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Steve Elling Mocks Overweight TPC Fan
Thu, 10 May 2012 18:05:16 -0400
While covering the first round of the Players Championship Thursday at TPC Sawgrass in Ponte Vedra Beach, Fl., CBS Sports golf columnist Steve Elling made a really ugly crack about an overweight fan in the Tiger Woods gallery: A distinctly rotund, lava-lunged woman was following the former world No. 1 all day, and was making no secret of her level of adoration for the 36-year-old. Make no mistake, the players in Tiger's threesome were tracking the hilarity, too, as Woods had to repeatedly fight a smirk. ... To put it politely, the woman looked like 300 pounds of cottage cheese stuffed into a 200-pound sack.
Elling liked mocking this woman's size so much that he devoted the lead and conclusion of his commentary to her, calling the fan and the challenge faced by Woods both "large and unavoidable." He also posted seven insulting comments about her on Twitter: 1: "Cabrera's WD announcement was 2nd-biggest laugh of day. First was every time the 300-pound female fan tracking Tiger today opened her yap." 2: "@HolterMedia Rinaldi was flustered probably because he was terrified that she might fall over and crush him." 3: "The 300-pound woman kept calling Tiger 'baby doll' and Mahan and Fowler nearly had aneurisms trying to keep from laughing." 4: "I misspelled aneurysm. Probably cause a vessel burst in my head when 300-pound woman bent over and her unmentionables nearly toppled out." 5: "After that 74 today, Tiger should be happy to have any fans out there cheering for him. This woman should have counted as two." 6: "I stand corrected. Shotlink had the woman at 400 pounds. Ha ha." 7: "@sallbee87 Yeah, he was responding to my question about the corpulent woman who was following him and calling him 'Baby doll.'" I've attended the Player's Championship several times in recent years, and the expectations of fan behavior are really high. There are dozens of volunteers on the course asking for you to be quiet and stay still while players make shots, and cell phones were not allowed at all on the grounds until this year. Most fans are extremely polite, even around the island green at 17 where you can lounge around the hole all day long drinking beer -- and hundreds do exactly that. Elling wrote a commentary in 2010 about how golf "has forever been a spectator sport where decorum rules, sportsmanship reigns and nary is heard a discouraging word." A pity that sense of decorum isn't shared by Elling. After publishing this post Friday afternoon, I heard from Peggy Howell, the PR director of the National Association to Advance Fat Acceptance, a group that fights weight discrimination. She called Elling's comments "immature" and said in an email, "I find it really interesting that this man is so full of fat hatred and bias that he can't focus on doing his job. Was he there to report on the fans or on the tournament? So now there's a size limit for attending sporting events?" She added, "The fact that this woman was able to follow the tournament the entire day says quite a lot for her fitness level, doesn't it? Guess it's not true that all fat people are lazy slobs who do nothing but sit on our couches eating junk food all day!" Howell's point about following a golfer's gallery is a good one. I've done that at TPC Sawgrass and you have to walk and climb hills all day long to keep up in the Florida heat. It's much easier to park your butt somewhere and let the golfers come to you. Elling hasn't retreated from his comments on Twitter, but the "300 pounds of cottage cheese" insult disappeared from his column this morning. Ironically, he's on Twitter today criticizing gender discrimination at the Masters. 
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Tech Journalist Quits the Internet
Wed, 02 May 2012 13:43:40 -0400
Paul Miller, a blogger who covers tech for The Verge, is quitting the Internet for a year. He'll continue to file stories for the site by pioneering a revolutionary new technique in online journalism: Calling people on the phone. Here's how Miller imagines the phone-driven journalism process working: "I'm going to try to use the six degrees of separation a little bit," he said on Tuesday afternoon in an interview -- by phone, of course. "I have a lot of co-workers and they know a lot of people and so anybody I can get a phone number for I'll call that person and maybe they have a phone number for another person. So I'll have to follow that sort of chain."
I have some experience practicing journalism without an Internet. The life he romanticizes of gathering information through phone calls, library research and good old fashioned shoe leather was mine at the Fort Worth Star-Telegram from roughly 1989 to 1994. The job was great, but being a reporter became so much better when the web arrived. At least until some guy named Craig started killing all the newspaper jobs. No longer did I have to annoy sources and prowl libraries for each morsel of news I could gather. The entire world was serving up an all-you-can-eat information buffet on every subject under the sun -- and some of it was even factual! The only things I miss about the old days are the sexy reference librarians with corrected vision. Tina, Linda, Carol, Dennis. Sigh. Contrary to what Miller thinks, when calling people by phone you don't have to get their number through word of mouth. There are huge books published each year that list phone numbers. I wish I could tell him this in an email. 
