Doing the Dan Dance

Here’s another video, this time of my friend Dan (the hairy man mountain) doing a silly dance. I took five seconds of footage and turned it into a techno video…

Resurrecting Old Videos for YouTube

I’ve been really into video editing since my freshman year of college. When I say "into," I’m not talking about professional-grade programs like Final Cut. I’m referring to iMovie. Still, I use this kind of software more than is humanly healthy and I know all the keyboard shortcuts for extracting audio and doing crazy shit.

Anyway, I’ve recently been going through all the short videos on my computer and uploading some of them to YouTube. Here’s one that I put together from video clips of Andy and my trip to Mexico in ‘04.

I’ll be uploading more videos in the coming days, so stay tuned.

All Your Grapes (On a Plane) Are Belong To Us!

UPDATE: I should have stated from the beginning, as Scoble always does, that this was a junket, which my company organized to draw some blogosphere attention to our clients. Yes, we got stuff (specifically good wine, good food and flights on private jets) for free with the expectation that we would blog about it and link in. However, as Christophe Hedges said to me, “I don’t mind if you write bad stuff about us. I just want to read it either way.” It’s up to you, my readers, to make up your mind whether you believe me or not about how great this event was.

Wow! What a 24 hour period. We finished the conference yesterday evening. It was an amazing three days with a mega letdown afterwards.

The Grapes on a Plane event was a smashing success. All the bloggers had an awesome time and we all bonded. I have a bunch of amazing photos that are forthcoming over my flickr photostream.

We visited a number of wineries. First we did some tasting at Bookwalter (try the 2004 Columbia Valley Chardonnay-Viognier) and Chandler Reach (the ‘02 Cab-Franc is awesome) before traveling to Hedges for dinner.

The dinner was really cool. There was an organic butter lettuce salad with Walla Walla onion and paired with a Three Vineyards. The main course was a traditional Boeuf Bourguignon, which was obviously well-prepared but not really my thing. I do have to get the recipe from Christophe Hedges because I think Andy would really enjoy it. They paired that with their Two Vineyards Reserve.

After the beef, there was a bread and cheese course, which is my favorite thing to eat. The bread crust reminded me a bit of matzoh, which is a good thing. They paired the course with a private reserve Single Vineyard Syrah, which requires a private list membership to even purchase. If I had the money, I would seriously consider purchasing a membership because I’ve never had anything quite as special as that Syrah.

Finally, they paired dark chocolate truffles with their Red Mountain Fortified port. Everyone had a great time. I think a small food fight even broke out at one point, there are photos in the photostream

The jets provided by Greenpoint Technologies were really a trip. I’ve never flown on a private jet before, and I felt very fancy. My favorite thing by far were the bathrooms. On commercial jets, the toilets make really scary noises when you flush them. I’m always afraid that it’s going to de-pressurize the cabin and vent everyone onboard into the stratosphere. On our jet, the toilet flushed like a normal toilet, except the water was blue. I wasn’t freaked out at all! I may never fly commercial again.

UPDATE: So, what do you think? Am I telling the truth about the junket? Did I really have a good time or is Jason Calacanis right to question my authenticity as a blogger? If you need to check out the photographic proof one more time, you might want to do that.

Bush - Confidence is Key to Victory

President Bush has come out recently as stating that he has no plan for a Democratic takeover of the House and Senate despite widespread reports by liberals and conservatives that Dems will sweep in November.  He says he is in the game to win, and is only making plans for victory.

I couldn’t agree more.  I mean, how would it have looked in the World Series, after the Cardinals got up 3-1, if they had planned on having a game 7.  If they had say, made hotel arrangments for the Detroit Tigers.  Or told employee’s that they might need to work that day.  Or had tickets ready for that game.  I mean, they KNEW the they were going to win, so they went ahead and scheduled a Rolling Stones concert the night when Game 7 could have been. Bush is a winner, and winners don’t prepare to lose.

Jim Webb - AUTHOR!

Now there are a lot of things I like about Jim Webb: he’s a former Vietnam marine, was President Reagan’s Navy secretary, currently has a son serving in Iraq, and accurately predicted exactly what was going to happen in this war.  He decided to run for Senate only because he felt Sen. George Allen was a lapdop for President Bush, and this former fratboy with no army expertise had no business pretending like he knew what war was like.

Webb is so strong on National Security he’s practically a Republican.  In fact, he used to be a Republican, and he only switched parties because he felt personally ashamed by George Allen and George W. Bush.

But then I found out something very disturbing.  Jim Webb wrote six books about war.  And in those books, he included scenes with murder and even rape.  What a pervert!  How dare he write a book about war that includes disturbing imagery.  I’m voting for George Allen.

