will make more people think of us as "the authority" in our field?