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Coroner: Andrew Breitbart Died of Heart Failure
Fri, 20 Apr 2012 19:32:11 -0400
Conservative media activist Andrew Breitbart died March 1 of "heart failure and hypertrophic cardiomyopathy with focal coronary atherosclerosis," the Los Angeles Coroner's Office revealed Friday afternoon. "No prescription or illicit drugs were detected," the office announced in a press release. Breitbart had spent two hours that evening at the Brentwood Restaurant in LA's Brentwood district and had drunk some alcohol but "he wasn't drinking excessively," Arthur Sando, a marketing executive he met there for the first time that night, said in an account to Hollywood Reporter. The coroner's office said Breitbart's blood alcohol content was .04 percent. He was pronounced dead at UCLA Medical Center at 12:19 a.m. March 1 after being seen by witnesses collapsing on a public street. Media reports have conflicted about where Breitbart was when he was stricken. After leaving the restaurant sometime around 11:30 p.m. on Feb. 29, Breitbart crossed the street and fell down in front of the Starbucks coffee shop in the vicinity of 148 S. Barrington Avenue. Paul Huebl, a detective and former Chicago police officer, wrote on his crime news blog March 2 that he went to the scene and interviewed an eyewitness who had seen Breitbart collapse. The man, Christopher Lasseter, told him he was walking his dog after midnight when he saw Breitbart cross the street. Huebl wrote, "Once Breitbart stepped up on the curb, as Lasseter put it, 'He fell hard like a sack of potatoes.'" Huebl wrote that he sold video of his interview with Lasseter to TMZ.Com. The photos he published on his blog match the location confirmed by the coroner's office as the place that Breitbart collapsed. "I know Christopher was actually there because I asked him to describe Breitbart's clothing and he did so accurately down to his Converse tennis shoes," Huebl told me Friday in an email. "Christopher did not seem to know who Breitbart was other than that he was somebody who seemed important because of the media attention." Though Huebl and others have speculated that Breitbart could have been murdered, the coroner's office dismissed the notion. "No significant trauma was present and foul play is not suspected," it stated in the press release. A final coroner's report will be available within two weeks. Developing ... 
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George Zimmerman Contradicts Himself on Stand
Fri, 20 Apr 2012 13:14:39 -0400
During the bond hearing today in his second-degree murder trial for the Feb. 26 death of Trayvon Martin, George Zimmerman said something in his testimony that is clearly contradicted by his original call to police on the night of the shooting. After his attorney Mark O'Mara told the court that Zimmerman wanted to make a statement, Zimmerman took the stand and made brief comments directed at Martin's parents, Tracy Martin and Sabryna Fulton, who were present in the courtroom. He said: I wanted to say I am sorry for the loss of your son. I did not know if he was armed or not. I did not know how old he was. I thought he was a little bit younger than I am.
Since Zimmerman is 28, this statement indicates he thought Martin was in his mid 20s. That's not what he told a police dispatcher when he called to report a suspicious person in his neighborhood minutes before the fatal incident. Here's the relevant part of the call transcript: Zimmerman: Yeah, now he's coming towards me. He's got his hands in his waist band. And he's a black male. 911 dispatcher: OK How old would you say he is? Zimmerman: He's got something on his shirt. About like his late teens. 911 dispatcher: Late teens? Zimmerman: Uh, huh.
Zimmerman correctly identified Martin, who was 17 when he died, as someone in his late teens. The prosecutor, Bernie de la Rionda, did not point out this discrepancy to Zimmerman while he was on the stand, but in another question he claimed that there were inconsistencies in what Zimmerman told police that night about the shooting. The prosecutor could not elaborate on what he meant because O'Mara objected and the judge sustained the objection. After O'Mara asked for $15,000 bond and De la Rionda sought that it either be denied or set at $1 million, Judge Kenneth Lester set bond at $150,000 with GPS monitoring and other conditions. 