Plymouth Gin Rocks

Quick shout to Plymouth Gin, Randall PR, and Maggiano’s, for throwing an awesome party last night.  They provided us with free food and drinks.  Teresa will probably post more on it later, but I just want to give them some quick props.

Prohibition - Smart, Effective, and Necessary

I am pleased to announce that Congress recently passed HR 4954, which prohibits banks from allowing deposits and withdrawls into and out of online casino’s, and make it illegal for online casinos to accept money from US residents.

The bill caused a major drop in the London stock market, due to the huge drop in online gambling sites trading there, such as partypoker.net, a major gambling site which plans to comply with the law, and block 90 percent of its former customers.

Online gambling, which has been referred to as "crack cocaine" for gambling addicts, is dangerous and many people are not capable or trying this drug without becoming addictive and losing their mortgage and marriage. 

We need to protect these people from themselves, and that means keeping the bad guys away.  There’s no way these gambling addicts will get their fix another way, and blow the bank in a real casino, or gambling on sports, horse racing, and the state lottery online (all still legal in 48 states), because their are significantly less addictive.

If those out there who just want to blow off a little steam at the end of the day have a problem with losing this service I say that all the fun, relaxation, and potential tax revenue (it is estimated that regulating and taxing internet gambling could yield billions of dollars in potential tax revenue) in the world aren’t worth letting potential addicts get their hands on this new technology.  The role of the government is protect us from ourselves at all costs*.

*I just deposited 50 dollars into Bodog.net and played an hour of poker.  Prohibition totally works.

Porn Stars and Political Office are Like Oil and Water, That’s a Sad Fact

It’s not that I think women who pose in pornography are being exploited. In a lot of cases, they are, but I don’t make that assumption about every woman who chooses to pose nude.

What really makes me sad about pornography is that the women who do it will never be able to run for President. Some of them are dumb as posts, true. But some of them are bound to be smart, especially the women who pose on Suicide Girls. Those women have basically forfeited any chance of ever being elected to political office, and it’s sad that they have to make the choice between indulging their youthful desire to pose nude and making a difference politically later in their lives.

I wonder whether any of these women have asked that question, and how they answered it for themselves.

Republicans Retreating from their Own 50 State Strategy

The great weakness of the Democratic party over the latter half of the past century has been their abdication in states where they thought they couldn’t win elections. It’s a strategy that Democratic Party chairman Howard Dean has been combatting with his “50 state strategy.” He’s awakening the rusty Democratic machinery in such far-flung Republican strongholds as Alaska and Kansas. When he says he wants to take the country back, he means the whole country.

That’s why I was surprised to see that the Republicans are making a strategic move in the opposite direction, cutting and running from states like Ohio, where Senator Mike DeWine is dropping in the polls. The Republican party cuts quite a diminished figure in retreat.

Microfinance: Fighting Poverty $25 at a Time

I was thrilled to read this morning that the Bangladeshi economist Muhammad Yunus was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for his pioneering work in the area of microfinance.

For those of you who don’t know, microfinance is the practice of lending small amounts of money with no required collateral to entrepreneurs in developing parts of the world. The idea is that with just a couple hundred dollars, these people can invest in themselves and their businesses, and turn their lives around.

Think you have to be a Nobel Peace Prize winner to be this kind of an angel investor? Think again. You can lend as little as $25 of your own money to a third-world entrepreneur using Kiva. Just pick a company, choose the amount you want to lend, and then get your money back once the term of the loan is up. Their repayment rate is 99%.

If you’re one of those people who believes in giving a hand up rather than a handout, this is absolutely the way to do it. It’s better than teaching a man to fish so he can eat for a lifetime. It’s lending the man the money to buy a boat so he can go out, fish, come back, sell the fish, make a profit, pay back the loan, save some money and put his kids through college.

Apple and the Kaba: Muslims Offended Yet Again

I’m so sick and tired of walking on eggshells all the time where Islam is concerned. Lord knows that religion and culture are deeply cherished and should not be disrespected. But when a group of people takes themselves so seriously that they can be offended by a building, you have to start questioning what lies beneath all that anger. Could it be deep, fundamental insecurity?

I got it when they were mad over the Muhammad cartoons (although getting all jacked up to the point of rioting in the streets was a little much). And the Pope’s remarks were pretty spectacularly stupid when you get right down to it (but also not worthy of a riot). But when you have a group of people angry because the Apple store in Manhattan too closely resembles the Kaba in Mecca, well…

On the other side of this coin, you have Muslims slaughtering Muslims every day all over the world. Their beef with one another: who should have succeeded Muhammad more than 1000 years ago. Let’s see some people rioting in the streets to protest Muslim-on-Muslim brutality once in a while. If Muslims want to be taken seriously, they should start there.