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Andrew Breitbart's Closing Argument
Fri, 02 Mar 2012 01:39:48 -0500
Thursday morning shortly after midnight, the conservative media provocateur Andrew Breitbart collapsed while walking his neighborhood in the Brentwood district of Los Angeles. He could not be revived at a hospital and died, exactly one month after his 43rd birthday. My condolences go out to his wife Susie (the daughter of the actor Orson Bean), his four kids and the many friends he had in public and private life. As publisher of the Drudge Retort, I've followed Breitbart's career going back to the days when he was doing half the work on the Drudge Report and getting none of the credit. Matt Drudge liked the mystique of the I-work-alone myth, and stories would be written that mentioned he had a collaborator without naming the guy. It was Breitbart, who had befriended Drudge and operated a legal defense fund for him after Clinton White House aide Sidney Blumenthal sued Drudge for libel. When Breitbart was still working at the Drudge Report in May 2001, I caught the site fabricating a source. In a story slamming the New York Times for being slow to cover Blumenthal settling his suit, the following paragraph appeared: "What the NEW YORK TIMES is doing with its sin of omission is no doubt a form of libel of its own, corporate news slander of the highest degree," said Professor Emeritus Andrew Breitbart of the Cashmere Institute of Media Studies.
That institute was fake. Cashmere was a reference to the street he lived on at the time. Breitbart had quoted himself in an article he reported. Four years later, when he helped launch Huffington Post, I sent the site an email congratulating him on the launch and asking if he brought Drudge's siren with him. Breitbart replied back, "No, I left it at the Cashmere Institute for Media Studies." After watching him rise up from anonymous Drudge lackey to infamous journalism mogul, I could never figure out why Breitbart sounded so angry all the time. He operated in a constant state of rage that seemed bigger than politics. He was still bearing a grudge, as a middle-aged man, against a high school principal he believed had turned other kids against him, he told the New York Observer in 2009. He once ruined a date with his wife at a Santa Monica restaurant by flipping off a procession of anti-war protesters, only to learn later that they were actually protesting the conscription of child soldiers in Africa. Breitbart cultivated liberal enemies all day long on Twitter, like he was afraid they might lose interest and start hating somebody else. Today, a link was shared with me that provided some insight into his personality -- a Usenet post he made in 1995 to the online discussion group alt.support.attn-deficit: Two weeks ago, I was clinically diagnosed with ADHD; the psychologist stated that the diagnosis was a "no-brainer" after just one meeting, one in which I rambled semi-coherently and excitedly about my life. MY FAVORITE SUBJECT!!!!!!!! ... I feel my condition is well worse than those I read about. I do not take much joy from this distinction, but true concentation is simply not an option, ever. ... Ironically, I am not depressed by my myriad of symptoms of ADHD. I love myself -- maybe too much. I love TV, radio, the news, books, movies, coffee, etc. The problem is -- jobs, occupation maintanence, and conforming to the work standards of others is a bit hard with my dependencies that obviously conflict with workplace norms.
Breitbart never had to worry about workplace norms. His plate-spinner personality was perfectly suited to this media age. Last year, I posted on Twitter that "Andrew Breitbart's baked expression on the cover of his new book explains a lot." He retweeted it within minutes. As much as I hated what he was doing to politics and journalism, I would have liked much more time to make that case in the years to come. At the GOP presidential debate in Jacksonville I covered last month, two seats were reserved on my row at the media center for Breitbart.Com. I walked over a few times to see if he'd turn up in one of them, but unfortunately nobody showed. He was a nemesis I wanted to meet. Credit: The photo was taken by Gage Skidmore and is available under a Creative Commons license. 
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My First Trip into a Debate Spin Room
Fri, 27 Jan 2012 19:36:35 -0500
I was granted media credentials by CNN to report on the GOP presidential debate last night in Jacksonville for the Drudge Retort, the first time I've had the opportunity to cover a debate. The University of North Florida squeezed around 400 journalists into a campus ballroom, putting online media together in one corner. I was sandwiched between the Huffington Post and The Guardian. A misprint on a sign led the British journalist Toby Harnden to think that Matt Drudge had come up from Miami to attend. When Harnden came over looking for the international newsman of mystery, I had to break it to him that instead of Drudge, he'd found me. He did not mask his disappointment. The debate began with the National Anthem, which inspired only one in four of the journalists around me to stand up, though some of them were foreigners and are thus excused. A woman down my row from the conservative American Spectator rocketed out of her seat with patriotic super-speed. During the debate, the second-loudest laugh was when Newt Gingrich began answering Wolf Blitzer's praise-your-wife question by complimenting the other candidates' ladyfolk instead. "I think all three of the wives represented here would be terrific first ladies," he said. The guy can't help himself. He just likes wives. The loudest laugh was in the final answer of the night, when Gingrich referred to Saul Alinsky. Journalists laughed so hard at the mention of the name you'd think a drinking game was going on. After the debate, I walked one floor downstairs to the spin room, where each candidate sent spin doctors to explain how his guy just mopped the floor with those other no-hopers. The first to arrive was former Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty, sporting an impeccably tailored suit and a Mitt Romney lapel button to identify his allegiance. The reporters crowded 20 deep around him, and I quickly found myself experiencing body contact that's a sin to Rick Santorum. I retreated to the peaceful solitude around Ron Paul's spinmeister, his national press secretary Gary Howard. I asked him this: The University of Chicago asked 37 economists if it was a good idea to return to the gold standard. All 37 said no. If returning to the gold standard is such a good idea, why is it that no mainstream economists agree with Rep. Paul? Howard challenged me to identify the economists. "I need to know who these economists are," he said. "They could all be Keynesians." Another reporter asked Howard how Paul, the leading vote-getter among Republicans under 30 despite being the oldest candidate in the race, had so successfully targeted young voters. "I think they targeted us," Howard replied. After asking questions of Bill McCollum and J.C. Watts, I approached Fred Thompson but something he was asked by another journalist caused him to skeedaddle. A reporter for Mother Jones blogged, perhaps jokingly, "I asked Thompson to speak about Gingrich's stance on the regulation of reverse-mortgages. He didn't respond." A lot of the media kept asking process questions -- "how'd your guy do?", "will he win Florida?", "will he drop out if he doesn't?", blah blah blah -- so I stuck to issues. The crowd thinned around Pawlenty, so I asked him about Lynn Frazier, the Jacksonville woman who had lost her job and could not afford health benefits. I thought this was the best question in the debate and the least adequately answered. The Republicans running for the White House love to talk about repealing President Obama's health reform but aren't saying much about what they'd do afterward for the 1-in-6 Americans who are uninsured. Frazier explained her circumstances and asked the candidates, "What type of hope can you promise me and others in my position?" The responses she received didn't offer anything more concrete than getting a tax deduction on purchasing insurance for herself as an individual. Paul's answer was particularly bleak. "Well, it's a tragedy because this is a consequence of the government being involved in medicine since 1965." I guess the uninsured need a time machine. When I asked Pawlenty if Frazier should be happy with the answers she received, he said yes because Romney will bring down the costs of health insurance as president. "We need to make health insurance more affordable," he said, mentioning the tax deduction again. I followed up by asking about people who can't obtain insurance at any price because of pre-existing conditions, one of the main problems addressed by Obama. He replied, "Mitt Romney will be making it so people aren't excluded by pre-existing conditions." After this, I horned in on a conversation Bay Buchanan was having about Newt Gingrich's body language during the debate. The first time Romney took shots at Gingrich, he stared daggers at him and Gingrich wouldn't make eye contact. After watching Gingrich silently debate his own shoes while Romney scolded him, I thought it was going to be a long night for the Speaker. "That was extremely weird," said Buchanan, who is way hotter than her brother Pat. When around 45 minutes had passed, the last of the spin doctors all left, like people at a family gathering who realize if they stay any longer they'll be asked to help clean up. 
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Dumb Reasons to Form Your Political Beliefs
Wed, 23 Nov 2011 14:29:06 -0500
A reader to National Review Online says that he became a conservative because of how his fellow college students at Kent State University responded to President Reagan's shooting: I came back to my dorm to see the TV lounges filled with students fervently wishing for the president not to survive the surgery. The worst of will was being expressed toward "Ronnie Ray-gun," to use just one of the epithets. Right then, I knew that, whatever side I belonged on, it wasn't the one where people were wishing for the death of the democratically elected president. For the first time, I started to pay real attention to American politics, and to investigate what American conservatism really was.
I don't comment often on right-wing sites, but I made an exception here because conversion stories like this one always seem a bit ridiculous to me. I was 13 when Reagan was shot in March 1981 and vividly recall following the news at my grandmother's house after Frank Reynolds of ABC broke in with a bulletin during One Life to Live [1]. I deplore the sentiments of people who wanted the president to die. But as I asked on NRO, does the reader not recognize the same irrational hatred directed at President Obama today on the right that was directed at Reagan back then on the left? The nine responses I've received answer my question. None of them thinks Obama is hated today the way Reagan was hated back then. As one person stated, "Death wishes for political opponents is something that's almost entirely confined to the left." I'm a save-the-abortion-rights-of-gay-whales liberal, but I would never make a statement as blinkered as that against conservatives. One of the most foolish things in politics is the belief that your side is reasonable and fair while the other side engages in all of the bad acts. There are numerous examples of Obama hatred today as rabid as the Reagan haters in college who converted the reader to conservatism. There will be plenty of jerks who wish death on the next elected president, too. These folks are easier to find today than in 1981 -- just read any newspaper's poorly policed comment section or the feedback on rabid political blogs. Left vs. right isn't the only meaningful divide in our politics. There's also assholes vs. everybody else. If the formative moment in the establishment of your ideological beliefs is the time you heard repugnant things said about the current president, you're just as likely to have become a liberal as a conservative. It just depends on when you heard them. 1: If anyone knows what Brad Vernon told his sister Samantha about Asa Buchanan's late wife Olympia, let me know. 