I know I’m going to take some flak from this, possibly from some very good friends who happen to be Muslim. You know I love you guys. I think your religion is swell, but there are some people who practice it who have GOT to learn how to laugh at themselves.

Books I Really Want to Read

It’s so interesting how I finally discovered my own intellectual curiosity post-college. Until now, it always seemed like the books everyone thought I should be reading clashed significantly with the books I wanted to be reading.

Now, that’s changed in one of two ways: either the books I want to read and the books people want me to read are the same, or I don’t give a shit what people think I should be doing anymore.

My sidebar tells you all about what I’m reading, plus what I just finished and what I thought of it. But here, dear readers, I will disclose to you what I want to read.

• Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies - Jared Diamond
• Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed - Jared Diamond
• The Mighty and the Almighty: Reflections on America, God, and World Affairs - Madeline Albright
• The Year of Magical Thinking - Joan Didion
• Prozac on the Couch: Prescribing Gender in the Era of Wonder Drugs - Jonathan Michel Metzl
• Talking Right: How Conservatives Turned Liberalism into a Tax-Raising, Latte-Drinking, Sushi-Eating, Volvo-Driving, New York Times-Reading, Body-Piercing, Hollywood-Loving, Left-Wing Freak Show - Geoffrey Nunberg
• No god but God: The Origins, Evolution, and Future of Islam - Reza Aslan
• From Beirut to Jerusalem - Thomas Friedman
• The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11 - Lawrence Wright
• Righteous: Dispatches from the Evangelical Youth Movement - Lauren Sandler
• Why Darwin Matters: The Case Against Intelligent Design - Michael Shermer
• The Search: How Google and Its Rivals Rewrote the Rules of Business and Transformed Our Culture - John Battelle

Incidentally, John Battelle is speaking at our conference in just a couple of weeks. I can’t wait to meet him!

If you want to buy me any of those books, feel free. E-mail me at tsv02001 [at] gmail [dot] com and I’ll send you a mailing address where you can send. I’ll even thank you personally and link to your blog :-). I have a PageRank of 5 now! Yay!

Ooh, and while I’m at it, I might as well mention that I’m just dying to see Jesus Camp and Half Nelson.

But no, you can’t take me to the movies. Just what kind of girl do you think I am?

Maybe He’s Just Ronery

Team America, World Police is one of my favorite movies ever. The reason, that song Kim Jong-il sings where he talks about how he’s really just “ronery.”

Sometimes, I think there’s more to that analysis than just some silly puppet humor. It’s possible that he doesn’t really have much in the way of real companionship. Maybe he drives people away from him. Psychologically, I’ll bet his life isn’t too pleasant most of the time. Maybe that’s why he acts out.

Now, I’m not making excuses for the guy. There’s absolutely no way to do that. Pursuing nukes is stupid, dangerous and a threat to everyone. But seeking an explanation for Kim’s behavior helps us to understand, and diffuse this situation without nuclear conflict.

Of course, we’re not even really sure that the weapon he set off was a nuclear weapon. It was less than a kiloton, so it could have been just a few hundred thousand sticks of dynamite. Knowing Kim, he might pretend he had a successful nuke, even when he didn’t. It would be a way of getting some attention. Maybe it would make him a little less “ronery.”

The Foley Scandal: What’s Gay Got to Do With It?

Why is it that when a gay person misbehaves–as Mark Foley did when he engaged in sexually explicit e-communication (warning: nasty) with young male Congressional pages–it’s all about their being gay? How come nobody came to the conclusion that all straight men cheat on their wives when Bill Clinton got his sorry little blow job in the Oral Oval Office?

I’m going to cut through the crap here. What person gay or straight hasn’t looked at a seventeen year old of either gender at one point or another and gone, “yummy…but jailbait,” and left it at that? I know I certainly have. I think it’s perfectly normal. If Pat Robertson and his ilk don’t masturbate to “barely legal” porno (like the photo at the left), then I’m a monkey’s estranged second cousin six times removed.

What’s downright abhorrent, and what Foley should be punished for, is his inability to keep his sexual fantasies where they belong: in his head. His lack of impulse control, poor judgment, alcoholism and flagrant abuse of power are the issues here. Not his sexuality.

Jackasses like Paul Weyrich only want to make Foley’s sexuality an issue to distract people from the giant coverup perpetrated by the Republican Party because they care more about retaining power than they do about any kind of values at all.

UPDATE 10/26/06 2:57 p.m. Chris Pirillo just teased me in a session at the Blog Business Summit about this post and the naked woman on the screen. I’d like to talk a little bit about the reason I chose to post this picture.

The girl in this picture is “barely legal.” She’s probably 18 or 19 years old, just on the other side of what the law says is acceptable. Any straight man or queer woman who looked at the picture likely went, “wow” and had a visceral, sexual response to her. She’s hot!