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Highway Deaths Amuse Justin Timberlake
Fri, 28 Oct 2011 11:10:15 -0400
The San Francisco Chronicle is running a story on a terrible highway accident in Indiana that killed seven people in a minivan Thursday night. A tractor trailer slammed into the van, possibly after it hit a deer and slowed down or stopped, and only three of the 10 passengers in the van survived the crash. The story is illustrated by a photo of Justin Timberlake and host Matt Lauer laughing it up on the Today Show: 
As you might expect, commenters aren't happy that Timberlake and Lauer find the crash funny. 
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New York Post Smears Occupy Wall Street Mom
Fri, 21 Oct 2011 11:17:09 -0400
The New York Post is running a story today about Stacy Hessler, a 38-year-old Florida mom who's gone from her family while she takes part in the Occupy Wall Street protests at Zucotti Park. Hessler is raising four children at home with her husband in DeLand, Fl., but she came to New York City to join the protests on Oct. 9 and has no plans to leave: I have no idea what the future holds, but I'm here indefinitely. Forever. ... Military people leave their families all the time, so why should I feel bad? I'm fighting for a better world.
The story makes it sound like she's just ditching her family, especially the nudge-nudge part about "keeping herself warm at night" in a tent with a male protester. The right winger Jonah Goldberg calls her mom of the year on National Review Online. When I read the Post story this morning, I used snap judgment skills honed in a decade of blogging to conclude that momma's getting her freak flag on. But her Facebook wall tells a different story. She's extremely involved in her childrens' schools and sports and has posted hundreds of photos of the kids engaged in family outings. Hessler made this post when she decided to turn her week-long stay into something longer: I have a plea for my friends. I need your help and support. I want to stay occupying wall st. I feel my presence is very important in the support of non-violent communication and sanitation(keeping the park clean) I am willing to work tirelessly on these efforts. I need help with getting my kids to activities and stepping up with the things I help lead, such as one small village, jr roller derby, bee-attitudes, 4H, for his glory co-op. Please respond if you are willing to help my kids so I can stay here and help this movement. I have a train ticket for tomorrow that I want to change but I need to know I have support from my community back home for my family in order to change the ticket.
No less than 12 of her friends are offering to help out. Sound like a bad mom to you? As Hessler's story is fed into the media sausage mill, I hope some reporters do a much better job telling it than Kevin Fasick and Bob Fredericks in the Post. 
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Full Disclosure: TechCrunch is Screwed
Tue, 06 Sep 2011 14:54:28 -0400
"We have a traditional understanding of journalism with the exception of TechCrunch." -- AOL chief executive officer Tim Armstrong
Around five years ago, Microsoft fueled a controversy by giving $4,000 Acer Ferrari 1000 laptop computers running Windows Vista Ultimate to some popular tech bloggers. A lot of bloggers -- particularly those who did not receive incredibly overpriced luxury branded laptops -- raised such a ruckus that Microsoft eventually asked for them back. Bloggers who wouldn't give them up were encouraged to hold a contest giveaway. I was reminded of this controversy when I read TechCrunch writer M.G. Siegler's post this morning about how the news site's impartiality would not be affected by TechCrunch founder Mike Arrington actively investing in companies they report on: The notion that Mike, or anyone else, investing in a company would dictate some sort of giant conflicted agenda is laughable. Literally. If Mike tried to get me to write some unreasonable post about a company he had invested in, I would laugh at him. But he would never do that. Ask Loic Le Meur. Ask Kevin Rose. Ask Shervin Pishevar. Ask Airbnb. Ask countless others. He didn't get to where he is by being an idiot. ... The magic at TechCrunch happens because the writers have very little oversight. Instead, the emphasis is placed on hiring the right writers in the first place and putting them through a trial-by-fire to see who emerges. Those that have, my peers, are the best at what they do.
Siegler's defense is exactly the same as those Ferrari bloggers. Every journalist knows she is personally capable of rising above conflicts of interest to report without fear or favor. Getting to do it on a $4,000 laptop tricked out like a midlife crisis sports car is all the sweeter. But let's say Arrington's new investment fund bankrolls Heello, the Twitter clone that 300,000 people were fascinated by for exactly 12 minutes last month. Let's say Siegler thinks Heello belongs in the TechCrunch deadpool. Will he report that story with the same enthusiasm he would give another startup that isn't fattened by Arrington's filthy lucre? There are far more lousy startups out there than Siegler has time to cover. It would be easy to make Heello a story he didn't quite get around to writing. The way a story gets reported isn't the only place journalistic bias rears its head. There's also the decision about whether to cover something at all. Even if those fire-tested TechCrunch writers give impartial coverage to Arrington's ventures and all of their direct competitors, there's another way his investments bite them in the ass. People will be too cynical to believe in that impartiality. If you accepted that laptop from Microsoft in 2006, for the rest of time you face a choice every time you write about the company: You can disclose that gift again or risk having a snarky bastard in the comments make it sound like you intentionally covered it up. Siegler now faces the same disclosure issue over and over again, and he didn't even get a laptop. 
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Villains & Vigilantes Creators Sue Game's Publisher
Thu, 04 Aug 2011 12:47:18 -0400
An epic battle is underway over one of the oldest super-hero roleplaying games, but sadly it won't be settled by muscle-bound men in tights. The creators of the game Villains & Vigilantes, Jeff Dee and Jack Herman, have filed a copyright infringement lawsuit against Scott Bizar, the longtime publisher of the game. The suit, filed July 27 in the U.S. District Court for the Middle District of Florida, claims that Bizar has no right to publish the game or any related products and illegally profits from their sale.  Villains & Vigilantes was created by Dee and Herman and first published in 1979 by Fantasy Games Unlimited, Inc., a corporation founded by Bizar. The game, one of the first to extend Dungeons & Dragons-style play into the super-hero genre, was popular in the early '80s and spawned a comic book series and other spin-off products. But by 1987, Fantasy Games Unlimited had run into financial difficulties with distributors and its business activity slowed to a crawl.
In June 2010, Dee and Herman started Monkey House Games, LLC and announced they would be publishing a new version of the game, which has been copyrighted in their names since its first edition. Dee told Ain't It Cool News that they had never been informed by Bizar that Fantasy Games Unlimited, Inc., ceased to exist in 1991, which he said caused the publishing rights to revert to them: We started to become unhappy in the late 1980s when FGU stopped advertising V&V, taking it to conventions, or even soliciting distributors. When it became clear that this situation wasn't going to change, we started looking for ways to get our game back. But for years, it looked hopeless. The contract seemed to give Scott Bizar enough loopholes so that he could keep it in force perpetually with little effort, and attempts to purchase the publishing rights from him were met by outrageously high price tags. Our contract was with Fantasy Games Unlimited, Inc. -- which, we recently discovered, was "dissolved by proclamation" by the state of NY in 1991 for failure to pay state taxes. It no longer exists. And the contract clearly stated that if FGU, Inc., ever ceased to exist, then the publication rights reverted back to us.
Bizar's a high school teacher in Arizona who kept his old games in print and ran a game store in Gilbert, Ariz., that closed in 2007. He told an interviewer in 2000, "My principal trade is now teaching not publishing. When you're over 50 and married with a child you cannot allow yourself the same delirious adventures as when you're 20 or 30. ... I no longer promise to fight as hard as I did in 1987, when the distributors refused to sell FGU products because they were not presented in boxes like TSR products." Dee's a game developer whose credits include the TWERPS and Quicksilver roleplaying games, the Warchest board game, and the computer game The Sims: Castaway Stories. In 2005, he released Living Legends, a super-hero game intended to be a sequel to Villains & Vigilantes. Herman's a writer published in comics such as Elementals, Robotech and Just Imagine and the computer games Ultima VI and Wing Commander II. For the past 12 months, both Monkey House and Bizar have been actively publishing and marketing Villains & Vigilantes and related products. Bizar's sole proprietorship, also called Fantasy Games Unlimited, has brought on new game developers. After Monkey House attempted to register a Villains & Vigilantes trademark on June 16, 2010, Bizar did the same a month later, leading to a case before the U.S. Trademark Trial and Appeal Board that began in March. The filing of this suit will likely cause that case to be suspended pending the result of litigation. Brent Rose, the Tampa attorney representing Dee and Herman, told me in email that the suit was filed after other means of resolving the dispute were attempted. "There were cease and desist letters issued by both sides," he said. "We requested arbitration or mediation or even just a teleconference to just try and work things out before filing our federal lawsuit, but our written requests were either ignored or refused." 