Most people can look at someone that age and decide not to go there. Mark Foley cannot. That’s why he’s in trouble. I used the picture as a very shocking way to illustrate that point. I think I should have done a better job of explaining that.

Corn Subsidies, Sugar Cane Tariffs, Lobbyists, Oil Dependency and the Future of Healthcare in America

According to the Organic Consumers Association, the United States Government gives corn farmers more than $10 billion in subsidies each year. Meanwhile, we have an utterly moronic 54-cent tariff (TimesSelect) on imported sugar cane ethanol from Brazil, even though according to Thomas Friedman:

Brazilian sugar ethanol provides eight times the energy of the fossil fuel used to make it, while American corn ethanol provides only 1.3 times the energy of the fossil fuel used to make it…sugar ethanol reduces greenhouses gases more than corn ethanol and…sugar cane ethanol can easily be grown in poor tropical countries in Africa or the Caribbean, and could actually help alleviate their poverty.

Meanwhile, we have an excellent use for that $10 billion per annum: subsidies for life-saving drugs and medical procedures for poor Americans, particularly children, who wouldn’t be able to afford them otherwise.

Don’t get me wrong, I don’t believe in a socialist society. But some things, like proper health care, are essential to human dignity. Our government rightly provides us with public libraries and public schools. There are government requirements for clean water and safe food. We already have a broken system of subsidized healthcare for poor Americans.

Let’s take the annual $10 billion that’s being used to pay farmers to grow useless corn–which is fed to cows as part of an unnatural diet or made into high-fructose corn syrup, the culprit for much of America’s obesity problem–and use it to provide insurance for our uninsured. Corn farmers can always grow what the market demands. But many uninsured children won’t have a chance to grow at all if we don’t make some changes.

At the heart of this is the agribusiness lobby, which year after year persuades our elected representatives to shell out the big bucks for an increasingly inane crop.

And while we’re on the topic of lobbyists, I’ve decided that in general, they’re pretty bad for America. The system that funnels campaign donations to corrupt Congressmen on both sides of the aisle in order to further the interests of one particular business over the interests of the Congressman’s own constituents is abhorrent and against the Democratic process. It must be stopped.

With lobbyists out of the way, we could successfully repeal the corn subsidies and reallocate the money for something that helps people. And with the agribusiness lobby out of the way, we could get rid of that stupid tariff, opening our market to sugar-cane ethanol that would work in all the flex-fuel ready cars of the future. And without the big oil lobby, there would be nothing to keep Congressmen from making this happen.

In one fell swoop, we could improve global warming, decrease our dependence on foreign oil and help uninsured Americans. All by getting rid of lobbyists and a few of the stupider policies they brought into being through bribes and influence peddling.

What Exactly is Sexual Immorality?

Before I get into this, I’d like to mention how thrilled I am that the Yankees were eliminated. Yes, I love all things New York, from deli food to the Times, but - for obvious reasons - the one piece of NYC I can’t stand are the Yankees.

But on to the scintillating topic of sexual immorality. I’m honestly not sure how it applies to my life.

On Yom Kippur, we apologize to God for many things: our unjust actions, our arrogance, our tendency to forget the better angels of our nature. We also apologize for sexual immorality. When it comes to that part of the prayer book, I fall silent while the rest of the congregation chants.

I am not so arrogant and stiff-necked as to stand before God and say that I am perfect and have not sinned. But I also firmly believe that my behavior when it comes to sex has been above reproach. The only thing I find wrong with regards to sex is taking unfair advantage of others. But unless I’m somehow snaring an unwilling Andy in my sexual web, I’d have to say I haven’t sinned sexually.

Of course, I’m open to challenging this belief. I’m curious for some other perspectives. When it comes to sex, what does your moral compass tell you? Is there such a thing as sexual sin?

Time for a Massive Update

Hoo boy, I’ve been a bad, bad blogger. Get out of the habit of posting and see what happens to you.

“Why are you out of the habit of posting?” you ask. Well, I’ve been very busy…

• designing Websites like this one and this one and this one.
• promoting the conference.
• reading a lot of good books about President Lincoln, like and Team of Rivals.
• redoing our kitchen from the gross brown cabinets with the pea green countertops to pretty stone countertops and nice white cabinets.
• learning more about the differences between moderate and fundamentalist Islam.
• a lot of climbing.

I’m going to try to get back into things, because I have a lot of interesting new insights. My study of Lincoln has shed a lot of light on just how bad President Bush is and why. More on that in another post.

For now, I’ll close with the fact that Lincoln was preceded by James Buchanan, who was probably our worst president to date. Let’s hope our next president is one of the best ever. We sure need it.

PS: This is hilarious.