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Matt Haughey on Running a 'Lifestyle Business'
Fri, 15 Jul 2011 18:11:50 -0400
There's a great interview in Willamette Week about my friend Matt Haughey, who has turned MetaFilter into a successful small business that employs around 3-5 people and gets 25 million hits a month. Haughey, who was one of the founders of Blogger, left Silicon Valley for McMinnville, Ore., several years ago. The interviewer does a nice job of picking up on the phrase "lifestyle business," which is used in the dot-com world to insult startups that make a sustainable amount of money for their staff but don't get deeply into debt trying to become the next Facebook. To those who believe he should've made MetaFilter into something huge, he says: I'm OK with this lifestyle business. It's a put-down for a lot of people, especially in Silicon Valley. I think it's the best thing in the world. You don't have to kill yourself. I've been at startups where we worked 16 hours a day and didn't get anything out of it. It's stupid. Geeks who know how to program and make things should be able to make a small thing that runs forever and make $100,000 a year and live off that. I mean, what is wrong with that? It's an awesome goal. I never got that message anywhere in the tech community. Like, what is wrong with making a decent living in doing something you love forever? And then people put that down as a "lifestyle business." Or ask, "How are you going to change the world or make the next Facebook?" It's like nobody sings unless they want to be Britney Spears. That's stupid -- we should all sing in bars three nights a week if we like it and get paid as professional musicians.
I gravitate towards lifestyle businesses as well, despite well-intentioned friends and relatives who believe I really should be a dot-com billionaire by now. I recently spoke by phone to someone who was meeting prospective investors for a "$20 million idea" instead of continuing a dot-com business that made yearly profits in the mid six figures. All I could think about during the call was how sweet it would be to run that existing business. 
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The Good, Bad and Ugly of Joe McGinniss
Fri, 10 Jun 2011 14:00:44 -0400
I've had a mixed history with author Joe McGinniss. His true-crime book Cruel Doubt was a laughably bad attempt to blame Dungeons & Dragons for a 1988 murder. His soccer book The Miracle of Castel di Sangro may be the best sports book I've ever read. McGinniss has a biography of Sarah Palin coming out in the fall. I was looking forward to it, since his move-next-door stunt reminds me of funny things he did in Castel di Sangro. But I'm looking forward to it less after reading this paragraph from his Palin book, which he shared on his blog: Sarah Palin practices politics as lap dance, and we're the suckers who pay the price. Members of our jaded national press corps eagerly stuff hundred dollar bills into her g-string, even as they wink at one another to show that they don't take her seriously.
That's a lot of sexist awfulness packed into 45 words. 
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People Who Aren't Offended by Weiner
Wed, 08 Jun 2011 18:33:17 -0400
In the din of voices casting judgment on Rep. Anthony Weiner (D-N.Y.) for having consensual extramarital cybersex with six women, none of whom have complained that they were harassed or offended, a few people in the media share my complete lack of outrage over his sex life. David Gelernter: For my part I couldn't care less what sort of pictures or messages Weiner has been sending around the Net, and it's an imposition to be required to care; to be unable to avoid the topic. I find that I have no interest in Congressman Anthony Weiner's sex life or virtual sex life whatsoever. And I've heard enough tearful on-camera contrition to last me the rest of my life. I don't want to hear Weiner's apology. It's got nothing to do with me, tells me nothing I want to know; the cable news media, conservative and liberal, would do the public a favor if they would agreed to a blanket tearful-apologies ban effective this instant.
Susannah Breslin: If adultery happens in 41% of marriages, if the guy next door is hiring prostitutes, if Brett Favre's penis scored nearly 2 million views, it's not the politicians that are the problem, it's Americans, who sit in turned-on judgment of those who dally sexually while doing so themselves, who dream of getting off in the same way but don't allow themselves to do so, who devote their work days to looking at the latest leaked cell phone pics of genitals that belong to someone more famous than themselves.
Glenn Greenwald: There are few things more sickening -- or revealing -- to behold than a D.C. sex scandal. Huge numbers of people prance around flamboyantly condemning behavior in which they themselves routinely engage. Media stars contrive all sorts of high-minded justifications for luxuriating in every last dirty detail, when nothing is more obvious than that their only real interest is vicarious titillation.
Hendrik Hertzberg: On MSNBC, the cable-news "home page" of my political tribe, one commentator said that one of the things Weinergate shows is that powerful politicians assume they can get away with things that regular people can't. If they do assume that, theyâÂÂre wrong. It would be more accurate to say that they can't get away with things that regular people can. Look around you. Consider your friends, your work colleagues, your relatives, maybe even yourself. It's likely that a nontrivial proportion of them have some sexual secret (at least they think it's a secret) in their lives.
Conor Friedersdorf: As far as I can tell -- we've all got a depressingly big sample size -- a politician's sexual fidelity in marriage, or his sexual behavior generally, doesn't reliably tell us anything about the integrity he demonstrates when acting in his official capacity. Nor is our moral culture elevated when we focus on these scandals. It is degraded, both because a large amount of the interest is prurient, and because by focusing on the sexual behavior of egocentric alpha males who spend a lot of time traveling far from home (that is to say, politicians) we may even be fooling ourselves into thinking that sexual impropriety is more common than it is, and thereby normalizing it.
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Anthony Weiner and the Infidelity Police
Tue, 07 Jun 2011 10:37:06 -0400
Megan McArdle, a commentator for The Atlantic, believes that it's the valid role of the media to dig into our private lives to see if we've kept our wedding vows: I don't think that cheating on your wife, or lesser betrayals like sexting, are minor marital pecadillos, of no more public interest than whether you remembered to pay the gas bill or unload the dishwasher. I don't think it's the government's job to punish infidelity, but that doesn't imply that society has no interest in whether people keep their vows. Marriage is a valuable social institution. There are good reasons that society should buttress it. ... [T]here's something a little too fifties about the "All men do it, so why should we care?" approach to this. I'd like to think that enforcing the norms which hold that infidelity is really, actually wrong is worth taking a few hours out of a slow news cycle.
Before the next politician gets caught with his pants down, there's something I'd like to put on the record. After many years of being a moralistic scold, I have lost faith in the idea that this kind of stuff has any bearing on whether someone is a good leader. A public figure can be admirable in public life and scurrilous in private. As long as the sex involves consenting adults and the person would not deny others the pursuit of the same happiness, it's none of our damn business. It's ridiculously intrusive for McArdle to think that there's a compelling societal interest in policing marital fidelity. Her premise is founded on the assumption that extramarital sex is universally wrong. I think most of us would say that it is, especially if our partner or our relatives are in earshot. But if you read a sex advice columnist who encourages complete candor, like Dan Savage or Dear Prudence, you find numerous people who've made different arrangements. A marriage operates by its own rules, most of which outsiders never learn -- even if they're close to the couple. One of the drawbacks to holding married people to account is that we don't what these rules are, and finding them out would be incredibly invasive. When they file their first story on a sex scandal, how do reporters know they're not maligning a person for sex outside of marriage whose spouse accepts the arrangement and engages in it too? There are people who do that sort of thing -- and some of them aren't even Europeans. There's a funny, profane speech on YouTube by Savage, who thinks an insistence on absolute lifelong monogamy breaks up marriages that could otherwise thrive. "We need to think of monogamy the way we think of sobriety. You can fall the fuck off the wagon and sober back up," he says. "I'm a deeply conservative person. I believe these things because I want people's marriages to survive for the long haul." This is from a guy who has spent the last 20 years hearing from people about their actual sex lives. It should come as no surprise that he takes a more tolerant view of sexual transgressions than media talking heads who tut-tut in disapproval with each bimbo eruption. Expecting the media to dig into the fine print of somebody's marital contract is disturbing. McArdle and her husband Peter Suderman are both journalists at prestigious national publications whose marriage was covered in the New York Times, so they're limited public figures. If they become embroiled in a sex scandal, would McArdle agree that it's my job as a journalist to buttress marriage by subjecting them to a thorough probing? McArdle's argument that the media has a valid role enforcing societal norms is even worse. Homosexuality has been far outside the norm until recent years. Was this ever a sufficient justification to reveal that a public official was gay? If you have any empathy at all, it's excruciating to see the press take a blow-by-blow look at somebody's sex life. I cringed at questions Rep. Anthony Weiner (D-N.Y.) was called to answer during his press conference Monday. As much as he invited that treatment by lying, I think many people would lie to prevent private sexual conduct from being scrutinized, especially if there's some guilt involved. Everybody has aspects of our sex lives we wouldn't want to explain to the world on live television. For most of my late teens I made sweet, sweet love to a throw rug I nicknamed Valerie Bertinelli. Related links: 
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